The Science of Salvation
One of the revolutionary aspects of Behind the Cosmic Veil is its identification of a hidden cosmology in the Bible, which it then uses to form a compelling, conceptual model of the way the universe is made that sheds new light on spiritual, paranormal and scientific mysteries. Because of the unprecedented degree in which it maps out this cosmology in a scientifically relevant way, I am occasionally asked how Christian salvation might fit into this model. The following question that was sent in by a reader and listener to my interviews is a prime example. My answer (yes, I actually do answer all emails) illustrates the challenges and limitations in taking any scientific theory to this high a spiritual level. It also addresses another common question in Christianity as to how the image of God in the Old Testament and that of the Father of Jesus Christ described in the New Testament can be reconciled. Because of the mixed nature of the question, the answer presents arguments from both scientific and religious viewpoints:
Hi Thomas,
I am a 62 year-old Vietnam veteran. I worked as a radiation therapist treating cancer victims for over thirty years. Most of my life I have been a Christian, save for the Vietnam experience, which set me back for a while. My entire career has been spent on alleviating suffering and providing hope to cancer patients. I think I have the gist of your book having read and studied it a few times. How does the death of Jesus Christ affect your theory of everything? In the Bible, it states death is the wages of sin. I'm trying to understand Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. Is there anyway that your theory correlates the death of Christ for the remittance of sin to the satisfaction of God the Father, being that Jesus was sinless? Many who attack Christianity attack the Father as a bloodthirsty God who demanded His own Son be sacrificed. They can't square Old Testament Yahweh with the loving Father of the New Testament (this includes a fellow guest on the Byte Show, Dr.Farrell, with whom I've corresponded). I somehow think proper application of your work would answer this question. Could you possibly give me your opinion, or point to a program where you may have addressed this? I hope I have phrased this question properly. I have a background in radiation physics and am fascinated with your book since it has addressed the presence of evil in the world which I now understand. Did sinless Jesus death throw off the cosmic tit for tat so to speak? I hope this makes some sense. Thank you so much for your labor, I'm sure it has helped not only myself, but thousand of others come to a greater understanding and faith in our Creator.
ANSWER:
Thank you so much for writing and for your interest in my work. And a sincere thank you for your service to our country.
Before I begin, I think it's important to re-affirm my Christian faith and belief in the Bible. Having read my book, you know this already. But I mention it again to provide the proper perspective and context for what follows.
The question as to how one might correlate my theory with the Christian process of salvation has come up numerous times since my book has been published, and so I though your questions might be a perfect opportunity to expand on this in detail.
The questions you ask are difficult and multi-faceted. As you know, Behind the Cosmic Veil takes Biblical principles to a new level of scientific relevance. However, science is a study of what is physical, specifically, the determination of the causes behind physically observable effects (cause and effect). Even if you include in your reckoning certain causes that may reside outside the physical (as I have done with supergeometric patterns and superphysical diffluential waves, and others such as physicists David Bohm and Louis de Broglie did with their concept of guide waves, or Theodore Kalusa with non-local gravity), if we are to adhere to scientific argument, then the effects of whatever mechanism is described must be physically observable. Once we embark in theorizing beyond effects that are physically observable (i.e., a theory where both cause and effect are not physically observable or measurable), we have left the realm of science. This is where religious, philosophical or metaphysical theories come into play. Of course, the problems with these kinds of theorizing has always been that they have never been able to make predictions that would be physically observable or testable, and therefore such theories are not scientific, however sound they might be spiritually. What makes my work different than what has come before is that it indeed makes physical predictions that can be experimentally verified, and so the theory of supergeometry is truly a scientific theory. So, for example, when I speak of the interaction between both the Positive and Negative Absolutes (God and Satan if you will, or from a strictly limited human perspective, good and evil) that produces the diffluential wave functions required for the dimensions of the physical universe, I can point to aspects of the physically observable universe as evidence, and also make physical predictions based on this model that can be experimentally verified. The results of those experiments will also be hard, physical observations. By confining my work to this approach, I have elevated ideas that were previously purely philosophical, religious or speculative to that which is scientifically relevant.
So, in order to stay on a scientifically relevant course, I had to establish the standard that whatever "spiritual" causes we might consider in our reckoning, the effects resulting from those causes must be physically observable in order to be directly embodied in my theory. But what physical observation can we make about salvation? Yes, the death of Jesus was a physically observable event. Even the various miraculous phenomena that are reported in the NT as having been associated with the timing of Jesus' death (temple curtain tearing, sky darkening, etc.) are all physically observable events. I personally believe that these events of power were due to a massive release of the Holy Spirit onto the face of the earth when Jesus surrendered His Spirit, and my theoretical model offers a reasonable way to understand how these events were physically possible. But the salvation of the soul effected by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is purely a spiritual matter, and therefore has no physically observable effect. As much as I would like to have a scientifically reasonable model of Christian salvation, the process of salvation takes place solely in the spiritual realm, and so it remains a matter of Christian belief and faith. And I suspect in the eyes of God it should remain so.
Here's what I mean. A Bible-believing Christian understands that the entire physical universe was created through the Word of God (greek:Logos), which acted as a cosmic blueprint if you will. The universe is then a physical expression of that purely spiritual Word. But it is only the physical part of reality—the physical universe—that we are able to analyze, understand and explain though science and scientific theory. That's why the study of how the creation is put together is called physics—it's about what's physical. Now let's say that the physical universe ceased to exist. At the point where the physical ends, so does physics, because physics is a description of the physical universe. Yet the Word still would exist, because the Word is independent of the physical. The universe is a physical expression of the Word, and so it can be studied scientifically because it is a physically observable expression of the Word. But the reverse does not hold true, or in other words, the Word is not an expression of the physical. Without that physical expression, there would be nothing that could be scientifically describable or even inferable about the existence and nature of the Word. In short, the only means by which we can even begin to understand the nature of the Word in a scientifically relevant way is that we have a physically observable component of that Word (the creation) to measure and analyze. This ability to discern at least a portion of the nature of God through the study of the physical universe is reflected in the Biblical statement that certain qualities (but not all) of God's nature can be understood by observing "the things that are made."
The physically observable component of the process of creation is the universe itself. It is all around us, and extends out as far as we can see. But where are we to find the physically observable component of the process of salvation? Take two individuals—one is saved, one is not. Is there any physically detectable, observable or measurable expression of this salvation in the saved person that could differentiate that individual from the unsaved? Let's put it another way—is there any physically detectable or measurable observation that would indicate whether or not a particular individual has accepted the salvation of Jesus Christ by examining the physical body alone? Is there some physical evidence like that from which we can tell if a person has had a certain disease by testing for specific antibodies in their blood? To the best of my understanding, there isn’t. To the best of my efforts, I cannot identify or isolate a physically measurable expression of salvation. Even if we pointed to a physically observable difference in a saved person's behavior, how would we qualify or quantify it scientifically? Perhaps we could perform brain scans to see the changes in brain activity patterns between pre- and post-salvational states. Could we scan an unsaved person for a ‘pre-salvational’ control image, then have that person saved (how could you even go about the salvation process this way?), and then re-scanned so that we could then compare the two bodies of data? Would the physical effects in brain patterns be identical for every individual? And how would we know if those same pattern changes might not also occur with other kinds of altered states of consciousness not directly attributable to Christian salvation?
Admittedly, this might be an interesting experiment, and I personally would be very intrigued about someone conducting such an experiment. But until someone would have an idea as to how such an experiment might even be framed (or even who would conduct or fund it), I believe we have to resign ourselves to accept that salvation is solely a spiritual matter of faith, and so resides entirely outside physical theory. One argument for salvation being an exclusively spiritual matter is that a person's salvation would still survive and persist even after the physical body—or the entire physical creation for that matter—ceases to exist, and so therefore must be purely spiritual, and therefore likewise remains beyond the reach of scientific scrutiny.
So to answer that part of your questioning, salvation through Jesus Christ and the remission of sin resides outside of any physical theory, measurement or test, because it has no direct physically observable expression or recognizable pattern of materialization (Biblically speaking, eternal life actually exists in a state of dematerialization, since the resurrection and the associated replacement of the old physical universe with the new heaven and earth described in both Romans and Revelation purges these things of their corruptible, material nature). The death of Jesus was indeed physically observable, but the understanding that this death provided a means by which sin is pardoned by God can only be discerned spiritually, since there is no physical expression of it that we humans can measure with scientific instruments. And so since there is no way to establish whether a person is saved by a physical examination, then so there is no way to correlate my theory, or any scientific theory, with Christian salvation.
As I state repeatedly in my book, such considerations are far above and beyond the limited scope of my work, which is confined to explaining the nature of what is physical. The spiritual relevance of Christian salvation is far greater than any physical theory of science. Science is the servant of mankind, not its master. Science is the creation of humanity, not its creator—what it means to be human does not arise from nor is endowed by science, in spite of what certain atheists would like us all to believe. Salvation exists outside of and completely independent of the physical. One of the related goals my book does accomplish, however, is to present for the first time a scientifically relevant model by which the interaction between a Creator and an adversary can give rise to physical reality (including gravity and time), and even a physical expression for the Word of God. While it cannot demonstrate salvation, it has certainly provided a new (and I believe vastly superior) avenue in Christian apologetics to reasonably explain to a 21st Century world how and why an all-seeing and all-knowing God capable of anticipating all things would have ever permitted the existence of evil in this world.
As to what interview in which this subject can be found, I discussed this in some detail with GeorgeAnn Hughes of The Byte Show in what I believe was Episode Seven or Eight of my many interviews with her. But I've also covered ideas in this letter that I've not discussed on any interview, so I think this text is a superior source for my viewpoints on this subject.
Reconciling the God of the OT with the Father of Jesus Christ is an issue that seems to have originated back with the 2nd century Gnostics. To cover the subject adequately would require a whole book (indeed, such books have already been written)! I do have space here for a few comments I'd respectfully pose to anyone who believe the two are different. First, it's abundantly clear from the NT gospels and letters that these authors unquestionably believed the two were the same God. Even the words of Jesus display that He claimed the God of the OT to be His Father. The writings of Paul assert that same position. It’s common to overlook the fact that at the time of these NT writings, there was no NT! Therefore, all the references to God in the Gospels and the letters were derived from the Jewish writings of the OT, which were allegedly from the time of the dominion of the "evil" God. All the NT authors had access to the same Jewish canon that we have today. So for those who believe the OT God was different than the Father of Jesus Christ, I would like to respectfully but assertively ask them this: How it is that you have somehow ascertained this "truth" that the NT authors, the apostle Paul, and even Jesus Himself were ignorant of or mistaken about? How is it that you are so enlightened that your great knowledge supercedes that of both the Apostles and Jesus Christ? When Jesus cried out to His Father from the cross (Matt 27:46), did He not cry out to the same OT God as did David before Him (Psalm 22:1)? If Christ's Messianic claim was based in part on His lineage from David, then wasn't it the OT God who proclaimed that lineage to be Messianic? Take a look at the passages in Matthew 5:17-35. Isn't Christ claiming, promoting and invoking the God of the OT? And aren't some of the things He's saying even harder and seemingly more cruel than what is written in the OT? And doesn't He say that this "cruel" law issued by this allegedly "evil" God is not only still in force, but that He actually came to fulfill this "evil" God's law?
And if one wishes to go down the path of claiming that the NT was corrupted or forged in some way to conceal the truth, how is it that they can place any confidence in anything written in the NT? And if they question the reliability of the NT, on what authority is their own Christian faith based (if they claim to be Christians at all), since by their own words they deem the witness of the NT unreliable? Such a religion would be a personally created religion based in part on cherry-picked portions of the Bible, the rest being filled in with whatever an individual would imagine it should be. Whatever that self-described religion might be, it's certainly not the Christianity described in the Bible. I guess it would then be up to each individual to decide which witness they are going to believe—the Biblical authors, or the “two Gods” pundits—or to determine what it is that they are even capable of believing.
Although this brief argument does not cover every aspect of the reconciliation between the seeming contrast in the depictions of God in the OT and NT, it at least demonstrates that such reconciliation must exist, and so I think one should seek to understand such reconciliation first instead of pursuing alternative, extra-Biblical solutions. Of course, the latter would not be nearly as sensational or controversial, and subsequently would not sell as many books.
This Gnostic belief of different Gods in the OT vs NT that has survived into modern times emerges from the refusal to accept any other image of God than what I call the "warm-fuzzy teddy-bear-in-the-sky" view of what its adherents want God to be. It is embodied in the perennial questions like "If God is good, why is there evil in the world," or "Why do bad things happen to good people?" As you know, my work finally provides a rational, convincing answer to this that is not based solely on religious argument, but in a scientifically relevant one. This ‘teddy bear’ concept has grown increasingly popular even in modern churches. But an honest examination of the NT shows that the Father of Jesus Christ is no teddy bear! For example, most of the penalties for sin that God proclaims in the OT speak of death and destruction in this world. Christ actually put less emphasis on that, but instead taught eternal hellfire damnation, a fate far more horrible! No teddy bear here. There are many other examples. I wonder how many have contemplated the man who was born blind in John 8:57? The disciples, not being able to imagine how else he could have been born this way, could only think that some sin had been committed to make this man so, a condition that in the ancient world with no public welfare would have meant a life of suffering and begging. At least if it were due to sin, then it would be understandable and just. But Jesus responds with the most unjust thing imaginable, in that God made the man that way, and condemned him to a life of suffering, just so this unfortunate man could serve as a five-minute talking point for Jesus! No teddy bear here either. In fact, the "evil" OT God would seem more just than what the Father of Jesus Christ did to this poor fellow! If I wasn't convicted otherwise, I might be tempted from this to make up my own religion too!
Finally, we must take extraordinary care in interpreting phrases from the Bible like "the wages of sin is death." Several words in the NT—death, life and light for example—can have multiple layers of mystical or symbolic meaning. Look at John 8:51. Do you think when Jesus said that anyone who keeps His Word will never taste death, that He meant such a person would not physically die? Or was He talking about spiritual "death?" There are many such examples in the gospel of John where a sincere and unprejudiced reading reveals He was not speaking strictly of physical death. Or what of Paul, in Romans 7:9, when he says that when the law came to him, he "died." Was Paul saying that he died physically or spiritually (if it was physical death, he would not have been around to write Romans!)? Yet there are times when physical death is the intended meaning, and also times that both physical and spiritual death are being inferred with the same phrase, as is the case with many other passages in the NT where certain concepts being presented have multiple layers of meaning. Many misinterpretations of the Bible have risen on the wings of passages taken out of context, or have been hijacked to satisfy a preconceived notion or denominational precept and doctrine.
I hope you find this useful information in your personal quest for Truth. Thanks again for writing.
Warmest Regards,
Thomas P. Fusco
One of the revolutionary aspects of Behind the Cosmic Veil is its identification of a hidden cosmology in the Bible, which it then uses to form a compelling, conceptual model of the way the universe is made that sheds new light on spiritual, paranormal and scientific mysteries. Because of the unprecedented degree in which it maps out this cosmology in a scientifically relevant way, I am occasionally asked how Christian salvation might fit into this model. The following question that was sent in by a reader and listener to my interviews is a prime example. My answer (yes, I actually do answer all emails) illustrates the challenges and limitations in taking any scientific theory to this high a spiritual level. It also addresses another common question in Christianity as to how the image of God in the Old Testament and that of the Father of Jesus Christ described in the New Testament can be reconciled. Because of the mixed nature of the question, the answer presents arguments from both scientific and religious viewpoints:
Hi Thomas,
I am a 62 year-old Vietnam veteran. I worked as a radiation therapist treating cancer victims for over thirty years. Most of my life I have been a Christian, save for the Vietnam experience, which set me back for a while. My entire career has been spent on alleviating suffering and providing hope to cancer patients. I think I have the gist of your book having read and studied it a few times. How does the death of Jesus Christ affect your theory of everything? In the Bible, it states death is the wages of sin. I'm trying to understand Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. Is there anyway that your theory correlates the death of Christ for the remittance of sin to the satisfaction of God the Father, being that Jesus was sinless? Many who attack Christianity attack the Father as a bloodthirsty God who demanded His own Son be sacrificed. They can't square Old Testament Yahweh with the loving Father of the New Testament (this includes a fellow guest on the Byte Show, Dr.Farrell, with whom I've corresponded). I somehow think proper application of your work would answer this question. Could you possibly give me your opinion, or point to a program where you may have addressed this? I hope I have phrased this question properly. I have a background in radiation physics and am fascinated with your book since it has addressed the presence of evil in the world which I now understand. Did sinless Jesus death throw off the cosmic tit for tat so to speak? I hope this makes some sense. Thank you so much for your labor, I'm sure it has helped not only myself, but thousand of others come to a greater understanding and faith in our Creator.
ANSWER:
Thank you so much for writing and for your interest in my work. And a sincere thank you for your service to our country.
Before I begin, I think it's important to re-affirm my Christian faith and belief in the Bible. Having read my book, you know this already. But I mention it again to provide the proper perspective and context for what follows.
The question as to how one might correlate my theory with the Christian process of salvation has come up numerous times since my book has been published, and so I though your questions might be a perfect opportunity to expand on this in detail.
The questions you ask are difficult and multi-faceted. As you know, Behind the Cosmic Veil takes Biblical principles to a new level of scientific relevance. However, science is a study of what is physical, specifically, the determination of the causes behind physically observable effects (cause and effect). Even if you include in your reckoning certain causes that may reside outside the physical (as I have done with supergeometric patterns and superphysical diffluential waves, and others such as physicists David Bohm and Louis de Broglie did with their concept of guide waves, or Theodore Kalusa with non-local gravity), if we are to adhere to scientific argument, then the effects of whatever mechanism is described must be physically observable. Once we embark in theorizing beyond effects that are physically observable (i.e., a theory where both cause and effect are not physically observable or measurable), we have left the realm of science. This is where religious, philosophical or metaphysical theories come into play. Of course, the problems with these kinds of theorizing has always been that they have never been able to make predictions that would be physically observable or testable, and therefore such theories are not scientific, however sound they might be spiritually. What makes my work different than what has come before is that it indeed makes physical predictions that can be experimentally verified, and so the theory of supergeometry is truly a scientific theory. So, for example, when I speak of the interaction between both the Positive and Negative Absolutes (God and Satan if you will, or from a strictly limited human perspective, good and evil) that produces the diffluential wave functions required for the dimensions of the physical universe, I can point to aspects of the physically observable universe as evidence, and also make physical predictions based on this model that can be experimentally verified. The results of those experiments will also be hard, physical observations. By confining my work to this approach, I have elevated ideas that were previously purely philosophical, religious or speculative to that which is scientifically relevant.
So, in order to stay on a scientifically relevant course, I had to establish the standard that whatever "spiritual" causes we might consider in our reckoning, the effects resulting from those causes must be physically observable in order to be directly embodied in my theory. But what physical observation can we make about salvation? Yes, the death of Jesus was a physically observable event. Even the various miraculous phenomena that are reported in the NT as having been associated with the timing of Jesus' death (temple curtain tearing, sky darkening, etc.) are all physically observable events. I personally believe that these events of power were due to a massive release of the Holy Spirit onto the face of the earth when Jesus surrendered His Spirit, and my theoretical model offers a reasonable way to understand how these events were physically possible. But the salvation of the soul effected by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is purely a spiritual matter, and therefore has no physically observable effect. As much as I would like to have a scientifically reasonable model of Christian salvation, the process of salvation takes place solely in the spiritual realm, and so it remains a matter of Christian belief and faith. And I suspect in the eyes of God it should remain so.
Here's what I mean. A Bible-believing Christian understands that the entire physical universe was created through the Word of God (greek:Logos), which acted as a cosmic blueprint if you will. The universe is then a physical expression of that purely spiritual Word. But it is only the physical part of reality—the physical universe—that we are able to analyze, understand and explain though science and scientific theory. That's why the study of how the creation is put together is called physics—it's about what's physical. Now let's say that the physical universe ceased to exist. At the point where the physical ends, so does physics, because physics is a description of the physical universe. Yet the Word still would exist, because the Word is independent of the physical. The universe is a physical expression of the Word, and so it can be studied scientifically because it is a physically observable expression of the Word. But the reverse does not hold true, or in other words, the Word is not an expression of the physical. Without that physical expression, there would be nothing that could be scientifically describable or even inferable about the existence and nature of the Word. In short, the only means by which we can even begin to understand the nature of the Word in a scientifically relevant way is that we have a physically observable component of that Word (the creation) to measure and analyze. This ability to discern at least a portion of the nature of God through the study of the physical universe is reflected in the Biblical statement that certain qualities (but not all) of God's nature can be understood by observing "the things that are made."
The physically observable component of the process of creation is the universe itself. It is all around us, and extends out as far as we can see. But where are we to find the physically observable component of the process of salvation? Take two individuals—one is saved, one is not. Is there any physically detectable, observable or measurable expression of this salvation in the saved person that could differentiate that individual from the unsaved? Let's put it another way—is there any physically detectable or measurable observation that would indicate whether or not a particular individual has accepted the salvation of Jesus Christ by examining the physical body alone? Is there some physical evidence like that from which we can tell if a person has had a certain disease by testing for specific antibodies in their blood? To the best of my understanding, there isn’t. To the best of my efforts, I cannot identify or isolate a physically measurable expression of salvation. Even if we pointed to a physically observable difference in a saved person's behavior, how would we qualify or quantify it scientifically? Perhaps we could perform brain scans to see the changes in brain activity patterns between pre- and post-salvational states. Could we scan an unsaved person for a ‘pre-salvational’ control image, then have that person saved (how could you even go about the salvation process this way?), and then re-scanned so that we could then compare the two bodies of data? Would the physical effects in brain patterns be identical for every individual? And how would we know if those same pattern changes might not also occur with other kinds of altered states of consciousness not directly attributable to Christian salvation?
Admittedly, this might be an interesting experiment, and I personally would be very intrigued about someone conducting such an experiment. But until someone would have an idea as to how such an experiment might even be framed (or even who would conduct or fund it), I believe we have to resign ourselves to accept that salvation is solely a spiritual matter of faith, and so resides entirely outside physical theory. One argument for salvation being an exclusively spiritual matter is that a person's salvation would still survive and persist even after the physical body—or the entire physical creation for that matter—ceases to exist, and so therefore must be purely spiritual, and therefore likewise remains beyond the reach of scientific scrutiny.
So to answer that part of your questioning, salvation through Jesus Christ and the remission of sin resides outside of any physical theory, measurement or test, because it has no direct physically observable expression or recognizable pattern of materialization (Biblically speaking, eternal life actually exists in a state of dematerialization, since the resurrection and the associated replacement of the old physical universe with the new heaven and earth described in both Romans and Revelation purges these things of their corruptible, material nature). The death of Jesus was indeed physically observable, but the understanding that this death provided a means by which sin is pardoned by God can only be discerned spiritually, since there is no physical expression of it that we humans can measure with scientific instruments. And so since there is no way to establish whether a person is saved by a physical examination, then so there is no way to correlate my theory, or any scientific theory, with Christian salvation.
As I state repeatedly in my book, such considerations are far above and beyond the limited scope of my work, which is confined to explaining the nature of what is physical. The spiritual relevance of Christian salvation is far greater than any physical theory of science. Science is the servant of mankind, not its master. Science is the creation of humanity, not its creator—what it means to be human does not arise from nor is endowed by science, in spite of what certain atheists would like us all to believe. Salvation exists outside of and completely independent of the physical. One of the related goals my book does accomplish, however, is to present for the first time a scientifically relevant model by which the interaction between a Creator and an adversary can give rise to physical reality (including gravity and time), and even a physical expression for the Word of God. While it cannot demonstrate salvation, it has certainly provided a new (and I believe vastly superior) avenue in Christian apologetics to reasonably explain to a 21st Century world how and why an all-seeing and all-knowing God capable of anticipating all things would have ever permitted the existence of evil in this world.
As to what interview in which this subject can be found, I discussed this in some detail with GeorgeAnn Hughes of The Byte Show in what I believe was Episode Seven or Eight of my many interviews with her. But I've also covered ideas in this letter that I've not discussed on any interview, so I think this text is a superior source for my viewpoints on this subject.
Reconciling the God of the OT with the Father of Jesus Christ is an issue that seems to have originated back with the 2nd century Gnostics. To cover the subject adequately would require a whole book (indeed, such books have already been written)! I do have space here for a few comments I'd respectfully pose to anyone who believe the two are different. First, it's abundantly clear from the NT gospels and letters that these authors unquestionably believed the two were the same God. Even the words of Jesus display that He claimed the God of the OT to be His Father. The writings of Paul assert that same position. It’s common to overlook the fact that at the time of these NT writings, there was no NT! Therefore, all the references to God in the Gospels and the letters were derived from the Jewish writings of the OT, which were allegedly from the time of the dominion of the "evil" God. All the NT authors had access to the same Jewish canon that we have today. So for those who believe the OT God was different than the Father of Jesus Christ, I would like to respectfully but assertively ask them this: How it is that you have somehow ascertained this "truth" that the NT authors, the apostle Paul, and even Jesus Himself were ignorant of or mistaken about? How is it that you are so enlightened that your great knowledge supercedes that of both the Apostles and Jesus Christ? When Jesus cried out to His Father from the cross (Matt 27:46), did He not cry out to the same OT God as did David before Him (Psalm 22:1)? If Christ's Messianic claim was based in part on His lineage from David, then wasn't it the OT God who proclaimed that lineage to be Messianic? Take a look at the passages in Matthew 5:17-35. Isn't Christ claiming, promoting and invoking the God of the OT? And aren't some of the things He's saying even harder and seemingly more cruel than what is written in the OT? And doesn't He say that this "cruel" law issued by this allegedly "evil" God is not only still in force, but that He actually came to fulfill this "evil" God's law?
And if one wishes to go down the path of claiming that the NT was corrupted or forged in some way to conceal the truth, how is it that they can place any confidence in anything written in the NT? And if they question the reliability of the NT, on what authority is their own Christian faith based (if they claim to be Christians at all), since by their own words they deem the witness of the NT unreliable? Such a religion would be a personally created religion based in part on cherry-picked portions of the Bible, the rest being filled in with whatever an individual would imagine it should be. Whatever that self-described religion might be, it's certainly not the Christianity described in the Bible. I guess it would then be up to each individual to decide which witness they are going to believe—the Biblical authors, or the “two Gods” pundits—or to determine what it is that they are even capable of believing.
Although this brief argument does not cover every aspect of the reconciliation between the seeming contrast in the depictions of God in the OT and NT, it at least demonstrates that such reconciliation must exist, and so I think one should seek to understand such reconciliation first instead of pursuing alternative, extra-Biblical solutions. Of course, the latter would not be nearly as sensational or controversial, and subsequently would not sell as many books.
This Gnostic belief of different Gods in the OT vs NT that has survived into modern times emerges from the refusal to accept any other image of God than what I call the "warm-fuzzy teddy-bear-in-the-sky" view of what its adherents want God to be. It is embodied in the perennial questions like "If God is good, why is there evil in the world," or "Why do bad things happen to good people?" As you know, my work finally provides a rational, convincing answer to this that is not based solely on religious argument, but in a scientifically relevant one. This ‘teddy bear’ concept has grown increasingly popular even in modern churches. But an honest examination of the NT shows that the Father of Jesus Christ is no teddy bear! For example, most of the penalties for sin that God proclaims in the OT speak of death and destruction in this world. Christ actually put less emphasis on that, but instead taught eternal hellfire damnation, a fate far more horrible! No teddy bear here. There are many other examples. I wonder how many have contemplated the man who was born blind in John 8:57? The disciples, not being able to imagine how else he could have been born this way, could only think that some sin had been committed to make this man so, a condition that in the ancient world with no public welfare would have meant a life of suffering and begging. At least if it were due to sin, then it would be understandable and just. But Jesus responds with the most unjust thing imaginable, in that God made the man that way, and condemned him to a life of suffering, just so this unfortunate man could serve as a five-minute talking point for Jesus! No teddy bear here either. In fact, the "evil" OT God would seem more just than what the Father of Jesus Christ did to this poor fellow! If I wasn't convicted otherwise, I might be tempted from this to make up my own religion too!
Finally, we must take extraordinary care in interpreting phrases from the Bible like "the wages of sin is death." Several words in the NT—death, life and light for example—can have multiple layers of mystical or symbolic meaning. Look at John 8:51. Do you think when Jesus said that anyone who keeps His Word will never taste death, that He meant such a person would not physically die? Or was He talking about spiritual "death?" There are many such examples in the gospel of John where a sincere and unprejudiced reading reveals He was not speaking strictly of physical death. Or what of Paul, in Romans 7:9, when he says that when the law came to him, he "died." Was Paul saying that he died physically or spiritually (if it was physical death, he would not have been around to write Romans!)? Yet there are times when physical death is the intended meaning, and also times that both physical and spiritual death are being inferred with the same phrase, as is the case with many other passages in the NT where certain concepts being presented have multiple layers of meaning. Many misinterpretations of the Bible have risen on the wings of passages taken out of context, or have been hijacked to satisfy a preconceived notion or denominational precept and doctrine.
I hope you find this useful information in your personal quest for Truth. Thanks again for writing.
Warmest Regards,
Thomas P. Fusco