Punishing with Kindness

Some people are impressed by this consideration: the leading men of the sect we have been discussing think they have established a kind of division, by which they declare that justice is one thing and goodness another, and they carry that division over even into divine things. They maintain that the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is indeed a good God, but not a just one, while the God of the law and the prophets is just, but not good. Since this carries weight with some, I think I must answer it, as briefly as I can. [a]

These people take goodness to be a disposition that would confer benefits on everyone, even when the one who receives them is unworthy and deserves no kindness at all. In my judgment they have not applied their own definition rightly, since they suppose that no benefit is conferred on a man who is visited with any suffering or disaster. Justice, on the other hand, they view as the quality that repays each person what he deserves. But here again they do not interpret their own definition rightly. For they think it is justice to send evils upon the wicked and benefits upon the good — so that, on their view, the just God does not wish well to bad men, but is moved by a kind of hatred against them.

They collect instances of this wherever they find a story in the Scriptures of the Old Testament: the punishment of the flood, for example, and the fate of those described as perishing in it; or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by a rain of fire and sulfur; or the falling of the whole people in the wilderness because of their sins, so that not one of those who had left Egypt was found to have entered the promised land except Joshua and Caleb. From the New Testament, on the other hand, they collect words of compassion and devotion, by which the disciples are trained by the Savior, and which seem to them to declare that no one is good except God the Father alone. On this basis they have dared to call the Father of the Savior Jesus Christ a good God, and to say that the God of the world is a different one, whom they are pleased to call just, but not also good.

Now I think the first thing they must be required to do, if they can, is to show — on their own definition — that the Creator is just in punishing according to their deserts either those who perished at the time of the flood, or the people of Sodom, or those who had left Egypt. For we sometimes see crimes committed that are more wicked and more disgusting than the ones for which those people were destroyed, and yet we do not see every sinner paying the penalty for what he has done. [f]

Will they say that the one who was once just has since been made good? Or will they rather hold that he is just even now, but is patiently putting up with human offenses, and that back then he was not even just, since he wiped out innocent nursing infants along with cruel and godless giants? These are the sorts of opinions they hold, because they do not know how to understand anything beyond the letter. Otherwise they would have to show us how it is literal justice for sins to be visited on the heads of children to the third and fourth generation, and on their children’s children after them. We, however, do not understand such things literally. As Ezekiel taught when he told the parable, we ask what inner meaning the parable itself contains.

They ought also to explain this: how is he just, repaying each man according to what he deserves, when he punishes earthly-minded people and the devil, seeing that these have done nothing that deserves punishment? For on their account such beings could not do any good at all, since their nature is wicked and ruined. As they call him a judge, he turns out to be a judge not so much of actions as of natures; and if a bad nature cannot do good, then neither can a good nature do evil.

Next: if the one they call good is good to everyone, then he is certainly good to those who are going to perish as well. Why, then, does he not save them? If he does not want to, he is no longer good; if he wants to and cannot bring it about, he is not almighty. And why do they not rather listen to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Gospels, preparing fire for the devil and his angels? How is a proceeding as punishing and as grim as that going to look, on their view, like the work of the good God?

The Savior himself — the Son of the good God — protests in the Gospels and declares: “If the signs and wonders had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.” And when he had come near those very cities, and had entered their territory, why, I ask, does he avoid going into them and showing them a mass of signs and wonders, if it was certain that they would have repented in sackcloth and ashes once the signs were done? But since he does not do it, he plainly abandons to destruction people whom the language of the Gospel shows to have had no wicked or ruined nature, since it says they were capable of repentance.

Again, there is a parable in the Gospel where the king comes in to look at the guests reclining at the banquet, and sees a man not dressed in wedding clothes, and says to him: “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?” Then he orders his servants: “Bind him hand and foot and throw him into the darkness outside; there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.”

Let them tell us who this king is, who came in to look at the guests and, finding one of them in dirty clothes, ordered his servants to tie him up and push him out into the darkness outside. Is he the one they call just? Then how had he ordered good and bad alike to be invited, without telling his servants to inquire into what each one deserved? Such a procedure indicates not the character of a just God who repays men according to their deserts, as they claim, but of one who shows an undiscriminating goodness toward everyone. And if this has to be understood of the good God — that is, either of Christ or of the Father of Christ — what further objection can they raise against the justice of God’s judgment? Indeed, what have they charged against the God of the law that is as unjust as this: ordering a man who had been invited by his own servants, whom he had sent out to call good and bad alike, to be bound hand and foot and thrown into the darkness outside, because his clothes were dirty?

What we have drawn from the authority of Scripture ought to be enough by itself to refute the arguments of the heretics. Still, it will not be out of place to discuss the matter with them briefly on the ground of reason itself. [m]

We ask them, then, whether they know what is regarded among men as the basis of virtue and of wickedness, and whether it follows that we can speak of virtues in God — or, as they think, in these two Gods. Let them answer this question as well: do they consider goodness a virtue? They will certainly grant that it is. What, then, will they say about justice? They will never, I think, be foolish enough to deny that justice is a virtue. So if virtue is a good thing, and justice is a virtue, then beyond doubt justice is goodness.

But if they say justice is not a good thing, then it must be either an evil or a thing of indifference. I think it is silly to make any answer to people who say that justice is an evil; I would look as if I were replying either to senseless words or to men out of their minds. How can a thing look evil which is able to repay good men with good things — as they themselves also admit? But if they say it is a thing of indifference, then it follows that, since justice is such, self-control too, and practical wisdom, and all the other virtues are things of indifference. And what answer are we to make to Paul, when he says, “If there is any virtue, and if there is any praise, think on these things, which you have learned and received and heard and seen in me”?

Let them learn, then, by searching the holy Scriptures, what the individual virtues are, and let them not deceive themselves by saying that the God who repays everyone according to what he deserves does so out of hatred of evil, paying the wicked back with evil — and not rather because those who have sinned need to be treated with harsher remedies, and because he applies to them measures which, though they look toward improvement, do for the present produce a feeling of pain.

They do not read what is written about the hope of those who were destroyed in the flood — the hope Peter himself speaks of in his first letter: “Christ indeed was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit, by which he went and preached to the spirits who were kept in prison, who once were unbelievers, when they waited for the patience of God in the days of Noah, while the ark was being built, in which a few — that is, eight souls — were saved through water. And baptism, which is like it, now saves you too.”

And about Sodom and Gomorrah, let them tell us whether they believe the words of the prophet to be the words of the Creator God — the God who is said to have rained a shower of fire and sulfur upon them. What does the prophet Ezekiel say of them? “Sodom,” he says, “will be restored to what she was before.” Why, then, when he afflicts those who deserve punishment, does he not afflict them for their good? He is the one who says to Chaldea as well, “You have coals of fire; sit on them; they will be a help to you.” And about those who fell in the desert, let them hear what is said in the seventy-eighth Psalm, which carries the name of Asaph in its title; for it says, “When he killed them, then they sought him.” He does not say that some sought him after others had been killed. He says that the destruction of those who were killed was of such a kind that, once they were put to death, they sought God.

All of this establishes that the God of the law and the God of the Gospels are one and the same, a God both just and good, who confers benefits justly and punishes with kindness. For neither goodness without justice nor justice without goodness can display the real dignity of the divine nature.

I will add the following remarks, which their subtleties force on me. If justice is a different thing from goodness, then — since evil is the opposite of good, and injustice the opposite of justice — injustice will doubtless be something other than an evil. And just as, on your view, the just man is not good, so neither will the unjust man be wicked; and again, as the good man is not just, so the wicked man will not be unjust. But who does not see how absurd it is that a good God should have an evil one set against him, while the just God, whom they say is the lesser of the two, should have no one set against him at all? For there is no one who can be called unjust, in the way that there is a Satan who is called wicked.

What are we to do, then? Let us give up the position we are defending — for they will not be able to maintain that a bad man is not also unjust, or that an unjust man is not wicked. And if these qualities cannot be pried apart from each other — injustice from wickedness, or wickedness from injustice — then the good man is unquestionably inseparable from the just man, and the just man from the good; so that, just as we speak of one and the same wickedness in malice and in injustice, we may also hold that the virtue of goodness and the virtue of justice are one and the same.

They call us back, however, to the words of Scripture by bringing forward that famous question of theirs, insisting that it is written: “A bad tree cannot produce good fruit, for a tree is known by its fruit.” What is their position, then? What sort of tree the law is, is shown by its fruit — that is, by the language of its commands. If the law is found to be good, then beyond doubt the one who gave it is believed to be a good God. But if it is just rather than good, then God will be reckoned a just lawgiver. [t]

The apostle Paul uses no roundabout speech when he says, “The law is good; and the commandment is holy, and just, and good.” From this it is clear that Paul had not learned the language of those who separate justice from goodness. He had been taught by the God who is at once holy and good and just, and enlightened by his Spirit; and speaking by that Spirit he declared that the commandment of the law was holy and just and good.

And to show more clearly that goodness was in the commandment to a greater degree than justice and holiness, he repeats himself, and in place of those three words uses that of goodness alone: “Did that which is good, then, become death to me? Certainly not.” He knew that goodness was the genus of the virtues, and that justice and holiness were species belonging to that genus; and having named genus and species together in the earlier verses, he fell back, when he repeated himself, on the genus alone. But in the words that follow he says, “Sin worked death in me by means of what is good” — where he sums up in general terms what he had set out before in particular.

The same is how we should understand the saying: “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings out good things, and an evil man out of the evil treasure brings out evil things.” Here too he assumed a genus in good or evil, pointing out beyond question that in a good man there were justice, and self-control, and practical wisdom, and devotion, and everything that can be called or understood to be good. And in the same way he called a man wicked who would beyond any doubt be unjust, and impure, and unholy, and everything that, taken one at a time, makes a bad man. For just as no one considers a man wicked without these marks of wickedness — nor indeed can he be — so it is certain that without these virtues no one will be counted good.

There still remains to them, however, that saying of the Lord in the Gospel which they think is handed to them as a shield of their own: “There is none good but one, God the Father.” This word, they declare, belongs to the Father of Christ alone, who on their account is a different being from the God who is Creator of all things — a Creator to whom he gave no title of goodness. Let us see, then, whether in the Old Testament the God of the prophets, the Creator and lawgiver of the world, is not called good. What are the words that occur in the Psalms? “How good is God to Israel, to the upright in heart!” and “Let Israel now say that he is good, that his mercy lasts forever.” And the words in the Lamentations of Jeremiah: “The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.”

So then: just as God is frequently called good in the Old Testament, so also the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is called just in the Gospels. Finally, in the Gospel according to John, our Lord himself, praying to the Father, says: “Just Father, the world has not known you.” And in case they should say that he called the Creator of the world “Father,” and called him “just,” only because he had taken on human flesh, they are shut out of that refuge by the words that come immediately after: “The world has not known you.” For on their account it is the good God alone whom the world does not know. The world unquestionably recognizes its own Creator — the Lord himself says that the world loves what is its own. Clearly, then, the one they take to be the good God is called just in the Gospels.

Anyone can gather at leisure a greater number of proofs: passages in the New Testament where the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is called just, and passages in the Old where the Creator of heaven and earth is called good — so that the heretics, convicted by so much testimony, may perhaps some day be ashamed of themselves.