Christians are all over the place when it comes to their understanding of what God requires of man before he will grant him eternal life in that Holy City. I think that naturally, one could consider the idea that “God requires nothing”, as a possibility to be covered in due diligence, but that once he sets one toe over that line of zero requirement, he steps out onto a slippery slope that will whisk a great many people away to a conclusion that do not find agreeable.
And the question, of course, is whether God finds that conclusion agreeable―whether it is the right and true conclusion, whether we might tend to think so or not. So this article examines that slippery slope, and what seems to be on each end of it, and how most people tend to reason their way up and down that slope, avoiding the landings at both the top and the bottom, preferring instead, the frantic life of trying to live somewhere along the slope itself.
I’ve made a rough list below of example positions below. It is surely imperfect in several ways, yet useful (I hope) in sketching out the gist of the quandary that plagues so many, and the various ways they dispute the particulars.
Some of the Various Positions
1a. Some say he requires nothing, and grants eternal life to all. (This one would be at the landing at the top of that “slippery slope” I’m talking about.)
1b. Some say he requires nothing, and grants eternal life to all except Hitler, of course, for it would not do to have a Hitler fouling up Heaven. (Once we allow that Hitler would be refused by God, then it opens the door to what/who else he might refuse. We’re now on the slope.)
2. Some say he requires nothing, and grants eternal life only to those he chooses, based on some considerations that are known only to God, and are a mystery to us.
3a. Some say he requires only that the man believes* in him.
*(How belief is defined is rather crucial.)
3b. Some say he requires only that the man believes* in him―but that God empowers this belief, as man is incapable of doing that believing on his own.
*(How belief is defined is rather crucial.)
4a. Some say he requires only that the man seeks God in some fashion
4b. Some say he requires that the man seeks God in some fashion―but that God empowers this seeking, as man is incapable of doing that seeking on his own.
5a. Some say he requires both the seeking and believing, but that he also requires the man to do good deeds.
5b. Some may reluctantly agree that he requires the doing of good deeds, but also behave somewhat dismissively about this idea, since they claim that it is impossible for man to do, want, or even conceive of those good deeds unless God empowers it all, acting on the man’s heart to make it possible.
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NOTE: From here, this growing list of possible positions gets quite complicated rather quickly, for if the good deeds are on the table, then a great many details about deeds must be dealt with―and there is a great deal of disagreement among Christians over the details. So let us simply fast forward to a position that would be quite opposite of 1a on a gradient that runs from God requiring nothing (1a) to God requiring a great deal more. Not being able to calculate how many positions I’m skipping over to get to the following, I’ll just fast-forward the numbering to 100a, as if what I’ve written below might just happen to be the full embodiment of everything the scriptures say about God’s requirements. Inasmuch as it is that full embodiment, I consider this the landing at the bottom of the “slippery slope”.
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100a. Some say he requires (among other things) that the man believe him and seek him out with all his heart, love him with all his heart, repent of his sins, obey him, and love his neighbor, be constantly growing in godly character and knowledge and wisdom, and that he must overcome the world, enduring in his faith until the end of his life.
100b. [We might expect to find here at 100b an alternative view similar in nature to positions 3b, 4b, and 5b. Interestingly, however, I don’t think I’ve ever run across a camp whose members are notably mature (compared to the maturity of Jesus), and claiming that such maturity has been done by the power of the Holy Spirit. They can claim this about their belief and their seeking, and even some of their good deeds, but have I ever seen even one camp where they’re all marked like Jesus? No.]
Some Observations
Cognitive scientists and philosophers are quick to point out that humans tend to be cognitive/moral misers, hesitating to expend more energy on our thoughts and morals than we are forced to expend. When people don’t overcome that miserly disposition, they’re much more likely to cherry pick bits and pieces of information and principles and rules than they are to go after learning the whole of a thing.
I think this happens quite naturally with those who read the Bible, just as it happens with all humans in all areas of life. I think it’s only natural that a lot of us are going to make errors in understanding the information and principles and rules in the Bible, and will be prone to just picking out bits and pieces, and ignoring the rest―or worse, hand-waving the rest away as unnecessary, or even branding the pursuit of the rest as being ungodly in some fashion (“legalistic”, perhaps?)
The people who take the position in 1a above can surely show you some Bible passages that they claim in support of that position. But so can those who believe in 100a. In fact, there’s not a thing in 100a that is without scriptural support!
So I think there’s a lot of mental/moral laziness that goes on concerning this topic, and a lot of people take the lazy way out, citing some scripture as their support, but neglecting to study the whole of scripture on this question of God’s requirements.
I can understand the appeal that #2 has for some:
2. Some say he requires nothing, and grants eternal life only to those he chooses, based on some considerations that are known only to God, and are a mystery to us.
The idea that it’s a mystery would seem to exempt us from having to think about it―even if there’s actually a great deal of information in the scriptures regarding God’s requirements and expectations and rules for Christians.
After having studied cognitive science for several years, and comparing recent scientific findings in that field to what I know from a lifetime of Bible study, I would expect to find Christians all over the place on this question of what God expects. I would expect to find three basic groups:
Three Groups
- Some who want to whittle it all down to a very mentally/morally easy set of expectations/requirements,
- Some who are willing to consider the possibility that God’s expectations/requirements may be a stretch for man, beyond what is easy or convenient for him, and
- A great many people who will be caught in between these first and second groups, wavering back and forth on just how it all works.
The Troubling Absence of 100b
Where are the camps who would hold to philosophy of 3b, 4b, and 5b when it comes to position 100a? They believe in God, and say that God has helped them do it. So why don’t we find a camp filled with people who are very much like Jesus, doing all the things in 100a, and growing better at it all the time, demonstrating the very power of God that they say is necessary for a human even to desire God in the first place? If God makes them want him, why does God not also make them behave like Jesus across the board?
Indeed, they will tell us that God simply worked on their heart, making them believe in the first place. It just happened, they say. OK, then why wouldn’t God simply work on their heart, making them become very much like Jesus? If it doesn’t depend on them at all, and depends wholly on God, then what’s the holdup? Is God unwilling for them to mature quickly, becoming like Jesus?
Their position has always been an enigma to me. And I don’t think they’ve got it right. I think that God doesn’t have to step in, intervening in a man’s heart to empower him to believe and to seek and to love and to obey and such, for he already created in man a heart/mind that is capable of choosing that path and learning it as he goes, based on the information and principles and rules in the scriptures.
Camp 3b/4b/5b make themselves vulnerable to this criticism I’m lodging regarding the absence of 100b, because they don’t follow the same reasoning all the way to 100b that they started back in 3b. They jump off track somewhere along the line. And I can’t help but to wonder if it’s because they don’t really want to be fully like Jesus. They don’t mind being required to believe, or to seek, but resist being required to go all out in being like Jesus.
And here’s the thing, if they don’t fully want it, and if the wanting can only come (as they say) from God, then God has not given them the desire. And if God has not given them the desire to be like Jesus, yet expects, requires, and demands that they do it, they they’re in quite a quandary, for it either comes down practically to God’s doing, or their own. And if it comes down to God’s doing, how shall we explain that he has not done it? Has he empowered them as far as belief, but cut them off from further empowerment, refusing to help them on to spiritual maturity?
Let someone step forth and explain that, please!
This is why I don’t think their model works―this idea that the natural man is incapable of wanting and learning and growing. If all that comes from God, then why is God holding back so much? That is, why are so very few people in this world even half as righteous in their living as Jesus was when he was here? (Have we even studied Jesus’ righteousness enough to be able to estimate the half of it?)
Yes, yes, they will say that maturation “takes time”―and I agree. But my question is this: Why? Is God incapable of going any faster? Or is it that it relies on the man’s willingness and his choices?
If it all relies on God, what does God gain by holding back on granting you the thing he requires you to have? How does this make any sense at all?
I suspect that they don’t have it because they don’t want it. Further, I suspect the reason they won’t want it is not because God hasn’t put that desire in their hearts, but that they are unwilling to have that desire, which depends wholly on them.
That model makes sense to me, where the other makes no sense at all. Yet the other is believed and defended so adamantly by so very many. In my Three Groups section above, I have the masses in #3, caught between the less-popular notion that God requires either nothing or next-to-nothing, and the real-world experience in which they are repulsed by “friends” who obviously make little or no effort to love them. They go back and forth, between wanting to shun an obvious charlatan at church, and having to defend the guy as being wholly covered by God’s grace, and being off limits for judging. (And even so, look how rare it is for any of them to expect to see Hitler in heaven!)
I think that’s a classic example of cognitive dissonance. I don’t think it works. It makes no sense. Either God is pleased with the charlatans, the insincere, the hypocrites, and the ungodly, or he is not. And there is a lot of scripture about this, but most camps are quick to dismiss it in favor of a few cherry-picked verses by which they condition themselves always to withhold judgment in such cases. It’s a culture of graduated thought-stoppers:
Don’t go there. Don’t reason that out. Don’t listen to that. Pay no attention to that man behind the mirror. That man just doesn’t understand. That man is under a delusion. That man is a heretic. That man is from Satan himself.
Whatever it takes not to listen―not to consider―not to think―not to pay attention to the whole counsel of scripture. This is what I think they are willing to do. They’ll be nice about it if they can get you to shut up while still being nice to you, but they’ll get downright nasty if you keep pressing the passages of scripture they don’t want to heed. That is, their not-listening is easy enough for them to maintain at first, but they will put an impressive amount of energy into the not-listening as needed to defend their big-picture conclusions on what God requires of man.
And I think that while this full-blown push-back from that camp is certainly not generally lazy (it requires a lot of energy), it is morally lazy, for it doesn’t deal honestly, rationally, and responsibly with all the information God seems to have delivered to our generation in the scriptures.
I think that if there’s a bent―a predisposition―a bias toward the lower-effort items on the list above (from 1a-5b), that bias will lead one to having to shun those who are willing to accept a higher number of expectations/requirements/demands from God. They’ll have to make them their enemies, whether only in cold principle, or with hot passion involved. I don’t think they could very well enjoy that difference of opinion with the one who holds to 100a, for it would be constantly highlighting that fact that the further you get past 1a in this list of positions, the more obvious it is that you’re on a slippery slope that will logically lead you all the way to 100a. And that would be very aggravating, trying to be friends with people of such a different view.
Indeed, to hear a 100a person talk for long about their model of understanding would require the 1a-5b person to have to hear a great many factors that they and their camps willingly shut down in their own thinking. No wonder there are so many divisions among those claiming Christ. No wonder an all-out view of commitment to Christ must be avoided in such camps.
Only a very few of those who believe in God believe 1a. And then the real-world sensibilities start to get involved from positions 1b onward, and such variations grow in popularity. But by the time you get to 100a, you’ll find very few again who believe it, and very much who rail against it. They may start by saying it’s merely an ignorant and unenlightened view, but many of them have been seen to roll out the big guns, even calling it heresy, and even saying that Satan himself must rule the heart that believes it.
The Appeal to Mystery
I suspect that the unwillingness to consider the whole of what scripture says about all this is the reason that mystery is so popular in so many of the churches. If we can excuse ourselves from understanding it by claiming that it’s all a big mystery, then that makes life in that fairly-comfortable area between 1a and 5b much easier to enjoy. But when I read the Bible, I find that there is a burden, even though it is “light”, and a yoke, even though it is “easy”. I find that the kind God is also a stern God, and that the Lamb is also a Conqueror―that the Teacher is also a Judge. I find many such tensions that require more careful thinking than the cognitive miser might be willing to do, and a softer heart than the moral miser might be willing to have. And I think that taking on the name of Christian, one is obligated to do such thinking, and to learn about this God whose thoughts and ways are higher than our own.
I leave it to God to judge whether I have done enough―even as a great many churchers will insist that I have gone too far, and ought to dial it way back on my understanding of what God requires! Of course, I get it all from the Bible. And I could have shown my math here in this article, which would make it a few times longer than it is. But even if the reader doesn’t know the half of the scriptures that have inspired my position, all he has to know of them is one expectation/requirement of God beyond what he is already meeting in order to convict himself that he needs to do more. And as people generally tend to do less than they know to do, no matter how much it is, who among us should not find this convicting?
And once we admit to the one further requirement, are we not on the slippery slope that leads us to 100a?
Backpedaling
And now, among those who have managed to read this far, surely there will be some who have to busy themselves discounting it all back down to wherever it is they find comfort in the list from 1a to 5b.
And let me say it again: I think the 5b people generally tend toward grumpiness, and don’t really want to do all the good deeds of Jesus. They seem to prefer an understanding that excuses them from having to do it all. Their position seems to boil down logically to something like this: If God wants me to do good deeds, he’ll make me do it.
No, most of them would never say that, but that’s what it seems to boil down to logically. What they will say is that God’s great grace ought to motivate people to do good deeds―and they do indeed go on and on about how great that grace is. But where are the good deeds that are supposed to flow forth from all that? Are they not constantly bemoaning the sad state of commitment among the members of their own churches, as if something were wrong?
Indeed, I think something is wrong. As to those good deeds that they themselves say they should be motivated (and helped) to do, I don’t see them. But if their model is right, there should be scads of Christians living quite like Jesus (and noticeably more-so all the time), and telling everybody that God made it possible―that he has empowered them to do it.
If not, why not? Let them answer. If they are really empowered from on high, then let them demonstrate that power. I think they would be cut down by the challenge: “Let’s see, then!”
They will say something or other about “sanctification”, and how that takes time. But I think this fails when they claim that God is the one who has to give that first spark to make an unbeliever into a believer. Why does the model suddenly evolve into one that takes lots of time thereafter? Can God only snap his fingers quickly the first time?
And if it takes time, is that all it takes? If God can’t just make it so, but needs time for it to germinate somehow, is that all he needs?
Yes, I think it takes time, too, but I think it’s the time of learning and maturation, and a time of the voluntarily refinement of the Christian’s will even to want such things. That’s why it takes time, and not because God is either unwilling or unable to be as generous and efficacious in making us want that growth as he supposedly us in making us believe in the first place. I think that’s a bogus model. It makes no sense, and it tends to absolve the believer of any moral responsibility for himself whatsoever.
Interestingly, when such believers meet people who treat them that way―who take no responsibility for themselves―they tend not to like them. Yet when they behave that same way toward God, they expect God to love them dearly, and to pour out his grace and blessings upon them. And so they are very slow to grow, thinking that God expects very little of them, and that God will meet his own expectations by his own doing wonders in their hearts.
Let’s see, then. Let’s see those wonders.
And I don’t think I’ve ever heard such a person expressing his grief that he doesn’t seem to be able to mature any faster―to become more like Jesus any faster. No, it seems universally accepted among such camps that such growth “takes time”. And again, I ask “why is that?” If it happens by way of an intervention from God, why is time required?
And they will say, “It’s a mystery, Jack!”
And I will say, “Uh-huh. A mystery.”
Meanwhile, the few people I know who think it’s up to them to choose to use their own hearts and minds to learn and embrace the teachings of scripture―these people do seem to be growing at a considerably faster rate than do those who think that their own maturation is not their own business, but God’s.
If God empowers it by special intervention, is it any coincidence that he seems to empower it more for the ones who see to it like it’s their own business? Or is it rather by the power of Satan that they become like Jesus?―while those who rely on the power of God never seem to mature as much? (Yes, I’ve heard such ridiculous explanations as that.)
This makes no sense to me. And to me, that’s a problem. But to Camp Mystery, it’s apparently no problem at all.
Curly: I can’t see! I can’t see!
Larry: What’s the matter???
Curly: I’ve got my eyes shut! (laughs)
If you don’t want to know everything the scriptures say about what God requires and expects of man, then suit yourself. Pick and choose whatever you like from it, and take your chances with God when you meet him. But good luck on not running into some of those few in this world who are willing to hear God out in all the writings! When you’re walking around with your eyes shut, you’re going to run into one of those people from time to time, and you’re probably not going to like them very much once you learn what their position is.
I have met so many people who walk around with their eyes shut, while claiming that they can see just fine. And I have certainly been one of them myself in the past. Surely. And what is at stake now is whether I am doing that in any way myself―claiming to see, while still having my eyes shut. And I suppose that I am still doing that in some way or another, for surely, I do not understand everything I think I do. And God will be the one to judge all that.
But I can tell you this: I am most definitely still learning and maturing, and it’s not by expecting God to do it for me, but by expecting that he expects me to learn it myself by voluntary use of: 1) the mind he gave me, 2) the scriptures he gave us all, and 3) the myriad lessons one with his eyes open can learn from this beautiful-ugly cause-and-effect world in which we live.
To Sew Up the Analogy
I’ve been using the slippery slope analogy (and I can’t get the image of a ski slope out of my mind). But if there is indeed a landing of maturity at the bottom of it, many in Camp Mystery will adamantly insist that it can only be reached by the intervening power of the Holy Spirit. I, however, believe that God created the “gravity” that would pull one down the slippery slope once they have dared inch off the edge, and take them all the way down without stopping. I believe that “gravity” is found quite naturally in the reality-based consideration of how things go in this world. If we’re going to observe and study and consider, we’re just going to figure some things out―unless―unless―unless―we find some way to put on the brakes, and hold ourselves in place somewhere along that slope, at a spot of our own choosing. But what a terrible life that is, clawing and scratching and clinging to stay in a place with all of nature fighting against us.
Indeed, why not just let go and get down to the bottom? Why not see what it’s like down there―where the whole counsel of scripture is fair game for our consideration and for living out in our lives?
I can’t say for sure how much of it I’ve got figured out yet, for I’m still learning. But I totally see that I’m headed for the bottom, and I embrace the trip down. I would hate to be trying to make a home for myself, half-way up somewhere and clinging to a sapling. And this is the tenuous life I think I see so many trying to live.
