God Has Left the Building (Law) and Lives in the Wild (Gospel)
Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian
Field Day January 1, 2023
God Has Left the Building (Law) and Lives in the Wild (Gospel)
When we talk of not being able to know those things of God that “are above us” what we are saying is not that we cannot understand such things but rather that we see and understand them only too well and can do nothing about them.
God naked, God in unclothed and demanding (as opposed to clothed and promising) majesty is only too clear to us. “Above us” is not an intellectual or emotional gap or distance but rather a theological one. And, to perhaps make a picture of this and hopefully see it more clearly, one could say we could think of this theology as geography. Think this way about the theology as geography: there is a place where God operates as the Law, where righteousness is proper obedience. It’s not that we don’t know this place. We know it only too well. God exists as Demand upon us. This is the “naked God” we do see, can see, and know. There is nothing about this that is “above us” as far as knowledge and experience goes. If this is the only God, dimension or expression of God, we see and know then we live only in (geographically/theologically speaking) the Law and we take “above us” to mean we just need to stay in this place of Law and figure out how to maneuver ourselves within this space to be able to figure out God, come to know God, within this Law, and eventually (of course, because we are properly humble, we recognize we can only do this with God’s help and thankfully there is this gracious Jesus as our Helper) come to the place where God is “above us” no longer.
Theological theodicies are our living within God as the Law and are our attempt to tame both the ferocious God we identify and name as one who allows evil and suffering and the impotent God, alternatively, that we identify and name, who can’t do anything about it.
Universalism (that religious system of no condemnation within a belief system of judgement, within the space of Law) is simply another way of navigating within the world of God as the Law: all people are off the hook because we think that God as kind and loving, but doing that loving within the confines of the Law, could not possibly condemn or kill anybody.
Exceptionalism (my term for the religious system of condemnation within a belief system of judgement/law) is also simply another way of navigating within that world of God as the Law: only here, where people believe and behave properly as given a pass by God and because God as holy within the Law could not possibly tolerate disobedience, those who disobey are disqualified.
But what if God is not the Law?
What if God operates in a different place (geographically speaking of theology) all together? What if God lives out in the wild? What if God is only Mercy, and not in the sense of being let off the hook but rather in the sense that there is no hook in the first (or last) place? A better word for this, rather than Mercy so that it doesn’t get understood as being given a break within the Law’s system, is perhaps Grace. What if God is only Grace?
And what if the biblical narrative of God punishing and rewarding on the basis of adherence to the law, the command(s) of God, is simply our projection of a world in which we can do something (we have agency, we have a free will) about our destiny?
The Bible’s accounts of an angry and wrathful, not to say also vengeful, God, are not the truth about God’s way and character, but rather the people’s experience in a fragile, threatened and always-at-risk world that drove them to define their world as a place where they might in fact gain agency and the ability to determine their safety, security and destiny. Rather than living at the mercy of the weather elements, for example, it made sense to create a belief system where the people’s behavior (sacrifice, obeisance) would influence those who hold the reigns of the weather, whomever they may be.
If God is the Law, then the biblical story of God causing evil because of our disobedience becomes the occasion for our quest for personal righteousness in order to avert God’s wrath.
But if God is Grace (God is the “Gospel” could be another way of saying this), then the biblical story of God causing evil because of our disobedience becomes the occasion for the appearance of God’s righteousness.
The belief system of law is front and center and is the Operating System (OS) in the biblical storyline [OS= correct belief + proper behavior = safety/security (aka salvation). Let’s call it the “ROS” as in “Religious Operating System” where religion means not faith in God but rather belief in human agency and activity (worship, sacrifice, good deeds) that changes how God either takes care of humanity/creation or does not].
But here’s the crazy thing: No matter how hard the biblical writers tried to tell the story of the world through the ROS lens there was just no stopping, in the end, the true OS from showing up and shining through (see “GOS” below).
The biblical story does in fact display and describe God as not only fighting evil but also causing it. The writers of the Story actually thought that God supernaturally intervened in human historical circumstances to cause good and bad things to happen. God does not do this, of course, contrary to the belief system of the biblical writers as well as millions of Christians today. God is Grace that only brings promise and unmerited liberation, not Law that only brings demand and conditional mercy. But God as Grace is just too untamed and the biblical writers were (just as we are) at pains to reign God in.
But something interesting and we might even say miraculous happens in the writing of the salvation story: something always happens to provide a release valve, a way out from the dilemma where persistent idolatry and disobedience presents the only option of decay and destruction to the idolaters and disobedient. That “something” is the remnant of people that God allows, in the story’s accounting, to live on. It’s as if the ROS is Law, but the Holy Spirit (another name for God’s real time activity that will not stay quiescent or silent!) just keeps tripping this humanly contrived ROS up and saving this remnant of folk who deserve nothing. When I say it’s “miraculous” that this happens, I mean that it’s astounding that Grace gets poured into the biblical story almost in spite of the writers of the Law ROS story themselves. The writers keep seeing the survival of the “remnant” of Israel in history as the Mercy of God operating in the Law ROS so many times and so consistently that anyone who pays attention may begin to believe that something else is going on here. God keeps letting the people, granted only a few in relation to many, off the hook and gives them a second, third, fourth, and forever, chance. What gives? Perhaps this: there is a deeper OS at work, deeper than Mercy that lets people off the hook. It is Grace. Call is GOS (Grace Operating System).
Think about it. With all the times Israel messed up (from the grandiose failures, according to the biblical writers, that brought in the Assyrians and the Northern Kingdom’s defeat in 721 BCE and brought in the Babylonians and the Southern Kingdom’s defeat and exile in 586 BCE to all the smaller trip ups and missteps) wouldn’t you think the ROS would have brought things to a breaking point where God would get tired of the whole mess and simply end it all (oh yes, there is in fact an intimation toward this whole notion of eliminating it all and starting over from scratch: you remember the story of Noah and the Ark. See? Even when the “let’s start over” approach took central stage in God’s mind, God simply could not pull the trigger!). Somebody had to survive! But why? My contention here is that the “remnant” survived time and time again because the ROS never was the true and honest OS of the world. Everybody knew it, but just didn’t want to admit it (we have a sense of this actually in the biblical writings themselves: take the story of Job, for example, when the whole ROS was shaken to the core) because admitting it would mean nobody in the world (tribe, ethnicity, what not) is any better than anybody else and none of us has any truck with what happens to us or what will become of us.
Until something happened, or better said, Somebody Happened, that finally killed the ROS and revealed the true OS for all time. The GOS, the Grace Operating System. Hebrews 1 puts it this way: “in many and various ways God has spoken to us through the prophets, but now in these last days God has spoken to us through his Son.” Jesus broke on to the world’s stage. He revealed the GOS in all its glory. He went way beyond bringing another occasion or event of mercy. He didn’t simply sympathize with and give a second chance to the least, the last, the lost, the little and the dead. He became them. He was them. Instead of giving merit only to those who sat up and flew right (the way ROS does), he gave it without respect for the Law’s demand and accusation. He was the GOS, the true and authentic OS of the world that has been here all along but has been kept at bay and has battled tooth and nail with humanity’s ROS. But wait, didn’t he lose the battle? Wasn’t he killed because of his disrespect for religion (Temple) and empire (Rome)? Of course he was killed for that. The ROS will not tolerate GOS. And of course he lost. Grace does not work by victory. There are not, in fact, in the GOS, any winners or losers. There is only love that is life. The life and death of Jesus are the GOS in action. The resurrection of Jesus is the GOS forever imprinted as the only OS for all time and space.
There is a darkness, a death, in wondering if we are loved and there is only that darkness and death until we are told that we are loved. There is only speculation until there is proclamation. When God is the Law there cannot be the “peace that passes all understanding” (check out the bible book of Philippians) because we are never told the quest has ended. When God is Grace, there is the peace, and it “passes” (geographically) the understanding, the knowledge that knows only too well there is nothing deserving about us that calls for compassion or forgiveness. Grace passes right by that understanding to be and live in a different place, a place where our loveliness is based on Love (God) instead of the Love being based on our loveliness. It is the wild of the Gospel.
The demand over our living that delivers liberation conditionally upon our ability to fly right is a human construction in humanity’s attempt to domesticate God into something and someone humanity can influence and manage. But God will not have it. God lives in the wild, the place and space of extravagant love that will not be confined. God has left the building of the Law, or more correctly, never inhabited it. God lives in the wild place that not only will not be confined but also will not be denied.
This is good news for mere mortals. And how do we know this? Look at Jesus. There he goes, into the wild.
