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Mike Morrell muses in an evocative, for some, and provocative, for others, post at his blog, Blessings Not Just for the Ones Who Kneel – the Promiscuous Love of God:

Bottom-line: God is love. Love is orthodoxy. (Agapetheism, as my friend Kevin Beck likes to put it) It’s God’s kindness that leads to repentance, not the big stick that you imagine God’s holiness to be. Let’s join together in the Great Work of our age – becoming the leaves of the Tree of Life for the healing of our relationships, our neighborhoods, our ecosystems, our economies – in short, our world. This begins, as Brennan Manning says, with healing our image of God – and the ones God loves. Which is all of us. God brings abundant blessings…not just for the ones who kneel. May we model this same lavish, indiscriminate, sloppy, positively promiscuous love.

Amen and amen.

PS: What songs, art, poetry and cultural artifacts remind you of God’s blessing breaking out of the confines of empire and religion?

As far as theological constructs go, I reckon one must affirm a reality like hell as necessary, in theory, only because true love is not coercive and God would force no one into relationship with Him, respecting our freedom. (How such a self-imposed alienation might be experienced in an atemporal existence, who knows? I doubt seriously fire and sulphur are involved.)

As far as theodicy questions, trying to reconcile such disparate God-concepts such as omnipotence and omnibenevolence, I’d affirm the latter and ditch the former. For one thing, if creation was any less ambiguous for us and seemingly less ambivalent toward us, we might experience the reality of God too coercively, diminishing the need for faith and thereby limiting our freedom.

In my view, we should abandon our puerile notions of substitutionary and penal atonement. We needn’t conceive of the incarnation as some type of divine initiative in response to some so-called felix culpa, as some type of cosmic repair job for an ontological rupture that took place in the past. Rather, from an emergentist perspective of cosmic evolution, we can conceive of a God who so loved created reality that the incarnation was in the plans from the cosmic get-go.

What we experience, then, is His and our teleological striving ordered toward the future, where our role as created co-creators is robustly participatory, where our questions change from Why is there suffering? to What am I going to do about it? That all of creation is groaning in one great act of giving birth need never be conceived as divine punishment or retribution but can instead be envisioned as God’s shrinking to make room for creation, finally shrinking so far as to take on human flesh without ever deeming equality with God as something to be grasped at.

Once we’ve recognized this divine initiative and fully experienced its efficacies in our lives, any notion that God employs the created order to punish us earthly heathen (as temporal punishment) seems rather facile. As for a theological construct like hell (an eternal punishment), such a theoretical necessity increasingly seems to be a practical improbability, for our God may be coy but She’s not timid, for, as a wily seductress and charming temptress, She will, eventually, have Her way with each and everyone of us, I just have to believe. And so did many of the Church Fathers, who articulated the notion of apokatastasis, which means that God’s loving initiatives are so overwhelmingly efficacious that, in the end, no one will escape them.

It might be heterodox to deny the reality of hell as an indispensable theological construct but it is manifestly not heterodox to hope and believe that there ain’t a snowball’s chance in the Superdome that anyone will ever end up there.

Rather, I believe that every beginning of a smile, every trace of human goodness, will be eternalized. We will each adorn the eternal firmament, filled to our capacity with the ever unobtrusive but finally inescapable love of God, some of us, perhaps like Mother Teresa, a blindingly bright and blazing helios, others, perhaps like that little altar boy, Hitler, but a tiny votive candle.

Often, I imagine God singing, to each of us, that Moody Blues song:

I Know You’re Out There Somewhere
Moody Blues

I know you’re out there somewhere
Somewhere somewhere
I know I’ll find you somehow
And somehow I’ll return again to you

The mist is lifting slowly
I can see the way ahead
And I’ve left behind the empty streets
That once inspired my life
And the strength of the emotion
Is like thunder in the air
‘Cause the promise that we made each other
Haunts me to the end

CHORUS
I know you’re out there somewhere
Somewhere somewhere
I know you’re out there somewhere
Somewhere you can hear my voice
I know I’ll find you somehow
Somehow somehow
I know I’ll find you somehow
And somehow I’ll return again to you

The secret of your beauty
And the mystery of your soul
I’ve been searching for in everyone I meet
And the times I’ve been mistaken
It’s impossible to say
And the grass is growing
Underneath our feet

CHORUS

The words that I remember
From my childhood still are true
That there’s none so blind
As those who will not see
And to those who lack the courage
And say it’s dangerous to try
Well they just don’t know
That love eternal will not be denied

CHORUS

You know it’s going to happen
I can feel you getting near
And soon we’ll be returning
To the fountains of our youth
And if you wake up wondering
In the darkness I’ll be there
My arms will close around you
And protect you with the truth

Thus imagined, that song gives me chills and brings a tear.