The most difficult superstitions to extirpate are always those that appear to emerge from common sense. After all, it is difficult to dispel a superstition if they are not recognized for being false, a curious misunderstanding of the nature of God and creation. Accordingly, most superstitions arise from the peculiar predilections of a particular age and people — a rabbit’s foot, a horseshoe, the hubristic dreams of a post-Cold War “End of History” in which all nations will inexorably transform into liberal democracies, etc. Such superstitions are quickly covered by the sands of time, fossilized to be discovered and ridiculed by incredulous archeologists of the future. But there are also those superstitions that are so universal, so consistently present across different civilizations and eras, that they reflect something about our primordial fears and desires.
One of these perennial superstitions is the belief that we will get what we deserve in the end — that is, that we will be rewarded and punished for our deeds by a cosmic system or divine actor after death. The Catholic faith teaches us a different doctrine, one that is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort. More on that shortly, but let’s first dwell on the common superstition that we will get what we deserve.
Now, I admit that this is not exactly an odd idea. Such a belief clearly comports with the universal human desire for ultimate justice and the hope that the order of the world is fundamentally grounded on a primordial, transcendent Good. Not only is this a noble desire and a beautiful hope, but it hangs on an acceptable image of God. It is sensible for us to think that God is angry when we act wickedly and happy when we live virtuously.
It is a good thing to know that God is rational, and that the created order is ordered by the reason of God. It is true that one need only skim through the holy Scriptures to see the myriad ways God punishes evildoers, rewards the just, and forgives the repentant. The God of wrath, the God of justice, and the God who relents and restores are all good, scriptural images.
However, it is nonetheless a strange thing for Christians to believe that God will give us what we deserve. It isn’t strange that humanity at large thinks this way — the most common ways we think about God, after all, tend to be little more than massive projections of our moral feelings into the night sky — and as human beings it is, admittedly, very difficult for us not to think about God this way.
I confess that I fall into this trap constantly because it is so commonsensical. Such an account is nevertheless an inadequate image of our relationship with God, and it is strange for us Christians to think about God this way when the animating heart of the gospel is that God does not give us what we deserve.
Consider what it would really mean if God gave us our due according to our deeds and misdeeds. If this were truly so we would all be greeting each other in hell, and this wouldn’t be just because we fall short of perfection but because we are incorrigible and obdurate sinners who are simply unable to stop sinning. When we look upon our common history together with sobriety, are we not confronted with a grand and relentless tragicomedy in which we repeat our mistakes, again and again, in ever more ingenuously self-deceiving ways?
When we reflect on our sins in the quiet of the day, in the profound and secret intimacy of our hearts, do we not notice that we are seduced by temptations that appear to have been tailored to match our unique personal weaknesses? If we are thus so compromised by concupiscence, if even the saintliest among us are not freed from the aroma of our lusts in this mortal life, it would be nothing but despair if God gave us what we deserve.
Indeed, if this were so, God would ultimately be a terrifying judge who weighs our deeds and, inevitably finding them lacking, condemns us. And by transforming God into a punitive condemner of souls, we have transformed him into the great accuser of humanity: Satan.
While it perhaps might not be so strange that other people think about God and ultimate justice in such a way, it is a very strange thing indeed for so much of our casual Christian thinking to amount to the worship of Satan. But habits of thought, and especially the stubborn resilience of our self-righteousness, have a way of making us forget that the real God is unconditionally in love with us, and has always loved us from eternity before we were ever born into this mortal life (Psalm 139:13-16).
The love of God is therefore changeless in an absolute way. While God does care about our sins and desires our repentance, the sin of the world is incapable of changing God’s love toward us because nothing can effect a change in the nature of God, who is Love (1 John 4:8).
Sin is terrible, but not because God will punish us for our wrongdoings by sending us to hell. Sin is terrible because its corruption makes us want to justify and flatter ourselves rather than allow the infinite love of God to save us from our narcissism. Sin is terrible because it deludes us into trusting in our own righteousness instead of the manifold and great mercies of God. But God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption, who there made a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.
The knowledge of this divine love which will never give us what we deserve has been visited and revisited in the history of Christian thought, and the doctrinal formulation of this beautiful truth has an old and venerable name: predestination.
Of course, the doctrine of predestination is not a popular doctrine — many people, Christian or otherwise, find it a chilling doctrine, one that consigns us to salvation or damnation by an utterly alien and arbitrary actor. Consequently, predestination carries heavy baggage for many people, conjuring gloomy shadows of Calvinist boogeymen who seem a little too delighted to believe that the reprobate suffer eternally. But the doctrine of predestination is in fact a delightfully liberating teaching, if only we can learn to consider it rightly, because it gives witness to the constancy of God’s love.
It is for this reason that we may say, in the words of Article XVII of the 39 Articles of Religion, that predestination is a doctrine “full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons.” God so loves us that he has preordained that we will never get what we deserve, and his love will hide the multitude of our sins — thanks be to God for this Good News!
Paul H. Matthew Lee is a seminarian at Wycliffe College, Toronto. Baptized with the name Paul in his childhood according to a Korean Christian custom, he writes under his Christian name for Covenant.