On God’s Holiness and Mystery in Judaism

In The Natural History of Religion, David Hume claims that the human mind has difficulty holding on to the pure (i.e., unencumbered) idea of divine simplicity, and thus tends to apply familiar (i.e., human) attributes or qualities onto that idea (i.e., anthropomorphism), as if hanging ornaments on a naked Christmas tree. Eclipsed or compromised, or even lost entirely, is the quality of God being wholly other, and thus being qualitatively different than us and anything in our world. The Christian theologian Dionysius grasped this idea in his claim that God goes beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and sensibility (i.e., human emotions). The Biblical claim in the Book of Job that God is angry with Job’s “friends” for making statements about God’s ways without knowing them can be analyzed with an eye towards both viewing anger as only going so far with respect to God and being critical of the “friends’” presumption in assuming that God’s ways are within the limits of human cognition (i.e., theories). Rather than go to a negative theology wherein God is thought to be ineffable, I want to stress the value of recognizing both distance and mystery as being indispensable with respect to our relation to God lest we reduce God to our various masks of eternity.

In the Book of Exodus, the anthropomorphism as a narrative device in myth is not problem-free, so it is important to emphasize the leitmotif of distance between God and humans. “Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.”[1] God remembers, which is an interesting anthropomorphism considering that omniscience is a divine attribute. That God remembers the covenant seems to imply that God had not been paying attention when the “Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites and made their lives bitter with hard service.”[2] So as to avoid the obvious incompatibility of omniscience and needing to remember, one commentator claims that the word, “’remember,’ when used with God as subject, typically means that God has determined to initiate action.”[3] But perhaps the two things—recalling and deciding—merely occur together (i.e., positively correlated) rather than mean the same thing even when applied to God as the subject. God is depicted nevertheless as being distant, moreover, looking upon the Israelites rather than being among them, and coming “down to deliver” the Israelites, which is a fundamental change from Genesis, where God is so close that God makes clothes for Adam and Eve once they realize they are naked.[4]

“What was God doing, during those years the Israelites suffered under the Egyptians?”[5] It is as if the hands-on deity had gone up to attend to other business, and turned back to the Israelites because their groans had reached a sufficient volume or intensity. Then God would be with Moses as he returns to Pharaoh to bring the Israelites out of Egypt. Alternatively, being omniscient and omnipotent, God may have been allowing the increased subjugation of the chosen people so they would experience their dependence on God, but the Israelites could not fathom this divine plan and thought instead that their god had been away. Such a divine plan is distinct from the infliction or permitting of suffering by God as punishment for the Israelites having violated the covenant. As one commentator admits, the Israelites in Egypt “are not accused of having done anything wrong.”[6] So the prophets’ association of the absence of God with “judgment for Israel’s sins” cannot apply here.[7] As in the Book of (righteous) Job, no “rationalization of the absence of God is ever attempted, but the issue,” according to one commentator, “is resolved by the coming of the God who saves.”[8] I disagree that the issue of God’s absence in the midst of undeserved suffering in the case of the Israelites in Egypt is resolved by the return of God, even if only in terms of God’s attention, for unlike Job, no wager calling for the slaves’ undeserved suffering to test their faith is mentioned in the text. In my view, the absence of God when the Israelites’ servitude was especially harsh is simply necessary for there to be the harshness, which in turn serves as the reason why leaving Egypt makes sense. God is anthropomorphized by the author here as God needing to remember, as a human does, for this narrative purpose. Were it the case as in Wisdom of Solomon that “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them,”[9] then presumably there would be no need for the Israelites to leave Egypt, and thus for God to save them.

In Exodus 3, there is also distance, but here the reason is easily understood. God at the burning bush tells Moses, ”Come no closer! . . . for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”[10] Here it is not that God goes off as if on other business; rather, it is humanity that should maintain a distance from God out of respect for God’s inherent holiness. Indeed, as one commentator states, “’Holiness’ has been identified as the quality of divinity itself . . .”[11] The definitive quality in experiencing holiness as analyzed by Rudolf Otto in his book, The Idea of the Holy, can be understood to be the numinous quality in which a wholly other, or “supernatural,” presence is sensed or inferred in the immediate context of liminality, as if the person were momentarily suspended between two types of existence or fundamental modes of reality. This core of holiness goes beyond what we can grasp as rationality or moral goodness and even “defies language.”[12] To use the term, “supernatural,” for instance, does not do the phenomenon justice.

Furthermore, sensing of a numen in a liminal situation is more fundamental than are the qualities of being fascinated and terrified. The latter two can be considered to be reactions rather than as primary. Projected outwards, God can be said to be fascinating or angry, but more to the point is God’s transcendence tangent to our realm. Put another way, something holy has sufficient deep significance to be sensed as ontologically different, or “other,” in a fundamental way.  God is the very definition, referent, or epitome of holiness.

Mankind is already tainted by the original sin of Adam and Eve by Exodus. Therefore, in Exodus, “Moses said to the Lord, ‘The people are not permitted to come up to Mount Sinai; for you yourself warned us, saying, ‘Set limits around the mountain and keep it holy.’”[13] So even though “Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God,” they “took their stand at the foot of the mountain.”[14] Even the priests were to stand at that distance from God, who had “descended upon Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain.”[15] After God spoke to the people, who then said to Moses, “do not let God speak to us, or we will die.”[16] “Then the people stood at a distance, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.”[17] Although “God’s appearance on the mountain is . . . described as both frightening and attractive, daunting and fascinating,”[18] the thick darkness, itself ontologically significant next to daylight, as the experience of a full solar eclipse may intimate to a degree, suggests the liminal presence of a numen—that something that is fundamentally other than ordinary is now present in our world.

Drawing on Otto’s terminology, the mysterium experienced from the sense of a transcendent, numinous presence can be understood to be more fundamental than the tremendum (terrifying, as daunting, as distinct from simply being afraid[19]) and fascinans (fascinating) qualities of a religious experience of the holy. Including the presence of mystery is perhaps just another way of saying that a religious experience, unlike experiences in other domains such as science, politics, and even ethics, go beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. In this way, Otto can be situated with the Christian theologian of the sixth century, (Pseudo) Dionysius.

One implication of the Otto-Dionysius “synthesis” or “nexus” is that even the wisdom tradition in the Hebrew Bible falls short, as evinced in the Book of Job. Job’s “friends,” who insist rather harshly that Job must have been impious to suffer so, invite Yahweh’s anger, for in the “repeated attempts to reinterpret Job’s situation against all appearances in accordance with [Wisdom] teaching, they demonstrate that the attempt to interpret human fate according to fixed rules can become deeply inhuman.”[20] Initially sympathetic, lying on the dirt with Job for seven days, the “friends” essentially kick the guy when he’s down because they think they know God by building “entirely on the [Wisdom] teaching and its infallibility.[21] Thus, “God’s wrath burns against [Job’s friends] because,” God says, they have “’not spoken of me what is right.’”[22] God says to Eliphaz the Temanite, “’My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.’”[23] Job’s three “friends” must “seek atonement” by performing a sacrifice to God; paradoxically, the “friends” “have to rely on Job’s petition on their behalf.”[24]

In contrast, Job does not try to “force God’s actions into any kind of theory,” then he recognizes the inappropriateness of his attitude after a dressing-down by God.[25] Job tells God, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in  dust and ashes.”[26] Job’s realization and repentance tells us that God’s initial claim that Job is a righteous man is correct after all. Job is blameless, not perfect, for he calls “God to account, indeed even accusing him” at one point, but he does so without the assumption of infallibility because, unlike his friends, questions the traditional human teaching that a “recognizable link” exists between what a person does and how much one suffers.[27] God rightly applies blame instead to Job’s self-righteous “friends,” for they have spoken of God without understanding, as they presumed that they could not be wrong about that which inherently goes beyond the limits of human thought and thus of theories. Humans cannot “understand God’s actions in terms of comprehensible and manageable rules.”[28] Faith seeking understanding should not put the cart before the horse, lest Aristotle’s notion of misordered concupiscence—putting a lower good above a higher one—apply.

Admittedly, it is tempting to stop at the anthropomorphist language of myth, or even to take that language literally, but God as wholly other necessitates mystery that goes with the inherent distance between us and a transcendent referent. Throughout the natural history of religion, the human proclivity to fixate on divine attributes at the expense of the distant mysterium of the divine, which relativizes even viewing it as a being (beings as entities being familiar to us in our realm), can at some point in a person’s experience of the divine compromise the sense of mystery and distance itself in yearning for that which inherently goes beyond the limits of human thought, senses, and feelings. It is thus important to keep in mind God’s command to stay off the mountain and the quality of mysterium in Otto’s theory, which, as a mere theory, does not exhaust God’s ways.

---

1. Ex 2:23-25
2. Ex 1:13-14
3. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):5.
4. The quoted text is from Exodus 3:8.
5. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):4.
6. Ibid., p. 7.
7. Ibid., p. 8.
8. Ibid., p. 10.
9. 3:1
10. Ex 3:5
11. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):26.
12. Ibid., p. 31.
13. Ex. 14:23
14. Ex. 14:17
15. Ex 14:20, italics added.
16. Ex 20:19
17. Ex 20:21
18. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):28.
19. Ibid., p. 32.
20. Rolf Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament, David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005):356.
21. Ibid., italics added. Ignorance that presumes that it cannot be wrong evinces the arrogance of false entitlement, as if the creature were above its Creator.
22. Ibid., p. 354. God’s statement is in Job 42:7.
23. Job 42:7.
24. Rolf Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament, David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005):356.
25. Ibid.
26. Job 42:5-6.
27. Rolf Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament, David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005):356.
28. Ibid., p. 357.

Hinduism and Judaism on Deities and Transcendence

A basic tenet of the Advaita (non-dualist) Hindu philosophy of Shankara holds, “If saguna points to brahman’s immanence, nirguna points to brahman’s transcendence. . . . superiority should not be accorded to the nirguna mode of discourse.”[1] Being a non-dualist, Shankara held that brahman is one, since reality or existence is unitary, and thus brahman as existence and reality of all is indivisible ontologically. Applying David Hume’s separability thesis from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the distinction between nirguna and saguna can be understood as one made only by human reason, which does not mean that nirguna and saguna are separate entities. In short, we make the distinction; it does not belong to brahman itself. Lest it be thought that nirguna brahman has no analogue in Western philosophy of religion, we need only bring in Spinoza, whose nirguna-like God is so different from the saguna-comparable Abrahamic personal deity that both Judaism and Christianity banished his texts; Judaism excommunicated him. The tremendous qualitative difference between saguna and nirguna brahman can be useful to anyone trying to understand why Judaism excommunicated Spinoza, which is not my task here. Rather, taking nirguna brahman as reality or existence of everything, which, like Spinoza’s notion of God, itself has awareness, I want to stress both how much this differs in kind (i.e., qualitatively) from both Hindu deities and the Abrahamic deity, and the more fundamental point that brahman is One. In spite of the qualitative difference, keeping the Hindu concept of nirguna brahman in mind while thinking about the personal deities that are consistent with saguna brahman is useful.

Nirguna brahman is simply unrecognizable as God in the Abrahamic religions (i.e., Judaism, Christianity and Islam), whose deity is personal (i.e., an intelligent being), and thus can be classified under saguna brahman. Yet as Hume points out in his Natural History of Religion, anthromorphism (i.e., applying human qualities onto non-human entities) applied to the original idea of divine simplicity says more about us than the divine. Hence saguna is not sufficient to account for transcendence. As Dionysius wrote, God (or the divine) goes beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and sensibility (emotion). Nirguna brahman is a concept that meets this need—if there is such a human instinct for transcendence as defined by Dionysius, while saguna satisfies the desire of the human mind, as postulated by Hume, to comprehend things that have at least some degree of likeness to ideas (from sense impressions, according to Hume) that are already in the human mind.  I first discuss the transcendence of nirguna brahman, which bringing in Spinoza will facilitate, after which I consider saguna brahman by looking at creation and, related, the word “God.”

The Taittiriya Upanishad twice (2.4.1 and 2.9.1) “describes brahman as that from which all words, with the mind, return, having failed to reach. Even the Vedas, in speaking about brahman, are constrained to use conventional words derived from everyday usage and, since these emerge from our experiences of finitude, they can never directly signify brahman. . . . Words are mere pointers to that which is beyond the meaning of all words and definitions.”[2] This is vintage Dionysius on God going beyond human ideas. The orientation is to beyond, or beyondness itself, rather than to what is familiar. As Hume writes, the human brain has a lot of trouble holding onto something like sheer beyondness, and it is difficult to yearn experientially for a naked beyond sans even the distinction between substance and attributes (or accidents). Hence the human need for saguna brahman in Hindu philosophy and a personal God in the Abrahamic religions. Nevertheless, nirguna brahman even as a transcendence-oriented concept can help us to keep saguna brahman and the Abrahamic deity from becoming human, all too human.

Reflecting on saguna brahman and the Abrahamic deity with nirguna brahman in mind can highlight the qualitative difference between gods and mere mortals. “To posit omnipotence as an attribute of brahman . . . does not mean that brahman possess (sic) the attribute of omnipotence in the same way that a lotus has the color blue as its attribute. The act of creation and being in relation to the creation does not alter the unity of brahman’s nature.”[3] Indeed, nirguna brahman transcends substance and attributes altogether. So rather than stipulating the law of karma from past lives as Shankara does to obviate the problem of evil, or limiting God’s omnipotence to that which is logically possible as Aquinas does, treating brahman’s omnipotence as qualitatively different than what it means for a human to have an attribute, and thus power in this case, may be sufficient to solve the problem of evil, at least in the case of Hinduism. Brahman’s holding of an attribute is, in other words, “wholly other,” and thus we cannot say using language that an all-powerful brahman is responsible for evil and thus is not good.

We can draw on the notion of nirguna brahman even in the West because the notion exists in Western philosophy of religion, even if in apparent opposition to the dominant conception of the divine as a personal deity. “The essential nature of brahman is indicated by the words satyam (reality), jnanam (awareness), and anantam (infinite).”[4] This is how Spinoza describes God as “reality or nature,” by which he means everything that exists. As God is a mode, according to Spinoza’s philosophy, God has awareness, but God is not a personal deity, as that would reek of anthropomorphism, and Spinoza was no fan of humanism in spite of the fact that his Jewish congregation and the Catholic Church excoriated him for being an atheist. Similarly, Nietzsche has been wrongfully accused of the same thing, even though he was pointing out the internal contradiction in a particular conception of God (i.e., Abrahamic). At any rate, Spinoza’s conception of God is in sync with distinguishing nirguna brahman from saguna brahman, in that the latter represents specific deities but without any doctrine of creation. Spinoza would agree that “the attribution of creatorship to brahman is limiting and defective. The world is also devalued when it is regarded as the product of a nonessential nature of brahman.”[5]

For Spinoza, God is not apart from the world (i.e., all that exists/nature), but is the entire world. Thus, he has been said to be a pantheist. Similarly, the original body, prior to the creation even of the gods, of purusa merges pre-creation materiality with the divine, though later Shiva and Vishnu were said to be purusa (i.e., the original body, out of which the multiplicity in the world comes).   Spinoza’s God is of course not a personal deity, as such a conception of the divine is anthropomorphic.  

Spinoza’s claim that redemption from suffering is like a person realizing, by reasoning, that one is not a specific wave, but instead the entire ocean, which analogously represents the whole of nature, or reality, and thus God. This is very similar to saying that atman is essentially brahman. The entire ocean has awareness, and is everything, and is not created, so Spinoza can once again be interpreted as viewing the God as being like nirguna brahman.

Keeping nirguna brahman in mind, we can hedge against excessive likeness of even saguna brahman to us. The suggestion in the Taittiriya Upanishad (3.6.1) is that brahman chooses to create the world from the limitless bliss-nature (ananda) of brahman, an “outpouring of the fullness of brahman and not an act motivated by any sense of incompleteness.”[6] Shankara “does admit the fact of desire on the part of brahman.”[7] But the desire does not presuppose or come out of a lack of something in brahman. Shankara writes, “What then are these (desires of brahman)? They are by nature truth and knowledge, and they are pure by virtue of their identity with brahman.”[8] Thus, the desires are not like ours, as that which we desire is not identical with us, but, rather, is external and extrinsic to us. Even the notion of the purpose or telos of brahman is qualitatively different than what it is for a human being to have a purpose. “While being cognizant of the limits of reasoning and the inadequacies of analogies, it is not impossible, with the aid of the Upanishads, to glimpse the significance of brahman’s desire to share its plenitude through self-multiplication. The desire for meaning, as numerous personal stories in the Upanishads reveal, is fundamental to the human being. The meaning of human existence, however, cannot be understood apart from the purpose of the one who brought all things into being.”[9] The one here must be saguna brahman, whose purposes include creation.

Unlike in the Abrahamic religions, the world is not “fallen” in the Hindu creation myths. “If the world . . . is seen positively as the outcome of the intentional creativity of brahman, expressing and sharing the fullness of brahman, the world does not have to be negated or rejected.”[10] Christianity comes to this only by the sacrificial atonement of Jesus Christ on the Cross; creation is redeemed, or restored, to a right relationship with God.

Also unlike case of the Abrahamic deity, God, Hindu creation is not ex nihilo (i.e., from nothing), for purusa already exists to be cut up as a sacrifice that gives rise to the world and the gods as we know and experience them. However, the fact that the repeated phrase, “And God said,” which immediately precedes God distinguishing or separating things, does not precede the earth as “a formless void,” which is not empty but is of “waters,”[11] may suggest that Yahweh distinguishes things rather than creates ontologically ex nihilo. That is, the message may be like that of Wittgenstein, wherein naming or stating is crucial to classifying something as something (and as distinct, or separate ontologically) from something else. It follows that the name of God is very important, even ontologically. That is to say, the word, “God,” is, according to Karl Rahner, “itself a reality” because the word “asks about reality as a whole and in its original ground.”[12] By implication, the word and its unique reality are qualitatively different from all other words and the sort of reality that they have. Just look at the salience of God’s name in the following passages from the Hebrew Bible:

“(A)ll the people of the earth will know your name.” (1 Kgs 8.43) According to Rendtorff, this means that “(t)o know the name of God means to acknowledge God himself.”[13] “Swearing by the name of YHWH is also an act of confession: ‘Fear the LORD your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name’ (Deut 6:13; 10.20).”[14] In Deuteronomy, “there is repeated discussion of the ‘place which the LORD will choose to let his name dwell.’”[15] “Here God will be present in his name.”[16] Deuteronomy “makes it clear that the prime concern is not with where God ‘lives,’ but with the presence of the divine name.”[17] I submit that this takes the significance of language too far, which I think Wittgenstein does too in claiming that there is no pre-classification awareness of something as a something prior to it having a name. I submit that God’s attributes, such as omnibenevolence and omnipotence, are more critical than God’s name, for, as Rendtorff points out, there are four names for God in the Hebrew Bible, and the name of something simply points to it, whereas the qualities and character of something are interior and inherent. Again, recalling nirsuna brahman is helpful; that brahman transcends and thus relativizes substance and attribute (or, peripatetically, accident) suggests just how integral the attributes of any personal deity that can be classified under saguna brahman are to the divine nature. Bringing in Dionysius, if God goes beyond the limits of human cognition, then God goes beyond words, and thus names. In other words, transcendent reality transcends the unique reality of the Abrahamic God’s name.

So, we can and should go beyond the Biblical statements, “We trust in your holy name” (Ps 106.21) “whose name is holy.” (Isa 57.15) Rendtorff makes the crucial point that, “But above all it is God himself who hallows his name.”[18] God’s name is holy because God is holy, not vice versa. Holiness is not based on the name of a god, and ultimately not even in a god’s qualities or attributes, but, rather, on that which any word for “God” (as per saguna brahman) points to, which in turn is ontologically not limited to human experience, cognition, perception, and emotion. If there is a human instinctual urge, or even attraction, to think beyond thought and yearn or reach beyond even reality or existence, then the momentum of secularity in modernity must be more a rejection of hollow or worn-out institutional religion than a permanent shift away from religion per se. Even the atheist David Hume posited such an enduring urge of the mind to behold divine simplicity, which our minds muck up by anthropomorphizing that which is transcendent into something familiar, and thus, human, all too human.

---

1. Anantanand Rambachan, The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 90.
2. Ibid., p. 89.
3. Ibid., p. 90.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., pp. 92-3.
7. Ibid., p. 93. See Taittiriya Upanishad (2.6.1).
8. Anantanand Rambachan, The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 95. 
9. Ibid., p. 97.
10. Ibid.
11. Gen. 1:1-3.
12. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, William V. Dych, trans. (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978): 49-50.
13. Rolf Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament, David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005): 592.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., p. 594.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 593.

Big Money in a Big Church: Thieves Hit Osteen’s Megachurch

Joel Osteen’s “megachurch,” also known as Lakewood Church, adheres to the Prosperity Gospel, which maintains that God rewards true believers with material wealth in addition to heavenly salvation. Implications from this theological perspective put the congregation and the leadership in a sticky position following the theft of $600,000 from the church. In the following essay, I intend to apply Christian principles to Christianity. How well Christianity makes out may give us some indication of the religion’s future, for a house divided cannot stand—at least for long after the inertia has run out.

The Prosperity Gospel is grounded in the Jewish Scriptures, wherein God repeatedly promises wealth to those of the chosen people who keep faith rather than lapse in maintaining the covenant. Yahweh being the “Possessor of heaven and earth,” the world is God’s property.[1] Human possessions are therefore gifts from God. Proverb 10 promises, “The blessing of the LORD brings wealth, without painful toil for it.”[2] Rather than becoming the absolute owner of the gifted property, the Hebrew is meant to act as God’s steward.[3] That is, God retains the basic or foundational ownership right in His property. Moreover, the property relations embody a relation between Israel and God in which the Israelites owe obedience and service as stewards in exchange for a right to Jehovah’s blessings, which include riches.[4] 

Although the notion of stewardship took root in historical Christian thought, the Prosperity Gospel sprung up in the late twentieth century in the theological approach that privileges the Biblical criterion of “literal meaning” as first advocated in Moody’s 1904 Fundamentals of the Christian Faith. One of the fundamentals is a belief in Jesus Christ. The Prosperity Gospel makes this belief the basis of God’s material rewards. Because the Christian with true belief is “saved” whereas a Jew (as well as Israel collectively) can break the covenant, the conditionality of the wealth once bestowed to those having true belief is muted if not applicable. If my interpretation is correct, then the conditionality in the Prosperity Gospel applies only until the person is “saved”; thereafter, the promise of wealth is unhinged at least in part from the notion of responsibility applied to use.

Joel Osteen's megachurch during a weekend service. A substantial amount of money is doubtless collected even just from one such service. 

This rationale may explain Osteen’s reaction on March 10, 2014 to the theft of $600,000 on the previous day from that weekend’s collections. According to a statement, church administrators were “heartbroken to learn . . . that funds were stolen” and relieved that the funds had been fully insured and thus would be replaced.[5] Tellingly, the administrators added that they were working nonetheless to get back the stolen funds. This orientation involves more than a quite understandable desire for justice—albeit public legal justice rather than the sort of justice that Augustine “Christianized” from Plato and Leibniz, the co-inventor of calculus, developed: love as universal benevolence. Whereas the dominant justice in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is in line with Shylock’s banking scales being restored to balance (e.g., an eye for an eye, or a pound of flesh for late repayment of a loan), justice that has love as charity due to everyone (i.e., neighbor-love as justly owed) is in line with Jesus’s new commandment to love one another unconditionally.[vi]

I submit that taking up the Prosperity Gospel points a Christian to the Old Testament notion of justice as well; the promise being extended to earthly wealth implies that those people who are motivated to quality would also be oriented to getting the wealth back rather than losing even more. Such people would tend to concur with the predilection of the administrators at Lakewood Church to get the funds back even though insurance covers the loss.

Every human perspective is limited, given how we are “hard wired.” So a focus on getting stolen money back and seeing that the culprits pay both literally and in suffering the pain of punishment comes not without an opportunity cost (i.e., the benefits of alternative perspectives that are given up for lack of sight in their directions). In the case of the Prosperity Gospel and the related inclination to view justice as its public legal variety, Christians can slight or even violate Jesus’s dicta in Luke 6:28-30 (NIV) without being aware of the hypocrisy.  Let’s unpack the verse as per the Lakewood case.

The preceding verse has Jesus saying, “bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” As a theft mistreats the owner(s) of the stolen goods—at the very least in not respecting the property rights—Jesus can be read here as proclaiming even the thieves of church funds as blessed. From such a basis the justice of loving the culprits (i.e., they being owed love nonetheless) can readily be grasped. Indeed, Jesus sees to it that the love is operational as benevolence even to one’s enemies (including those who steal from one’s property). First, Jesus gives the general principle: “whoever hits you on the cheek, offer him the other also.” Anyone who has had their residence broken into would doubtless agree that discovering the theft can feel like a slap on the face. Once while studying at Yale, I returned from martial-arts (self-defense) training at the gym to find my apartment ransacked. I felt like someone had slapped me on my face. To be sure, the irony of returning from a self-defense class mitigated the sting somewhat.

As though tailor-made for Lakewood’s administrators and ministers, Jesus makes his imperative concrete. Whoever “takes away your coat, do not withhold your shirt from him either.” If stealing qualifies as taking away, then the officials at Lakewood Church should have put out a statement offering still more money to the thieves. Lest by some convoluted logic an administrator agree to extend the church’s charity program to the thieves even as he or she tries to get the stolen funds back, Jesus provides no such relieve. “Give to everyone who asks of you, and whoever takes away what is yours, do not demand it back.” While the church officials’ announced intent to get the funds back is strategically in line with keeping insurance premiums down (car owners are doubtless very familiar with this game), it flies in the face of Jesus’s demand not to demand back that which someone has taken away.

Moreover, while the intent is in line with public legal justice, Jesus’s notion of justice as “Give to everyone who asks of you,” or universal benevolence, is quite other. In the seventeenth century, Leibniz labeled the latter theory of justice as caritas naturalis seu benevolentia universalis. Natural love is sublimated from garden-variety lust (eros) to Plato’s love of the eternal moral verities “Christianized” by Augustine as God as the Highest Good, and yet unlike Plato’s intellectual love the human love directed heavenly is expressed as love of one’s neighbor (anyone). Achieving this sort of justice is one of the primary costs of adopting the Prosperity Gospel and (relatedly) Shylock’s notion of public legal justice as akin to demanding a pound of flesh.

---

1. Charles R. Smith, The Bible Doctrine of Wealth and Work. London (1924): Epworth Press, p. 23; Genesis 14:19,22.

2. Prov. 10:22.

3. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, p. 25.

4. Ibid., pp. 26, 55.

5. KHOU.com, “Osteen’s Lakewood Church Suffers Theft of Over $600,000 Shocking Texas Megachurch,” The Huffington Post, March 11, 2014.

6. John 13:34.