God of Love, God of War, locating the meme

[nancylebov]

When I started getting reactions to the effect that people had never heard Christians claim that they have a God of Love who's an improvement on the earlier version, I wondered if I'd been hallucinating-- quite an unnerving thought, since I know I forget a fair amount, but I don't think of myself as especially much making things up.

However, I mentioned this discussion to another friend, who came close to wondering what was wrong with you guys that you hadn't noticed something so obvious. Some questioning established that he's heard it a lot from bible belt Protestants, and he thinks it's been fading in the past decade.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

I rarely run into Bible Belt Protestants. For all I know, they do or did say that. I can't see, though, how people who assert the literal truth of the whole (Christian) Bible and insist that God never changes could be comfortable with such a notion.

[nancylebov]

I think people in general (that is to say, non-geeks) take a very approximate attitude towards ideas, and may well ignore theology when they have a chance to snark at someone.

[wcg]

I asked my nephew, the Disciples of Christ minister, about this. His reply was: "I've heard it, but it's pretty much dismissed in progressive Christian theological circles. The idea is that the writers of the books where God is presented as a vengeful, warlike God wrote them during times where the morale of the Israelite people was very low, and those writings were intended to boost their morale and pump up their national ego."

For context, he graduated from Wake Forest's school of divinity last year, and he's the pastor of a church in a small town in Missouri.

[siderea]

I, for one, never said that I'd hadn't heard of Christians calling their god a God of Love. I said I've never heard them refer to Jews as having a God of War, and I've never seen them contrast their god against the god of the Jews as if they were two distinct entities.

I've heard of Christians comparing their god to nonabrahamic faiths' gods unfavorably, though these days it's rare to see a Christian deign to treat nonabrahamic faiths' gods as sufficiently real as to be inferior.

[thnidu]

I've certainly encountered this contrast being drawn, but in reading, not conversation. And, ISTM, specifically reading books and other serious discussions of theology: sometimes as an observation of different views of the Deity and sometimes, yes, as a claim of the superiority of the (Christian) writer's tradition. And tracts of course, between picking them up from the sidewalk or removing from public space (e.g., phone booths) and dropping them in trash or recycling bins.

[siderea]

You're in luck: there's an entire internet made out of words. Shouldn't be to hard for you to find an example and bring it to our attention.

[thnidu]

Naaah, sorry. That's not been recent reading -- more of in college, many decades ago -- and I'm not invested in this particular issue enough to spend more time and spoons digging up documentation.