Timothy Keller, from his book “The Reason for God” shared (see also previous posts from Timothy Keller’s writings, that follow the above from January of this year (2021). They can be accessed at . . . “A Loving God Would Not Allow Hell”.) “. . .many people complain that those who believe in a God of judgment will not approach enemies with a desire to reconcile with them. If you believe in a God who smites evildoers, you may think it perfectly justified to do some of the smiting yourself. Yale theologian Miroslav Volf, a Croatian who has seen the violence in the Balkans, does not see the doctrine of God’s judgment that way. He writes:
If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make a final end to violence—that God would not be worthy of worship. . . .The only means of prohibiting all recourse to violence by ourselves is to insist that violence is legitimate only when it comes form God. . . .My thesis that the practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many . . . in the West . . . . [But] it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human non-violence [results from the belief in] God’s refusal to judge. In a sun-scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. . .[with] other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind. 7
In this fascinating passage Volf reasons that it is the lack of belief in a God of vengeance that “secretly nourishes violence.”8 The human impulse to make perpetrators of violence pay for their crimes is almost an overwhelming one. It cannot possibly be overcome with platitudes like “Now don’t you see that violence won’t solve anything?” If you have seen your home burned down and your relatives killed and raped, such talk is laughable—and shows no real concern for justice. Yet victims of violence are drawn to go far beyond justice into the vengeance that says, “You put out one of my eyes, so I’ll put out both of yours.” They are pulled inexorably into an endless cycle of vengeance, of strikes and counterstrikes nurtured and justified by the memories of terrible wrongs.
Can our passion for justice be honored in a way that does not nurture our desire for blood vengeance? Volf says the best resource for this is belief in the concept of Gods divine justice. If I don’t believe that there is a divine God who will eventually put all things right, I will take up the sword and will be sucked into the endless vortex of retaliation. Only if I am sure that there is a God who will right all wrongs and settle all accounts perfectly do I have the power to refrain.
Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, wrote the remarkable essay “The Discreet Charms of Nihilism.” In it he remembers how Marx had called religion the “opiate of the people” because the promise of an afterlife (Marx said) led the poor and the working class to put up with unjust social conditions. But, Milosz continued:
And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders are not going to be judged . . . [but] all religions recognize that our deeds are imperishable. 9
Many people complain that the belief in a God of judgment will lead to a more brutal society. Milosz had personally seen in both Nazism and Communism, that a loss of belief in a God of judgment can lead to brutality. If we are free to shape life and morals any we choose without ultimate accountability, it can lead to violence. Volf and Milosz argue that the doctrine of God’s final judgment is a necessary undergirding for human practices of love and peacemaking ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York, NY: Penquin Books, 2008,2016), 78-81 continued, see. . . .
Timothy Keller is a well known and founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
