…on much traditional Christian theology, God’s love consists in more than benevolence, that is, in more than the sheer agapic love that is directed to creatures irrespective of their intrinsic worth, desiring to create good out of evil. God also has what has traditionally been called a “love of complacency”—that is, a love that is directly responsive to the merits of its object and that delights in what is intrinsically good. In other words, in addition to being a bestower of value, God is also a respecter of it. He recognizes and honors the intrinsic worth that something possesses because of what it is, because of its nature.
And while God’s benevolence is entirely directed outward, creatively bringing goods into existence and bestowing further goods on what He has created, His complacent love is directed to anything which has intrinsic worth. And while created things have such worth once they exist, the most intrinsically valuable thing of all is God Himself.
Let us briefly pause here to consider a possible misunderstanding concerning God’s complacent love of Himself. Specifically, there is nothing self-seeking, nothing egotistical, about complacent love. If God loves and delights in His own essence, it is not out of some sort of narcissism but because it is objectively right to do so. Part of what it means to be morally perfect is that one responds to that which is intrinsically valuable in the appropriate way—namely, by valuing it in proportion to its objective worth. But insofar as God’s objective worth is infinite, this means that it would be a moral failure on the part of God to fail to love Himself (with the love of complacency) with anything less than the most perfect delight and profoundest respect for His own merit.
We are convinced that all of this is consistent with holding that what renders God worthy of being the object of such limitless respect is, above all else, His boundless agapic love—that is, His perfect and unwavering benevolence, an overflowing, life-giving love that does not wait on worth. It seems to us that God would not be benevolent unless He valued benevolence itself. By implication, God could not be benevolent above all else unless He valued benevolence above all else, and hence valued its most perfect embodiment (Himself) higher than any flawed or restricted expressions of it. Hence, if God’s complacent love for Himself exceeds His complacent love for anything else, it is precisely because He values agapic love above all other things, and because it is God Himself who most perfectly embodies and expresses such love.
And to value something means, in part, standing up for it, insisting that its value be acknowledged and appreciated. Those who show disdain for or indifference to God (at least if they have anything approaching a proper understanding of God’s essence) are showing disdain for or indifference to benevolent love itself. God cannot be perfectly benevolent without being angered by such disdain or indifference to perfected benevolence.
These considerations lead us to the importance of including in a complete Christian account of DU some reference to God’s love of complacency for Himself. This love for His own perfection has been—and, we think, justifiably should be—considered a fundamental basis for God’s opposition to all sinfulness, insofar as sin involves a failure to value God as He ought to be valued. In fact, if God’s value is infinite, then any shortfall in the creature’s love of God must be an infinite shortfall. The failure to love God as one should is the failure to appreciate and value the ground of all love, all benevolence, all goodness. And it is a shortfall that is inevitably infinite in degree.
This offers, we think, the most plausible understanding of the traditional claim that sin is an affront to God’s majesty—not in the way that disobedience is an affront to the pretensions of a tyrant, but in the way enslavement is an affront to the real objective worth of a human person. To be in the presence of God while persisting in a state of sin is comparable to being in the presence of another human being, and yet to treat that person as if he or she were a mere thing to be used. It involves a failure to respond appropriately to the objective worth of the person with whom one is confronted.
This is something that a morally perfect being cannot tolerate. Hence, just as a morally good person becomes rightly angry when a human being is treated like a thing (just as I become angry when my child is teased or belittled; and just as I think my child ought to become angry on her own behalf when this happens), God becomes rightly angry when He is treated in a manner that falls short of what is fitting with respect to the ultimate source of all good and value. This may be the philosophical idea behind the ancient Jewish notion, captured in the following passage from Isaiah, that God will not allow the sinful creature to come into His presence until He Himself purifies the creature:
In the year that king Uz-zi’ah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a
throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the
seraphims: each one had six wings: with twain he covered his face, and with
twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto
another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is
full of his glory.
And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the
house was filled with smoke.
Then said I, Woe is me! For I am undone: because
I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean
lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.
Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand,
which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my
mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken
away, and thy sin purged. (Isaiah 6:1-7)
This passage from Isaiah helps to highlight the key point we want to make in this section: While God’s complacent love for His own essence is often put forward as a reason God might be so wrathful at sin as to cast sinners into hell, we think it is more coherently invoked as a divine motive for responding to sin by purging it, by taking away the iniquity of sinners and so making them suitable for union with God--and it would be such a motive for each and every sinner, and so would be a motive for universal salvation.
We suspect that one reason why this implication is so frequently overlooked is because the notion of divine wrath is so often misconstrued in terms of our own confused relationship with human anger. Anger is a much maligned emotion, in part because it is so often associated with acts of violence. Those who abhor violence therefore will frequently extend their condemnation to anger itself--and, conversely, those who find their anger legitimate will often treat violence towards the object of their anger as justified.
But anger is not violent as such and need not be paired with violence. It is, instead, the emotional correlate of recognizing that a wrong has been done to someone (oneself or another). In ordinary human life anger also provides an impetus to respond to injustice. But the response need not be violent. That is, one can strongly say no to evil without doing violence to the agents of evil.
In fact, as Walter Wink has argued more than once, Jesus’ famous injunction to turn the other cheek can be understood as an example of how to take a firm stand against moral affronts to one’s person without striking back in kind. In other words, it is an example of how to express anger at injustice without doing violence. Wink thinks it is no accident that Jesus specifies that when one is struck on the right cheek (not the left one), one should present the other. The right cheek was the one that would, in Jesus’ day, be struck by a back-handed blow—the kind a master would deliver to a slave. To turn the other cheek would be to assert one’s dignity in the face of an insult to it, but without doing violence in kind.
Part of the point of responding to wrongs in this way is that this kind of response is more apt to work on the inner character of the wrongdoer. If I attack you and you attack me back, your counter-attack only tends to fuel my aggressive impulses, perhaps even causing me to see them as justified. If I attack you and you put up with it without complaint, or crumble before me, then I am inclined to experience contempt for you. My aggressive act presupposes that you lack the value of a person, and your response reinforces this false presupposition. But if I attack you and you take a strong, creative stand in defense of your dignity and worth, one that I cannot help but notice but which is not a counter-attack, my aggressiveness and contempt are challenged. I am called to question myself and how I am treating you.
Turning the other cheek, rather than striking out against the wrongdoer, strikes out against the wrong and the ideas and attitudes that lie behind it. And this, if we are to believe Jesus’ words, is the truly moral response to affronts to one’s dignity. We should neither let them stand unchallenged nor strike back in kind. Instead, we should repudiate the wrong clearly and powerfully and in a way that has the potential to jolt the wrongdoer into recognizing what he or she is doing as the wrong that it is. The aim is not to beat the wrongdoer down but to move the wrongdoer into a psychological place in which repentance and remorse become possible.
And if we think about it carefully, this aim only makes sense. If someone behaves towards me in a way that fails to show respect for my real value, this is a serious wrong against me, and I should feel justifiably angry about not being valued as I should. But if I respond by beating the wrongdoer to a bloody pulp, what will be the effect? Among other things, the wrongdoer will most likely become entrenched in a hateful or resentful attitude towards me that fails to show respect for my inherent dignity and worth. I have responded to the crime of someone failing to value me as I deserve by ensuring that this crime continues unabated in the wrongdoer’s heart. Such a response is incoherent—but the incoherence lies not with my initial anger at having been wronged, but in my violent response.
So what does all of this entail with respect to God and His complacent love for Himself?
If God loves His own essence, then He loves the love of it and hates the hatred of it (or even indifference to it). As such, God would have a powerful motive to expunge all hatred of His essence and replace it with love. That is, He would have a powerful motive to respond to affronts to His dignity in ways that inspire repentance and remorse—in other words, that bring about conversion. If God has a complacent love for Himself that stands opposed to all disdain for His value, then it seems God would want to convert every sinner, especially those who most flagrantly offend His majesty. As Thomas Talbott has pointed out, insofar as DH implies that the damned never repent and forever reject God, DH commits one to the view that hatred of God is never fully stamped out, but persists forever in the souls of the damned. This outcome would seem to be an intolerable affront to God’s love for His own majesty. That very love can therefore be thought to be a motive for His willing the salvation of all. Only when all are saved is God’s majesty respected as it ought to be.
