Is God a Monster? No and Yes.

Brian Zahnd wrote an excellent blog post two days ago called God Is Not A Monster. I can get behind it 100%. You should go read it right now. It disarms so many of our misunderstandings about the nature of God, especially when we envision him as merely one of the gods. The best line in the post is: 'Jesus is perfect theology.' That said, I can imagine nuancing some elements. I'd want to say that holy fear isn’t mutually exclusive with holy love. In fact, the 'holy' in Holy Love (the two words John Wesley said could sum up the character and nature of God) implies awe, wonder, terror, and Otherness. I think Jesus wipes out all unholy fear of God, all fear of punishment, and purifies fear into a beautiful reverence and wonder and awe and adoration and, indeed, love for God. Holy fear involves no worry that God's awesomeness would destroy you, but it exults in his glorious power and righteousness, which is SO good it sends shivers up your spine and thrills you. Especially as a sinner eternally forgiven and welcomed into the fellowship of the Holy Trinity. An awe-inspiring thought, fearful and lovely at once. Just as importantly, however, I'd also want to put in a good word for holy monstrosity. The Cherubim in the book of the prophet Ezekiel are four-faced, six-winged, covered-in-eyes angelic beings who attend God's throne. The four faces are those of a lion, ox, eagle, and man. So we’re talking fangs, horns, fur, and sharp, hooked, pointed beak, piercing eyes and piercing cries, snarling and bellowing and screeching. These beasts known to maul, gore, and slash are hybridised skin-crawlingly with an anthropoid form, a were-ox/eagle/lion if you will, a gryphon-esque being. That seems like a sort of monster to me, minus the destructive ravening and ravaging (but not necessarily minus the roaring) and with no trace of malevolence. Jesus himself is called the Lion of Judah in the New Testament. The very same animal to which that same New Testament likens the devil! A lordly, top-of-the-food-chain predator, fanged and clawed, is considered an apt image of both the holy and the diabolical. This is not to confuse us, but to assure us. The malevolent devourer can be vanquished by the mighty saviour, claw for claw, fang for fang. You see, it's the Book of Revelation that calls Jesus a lion and also gives a reprise to the Cherubim (and these heavenly monsters are said to give ceaseless glory, honour, and thanks to the thrice-holy enthroned one). And it's no wonder the leonine Lord and his holy monsters are introduced in the opening chapters when you see the fearsome diabolical monsters that fill up the rest of the Book of Revelation! Our Lord and his angelic attendants are fully ferocious enough in love and glory to overcome our terrifying foes and put the world to rights in the end. And I do think C. S. Lewis named something true and good and beautiful about God's nature when he semi-allegorised Christ as Aslan the preternatural lion-lord of Narnia. 'Aslan is not a tame lion' and ‘Aslan is not safe, but he’s good, he’s the King I tell you!’ seem like right sentiments about Christ to me. If ‘Jesus is perfect theology,’ then we must not try to edit the New Testament portraits of him down to something tamed or tameable. The Jesus who could excoriate hypocrisy with the whip of his words as much as cleanse a money-grubbing temple with a whip of cords is the same Jesus who showed stupefying mercy to all humble sinners who sought him or were sought by him and who yielded to his seeking kindness. The one who commanded demons and calmed storms is the same who touched untouchables and played with children brought to him by parents. The one who said in no uncertain terms that before Abraham existed, he, a man from Nazareth, already existed, and that he would come again in the clouds with his angels - this same one washed his disciples' feet and received a scandalous foot-washing from a pariah and called her act beautiful. You can’t tame this one with either/or false dichotomies or with any human agenda or perspective whatsoever. No theology can capture him. He is too brawny and elusive at once to be caught in any puny theological nets. Theologise we must, but he laughs along with all such theo-comedy, for every time ‘the ropes that were on his arms became as flax that has caught fire, and his bonds melted off his hands’. He himself is his own perfect theology. If he is a holy monster of sorts, this Lion of Judah is only good and does only good. If he eats us alive, it is only to save us from the bad monsters who would destroy us, to give us shelter in his gracious belly from their terrors. And those unholy horrors he will eat up for their undoing and demise. All tyranny and brutality will be masticated into oblivion in his maw.

'Do you eat girls?' she said. 

'I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,' said the Lion. It didn't say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it. 

(The Silver Chair, C. S. Lewis) 

'Please,' she said, 'you're so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I'd sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else.' 

'Dearest daughter,' said Aslan, planting a lion's kiss on her twitching, velvet nose, 'I knew you would not be long in coming to me. Joy shall be yours.' 

(The Horse and His Boy, C. S. Lewis)

If his glorious, gracious claws or fangs cut our skin and spill our blood, it is all ferociously merciful surgery, to clothe us in new skins, infuse us with new blood.

"Then the lion said—but I don't know if it spoke—‘You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. 

"The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. [...] Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off—just as I thought I'd done it myself the other three times, only they hadn't hurt—and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me—I didn't like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I'd no skin on—and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I'd turned into a boy again."

(The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C. S. Lewis)

Christ’s claws are kinder than the sweetest kisses of the Accuser. Indeed, he is the holy monster who laid down his life for us. He is the predator who hunts and kills death itself. For in the Book of Revelation he is announced as the lion of Judah, yet when he enters the throneroom of God he is seen to be the seven-eyed, seven-horned lamb of God who was slain (another monstrous image of the sacred) and is now risen, who takes away the sins of the world. By the wounds he received on the cross we are healed, as the prophet Isaiah foresaw. Yet also, by his fierce, fanged compassion we are transformed out of our own unholy monstrosity, restored to humanity. He is lion and lamb in one. Not tame. Not safe. But good. So utterly, terrifyingly, breathtakingly, beautifully, wondrously good. I fear him and love him at once and in no contradiction. My love happily and enthusiastically expresses itself in holy awe and reverence. My fear rushes easily and effortlessly and, indeed, fearlessly into his everlasting arms of complete and neverending love and acceptance of me, his sanctified child. In this, and only this, context, to fear him is to love him and to love him is to fear him. That is my theo-comedy. Brian Zahnd wrote of his theo-comedy and I heartily resonate with it. But Christ laughs along with us both. Jesus is perfect theology.

[First image from the cover of an edition of Madeleine L'Engle's novel A Wind In The Door, artist unknown; second image, source unknown, artist unknown.]

Readers may also be interested in a different case for the redemption of monsters that I made in a conference paper called 'Leviathan Regained: Towards a Theology of the Ecomonstrous'. (Note:  after the first few pages, the theory-speak settles down and some more accessible theologising happens.)