The God of Jesus is not the God that most people believe is the God of Christianity - Chapter 4 of Why I Am Still A Christian Continued

This God, as Jesus proclaimed him, is not- as has so often been taught to children - an all too masculine, arbitrary, legal-minded God, a kind of martinet, a God without maternal features.  He is not a God created in the image of kings, tyrants, and dictators.  This God really is - and I beg ou to take the word not in its superficial meaning but in its deepest meaning - the loving God who is my mother too:  that is, he is the God of love who for all his justice, commits himself unreservedly to all human beings, to all their needs and hopes (which is also important for questions about sexual morality).  He is a God who does not always merely demand, but gives;  who does not oppress but liberates;  who does not make people ill or poison their lives, but heals them.  He is a God who spares those who fall - and who does not fall?  A God who forgives instead of condemning, liberates instead of punishing, makes grace rule instead of law;  who rejoices more over the repentance of one sinner than over ninety-nine just people.  He is therefore a God who prefers the Prodigal son over the one who stayed at home,  the tax collector to the Pharisee, the Samaritan heretics over the orthodox, the prostitutes and adulterers to their self-righteous judges.  As you see, this preaching of Jesus was offensive and scandalous, not only for that time in history but for today as well, particularly since it was accompanied by an equally offensive and scandalous practice;  not excommunication but communication - even communion!  He sat down - even sat at table - with the despised and the failures, "sinners" of every kind.

In short, The God of Jesus is not the God that most people believe is the God of Christianity, both those who believe they believe and those who reject Christianity and God.  The God of Jesus is not the God of the rulers, the rich, the civil authority NOR, IN SO MANY CASES, OF THOSE WHO HOLD HIGH RELIGIOUS OFFICE.   The God of Jesus is the God the slaves found as those who kept them in slavery didn't have a clue that God was there.  The God who is not the God of much if not most of organized Christianity nor the one of their opponents to whom they have given so much ammunition, ANTI-CHRISTIANITY. 

It is obvious that this God's name of Father is not merely an echo of the experience of fatherhood, masculinity, strength and power in the world.  This is not a God as seen by the former theologian and later atheist Feuerbach:  a God of the hereafter at the expense of the here and now, at the expense of human beings and their true greatness.  Nor is this a God such as Karl Marx criticized:  a God of the rulers , of unjust social conditions, of deformed consciousness, and false consolation.  Nor is this the God rejected by Nietzsche : a God engendered by resentment, a God of pitiable weakling.  Nor is this the God rejected by Freud and a number of psychoanalysts: a tyrannical super-ego, the false image of infantile needs, a God of obsessive ritual arising from a guilt complex, a father complex or an Oedipus complex.

Hans Kung goes into detail on several of these points but for my political commentary on this book, the most immediately important is the refutation of the charge from the atheist play-left that Christianity is all about "pie in the sky" and not justice, economic as well as social justice here and now.   I am pressed for time so I will excerpt a piece I wrote contrasting a Christian denomination with whom I disagree with about much and a legendary leftist entity which still today holds the (generally uninformed) affection of so many on the left.  Though, notably, not their paid-up membership. 

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In a turnaround from that old song, The Preacher and the Slave, by Joe Hill, it is the secular left that has been promising pie in the sky, or at least in some future that never seems to get here.  And then doing everything in their power to screw up delivering on that promise.  The Salvation Army, which he satirized in the song certainly fed more people than the Wobblies ever did, they clothed more, they housed more and I dare say they contributed more to the actual welfare of the destitute and the poor than the IWW ever has in the past or present or will in the future.  I suspect that the Salvation Army have, actually, been the vehicle for improvement of lives, including working lives, more so than the Wobblies ever were or ever could have been.   I certainly don't agree with the Salvation Army's theology in places and I don't approve of the quasi-military structure of it and am aware of notable lapses between its aspired ideals and beliefs and its actual achievement of those, but I'm not going to lie about it, what it does when it follows its stated intentions.   No matter how much I dislike the quasi-military garb and ranking or some aspects of it, in every practical way they have contributed more to the actual achievement of the goals of the left in real life than the sacred Wobblies and their like. 

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I would now say the same thing about most if not all of the secular left of which I spent most of my adult life in. 

A more successful critique of the Salvation Army could be made in that the God it believes in is far more susceptible to being considered a God of the ruling class than the God of those it has served.  I am not uncritical of the Salvation Army, no more than I am the Catholic Church or the Friends General Conference, a meeting of which I once very seriously considered joining and who I generally admire.  None of us live up to God as Jesus taught or to his moral teachings.   I say that, sitting here, at my computer instead of feeding the poor, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner (though I'm supposed to go sit with a sick person later today) and giving aid to the alien oppressed by the Trump regime, so I should talk.

This section of the book which describes God as taught by Jesus is the most complex part of it, but I will comment on all of it.