A God of Love and Justice

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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 the Canaanites. And even the most casual Christians can usually call to mind the New Testament’s gentle Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5) and his commands to “turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39) and “love your enemy” (Matthew 5:44). The beautiful, youthful Jesus of the limpid eyes, soft brown hair and white robe so familiar to Western European and American Christians¹ provides an obvious contrast with the stern, white-bearded, old man conventionally associated with God in the Old Testament.

But beneath the surface of these seemingly superficial differences lies a Christian gloat at the expense of Judaism: My loving Christian God is nicer, more civilized, and superior to your rigid and vengeful God. (In the interests of fair disclosure, I should note that my religious background is Protestant Christian.) On a more theologically sophisticated level, the distinction is a classic expression of supersessionism, the assertion that the coming of Christ rendered Judaism null and void.² This troubling doctrine, never a part of Jesus’ ministry, emerged later as a consequence of Christian-Jewish relations.³ All major Christian denominations today reject the doctrine and have worked to excise it from the liturgy, especially Easter liturgies, which traditionally contained the most visceral expressions of anti-Judaism.

Confronted with this supersessionist statement, of course, thoughtful readers can retort that the Hebrew Bible abounds in examples of divine compassion. Centuries before the author of John 10:11 wrote of the “good shepherd,” the divine shepherd in Psalm 23 was restoring, comforting and promising goodness and kindness. God’s mercy is embodied by the prophet Hosea’s loving forgiveness of his wife, and in the same book God’s compassion trumps divine anger (Hosea 11:8–9). In Jonah 4:11 God’s vast mercy encompasses not just the human but also the animal inhabitants within the walls of repentant Nineveh. Even in the overwhelmingly legalistic discourse of Deuteronomy, God’s choice of Israel and God’s gift of Torah at Mt. Sinai can in the end only be explained by the irrational force of divine love (Deuteronomy 7:7–8).

On the other hand, many Christians are taken aback by the judgmental Jesus of Matthew 10:34–35, who tells his followers, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother.” Or consider Jesus’ proclamation against the obstinate towns of Chorazin and Capernaum, the latter condemned to be “brought down to Hades” (Luke 10:13, 15). “Woe to you,” intones Jesus, in a litany of condemnation that takes up almost all of Matthew 23. The Book of Revelation, however, contains the New 044Testament’s most sustained depiction of Christ in judgment, beginning with the white-haired “one like the Son of Man” of Revelation 1:13–14, from whose mouth emerges a sword (Revelation 1:16). In Revelation 19 a blood-drenched Christ charges forth on a white horse to mow down nations with his sword and tread the bloody “wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty” (Revelation 19:15), where carrion birds are invited to a feast of flesh (Revelation 19:17–18).

Christ as judge struck a particularly resonant chord in the piety of the Middle Ages and, carved in stone, the subject dominated numerous cathedral doorways. In their paintings of the Last Judgment, medieval and Renaissance artists often devoted so much creative energy to spectacular visualizations of the damned that, as in the example by Jan van Eyck, Heaven is upstaged by Hell. The presence of Jesus’ mother Mary and his cousin John the Baptist on either side of Jesus in this painting (and countless others) reflects the commonly held belief that Christ was too implacable and distant to approach directly; ordinary sinners depended for their salvation on the successful lobbying efforts of the more “loving” Mary and other saints who had privileged access to Christ.

Humans need a God who is both awesome and intimately attentive,⁴ and believers face an ongoing challenge to reconcile the tension between divine justice and divine mercy.⁵ In the process, it is important to resist the temptation to fall into the “comparative gods” trap. How sad and ironic that born-again Christian Charles Colson asserts⁶ that Christians and Jews share the same loving God while Muslims worship a different God who is “aloof and distant”—a surprising claim considering that virtually every chapter of the Koran and the daily calls to prayer invoke God as the “merciful and compassionate.”

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 […]