Is God a Vindictive Bully? | with Paul Copan
I Don't Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST
Dr. Frank Turek
4.9 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2022
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is God a vindictive bully? Is the God of the Old Testament different than the God of the New Testament? Critics outside the church often accuse the Old Testament God of genocide, racism, ethnic cleansing, and violence. But a rising tide of critics within the church claim that Moses and other "primitive," violence-prone prophets were mistaken about God's commands and character. Both sets of critics dismiss this allegedly harsh, flawed, "textual" Old Testament God in favor of the kind, compassionate, "actual" God revealed by Jesus. But are they right to do so?
There's no better person on the planet to discuss this issue than our good friend and noted apologist, Dr. Paul Copan! Following his popular book, Is God a Moral Monster?, his new book, Is God a Vindictive Bully?: Portrayals of God in the Old and New Testaments, contains brand new content and takes on some of the most difficult Old Testament challenges and places them in their larger historical and theological contexts to help us dispute these emerging claims that are creating a destructive gap between the Testaments.
On today's podcast episode, Frank and Paul discuss the following questions:
Who are these critics "from without and from within" the Church?
Did Jesus really repudiate the laws of Moses?
What's the deal with imprecatory psalms like Psalm 137 and "dashing babies against the rocks"?!
What can the Old Testament law still teach us today?
What is incrementalism, and how does God use it?
Does "utter destruction" really mean what we think it does?\
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Paul's new book: https://a.co/d/7gB1YLZ
Paul's website: http://www.paulcopan.com/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Does truth exist? |
| 0:03.3 | Because you have faith, does that make this book cool? |
| 0:05.6 | Does God exist? |
| 0:07.4 | So when someone says there is no truth, |
| 0:09.8 | if you apply the claim to itself, what should you say? |
| 0:12.6 | Is that true? |
| 0:15.2 | They don't think Christianity is true. |
| 0:17.7 | They're talked out of it. |
| 0:20.0 | You know why they're talked out of it? |
| 0:22.0 | Because they've never been talked into it. |
| 0:24.2 | Cross-exemining skeptical and atheistic views. |
| 0:28.0 | Welcome to Cross-exemining with Dr. Frank Turek. |
| 0:33.0 | Ladies and gentlemen, is God a vindictive bully? |
| 0:36.6 | Is the God of the Old Testament different from the God of the New Testament? |
| 0:41.6 | What about some of these moral problems that we have in the Old Testament? |
| 0:45.9 | Slavery, apparent genocide, misogyny. |
| 0:50.5 | Is this really the true God? |
| 0:53.0 | What do we have to say about this? |
| 0:54.6 | Well, we have one of our favorite guests on to talk about it. |
| 0:57.8 | Dr. Paul Copan, who originally has been on this program |
| 1:02.2 | to talk about a similar issue with his first book, |
| 1:04.4 | is God a moral monster making sense of the Old Testament. |
... |
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