Allison Yarrow concludes her review of my novel, “The Gospel of Anarchy,” by citing my quotation of G.K. Chesterton saying that “Christianity alone has felt that God… must have been a rebel as well as a king” (“Wanted: A Gospel Worth Following,” March 11).

Yarrow counters that “Christianity claiming a monopoly on the concept of rebel-king… does not hold. After all, the tempestuous God of the Hebrew Bible was a rebel, too.”

Christianity has indeed borrowed or appropriated many concepts from antecedent religions, Judaism chief among them, but Chesterton is right to identify the notion of the rebel-king as unique to it. Though occasionally willing to consider the complaints of His subjects (Abraham, Job, etc.) our tempestuous Jewish God is nonetheless an autocrat.

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In the clause lost in Yarrow’s ellipsis, Chesterton says that “God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king” (emphasis mine). The idea is that when Christ cries from the cross (“Father, why have you forsaken me?”) God momentarily becomes an atheist — i.e., rebels against Himself. There is no Jewish antecedent to the notion of a God in rebellion against anyone — least of all Himself.

When Moses asks our God’s name, His first response is Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh: “I am that I am.” There are other translations, most of them similarly ambiguous, and yet at the same time it is perfectly clear what He means.

JUSTIN TAYLOR
Brooklyn, N.Y.

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