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Which "Christian" God Do You Believe In?

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For the followers of the Christian faith, it must be difficult to know which God is the right one. The Old testament God is cruel, vindictive and bloodthirsty, the New testament God is loving and caring.So, which one do you follow? And, how do you reconcile the two Gods? After all, he/she/it cannot change, as it goes against the whole concept of a Godhead, or is/was there really two gods?

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Wow! This is coming as a complete surprise to me. I didn't know that people considered the Old testament and New testaments as 2 different Gods. Of course, I'm not a Christian (I'm a Hindu), but I studied uptil my 10th grade in a Christian School with Good Friday and Christmas celebrations, but didn't really come across something like this.Could you tell us more about this? I find this a bit interesting.

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I am not really a religious person, but still my country is Christian and I know something about it: as I now the main Christian believes are orthodoxy and catholicity, I am a catholic, but I don't really walk to church on Sunday mornings. Anyway, they both appeared when Roman empire divided to west and east. So catholics believe in the new testament same as part of people of orthodoxy, but in orthodoxy there are the old believers, which numbers are quite low and as I know Jews believe in the old testament.. so there is no such a thing that we need to choose between two Gods, there is only one the same God for all the religions, we just believe in him/her/it differently, don't we ?Well, I might be wrong, because I am not really religious, but I had some info some time ago in school on theology and history lessons. In my opinion people who believe in the old testament are quite strange, from my point of view, they have different traditions and stuff, here in my country there are Churches for different sides. But perhaps if I would be reading the old testament in school to know it, maybe I would call the other believers strange, that they do the confession/shrift differently. :o

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I believe they are one in the same. IMO, God is not cruel, vindictive, or bloodthirsty in the Old Testament. He creates the universe and all life, he starts the Exodus from Egypt; hardly the acts of a cruel God. I can understand your view, being that we do witness much of God's wrath in the Old Testament. However, it is important to note that this wrath is directed only at sinners. We also witness many acts of God attempting to aid people like Noah and Abraham. There are many stories in the Old Testament about groups of people who fell into sin and stopped believing in God, and so God punished them as an example for the rest of us. I suppose you could view this as vindictive, but I don't believe that is the intent. God loved us as much in the Old Testament as he does in the New. Most of the Old Testament is about establishing order and law, and in order for people to follow the law, they must fear the repercussions of not following it. This is why Christians are considered 'God fearing'. Because a man who doesn't fear God has no reason to follow his rules.

Edited by presto (see edit history)

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I agree with the idea that they are not two seperate "God's". One point to remember is that the Bible is a book written by humans. The old and new testaments could simply be different perspectives, focusing on different things based on the human aspect of the writings.Hell you can not say a word of a lie, and make George W. Bush look like a genius or a bubbling idiot (obviously one is easier then the other, but I digress). I just feel that interpretation is key. You have to accept these biblical accounts for what they are, a retelling of events. Translated and retranslated and skewed. I'm not saying I think the bible is "wrong" or the old or new testament is "more right"... just that they are different ways of seeing things.So yes, in summary, one God, THE God, qed. heh.

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i know the bible gives god two names... but actually there were more than just 2 names.. but they all respresent the same god.... anyways it's all brainwashing stuff that moses created in 1523bc anyways :Plearn history some more :o

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Valcarni, what exactly do you mean by 'learn history some more'?I ask simply because, if you call the bible brainwashing, you could call history brainwashing... since history is basically the accounts of the past as seen by the dominant power of the period :o

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I dont really understand this question.

 

if you believe in the 'first' god, like you said is in the old testament, then you are following judaism.

 

if you believe in the 'second' god, the new testament, then you are a christian. because the new testament is after jesus christ, therefor christians

 

but i really dont think that there are two gods. maybe two sides of one. but the old testament says that there is only one god. if that was a different entity then the christian bible would only be the new testament.

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i know the bible gives god two names... but actually there were more than just 2 names

I'm not sure which parts you're talking about in the bible, but I'm thinking that God only gives his name once in the Old Testament. And he calls Himself YHWH, or 'I Am'.

if you believe in the 'second' god, the new testament, then you are a christian. because the new testament is after jesus christ, therefor christians

No, you can believe in the New Testament and not be Christian. A Christian believes that Christ existed, was the Son of God, and accepts Him as their savior.

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There aren't two Christian Gods. There are quite a few references to war and doom, blood and gore, in the Old Testament. However, I should probably point out that there are plenty of these things in the NT as well. In the book of Acts, Ananias and Sapphira dropped dead (literally) for lying to God. This is the same God Who, in the Old Testament, wiped out the Egyptians who tried to chase the Jews across the desert (the Exodus). Among other things.So, you can see that God doesn't *really* change from the OT to the NT. He still punishes sins. People still die for disobedience. He's the same God even though He was utterly silent for 400-something years between the OT and NT.It's just that the NT is less filled with accounts of these less-than-wonderful things that God has done. So it seems like God suddenly decided to be all sweet and nice to everyone, which is definitely not the case. He still sees sin as sin, even though thousands and thousands of years have passed since the OT was written.Oh, and what about all the merciful and loving things that God did in the OT? You didn't bring that up. Example: not destroying the entire planet, but sparing Noah and family so that mankind could live on. Not abandoning His chosen people (the Jews) even though they continually turned away from Him. God is God. He's the same in both Old and New Testaments. We might see more of the wrath in the OT than in the NT, but we still see it in both sections. The same goes for God's love and mercy: we see that in both sections too.

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Wow! This is coming as a complete surprise to me. I didn't know that people considered the Old testament and New testaments as 2 different Gods. Of course, I'm not a Christian (I'm a Hindu), but I studied uptil my 10th grade in a Christian School with Good Friday and Christmas celebrations, but didn't really come across something like this.
Could you tell us more about this? I find this a bit interesting.


I was able to read the whole old testament coz its like a long adventure story and its a good story. in the OT the god of the hebrew is cruel and sometimes unforgiving. He even wiped out a whole town leaving only a prosititute who helped the israelites. There were times that he commanded that all will be killed when the freed slaves raided a town. OT is even the cauase of the war between the palestinians and the jews. In OT the jews raided israel and settled there thus pushing away the locals palestinians. and so the fued between two nations still in progress today ;) anyway, but when i started to read the new testaments i stopped after a few pages. It was pretty boring :P and like they said, u might say that its a different god, who knows. This new god is forgiving, offering even his own son. If jesus where born in the OT time his father would wiped out the Romans :o. There is a great difference in attitude between the God of OT and the God of NT. Of course they have their way of explaining since its their job. The bible has soo many holes in it that if you are wise enough you can make a religion out of it. Thats why christianity has so many kinds :o

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I said 2 Gods, simply because the two books in the Bible would appear to have completely different Gods, as I wrote.The God of the old testament comes across as cruel, harsh vindictive etc. He wipes out towns and villages, kills, or orders thousands of people, inspires fear and hatred, and, in what must be one of the most disgusting and sick things ever written, tells a man to prove that he believes in him, by killing his own son!!However, the God of the New Testament appears to have undergone a personality change! According to the Christ, God has become loving and caring, full of compassion etc. Indeed, the two personalities of God are at odds with one another, in a human, it would be called schizophrenia This is why I said 2 Gods, sorry if I wrote and did not explain what I meant properly.

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For the followers of the Christian faith, it must be difficult to know which God is the right one. The Old testament God is cruel, vindictive and bloodthirsty, the New testament God is loving and caring.
So, which one do you follow?

And, how do you reconcile the two Gods?


There is only one God there and the main thing which changed is not God but mankind. It is well known that the liar assumes that everyone is lying and the treacherous see treachery every where they look. But not only has the perception of mankind changed but also the effective means of communicating with and motivating mankind has changed as well. There is no doubt that God comes down off His high horse to speak to us where we are at, for if He did not He would not get anywhere with us, ever.

This was precisely where Jesus deviated from the teachings of the Jewish rabbinal tradition (the Pharisees). He was willing to go where the sinners were and speak to them in a way they could understand. The Pharisees reviled Him for this, and you are no different. You make ignorant judgements from a moral high ground about a world of which you have no experience or comprehension, to condemn what is absolutely good and pure. Two thousand years ago you who have shouted "Crucify him", because all of your morality and self-righteousness is based on ignorance and self-deception, just like the Pharisees.

I am a Christian, but obviously I am no fundamentalist to believe that the Bible is the only source of truth or that its interpretation is obvious. I still believe that the Bible is the word of God, but obviously it was written by human beings doing His will. So the intruments in this were human beings of the age in which it was written and they could only write it in the language which they knew, within which was contained their culture and their way of looking at the world, by which the language itself was limited and constrained. If we have learned to see more clearly since the time it was written then we have the ability to see past the cultural limitations of the writers to the message that God put there for us. And so the Bible remains the word of God for all to receive if we but have the will to read and the desire to understand.

After all, he/she/it cannot change, as it goes against the whole concept of a Godhead, or is/was there really two gods?


I am also no Calvinist to believe that all is fixed and changeless. I do not believe that God as well as men are determined by their natures. God exists both outside of space-time and within it, and His presence within time is capable of everything that a man is capable of including change, learning, risk, sacrifice and self-limitation. God has no limits except those which He Himself chooses. He CAN make a rock so heavy that even He cannot lift it. For in creating the rock, His decision that the rock shall be immovable is equivalent to deciding that He will never move the rock, and having decided this He requires nothing to force Himself to abide by His own decision and as the creator of the rock His decision become a law of the nature of the rock. All of this is, of course, within space-time for otherwise talk of moving a rock makes no sense.

Thus God is ruled by His will and not by His nature. So God can change within time as He wills, but as I said before what has changed is primarily man and not God. Also being outside of time, in the end He has not become or learned anything which He was not or did not know already at the beginning. There is only one God, but He is infinite, and therefore there is no contradiction in knowing Him as three different and distinct persons, but this is NOT the reason for the change you perceive in the Bible in going from the Old Testament to the New.

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The Bible has to be view as ONE book. The story starts from Genesis all the way till Revelation. Actually that's not the end of the story because God is alive today and He is doing His work amongst us even till this very day till He comes again.I agree people might see the OT God as cruel.. But remember this God is the same both in OT, NT and even today. Sin is bad, and has to be punished. Reason why today we don't get struck by lightning the moment we do something bad is because of Jesus. When he died and rose again, he bought us some time. In a sense we're the lucky ones. We are not punished immediately for the sins we commit. But there will come a day where our sins are judged. No crime can go unpunished.But we can be glad that if we do tell God we're sorry, he forgives and FORGETS. That's how loving God is..

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I seriously can't understand anything. I aint a Christian, I am a Hindu. What I can't figure out is how is God evil and cruel etc etc. How can god be a sinner at all??? I mean this is not at all the definition we learnt. Although Hinduism breeds upon one sole entity that they refer to as "Sarvagya" (He who has unlimited knowledge), we have three principal Gods. Brahma (The Creator), Vishnu (The Saviour) and Shiv (The Destroyer).If you read stories of Lord Shiv(a), you might get an impression of a cruel God, but the fact remains, that he is the most calm out of all, and awakens only when cruelty and immorality goes beyond control on earth.As common Logic says, If God does evil, then what does the Devil do? Hence, if God is evil, or cruel, He is not God at all in the first place.Also I have noticed some people using He/She/It for referring to God, I must bring to notice, that Hinduism is the Only religion to worship God in feminine form (apart from Masculine), and legitimately use "Her".

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