Embracing God's Identity as a Loving Father Without Sidelining His Holiness

My Dad and me beside the Bow River in Calgary way back in 2016.

This is the second of three blog posts that I am doing which focus on some of the incredible things that I love about the charismatic movement. Foremost among these things for me is what is often referred to as 'the Father heart of God'. This kind of theology is especially common in movements such as the Vineyard, Catch The Fire and YWAM. Prominent teachers focused on this have included Jack Winter and Jack Frost (who were unrelated despite the humorously similar surnames). Expressions of this theology often go something like this:

'Oftentimes in Christian contexts we have heard preaching that paints a picture of God as an angry and disappointed judge who loves nothing more than to shame us for our sins and punish us for our weaknesses. We have often been brought into the kingdom of God by means of the terror of divine judgment. This kind of messaging breeds distance and mistrust in our relationship with God and increases our struggles with guilt, shame and fear and thus hinders our progress as Christians rather than helping it. But, in contrast to this, Jesus presented his Father as a perfect Father, a Father who relates to his children as one full of love, affection, tenderness and care. He does not want us to be afraid of him, he runs to us as the father of the prodigal son and lavishes his love upon us even in our sin. And God doesn't just want us to know this love only cerebrally as a point of doctrine, but as a lived and felt reality communicated experientially by the power of the Holy Spirit.'

When I first arrived in Canada and was attending Catch The Fire Toronto's School of Ministry, I had a profound personal experience of God's love for me as my Father that brought great healing to my heart and set me free from several addiction issues that I had been unable to break free from for years, despite my best efforts as a Christian up until that point. God's fatherly tenderness and affection healed something within me that brought a release from deep-seated shame that had left me open to sinful temptations. Literally tens of thousands of people had been coming to this Toronto church since the revival broke out in 1994 and having similarly lifechanging experiences of God's fatherly love.

After I had finished my 5-month School of Ministry program at Catch the Fire Toronto and began training to be a youth pastor, however, I encountered a problem. The more I dug into the Bible, the more I encountered texts that spoke of God's utter holiness and just wrath against sin and sinners. When I began encountering Calvinist/Reformed preachers online this 'problem' became even more acute. Was the God I thought I encountered at the School of Ministry really the true God of the Bible? Can I still believe in 'the father heart of God' style teachings? Did such teaching neglected or even contradict large swathes of the biblical text in order to present God in such a way? Was this a sanitized, 21st-century God that supposedly just wants to give us a big cuddle and doesn't really care about our sin?

Over the years I have seen people take differing approaches to this question. At heart, the question is 'How does God's love related to his holiness?'. I have seen many people from similar Catch The Fire/charismatic backgrounds simply double down and try to do away with the many biblical depictions of God that highlight is holiness, wrath and anger against sin. Sometimes this takes the form of sheer denial. Those who want to take a more intellectually honest approach will often latch on to the positions of people like Brad Jersak or Greg Boyd. In my view, both of these teachers are essentially modern-day Marcionites, though they would deny this (Marcion was an early church heretic who denied the validity of the God of the Old Testament and wanted to distance Jesus and His Father from this wrathful, angry deity). I personally did not want to A. Give up on the Father heart message, because I felt it accurately presented much of Jesus' teaching, B. Take a simplistic denialism approach (i.e. well the Bible never truly talks about God being angry or wrathful), or C. Take a Marcionite approach that sanitizes the Bible's depictions of God's utter holiness and just anger and wrath against sin. I thought about this question of the relationship between God's love, mercy and grace and his holiness, anger and wrath for many years, a process which culminated in the writing of my MA thesis which focused squarely on this question. My academic conclusion in this thesis mirrored the more colloquial conclusion that I had already arrived at after many years of praying and wrestling. Both could be summarized in this way: 'God's ultimate characteristic is revealed in Christ's death on the cross for sinful humanity: who God is at his very core is suffering, enemy-blessing love, a giving away of himself so as to save, bless and redeem those who have rebelled against and hated him. Thus, in all God's actions at all times, he freely chooses to act in line with this central core of who he is. At the very same time and in fact motivated by this same selfless love, God also acts in wrath and judgement against sin, sometimes in severe ways. But this wrathful judgment is ever and always an expression of his enemy-blessing love, not a contradiction of it. After all, would God still be loving if he left sin and Satan unchecked, and if he didn't provoke his people unto repentance?'

In this way I was able to chart a course through this theological and spiritual dilemma such that I held on to an understanding of God as a tender, affectionate, kind and merciful Father, and yet at the very same time I did not conveniently erase all that the Bible says about God's holiness and wrath against sin. Although these aspects of God's character often feel to us as though they are irreconcilable and contradictory, this is not the case. It is a question of both-and, not either-or. As a result, even today, 16-years after my profound experience of God's love at Catch The Fire Toronto's School of Ministry, I still live full of God's Fatherly love. At the same time, I stand in awe of his holiness and in the fear of him that is the beginning of true wisdom. This is a gift that has come to me from God through the charismatic movement. It is something that I will treasure all my life and on into eternity.