“And when now in our enlightened age, where all anthropomorphic and anthropopathic conceptions of God are deemed inappropriate, it is none the less not considered inappropriate to think of God as a judge, like an ordinary magistrate or a superior military judge…”
- Soren Kierkegaard (The Sickness unto Death)
I have a nephew who has been in university getting his degree in criminology. This semester he is taking a philosophy class, studying the existentialists. He is not a believer in God, but we have plenty of great conversation when it comes to religion and philosophy. He inspired me to dive back in to the existentialists, just to ensure I can be a better conversation partner. I forgot how much this stuff speaks my language.
In particular, Kierkegaard, our resident existentialist, has a whole lot to to say about the relationship between things like despair and our conceptions of God. I really appreciated the broader implications of the above quote to this end, especially in context of the book itself. One of the questions the quote begs is this; there are tendencies within Christianity to conceive of God as wholly (or holy) other, and subsequently to resist anthropomorphic depictions and to actively distance the creator from creation.
With one exception- the judge. There seems to be very little hesitancy in these same theological leanings to parlay human conceptions of justice on to the character of God, even to the point of assuming that certain societal constructs and systems are direct reflections of how God does and would act when it comes to justice. We (a generalized we) say, if we would act this way, then God must act this way. And often this way includes ideas such as a God who must punish to be just and/or who must punish with death to be just.
I wonder if this is a point of great inconsistency when it comes to such theological approaches.
The Stories of my Life 