A few weeks ago I have the privilege of meeting with several people seeking ordination in our denomination. My team’s responsibility was to review their doctrinal statements and ask questions around doctrine and theology.
For the most part, they did well in expressing the core Wesleyan doctrines of grace, salvation and other topics. However, one issue that was evident in almost all of them was as lack of understanding of certain aspects of God’s nature and attributes – theology proper.
We asked them to describe what God was like to a curious seeker who had no knowledge of God, they did a good job of talking about God’s grace, love, mercy and forgiveness, but that was where it stopped.
I asked, “What about God’s other attributes, what attributes make God’s mercy and grace necessary?” They were stumped. It seemed that the attributes of God they could relate to were on God’s “good side.” When pressed and coached, one candidate said, “Oh you mean God’s vengeance.”
The first class I took in seminary was a class on Systematic Theology and one of the first books we read was the devotional classic by A.W. Tozer, Knowledge of the Holy.
This book, along with the other textbooks in the class introduced us to the attributes of God, among many other things. The class taught us about God’s love, mercy, grace and forgiveness, but also about God’s holiness, justice, righteousness, eternity, omnipotence and omnipresence and others.
Many people pit these attributes against one another as if God were one or the other―that is not the case. God is all of these at the same time. H. Ray Dunning sums up many of God’s attributes in the term holy love. God is holy and loving, God is just and merciful. God is transcendent and imminent. God is omnipotent and compassionate; and all of these at the same time.
What is most disturbing is the characterization of God’s righteousness, holiness and justice as vengeance. Let’s draw some analogies: Are parents vengeful when they do not allow one of their children to play in the street and physically stop them from doing so? Is a civic club vengeful when it establishes a code of conduct and then holds its accountable for it? Is a teacher vengeful when she catches a student cheating and gives her/him a zero for the test? Is a judge being vengeful when he sentences a defendant to life in prison for killing someone?
I think we as pastors and “theologians in residence” have an obligation to help people understand the nature of God and not divide God up so that we can pick and choose the parts we want. We must teach and preach a God who is whole, holy and loving.