Judgement and Mercy - The BAS Library
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Judgement and Mercy

For there to be forgiveness or mercy, the truth, no matter how harsh, must be told. That is a lesson to be learned from the God of both testaments.

By N. T. Wright

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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Endnotes

1.

Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999).

2.

L. Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).

3.

Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996).