This week I cam across some rather funny misunderstandings:
One person writes that when he was around 5 or 6, he was told to watch his baby cousin as she was laid on the couch. He watched her roll off the couch. Everyone was angry at him. He watched her roll right off the couch.
Another tells how as a child his mother popped out while she was cooking. She was boiling some potatoes. She said to him “Watch the potatoes” as she left. He writes: I watched them. They burnt!
But misunderstandings can sometimes be of a far more serious nature:
This week, I learned the shocking information that a misunderstanding and a mistranslation led to the United States dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During World War II, when asked if Japan would surrender, the Japanese ruler used the word “mokusatsu” which meant “we withhold comment – pending discussion.” However, it was mistranslated to mean “We are treating your message with contempt” when sent to Washington. This mistake spread quickly through the media. Frustrated by what he thought was Japan's response, President Truman decided to use atomic bombs, causing the deaths, injuries, and radiation exposure of 150,000-250,000 people. It is tragic that a mistranslation of a Japanese word could have had such devastating consequences.
Over the past two weeks I have been inviting us to question the notion of Eternal Hell.
Most of the thoughts in these reflections are taken from a book by David Bentley Hart called “That All May Be Saved”. David Bentley Hart essentially believes that when the Church began to teach the notion of Eternal Hell or Eternal Damnation, the church began to take itself down a wrong path. He believes that traditional teachings on eternal hell undermine every other claim that Christians make about God, most especially the central idea that God is love. He writes that much of the teaching on eternal hell he believes is a misinterpretation or misunderstanding of how to read and translate Scripture.
In the course of these early arguments in the book, David Bentley Hart examines the theology of John Calvin, one of the major theologians of the Reformation, who had a particularly strong influence on ‘subscribing’ Presbyterians (as opposed to non-subscribing Presbyterians).
John Calvin's assertion was that God made some to be predestined to heaven and some to be predestined to eternal hell as an expression of God’s Power and Sovereignty. But David Bentley Hart writes, that such a position is based on what he describes as a notoriously confused reading of scripture, based on an inability to read Greek and relying on defective Latin translations.
And so he describes the Calvinist account of predestination as unquestioningly the most terrifying and the most severe expressions of Christianity.
To Calvin's credit, writes David Bentley Hart, Calvin makes no effort to deceive us as to his views. Calvin quite openly proclaims that God created some to be the object of God’s love and others to be the object of God’s hatred. For John Calvin, this predestination of some to be damned and to be the objects of his hatred is nothing more than sheer absolute power exercising itself for power’s sake and therefore comes across as a manifestation of boundless cruelty: that God, of God’s own free and sovereign will would create beings for torturous and unending suffering. What boundless cruelty says David Bentley Hart and goes on to say that Calvin at his worst produces a picture of God as resembling an omnipotent cruel and mad dictator.
But he writes however that he does not hold Calvin necessarily accountable for this dismal and distorted theology, since in this matter he was the product of centuries of bad scriptural interpretation and even worse theological reasoning. Bentley Hart writes that Calvin differed little in this respect from many of his contemporaries, both Protestant and Catholic alike.
Where in particular did Calvin go wrong? David Bentley Hart suggests that Calvin’s primary error is his misinterpretation of chapters 9-11 of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Like St Augustine a few centuries before him Calvin’s error came in treating chapters 9-11 as comprising a series of separate ideas with separate conclusions, instead of reading these chapters as a whole in which Paul is wrestling with a single question that had clearly haunted him for a long time.
What preoccupies Paul from the beginning to end of these chapters is the agonizing mystery that the Messiah of Israel has come and yet so few of the house of Israel have accepted him, while on the other hand so many gentiles have. How can the promised messiah of Israel fail to be the saviour of the people of Israel? Has God abandoned his promises the people of Israel?
In the process of wrestling with this question he begins by firstly trying to entertain the possibility that indeed God has abandoned the people of Israel. What if God has kept some people (namely Israel) solely for destruction in order to show just how glorious his salvation lavished on the people of his mercy. It is a terrible possibility, and horrifying to contemplate, but for a moment, Paul wonders if this is simply how things are.
But he does not stop there, because he knows that this cannot be the correct answer. It is so obviously preposterous that he decides that a completely different solution must be found, one that makes sense and in which God remains faithful to God’s promises. And so writes David Bentley Hart, Paul spends the next two chapters unambiguously rejecting the initial provisional answer that he came to in the previous section, so that he reaches a completely different and far more glorious conclusion, that in the end through Christ, God will bless everyone.
32 God has given all people over over to their stubborn disobedient ways, so that God can show mercy to all.
And having come to this glorious conclusion, Paul explodes with joy as he says:
Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!...
“Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been God’s counsellor?
For from God and through God and for God are all things.
To God be the glory forever! Amen.
You can almost feel Paul’s joy and his relief as he comes to the conclusion that all will be saved by God’s most amazing grace.
But this is an answer that he already knew in his heart… For in his earlier letter to the Corinthians a few years before his letter to the Romans, he already came to this same conclusion when he wrote:
1 Cor 15:22 For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. For Paul, God’s saving work in Christ will eventually completely undo the sin and death which all human beings participate in, symbolised in the person of Adam.
And so, David Bentley Hart believes that Calvinism, makes a monster out of God, because of misreading Paul’s letter to the Romans and building his theology on an idea that Paul himself rejects in his own letter, namely, the idea that God has created some for salvation and some for destruction.
David Bentley Hart suggests that if it is read correctly, then the story of God in the New Testament a story of infinite and universal love which suggests that God will never leave anyone in the mire of slavery to sin with all its destructive consequences. God’s intention is to save all. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.
For those who might still be struggling to shake off the ideas of God who is a monster who predestines some to eternal torment, Bentley Hart suggests that sometimes childish imagery – even childish anthropomorphisms can help to bring clarity. And in this sense Christ instructs his followers to think of God, the Great Universal Intelligence of the Cosmos, using the analogy of a human father and in doing so Christ encourages his followers to feel safe in assuming that God’s actions toward them will display something like – but also something far greater than paternal love.
In Matthew 7:9-11 Jesus says:
9 “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? 11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
David Bentley Hart suggests that at the very least, when Jesus refers to God in this way, we gain an idea of what NOT to expect from God. For instance, Jesus implies that God, the Universal Intelligence, will not be like a father who punishes his children for any purpose other than the child’s correction and moral improvement. Punishing simply as an arbitrary display of power over a child created as an object of hatred is not behaviour one would ever expect from a father worthy of the name and therefore should not be something we should expect from God either.
In addition, Bentley Hart suggests that a father who surrenders his child to the fate of an eternal suffering is surely also not a truly loving father.
He writes: It is surely the responsibility of a father [or parent] to continue to love their children in all conditions and to seek their well being and if need be their reformation and to use whatever natural powers they posses to save their children from ruin. He adds – what a happy circumstance if a father happens to possess infinite power to do these things and to carry them out.