Does it really matter to know what ‘kind’ of God we are dealing with?
It seems for most, who still believe in God, that the important thing is to ‘be saved’. As long as I know that I’m on my way to heaven and not somewhere else (we don’t talk about hell anymore - we do not really want to belief in a ‘kind’ of God who send people to everlasting damnation), it does not really matter how God is and what he is like.
It seems for most, who still believe in God, that the important thing is to ‘be saved’. As long as I know that I’m on my way to heaven and not somewhere else (we don’t talk about hell anymore - we do not really want to belief in a ‘kind’ of God who send people to everlasting damnation), it does not really matter how God is and what he is like.
If we take the position that the God of the Old Testament is
this terrible distant god who stand ready to judge and punish people, then mankind
need to be saved from him. Fortunately, we have Jesus to do that for us. The result
is that Jesus becomes the one who saves us from the terrible Old Testament God.
Marcion, who lived during the second century AD, rejected the Hebrew
Bible because he could not reconcile the Hebrew God of the Old Testament with
the New Testament teaching about Jesus. As Bos (2008:7) puts it, Marcion “saw
an unbridgeable antithesis between the stern, rigorous, and cruel Creator-God
of the Old Testament (the so called Demiurge) and the God whom we meet in and
through Jesus Christ”. Thus, for Marcion there was such a dichotomy between the
‘kind’ of God we are dealing with in the Old Testament and the New Testament,
that it is unthinkable that they could the same God.
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