Time recently published an article by Robert Wright, which tries to sort out how “the God” of the three Abrahamic religions could start off as violent and then moved to be more graceful. Wright gives the impression that God is somehow moody. Wright also attempts to bring together the Christian Old Testament, the Hebrew Torah, and Islam’s Koran. I found this article to be inaccurate and misleading because the author tries to make sense of God from a logical stand point and not a theological stand point. Below are five statements from the article and my five reactions.
#1
“The Bible isn’t the only Scripture with such vacillations between belligerence and tolerance. Muslims, who like Christians and Jews worship the God who revealed himself to Abraham, are counseled in one part of the Koran to “kill the polytheists wherever you find them.” But another part prescribes a different stance toward unbelievers, “To you be your religion; to me my religion.”
My Beef: If you want to understand God, you must understand God theologically. To understand God and compare the God of Christianity to another religion is like trying to compare apples and oranges. These three religions say three very different things about God. Most religion professors would tell you that.
#2
“But the fluctuations aren’t really random. If you juxtapose the Abrahamic Scriptures with what scholars have learned about the circumstances surrounding their creation, a pattern appears. Certain kinds of situations inspired tolerance, and other kinds inspired the opposite. You might even say this pattern is a kind of code, a code that is hidden in the Scriptures and that, once revealed, unlocks the secret of God’s changing moods.”
