A More Thorough Review of “A More Christlike God; A More Beautiful Gospel”

I sometimes end up reading books at the request of my parishioners, asking for my opinion of them (such as The Shack by William Young and Love Wins by Rob Bell).  That is why I read Bradley Jersak’s A More Christlike God; A More Beautiful Gospel.  Like its post-modern Evangelical forerunners by Young and Bell, it is an easy-reading page turner, very user-friendly, with terms being defined in large sidebars (though one wonders who among its readers would need a definition for terms like “Christendom”). 

It is clearly a book by and for post-modern Evangelicals:  it is published by CWR Press (i.e. Christianity Without Religion), an imprint of “Plain Truth Ministries” (formerly associated with Herbert Armstrong, founder of the Worldwide Church of God), an evangelical organization whose Statement of Faith is a classic example of Evangelical Protestantism, as can be seen by its definition of “the Church” as “the universal body of Christ and the spiritual unity of believers in our Lord Jesus Christ”.  Logging on to the website thus leads one smack in the middle Protestant Evangelical world.  A More Christlike God fits right in, since it is a Protestant Evangelical book, written in the folksy style used in much Evangelical preaching.

The confusion begins early, in the Foreword written by Brian Zahnd, pastor of the Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri.  Zahnd points out (correctly) that the Bible is not self-interpreting, so that in the Bible “we are likely to find just the kind of God that we want to find”.  His solution is to focus on Jesus, since “the Scriptures ultimately bear witness to Christ and Christ perfectly bears witness to God…God is like Jesus”.  That is true, but it seems to miss the point that in the New Testament we are also likely to find just the kind of Jesus that we want to find—as Jersak goes on to abundantly demonstrate.  It is as easy to pick and choose from the New Testament Gospels as it is to pick and choose from the Old Testament texts.  Evangelicals, even post-modern liberal ones, evidently have trouble escaping from their biblicism

The book itself has drunk deeply from the wells of post-modern liberalism, though this is hidden beneath a welter of homiletical rhetoric and Evangelical buzz-words.  This is clear in Jersak’s reported heartfelt conversation with a young girl.  The young girl had rejected Christianity because of perceived moral difficulties in the Old Testament, such as the commanded slaughter of Jericho.  When at Jersak’s prompting the girl concluded that God never did give any such commands but that “they [i.e. the authors] just described Him based on what they thought”, Jersak replied, “Well, then I guess He didn’t”—i.e. God didn’t command the slaughter of Jericho after all. 

It was offered as a success story, ending with the girl crying tears of joy and returning to faith.  What was not stated was that Jersak had quietly dumped the historicity of the Old Testament and avoided the hard work of coming to terms with a difficult text—as theological liberals have been dumping Scripture’s historical reliability for decades.  As Jersak sees it, the only alternative to his historical liberalism was saying to the girl, “Yes, God is in control; yes, he commands genocide; and yes, your Grandma’s in hell, along with all the rapists and probably you as well, one day” (his words).  A more thoughtful theology will find an alternative somewhere in between a biblical liberalism content to dump historicity and a biblical fundamentalism that sends the girl’s Grandma to hell. 

But these are two poles along which Jersak works:  either an Evangelical fundamentalism and literalism or a liberal universalism and abandonment of Tradition.  No wonder the book is popular among Evangelicals, who live and move and have their being among such stark dichotomies.  They have discerned correctly that the former alternative is inadequate, so the latter must be true.  And Jersak’s book is all about stark dichotomies:  either the wilful God for whom genocide must be good because God ordered it or the God of love who has no wrath at all.  As examples of those proclaiming this terrible wilful God in history we are offered Augustine (of course), Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Calvin, Cromwell, and such moderns as John Piper—a fairly confined (and western) list.

More alarming is Jersak’s entrenched biblical liberalism, by which he rejects anything in the Old Testament which he finds uncongenial.  He acknowledges that “in the Old Testament the fact is that Yahweh is reported to have committed or commanded these types of ‘evils’ frequently, embedding them right within his Law” (p. 70).  But he goes on to say that in the New Testament we find a different portrait of God in the life of Jesus, a more accurate one.  How to account for the change?  “God didn’t evolve; our concept of him did, in greatest part because Jesus came to show and tell us exactly who God is in ways no prophet had the capacity to anticipate—not Moses, David or even Isaiah…Whatever maleficent image we see is the result of distorted vision, whether ours or the stories’ character or their human narrators [italics mine]” (p.75).  In other words, Moses, David, and even Isaiah gave us an inaccurate and distorted view of God. 

Note: the Old Testament portrait was not simply in need of supplementing by a deeper view provided by Jesus; it was essentially inaccurate and distorted.  No wonder Jersak could tell the young girl mentioned above that God never commanded the slaughter of Jericho. In Jersak’s words (p. 22), “every human conception we previously associated with ‘God’ is uprooted, root and branch!” This is pure heretical Marcionism. 

Part II contains the best chapters in the book.  In chapter 7 Jersak argues that divine consent does not equal divine control, and that divine kenosis or self-emptying was implicit in the very creation of the world when God delivered His creation into human hands.  (He takes care to credit Rev. Ashley Collishaw for the insight.)  In chapter 8 he has good things to say about God’s participation in His creation and in human suffering.  In chapter 9 he writes well about the inadequacies of most theodicies.  He does less well when he cites St. John Cassian in chapter 6. 

In this chapter Jersak tries to undercut the plain statements of the Old Testament about God’s wrath by appealing to anthropomorphic language.  To this effect he quotes Cassian (in his Institutes 8.4), where Cassian writes that “these things cannot be understood literally of Him…neither can the passion of anger and wrath be attributed to that unchangeable nature without fearful blasphemy”.  A quick look at the context of the quote reveals Jersak’s error. 

Book 8 of the Institutes deals with the spirit of anger.  In chapter 2 Cassian wrote, “We have heard some people trying to excuse this most pernicious disease of the soul in such a way as to endeavour to extenuate it by a rather shocking way of interpreting Scripture:  as they say that it is not injurious if we are angry with the brethren who do wrong since, they say, God Himself is said to rage and be angry…not understanding that they are ascribing to the divine infinity and fountain of all purity a taint of human passion.”  In chapter 3 Cassian says that biblical references to God arising from sleep do not mean that God reclines or sleeps, and that references to the arm of the Lord do not mean that God actually has physical limbs.  In chapter 4, the chapter quoted in part by Jersak, Cassian explains that Scripture’s references to God’s limbs are to be understood symbolically, so that “the arms are the emblems of His might and government with which He upholds, rules, and controls all things”.  Cassian then writes, “When we read of the anger or fury of the Lord, we should take it not according to an unworthy meaning of human passion, but in a sense worthy of God who is free from all passion, so that by this we should understand that He is the judge and avenger of all the unjust things which are done in this world, and by reason of these terms and their meaning we should dread Him as the terrible rewarder of our deeds and fear to do anything against His will”.   

From this quote we see that Jersak distorts what Cassian means, completely ignoring the context from which he quotes.  God has anger at “all the unjust things which are done in the world” so that “we should dread Him as the terrible rewarder of our deeds”.  It is the sinful passion of anger that afflicted some of the monks from which God was free, not anger itself.  An appeal to anthropomorphism is not a magic wand whereby we evade the plain meaning of Scripture.  Jersak’s attempted interaction with Cassian shows how far he is from what Cassian believed and from the mindset of the Fathers.

The heart of Jersak’s book comes with Part III, entitled Unwrathing God.   He begins by trying to evade the clear force of the biblical texts by suggesting that all mentions of wrath are metaphors which the Church up until now has “literalized”.  In reality, he suggests, God’s wrath is simply God’s passive consent to “the self-destructive consequences of our own willful defiance” (p.185), “the consequences of God’s consent to our non-consent” (p. 189), “the painful results of God letting us have our own way” (p. 195).  There is some truth to this, in that God’s wrath is never seen as the result of His arbitrary irascibility, but as His just judgment to our own defiant sin. 

But the texts describe something more than simply the organic and intrinsic “consequences built into the fabric of the universe” (p. 195).  Not all God’s judgments can be described as “self-destruction” on our part (p. 197) or as “a metaphor for the intrinsic consequences of our refusal to live in the mercies of God” (p. 199), however many times Jersak repeats the words “metaphor”, “consent” or “cruciform”.  Pharaoh, for example, defiantly refused God, but there was nothing in his non-consent which would have caused the death of the firstborn if God had not sent the destroyer.  Pharaoh’s destruction was “self-destruction” only in the sense that it was merited, not because there was anything in the fabric of the universe which would be lethal to the firstborn of Egypt that Passover night.

Jersak seems to realize this, for his next chapter deals with “God’s active wrath”.  Here again he betrays an unconvincing and forced exegesis.  He argues that the destruction of Egypt’s firstborn by the destroyer God sent (Exodus 12:23) was not the work of God, but merely of “the destroyer” itself.  And in a similar handling of Scripture, Jersak declares that God did not incite David to number Israel as it says in 2 Samuel 24, but rather Satan did it, as 1 Chronicles 21 says:  according to Jersak, “the chronicler rejects the earlier version and puts the blame on Satan instead!”  A more mature exegesis will attribute the change not to the chronicler simply “rejecting” the previous tradition as inaccurate and wrong, but will probe the use of the Satan figure in post-exilic Judaism.

St. Paul comes in for similar handling, so that “where wrath appears, Satan is the destroyer and God is not” (p. 205).  This presupposes an astonishingly etiolated view of God, utterly different from anything found in the Fathers or the Scriptures.  And try as he may, Jersak cannot free himself from the charge that God’s consent in the work of the destroyer —or His sending the destroyer, as the texts actually say—makes Him complicit.  Admitting that God is the “First Cause of it all” but saying that the destructions it caused were only “technically secondary consequences” is not much of an exoneration of God for His role in judgment.  Better to face the text square on.  St. Paul does not shrink from portraying God as the just judge of unrighteous deeds, however emotionally difficult this may be for post-modern Evangelicals.   

As a preacher in the post-modern tradition, Jersak asserts (p. 215) that God is never angry, despite the fact that in His parable of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:23f), Christ portrays God angrily judging the unforgiving servant to the point of handing him over to the torturers.  Jersak’s solution to this unwelcome bit of Scripture?   “Jesus is intentionally borrowing his listeners’ own common misunderstanding of God—God the angry king—and He uses it ironically”.  Such a handling of the parable reveals Jersak’s determination to avoid the parable’s meaning at all costs, even at the cost of attributing unreliability to Christ’s teaching.  This is more than troubling.  For how then can we know when Christ is teaching truth and when He is simply “borrowing from His listeners’ misunderstanding”?  If Christ does not mean what He says, how can His words be of any use to us?

Jersak shows a similar cavalier attitude toward the text when dealing with the parable of the Last Judgment and the evil servant in Matthew 24:45-51.  That parable concludes with the words, “the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him.  He will cut him in pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth”.

Jersak can only respond to the plain meaning of the text with a denial:  “Really? Are we to understand that our heavenly Father will do this violence? Or Christ himself? No! But in rejecting Christ, the religious establishment was sealing the fate of Jerusalem.  The angry master is again a metaphor for God’s heartbroken consent.”  For Jersak this parable tells us nothing about God; the violence it describes was not done by God, but by the Romans at the siege of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.  The only problem is that the parable was not dealing with the fate of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., but that of the wicked at the Last Judgment—as is plain from the references to weeping and the gnashing of teeth (compare also Matthew 8:12, 13:42, 50, 22:13, 25:30).   Again we see Jersak’s determination to evade Scripture’s clear meaning when it is uncongenial.

In the final chapters of Part III Jersak deals with theories of the atonement, and here his main concern is refute fundamentalist Evangelicalism’s view in which Christ’s suffering appeases an angry and vindictive deity.  He makes rather heavy weather of it, and is emphatic that the ransom Christ offered was not to God’s Law or justice, even though he grants that both Origen and C. S. Lewis “hint” at this. 

He might have added St. Athanasius to his list:  in On the Incarnation, he wrote, “There was a debt owing which must needs be paid, for, as I said before, all men were due to die.  Here then is the second reason why the Word dwelt among us, namely that having proved His Godhead by His works, He might offer the sacrifice on behalf of all, surrendering His own temple [i.e. His body] to death in place of all, to settle man’s account with death and free him from the primal transgression…Death there had to be, and death for all, so that the due of all might be paid.” 

And of course Lewis, Origen, and Athanasius were merely repeating the teaching of St. Paul in such passages as Colossians 2:13f where Paul wrote that God “forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness which stood against us and condemned us; He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross” (Jersak’s wording, from p. 250).  If what was cancelled was “our legal indebtedness”, then what remains of Jersak’s refusal to admit that the ransom was paid to God’s Law or justice?  He tries in vain to wriggle out of the plain meaning of both the Fathers and the Scriptures by saying that “There is no law or principle of justice higher than God to which he is beholden”.  That is true—but what if God Himself established such a law and principle of justice because it was rooted in His own character?  This is not to side with the fundamentalist view of penal substitution, which is indeed flawed.  But the justice of God need not be thrown out with the fundamentalist bath water.

The book concludes with a chapter summarizing its teaching and saying that it represents “a more Christlike message” and “a beautiful Gospel”.  Jersak is quick to disown the assertion that he presents a new and different Gospel than that presented by the historic Church.  But he does admit, “as the Spirit of truth continues to guide and illuminate God’s people, new light is shed on the wonders of what Jesus has done for us, and the Good News is even better than we thought…while the gospel does not change, our vision may improve, our understanding may increase and our presentation may require revisions” [italics mine]. 

Anyone who has been reading Evangelical and charismatic literature for decades as I have will recognize the voice Protestant revisionism.  No Evangelical will admit to changing the Bible’s message, since the Bible has remained the same from the beginning.  The change comes, they all say, in the form of our understanding.  Luther felt that his vision had improved and the Church’s teaching required revisions.  Calvin too felt that his understanding had increased and that revisions were required.  As did Wesley.  As did every charismatic preacher with a new revelation since Azusa Street.  As did John Robinson in 1620 when he wrote, “I am verily persuaded the Lord hath yet more truth yet to break forth out of His Holy Word.”  The truth is that Jersak stands in this long line of preachers who look back on the church’s past and feel that the convictions of those in the past were distorted and wrong, and (in his words) need to be “uprooted, root and branch!”

His book accurately and legitimately lampoons some of the harsher statements of fundamentalist Evangelicals—his main target audience and the community in which he still lives, moves, and has his being.  It is unfortunate that his proffered solution to their ills has little to commend it.  But he does have the advantage of speaking as an Evangelical to fellow-Evangelicals in a style they can understand as they continue a much-needed dialogue over Evangelical issues.  But to those firmly anchored in the Orthodox Tradition, he speaks as an alien with a revisionist Protestant spirit.  To us he has practically nothing to say at all.