God Is Right?

By Stanley K. McDaniel

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     From the first time I attended an assembly of a Church of Christ to the present day I have heard, "God is right." Rightness (orthodoxy) has always been preached to me as being almost the essence of the religious life. Such phrases as, "the Bible is right," "Christ's church is right," and "God is right" are commonly heard in our meetings. Our traditional position is that "He is the source of truth, and all man has to do is read His word, do what He says, and man will be right."

     I find my enthusiasm for this position waning rapidly as I become more involved with people and their personal problems. The difficulty I have with the position that God is right is not one of unbelief in the truth of the statement, rather it is one of doubt in the practical value of the statement. I do not believe we have demonstrated that our emphasis on rightness has produced workable solutions to our greatest problem, which many see as a lack of genuine spirituality in the Churches of Christ. No church in America is more insistent than we are that God is right, while manifesting among ourselves the most unlovely problems which we are almost totally impotent to heal. We are found in 1970 screaming at each other from warring camps that God is right, while the world scornfully passes us by on its undisturbed course to hell.

     My involvement in the troubled lives of people, both Christians and unbelievers, and my study of history indicate to me that when a people conceive the essence of God as being right they are laying a foundation for spiritual disaster and chaos. I would like to clarify this statement by discussing the following ideas: (1) the concept, God is right, is

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a product of western thought, (2) the application of this concept to the problems of Christian living has wreaked havoc among the professed followers of Jesus, and (3) the scriptures do not advocate the essence of God as being right.

     The development of western thought has been greatly influenced by Aristotelian logic. This system of logic has influenced our language and thought structure so that we tend to perceive the problems of man in terms of right or wrong. Aristotle's logic asserts that reality exists as either A or non-A. Nothing can be both A and non-A at the same time. The Christian thinker of the western world, applying this law of the excluded middle to himself, his God, and his religion, sees reality existing as a dichotomy. All is right or wrong. To borrow from the American western movie, life is a struggle between the good guys in white hats and the bad guys in black hats. There can be no middle ground. God becomes all truth, goodness, and rightness. Satan becomes the opposite of the virtues of God. A man in his search for God must search for absolute right, for God is total rightness and there is no middle ground. Therefore, the Christian concludes that a man's godliness must depend upon human conformity in thought and action to rightness.

     This dichotomous approach to human problems is especially characteristic of the American personality. He experiences political problems as alignment with the right party. He fights a world ideological battle in which he divides men into capitalistic or communistic camps. His labor problems are seen as management versus workers. When at home he struggles with a generation gap, parent versus child, which he hears exists on the college campus as administration versus students. In America the law of the excluded middle has influenced his behavior toward minority groups. The nation is pock-marked with ethnic ghettos of all kinds because he thinks and acts in terms of black and white. He sets aside reservations for Indians and reserves the rest for his people.

     The application of this dichotomous concept to the problem of developing spirituality among Christians is a story of centuries of failure. Two consequences of this concept were codifying of church law and creed making. Once we shouldered the oppressive cross of judging the godliness of other men on the basis of rightness we needed some objective standards for judging. Thus the creeds of Christendom were created by men for the purpose of keeping others on the "right side."

     The inevitable result has been a tendency to over-emphasize right thought and de-emphasize right living. Is it not paradoxical that among the Churches of Christ we have an amazing tolerance toward the brother who is struggling with a sin of the spirit, but woe to him who commits an error in doctrine? The publicans and harlots will not receive the harassment from the "faithful" that is reserved for him who is judged to be doctrinally wrong on any one of our unquestionable, unwritten creeds. A man is seen as one to be fellowshipped or not fellowshipped on the basis of his right thinking, whether or not he has been begotten by the Father. Growing toward maturity in Christ, among the Churches of Christ, is the ground of the excluded middle which our logic will not tolerate, and to which we give only lip service.

     However, this situation is not unique to the Churches of Christ. The history of the church in western civilization contains the sordid story of centuries of chaos and conflict among professed Christians. Chaos and conflict which arose, not from questions of right living, but from ecclesiastical disputes on points of dogma.

     A further result of this dichotomous concept is fragmentation among the professed followers of Christ. One is a Baptist or he is not. One is a Catholic or he is not. One is a Presbyterian or he is not. The religious reformation of Thomas and Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone has been adulterated in like manner. We support missionary societies or we exclude ourselves from those who do. We are either for or against instrumental

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music in public worship and we manifest our positions by fragmentation. The same behavior occurs when we discuss orphans homes, Bible colleges, Sunday school classes, and such like. In this respect our actions follow the premise which says, "There are two sides to every issue, mine which is right and yours which is wrong if we differ, and the twain shall never meet."

     One of the basic concepts behind this fragmentation is "God is right" (His essence is orthodox). Therefore a man's acceptance by God, and consequently acceptance by God's people, is on the basis of his rightness. This in turn has produced the issues, the unwritten creeds which we have used to judge rightness or wrongness in others. We continue this policy of fragmentation today in spite of the fact that we have hundreds of years of history to teach us the disastrous and chaotic fruits this policy has produced. We establish neither peace on earth nor good will among men. We trample under foot the Son of God, we regard the blood of the covenant as of no account, and we insult the Spirit of grace by insisting that brotherhood in Christ depends upon His blood plus rightness, as we see rightness.

     Now let us consider the teaching of the scriptures on the essence of God and the problem of developing spirituality in the lives of Jesus' followers. Keep in mind that Christianity did not begin in the West, but was a child of the Near East. This is to say that although we perceive reality and systematize our religion using western logic, it need not be so. This does not mean that Jesus promoted either western logic or the paradoxical logic of the East. But it does mean that to know the nature of God and understand Jesus teachings we are not dependent on an exclusive and inflexible application of western logic. For example, to be meek and inherit the earth seems to be a contradiction (Matt. 5:5). In commenting upon this paradox, Alan J. Lerner writes a line in the musical play Camelot, "It's not the earth the meek inherit, it's the dirt." To take something away from a man who has nothing (Mk. 4:25), to save your life by losing it (Mk. 8:35), to be last to be first (Mk. 9:35), to become a servant to be great among men (Mk. 10:43) seem to say that all may be A and non-A. Perhaps this was the message of Paul to the western-thinking Christians at Corinth when he asked, "Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?"

     If we accept that the teaching of Jesus and his apostles does not depend on an exclusive and inflexible application of the law of the excluded middle, as historically used in western civilization, then we can expect to find in the scriptures that the definitive essence of God is something other than rightness, and that the practice of creed-making and intellectualizing about issues to achieve rightness in men's lives is not essential to Christianity.

     Our expectations are met by the simple pronouncements that "God is spirit" (John 4:24) and "God is love" (1 John 4:16). These are the definitive statements concerning the essence of God from Jesus and the apostles. They do not raise the issue that God is right, either to affirm it or deny it.

     Consistent with His own teaching, Jesus said that a man's ability to love was the sign of his rightness (John 13:35). Jesus taught that the judgment principle to be used to reward or punish men eternally is right behavior toward your fellowmen rather than orthodox intellectualizing on religious issues (Matt. 25).

     This teaching was amplified by Paul when he wrote to Christians to help them find victory over the world. Paul contended we do not owe to our brethren rightness on the issues of observing or not observing days, or eating or not eating only vegetables, but rather we owe love (Rom. 13:14). It is not judging about food or drink, a festival, a new moon, or a Sabbath day which is the Christian's thing to do; rather it is to put on love which is the perfect bond of unity (Col. 2:3). It is not that one is either right or wrong on the circumcision creed that means anything, but rather it is faith working through love (Gal. 5:6).

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     In summarizing the implications of the foregoing discussion it would be erroneous to conclude that it is incorrect to say, "God is right," or that doctrine is irrelevant to salvation and Christian maturity, or that any one system of logic is needed to discern truth and know God.

     The justifiable implications are: (1) genuine spirituality in people cannot be produced by intellectual conformity (we have no historical evidence to indicate that this policy has ever worked), (2) God is love -- this is the definitive characteristic of the God of Christianity, (3) love is the definitive characteristic of the Christian, or rather, love is his badge of rightness, and (4) rightness or wrongness on issues leading to maturity in Christ was never used by the apostles as the principle for accepting or rejecting another's profession of faith in Christ or the genuiness of his obedience to the gospel.

     When we, the Churches of Christ, implement in our behavior the truth that God is love, we will have conquered our lack of genuine spirituality and experience the pragmatic value of the truth, "Christ in you, the hope of glory."

Editor's Note: Stanley K. McDaniel is an instructor in College of the Redwoods, Eureka, California 95501. You can write to him at that address.