Preceding Love
Posted By: Zach Hoag
This is the first post in a little blog series I did over at the nuance. Given our recent focus on Jonah, preceding love, and covenant, I thought it might be helpful. (Feel free to check out the rest of the series here.)
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deconstruction, pt. 1
Not sure if anybody has heard Regina Spektor’s song “Laughing With”, but it’s been making the rounds in the evangelical blogosphere of late, and I caught a glimpse a couple weeks ago. And I like it, a lot.
It actually reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend yesterday. The thought I got after the conversation was, Deconstruction. We Christians are in the business of deconstruction now. Because when you think about it, what most folks believe about God and the church and Jesus and the faith called Christianity is largely or at least partly a strawman, a caricature, an imbalanced broadstroke of one-dimensional summation incapable of getting the nuance – the truth that’s all in the emPHASis.
Our conversation went kind of like this:
Do you think this or that lifestyle is wrong or sinful?
Well, yeah, but the question becomes what you mean by sinful. If by sinful you mean “bad,” as in “those people who live that lifestyle are bad,” as in “we people who don’t live that lifestyle are good,” then you don’t have a biblical understanding of sin. That understanding of sin works fine if you are looking for a religion of moralism, but not if you are looking for a redemption-spirituality like Christianity. And that’s just it – the religions of the world are generally about defining what’s bad and what’s good and doing your darndest to be on the good side (as Nick explained well last Sunday, check the podcast). And Christianity is about redemption.
The wholiness of God (missp. intentional) brings with it the implication that anything less than his wholiness is incomplete, broken, lacking, missing the mark. Most people say, “I’m not perfect, I’m just human” and by this they mean that they are not whole like God is whole but instead they are fractured, a cracked Eikon as Mr. McKnight would say. They fall short of the perfect design, fall short of the sheer glory of God. And in a whole biblical-theological sense, that’s sin.
The other piece to consider in this equation is brought out nicely by the song:
But God can be funny At a cocktail party while listening to a good God-themed joke Or when the crazies say he hates us and they get so red in the head you think that they’re about to choke
Is it crazy to say that God hates sin or sinners? Is it crazy to imagine a God of wrath? Because this is the way most traditionalist, conservative evangelical types present God, at least when they “begin” their presentation. The reason strong, pulpit-based, political campaigning against gay marriage or abortion seems justifiable to some Christians is because God hates sin, and he intends to judge sin, and so making public the anger and judgment of God towards sin is a good thing, they say, perhaps even “preparing” one for the gospel message of Jesus’ forgiveness. The problem here is that the longer one lingers in the anger and judgment of God – and evangelicalism has been lingering for over 20 years in its culture-warring and politicizing position – the more forgiveness becomes overshadowed, secondary, and even superfluous to a good-guy moralistic subcultural movement.
And this is American Evangelicalism as we know it.
I want to coin a phrase at this point in the diatribe, and it might be completely unoriginal. It’s this: the Preceding Love of God. This is my understanding of the gospel, and it runs somewhat counter to the modern evangelical version which is based on the old pseudo-Reformation Law-then-Gospel method (popularized in recent days by Todd Friel and the uber-annoying Way of the Master gang).
In my opinion (for what that’s worth), Preceding Love is the biblical emphasis to which the Christian church must return, by and large, if it is to properly represent Jesus in the next century. I think that Preceding Love is the heart of the Christian faith and presents the antidote to the culture-warring false gospel.
To begin, instead of focusing on a broken-moral-code understanding of sin, a Preceding Love emphasis takes as its starting point creation and Fall, not Sinai and Law. Only when creation and Fall are properly seen as the fountainhead of sin can Sinai and Law be properly understood as contributing to and exacerbating the preexisting problem of sin (which is exactly Paul’s understanding of the Law’s [or the Torah's] weakness according to the flesh and its sin-increasing tendency, cf. Ro. 7). And I like to locate God’s fundamental response to man’s rebellion against him not in Joshua (where God deals militarily with pagan nations in Canaan) or in the Prophets (where God deals militarily with his own nation Israel), but in Genesis 6:6-8, where God prepares to deal with humanity in general directly through the hand of nature:
And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.
You’re probably wondering what this has to do with the preceding love of God since it seems to directly precede judgment. But look carefully and see God’s heart: Very early on in human history, after mankind broke his relationship with God and began to worship creation instead of Creator (Ro. 1), thus allowing brokenness to enter all his relationships, the Lord was so grieved (NIV: “his heart was filled with pain”) that he considered stopping this downward spiral before it got any worse. What we see here is not some capricious pleasure in punishing immoral lawbreakers, but rather an emotional moment of decision where God could have prevented what is surely now the most tragic series of events one could imagine: human history itself.
For one thing is beyond debate: Human history has been nothing short of a death-machine.
Yet in this Creator’s heart, there was a deep-seated unwillingness to end it; and this is the place, in the crisis moment of God surveying human sin and destruction in the early days of history, that I think we can locate the genesis of his preceding love.
Since God did not, in fact, end it all in the Great Flood but rather purged the young world of desperate evil in hope of a better future, promising never to do it again, then everything after, and certainly everything in our own 21st century experience, is marked decisively by his preceding love.
Even our existence is owed to the fact that he loved first and did not prolong his judgment.
(We love because he first loved us.)
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