The greatest barrier to faith isn’t doubt, it’s fear. For countless Christians, the image of an angry, punitive God creates a spiritual paralysis that prevents genuine relationship with the Divine. What if our understanding of God’s wrath, judgment, and justice has been fundamentally wrong? Dr. Bradley Jersak, professor at St. Stephen’s University and author of multiple groundbreaking books on the nature of God, joins The Dig In Podcast to dismantle the violent God narrative and reveal the Christ-like character that transforms everything.
This conversation tackles one of the most urgent theological crises in modern Christianity: the disconnect between the God of the Old Testament and the revelation of Jesus Christ. Dr. Jersak brings decades of scholarly work and pastoral wisdom to help Christians read Scripture through the lens of the cross rather than forcing Jesus to fit our preconceived notions of divine violence.
The God Problem: When Theology Creates Trauma
Dr. Jersak doesn’t mince words when addressing the consequences of believing in a violent, retributive God. Drawing from a recent master’s thesis he supervised, he reveals a disturbing pattern: “The very same symptoms that women were exhibiting in terms of PTSD through violence of their husbands or partners, she was discovering in those who’ve internalized the retributive God, the punishing God.”
This research examined three specific theological frameworks:
- Old Testament violence interpreted literally
- Penal substitutionary atonement as divine child abuse
- Eternal conscious torment as God’s ultimate threat
The fruit of these beliefs? Religious trauma that mirrors domestic abuse. “Jesus said, test by the fruit,” Dr. Jersak reminds us. “And I’m telling you what the fruit is and it’s religious trauma rooted in those beliefs. That’s the cost.”
Why We’re Comfortable With an Angry God
The conversation takes a profound psychological turn when examining why so many Christians prefer a wrathful deity over a Christ-like one. Dr. Jersak identifies the root issue: “If you’re feeling that you’re an awful person, then the God who sees you as an awful person makes sense.”
This isn’t just bad doctrine from certain faith traditions. It’s rooted in human shame itself. As Dr. Jersak explains through the Genesis narrative: “Adam and Eve stumble and the very first thing they do is they construct an image of God out of their shame from whom they need to hide because he’s gonna kill them. He had never presented himself that way.”
But there’s a second dynamic at play. We want God to be angry toward others. “He becomes a projection of our hopes that he would come down hard on those who we don’t love and want included,” Dr. Jersak observes. This reveals how the angry God serves both our self-loathing and our hatred of enemies—the exact opposite of Jesus’ teaching.
Reading Scripture Through Christ: The Hermeneutical Revolution
One of the most powerful moments in the conversation addresses the fundamental question: when people say the God of the Old Testament is different from the God of the New, what needs correcting?
Dr. Jersak identifies it as a hermeneutical problem, meaning how we interpret Scripture. “What you can’t do is read the wrath, anger and violence of God literally or you’ll end up having the God of the Old Testament in an ugly way.”
The Early Church Solution
The early church fathers didn’t throw out the Old Testament like the Marcionite heresy. Instead, they developed a reading strategy that Dr. Jersak learned from second-century figures like Melito of Sardis and Irenaeus. Every story, character, and event in the Old Testament prefigures Christ in three ways:
1. Suffering Prefigures the Cross Any suffering of God’s people—from Joseph in the pit to Israel in exile—points forward to the much greater suffering of Jesus bearing the sins and sorrows of all history on the cross.
2. Victories Anticipate Christ’s Victory Even the dubious, ugly conquests of the Old Testament prefigure “the far greater, more beautiful victory of Christ where he makes everything right without having to kill one person even.”
3. Betrayals Reveal Human Sin The critiques of the prophets against Israel’s kings identify the horrible ways God’s people have betrayed him, prefiguring the ultimate betrayal when religious leadership, state power, and mob violence conspired to crucify Jesus.
Teaching Children to Find Jesus in Every Story
Dr. Jersak’s approach with eight and nine-year-olds is brilliantly simple. He has them memorize John 10:10: “It’s the thief who steals, kills and destroys, but I, Jesus, have come to give you life and that more abundantly.”
Then when reading Old Testament stories, children look for death-dealing and life-giving. As Dr. Jersak explains: “We use Pete Enns’ phrase, because God let his children tell the story and they didn’t know Jesus yet.”
The results are remarkable. Kids discover that Jesus “is not in the sword of Joshua. He’s in the veins of Rahab. He’s not in the conquest of Jerusalem or the siege of Babylon. He’s in the tears of Jeremiah.” When children learn this framework young, “they’re unrattled when they see it. They know just what to do.”
The Bible and Jesus: Which One Is Actually God?
The conversation tackles a dangerous but necessary question: do we worship the Bible more than we worship the one the Bible points to?
Dr. Jersak is unflinching: “If you’ve been taught that faithfulness to God means reading the Bible in a particular way, then you will even be willing to throw God under the bus to stay faithful to that reading.”
He cites 1 Samuel 15 where the narrator claims God commanded Saul to commit genocide against the Amalekites. “What kind of God would you have to believe in? How far is that from Christ if you’re going to take that literally?”
The Living Word vs. The Written Word
Citing his mentor, Orthodox Archbishop Lazar Puhalo, Dr. Jersak delivers this stunning principle: “Any scripture that claims to be a revelation of God must bow to the living God when he came in the flesh. The scriptures bow to Jesus.”
This is exactly what Hebrews 1 teaches—Jesus is the exact representation of God’s nature. And John 1:18 declares: “No one has ever seen God at any time, but God, the only son who’s in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.”
Dr. Jersak puts it plainly: “Any scripture that claims to be a revelation of God must bow to the living God when he came in the flesh. I don’t say cut it out of the Bible, but Paul would give an example in 1 Corinthians 10 that the scripture has cautionary tales. I would include in that not just don’t go sleep with people like David, but a cautionary tale of a misreading of God himself in the text.”
Rethinking God’s Wrath: Consent Rather Than Retribution
The conversation shifts to one of the most controversial aspects of Christian theology: divine wrath. Dr. Jersak’s definition revolutionizes the concept: “Wrath is what happens when we defy love.”
Wrath as Divine Permission
Rather than God actively punishing, Dr. Jersak describes wrath as divine consent to our choices. “When I’m presented with perfect love and I turn away from it, I defy it, I create a shadow of consequences, harm done to others and to myself. What happens in that shadow we would call wrath.”
The key insight? “God no more turns from the sinner than the sun ceases to shine for the blind man.” This comes from St. Anthony the Great, illustrating that God continues to shine on us even as we turn away. The shadow we experience is our own creation, not God withdrawing his presence.
This connects powerfully to Romans 1, where God “gives them over” to their choices. It’s not active punishment but consent to our defiance. “The giving over is mentioned like three times in Romans 1, where that becomes the phrase used for consent.”
Love Requires Freedom
The conversation touches on why this kind of wrath is intrinsic to love itself. “Love must be consensual. It can’t be that smoking gun to your head,” Dr. Jersak explains. This means God gives us the dignity of facing consequences, “like the younger son getting hungry in the prodigal son story.”
In addiction recovery language, this is bottoming out. “The folks I know who really recovered, they will say, I can even thank God for my addiction because it’s what ended my self-will and I finally came home to find him.”
The Cross: Revelation and Victory, Not Appeasement
When asked what was actually happening on Calvary if not satisfying God’s wrath, Dr. Jersak identifies two realities:
1. Definitive Self-Revelation
“It is God’s definitive revelation of himself in the context of our wickedness and our evil. When we did the very worst thing we could conceive of doing, murdering the son of God, he reveals himself as self-giving, radically forgiving, co-suffering love.”
The sacrifice isn’t about appeasing an angry deity. “It’s the sacrifice of a first responder running into the Twin Towers to go rescue people even if it’s going to kill them.”
Dr. Jersak marvels at this: “With all the images of God in history and all the weird ways of seeing God and especially all-powerful kind of God, and yet now it’s the cross on my neck. It actually is the dominant image of God in human history. Isn’t that amazing?”
2. Decisive Victory
The Orthodox Pascha chant captures this: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.”
“On the cross, Jesus says in John, the prince of this world is driven out, all your sins are removed, and death is completely defeated. You simply can’t die anymore if that means a full stop into non-being.”
This is totalizing victory. “The entire universe and all of history begins revolving around the cross retroactively, prospectively, you name it. This is how the early church preached about it. We see God as love and we see what love has done for us.”
Hell, Gehenna, and the Gospel Without Threats
Johnny raises the urgent question: why do we preach a “love me or else” gospel when this appears nowhere in Acts?
Dr. Jersak had his students examine every sermon in Acts, “whether it’s one-on-one evangelism or speaking to a large crowd, whether it’s to Jewish people or to Gentiles. Not once in any sermon in the whole book of Acts do you get a hell or else message.”
The Universalist Passages We Ignore
Instead of building theology on contested hell passages, Dr. Jersak starts with clear statements about how everything ends:
- John 12:32: “If I’m lifted up, I will draw all people to myself”
- Ephesians 1: The summing up of all things and all people in Jesus Christ
- Philippians 2: Every knee will bow, every tongue will confess Jesus is Lord
- 1 Corinthians 15: Every enemy brought under Jesus’ feet, including death, until “God will be all and in all”
“I’ve mentioned three examples. There’s dozens of them,” Dr. Jersak notes. “Will we negate those with our hellfire message? In fact, we have. Or we’ve deliberately twisted them. He has reconciled all people through his blood. We inserted ‘he’s reconciled all the elect.’ Now we don’t actually care about the Bible anymore, do we?”
Judgment as Penultimate, Not Ultimate
Dr. Jersak doesn’t dismiss judgment passages. He reads them as penultimate (second to last) rather than ultimate. “Whatever judgment passages that we see, the dire warnings don’t need to be erased. We just need to read them in the context of these are a means to that end. So therefore they can’t be retributive. They have to be restorative.”
The refiner’s fire brings about gold, silver, and precious stones of our true selves “and it consumes only the wood, hay, and stubble of my attachments, of my addictions, of my false identities.”
What Justice Looks Like in Christ-Like Hands
The conversation tackles what final judgment actually means if God looks like Jesus.
Dr. Jersak envisions it through early church fathers like Maximus the Confessor, Saint Macrina the Younger, and Isaac of Syria: “When I meet Christ, justice will look like me having to face what I’ve done to be healed of the things in me that were self-harm and others’ harm.”
Restorative Justice, Not Retributive Punishment
“What about Hitler?” Johnny asks. Dr. Jersak’s answer is sobering: “Hitler will need to see what he’s done without being able to numb it out or flee from it or hide it. And he will need to face the fires of restorative judgment, which may include six million Jews assisting in his forgiveness because they’ve been so healed, they’ve been so resurrected that they’re able to.”
This mirrors restorative justice practices, particularly among First Nations people in Canada. “What they’ll do is a victim impact statement followed by a truth and reconciliation.”
Dr. Jersak believes we’ll all pass through this fire. “I may do some weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth about regrets I have, the harms I’ve caused, things I’ve neglected, and then he will wipe every tear from our eyes.”
Your Conscience as Judge
Drawing again from Archbishop Lazar: “The presiding judge will be your conscience, and your conscience is the judge that you cannot bribe. But your conscience itself will need to hear the good news of Jesus Christ.”
This is why confession heals. “I go to confession not because I got to make things right with God. He’s fine. He’s forgiven me. But I need to reconcile with my conscience and that happens as I am reminded that he’s forgiven me and that he loves me and he welcomes me.”
The Gospel Beyond Church Walls
One of the most powerful moments comes when Dr. Jersak describes seeing Christ-like transformation in 12-step recovery programs.
“The only requirement to participate in 12-step recovery is a desire to be free. You don’t even have to be free.” What people encounter there is “no punishment at all. Sin was its own punishment.”
The Atheist Who Discovered the Trinity
Dr. Jersak shares an astonishing story of a man who “started out an atheist but he came because he was desperate and then he became an agnostic.” Three years sober, he declared: “I don’t know if I can say I don’t believe in God anymore because I don’t believe he’s like this old man in the sky. What if God is love?”
This man, who had never attended church, began working out trinitarian theology: “If God is love, that would be like he’s sort of like my father. And that would mean like Jesus is like my brother. And what if these people who talk about the Holy Spirit? They’re talking about love. What if that’s love?”
Dr. Jersak’s response: “He became a trinitarian and I’m like, flesh and blood did not reveal this to you.”
These stories will appear in his forthcoming book “A Feast for All: Jesus’ All-Embracing Gospel” (2027), where he explores “the grace of the Holy Spirit transforming people outside the Christian brand.”
Power, Control, and the Way of Jesus
The final question addresses what Jesus’ character teaches about power in a world addicted to control.
Dr. Jersak points to kenosis, the Greek word from Philippians 2 meaning Jesus “emptied himself not as a disguise from being God, but as a revelation of the nature of God.”
Love as Consent, Not Coercion
“If you think about God’s love, God is love, then love is manifest as consent rather than power over.” Jesus explicitly taught this: “In my kingdom, there’s not a lording over. In fact, he even says that you won’t even exercise authority over it, which is a mind blower for pastors especially.”
The nature of God appears when “Jesus kneels at his disciples’ feet and begins washing them. We see the nature of God when he willingly is dragged to Golgotha and is crucified.”
The Three Temptations
Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness were all about power: being impressive, using magic, controlling outcomes. “This is just not how God works. He works in love.”
When power manifests in love, it appears as “faithfulness, enduring love, faithful love, sacrificial love. That takes a lot of strength, but I don’t think power is a great word for it even really.”
What Would Change If We Believed God Looks Like Jesus?
The closing question imagines what transformation would occur “if the entire church truly believed that God looked like Jesus.”
Dr. Jersak’s immediate response: “We’d stop being abusive.”
He points to Acts 2, describing the early church as “a community of joy and worship where no one was in need because everyone was taking care of each other.”
But it expanded beyond the church. “It became alarming to the empire when Christians were now taking care of people who weren’t Christians.”
The Matthew 25 Standard
Dr. Jersak references the parable of the sheep and goats: “Visiting the sick, visiting the prisoners, bringing them food, feeding and clothing the poor and all of that. The things that actually come up at the final judgment as values of this community who believes in a Christ-like God.”
“You do see pockets of it here and there that are possibilities,” he concludes, holding out hope for what the church could become.
Practical Application for Your Faith Journey
For Pastors and Church Leaders
- Audit your preaching: Count how many times you use threat-based motivation versus invitation into love
- Examine Old Testament teaching: Are you making God the agent of violence or showing how Jesus reinterprets these texts?
- Review your atonement theology: Does your cross presentation make God the problem that needs appeasing?
- Consider your hell teaching: Are you starting with threat or with the reconciliation passages?
For Individual Believers
- Notice your God image: When you sin, do you hide from God or run to him?
- Test by the fruit: Does your theology produce freedom or fear, healing or trauma?
- Read Scripture through Christ: Before interpreting any passage, ask “Does this look like Jesus?”
- Embrace restorative language: Replace punishment thinking with restoration, healing, and reconciliation
For Those Deconstructing
If you’re questioning traditional hell doctrine, angry God theology, or penal substitutionary atonement, you’re not alone. Dr. Jersak’s work provides a scholarly, orthodox path forward that honors Scripture while revealing the Christ-like character of God.
Warning Signs of Violent God Theology
Watch for these red flags in teaching and preaching:
- Threat-based evangelism: “Believe or burn” messaging
- God vs. Jesus contradictions: Having to explain away Jesus’ mercy to defend God’s justice
- Fear as primary motivator: Using eternal torture to manipulate behavior
- Love defined by punishment: Claiming “God had to punish someone” for sin
- Retributive language: Focusing on payback rather than restoration
- Warrior God imagery: Celebrating divine violence while preaching enemy love
Connect With Dr. Bradley Jersak
Dr. Jersak’s work has transformed countless Christians’ understanding of God’s character. Explore his extensive writings on reimagining God through Christ:
Books by Dr. Bradley Jersak: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=brad+jersak+books
Study With Dr. Jersak: St. Stephen’s University offers Master of Arts and Master of Ministry programs in Theology and Culture, Peace and Justice, and Reconciliation Studies through hybrid learning (online, Zoom, and optional one-week intensives). Visit ssu.ca for more information.
Follow Dr. Jersak:
- Substack: Bradley Jersak
- Facebook: Bradley Jersak
- Instagram: Bradley Jersak
Don’t Miss This Transformative Conversation
Watch the full interview with Dr. Bradley Jersak to hear more about reimagining God through Christ, reading Scripture without violence, and discovering the healing power of a truly Christ-like God. Subscribe to The Dig In Podcast YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@thejohnnyova for deep conversations that challenge conventional theology and reveal the richness of biblical scholarship.
Stay Connected With Johnny Ova
For more episodes exploring the Bible through historical context and scholarly insight, connect with Johnny:
- All Things Johnny: https://linktr.ee/johnnyova
- The Revelation Reset Book: https://a.co/d/hiUkW8H
- YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@thejohnnyova
