God is widely assumed by everyone to be a perfect being. He is supposed to be the greatest conceivable being, with maximal properties (like maximal knowledge, maximal goodness, etc.).
Reading the works of New Age revisionisms of Jesus, I've found a curious emphasis on God's infinite love over other divine attributes (including over infinite justice), and this is used as an argument for the claim that God's punishment doesn't exist.
You have to keep in mind the full context in which New Age revisionism works: They are appealing mostly to people who have been religiously injured during childhood, specially people who have suffered intense feelings of guilty and fear related to traditional Christian concepts like the hell, the final judgment and so forth. I've observed very carefully this again and again in many cases in USA, and I infer the same phenomenon applies to other countries.
This emotional injury and wound tend to predispose the injured believer to be strongly sympathetic to alternative sources of information about Jesus (radical liberal views, new age views, mystical sources about Jesus, etc.) which tell precisely what the believer wants and needs to hear, namely, that doctrines like the hell, sin, final judgment are false, that they are pure inventions of the Church in order to gain control of believers, that they are not doctrines rooted in the Historical Jesus himself.
Critique of the New Age view about God's punishment
Regardless of whether God punishes or not (I don't know), what it is true is that God's infinite love doesn't exclude God's punishment, since the latter is a function of JUSTICE, not of love.
When a criminal commits a crime, he is punished by society. This has nothing to do with "love", it is a pure function of justice. It would be extraordinarily unjust that the crimes of people like Hitler or Bin Laden were ignored by society... or by God.
If God is a perfect being, we would expect not just infinite love, but infinite justice too. A perfect being cannot be morally indifferent. Morality implies condemming evil acts and actions, and praising good deeds, people and actions.
The New Age revisionisms tend to create an unbalance between God's love and justice, in which only love counts. But why exactly God's love destroys God's justice? In a moral world of free agents, in which objective moral values exist, some kind of moral accountability for our actions would seem to be appropiate. Otherwise, morality would be just an illusion without any spiritual effects, and moral indifference would be a kind of divine virtue, which is absurd.
No rational and sane person would be morally indifferent to rapists of babies, child pornography or serial killers. Morally, they're bad persons and we want some kind of (moral) reprobation and legal measures against them. We want them to be in jail and to be morally castigated by society. We agree that some of their civil rights (e.g. freedom) be removed from them.
Likewise, no rational person would be morally indifferent to good people who do good actions. We admire and support such people, they are "good". We want the best for them, and even support their cause.
The point is that, besides cases of mentally ill or criminal people, most people are sensible to what is good and evil. Wer're NOT morally indifferent. And such moral awareness is translated into specific actions regarding the moral or immoral deed or person in question.
Now, if God exists and is a perfect being, why exactly such God should be morally indifferent? Why Hitler's evil deeds would be indifferent for God? Why is God's moral indifference an attribute of a perfect being like God? Why does God's infinite love imply moral indifference?
In some works of New Age revisionisms about Jesus, you can see a Jesus who portrays a God who is pure, infinite love, but God's infinite JUSTICE doesn't appear anywhere and is almost never addressed or mentioned. Apparently, love overrides justice (as whether they were incompatible divine attributes).
But a God who is not just, who is indifferent to cosmic justice regarding evils, is not a perfect being. He's morally indifferent.
The obsession of some New age believers with God's love, which bypasses his infinite justice, actually destroys the moral perfection of God.
The scholarly evidence for Jesus in the earliest sources contradict New Age revisionisms about Jesus and God's moral indifference
Believers in New age revisionisms about Jesus (who in general are people strongly prejudiced against Christianity and hence eager to believe that Christianity is false) either wholly ignore the scholarly evidence about the historical Jesus, or selectively choose only the passages which apparently support their view of Jesus and God.
They mention, for example, the evidence in Q (the earliest document about Jesus's sayings). But as I commented in this post, Q itself portraits a Jesus who is strongly judgmental, morally severe and discriminatory (in the sense of punishing moral evils and discriminating and excluding evildoers) and who perceives himself as someone with exclusive the authority of making moral reprobations of others and conditioning their ultimate spiritual fate to their personal response to himself.
This Q saying (Mattew 7:21-23 and Luke 13:24-27) is telling:
In Mattew 7:21-23:
In Mattew 7:21-23:
Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!
Luke 13:24-27:
Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to. 25 Once the owner of the house gets up and closes the door, you will stand outside knocking and pleading, ‘Sir, open the door for us.’ “But he will answer, ‘I don’t know you or where you come from.’ 26 “Then you will say, ‘We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.’ 27 “But he will reply, ‘I don’t know you or where you come from. Away from me, all you evildoers!
The whole point of this Q saying is the strong moral reprobation, spiritual discrimination and severe judgment of certain kind of people. The whole point is that certain people will be saved and others (the "evildoers", note the reference to "evil" and hence to the moral aspect of the saying) won't. For the latter, the door is closed.
Note that "closing the doors" of salvation in God's kingdom is a punishment infinitely more important and severe than any imaginable earthly punishment (e.g. jail), because in the case of Jesus it is our whole spiritual fate which is at issue. If Jesus is right and we choose the wrong ways (=wider doors, instead of the narrow one), we won't enter God's kingdom, which is equivalent to the ultimate spiritual destruction.
Any earthly punishment, even the severest ones, pale in comparison with the spiritual punishment implied in Jesus' warnings. Clearly, Jesus' God is NOT morally indifferent: the evildoers won't enter God's kingdom.
This kind of Q saying causes strong cognitive dissonance to people who believe that Q provides a Jesus similar to the New Age versions. It doesn't.
Assuming for the argument's sake that the Jesus' teaching in Q is true, the New Age sources about Jesus provide a very dangerous, deceptive and misleading portrait of Jesus, which will tend to confuse a bunch of people of good will, pushing them into spiritual destruction.
You can find unpalatable this kind of Jesus' sayings (which, being in the early source Q, it is likely to be authentic according to modern standards of authenticity). What you cannot do is to misrepresent the evidence, and to claim that the Jesus in Q is similar to the "soft", "God doesn't punish", "Punishment is an human invention and God is beyond that", "be happy, buddy", "everything is an illusion", "consciousness is everything" New Age versions of Jesus. This is false and dangerously misleading.
Certainly, the best scholarly evidence and most reliable, early sources about the Historical Jesus clearly show that Jesus wasn't morally indifferent regarding to the fate of evildoers. And it doesn't refute God's infinite love... only testifies about God's infinite justice.
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