In the real olden days, and here I’m going to conflate the Middle Ages, the Victorian Age and everything up to and including our grandparents in one big lump of history, it seems like the main attribute that was widely attributed to God, whenever anyone talked about him was his power, his majesty, his rule, and his role as your judge, your master, your lord, your creator beneath whom to tremble. The idea of God as huge and to be feared, like in Proverbs 9: The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

This heavy emphasis has fallen away a bit in the late 20th Century, which is a relief, as the idea of being ‘scared straight’, by any definition, is the root of many abuses. I know people who have fled churches where the fear of God has been conflated with the fear of hell. But God and Hell really shouldn’t be made to seem synonymous.

Yes, he has anger, righteous indignance. Jesus is immensely angry at injustices, about hypocrisy, and about the exploitative moneymaking in the temple of God. Christians, and the church should likewise be moved to anger at injustices, but I don’t think people should fear Christians. I think once you take the phrase ‘the fear of God’ and make it so that people fear Christianity, oppression is afoot. People are exploited, people suffer, and the church becomes a monster, one which can only put people off God. It shouldn’t seem a church without kindness, or patience or love. I think the middle ages, Victorian idea of fearing a furious God makes him seem like some kind of Satan.



By the time I was growing up, the pendulum had swung the other way. The emphasis was on God as love. Like in 1 John 4: ‘Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and everyone that loves, loves God and knows God’. God as father, mother, friend, shepherd. I think it’s a far more positive and approachable perspective, though it is still only one angle. It’s God of carrot, not God of stick, but I worry, preached in isolation, it can sound facile, like Father Christmas or a lovely old man who will hug and give you presents, but has no teeth.

I’ve often heard people say, and I think they are wrong, that the Old Testament is a scary God of judgement and the New Testament is a nice God of mercy, and that olden days churches were more OT and that progressive ones are more NT, by which I not necessarily mean neurotypical.

I think in the Old Testament there is judgement and there is mercy. There is deep love between God and David, God and Jacob, great trust and honesty between Hannah and God. There is also a lot of death and killing. It’s wars and it’s alarming corrective measures and then it’s more wars again, and I’m glad the New Testament isn’t like that. Likewise, the New Testament is full of hope, forgiveness and love, but also full of dire warnings, of deep upset and material in Revelation I cannot see as wholly gentle and friendly.

I believe there is an ongoing tension in the Old Testament between God’s promise of justice and his mercy. There are laws and there are consequences, but everyone breaks almost all the laws. Every time the people start to sin less they start to sin more. The cycle of God giving guidance, people getting better then worse and then disaster - it shows no sign of abating or improving. Even when the nations are destroyed! Justice was promised, but if nobody keeps the laws, justice is going to be bad. I’m greatly relieved the popular conception of karma doesn’t exist, because if I suffered in accordance with every bad thing I did I would surely die. It’s easy to long for justice, but unless the standards are slack, perfect justice would probably go badly for most of us, because God’s standard is high, and nobody can live up to it. Even in the Old Testament where Abram doubts and Moses does a murder and Jacob lies and his favouritism within his family causes blood to be spilt, the heroes who are held up sin. They fall short. But if the promise is justice, true, unflinching, fair justice, they probably wouldn’t like what they got. If David got justice, as others in the Old Testament get justice, he would by no means have lived so long.

That’s why I say there is a tension between justice and mercy. God has a forgiving heart and longs for peace and reconciliation. In 1 Timothy 2: God our saviour who desires all people to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth. But fulfilling the law as promised is incompatible with forgiving people. If you handwave sin away you say the law was bobbins. You did a sin, a theft, a hatred, and many acts of cruely. Well I’m sorry about it God. Oh, that’s ok then. The law didn’t really matter that much and I love you. That’s how it can seem, but there’s an essential clash in there.

As I understand it, the crucifixion was the only possible answer to that conflict. There has been great sin, great evil, we’ve seen it! We people of earth have done many, many, many things against God and against our fellow humans, and also against animals. Cruelty, lies, pain, massacres, theft and arson and attacks and unkindness and structural inequality and hate, and it has to be paid for, it has to be made up for, the debt is real and the wound between us and God is real. For him to bring the forgiveness he dearly wanted to bring, he had to be our guarantuar. You don’t pay your rent, your parents are guarantuar, suddenly it becomes their problem, they have gotta pay. The punishment needed to happen, and he volunteered to take it himself. The forgiveness was real but it couldn’t come out of nowhere.

The powerful God and the loving God are the exact same one, and I think the one that should be taught first is in the middle, the goodness of God. The fact that he’s not loving and limp, but loving from his heart because he is good. He isn’t terrifying and to be obeyed because he’s our king and our parent. No! He’s to be obeyed and followed because he’s good. No-one likes to obey anyone these days, but if you’re going to obey anyone, it should be on the basis of their goodness first and foremost.

That’s why I don’t like the doxology at the end of the Lord’s Prayer: ...for yours is the kingdom, the power and the glory’? No, I don’t think so. Jesus didn’t include that bit in his Lord’s Prayer, and it only got permanently attached in the UK when the church was nationalised by Henry VIII. We don’t honour and venerate and love God because he has a kingdom and some power and some glory. Henry the VIII had those things. By some measures, Satan, and all the worst world-leaders you can name have a kingdom and power, and probably some glory. I don’t really know what glory is. My problem with the doxology. It’s the word ‘for’, meaning, ‘because’. The rest of the prayer, is not predicated on God’s position as legitimate ruler - though he definitely is that - but on the fact he’s good. May his name be hallowed because he’s good. May his kingdom come because he is good. He didn’t wash his hands of humanity and chuck us all in the bin. He put up all of humanity’s nonsense with astounding patience. I’m tempted to say ‘with the patience of a saint’ and think of Elisha and St. Joan and St. Alexander Nevsky and St Helga and other saints who were slow to anger but did eventually anger darkly! The Goodness of a God who would take all the worst things that anyone deserved and suffer them himself.

The crucifixion is the answer to the whole question of the Bible and of history to that point. I don’t know how it worked on any deep complex theological level, but I can do the math. God is many things. A shepherd and a lamb and a lion, and not a tame lion. And despite everything I believe in his goodness and mercy.

We’re nearly done. You know what else is good? Friday!