Is God mean or loving?

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I can remember studying Christianity in my RE class at school, and being told that the God presented in the Old Testament is this mean, judgmental God of fire and brimstone, but that He must have gone on holiday for a couple of hundred years and apparently came back a changed, more left-wing God for the New Testament. Old Testament = Mean God, New Testament = Tolerant God.

And the first Christians I properly got into conversations with tended to confirm this – I was pointed to Jesus’ words that the Old Testament teaching of ‘an eye for an eye’ was being replaced by ‘love your enemies’. It was only last week that a friend of mine told me that ‘God learned to love’.

Well done everyone.

No, sorry, I just don’t buy it. In the opening chapters of the Bible Adam and Eve just completely lose it and disobey God, then lie about it and blame one another. The God of Wrath we’ve been told about doesn’t fly off the handle, he prepares clothes for them. A couple of chapters later we see that the entire population of the world was caught in an orgy of sin and evil but that God poured out undeserved grace on Noah’s family to preserve humanity in the face of the coming floods.

This theme of grace is repeated throughout every story in the Old Testament – it would seem that the God of Wrath is some fictional character rather than the actual Christian God. No wonder Dawkins hates him so much, he doesn’t sound very nice at all but thankfully is a figment of our imagination.

But I don’t think that the idea I was given of the God of Tolerance is much closer to the truth either! In the New Testament we see Ananias and Sapphira killed on the spot for lying about how much money they gave to the church, and Jesus seems to have something about casting out unfaithful servants to places of darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth…so the God who simply accepts everyone as they are seems to be a fictional character too.

Is it possible that God is actually completely holy, righteous and just, and can’t bear sin in His presence or among His people so promises to punish sinners for stepping even ever-so-slightly off the mark, yet would sort the whole problem of sin out in one action through the grace-fuelled punishment of his only Son as a substitute sin-bearer and redeemer for anyone who believes? Well, that doesn’t sound like either of the false gods presented in my RE class.

But He sounds a whole lot better in every way.

The God Who Smokes by Timothy J. Stoner

Yes, the guy’s name’s funny. He admits it on the opening pages. Anyway, this book OS intended to be ‘scandalous meditations in faith’, particularly by trying to find middle ground between the emerging/emergent and fundamentalist evangelical movements. Stoner’s chapters look at God’s character and our response.

For a start, this is phenomenally well-written. Through personal stories and clever analogies it’s impossible not to enjoy the communication style. The content’s good too, biblically sound, logical and gracious.

That said, I struggle to put this in a box. With this title you don’t expect orthodoxy, but that is what you get, albeit presented in a post-modern style. He clearly tries to get the emergent crowd on board by using the word ‘crap’ in the introduction, and quoting Rob Bell and Brian McLaren throughout, but he fundamentally disagrees with them both.

The problem with this book isn’t the words, it’s the cover. It doesn’t really discover a new middle ground in Christianity, it just presents evangelicalism in a more Rob Bell style.

So, it gets plenty of thumbs up from me – I looked forward to reading it every day – but on this occasion you have to conclude that you can’t judge a book by its cover!

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from NavPress Publishers as part of their Blogger Review program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Rob Bell and the anger of God

I was recently on that internet and I came across this article:

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/outofur/archives/2007/11/heresy_on_tour.html

Fans of Rob Bell are pretty angry that fans of Mark Driscoll (and Driscoll himself, of course) are calling him a heretic. The author of this article seems to have been won over by a sermon given by Bell on a tour. I do not want to get dragged into little arguments about penal substitutionary atonement, the truth about the virgin birth and so on but I do think that sound doctrine is incredibly important – because the Bible tells me that it is!

I do, however, have a little issue with Rob Bell’s sermon content – let’s just ignore the fact that he actually talks about the spirituality of cavemen and the ‘evolution’ of the Christian faith. Apparently, the whole point of God speaking to Abraham, the giving of the Old Testament law and Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross were to prove to us that God’s not angry.

Now I have a problem with this. I think that God is angry. Very angry. Monumentally angry. I think that God’s wrath is absolutely key when it comes to understanding the cross. How on earth could a God who is not at all angry take His one and only son, and force him through torture, mockery and isolation? I look at things like The Passion of the Christ movie and see a dying, tortured, hurting man – I can only see this as a result of anger; I would not torture and kill someone because I thought it might be for the best!

Without God’s anger there is no need for me to be ashamed of my sin; whose problem is it if I want to be gay, or a murderer, or a pervert, or a false teacher? If God’s not angry with me then I might as well sin as much as I can, getting the short-term benefits in the knowledge that Jesus’ sacrifice is enough for me. That simply doesn’t wash.

I think that God’s anger is a key theme throughout the Bible. Take that out and we’re left with a confused God who doesn’t mind us sinning but kills His son anyway. And the thought of Him giving me eternal life without being at all angry that I’ve spent my entire life sticking my middle finger up at Him actually makes me angry. I don’t think we can even begin to imagine the depth of God’s anger.

I would really appreciate your thoughts!