God Is Just and Righteous. But Who Cares?

God Is Just and Righteous. But Who Cares? May 28, 2016

Minos by William Blake Creative Commons

How important would it be to you that a therapist you are seeing or a butler or bellhop who serves you were guilty of tax evasion or cheating on their spouse? As long as the therapist or butler/bellhop weren’t cheating you, would that be okay? What about God? As long as a God who cheats others weren’t cheating you, would that be okay?

How did God come into the picture? According to sociologist of religion Christian Smith, many young people, who espouse a form of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” view God as “something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist—he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process.”[1] Smith claims that MTD’s “creed” is:

  1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.

  2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

  3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

  4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.

  5. Good people go to heaven when they die.[2]

For his book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, Smith and coauthor Melinda Lundquist Denton interviewed numerous young people. The interviews reflected significant emphasis among American teenagers on personal happiness and fulfillment as well as feeling good about oneself or life, yet very little consideration on their part about what God is like. For example, there was very little mention of divine (or human) righteousness and holiness, or divine justice.[3] It would appear that many young people are not connecting the dots between their concerns for what God wants from us—fairness and goodness toward one another—and what they want from God—fair treatment of good people—with what God is like. They likely assume that God is good and fair, but it appears to be no more than an assumption, intuition, or feeling (given that they are not Trinitarian, which would include the accompanying claim that Jesus is God incarnate, and that they don’t see the Bible as divine revelation, according to Smith[4]). How do they really know that God is good and fair? How can they be sure this deistic deity or ‘theism on demand’ divine being, as I like to refer to it, matches their religious opinion or preference?

Could it be that it does not really matter if God is just and righteous in all spheres, except when they call on him? If so, it would be ‘fairness on demand’. Perhaps many youth—and many adults—view God like we do our neighbors: “as long as their crap (i.e., what they do, how they treat their kids, etc.) stays in their house, I don’t ultimately care; it doesn’t affect me.” But as with the therapist or butler/bellhop who cheats outside the workplace, who’s to say that it won’t spill over into their treatment of you and me, or into society as a whole?

Perhaps we don’t want to know what God is like behind closed doors because we don’t want God to know what we are really like in the bedrooms and closets of our lives. If God really knew us, would the Almighty accept us?

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[1]Christian Smith, “On ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’ as U.S. Teenagers’ Actual, Tacit, De Facto Religious Faith,” page 50:  https://www.ptsem.edu/uploadedFiles/School_of_Christian_Vocation_and_Mission/Institute_for_Youth_Ministry/Princeton_Lectures/Smith-Moralistic.pdf.

[2]See Smith, pages 46-47.

[3] See pages 52-53 of Smith’s article.

[4]“But this God is not Trinitarian, he did not speak through the Torah or the prophets of Israel, was never resurrected from the dead, and does not fill and transform people through his Spirit.” See Smith, page 50.


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