A correspondent stirs the embers of what I had thought was a dying fire. “I see the God of the Old Testament,” he writes, “as much harsher and jealous and more vengeful than Jesus.” I sigh deeply and think once more of the inexpressibly tender compassion of God in Hosea or Isaiah, and of the unutterably stern warnings of Jesus scattered throughout the gospel traditions. Why can’t we shake off the old 19th-century stereotype, with all its dark overtones of a contrast between the God of the Jews and the God of the Christians?
At its heart this is not simply a matter of reading the texts. Not only in Hosea and Isaiah, but again and again throughout the Hebrew Bible we find a God of infinite mercy. This God, it seems, possesses a bottomless reserve of fresh generosity with which to meet the follies and failings, and the downright rebellion and wickedness, of humans in general and of Israel in particular.
Likewise, it is not only in one or two sayings but throughout the gospel narrative that we find Jesus resolute and implacable as he opposes oppression, injustice and wickedness of all sorts. Isolated sayings can be “picked off” by critics eager to assign anything “judgmental,” not to Jesus himself, but to his later biographers, but this often reflects only the prejudice I am here addressing.
Of course, the Hebrew Bible (the odium attached today to the phrase “Old Testament” is presumably in part a reaction to the attitude expressed by my correspondent) has a good deal to say about judgment—not only on Egypt, Canaan, Assyria and Babylon, but also on Israel and Judah. And of course the Christian canon has a good deal to say about mercy, forgiveness and the overflowing love of God. But to suggest that the “Old” Testament is full of nothing but the former and the “New” Testament of nothing but the latter is to bring to these texts a bias that, I must conclude, is still ingrained in parts of Western culture.
The good news is that Western culture is having to come to terms with realities that challenge this sort of sterile antithesis, this false either/or. Some theologians and church leaders today are facing the challenge of articulating a worldview in which we might be able to find our way forward in our communities, and perhaps also in our thinking and our reading of texts.
If any journalist had predicted, 30 years ago, that a black archbishop of Cape Town would preside over the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the whole community, he or she would have been laughed off the airwaves as hopelessly optimistic. The image of white secret policemen and black terrorists together confessing their atrocities and seeking reconciliation with their victims ought to be recognized as one of the great moral landmarks of the late 20th century. As Desmond Tutu makes clear in his remarkable recent book, No Future Without Forgiveness,1 the commission faced attack from both sides: those who wanted vengeance, not reconciliation, and those who wanted to let bygones be bygones, not to stir up the past. Both the attacking groups wanted, we might say, to live with the sterile antithesis of judgment and mercy, distorting both by keeping them separate. They, like many Bible readers, were unable or unwilling to face the possibility that in their highest form judgment and mercy are inseparable.
Two other remarkable recent books explore the same territory, giving hope that ordinary readers of the Bible may start looking deeper than has often been fashionable (“Is God being nice or nasty in this passage?”). The dean of Duke Divinity School, L. Gregory Jones, shows that forgiveness, so often seen as a weak and spineless response to evil, is in fact a complex and deeply demanding phenomenon that can be as daunting as a sheer and unclimbable cliff face.2 The view from the top, however, is worth the cost, as Desmond Tutu would agree, despite the shocking burden he and his colleagues have borne as they have listened to stories of appalling brutality. And the Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf, now teaching at Yale, addresses the question of how a Croatian can forgive his or her Serbian neighbor—and uses that question to launch a major exploration of the whole concept of otherness and reconciliation.3 How, he asks, within our culture, and drawing on our biblical roots, can we achieve reconciliation with others, particularly those who have deeply wronged us, who have, perhaps, irrevocably damaged our lives? Nobody involved in serious pastoral work, and nobody involved in serious international- or community-relations work, will deny that these pressing questions are of the utmost importance. Think of the Middle East. Think of domestic violence.
As these three books make clear, for there to be forgiveness or mercy or “embrace,” the truth must be told. Jones stresses Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s rejection of “cheap grace”; what does forgiveness mean for a Holocaust survivor or a battered wife if it does not address the question of what has happened? Nor can we retreat here into postmodernism’s question of “whose truth?” If someone has killed my son or raped my daughter, that is a fact that has to be dealt with. Of course, there are other facts, too (the psychological state of the offender, for a start); truthtelling is complex and costly. But the battle for truth, which for some is simply an exciting philosophical or theological quest, has become increasingly a matter of actual lines drawn in actual territory, of actual blood spilt and actual houses burnt. If theology—whether Christian, Jewish or any other variety—cannot deal with that it has nothing to say to the new century.
In our reading of the Bible, it will not do to separate judgment and mercy and play them off against one another. If God is a just and holy God, then God must hate evil, must make no peace with injustice and oppression. Mercy that connives at evil is no longer true mercy.
To address these problems today we need a deeper and richer conception of what Paul calls “the kindness and the severity of God” (Romans 11:22). If it is true, as the letter of James affirms, that “mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13), it will be a costly mercy in which the full weight of appropriate judgment has been incorporated.
A correspondent stirs the embers of what I had thought was a dying fire. “I see the God of the Old Testament,” he writes, “as much harsher and jealous and more vengeful than Jesus.” I sigh deeply and think once more of the inexpressibly tender compassion of God in Hosea or Isaiah, and of the unutterably stern warnings of Jesus scattered throughout the gospel traditions. Why can’t we shake off the old 19th-century stereotype, with all its dark overtones of a contrast between the God of the Jews and the God of the Christians? At its heart this is […]
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