I've been reading David Bentley Hart's translation of the New Testament as a way of getting me back to reading the Bible. Aside from the fact that Hart may be a universalist, as mentioned in his discussion of Orthodox diversity vs. Evangelical "Hell Club" members and an essay "God, Creation, and Evil," I find that reading the Bible on my own presents me with a very unpleasant God, a God who the Bible says loves us and sends us His son to be crucified on our behalf. Hart reminds us that if we truly comprehend God as He really is we will love Him fully. Hart's passage reminds me of my favorite passages from Rufus Jones' book Fundamental Ends of Life.
Forgetting my intellect for a moment, I want to say that from my gut and intuition and on a very raw level, I find this God unpleasant and reading Paul's rhapsodies about this amazing God to be off-putting. I want to find inspiration from the New Testament because I want to be Christ-like, and I want to be humble, I want a pure heart (as much as my evil, selfish, sinful side doesn't encroach on that project) and I'm feeling a lot of hate from this God.
I am no original thinker on this subject. Other writers refer to this "Hell Club" god who hates us so much he can't tolerate and "love" us unless he gives himself a bloody sacrifice of the grandest order, of no less than his only begotten son. There a many implications of such a god regarding his wrath and intolerance of human frailty, weakness, defect, and sin. There are also questions of proportion, of this god's need to eternally damn the human race for its seemingly finite sins. I feel this problem on a gut level when I read scripture.
Other writers address this, namely Sharon L. Baker in Razing Hell and Brad Jersak in A More Christ-Like God and Her Gates Will Never be Shut.
This problem is also addressed in Jerry Walls' Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory and Dale Allison's Night Comes. I should add that I've been thinking of also re-reading Bart Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted.
I hope I don't read these books in the service of being a selfish sinner or unbeliever. I want to remove the unpleasantness of what appears to be or what feels like to me a malevolent, toxic god, the one who creates what William James calls "The Sick Soul."
My problem with being a universalist or of back pedaling or softening harsh doctrines (as Elizabeth Anderson writes about in her essay "If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?") is that once I remove one doctrine, a slippery slope begins as I go down the road to apostasy. That is the strength of orthodoxy and one of the reasons liberal churches are dying on the vine.
Don't get me started on the evangelical church's widespread support for evil politicians.
Back to my "Sick Soul": I find that there is an amazing absence of sickness in Marcus Borg's Reading the Bible Again for the First Time.