Is the Old Testament God a God of wrath and the New Testament God a God of Love?

October 21, 2009

Is the Old Testament God a God of wrath and the New Testament God a God of Love?
This is the question we have been looking at tonight at a superb presentation by two leaders in our church. In the next few days I will attempt to summarise what has been said and add a few thoughts of my own. Meanwhile what do you think?

Comments

Anonymous said…

Rationalisation is a fundamental part of religious belief. The religious often rationalise their beliefs and the necessary possessions of their religion (i.e. religious texts, theology etc.) with their particular place in the social and cultural present. However there is also a need to maintain some sense of social difference. I suppose a pertinent example in Evangelical Christianity is the debate around sexuality, particularly homosexuality. In the secular world – particularly the world of the more educated and in the main liberal middle-class – homosexuality is seen as a just different life style and of little consequence either to the well-being of society or some moral deficiency of an individual.

Evangelical Christianity does not hold this view, it states that God created man and woman for a purpose and that the only acceptable (and this is the important bit) and fruitful emotional and sexual human relationship is between a man and a woman. Much of this thinking is based upon Scripture: the template human relationships laid out in Genesis and the prohibitions set out in Levitical law; though there is also, among the more articulate Evangelicals, an appeal to ‘natural morality’ (though this tends to be mainly Thomist in its arguments).

Liberal Christians, however, hold that God’s revelation to humanity is ongoing and that prejudice against homosexuality is rooted in cultural taboos which have influenced the writing of Scripture and therefore committed relationships between people of the same sex are a perfectly acceptable and moral mode of human relationship and should be accepted in Christian life.

What is interesting here is that the vast majority of Evangelical Christians also hold the same view of the ongoing revelation of God to humanity. Few Evangelicals would require women to be silent and cover their heads in church; few Evangelical women would wholly submit to their husband just because he was their husband. And even fewer Evangelical Christians would abide by the dietary regulations set out in Acts. Yet the Bible is very clear on one topic, that anyone who divorces and remarries, except in the case of adultery, commits adultery when they re-marry. But we find more and more churches are happy to allow divorcees in the congregation to remarry, despite Jesus own words of this subject.

Well, this is rationalisation at work: the role of women has changed considerably in the past forty years; the divorce rate has also risen. And we see the role of women likewise change in even the most conservative of churches, as we see the number of remarriages also increasing. Yet the same liberalisation is not extended to homosexuals in Evangelical churches. The answer to this is simple – the majority of the congregation are heterosexual and therefore it would impact upon the majority of the congregation if a conservative attitude was retain concerning women’s roles and divorce in most churches. Whereas maintaining a conservative stance on homosexuality affects only a tiny percentage of any congregation and there is considerable symbolic capital to be gained by adopting a conservative stance; it is a way of being morally upright without the inconvenience of the burden of that morality falling on the majority of the congregation’s shoulders.

What has this to do with the Old Testament God and the New Testament God? Simply a prediction I am willing to make that if, Neil, you regurgitate the ‘presentation’ of your leaders, it will contain a good deal of rationalisation. There will be a smattering of the ‘ongoing God’s revelation to humanity’, coupled with an allowance for (in certain instances) the cultural circumstances and prophetic actions of the genocidal and blood-thirsty God of the O.T.; whereas as the New Testament God will be everything that Plato suggested he should be. The inconsistencies will be rationalised because to dwell on them too much would strike at the root of many people’s faith and faith has its advantages!

October 24, 2009 at 2:42 AM