Paying for protection

Subsequent generations, however, gradually moved away from the Reformation in these areas. Rationalist religion, reacting against exaggerated and overexplicit portrayals of human wickedness and divine wrath among many Puritans, began to stress the goodness of man and the benevolence of the Deity. By the time of the Second Awakening, many leaders of the revival were adjusting to this critique by presenting an increasingly kindly, fatherly and thoroughly comprehensible God. In the late nineteenth century, D.L. Moody determined to center his message around the truth that 'God is Love' and to tone down the mention of hell and the wrath of God to the point of inaudibility. But this was only one example of the sentimentalizing of God in every sector of the church, among evangelicals and the rising Liberal movement alike.

The whole church was drifting quietly toward Marcionism, avoiding the biblical portrait of the sovereign and holy God who is angry with the wicked every day and whose anger remains upon those who will not receive his Son. Walling off this image into an unvisited corner of its consciousness, the church substituted a new god who was the projection of grandmotherly kindness mixed with the gentleness and winsomeness of a Jesus who hardly needed to die for our sins. Many American congregations were in effect paying their ministers to protect them from the real God. The decay of spirituality resulting from this deception can already be traced in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It is partially responsible not only for the general spiritual collapse of the church in this century but also for a great deal of apologetic weakness; for in a world in which the sovereign and holy God regularly employs plagues, famines, wars, disease and death as instruments to punish sin and bring mankind to repentance, the idolatrous image of God as pure benevolence cannot really be believed, let alone feared and worshipped in the manner prescribed by both the Old and New Testaments.

...It is only in the light of the revelation through the cross of God's overwhelming love for his creation that we can understand his anger against the distortion or destruction of that creation. The cross, in fact, is the perfect statement both of God's wrath against sin and of the depth of his love and mercy in the recovery of the damaged creation and its damagers. God's mercy, patience and love must be fully preached in the church. But they are not credible unless they are presented in tension with God's infinite power, complete and sovereign control of the universe, holiness, and righteousness. And where God's righteousness is clearly presented, compassionate warnings of his holy anger against sin must be given and warnings also of the certainty of divine judgment in endless alienation from God which will be unimaginably worse than the literal descriptions of hell. It is no wonder that the world and the church are not awakened when our leadership is either singing a lullaby concerning these matters or presenting them in a caricature which is so grotesque that it is unbelievable.

(From Richard Lovelace; Dynamics of Spiritual Life, pp. 83-85.).