‘Door zijn striemen bent u genezen’: een uitweg uit de verstaanscrisis

Samenvatting

The post-Christian situation makes it difficult to answer the question: Can the God of the Old Testament be good if he punishes whole communities without paying attention to the individual? Contemporary culture protests against religious understandings of guilt and punishment; God has to be a forgiving God. However, if God is understood to be unambiguously good so that he has nothing to do with evil, the result is a God who is harmless, who cannot affect real life. This article argues that, in Christ, God identifies with humanity in order to judge sin and to create a new situation of peace and righteousness. God does more than humanity expects: In Israel’s representative, the Messiah, God establishes a new community in which evil has no place.