I respect Longman and likely would agree with 99% of the book (good subtitle: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions About God), but I disagree with everything after the first sentence.
First, it’s not supported by the gospels. Matthew says nothing about the Father’s emotions, but he makes it pretty clear who is mocking and deriding Jesus, as well as who inspired the crowd’s taunts. (Hint: It wasn’t God.) Second, it opens the door to a fundamental misunderstanding of the character of God. On the one hand, classical theism says God is “impassable,” and on the other, the emotions ascribed to God by Longman are mocking, derision, and disgust directed at the Son upon the cross. Are those the actions of a loving Father?
Contemptible? Why not do better instead of doubling down? If certainty regarding one’s beliefs about God was a sin, I’m pretty sure this jury of your peers would find you as guilty as Klax.
C’mon guys. This isn’t hard. Word choice matters. You quote someone and reply “This is a lie.” It’s just as easy to say, “Strongly disagree.” The same applies to Mike.
It’s more nuanced than this. Klax admits he doesn’t know God in numerous ways, and yet is certain regarding what may or may not be in his nature.
Classical theism sometimes errs in the way of philosophical theism.
If you believe Jesus bore the wrath of God the Father in our place on the cross, then I don’t see the problem with this including the mockery of God. If you don’t believe Jesus experienced God’s wrath, then I think you have more to disagree with Longman than his view of God’s derision.
Narcissus existence does become meaningless, but it becomes so of itself. Sisyphus’s is different. Although he is is used as the ultimate example of meaningless existence, no one seems to notice that the meaninglessness of his existence was its’ PURPOSE, created for him special as punishment.
This is quite different from the run-of-the-mill nihilist, who sees life as intrinsically meaningless.
Mark,
I like your questions. They’re uncomfortable but worth thinking about.
I finished “The Sense of the Sacred” video today, while I was repairing library books at a local school. I really felt like I was getting lost in metaphor on this one. Which is probably an occupational hazzard, when trying to talk about the sacred or divine or god/God, and particularly in terms broad enough to be entirely inclusive.
Thinking just about this problem, that is the challenge talking about these things, it really is easier, when one has a faith tradition with established concepts and ways of talking. There’s a shared vocabulary and set of ways of thinking as well as doing that is shared.
Basic politeness doesn’t require that much nuance. You’re just as certain as he is about what may or may not be in God’s nature, and I’m equally certain that some here disagree with your convictions but somehow manage not to use words like “contemptible” to describe your opinions. Again, it’s not hard.
So you’re not a classical theist?
See. You managed to disagree with me without any ad hominem. It’s not hard.
Let me unpack my meaning. Matthew and Mark mention Jesus’ “cry of dereliction” (Ps 22:1) from the cross. Neither evangelist says anything about God’s emotions. The focus is Jesus in his humanity feeling abandoned by God and surrounded by enemies, like the psalmist. Any speculations about what God was feeling in that moment are just that – speculation. I take it as a general rule of thumb that we shouldn’t speculate about God’s thought life without pretty dang good textual evidence, which is lacking in the gospels themselves. (We could debate the meaning of darkness on the land and the rending of the Temple veil, but those are just inferences about literary symbols.)
What isn’t lacking are theories about what happened during those hours on the cross when Jesus bore God’s wrath. From My God, my God to Abba, into your hands I commit my spirit, it seems to me God the Father withdrew his presence for a moment, but Christ the Son never doubted his Father’s love. But, of course, that’s an inference from the text not explicitly stated. You see the problem?
A loving father may turn away from a child in justified anger, but he would never mock them, laugh at them, or make them feel he no longer loved them. That’s emotionally abusive. If that applies to mere human beings, surely it applies to God the Father. My two cents. Take it for what it’s worth.
I thought about making this an edit, but it deserves its own post.
Try telling a person who’s lived (or living) in an abusive home that God the Father violated the Son, mocked him, laughed at him, derided him, and abandoned him in disgust, yet this was all somehow an expression of God’s love.
Allender and Longman continue and I couldn’t agree more:
Something inside us shouts: “It cannot be. How could the Father curse His Son? How could the perfect, beautiful, pure Son be assaulted with the vile content of our souls? How could He take our place—how could He bear our sin?”
In a mysterious instant, the Father who loved the Son from all eternity turned from Him in hatred. The Son became odious to the Father. It is the most inconceivable moment in the history of time. Jesus submitted to it in order to redeem His people for His Father’s glory: “‘He himself bore our sins’ in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; ‘by his wounds you have been healed’” (1 Peter 2:24)
The willingness of Jesus to bear the stripes of mockery opens our heart and draws us to see that God’s contempt has been poured out on the perfect, unblemished Son of God. We will never look into God’s eyes and see contempt or mockery. No matter how hard our heart becomes or how far we flee, the Father’s response at our return is not cold, cruel, cutting eyes, but the open arms of One who knows joy, not contempt, toward us.
Allender and Longman have an important point that shouldn’t be dismissed because some random person on the internet someone paints a nice picture humanizing God. They are respected leaders in their fields of biblical theology and Christian counseling.
Just pondering Sisyphus and frames of reference. In that story, the gods (external and transcendent to Sisyphus) may have ascribed a meaning, i.e. “punishment” to his actions, such that Sisphus’s actions are really part of a Grand Narrative that involves those gods’ purposes for the universe (and them enacting cosmic justice). But let’s imagine a Sisyphus who does not believe any gods exist, whose frame of reference is only himself. A materialist Sisyphus who finds himself rolling that rock endlessly. Does that fellow still have meaning (or simply a proximate purpose) to what he does?
Re: Substitutionary atonement and whether the Father passively turned away or actively mocked the Son. I think we could all do with de-escalating some of the rhetoric and one-liners at play and taking a beat. Remember, this is not Twitter or Reddit, we’re in the dialogue business here.
Thanks for all the contributions to this fascinating topic so far and for @klw bringing us back on-topic.
An atheist who decides that “life” is nothing more than “rolling the same rock up the same hill for all of eternity” would, IMO, be a remarkable atheist. What atheist believes that he’s going to be in any condition to do anything after he dies?
The story of Sisyphus, on the other hand, assumes -that:
humans [at least one human] live forever;
that gods exist;
that some gods are smarter than others,
but sometimes it’s possible for a human to outsmart one more than once; and
in doing so, trick, annoy, and offend a god,
ultimately being condemned by a god to do something that required effort but accomplished nothing … for all eternity.
Besides the difference between the atheist and the theist in the myth, there is also the noteworthy brute fact that Albert Camus did not make the Myth of Sisyphus up. The myth existed long before Camus was a twinkle in his father’s eye.
In other words, both myths, one by Greeks a couple of thousand years ago and the other by a 20th century French atheist, are fantasies made up by different people meaning completely different things in different times and places.
And the real tragedy is that a person can fail to write an acceptable essay on Camus’ essay and possibly fail a literature class and end up suffering the consequences until he or she dies.
@Terry_Sampson did a good job giving a overview just a bit ago.
I think the meaning part is entirely up to him.
The Greeks came up with the story, aparently because the assigned work was laborious, pointless and repeatable. (They seemed to have a thing for endlessly repeated punishments. Prometheus comes to mind, too.)
Anyone who believes themselves to be within a meaningless life and finds that intolerable, will need to change how they understand some aspect of meaning or how they value meaninglessness. Or live an intolerable life.
As far as purpose for the atheistic Sisyphus, as I described purpose (as having been applied by the gods), it can’t be part of this version of the myth.