I’d like to point out a new contribution to the recent conversation in the blogosphere on the topic of the OT vs. NT depictions of God’s disposition — and not just because my blog is referenced! Arni makes some excellent statements, including the following:
Jesus not only preaches non-violence and lives non-violently when there was ample opportunity to do the opposite – he lays his life down in solidarity with those who suffer at the hands of violent power. Jesus is love and God is love, not violence.
Luther said somewhere that Jesus is the sun of the Bible. It is thus in the light of Jesus that the Bible should be read. Just like when the sun rises over a landscape, not all parts of the Bible receive as much light as other parts. There are mountains and valleys, the former receiving more light than the former.
“Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
So begins the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Here’s George MacDonald:
“For my part, I wish the spiritual engineers who constructed it had, after laying the grandest foundation-stone that truth could afford them, glorified God by going no further.”
Second century heretic Marcion was quite a character. Because the only contemporaneous descriptions of his beliefs that survived are those of his detractors it’s hard to say definitively, but his distinctive teachings seem to have originated in the belief that the god of the Old Testament, Yahweh, was a cruel and evil god challenged by the good god represented by Jesus; for Marcion, this schema accounted for what was even then recognized as a sharp contrast between the harshness of God’s behavior in much of the Old Testament and the essentially loving nature of God as revealed in Jesus.
What has emerged as the “orthodox” way of dealing with the contrast in OT/NT divine dispositions is a vehement denial of any such contrast. And indeed, as I have said on this blog, the OT’s Yahweh is extolled as full of ever-new mercies and unending lovingkindness, and much judgment and hellfire is found in the sermons of Jesus. We are far astray if we deny that Jesus was said to have come “to bring a sword”; the aspect of the historical Jesus as apocalyptic prophet speaking the doom of the current age should never be too far underplayed. Instead, what we should emphasize is the explicit characterization of God’s motives for judgment as reflecting personal concern and a desire for restoration, not a craving for vengeance and some sort of legal satisfaction of abstract requirements. The religious leaders of Jerusalem were condemned because they caused the little ones to sin, because they did not care for the fatherless and the widow, and because they had proved themselves faithless “hirelings” by their indifference to the welfare of those over whom they were given supervision. The desire for restoration and concern for the marginalized is, again, something not at all alien to the later Old Testament writers; Jesus simply put the focus more squarely on those things by virtue of his place as the “image of God bodily.” God has an interest in judgment but not because of a desire to wreak revenge on those who have personally affronted Him disguised as disembodied “justice”.
I just fixed my Google Reader widget in the sidebar just to the right of this text. I use Google Reader to share links to blog posts of special interest to me and the subjects I treat on this blog. I read a number of blogs’ RSS feeds daily (but not nearly as many as this guy!), so there’s usually quite a variety of material there.
So if you’re at all interested in what I have to say, you might like to check out my shared items where you’ll hear a lot more from people of varying degrees of like-mindedness!
Apologist Matt Flannagan once again defends God against the charge of commanding the Israelites to commit genocide against the Canaanites. Not including the final sentence, his concluding statement articulates a very important reminder about the importance of recognizing the Bible as a product of ANE literature:
Consequently, if one does not read the texts in isolation and is sensitive to the genre of Ancient Near-Eastern writings then a literal reading is far from obvious. As Egyptologist James K. Hoffmeier notes, such a reading commits “the fallacy of misplaced literalism … the misconstruction of a statement-in-evidence so that it carries a literal meaning when a symbolic or hyperbolic or figurative meaning was intended.” This underscores an obvious but often neglected point, the bible is not written in accord with the conventions of 21st century English. It was written in ancient foreign languages and in the conventions that governed historical, legal, epic, etc writings of that time. To understand what it teaches accurately one needs to ask what it teaches given these factors. When one does this, it seems probably that the Old Testament does not teach that God commanded or that Israel carried out, the genocide or extermination of the Canaanites.
This is a guest post from frequent commenter Arcamaede, who follows the climate change news very closely. I asked him to lend his “fair and balanced” perspective to this question. Often, it’s assumed that “as evolutionary science, so climate science” — either scorning both or upholding both unequivocally. Might there be cause for a more nuanced approach?
~ Steve
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If you haven’t heard about “Climategate” then you do not follow the issue of climate change!
In brief, Climategate is the controversy that erupted after the release of thousands of emails from the CRU (Climate Research Unit) of the University of East Anglia which detailed serious scientific misconduct among climate scientists there (and in other similar institutions throughout the world). That misconduct was in the form of suppressing dissenting views as well as data that conflicted with the views of an inner cadre of high level climatologists.
My friend Travis Jacobs recently mentioned on a podcast the fact that despite popular Sunday School renditions, the actual Genesis account of Noah never mentions his evangelistic efforts, nor even so much as a warning to his fellow men of the impending cataclysm. (Travis also noted ironically that one source for the Flood story that does feature an evangelistic Moses is the Q’uran.)
I suppose a possible contributor to the near canonization of this portrait of Noah as spurned evangelist is the later Jewish and Christian ethic that views judgment as contingent upon spurned chances for repentance (cf. especially the Book of Jonah). Yet it appears from the Genesis account taken purely on its own terms that God had already chosen who was going to survive, and that was that; the door was effectively sealed shut before the ark was even constructed, so why should Noah have wasted his time? (Compare the unconvincing justifications for the reasoning behind evangelism coming from the Reformed — and don’t miss the role Noah’s righteousness played in his election! But that’s beside the point.)