In this section Keller gives his explanation for how God can be a God of love and of wrath. He starts by pointing out that it is not uncommon for people to become angry, not in spite of, but because of love. Love means caring a great deal for someone, so if anything bad is happening to them we can get angry.
Keller makes a second point, with the help of Miroslav Volf, that a god who did not mete out justice would not be worthy of worship. They go on to argue that belief that God will right all wrongs is the only way they can prevent themselves from taking action against injustice and continuing the circle of violence.
Finally, Keller quotes Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel prize winning poet, to suggest that belief that there is no heaven or hell, that no justice will be dispensed after death, encourages peoples baser instincts to lie, and murder and other bad things.
Keller’s second and third points are not really related to the core issue here, so I’ll start with the first. Saying that we get mad from love is not at all convincing to me. God is perfect, and loves perfectly. If you perfectly love something you must delight in all of it’s aspects. Blemishes become beauty marks, annoyances become cute quirks. So it must be for God for all of us, to a perfect degree.
Or maybe my notion is wrong, and God still sees flaws in us. How can he be mad at anyone but himself? He made us. He made everything. It’s like us drawing a circle, and telling it to be a square, and then getting all angry when it’s still a circle.
And finally, assuming you still think it makes sense that God get’s wrathful, then why does he do the things he does when he does? He’s God, he could enact justice with laser precision and with cutting poignant poetry. Instead he drowns the whole world? or kills all the first borns in a city? Those are the anthropomorphic projections of scared humans, not the actions of loving deity.
Keller’s other two points don’t really argue against the motion, but instead try to suggest that it’s a good thing people believe in a God of justice, regardless of it’s truth. This is a strange tactic to take if you think it’s true, in my opinion. Let’s look at the arguments anyway.
They both basically boil down to the notion that people are worse if they don’t think God is up their watching, making sure everything’s fair in the end. They are childish ideas dressed up with fancy language and spoken by highly decorated individuals, but childish ideas still.
Two things, first, we just got done with the chapter on morality where Keller argued several times that Christianity won’t necessarily make you a better person, and yet here he is arguing the opposite. Christianity doesn’t make you better when you point out that Christians aren’t actually better, but it does in all other arguments, apparently. Again, I’d like to point out that there’s never been any evidence that Christians, or any other religious group, behave any better than atheists.
Second, God’s justice, at least as described in the bible, is anything but. He has created us as sinners, commanded us not to sin, and then deals out ultimate punishment, where’s the justice in that? A man can rape and murder small children all his life, so long as he asks forgiveness and be let into heaven, but those children, if they die unbaptized, will go to hell? Perhaps you don’t believe in such extremes, but regardless, the heaven and hell system of justice cannot be perfect unless humanity is composed of only angels and demons, which it objectively is not.
Keller’s case here is frustratingly flimsy. There’s not enough here to even really rip into. As usual, god is unnecessary. In Keller’s own writing he explains why people forgive and choose not to seek “justice” or revenge, because it leads to a never ending cycle of violence. Nothing more is needed to explain these actions of rational compassion, but Keller, and his fellows, tack on God because they already believe in him. If you belief that god is the source of all good things, then it makes logical sense that belief in him would make people better. Fortunately, you don’t need to do all the extra work of believing in god, you can just use logic and empathy to be a decent human.