In an earlier thread, there was a question concerning the relevance of the Old Testament God (say, Yahweh) to Christians. I kept waiting for one to write that the relevance was great because it was in the Old Testament that we learn much about the Father of Jesus. I did not see that post. Was a God other than Yahweh, Jesus’ Father? Is Yahweh not the god of the New Testament as well as the Old Testament? I cannot find any suggestion that Jesus, the Rabbi, was worshiping any God other than the one God of Judaism, Yahweh. Have I missed something? Was there a switcheroo when I was not watching?
The Christians who speak like the posters in question, in my experience, aren’t saying “New God” rather they’re saying “new rules, some old God.”
I think we need a link to what you’re talking about, to begin with.
Second, there’s a (facile and fraudulent) assumption that the God of the New Testament (i.e., God as conceptualized in the NT) differs in significant ways from the God of the Old Testament (i.e., the consensus view of how God is conceptualized in the OT). For the most part, this doesn’t hold water – both Jesus and Paul, the two people who most shaped the early Christian view of God, are at pains to show how their theology draws on the OT concept of God. What is very easy to do is to cherry-pick the “Nice Guy” God of Jesus and contrast him with an equally cherry-picked YHWH-the-petty-and-wrathful-tyrant from the OT. But neither conceptualization is true to the facts of what the Bible actually says. Jesus’s view of God (and IMO He ought to know if anyone does) was one that could be stern and wrathful, but was ready to forgive – which is almost precisely the message of the prophets, boiled down and in a nutshell.
Those who want to denigrate the Bible are fond of dredging out God commanding genocide, etc. But someone saying, “God told me that we should kill off all the Amelekites,” is little different than Fred Phelps, Jerry Falwell, or Oral Roberts telling us what “God said” to them about the evils in American society – it’s a convenient way to attribute your own motives to the Big Guy Upstairs, and put the blame on him – even if you believe it yourself as you say it.
The first person to come up with this theory is also the first person who created a canon set of books of the Bible. His name was Marcion, and he was one of the first heretics.
His bible contained a variant of Luke, and ten letters of Paul. He wasn’t a Gnostic, though there is similiarity.
Jesus and Paul may be at pains to try and link their concept of God to the Judaic one, but that doesn’t mean that they really succeed. Too many of the basic theological elements contradict each other. Judaism doesn’t really support the core idea of original sin through a redeeming salvation in the first place, and for all of Paul’s re-imaginings, they just don’t hold water.
Jesus and Paul believed in the Jewish God in the same sense that Muslims and Mormons believe in Christ. They said they did, but the spun off their own peculiar theologies that radically changed the original picture.
How is it different?
If the answer is “because God genuinely told them to kill the Amelekites” while Phelps et al are nutcases, that’s a matter of faith, and not something that can be argued against. But I don’t really see much difference between people claiming God told them to wipe out so-and-so a people thousands of years ago and people claiming God told them that now. And surely if the Bible is accurate in that God acted in that way, I don’t see what’s so obviously uncharacteristic of him to command similar things now. I don’t mean he is, i’m just saying it seems that a Christian who accepted that part of the Bible as true surely shouldn’t be all that surprised by people claiming similar things today.
For the second time in two days, Renevant, we’re agreeing but thinking we don’t because of vocabulary! 
“Little different” as I used it was supposed to be a minimizing statement – “not really different at all” would be the implication I intended. (Though of course we know less about the motives of the ancient espousers of the “Don’t blame me, blame God – He’s the one who commanded it!” statements than we do about those of the current crop.
Ah, I see. My fault - I read your post as “‘God said kill these people’ is a little different from Phelps”, and got the completely wrong impression you were being snarky. Apologies.
When I recite or read the 23rd Psalm, I can’t help but notice that David was familiar with a loving and comforting God.
The metaphor of a good shepherd must have been common in those times for the representation of care and safety.
He may have held other images of God too, but at least this part is not contradictory to the loving God of the New Testament. It seems to me that the 100th Psalm also speaks of God’s mercy that endureth forever. I guess it just depends on which cherry tree you’re chopping down.
Parenting is frequently an occasion for personal growth.
I think this post gets at the heart of matter. It is the same God, but a different theology attached to that God. One may certain reasonably dispute whether one can have different theologies regarding the same God. It comes down to semantics as to how one defines the Divine and the enterprise of theology.
By same God, I mean the continuity of: the God of Universe and all peoples, who has a unique covenant with the people of Israel, who wills salvation into an imperfect world through the revelation of His logos.
For those who remain in the Israelite covenant, the logos is “Torah”
For those who enter into the covenant through the saving death of the Christ, the logos is the “incarnate son of God.”
Having studied both religions, I would say in general that the discontinuities are often and typically over emphasized.
I cant remember where Iread this so Ihave no cite ;butIcame across an article that claimed that Yahweh was actually the war god of the Israelites and The Golden Calf (Baal?) that they were worshipping when Moses came down from the mountain was the Israelites love god ;which suggests a pantheon.
If this is correct(though I’m not saying it is )then judicous editing out of the losing deities by the priesthood doesn’t seem so far fetched.
The Bible itself had many books struck from it at church council ,I believe round about the fourth century.
I realise that conventional wisdom suggests that The Golden Calf was an Egyptian god.
Well, there are a wide assortment of claims related to the origins of YHWH as God of the Israelites. The only one I know of with any strong scholarly support is the “Kenite hypothesis” – the idea that YHWH was the tutelary God of the Kenites, the Midianite tribe to which Moses’s in-laws belonged, and that he derived his first knowledge of YHWH from them … preparing him for the theophanies he experienced. (Note that this is not theological but anthropological in concept: It doesn’t “tell where God came from” but rather where Moses’s and the Israelites’ idea of God came from.)
There seems to be some evidence for early Hebrews having known [the deity we call] God as El, usually with some epithet: El Shaddai, El Elyon, El Elohe, and to have regarded him as high god of a pantheon. This Jovian concept then moved to henotheism – multiple gods, but “our God’s bigger than your god” – and then to a monotheism in which the other gods were His servants erroneously elevated to divine status, or demons tempting people to false belief. Obviously there is an enormous amount of speculation in this, with fragmentary evidence in the Psalms and the prose elements of Job giving it marginal support.
As for the Bible, prior to the Reformation nobody was “striking out books” that were accepted by any reasonable proportion of believers, whether in Church Council or not. The Canon evolved very slowly – in fact, the Orthodox churches still have no formally adopted canon, though adding or subtracting from the Septuagint-plus-New-Testament would be resisted strongly by nearly all Orthodox. But at rock bottom, what happened was the gradual agreement that certain books were in fact canonical and others rejected. There was quite a mass of debatables, in a spectrum from generally accepted to “only a few nuts believe that” (said in proper 4th Century Greek or Latin, of course). II Peter and Revelation were among the last books to get general approbation; the only book left out that had anything like even their acceptance was the “Shepherd of Hermas.” Wikipedia’s listing of New Testament Apocrypha is less than perfect on this, but the contrasting views in the “Evaluation” section at the end may be useful in grasping the process.
To give you a modern parallel, suppose someone is setting up a “canon” of works to be studied as examples of the literary epic. The Ramayana, Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Nibelungenlied, etc., will unquestionably be included. You might get arguments about the Kalevala, the Voluspa, “Paradise Lost,” the Charlemagne/Roland cycle, and especially The Lord of the Rings. But there’d be general consensus that they ought to be included, if perhaps with critical notes provided. On the other hand, only a few nuts would want to see included The Sword of Shannara. Something like this, heavily tinged by strong adherence to the belief system the various books embody or challenge, was how the judgment as to the canon evolved.
(Side note: You will be aware that there are actually three canons: Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. The books included in “unabridged” Protestant Bibles as “the Apocrypha” are fully accepted by the Orthodox, along with Psalm 151, and all but I and II Esdras, the Prayer of Manasses, and Psalm 151, are considered fully canonical by Catholicism.)