Undeception

Review: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It)
Author: Thom Stark
Wipf and Stock, 2010
Chapter 6: “Blessing the Nations”

Why would God have ordered the systematic massacre of whole people groups, including women and children? Could He maintain a reasonable expectation of being acknowledged as “good” in any conceivable sense, let alone worshiped, while commanding something like that — not once, but many times throughout Israel’s history? In this chapter, Thom Stark answers these questions with a definitive, “He wouldn’t” and “He couldn’t,” respectively, by explaining that in actuality, “He didn’t.”

To be clear, my argument is not that God is evil for commanding genocide. I am not claiming “to know better than God” — an accusation Christian apologists often make against Christians who hold my position. My contention is that God never did command the Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites wholesale. These accounts reflect a standard ideology that Israel shared with many of its ancient neighbors, and I read them as products of ancient culture, rather than products of pure divine revelation. Therefore, my claim is not that I know better than God, but that we all know better than those who wrongly killed women and children in God’s name.

The chapter opens by forcing you to imagine yourself in the place of one of countless millions of human beings throughout history who have suddenly had their worlds, their homes, their loved ones, even their babies cruelly destroyed by the hand of genocide. His vivid portrait of what these events essentially look like does not at all come off as a cheap appeal to emotion, but as a well-aimed blow intended to restore reality to the theoretical postulations of Christian apologists who by various sleights of hand seek to turn our attention away from the atrocities described in the Conquest narratives. There have been many theological attempts to reconcile the apparently schizophrenic character of one who both ostensibly told His followers that it was not only okay but necessary to massacre their neighbors and commanded other followers to love their neighbors and enemies alike. Stark shows his familiarity with and mastery over more of these arguments than I’d ever encountered before.

Justifications for genocide

One after the other, Stark addresses these justifications for genocide as articulated by several prominent Christian apologists and thinkers, including William Lane Craig, Christopher Wright, and Paul Copan. Time and again, he resists the temptation to become snarky, allowing the absurdity of their attempts to justify genocide to shine instead through fair presentation. Although the more philosophical reasoning and scholarly counter-evidence he adduces are strong, I was particularly impressed by how often Stark was able to show that their flimsy arguments were contradicted within the Bible itself.

So what are some of the defenses that Christians are wont to present as an excuse for God’s purported bloodlust? Let me give you a thumbnail sketch of Stark’s responses to some of the apologists’ arguments.

Apologist: Israel needed to eliminate the bad influence of the Canaanites wholly and completely, or else she might be led astray (Deut 7.1-6). God was acting as a caring surgeon who knew he must cut out the cancer before it spread throughout the body. (esp. William Lane Craig and Christopher Wright)

Stark: How could infants pose any such threat of bad moral influence? Were they raised by Israelite parents, all pernicious moral influence would be as foreign to them as it supposedly was to native Israelites. Not only that, but Deuteronomy 7′s insistence upon a total massacre of all humans young and old because of their corrupting influence is flatly contradicted in Numbers 31.7-18, in which the Israelites were told to keep the girls and virgin young women around to interbreed with them! Moreover, Deuteronomy itself later lays out a double standard, allowing for intermarriage for towns outside the borders of Israel (Deut 20.10-18) — where the people outside the borders somehow not going to be a bad influence?

Apologist: The wholesale massacre of Canaanites was long-delayed and fully deserved divine punishment undertaken by human agency. It was not until the Canaanites’ iniquity was complete that God destroyed them.

Stark: Let’s say that they really did deserve to have their babies ripped from their wombs and their grandmothers killed before their very eyes. Why did God not send Israel in as a witness to His ways through a form of evangelism? Remember that Jonah (as most inerrantists believe) was chided for being reluctant to save Nineveh from destruction, which he was able to single-handed accomplish regardless of his reluctance. Were infants and children culpable of grave moral sins? Even if one accepts a thoroughgoing doctrine of original sin, in what way were those infants more fully deserving of being murdered than others? (esp. Christopher Wright)

Apologist: Joshua 11.1-5 and Numbers 21 show that the nations were aggressors that could have wiped Israel off the map. In order to fulfill His promise to Abraham to bless the nations (ultimately through Jesus), the preservation of Israel was necessary by any means, however gruesome it looks to us.

Stark: First, compare Deut 2.24-35 for a different picture as to whom the aggressors were in the situation described in Joshua. But regardless, this is unmistakably an “ends justifies the means” argument; it is an argument against the absolute, objective morality that Christians everywhere claim to believe in. Was it permissible not merely to (dubiously enough) preemptively attack the cities that might attack them later, but also to put babies to the sword just so that God’s promises could be fulfilled? Could a wise and powerful God truly find no other way?

Apologist: Justice and good are not defined by what we humans think: whatever God does, by definition, is good and just.

Stark, quoting Eric Seibert’s Disturbing Divine Behavior, p. 74: “…if God’s standard of justice is so fundamentally different from ours that physical abuse and the slaughters of babies can be considered just, then it no longer seems possible to have a meaningful conversation about what constitutes justice.”

I will briefly summarize Stark’s response to one more solution to “the problem of genocide”, one that’s gained a lot of traction in the time since his book was being prepared for publication due to its advocacy by Christian philosopher Paul Copan and more recently by apologist/philosopher Matthew Flannagan. The proposed solution: that genocide talk was (mostly at least) rhetorical exaggeration.

Stark doesn’t hesitate to admit that they have a point, but it’s not particularly helpful for inerrantists: in fact, very little of the archaeological record backs up the biblical account of the Canaanite Conquest. A few exceptions like Hazor notwithstanding, archaeological evidence shows that the Conquest narratives describe many more instances of the Israelites assaulting cities that didn’t even exist (as such) at the time the Conquest was supposed to have taken place, such as Arad, Heshbon, Dibon, Jericho, Ai, and Gibeon.

The more popular but even less defensible version of this “rhetorical exaggeration” defense is Copan et al.’s contention that the inclusive, ultra-violent commands were never intended to be followed through literally: “kill everything that breathes” and “leave no man, woman, or child alive” were (supposedly) just the way the ANE crowd psyched themselves up about their mostly conventional warfare.  Starks points out multiple reasons why this simply cannot be the case: cf. the already noted contrast between the atrocities demanded for the inhabitants of Canaan in Deuteronomy 7 and the relative leniency prescribed for those outside the borders in chapter 20. Even if God didn’t command the babies to be killed, “girls” were obviously under the ban in chapter 7. These justifications amount to flailing helplessly, and everyone knows it.

Stark explains that all the boasting of sacking the cities which were never actually sacked actually forms something of a national origin myth, probably from Josian reform days:

The literature reflects the attempt of rising empires to express their hegemony through origin stories that crystalize their present-day claims to power. These origin myths present the young nation as an unstoppable force, specially empowered by their deity whose strength far outstrips that of the other tribal deities. The myths serve to crystalize and legitimize the nation’s rise to power. I believe the preponderance of the evidence shows us that this is precisely what is going on in the conquest narratives. (147)

Many more arguments from people who should know better are addressed and decimated in this chapter. I also found his discussion of Origen’s and Gregory of Nyssa’s response to the genocide passages helpful. I especially loved one of his responses to those who refuse to reject the immorality of genocide and the impossibility of a good God’s commanding it by appealing to “divine mystery”. Yes, it is indeed a mystery. “How it is possible to affirm that God committed genocide and that God is good — that is a mystery. Whether it’s a profound mystery or a convenient one is up to you to decide.” (138)

This topic seems to be Stark’s métier. At times it is an astounding thing to watch him cite and interact with so much of the literature, both that of the apologists and the archaeologists. All the while his own good sense drives the discussion in an admirably readable and fair direction. I really wouldn’t be a bit surprised if this chapter were eventually expanded into a book of its own, although given the thoroughness of his discussion in this book, such an undertaking would probably be unnecessary.

It seems every time I hear Ravi Zacharias he’s either (or both) quoting Malcom Muggeridge or telling the story of going to a college campus and stumping a questioner by giving the following exchange (approximately):

Atheist: “If the Christian God exists, why is there evil in the universe?”

Christian: “The very fact that you believe there is evil shows that you are acknowledging a moral law, which itself requires a Lawgiver. So what’s your question again?”

Atheist: “. . .”

Every time he tells this story, which probably is just recounting the same incident that gave the best result, the questioner is said to be dumbfounded, essentially conceding the point, while Ravi’s current audience laughs and applauds as though it’s the first time they’ve seen the woman apparently sawed in half emerge from the box in one piece.

This silly gotcha game bothers me every time I hear it. It’s clear what the questioner is asking: “If, as Christians claim, evil is defined and despised by the Christian God who made the universe, then why would that Christian God allow evil as Christians define it?” What is being pointed out is a perceived lack of consistency in the Christian conception of good/evil and God’s nature. The questioner can be thought of as saying something like, “The idea of God offends my moral sense, which is evolutionary and emergent rather than absolute so long as He does not exist but is hopelessly self-contradictory if He does.”

It is a legitimate but entirely separate issue to ask someone who intuits and whose beliefs and attitudes presuppose an absolute moral law if they will acknowledge that there is no absolute basis for any of his/her ethical/moral preferences. There is some potential value in making them lie in the bed they make. But this is not what is being done in the shell game above. Instead, they’re asking Christians to lie in a bed we’ve made. What’s good for the goose, etc.

The tack above that Ravi and many other apologists have taken amounts to changing the subject and hoping they won’t notice. This does not mean that we as Christians are the only ones with hard questions to answer, but when answering this good question this way we should be aware that we are avoiding rather than doing theodicy. The problem of evil is the biggest hangup unbelievers and believers alike have; just try not to be so coy when you ignore it, please.

William Dembski, a father of the Intelligent Design movement, has recently become comfortable calling himself an old earth creationist who, as a good Baptist, accepts the historicity of Adam and Eve. This comes as no surprise really, but it’s interesting to see how his gears turn as he systematically lays all his cards on the table for why he’s personally invested in pursuing a critique of common descent.

Discussing his book The End of Christianity with the host of the UK radio show Unbelievable and an atheist guest, Dembski describes how he thinks that the chief difficulty for old earth as opposed to young earth creationism is the exceptionally long time for evil having existed prior to the event that was supposed to have caused it: the Fall of Man.

Dembski’s proposed solution is basically this: because God is not limited by time and knows the future, He allowed natural evil in anticipation of the evil that Adam and Eve introduced.

The host, Justin Brierley, imagines unbelievers thinking to themselves in reponse to this solution, “What a convoluted way of having to justify a God who allows evil, justifying it with Scripture.” Heck, I’m a believer and I thought the same thing. The atheist on the program gave a great analogy of a father telling his kids that if they’re quiet for the next ten minutes, they’ll go see a movie, and after the kids make a noise during that interval, explaining, “Well, I didn’t actually buy the tickets because I knew you’d make a noise.” As the guest points out, this certainly seems an under-handed way of parenting.

Only the supralapsarian viewpoint can seriously take that position: God had no interest in preventing evil at all since He instead actively foreordained its existence. This still doesn’t offer a theodicy for the problem of evil, because one can’t very well answer the objection that a good God and the existence of evil cannot be reconciled by outright denying that God is in fact good according to the terms presupposed in the objection.

Another bit of something Dembski described that I thought was interesting – although hopelessly wrongheaded – was that the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2 were not two separate Ancient Near Eastern tales: rather, chapter 1 describes God’s conceptualization of creation and chapter 2 is the realization of the creation. I do not think this holds up for a number of reasons (not least of which because it would entail God changing His mind between planning and implementation), but since it is yet another example of Dembski’s concordism causing him to reject the scholarly consensus on the text, I thought I’d mention it here.

I didn’t disagree with Dembski throughout the whole show, though since he did score a couple hits against the belief in a young earth. He cites scientific data as being more-or-less conclusive on the issue of the age of the universe but finds Scriptural reasons for doubting young earth creationist arguments. For instance, he wonders why God needed to set up a segregated area, the Garden of Eden, in order to place His people if the world were so perfect and free from the effects of sin. Also, when someone asked him how could God have made it clearer that the days were literal 24-hour days, Dembski responded that He could have put the creation of the sun on Day 1 rather than on Day 4. Credit where credit’s due: touché, Bill.

I have not tried to find a reason to disagree with the majority when it comes to my theological positions. Any reader of this blog will recognize that this has nevertheless happened on occasion. Chiefly, theistic evolution puts me at odds with most evangelicals and full preterism puts me at odds with most believers. In other words, I hold a minority position on protology (the doctrine of first things) and eschatology (the doctrine of last things). From what I know, only a handful of Christians who accept full preterism also accept the scientific consensus on origins; likewise, only a few believers who accept the scientific consensus on origins accept full preterism. I am amazed by this because of how well the two fit together. I’ve been meaning to write a post such as this for some time, so here goes.

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Cliff Martin continues his interesting discussion of the apparently conflicting ideas of the loving Christian God and the God who ordained the sometimes brutal processes needed for evolution. I see no more problem with God’s authorship of evolution than I see with natural evil of all other kinds, but he makes some interesting arguments about an ever-evolving creation being God’s ongoing natural remedy for the problem of pain. Check out Cliff’s Evolution, Red in Tooth and Claw Part 1 and Part 2.