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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > April 2004

A God of Love and Justice

Jesus has more in common with the God of the Old Testament than popular belief has it.

By Mary Joan Winn Leith

Permit me, please, to indulge in a rant. The assertion that the God of the Old Testament is a God of Justice and the God of the New Testament is a God of Love is an insidious cliché that must be abandoned immediately. The insidiousness of this phrase relates to its seemingly neutral, descriptive tone. On the surface, it seems somewhat plausible to many people. After all, most people are aware of such (in)famous Old Testament stories as God’s total destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18–19 or passages like Deuteronomy 20:16–17, where God commands the annihilation of […]

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Endnotes

1.

A new book by Stephen Prothero, American Jesus (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), points out that this almost effeminate conception of Jesus is a 19th-century creation.

2.

See Common Prayers: Faith, Family, and a Christian’s Journey Through the Jewish Year (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), pp. 139–146, by Protestant theologian Harvey Cox, for some thoughtful comments on this subject. Another relevant book is John G. Gager’s Reinventing Paul (New York: Oxford, 2000), which argues that Paul’s supposed supersessionism has been interpreted out of context and that Paul’s message was meant for Gentile Christians. Paul, who never gave up being Jewish himself, expected Jewish Christians to continue to be Jews as part of their faith in Jesus.

3.

James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), is a good source on the history of Christian anti-Judaism.

4.

See Cox, Common Prayers, p. 26.

5.

Just do a Google search under “God of Love” “God of Justice” for a taste of the amazing range of responses to this tension!

6.

Find the comment at: http://www.intervarsity.org/ism/article_item.php?article_id=914.