John
Chapter 14
The smiting is not just implied in the New Testament. Jesus talked frankly about Hell. And the smiting that occurs in Revelations in the New Testament beats anything in the Old.
But I would not characterize God as “mean and vengeful” in either book. He dealt with some serious serious sins.
I don’t buy it. There needs to be some notion of irony, progressive revelation, mystery, etc. to pull this all together.
If we believe the tramping out of the vineyard where the grapes of wrath were stored is a description of the cross it becomes a rather stunning concept. All the ‘smiting’ was done by those who were not God’s people and it was God Himself who took it on the chin. The vision of the zealots was overthrown completely.
The blood was His own. In this amazing reversal of all of human history there is no longer room for tribalism, party spirit, etc. Which is why Christianity alone has such a beautiful vision of inclusiveness, all nations streaming to zion for incorporation into the very Body of the one smitten and resurrected God.
How do non-Christians establish their inclusiveness? Certainly all of human history says it ain’t in our genes and if we look at the mechanisms hypothesized by evolution how could it be?
*** A semi-agnostic co-worker recently remarked to me that he regards the Bible as so much hooey because the God of the Old Testament is mean and wrathful while the God of the New Testament is about love and forgiveness.***
How Marcionite of them. I didn’t know any were still around.
Probably refers to Revelation as that weird book at the end that nobody reads because it is too hard to figure out.
Is the past tense of the word smite, smote or smiteth ?
Very well said. Looking at this from a Roman Catholic perspective, we used to teach little ones the Catechism in rote phrases, then explain more as they matured. But they always had that basic information on which to build their understanding.
Sadly, folks who wanted to be more modern in their Catechetics got rid of rote learning in favor of nice phrases and limited knowledge. As a result, we have at least 2 generations of poorly Catechized Catholics. They never learned the basics and put them in their memory banks, so anything else they learned along the way really had no grounding, so it never stuck. Many Catholics up to the age of 50 would have a hard time explaining not only WHAT the Church teaches, but WHY she teaches it.