That was the kind of God I tried to believe in for over 28 years, whilst all the time, knowing that something was truly rotten in the State of Denmark! Through understanding more the teaching of the early church and ultimate Universal redemption, something lifted almost physically off my shoulders. Jesus truly is the Saviour of the World, and shows us the Father's will, and God is completely unknowable yet closer to us than we are to ourselves, hallelujah!

I've always had a problem with an all loving God who would create us against our will then torture us forever for being what we are.

Hart is not expressing his view of God, but: "...the flawed modern conception..." from the mainstream.

This limited conception of YHWH - where he is compelled to comply with the pages of books, read literally - is not a God worthy of worship. The God I see on the cross IS. Mark Brown's comment below is apposite here: and yet the contemporary Church has been 'triggered' into fighting - not for GOD - but for that 'literal' way of reading our scriptures. It ought to be obvious: the Church Dr Hart is describing here has held sovereignty over the Church since Constantine: and THAT is the Church the 'world' (which that Church despises!) is rejecting. As fundamentalism grows within Churchianity, so the Church will shrink in terms of quality.

If love is desire for the good, and God is love, then the god that wields power over us by enforcing his will merely to display his sovereignty begins to sound more like Nietzsche’s Übermensch driven by a will to power, and cannot be the God of the Gospels. Power usually corrupts, and where there is power, there usually is no love. Where there is no love, God is absent.

Beautiful!

I think their are assumptions that have limited this mechanistic version of God that pervert from a greater takeaway. If this God has to display its sovereignty to creation, it's a God with an agenda to prove itself by contrast. This is a very limiting notion. On the other hand, if the same ultimately Deterministic God doesn't have an agenda, is honest about all creations of duality (thus their existence, or their emergence) and this is His act not of Sovereignty but of Providence, and His will whenever acting in these states of duality, to every degree and extent recognized and also unrecognized, if these acts are His Sovereignty, to bestow the goodness that can be known in it and known from beyond the states of duality, then this God is not wicked nor beyond good and evil, but just allowing the problem of evil to persistently be its own illusion, while solving it and coagulating it to perfection at once, even if the equation of it all eludes our currently irrational minds. This isn't really anything that causes an angry reaction but actually gives the clearest sense of peace about why things can appear so wrong, and yet the righteousness of it all is just a great mean that remains fulfilled in the eschaton of any and all things, readied to reveal the totality of its meaning. - YQA

PSA!?

Non sola scripture then. Some very nasty pro hell passages.

Then he never understood rabbi Yeshua in the first place, radical Torah observance - not its abandonment for pagan ideas!!