Rector's Blog: That God of the Old Testament

I say the phrase “Old Testament God” is theologically inaccurate because it suggests that the God who is described and portrayed in the Old Testament is a different God – or at least a God of fundamentally different characteristics, desires, and actions – than the God who is described and portrayed in the New Testament. Christians will casually refer to the so-called God of the Old Testament as angry. And you know what? Sometimes in the Old Testament God gets angry. Specifically, God is angry when they see people in positions of power marginalize and oppress the powerless in God’s name. God’s anger is not arbitrary but is inflamed by injustice and inhumanity.

This is absolutely consistent with the New Testament in which Jesus – whom Christians believe is God – is angered by the hypocrisy and exploitative behavior of the religious authorities who harm others in God’s name.

In both the Old and New Testaments, God is interested in justice – God is consistently emphatic that people who speak and act in God’s name should speak lovingly and act fairly and kindly on behalf of others – especially those who are powerless and need help. In both the Testaments the same God invites people to participate in the healing of the world by the way they live their daily lives. Throughout both Testaments, that same God gets angry and annoyed and also is extremely merciful and faithful. In both places God is both utterly present and frustratingly mysterious. And as I’ve written before, Jesus – whom we Christians follow – refers to the God of Israel as God, as Father. Jesus does not differentiate but recognizes the same God working throughout the history of the world. So should we.

When we differentiate, we are furthering the idea either that there really are two Gods, or that the one God had some sort of identity crisis or change of heart. Christians do not believe there are two Gods, and we do not believe that somewhere between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New, God had a midlife crisis, had a kid named Jesus, got a therapist, bought a sports car and got a new outlook on life. In fact, one of the major recurring themes of the New Testament is the emphasis on continuity – how Jesus serves as a fulfillment of the hopes, dreams, and plans of God. Jesus is not seen as a course corrective or a constitutional amendment to God’s plan but as the human embodiment of the same God we have come to know in what we call the Old Testament.

The term “The God of the Old Testament” is antisemitic.

I understand that is strong language and that if you’ve used the term before you probably had no intention of being antisemitic. So I’m not saying this to shame you – I’m saying it to help solidify in your mind the damage this language causes and help you move past it so that we can begin to adopt new language and with it a better understanding of the God in whom we say we believe.

The term “The God of the Old Testament” is antisemitic because it describes the God of the Jewish faith as both inferior and incomplete. Inferior in that we Christians almost exclusively use the term to describe attributes of God that discomfit or scare us and then juxtapose it with a “New Testament God” whose attributes we find more palatable. Think about it: every time we use the “Old Testament God” in a demeaning way, we are actively demeaning the God of our Jewish siblings.

The term also implies that our Jewish siblings’ understanding of God is incomplete, because we are essentially saying that without the elements or characteristics of God that are presented in our New Testament, the Jewish people are just worshiping half-a-God. It’s worth noting at this point that Jewish people don’t call their Bible the Old Testament. They call it the Bible. Or the Tanakh or Miqra. They don’t see their Bible as half-a-bible waiting on a scriptural conclusion. They understand the authority of their biblical text as it stands. We want to remember that, to our Jewish siblings, our so-called New Testament is a sequel that nobody asked for.

Is the Jewish understanding of God incomplete? Well, I would argue yes in that every single religion’s understanding of God is incomplete – including ours. That’s not to say all religions are the same. They aren’t. We all believe very different things about the Divine, about creation, and about creation’s relationship to the Divine. Christians believe Jesus is the Messiah of Israel and God incarnate. Jews very specifically believe neither of these things. It’s not our job to pretend that we all agree. We don’t. But it is our job to seek to understand our siblings, and to treat our differences with respect.

About 2000 years ago something happened: a subsection of Jewish people in Israel came to believe that the Messiah upon whom Israel had been waiting actually showed up. They believed Jesus was that Messiah, that he had been arrested, publicly executed by the Roman authorities, and then that he miraculously came back from the dead. They came to believe that he was not only a messenger from God, but was – in some inexplicable way – God themself walking among them as human. And they believed that this event was something so radical that it was meant to be shared with the whole world. In a relatively short period of time, the non-Jewish members of this new sect outnumbered the Jewish members, and in that same period of time the group stopped understanding itself as Jewish altogether. They became known as Christian.

I am one of those. I am a Christian. I believe in Jesus. I buy the story of Jesus and I seek to live as if it is true. And at the same time, for the sake of honesty and integrity, I have to remember regularly that the vast majority of Jews who were presented with the Jesus story 2000 years ago didn’t buy it. And instead of assuming they were inferior or incomplete, it is my sacred responsibility to honor their experience and respect their beliefs. They kept being Jewish, and their offspring are still among us today, having lived in the beauty and fullness of the Jewish tradition, and growing and developing their beliefs and customs within Judaism just as Christians have grown and developed our beliefs and customs within Christianity.

So it’s time to get rid of our “God of the Old Testament” language. It misunderstands both the Christian and the Jewish understanding of God at the same time, and who needs that? Instead, we can simply talk about what we believe to be true about God. And if we’re really serious about loving our neighbors as ourselves we can ask our Jewish friends what they believe to be true about God. And when they respond, we can listen.