Virtually all Christians claim that God is “love.” Sadly, few believers bother to square this claim with the Bible. Liberal and progressive Christians tend to ignore anything in the Bible that doesn’t square with the “god is love” claim. Certainly, they can find Biblical justification for this claim, but doing so requires a helter-skelter hermeneutic. Evangelicals, on the other hand, typically have a two-faced deity: a God of love and a God of judgment. While both viewpoints find rationalization for their beliefs within the pages of the Bible, Evangelicals tend to have a more complete view of God, albeit one that they routinely distort and corrupt. Both sides are willing to reinterpret the Bible to justify their claims.
While it is certainly true that God is love, it is also true, as Richard Dawkins said, that:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
While Dawkins specifically mentions the God of the Old Testament, his observation applies to the God of the New Testament — Jesus. Most Christians are trinitarians. Trinitarianism is the belief that:
One God who exists eternally as three distinct, co-equal, and co-eternal persons: the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit. While God is one in essence or substance, these three persons are distinct but share the same divine nature, making God both one and three at the same time.
This means, of course, that the God of the Old Testament is the same deity revealed in the New Testament. When God drowned the entire human race save eight people, and killed countless animals, that deity was Jesus. And when God unleashes the horrific violence recorded in the book of Revelation, that deity, again, is Jesus. As God, Jesus is culpable for the violence and bloodshed attributed to God. You can’t be a trinitarian and deny this conclusion.
I have no doubt that many Christians wish that the early church had rejected the Old Testament as part of the canon of Scripture, but they didn’t, saddling Christians with a God they increasingly find distasteful and hard to defend. Liberals and progressives tend to focus on Bible verses that promote the idea that love is God’s primary attribute. However, it is hard to take the Bible at face value and come to this conclusion. Evangelicals typically embrace the sum of God as presented in Scripture, but this leaves them with having to defend all sorts of things, including rape, incest, genocide, and slavery. I have listened to numerous Evangelicals on atheist call-in shows try to defend God’s honor, without success. Why? Some of God’s behavior is without justification or excuse. He may be a God of love, but he is also a bloodthirsty deity; a God whose behavior is antithetical to the moral beliefs of both atheists and Christians alike.
Personally, I prefer to live in a “God is love” world. I suspect most of you have similar sentiments. That said, the real world is dominated by religions with long histories of violence and bloodshed — especially the Abrahamic sects. While I find the “God is love” claim intellectually lacking, I know the world is better off when both believers and unbelievers alike practice love, mercy, kindness, and compassion.
Let me conclude this post with a short video by Justin, the man behind the Deconstruction Zone. In a few minutes, Justin Holmes, a former Evangelical preacher, dismantles the “God is love” claim. If you object to what I have shared in this post, please provide a theological argument for your objection. Better yet, refute Justin’s video (which I am confident you will not be able to do). And when I say “refute,” I mean show that Justin is errantly interpreting the Bible.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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