Q.
106
In the Old Testament, God seems to be
actively involved in world events. In the
New Testament, God is portrayed as less
interventionist but still directly involved. Now,
it seems God is much more abstract. What
happened, and is this a good or a bad thing?
Gary Peluso-Verdend
A.
Nothing happened to God, fundamentally. What happened is that
the biblical writers refl ect two different eras, and today we read the
text and think about God from yet another point of view.
The Christian Old Testament (note: The books of the Hebrew Bible are
arranged in a different order from the Old Testament) begins with God’s
creation of the world and then a series of covenants that God makes with a
chosen people. Much of the remainder of the Old Testament is the stories of
how those covenants worked out in history—or at least how those who wrote
the history remembered it.
The writers consistently understand God to be the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob. The story of God is told through the lenses of God’s interac-
tions with God’s chosen people. God forms God’s people into a nation and
gives them land—land that was inhabited by other peoples and that sits at the
crossroads of empires, meaning that from Israel’s perspective, there was a lot
for God to do!
In the New Testament period, Israel no longer exists, Palestine is a client
state of the Roman Empire, and most of the New Testament writers refl ect a
view of God who, for whatever reason, is allowing a time of Roman oppres-
sion that God will bring to an end—perhaps soon, perhaps through a messiah.
But the worldview of a God who acts in history for the sake of God’s people is
relatively the same.
God has not withdrawn from history. The lenses of biblical times are no
longer the dominant ones, at least in the West. We’ve added powerful new
perspectives to our worldview. Views formed by physics, astronomy, biol-
ogy, brain studies, sociology, anthropology, and psychology complicate how
we think about human agency and how we think about God’s agency. And
the relationship between God’s agency and human agency is one of the most
important understandings expressed in any religion.