Is God’s Love ‘Reckless’?

If you’re not familiar with the worship song, Reckless Love, by Cory Asbury, the chances are that your immediate reaction to this blog title will be, “Of course not—how ridiculous, if not heretical.” That may also be your reaction if you are familiar with it—you may even have thought that as you’ve sung it. And especially if you know that it comes out of Bethel. It’s pretty standard to be on ‘heresy alert’ for anything coming out of Bethel (and not without good reason). So what’s the situation here?

If I had a pound (I’d settle for a dollar) for every dodgy worship lyric I’d been invited to sing in church, I would be doing very nicely. Most of those are in the ‘wince’ or ‘grimace’ category. It’s not often that one comes along which is truly in the egregious category, such as the line, ‘On that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied’ (In Christ Alone, by Stuart Townend and Keith Getty). I could write a whole blog about that. Suffice to say that nowhere in Scripture is such a statement ever made or even inferred. ‘Satisfaction’ (whether in verb form or noun form) is never used in any biblical context remotely corresponding to the cross or Jesus’ death. It is an unashamedly Calvinist extra-biblical idea.

It makes me somewhere between sad and angry that this lyric should be propagated in a modern hymn that is so well-known and otherwise popular. That’s part of the problem—my observation is that most ordinary Christians get their core theological ideas from worship song lyrics; hence why this line is all the more abhorrent. Calvinism is (along with fundamentalism) one of the below-the-waterline influences on conservative evangelicalism; sadly, many evangelical leaders seem blissfully unaware of that, while unwittingly defaulting towards it in their theology (seasoned with a large dollop of fundamentalism).

The word ‘satisfaction’ in relation to the atonement (‘how Jesus saves us’) derives directly from a (non-scriptural) way of picturing it that was developed by Anslem of Canterbury in the 11th century. It’s wholly rooted in the cultural context of mediaeval feudalism (lords and serfs, fair maidens, brave knights, and offended (divine) honour that required ‘satisfaction’—throwing down a gauntlet and all that). Whilst it would no doubt have made sense as a picture in its day (‘What Jesus did for us is a bit like this …’), (a) it makes no sense whatsoever in any other cultural context, (b) it was never remotely based in Scripture—there are no verses we can point to—and (c) even then, it had nothing to do with satisfying something called ‘God’s wrath’.

Anyway, mini-rant over; back to the question. Here’s a snippet of the lyrics:

Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God

Oh, it chases me down, fights 'til I'm found, leaves the ninety-nine

I couldn't earn it, I don't deserve it, still, you give yourself away,

Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God

Let’s start by saying that we should cut worship song writers some slack; they’re empowered to come up with new and creative metaphors beyond those that worked for people in Scripture’s Ancient World context. That said, their new metaphors (and song lyrics generally) need to be consonant with Scripture read well (meaning, not just ‘copying and pasting’ biblical words, phrases, and verses and applying them in ways that fail to reflect their contextual meaning). Simply borrowing words and phrases found in the Bible doesn’t make them theologically ‘biblical’, any more than that’s true when deployed in sermons.

Back to Cory’s song—he’s taken some flak for that notion of God’s love being ‘reckless’. Did he go too far? Funnily enough, despite the Bethel connection inclining me to assume so instinctively, I don’t believe he has.

I’m thinking that what he had in mind was a couple of very biblical reference points. Even if he didn’t have them in mind, I’m about to offer him the opportunity for some retrospective ratification that could prove useful in defending against the heresy police.

One such biblical reference is the ‘recklessness’ of the shepherd in the Parable of the Lost Sheep, who left ninety-nine alone on the hillside to go searching for one lost one. That was ‘reckless’—though we need always to remember that ‘it’s a parable, stupid’ rather than offering divinely-inspired wisdom on husbandry.

And the other biblical reference is the father of the prodigal—also found in a parable setting—who was ‘recklessly’ unconcerned about what people thought of him, such was the priority he gave to his love for his son. He was especially unconcerned about the reaction of the religious people, who thought the father’s love was going way too far . . . way too ‘reckless’ . . . too much love and grace and mercy and forgiveness . . . too ‘soft on sin’, as they saw it.

The thing is, God’s love and grace and mercy and forgiveness will always seem almost too good to be true, if we’ve really understood them.

Personally? I’d have put the word ‘reckless’ in scare quotes. But then I tell myself, “It’s a song, Steve, not a theology paper.”

One final thought from the song: the reckless love ‘chases me down, fights 'til I'm found’. The context for those words is self-evidently the Parable of the Lost Sheep, where the shepherd does, indeed, do that (the clue is in the phrase that immediately follows: he ‘leaves the ninety-nine’). But that isn’t the case, of course, when it comes to the father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son—he doesn’t go ‘chasing’ him, or ‘fight’ to bring him home. And yet, once the son has ‘come to his senses’ (Luke 17:17), and turned around (the literal meaning of the biblical word for repentance), the father sees him while he’s ‘still a long way off’—suggesting that he's been constantly on the lookout, ready to receive him in unexpected ways (unexpected both from the son’s perspective and from those listening’s perspective) if and when he chooses to return.

The ‘recklessness’ of the father’s response to this son who has disgraced the family and community is blatant: ‘His father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms round him and kissed him’. All this happens before the son has said a word. And even when the son starts his prepared speech, the father—who the whole village will have been mocking for his humiliating weakness towards the rebellious son, letting him walk all over him—doesn’t allow him to get to the bit where he was planning to say, ‘Make me like one of your hired men’. Instead, the father insists on receiving him as a son, with full sonship immediately restored. Which, of course, gets right under the skin of the older brother figure, who represents the religious onlookers, for whom the father is blatantly and shamefully ‘soft on sin’.

So why the contrast? Why in one parable does the shepherd proactively ‘chase down’ and ‘fight ‘til I’m found’, while in the other parable the father watches and waits until the son ‘comes to his senses’ and turns around to return? We should never press any parable too far, expecting it to do more than any one picture or metaphor is capable of (a parable is only ever conveying a truth to a point), but I think we’re seeing a combination of two things. In both parables, the nature and character of God the Father is centre-stage (the shepherd and the father, respectively), but he’s responding to different scenarios, different causes of lostness. The sheep is harassed and helpless (cf. Matt 9:36), so the shepherd will be proactive. Victims need us to go above and beyond. But the son is exercising his freewill—his freedom of choice. The father’s love will not override that (and yet, the father’s love immediately responds to the very first inkling of a move back towards him). So both responses to lostness are true of God the Father at different times and in different situations—he will respond to our lostness in ways that reflect our helplessness and in ways that respect our freewill, as the case may be. His ‘overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love’ is always the same, but it’s outworked differently.