Several years ago, I became aware of a growing trend among Christians to view the God of the Old Testament as different from the God of the New Testament. I first encountered this interacting with college students on summer travel experiences to the lands of the Bible. More recently, I have heard this refrain from pastors and adult members of churches. In its most benign form, it is expressed as the God of the Old Testament was violent and judgmental—like a person before their morning cup of coffee—while the God of the New Testament was full of grace and love (the caffeine kicked in). Often behind these characterizations lies another set of characterizations: the violent and judgmental God of the Old Testament connects to a particularism tied to an ethnic people Israel, while the gracious and loving God of the New Testament represents the universalism of Christianity. God is not ethnic or nationalistic; he’s universal belonging to everyone equally.
So, does God have an identity crisis? Did he wake up one morning and decide the violence and judgment weren’t working, so he would become more mellow, gracious, and loving?
To answer this question, we need to answer two other questions: 1) how did the ancients, both polytheists and Jews, view their gods? 2) Where did the separation of the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament come from?
Gods within the ancient world usually shared the ethnicity of the people who worshipped them.[1] Athens and Athenians derived the name of the city and their identity from their patron goddess Athena. Whether polytheists or Jews, ancient peoples defined their identities through land, language, family connections, and gods. These bonds of kinship spanned heaven and earth. Gods and humans formed family groups, and gods shared the ethnicity of their people. Thus, the God of the New Testament, was Jewish. Non-Jews who found themselves attracted to Judaism, understood the god being worshipped as the Jewish God. Judaism, as a religion, defined itself through practices and rituals, the Torah, and the land of Israel. Because of Judaism’s claim of the oneness of its god, they claimed their particular god as the God of the universe. Yet, if non-Jews wanted to be safe at the end of the age, they had to turn away from their idols and behavior contrary to the moral will of the God of Israel and turn to the God of Israel. Ancient Judaism debated how non-Jews could find safety at the end of the age. Some demanded they fully identify with Israel, which meant men had to be circumcised. Others, following the visions of some of the biblical prophets, believed the non-Jews would abandon their idols and come to worship Israel’s God yet remain non-Jews. Either way, the hope for non-Jews to be safe at the end of the age, when the reign of Israel’s God would appear universally and righteous and wicked would be judged, required the non-Jews to align with Israel and its Jewish God.
This view extended into Jesus’ movement, which identified as a Jewish movement, in the first century. The non-Jews who joined Jesus’ movement understood themselves as aligning with the God of Israel. Their inclusion as non-Jews into Jesus’ movement required them to live a Jewish morality while not fully entering the Jewish community. Their turning to the God of Israel as non-Jews, forsaking their idols, was to serve as a testimony to Israel that God’s redemptive era had dawned, which would culminate in the redemption of Israel and the appearance of the God of Israel’s universal reign (see Romans 11:11-27; see also Mekhilta de Rabbi Ishmael on Ex. 17:14).[2] Thus, while the God of Israel (and Israel’s claim about their God) claimed cross-ethnic supremacy, he remained a Jewish God in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews, including the non-Jewish followers of Jesus.
The New Testament views God as the God of the Hebrew Bible throughout (see Acts 3:13). Like Judaism, the writers of the New Testament expected the appearance of God’s universal reign at the end of the age, and part of that final era would be the non-Jews turning to the Jewish God and forsaking their idols. The New Testament writers did not make a “new” or different claim about God; rather, they claimed the fulfillment of Jewish hopes of redemption had begun. This explains the inclusion of non-Jews into Jesus’ movement and the expectation of God’s universal reign. The New Testament did not shift God’s nature or identity, that was left to ex-polytheistic Christians in the second century AD.
The earliest proponents of the God of the Old Testament differing from the God of the New Testament were the Christian Gnostics Valentinus and Marcion, and the church father Justin Martyr in the second century AD.[3] These Christian thinkers imported the philosophical worldview of Middle-Platonism into their theology. Middle-Platonism argued the high god was transcendent, perfect, immaterial, and changeless. A universal god of the philosophers removed from the ethnic deities worshipped by people. Such a god would not create matter. Another, lower god, a demiurge, organized the material universe. He could act in the world, unlike the high god. The imperfections, ills, and evils of the physical universe happened because of this lower god. The God of the Bible, a being of passions and changing of mind, a God who suffers, how can He be the high god, unchanging, incorruptible, and immaterial?
These Christian thinkers held that God the Father was an eternal, transcendent deity, without body or passions, and prior to the revelation of Christ, he was utterly unknown. The God of the Jews was the demiurge, the lower god, subordinated to the high god. He gave the Jews their laws, like circumcision, Sabbath, and dietary restrictions. They differed on the relationship of this lower god to Christ. Valentinus argued, Christ fulfilled the good laws of this lower god and destroyed those laws Valentinus considered baseless. Marcion viewed the demiurge as hostile to the gospel of Christ. Justin identified the lower god as “another god,” distinct from the high god. Justin, however, argued the lower god, the God of the Jews, was the pre-incarnate Christ; thus, the God of the Jews was the God of the Christians, the pre-incarnate Christ, the Son. The God of Israel was dead.
Neither Jesus nor Paul would have recognized the god of these Gentile Christians. They also would not have understood those who have made the kingdom of Heaven something inward, spiritual, transcending national or ethnic bounds. For them the kingdom of Heaven (God) belonged to Israel’s hopes of redemption, which would culminate in the universal reign of Israel’s God.
While the tradition of viewing the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament as different or divided has a long history within Christianity, it grew, not within the Bible, but from the importing of philosophical paradigms into Christian theology. We may continue to strip the God of the Bible of his ethnic identity to fit our theological paradigms, but we need to recognize the tradition we stand in when we do this. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, we remove our ability to understand the God Jesus and Paul sought to explain and fail to understand their hopes of the redemption the God of Israel would bring.
[1] P. Fredriksen, “How Jewish Is God? Divine Ethnicity in Paul’s Theology,” JBL 137 (2018): 192-212.
[2] M. Nanos, “’All Israel Will Be Saved’ or ‘Kept Safe’? (Rom. 11:26): Israel’s Conversion or Irrevocable Calling to Gospel Nations?,” in Israel and Nations: Paul’s Gospel in the Context of Jewish Expectation (ed. F. Abel; Minneapolis: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2021), 243-270.
[3] Fredriksen, Paul the Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 170-174.