Weblogs: An Old Testament God

dissonant bible: "A couple of nights ago I watched Phone Booth for the first time and if I was ever to teach an introductory course on the OT to a group of students who did not mind a fairly high count of MF's, then I would start with this film.

Why? Because, in the character and actions of the anonymous sniper, it brilliantly (illuminatingly) captures so much of how we might conceive the 'OT God'.

A god who demands absolute purity and holiness, a god who 'desire[s] truth in the inward being' (Ps 51.6), who calls us to confess the truth of who we are and receive, possibly, absolution.

A god who punishes the sinful, a hidden god who has drawn a bead on us and is ready to smite us in his wrath should we step out of line. A god who, even when we have come clean, even when he reveals himself, continues to privilege fear over mercy.

If you want to, you can find this god in the Psalms, in Job, in the narratives and laws and prophetic books - and then you can label him 'the Old Testament God'. But you will have had to discard an awful lot of text along the way.

For me, listening to the bible's dissonance is not just about recognising those parts we don't like and engaging with them; it also involves paying attention to those parts which resist our simplistic caricatures of the Lord God, even if our rhetoric is defused as a result."