Re: [asa] The Old Testament God is ..

Don,

Do I get the idea that you think God was too feeble to make a better
job of
it? You say that Jesus was "driven by his culture", and that, in
effect,
God was forced to take measures that give a very poor picture of who He
really is.

That doesn't sound very omnipotent to me. It sounds like circumstances
forced God to do what He did, rather than God being in control.

Iain

On 10/3/06, Don Winterstein <dfwinterstein@msn.com> wrote:
>
> The God of the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges and to a lesser degree the
> books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles fits fairly well Dawkins'
> characterization if judged by contemporary standards of political
> correctness. The God of the prophets was in several respects
> closer to t=
he
> God of the NT. The response of the na=EFve Christian is, "Who has
> the ri=
ght
> to challenge God?"
>
> Jesus (unfortunately IMO) seemed driven by his culture to accept a
> fairly
> literal interpretation of all OT scriptures and--according to the
> gospels--claimed everlasting torture was to be the penalty for all
> unrepentant offenders. So God continues to be something of a small-
> minde=
d
> monster if he inflicts infinite torture for finite, relatively petty
> crimes. Any human raised in the West who would publicly suggest in
> our
> day that such punishment was appropriate would be vigorously
> scorned. (S=
o,
> as they say, people today are morally superior to God.)
>
> I deal with these issues by asserting that God hasn't changed but
> people
> have. It was necessary for God to separate out a nation from among
> the
> idolaters. The law was God's way of imposing a special identity on
> this
> chosen nation, and the genocidal wars had their place in keeping
> his peop=
le
> separate. Few of us today, I think, can understand how attractive the
> foreign gods were. Without extreme measures (including especially the
> Babylonian captivity) the Jews would have lost their identity as
> surely a=
s
> the citizens of the Northern Kingdom did.
>
> Ultimately the measures worked, and Jews have retained much of their
> identity as God's people to this day. But in taking these extreme
> measur=
es
> I think God presented a wholly inaccurate picture of himself. Such
> measures were necessary at the time because of the way people were
> at the
> time--but they give a very poor idea of who God really is.
>
> Don
>
>

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Thu Oct 5 23:06:13 2006