What Kind Of God Would Let People Who Hate Him Stay Away?

Mark Shea:

Yet Another Rules-Based MSM Discussion of Mortal and Venial Sin

What is absent from all this is any concept of life in Christ as *relationship*. All you get are rules, written on a card and magnetized to the refrigerator. Break rules on card A and the Divine Administrator puts in the record that you are slated for Hell. Break rules on Card B and the Divine Administrator marks you down. Earn enough infractions and the Sin Monitor Task Force transfers your name to the Go to Hell file. However, if you do the theological equivalent of filling out a waiver by going to confession, the Divine Adminstrator will, for inscrutable reasons, round file your sin folder and let you start over. The goal of the Christian life, therefore is to die with your sin folder empty. Then God has to let you into heaven, which is this beautiful place that has nothing to do with Him really. It's just a really pretty park where your favorite people have been standing around waiting for you to arrive. The notion that a life of virtue spent trying to cultivate a *relationship* with God never enters into the picture. It's just a question of keeping and breaking rules. And nobody really knows why one rule is more important than another. Indeed, some of the rules appear (to us moderns) to have nothing whatever do with anything. A mortal sin to miss Mass? Why? That one must have been stuck in by the Church to try to control people. Hey! Everybody lusts. Downgrade that one to venial. And if we are going to have rule to control people, why not putt something in there about SUVs. Destroying the earth is more serious than missing Mass!

In the same way, hell seems to have nothing to do with *relationship* in the modern mind. I constantly meet people who seem to think of Hell as an absurdly sadistic overreaction by a touchy God who get irrationally angry when people don't keep his arbitrary rules. Or else its something that falls on the head of innocent people like a safe, destroying them for no reason. The notion that Hell has everything to do with *relationship*: that it is the "definitive self-exclusion" of a soul from the society of God never seems to occur to anybody. Having lived through the 20th Century, having seen a soul like Hitler's look around at a world he destroyed and declare that it was everybody else's fault but his, postmoderns can still somehow take seriously the notion that the human heart is incapable of walling itself off from relationship with God and man in pride.

In short, people don't seem to grasp that Heaven is simply the fruit of a life that pursues relationship with God on His terms and Hell is simply the fruit of a life that pursues its own course on our terms. Mortal and venial sins are useful distinctions, to be sure. But if you turn them into another way of trying to be saved by law, you are stone deaf to the most elementary teaching of the gospel: that only Christ, not law, can save us.