Worstelen met Gods berouw
Samenvatting
Christian theology usually struggled with the concept of God’s repentance. Biblical verses describing a repenting God were considered highly anthropomorphic. Texts about his immutability were taken more seriously in order to avoid the idea of an arbitrary and unreliable God. The Jewish tradition had no problem with God’s repentance. On the contrary, rabbis considered repentance one of the features of God’s reliability: he would always turn himself to the people he loved, if they would turn themselves to him. A theology of divine repentance was developed, which tried to establish which human actions encourage God’s ‘conversion’. Both Christianity and Judaism believed in a reliable God, but their religious leaders took a different path to substantiate that claim: whereas Christian theology was concerned with the nature of God by itself, Jewish theology was based on the stable relationship between God and the righteous.
