Are the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament the Same God?

Jesus and the “God of the Old Testament”

Marcion was a second-century heretic who believed that the god of the Old Testament and the god revealed to us in Jesus Christ were two entirely different gods.  The god of the Old Testament was the creator god, a god of justice.  The god revealed to us in Jesus Christ was the god of spiritual salvation, a god of love.  For Marcion, justice and love were incompatible, and a god of love could never be wrathful.  Marcion’s theological assumptions led him to reject not only the Old Testament, but most of the New Testament as well.  The only books of the New Testament that Marcion accepted as Scripture were the epistles of Paul and the Gospel of Luke, which Marcion edited by removing all the parts that did not fit with his theology.  Though Marcionism was rejected as heretical by the mainstream Church, a Marcionite church continued to exist for centuries after his death before eventually dying out.  

Almost no one today completely agrees with Marcionism.  The idea that there are two gods, and that the god of love and salvation is not the creator of the world is simply not an idea that most people today are willing to accept.  Yet, the spirit of Marcion is alive and well in the modern period.  Many Christians today believe and teach that the character of the God of the Old Testament and the character of the God of the New Testament are not the same.  Unlike Marcion, they do not conclude from this that there are two different gods.  Instead, they conclude that many parts of the Old Testament are simply wrong in their depiction of the character of the one true God.  This “semi-Marcionite” perspective has become increasingly popular among modern Christians.  

Arguments for semi-Marcionism are typically based on instances of violence in the Old Testament.  Numerous times, God directly commands His people to use violence in the Old Testament, which seems to contradict the moral teachings of the New Testament that we love our enemies and never use violence.  Furthermore, God often acts in violent ways in the Old Testament, which seems to contradict the reconciling, self-sacrificial love God displays in the New Testament.  

Semi-Marcionites operate with a Christological reading of Scripture.  The New Testament makes clear that Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God.  “In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” (Col 2:9), and whoever has seen Jesus has seen the Father (John 14:9).  Therefore, they argue, if we want to know what God is like, we should only look at Jesus and the things Jesus does.  If anything in the Old Testament does not line up with this, it should be rejected.  The New Testament also makes clear that the cross of Jesus Christ is the ultimate expression of who Jesus is and thus who God is (Phil 2:5-11).  On the cross, we see an amazing expression of God’s humble, reconciling, self-sacrificial love for us, which is the opposite of violence.  Therefore, they argue, we know that God would never use violence or command His people to use violence.  If this is the case, then those parts of the Old Testament that depict these things must be wrong.  

It is certainly the case that there is significant ethical discontinuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament.  Jesus commands Christians to follow Him on the way of the cross, to love their enemies, and to refuse to use violence, which is quite different from the violence God sometimes commands His people to use in the Old Testament.  But it does not follow from this that the Old and New Testaments contradict one another and that the Old Testament is wrong.  There is nothing contradictory about God giving different commands to His people at different points in salvation history.  Parents give different commands to their children at different points in time.  Sometimes these commands may be exactly opposite.  For example, a parent may tell their small child, “Never leave the house without me,” but then tell that same child, “You need to leave the house and go off on your own,” once that child becomes an adult.  This does not mean that the parent is contradicting themselves, or that the parent’s character has changed.  It just means that the parent is giving differing commands that are appropriate to give at different points in time.  In the same way, God has given different commands to His people at different points in salvation history, according to what was appropriate at the time.  

It is certainly the case that Jesus, especially in His self-sacrificial death for us on the cross, is the ultimate revelation of who God is, and that Jesus was nonviolent.  But it does not follow from this that God has never and would never use violence.  Let’s say there is a doctor working hard to save the life of a patient who has all sorts of medical problems.  Finally, he administers a life-saving medicine that fully restores the patient’s health.  We could say that this act of delivering this life-saving medicine is the ultimate expression of who this doctor is and his desire to save this patient’s life.  It does not follow from this that this doctor never removed a gangrenous limb from or cut a cancerous tumor out of this patient.  While destroying a part of his patient’s body was a quite different act than administering a life-saving medicine, it was still an expression of his desire to save his patient’s life.  In the same way, God’s acts of violent judgment against the wicked in the Old Testament (and the New Testament) are expressions of love for His creation, even though they are quite different acts than His ultimate act of reconciling love on the cross.  

The difference between these two kinds of Divine action can be articulated in terms of the difference between restorative justice and retributive justice.  Restorative justice attempts to restore a right relationship between an offender, the victims, and their community, bringing about reconciliation.  Retributive justice, in contrast, simply seeks to punish the offender.  The cross of Jesus Christ shows us that God’s ultimate desire for His creation is restorative justice.  God desires to reconcile a wayward humanity to Himself, “not counting people’s sins against them” (II Cor 5:19).  But restorative justice cannot work unless there is some degree of repentance from the offender.  Even the cross of Christ does not bring about reconciliation with God unless a person repents of their sins and puts faith in Jesus.  Because human beings have free will, God cannot act towards them in terms of restorative justice 100% of the time.  If the wicked refuse to repent, then, for the sake of the creation which He loves, God must act towards them in terms of retributive justice, and use violence against them.  There is no contradiction between this and the fact that God’s ultimate desire for His creation is to reconcile it to Himself.  God ultimately seeks to establish restorative justice, but, sometimes, He must settle for retributive justice.

The fact that Jesus is the ultimate revelation of who God is should not lead us to simplistically conclude that God would never, in any circumstance, act in a way that is different from how Jesus acts in the Gospels.  Jesus is God, but He is also a human being.  He simultaneously shows us who God is and what God’s ultimate desire is for how human beings should live.  Thus, if there are certain actions which are appropriate for God to do, but inappropriate for Christians to do (e.g., violent acts), then we would not expect to see Jesus doing them in the Gospels, even though God sometimes does these things.  We simply cannot arbitrarily assume that in a few years of human ministry, God Incarnate did every possible type of thing that God might do.  In spite of the fact that the Jesus of the Gospels is nonviolent, God does sometimes use violence.  There is nothing incoherent or contradictory about making this claim.  

Divine Violence, Old and New Testaments

The first fundamental problem with semi-Marcionism is that Jesus very clearly affirmed the truthfulness and the Divine Authority of the Old Testament Scriptures (Matt 5:17-18; John 10:35).  There is no hint anywhere in the teachings of Jesus or His apostles that we are supposed to ignore or reject parts of the Old Testament.  Rather, Jesus and His apostles make it clear that the Old Testament Scriptures are the inspired word of God.  The second fundamental problem with semi-Marcionism is that a careful reading of the New Testament will show that God is just as wrathful in the New Testament as in the Old.  Thus, it is quite simply false to claim that the portrayal of Divine wrath in the Old Testament contradicts the portrayal of God’s character in the New Testament.  

An attempt to respond to these objections has been made by Gregory Boyd in his book, Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence,^[1]Gregory A. Boyd, Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017). which presents a rather sophisticated, nuanced form of semi-Marcionism.  First, Boyd argues that, though all of the Old Testament is the inspired word of God, it still contains some false, violent depictions of God; these false depictions of God function as “literary crucifixes” which indirectly reveal God’s character by revealing the cruciform character of God in His willingness to bear His people’s false conceptions of Him.  Second, Boyd argues that, though God does bring judgment on people for their sins, He never does this directly, through Divine violence; instead, God always does this indirectly, by withdrawing His protection from people and allowing them to be harmed by wicked human or demonic agents.

The first problem with Boyd’s form of semi-Marcionism is that Divine violence is not restricted to the Old Testament.  For example, God sends an angel to kill Herod in the book of Acts (12:20-23).  When the author of Hebrews warns Christians of that “God’s judgment” will come upon them if they do not repent of their sin, he writes, “Anyone who refused to obey the law of Moses was put to death without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses.  Just think how much worse the punishment will be for those who have trampled on the Son of God?” (Heb 10: 28-29).  The author of Hebrews thus clearly affirms that capital punishments carried out according to the Torah of Moses were indeed Divine judgments, and warns that God will inflict even worse punishments on those who despise and are unfaithful to Jesus.  In the book of Revelation, Jesus Himself is quoted as warning that God will strike some people dead if they do not repent (Rev 2:23).  If depictions of Divine violence in the Old Testament show that an author had false conceptions of God’s character, then we must also say that the New Testament authors had false conceptions of God’s character.  But if this is the case, then why should we trust their depictions of the character of Jesus?  Why should we trust them when they claim that Jesus is God and that the crucifixion of Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God’s character?  If we do so, our interpretation of Scripture ends up becoming inconsistent and arbitrary.  

The second problem with Boyd’s form of semi-Marcionism is that his distinction between God judging people by directly using violence and God judging people by intentionally allowing the forces of evil to treat them violently is a distinction without a difference.  If I am holding a savage, rabid dog on a leash, and I deliberately let go so that it will kill someone, I am responsible for that person’s death just as much as if I kill that person directly.  If God brings judgment on people by intentionally letting certain spiritual forces of evil “off the leash” in order to harm them, He is just as “morally” responsible for their deaths as if He killed them directly.  Thus, nothing has been gained by this attempt to distance God from the violent judgments people experience at His hands in the Old Testament (and the New).  

The third problem with Boyd’s form of semi-Marcionism is that his idea that depictions of Divine violence in Scripture are “literary crucifixes” which are indirect revelations of God’s character precisely because they are false pictures of God’s character is overly convoluted and deeply problematic.  God is omnipotent.  No matter how much His people had false conceptions of Him, there is no reason He would have to include such false conceptions of Him in His inspired word.  If God deliberately included such false conceptions of Him in His inspired word, then He has deliberately deceived His people about His character, an extremely foolish thing to do.  It would be much more coherent to just say that Scripture contains a mixture of some Divine revelation and some human errors which should be discarded (But, as I have already argued, that does not line up with what Jesus has to say about the Old Testament Scriptures).  

So, even Boyd’s nuanced, sophisticated form of semi-Marcionism fails to provide a coherent explanation of the Biblical data.  Both the Old Testament and the New Testament make it clear that God does sometimes act in a violent manner.  God wants Christians to be nonviolent.  But it does not follow from this that God must always be nonviolent.  

It is perfectly acceptable for God to be wrathful and to use violence.  It is His prerogative.  The apostle Paul actually appeals to God’s wrath as a reason why Christians should be nonviolent: “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord” (Rom 12:19).  Christians must love all people, including their enemies, and fervently desire to see them reconciled to God through Jesus.  But we must recognize that, if they do not repent, they will experience retributive justice, and be on the receiving end of God’s wrath.