Can Cummings’ ‘God as Mister Rogers’ be real?

In his June 12 column, “Unconditional love,” Dr. Bill Cummings once again cherry-picks the Bible to support his liberal religious beliefs. This is not to say that liberal Christianity is necessarily wrong — I know very little about religion and, for all I know, it could turn out to be correct. But why, oh why, oh why, good doctor, can’t you be straightforward about what you are doing instead of pretending that an objective, unbiased reading of the Bible supports your beliefs?

Cummings tells us that God “loves us like a mother,” unconditionally, and for support cites 1 John 4:16 (“God is love”) and several other verses. Like all liberal Christians, he embraces the comforting parts of the Bible and either dismisses the “hard” parts as inauthentic or simply ignores them. Astonishingly, he asks, “Are there still some Christians who believe that God will not love and save all those millions of people who reject Jesus Christ?” The answer, of course, is a resounding “yes.” But far more important than how many Christians happen to believe any given thing at any given time is what the Bible actually says.

In Mark 16:16, Jesus is quoted as saying, “Whoever believes (his gospel) and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” In John 6:29, when asked, “What must we do to do the works God requires?,” he replies, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” In John 14:1 he says, “You believe in God; believe also in me.” In Matthew 10:32-33 and Luke 12:8-9, he says that those who confess him on earth he will confess in heaven, while those who deny him he will deny, and he says almost the same thing in Mark 8:38. In John 6:47 and 11:26 respectively, he says that those who believe in him will have eternal life and will never die. In John 12:48 he says, “There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not receive my words,” who will be judged “on the last day.”

But often Jesus is much less definite on the question of believing in him. Even the famous “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6), though usually interpreted as requiring belief in him, actually doesn’t quite say that. In John 5:24, he exhorts his hearers to belief not in himself but in “him who sent me.” In neither the famous description of separating “the sheep from the goats” on judgment day in Matthew 25:31-46, nor in his consignments of the wicked to damnation in John 5:29 and Matthew 5:29-30, 13:42, 13:50 and 18:8-9, nor in his advice about salvation to the lawyer in Luke 10:25-28, does Jesus even mention believing in him. And in Matthew 7:21-23, he says that not all who do believe in him will be saved.

As for the words about belief and salvation not from Jesus but his followers, they range from the ambiguous (John 3:17, “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world”) to the very unambiguous (John 3:36, “he that believeth not the Son … the wrath of God abideth on him”) to everywhere in between. See John 3:16, 3:18 and 20:31, Acts 16:31, Romans 8:1 and 10:9, 2 Thessalonians 1:8, 2 Timothy 2:12, 1 John 2:22 and 5:5-13, and Revelation 3:5, 20:12-15 and 22:12-16, to mention a few among many.

These verses, as Cummings has told us many times, are open to interpretation, nuanced exegesis and challenges to their authenticity, and billions of words have been written doing those things. But his airy belief in an “open admissions to heaven” policy, including not just for those who passively follow other religions but for atheists and those who, in his own words, actively “reject Jesus Christ,” seems to be nothing more than wishful thinking on his part, unsupported by any objective reading of scripture.

The doctor goes beyond mere cherry-picking, however, and into outright distortion, when he repeatedly compares the love of God with that of a mother who invariably and unconditionally stands by her sinful child, no matter how egregious the sin. But, as a New Testament scholar, he surely knows that God is called “Father” throughout the New Testament, including hundreds of times by Jesus himself, while references to God as “Mother” are either rare or nonexistent. (Actually I can find none.) The Lord’s Prayer begins with “Our Father,” not “Our Mother.” Jesus on the cross said “Father forgive them,” not “Mother forgive them.” He said “I and the Father are one,” not “I and the Mother are one.” And so on. Yet Cummings repeatedly invokes the metaphor of God as mother while completely ignoring the metaphor of God as father, even though it dominates both the New Testament and traditional Christianity. And so, as difficult as it is to say, it must be said that Cummings is here not just cherry-picking the Bible but trying to rewrite it to fit his beliefs.

It is well known that a good earthly father is loving and forgiving but also, at times, stern and demanding. In theological terms, he reflects not only the mercy of God but the righteousness of God. (This is why many children would rather ask their mother than their father for permission to do something — they know that she is often an easier mark.) But Cummings and his fellow liberal Christians want all the mercy without any of the righteousness. They want there to be no requirements at all in order to be a Christian. They believe that God automatically and invariably overlooks any and all sin, no matter how heinous, blasphemous or hurtful to our fellow human beings, whether there has been any repentance or not. If they believe in the concepts of sin and repentance at all, they believe that, because God is nothing but benevolence, to use Cummings’ own words, “It doesn’t matter.”

And it’s just possible that they’re right. It’s just possible that all the “hard” parts of the Bible are inauthentic after all and there isn’t really any such thing as sin or, if there is, it doesn’t matter. Life certainly would become much easier for us if this was the case — at least as long as we are among the ones doing the sinning rather than the ones being sinned against. But the important question, here as elsewhere, is not what is easy but what is consonant with reality. And the irony here is that, according to the Catholic theology that Dr. C apparently once believed in, this belief about sin is itself a sin. As he must surely know, “presumption of God’s mercy” is held to be one of six grave sins against the Holy Spirit.

On this question of the love and fatherliness of God, C.S. Lewis perhaps said it best:

“By Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness. We want not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence.(But) love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. The mere kindness which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is at the opposite pole from Love.

“To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God. Because He is what He is, His love must be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labor to make us lovable. I do not think I should value much the love of a friend who cared only for my happiness and did not object to my becoming dishonest.” (Quote condensed for brevity.)

Of course Lewis could be wrong and Cummings could be right. His and his co-believers’ hippy-dippy conception of God as an all-benevolent Santa Claus who never brings us ashes and switches but brings only goodies, whether we’ve been good children or bad, could turn out to be the correct one after all. It’s just possible that God could be, in fact, much more like Mister Rogers, or a senile grandfather, than the God Lewis describes. We can know little if anything with certainty about God. But we are told in the Bible, almost at its very beginning, that God created us “in his own image.” And if you were God, which kind of God would you choose to be?

In closing, because my previous columns about Cummings were widely misunderstood, I want to say that he is an asset to Middle Georgia and The Telegraph and that we should all respect him for his knowledge, his commitment, his passion and his energy in writing about his beliefs, as well as for his obvious compassion and love for his fellow human beings. Speaking personally, I respect and even admire him. But none of this is equivalent to his being correct. None of it precludes the right, indeed for me what feels like the obligation, to point out where he is mistaken.

This story was originally published July 9, 2016 at 9:07 PM with the headline "Can Cummings’ ‘God as Mister Rogers’ be real?."