lesser God. Are they right?" I asked. Carson sighed. "My father was a preacher," he replied, "and a dictum in our home when I was growing up was, 'A text without a context becomes a pretext for a proof text.' It's very important to see this passage in its context. The disciples are moaning because Jesus has said he's going away. Jesus says, 'If you loved me, you'd be glad for my sake when I say I'm going away, because the Father is greater than V That is to say, Jesus is returning to the glory that is properly his, so if they really know who he is and really love him properly, they'll be glad that he's going back to the realm where he really is greater. Jesus says in John 17:5, 'Glorify me with the glory that I had with the Father before the world began'-that is, 'the Father is greater than V "When you use a category like 'greater,' it doesn't have to mean ontologically greater. If I say, for example, that the president of the United States is greater than I, I'm not saying he's an ontologically superior being. He's greater in military capability, political prowess, and public acclaim, but he's not more of a man than I am. He's a human being and I'm a human being. So when Jesus says, 'The Father is greater than I,' one must look at the context and ask if Jesus is saying, 'The Father is greater than I because he's God and I'm not.' Frankly, that would be a pretty ridiculous thing to say. Suppose I got up on some podium to preach and said, 'I solemnly declare to you that God is greater than I am.' That would be a rather useless observation. "The comparison is only meaningful if they're already on the same plane and there's some delimitation going on. Jesus is in the limitations of the Incamation-he's going to the cross; he's going to die-but he's about to return to the Father and to the glory he had with the Father before the world began. He's saying, 'You guys are moaning for my sake; you ought to be glad because I'm going home.' It's in that sense that 'the Father is greater than I"' "So," I said, "this isn't an implicit denial of his deity." "No," he concluded, "it's really not. The context makes that clear." While I was ready to accept the fact that Jesus was not a lesser God, I had a different and more sensitive issue to raise: how could Jesus be a compassionate God yet endorse the idea of eternal suffering for those who reject him?
The Bible says that the Father is loving. The New Testament affirms the same about Jesus. But can they really be loving while at the same time sending people to hell? After all, Jesus teaches more about hell than anyone in the entire Bible. Doesn't that contradict his supposed gentle and compassionate character? In posing this question to Carson, I quoted the hard-edged words of agnostic Charles Templeton: "How could a loving Heavenly Father create an endless hell and, over the centuries, consign millions of people to it because they do not or cannot or will not accept certain religious beliefs?" That question, though tweaked for maximum impact, didn't raise Carson's ire. He began with a clarification. "First of all," he said, "I'm not sure that God simply casts people into hell because they don't accept certain beliefs." He thought for a moment, then backed up to take a run at a more thorough answer by discussing a subject that many modern people consider a quaint anachronism: sin. "Picture God in the beginning of creation with a man and woman made in his image," Carson said. "They wake up in the morning and think about God. They love him truly. They delight to do what he wants; it's their whole pleasure. They're rightly related to him and they're rightly related to each other. Then, with the entrance of sin and rebellion into the world, these image bearers begin to think that they are at the center of the universe. Not literally, but that's the way they think. And that's the way we think. All the things we call 'social pathologies'-war, rape, bitterness, nurtured envies, secret jealousies, pride, inferiority complexes;-are bound up in the first instance with the fact that we're not rightly related with God. The consequence is that people get hurt. From God's perspective, that is shockingly disgusting. So what should God do about it? If he says, 'Well, I don't give a rip,' he's saying that evil doesn't matter to him. It's a bit like saying, "Oh yeah, the Holocaust-I don't care." Wouldn't we be shocked if we thought God didn't have moral judgments on such matters? But in principle, if he's the sort of God who has moral judgments on those matters, he's got to have moral judgments on this huge matter of all these divine image bearers shaking their puny fists at his face and singing with Frank Sinatra, 'I did it my way.' That's the real nature of sin. Having said that, hell is not a place where people are consigned because they were pretty good blokes but just didn't believe the right stuff. They're consigned there, first and foremost, because they defy their Maker and want to be at the center of the universe. Hell is not filled with people who have already repented, only God isn't gentle enough or good enough to let them out. It's filled with people who, for all eternity, still want to be at the center of the universe and who persist in their God- defying rebellion. What is God to do? If he says it doesn't matter to him, God is no longer a God to be admired. He's either amoral or positively creepy. For him to act in any other way in the face of such blatant defiance would be to reduce God himself." I interjected, "Yes, but what seems to bother people the most is the idea that God will torment people for eternity. That seems vicious, doesn't it?" Replied Carson, "In the first place, the Bible says that there are different degrees of punishment, so I'm not sure that it's the same level of intensity for all people. In the second place, if God took his hands off this fallen world so that there were no restraint on human wickedness, we would make hell. Thus if you allow a whole lot of sinners to live somewhere in a confined place where they're not doing damage to anyone but themselves, what do you get but hell? There's a sense in which they're doing it to themselves, and it's what they want because they still don't repent." I thought Carson was finished with his answer, because he hesitated for a moment. However, he had one more crucial point. "One of the things that the Bible does insist is that in the end not only will justice be done, but justice will be seen to be done, so that every mouth will be stopped." I grabbed ahold of that last statement. "In other words," I said, 4'at the time of judgment there is nobody in the world who will walk away from that experience saying that they have been treated unfairly by God. Everyone will recognize the fundamental justice in the way God judges them and the world." "That's right," Carson said firmly. "Justice is not always done in this world; we see that every day. But on the Last Day it will be done for all to see. And no one will be able to complain by saying, 'This isn't fair."'
There was one other issue I wanted to raise with Carson. I glanced at my watch. "Do you have a few more minutes?" I asked. When he indicated he did, I began to address one more controversial topic. To be God, Jesus must be ethically perfect. But some critics of Christianity have charged that he fell short because, they say, he tacitly approved of the morally abhorrent practice of slavery. As Morton Smith wrote, There were innumerable slaves of the emperor and of the Roman state; the Jerusalem Temple owned slaves; the High Priest owned slaves (one of them lost an ear in Jesus' arrest); all of the rich and almost all of the middle class owned slaves. So far as we are told, Jesus never attacked this practice.... There seem to have been slave revolts in Palestine and Jordan in Jesus' youth; a miracle-working leader of such a revolt would have attracted a large following. If Jesus had denounced slavery or promised liberation, we should almost certainly have heard of his doing it. We hear nothing, so the most likely supposition is that he said nothing. How can Jesus' failure to push for the abolition of slavery be squared with God's love for all people? "Why didn't Jesus stand up and shout, 'Slavery is wrong'?" I asked. "Was he morally deficient for not working to dismantle an institution that demeaned people who were made in the image of God?" Carson straightened up in his chair. "I really think that people who raise that objection are missing the point," he said. "If you'll permit me, I'll set the stage by talking about slavery, ancient and modern, because in our culture the issue is understandably charged with overtones that it didn't have in the ancient world." I gestured for him to continue. "Please go ahead," I said.
"In his book Race and Culture,' African-Anerican scholar Thomas Sowell points out that every major world culture until the modern period, without exception, has had slavery," Carson explained. "While it could be tied to military conquest, usually slavery served an economic function. They didn't have bankruptcy laws, so if you got yourself into terrible hock, you sold yourself and/or your family into slavery. As it was discharging a debt, slavery was also providing work. It wasn't necessarily all bad; at least it was an option for survival.
Please understand me: I'm not trying to romanticize slavery in any way. However, in Roman times there were menial laborers who were slaves, and there were also others who were the equivalent of distinguished Ph.D.'s, who were teaching families. And there was no association of a particular race with slavery. In American slavery, though, all blacks and only blacks were slaves. That was one of the peculiar horrors of it, and it generated an unfair sense of black inferiority that many of us continue to fight to this day. Now let's look at the Bible. In Jewish society, under the Law everyone was to be freed every Jubilee. In other words, there was a slavery ban every seventh year. Whether or not things actually worked out that way, this was nevertheless what God said, and this was the framework in which Jesus was brought up. But you have to keep your eye on Jesus' mission. Essentially, he did not come to overturn the Roman economic system, which included slavery. He came to free men and women from their sins. And here's my point: what his message does is transform people so they begin to love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love their neighbor as themselves. Naturally, that has an impact on the idea of slavery. Look at what the apostle Paul says in his letter to Philemon concerning a runaway slave named Onesimus. Paul doesn't say to overthrow slavery, because all that would do would be to get him executed. Instead he tells Philemon he'd better treat Onesimus as a brother in Christ, just as he would treat Paul himself. And then, to make matters perfectly clear, Paul emphasizes, 'Remeniber, you owe your whole life to me because of the gospel.'
The overthrowing of slavery, then, is through the transformation of men and women by the gospel rather than through merely changing an economic system. We've all seen what can happen when you merely overthrow an economic system and impose a new order. The whole communist dream was to have a 'revolutionary man'