In the course of the history of Christianity, there have been many attempts made to drive a wedge between the Old Testament and the New. For the Old Testament was thought to be too closely associated with the idea of a nasty God, whereas the New Testament was seen as presenting a God of peace.
The distinction between the two parts of what came to be the Christian Bible was particularly acute in the early centuries of the Church, when a movement known as `gnosticism' (from the Greek term for `knowledge') strove to discard the Old Testament entirely and retain only the parts of the emerging New Testament that suited its view of reality.
The obvious question is: Why? The answer is wonderfully simple, and apparently quite rational. The gnostics were clever people, and also keenly sensitive to the problem of evil. Maybe the two things go together. In any case, the gnostics were so oppressed by the reality of human suffering that they couldn't square the idea of a good God with the existence of a world of unending pain.
Their solution to the dilemma was, as just intimated, admirably simple. They detached the world of creation from the realm of the good God, represented by Jesus the Redeemer, and attributed its existence, as the opening pages of the Bible claim, to the God of the Old Testament. In this perspective, Jesus came to redeem humanity not from any `fall', but from `creation' itself. For the gnostics, creation itself was the fall.
People then and since have not infrequently been attracted by the argument that the Old Testament shows a cruel God, or at least a God indifferent to the pain of the world he created, a God indeed who was even occasionally prone to encourage his followers to commit acts of barbarism.
Perhaps a somewhat similar view of God lay behind the quip allegedly made by the French writer Stendhal (1783–1842) that, "God's only excuse is that he doesn't exist". The gnostics in an earlier age avoided that wry conclusion, but only by having two gods.
In the early centuries, however, despite knowledge of the gnostic alternative, `mainline' or `orthodox' Christianity took a different view. From the Old Testament - that is to say, from the faith of the Jewish people - the early Christians took over belief in God as the creator of the world, even though it was and is a very difficult belief to accept. But it is a belief that is essential to Christianity.
Faith in God as the creator is hard to swallow for the obvious reason that there is so much suffering in the world that it is practically impossible to see how God could be the creator of this world of suffering, given that Christianity also includes belief in God's infinite goodness.
On the other hand, it's more attractive to accept belief in Jesus alone, in isolation from the creator. That's to say, it's relatively easy to accept belief in Jesus, who is purely good and even willing to give his life for the world's redemption, and simply to shelve the question of who, if anyone, is responsible for the world's existence in the first place.
It is relatively easy to be captivated by the notion that Jesus effected the stark reversal and revaluation of the `real' world's usual order of priorities. It is more difficult to retain faith in Jesus as not just the world's redeemer but as also intimately involved in the creation of a world marked by deep and irremovable ambiguity.
The gnostics - those who claimed to be in the `know' on the ultimate questions - offered an ingenious answer, but its rational neatness still leaves too much unanswered to be really convincing.
Which is why faith is not a luxury but a necessity in religion. Faith cannot explain its mystery, it can only proclaim it. But Christian faith, at any rate, must continue to contain the twin claims, both that Jesus is the Word of God, through whom and for whom the world was created, and at the same time the Son of God who illuminates the world and redeems it from sin and death. How these twin beliefs are to be maintained together or integrated or combined with one another is, admittedly, a question no one has ever succeeded in answering.
It remains a mystery of faith. But these twin beliefs belong to the heart and essence of Christianity. Without these twin beliefs, the possibility of the world's salvation disappears. But on these twin beliefs, even if we’ll never fully understand them, human hope for the final redemption of the world that God has created can rest secure, and can remain a possibility promising more than humanity could ever understand or even imagine.
:: Martin Henry is a former lecturer in theology at St Patrick's College, Maynooth and a priest of the diocese of Down and Connor.
