Miscellanies

We will concede perhaps that man is as wicked as Edwards said. What we do not know–or do not yet know–is that God is as holy as Edwards knew him to be. We have in our wisdom substituted for the holy God a kind Heavenly Father. A holy God will not suffer his plans for a vast, stupendously intricate, marvelous creation and the men designed to be his sons to be flouted and destroyed by self-willed and proud little delinquents, aged 60 as often as 16, called nations or civilizations as often as persons. Or we have substituted for the holy God, the sovereign source and determiner of being, Being simply considered, the Constitution of the universe, a wildly running chance. Our feet are standing in slippery places, to be sure, but we are not being held this side of destruction by holy power and determined will; it is chance that keeps us from slipping. There is no wrath in heaven directed against us, because there is no holiness, no will for wholeness, for integrity, and for glory. And since there is no holiness there is no hope for us except the hope that we’ll get by a little longer with our compromises and our superior animal cunning.

Edwards used to say that the trouble with men was not that they had no ideas of God, but that they had little ideas of God. We might add that they are ideas about little Gods. The anachronism of Edwards celebration is not so much that we try to honor him in a time of atheism, when men do not believe in God; but that we seek to know and respect a servant of the Almighty, of the Lord, the Source of Being itself, of Power beyond all powers, in a time when our God is someone we try to keep alive by religious devotions, to use for solving our personal problems, for assuring us that we are beloved. He is without wrath, because we have made this image wrathless; his love is not holy love because we have painted the icon without holiness.

H. Richard Niebuhr, The Anachronism of Jonathan Edwards