Is This of God?
Dispensationalists, covenant theologians, and postmodern Christians such as Brian McLaren or NT Wright all agree on one simple thing that is untenable to people such as myself: that at some point in time it was acceptable for innocent men, women and children to be murdered. Stop hiding behind dry theologies please! Recognize that murder is murder; infants being butchered is evil - it is the heart of all that is wicked and wrong. Is this really of God? If you wish to have this God, you may have Him; but do not be surprised when your faith becomes increasingly fundamentalist, rigid, and ultimately advocates rabid nationalism which is discriminatory and immoral. Progressive Christians do not understand or are unwilling to accept that their view of what God has mandated in the past is transferred into the modern day in moments of time that history records as holocausts and wars.
Is This Of God?
“A lot of women, variously estimated from 60 to 160 in number, were shut up in a church, and the soldiers ‘let loose’ among them. Many were outraged [raped] to death, and the remainder dispatched with sword and bayonet. Children were placed in a row, one behind another, and a bullet fired down the line, apparently to see how many could be dispatched with one bullet. Infants and small children were piled one on the other and their heads struck off.”
“No respect was shown for age or sex. Men, women, and infants were treated alike except that the women were subjected to greater outrage [rape] before they were slaughtered. In one place three or four hundred women, after being forced to serve the vile purposes of merciless soldiery, were taken to a valley near by and hacked to pieces with sword or bayonet. In another place about two hundred women, weeping and wailing, knelt before the commander and begged for mercy, but the blood-thirsty wretch, after ordering their violation, directed the soldiers to dispatch them in a similar manner.”
“Men, women, and children were most barbarously slaughtered - unnamable outrages were perpetuated on all. The less horrible outrages were some of the following: bayoneting the men, and in this wounded condition either burying or burning them; outraging [raping] the women and then dispatching them with bayonets or swords; ripping up pregnant women; impaling infants and children on the bayonet, or dispatching them with the sword; houses fired and the inmates driven back into the flames.”
Taken from The Burning Tigris, Peter Balakian, pages 65-66, survivor letters from the Turkish genocide of Armenians.
I Samuel 15: 1-3, 7-8 “Samuel said to Saul, ‘I am the one the LORD sent to anoint you king over his people Israel; so listen now to the message from the LORD. This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’ Then Saul attacked the Amalekites all the way from Havilah to Shur, to the east of Egypt. He took Agag king of the Amalekites alive, and all his people he totally destroyed with the sword. But Saul and the army spared Agag and the best of the sheep and cattle, the fat calves and lambs-everything that was good. These they were unwilling to destroy completely, but everything that was despised and weak they totally destroyed.”
Deuteronomy 7:1-2 “When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations–the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you– and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.”
Joshua 10:11-14 “At that time Joshua turned back and captured Hazor and put its king to the sword. (Hazor had been the head of all these kingdoms.) Everyone in it they put to the sword. They totally destroyed them, not sparing anything that breathed, and he burned up Hazor itself. Joshua took all these royal cities and their kings and put them to the sword. He totally destroyed them, as Moses the servant of the LORD had commanded. Yet Israel did not burn any of the cities built on their mounds-except Hazor, which Joshua burned. The Israelites carried off for themselves all the plunder and livestock of these cities, but all the people they put to the sword until they completely destroyed them, not sparing anyone that breathed.”
Before we begin this journey, frame your approach to this essay with these pictures: a picture of a dead child, and a murdered man and a starving orphan, innocent victims of genocide. I want these images seared into your mind when you read this essay. I want you to feel their pain, their terror, and their cries for help as they were butchered. Perhaps as a result of these people’s images we can once and for all bridge the gap between the vapid world of theology and the real world of pain, need and suffering.
What are we to make of these passages from the Old Testament? Rightfully we weep at the stories of innocent Armenians who fell at the hands of Turkish murderers. We recoil in horror at the violence perpetuated on a group of people because they supposedly presented a threat to the national cohesion of the Ottoman Empire. But when Christians encounter similar testimonies (granted from the conquerors, not the vanquished) in the Old Testament, they see these stories through a prism of theology, that old friend which allows personal horror to be dried up, ground into powder and dissolved into the water of need. What need is so important as to allow us to overlook material that in any other setting would be considered heinous? The need simply put is to avoid having to apply reason to sacred Scripture: if application of reason is introduced into our theology, Scripture does not have innate authority - it has whatever authority we can test and apply against that which we know to be moral and true.
Progressive theologians, who make an effort at couching the horror of the Canaanite genocide within time long ago past, hope that we can appeal to an ambiguous idea of life being worse in antiquity than it is now. But when we realize that in 2005 the world will commemorate the ninety year anniversary of the Armenian genocide, it seems ludicrous to argue that horror knows some sort of time-sensitive, historical uniqueness. Tell the orphans of Rwanda, the slaves of Sudan or the widows of Kosovo that butchery and pillage are yesterday’s news. Writing this is not easy for me in large part because I realize the consequences of the ideas I propose. But as I finished Peter Balakian’s The Burning Tigris: the Armenian Genocide and America’s Response I could not shake the belief that I needed to take these people’s stories and draw the necessary conclusions as to Christianity’s claims of the Old Testament. I have struggled for some time with the coldly genocidal parts of the Bible and believe sincerity on this issue is absolutely central to authentic faith. I believe Christian pastors, theologians and lay people do not understand that while it is certainly true that modern people struggle to accept Christianity because of its “irrational” beliefs in things such as miracles, what is just as much of an obstacle is understanding how Christians can simply look past the Canaanite genocide.
Reason plays an odd role in the life of faith. Christianity explains theological ideas such as the Trinity under the auspices that some Biblical teachings are not knowable to men. The conception of ideas whose validity lies outside human reasoning is important - it lies at the roots of recognition that ultimately we can no more speak for the mind of God (His motives, His abilities, His way of working) than we can speak ourselves into existence. The idea of supra-rationality rightfully advocates the proper place of man and God - reinforcing the axiom that “His ways are not our ways.” I respect this position; where I diverge with those who advocate such a position is in how far I am willing to take reason versus what I accept as faith. This is a critical point and must be weighed, as with most issues of theology, by the heart’s intent: if my intent is to elevate the idea of an ambiguous, impersonal God so that I can accommodate some secret sin, then my theology is suspect. If, however, I come to these questions desiring to see truth and to affect change in this world with what I know to be right, then I believe dry theological concepts take on another dimension. Rather than being ideas whose purpose is little more than intellectual aspirations found within the real of academia, beliefs can benefit the world - motivating man kind to stand in the gap for the innocent, the murdered, the disillusioned, the vanquished.
No ideas merely exist save two: the question of origins as answered by God, and the question of where objective morals come from. Both of these questions have existed across time and cultures. Religion in most forms offers answers to these questions (save Buddhism in its purest form, which teaches that the Buddha proposed a set of questions that could not be answered, one of which was the question of origins). All that is found within the annals of theology require the application of reason. The previously mentioned teaching of the Trinity does not simply exist - it exists as the result of finely tuned minds struggling with Scripture for over three hundred years. Rationalism within theology seems to me to be a deliberately chosen and deliberately abdicated tool: it is necessary to the formulation of the idea itself, and then when the proposed idea becomes unexplainable, rationalism is foregone. Words are used to describe the ideas until the words themselves stand at odds with what they actually mean. Then, mystery is advocated. Tested broadly against my earlier comments that some things are knowable and some things are known only to God, this is perhaps the only way in which knowledge can develop. But the question of how far we take reason is a related question that is often times too quickly passed over. To say that some constructs of reality are unknowable is understandable as long as it does not require us to set aside what we know to be right; if we accept a construct of reality that says something other than morality dictates what is right or wrong (as an example that God can command us to do something wrong), we have literally no right to say that David Koresh and the Branch Davidians or Jim Jones in Guyana were in fact following God’s orders. Things we know to be wrong I would propose are things like genocide, murder, and infanticide; as long as Christians overlook the obvious fact that the Bible records a God who commanded these acts, history will record future acts of villainy that will justify their actions on the back of the above pages from the Bible.
I do not mind ideas about the nature of God or complexities within ideas like that of the Trinity, but I believe we have a moral responsibility to resist any ideas that advocate that which we know is immoral. The Canaanite genocide is one such issue - under no situation can it be seen as acceptable - the murder of innocents is never right. Postmodern thinkers are often accused of being moral relativists because they are willing to believe that issues like homosexuality may in fact not be wholly wrong. How interesting that many of those evangelicals who take issue with post-modernity “relativism” actually engage in their very own form of it, although I would suggest their form is much more vile. Why? Because the “traditionalists” are willing to accommodate genocide and infanticide because if they do not, they must revisit what is meant by Divine inspiration. The higher moral calling that traditionalists wish to characterize themselves by is visible only to those people who accept arguments for the internal symmetry of the Bible; for those who look at and struggle with the issues of genocide and infanticide it is the traditionalists who seem to be the true moral relativists.
For Christians the Bible has been, and continues to be, the standard of authority by which we live our lives. We base our belief system - whether it is in the afterlife, the nature of God, or an issue like homosexuality - on what we see as distinct moments in time as recorded in the Bible when people have had theophanies (direct contact by God which revealed truth). Because God directly revealed His will to these people, we must bow to their teaching, regardless of how little sense it may make to us now. I believe the primary reason the Canaanite genocide is still held, even by progressive Christian thinkers, as being of Divine origins is that if it is admitted to be of man, the Bible will become subjected to tests of morality and critical thinking based on contemporary knowledge. If we determine that we must test for what within the Bible is of God and what is of man, we have to introduce timeless standards of morality (genocide was never right) in conjunction with what our more advanced basis of knowledge compels us to hold up (homosexuality is not, as Romans records, “against the nature” of many people). I believe this fundamental point is recognized by most Christian thinkers and is intentionally why they are willing to accommodate murder against a greater threat to their value system being destabilized.
Losing the Divine mandate for the Canaanite genocide also seriously impacts the idea of the covenant between God and His “chosen people.” The Canaanite genocide is glossed over by people such as Lee Strobel and Normal Geisler by arguing that the people in the land of Canaan had been given time to repent and had in some cases stood in the way of the Israelites coming into the “promised land”; the possession of the promised land being a significant part of the covenant between God and Israel. The irony is perhaps lost on some that native people would actually resist the idea of another people coming in claiming that they had to give up their homeland because another group’s god had told them they had a right to the land. Again here we might realize that this logic has been used by any number of politicians and religious leaders to advocate brutality in the interests of nationalism. Most importantly for Christians, the covenant is a critical component to Christian theology because within it is the promise of God to provide a Messiah. To lose the idea of a Messiah is to be forced to admit that Jesus may not have been Divine, or at the very least to establish the Divinity of Christ outside of the prophetic texts within the Old Testament.
Is this a necessary step? No doubt for many post-moderns, this train of thinking represents exactly what they believe and for many, the process by which they came to their belief system. I have grown tired of hearing Christian thinkers who should know better, talk in a demeaning fashion about how post modern people have beliefs without logic, or that they do not believe in such things as objective historical truth (a recent talk by NT Wright on the topic of post-modernity especially aggravated me in this fashion - he says that people such as me give “no thought to the idea that their may actually be some such thing as historical truth” within the tradition of Christian faith). Whatever the faults of my belief system, they are not the result of not struggling with what is objective truth. Perhaps if someone could help with me on issues like that of the Canaanite genocide in a way that seems even half-way moral, I would be more likely to believe in their theology. Dispensationalists, covenant theologians, and postmodern Christians such as Brian McLaren or NT Wright all agree on one simple thing that is untenable to people such as myself: that at some point in time it was acceptable for innocent men, women and children to be murdered. Stop hiding behind dry theologies please! Recognize that murder is murder; infants being butchered is evil - it is the heart of all that is wicked and wrong. Is this really of God? If you wish to have this God, you may have Him; but do not be surprised when your faith becomes increasingly fundamentalist, rigid, and ultimately advocates rabid nationalism which is discriminatory and immoral. Progressive Christians do not understand or are unwilling to accept that their view of what God has mandated in the past is transferred into the modern day in moments of time that history records as holocausts and wars.
What can people such as me, who love the teachings of Christ and who find peace in the Psalms, do with these questions? I believe several options are available to us. First, we may believe these passages are poetic and not literal. This would require us to believe that Israel fought wars but stopped short of entirely decimating whole groups of people. The weakness of such an approach is that it still accommodates a God who advocates war against innocent people. A second option is to take the poetic approach a step further, believing that nationalism and spirituality became inexorably and unhealthily linked. The difficulty with this idea is that it significantly diminishes the covenant between God and Israel, with the problems I have touched on earlier. A third option is to believe that God did not mandate these actions and did not have a covenant between Him and Israel. The implications to this idea are horrific to Christians, because of what it means to our ideas of a personal God, Divine revelation, objective morality, and religious pluralism.
In this essay I have argued for my belief that the primary reason Christianity - even among progressive theologians - can not unilaterally condemn the Canaanite genocide is because the genocide is seen within the covenantal promise between God and Israel, which leads to the promise of the Messiah, which then introduces the personal God embodied in Jesus Christ. Christ means, for most, the atonement, the Resurrection and the promise of an after-life. If following Christ means accepting the Divine mandate for the genocide, then I can not do so. To do this would mean to set aside all that I find so inspiring about his life so that I can preserve a theology that makes sense. Christ being Divine is secondary to innocent people being slaughtered.
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March 1st, 2006 at 12:32 pm
Thanks for a breath of fresh aired honesty.
I have wrestled with this genocide issue and am drawn to argument that this was not a contest betwen Israel and the Canaanites, but Yahveh and the gods of the canaanites.
The god’s of the canaanites are lesser spirits in the spirit realm sosmetimes called “sons of God” (Ben Elohim). In Greek they are called arche, exousia, tronos, and dunimas. Paul says if they had known who Yahshuah (Jesus) was they would have never engineered his death.
Abraham escaaped the polytheism of Babylon was the father of monotheism. His grandson Jacob carried it to Egypt.
Yahaveh came to Canaan fresh from destroying the gods of Egypt and was poised to destroy the gods of Canaan. He promised to drive them out by his angel and by hornets.
Yahveh was to be the sole warrior as he was in Egypt, but the people retreated in lack of faith requiring Plan B.
Plan B is that doubt =sin and sin is punished by warfare. Israel had to do the work orignally planned for Yahveh. Warfare was their punishment for disbelief. One way or another Yahveh was going to clear the land of polytheism. So the story of the Bible is that of Monothiesm triumphing over polytheism.
The Egyptian people were not destroyed because they were not hostile to the Hebrews in the sense of trying to exterminate them, whereas the Canaanites (except for the Gibeonites) tried to destroy the Hebrews. In fact just as God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, it says he hardened the Canaanite’s hearts.
So Yahveh destroyed their gods and the followers of the gods because he knew that they would ensare the weak Hebrews in Idolatry. Which is exactly what happened for Joshuah and his followers stopped short of total Herem.
The struggle we see today between the East and the West is a struggle of the gods; Allah versus Yahveh. It is a no win situation until one is etiher completely destroyed or they realize they both serve the same God of Abraham.
If the story of the Bible is monotheism versus polytheism and Yahveh is destroying the gods of other nations then the real battle will turn farther East against India and China, Tibet and Japan (the last out posts of polytheism).
What Yahshuah restored to the equation was that in Holy War Yahveh is the sole warrior and his followers are to use peace and love as they bring every spirit into submission to Yahveh.
In the Revelation and throughout the sciptures the followers of false gods were called to repent, but those who refused were marked for destruction. The Flood, Sodom, Egypt, Canaan are all examples of the coming Judgment day. I like to think of them as parables and the message is clear. There is one God (not 3 in one). Get into his kingdom of love or perish.
Many scholars say that we lack evidence of the flood, or the invasion, so whether they did, or did not happen, these are parables, we should not be too quick to declare the Canaanites as innocent victims of Genocide.
Peace and love in Yahshuah and Yahveh
Robert
July 13th, 2008 at 1:09 am
If one must use logic to test the morality of the Bible in order to determine which parts are “of God”, what stops an individual from applying logic to the rest of the contents? For example, by what logic does the story of Jesus operate? Man sins, so God chooses to create a path by which sin can be forgiven. Great. But why would an all powerful being need to make an innocent man suffer and die in a horrible way in order to achieve this end? An all powerful being could simply, well… make it so. If we’re questioning morality, what of the morality of God itself? Clearly God chose to make a being suffer in order to achieve an end that could be achieved without suffering. How could a moral being do such a thing? Clearly one couldn’t. By simple logic it follows that God is not a moral being, and if that’s the case how valuable really is this book?
The instant that book ceases to be monolithic and perfect, it becomes open to analysis and the very core of it crumbles to dust.
I honestly don’t understand how any individual can have such sober and clear vision, and yet miss the obvious conclusion that’s staring him in the face.