Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 29:2 (Summer 2025)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

Book Reviews

Is God a Vindictive Bully? Reconciling Portrayals of God in the Old and New Testaments. By Paul Copan. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2022, 320 pp., $27.99 paper.

Paul Copan currently serves as a professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University, holding the endowed Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics. He is a Christian theologian, analytic philosopher, apologist, and author. Is God a Vindictive Bully? serves as a follow-up and companion volume to Copan’s Is God a Moral Monster? (Baker, 2011) and shares a strong connection to Did God Really Command Genocide? (Baker, 2014), written with coauthor Matthew Flannagan. This third book focuses on filling in gaps present in the two previous works. All three share the aim of presenting “a unified portrayal of the kind and severe God of both testaments” (xiv). The depth of this aim is broad enough that Copan can modify and expand on the material in the previous books without much overlap. Several new questions are also raised and answered.

The thesis of the book is based on Romans 11:22 where Paul writes, “Note then the kindness and the severity of God” (ESV). Copan’s focus is to explore “the dual biblical affirmation of God’s kindness and severity” (6), which he believes is consistently portrayed in the OT and the NT without discrepancy. Criticism of this thesis comes from outside and inside the Christian faith community. For those criticizing from outside, particularly the New Atheists, Copan emphasizes, “God is far more loving, kind, patient, tender, and merciful than we could ever know” (6). For those criticizing from within, Copan stresses, “God is more severe and harsh and unsafe than they suggest” (7). The book is divided into seven parts, each addressing a unique category of criticism targeting perceived inconsistencies in the portrayal of God between the OT and the NT. Part one spans the first four chapters, connecting the current attacks from within back to the early church and the heresy of Marcion, the original advocate for pitting the God of Moses and the God of Jesus against one another. Copan focuses much of his attention in this section on the difficult passages addressed by two

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critics from within, Andy Stanley and Greg Boyd, who, he concludes, read Scripture selectively.

Part two, chapters 5–9, answers the question: “What makes the law of Moses so special?” The OT law is compared with the law codes of adjacent cultures at the time, revealing both the similarities and uniqueness of the OT law. Copan believes the similarities build Scripture’s credibility. The differences reveal a uniqueness in the law of Moses that is internally consistent with the rest of the ...