We don't need to define God's Goodness for Him - God's Goodness in God's terms

In a previous essay I addressed our interaction with non-Christians — rational minds that are at odds with who the God of the Bible is. But there is another audience that may need a deeper conversation about that second step, about who God really is: Christians themselves.

When one surveys the landscape of Christian activity, especially in the Western world, one of the concepts most prone to misconception is the goodness of God. Health-and-wealth theologies are the most obvious symptom of the problem. But the same distortion can be detected in well-intentioned Christian discourse and in the kind of theodicy employed to make all things appear tidy. "Everything is well in the end — if things are not well, it is because it isn't the end yet." "God has a purpose in everything." "God created you to be happy." These affirmations are not necessarily wrong, and something positive can be drawn from each of them. Yet they easily lead Christians into an equivocated concept of God's goodness.

The central issue is this: as Christians, we strive to uphold God's glory and goodness before the world. That would not be a problem in itself, were it not for the fact that "goodness" here is too often measured by human standards. When something in the Word or in the World happens according to God's will — but not according to human standards of goodness — we instinctively try to make it look as though God is still good under those same standards. A practical example is the perennial question about good people who die too young. A theological example can be found in Arminian theology.

Arminianism is usually thought to be founded on free will — "Accept Jesus" seems to be its core line. However, a different angle is presented by the website Jesus Creed:

Myth #4: the heart of Arminianism is belief in free will. Nonsense, [Roger] Olson argues in his must-read Arminian Theology. The heart of Arminian theology is the character of God, God's goodness, and its system yearns to glorify God by exalting his goodness.

The fundamental tension here is that Arminians think Calvinists must make God the author of evil and sin… Arminianism begins with God's essential goodness and derives free will from that; it does not begin with the necessity of free will… Over and over Olson provides evidence from the major Arminian writers that the fundamental problem Arminians had with Calvinism was that it made God less than good… The argument was grounded in the nature, attributes, and character of God.[1]

What this reveals is striking: the "Accept Jesus" emphasis may be more directly tied to an obsession with making God look good under human parameters than to God's own declared will — as expressed, for example, in Ephesians 1.

Tony Campolo offers another example of how God's goodness and omnipotence can be misconstrued, in "God as Suffering Servant" (Tikkun, May/June 2007):

If God is in control of everything that happens, then there would be no such thing as human freedom. Without freedom, none of us would be able to choose to love God… What I am saying is that God deliberately gives up power in order to express his love for us and to give us the freedom to choose to love him in return.

It is surprising to me that most of my Jewish friends likewise believe that God is omnipotent. They do so even though the Hebrew Bible never declares him as such. No wonder so many of them rejected their religious beliefs following the Holocaust. "How could an omnipotent, loving God let such a thing happen?" Does it not seem more likely that their loving and merciful God groaned in agony at Dachau and at Auschwitz?

In both cases — Olson's Arminianism and Campolo's process-leaning theology — the starting point is a human intuition of what goodness must look like, and the doctrine of God is then shaped around it. Every time one tries to explain and teach God's goodness outside of Biblical parameters, we are led into the danger of an imprecise image of God.

God has already revealed His will in His Word. Christians need to spend more time talking about who God is in that revelation — His revealed face — and less time speculating about what God must think, or what He can or cannot be, based on our contemporary notions of justice and goodness — His hidden face. When we feel the urge to "make God look good" before the world, it is almost always because we are applying human parameters of goodness to judge God's actions. And we will fail every time.

The Bible itself makes this plain in passages that resist every attempt at cosmetic improvement. Consider the doctrine of election: "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated" (Romans 9:13). Paul anticipates the human objection immediately — "Is there injustice on God's part?" — and his answer is not a reassurance that it all makes sense by our standards. It is a reaffirmation of God's sovereign freedom: "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy" (9:15). Ephesians 1 is equally unambiguous: God "predestined us for adoption through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will" (1:5) — not according to foreseen merit, not according to human choice, but according to His will and to the praise of His glory. Then there is the hardening of Pharaoh's heart. Exodus presents God as the direct agent: "I will harden his heart" (Exodus 4:21). Romans 9 returns to this episode precisely to close off the escape route of human autonomy: "So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills" (9:18). The text does not soften this. Any reading that does is importing a standard from outside the text. Finally, the suffering of the righteous — the entire Book of Job, the lament Psalms, Psalm 88 which ends without resolution, without comfort, without a tidy divine explanation — these are not embarrassing exceptions to be explained away. They are canonical testimony to a God whose ways are not our ways, and whose goodness is not the same thing as our comfort.

None of these passages submit gracefully to the project of making God look good by human measures. That is precisely the point.

God has already revealed His will in His Word. Christians need to spend more time talking about who God is in that revelation — His revealed face — and less time speculating about what God must think, or what He can or cannot be, based on our contemporary notions of justice and goodness — His hidden face. When we feel the urge to "make God look good" before the world, it is almost always because we are applying human parameters of goodness to judge God's actions. And we will fail every time. This applies not only to passages dealing with gender, polygamy, indentured servitude, or the submission-and-love structure of marriage, but equally to the passages above — to election, to sovereign hardening, to unresolved suffering. Whenever we try to make God look good on our own terms, the Bible will not come to our aid — and no amount of rhetorical maneuvering will change that.

At this point, one might wonder whether this essay is advocating that the right way to present God is always in a harsh light, slamming against reason — or that He is a puppet-master playing with the world for His own pleasure. 

Certainly not. The point is to witness and teach the God of the Bible faithfully — and for that, we are not left without guidance. We have the Catechism, our Confessions, our Dogmatics, and the works of our theologians. Luther's Large Catechism is not embarrassed by a God who commands, judges, and saves entirely on His own terms. The Augsburg Confession does not negotiate the doctrine of grace to make it more palatable. Melanchthon's Loci Communes and the Formula of Concord address election and grace with precision, not apology. These sources are clear about the essence of the Christian Lutheran faith. Faithful witness means returning to them — not to score confessional points, but because they have already done the hard work of holding together what we are tempted to pull apart: God's absolute sovereignty and His genuine mercy, His hiddenness and His revelation in Christ, His justice and His grace. The problem begins when we soften or water down what they teach, out of fear that God will not sound as good as we wish He would to our neighbor's ears. That fear, however understandable, is itself a failure of faith — a sign that we have begun to trust our own persuasive powers more than the Word and the Spirit.

This does not mean we abandon sensitivity to audience, culture, or context. One does not use the same language at a wedding as at a funeral, in marriage counseling as at a youth camp. Even the most demanding passages of the Bible and the Confessions are written in context, and so will our teaching be. Sometimes a particular word triggers a reaction in listeners that derails the entire message; choosing alternative words or phrasings is not a compromise — it is good communication. The Bible we use is already a translation, and in translation there is often more than one word available for the same Greek or Hebrew term. Choosing words wisely is not the problem. Choosing meaning according to the spirit of the age is.

Nor does this mean that analogies, comparisons, and illustrations have no place. Jesus himself used parables to both shock the human mind and to teach the Word of the Kingdom. We may do the same — illustrating daily life, drawing analogies, projecting scenarios. But our goal is to call things what they are. It is to witness Jesus as the Lord He is, allowing the human mind to be unsettled by what is, in truth, terrible news for our self-sufficiency — and allowing the human heart to be comforted and faith to be awakened by the work of the Holy Spirit. 

In short: as Christians we need, first, to acknowledge God as He is — even when what He is does not fit what we think He should be, even when it makes us look strange before family and friends, and naïve or even offensive before the world. God's goodness, as the Bible defines it, is goodness in Christ. And that one exclusive clause alone — only through Christ — is already a scandal to the rational world.

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[1]  “Do Calvinists understand Arminianism? 5” (October 5, 2006, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2006/10/05/do-calvinists-understand-arminianism-5/  ,  accessed 23 June 2023).