The Gospel in the Marketplace of Ideas: Paul's Mars Hill Experience for Our Pluralistic World by Paul Copan & Kenneth D. Litwak

Author:Paul Copan & Kenneth D. Litwak
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Christian, The Gospels & Acts, Religion, New Testament, Jesus, Apologetics, Biblical Studies, Christian Theology
ISBN: 9780830840434
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2014-06-05T01:53:15+00:00

or decide disputes by what his ears hear,

but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,

and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;

and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth. (Is 11:3-4 ESV)

Israel, as God’s chosen people, is to imitate God in practicing justice. The Mosaic law is full of instructions to Israel that people are not to pervert justice, nor be unjust toward the powerless: “Cursed be anyone who perverts the justice due to the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow” (Deut 27:19 ESV). Paul tells the Athenians that there is coming a future day of judgment. Most Greeks believed that history was one long, ongoing process, with no purpose, goal or end. There was not going to be an end of history at which some god or goddess would decide someone’s fate. Paul rejects this idea and asserts that the Athenians are responsible for their actions as idolaters and need to repent. God will hold people responsible for rejecting the light they have and not seeking him.

Today one often hears the idea that since “God is love,” he would never punish anyone for wrongdoing. There are at least three problems with that view. First, Paul tightly connects God’s love and God’s justice when he talks about Jesus dying for the sake of others, as in Romans 3:24-26 and 5:1-11. For Paul, love and justice fit together well. Second, would we really want a world in which there will never be final justice? The powerless are oppressed. They are imprisoned, tortured and killed. Women are raped or abused by men. Children suffer all sorts of wrongs. If God is only love, but not interested in justice, it means that a child who is sold into sexual trafficking is the same in God’s eyes as the person who kidnaps her and forces her to be a sex slave each day. In a world with no final justice, Mother Teresa and Adolf Hitler are treated the same. Some might say in an argument that this is fine, but really, when wrong is done to them, they want justice.

Yale theologian Miroslav Volf was born in Croatia and lived through the nightmare years of ethnic strife in the former Yugoslavia—including the destruction of church buildings, the raping of women and the murder of innocents. He once thought that wrath and anger were beneath God, but he came to realize that his view of God had been too low. Here he puts the complaints about divine wrath or judgment into proper perspective:

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced.

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