It was a typical sunny Tuesday morning in Orange County, California, when my aunt telephoned. In a distressed voice and said, “Turn on the news! Two commercial passenger jets have crashed themselves into the Twin Towers in New Yorker City!”
I sat and watched incredulously as the buildings came crashing down. Thousands of precious human lives were snuffed out as the towers collapsed. I wanted to keep watching to understand, to wrap my head around the evil before my eyes. Like many Americans, I wanted to know why this happened. Who did it? Was it an accident? How could someone do this? No time to get answers that morning. I had to go teach. So I left to meet my students in New Testament class. Makeshift signs greeted me as I drove into the parking lot. “DRIVE CALMLY,” to remind students upset by the news.
The classroom was quiet as I entered. All eyes locked onto me. The students’ questions that morning were unspoken but obvious. How could a God of love allow this? Who is to blame? What was the cause? As the tension built, these and other questions came to the fore. Didn’t God do the same kind of mass killing in the Bible? Didn’t our God also demand such violence?
“Oops! Did I really say that?”
Noteworthy Christian speakers almost intuitively identified the mass murder of 9/11 as judgment from the biblical God. Leader of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, appeared on Christian television blaming the attacks of 9/11 on “pagans and abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians…the ACLU, People for the American Way, all…who have tried to secularize America.” Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson sat there in abject agreement with Falwell. So, according to these two and many like them, the attacks of 9/11 were the vindictive judgment of the Christian God.
Both Falwell and Robertson publicly reversed their televised convictions in the furor that followed. But too late. Their true opinions about 9/11 were already out for all to see and hear.
To close out 2001, a cable channel aired a “year in review” program on New Year’s Eve. There, comedian Phyllis Diller quipped that Bin Laden and Jerry Falwell “have the same God.” Yup!
In 2002 a caller to a Christian radio station asked apologist Robert Morey how we can condemn Bin Laden’s God when the biblical God commanded the same atrocities in the Old Testament. Morey’s answer? “Because our God is the right God.” So, slaughtering thousands is wrong if carried out in the name of a false god.
On the other end of the Christian spectrum, Chicago’s Liberation Theologian Jeremiah Wright preached that America got what she deserved. “The chickens are coming home to roost,” he said. The Islamic terrorists flying those passenger planes were merely God’s instruments of judgement for the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshema.
From whence the idea?
Why were these popular Christain leaders so quick to identify 9/11’s murderous acts with the biblical God? Just so we are clear, here are but a few of the passages to which Morey’s caller was referring. The quotations are taken from the English Standard Version of the Bible, with a few changes. “Kill every male among the small ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves” (Numbers 31:17-18).
“You shall keep alive no one who breathes, but you shall give the them to utter destruction – the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites – as the Lord your God has commanded” (Deuteronomy 20:16-17).
“Go and strike Amalek and give to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both men and women, children and infants, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys.” (1 Samuel 15:3).
The Quran itself is replete with such passages. “Kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out” (Quran 2:191). There are about 50 to 70 similar passages in the Quran, targeting non-Muslims for slaughter. So, it was understandable that Morey, Falwell, Robertson and Write identified God with a literal reading of these biblical passages.
Let’s get ‘em!
Where are the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, etc. today? The descendents of the survivors are still around in the DNA of various Middle Eastern people, the Lebanese, the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Arabs. So, should Bible believers complete the genocidal task that was commanded by the biblical God, Moses and Joshua?
Christians will generally say no, because we are in the New Testament age with the arrival of Jesus Christ. That was B.C. This is A.D. Jesus Christ is the penultimate revelation of God, and of his genuine love for humanity in this new age. Yet the question remains; if the New Testament God is the same as the Old Testament God, then why did he command such bloodthirsty warfare?
Kill them all. Let the apologists sort it out
Standard explanations are commonly given by Christians “in the know.” It is said, for example, that those people targeted for slaughter were in the way of Israel’s settlement of the Holy Land, and hence in the way of the Messiah’s arrival in our world. They had to be taken out of the way to keep Israel pure, and for Jesus to be born.
Another response is that God has the right to both give and take life. We are all guilty and more offensive to God’s holiness than we can possibly imagine. And so, the real question is not, “Why did God command genocide?” but instead, “Why does God allow any of us to live in the first place?”
Yet another explanation is that God gave these people hundreds of years to repent and turn to him. They did not. Hence, his righteous judgement was carried out by his own people, the Israelites. The judgments on the Canaanites, Amalekites, etc. are a foretaste of the judgments that will be given on antichristians at the final judgment, as seen in Book of Revelation. The Torah and the Book of Joshua are drenched in bloody judgement. So is Revelation.
These are thumbnail sketches of responses given by Christian apologists such as Paul Copan, Daniel Gerd, Tremper Longman III, Norman Giesler and Gleason L. Archer. Notice in the last example how the most mysterious and symbolic book of the New Testament, John’s Revelation, is used to obscure the clear historical Apostolic witness to the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, as found in the plain newspaper language of the Gospels and Epistles. Skipping over the historical Jesus Christ, God is thus seen as genocidal in Israel’s early history, and genocidal at the end of history as well. God’s grace in Jesus Christ is misunderstood as a mere prolonged interlude between genocides.
You’ve got some ‘splaining to do!
For some Christians, these defenses of God’s genocidal will in the Old Testament are unconvincing, though it may be difficult to articulate why. But let’s try. God is all powerful, so couldn’t he have cleared the Holy Land without having its inhabitants slaughtered? “Nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37). Infants can’t be civically guilty for the sins of their fathers, can they? “The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son” (Ezekiel 18:20). And so the responses listed above are sometimes met with doubt.
In the back of many Christians’ minds are also passages such as Luke 9:52-54, where Jesus “sent messengers ahead of him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans, to make preparations for him. But the people did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, ‘Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?’” (Old Testament style) “But he turned and rebuked them. ‘You do not know what manner of spirit you are of; for the Son of Man came not to destroy people’s lives but to save them.’”
The spirit who torches villages in not the Spirit of God.
What the apologists won’t tell you
There are other ways of explaining the genocidal passages, though unknown to many Evangelical Christians. These views are slightly altered and expanded upon here.
First, there is the view of C.S. Cowles. In Jesus Christ God is fully revealed. “He is the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). In light of Jesus Christ, his work and teachings, the genocidal commands in the Old Testament are neither historical, nor are they commands from God.
Progressive revelation and greater understanding
Evangelicals like to take the biblical text as literally as possible, whenever possible. If a passage looks historical, then it must be historical. The Book of Joshua seems to be a historical genre. Therefore the bloodcurdling events happened exactly as written, as a blitzkrieg style conquest of the Holy Land.
The genocidal commands and their narratives were written to the Israelites as part of a long, divinely inspired historical process. God progressively revealed his character as first, a warrior King, then a merciful King, and eventually the historical flesh and blood Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ.
Besides their penchant for literal interpretation, Evangelicals also believe that “all Scripture is inspired from God” (2 Timothy 3:16). It is held that there are no misleading passages in the Old Testament. But God disagrees with this: “In the wilderness…I gave them statutes that were not good and rules by which they could not have life, and I defiled them through their very gifts in their offering up all their firstborn, that I might devastate them” (Ezekial 20:23-26). “Ah, Lord God, surely you have utterly deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, ‘It shall be well with you,’ whereas the sword has reached their very life” (Jeremiah 4:10). “O Lord, you have deceived me, and I was deceived” (Jeremiah 20:7). God put a “lying spirit” in the mouths of the prophets (1 Kings 22:21-23).
Just as David’s census was said to be incited from God (2 Samuel 24:1), but later revealed to actually be from Satan (1 Chronicles 21:1), so the genocidal commands were in fact satanically inspired. More precisely, God allowed Satan to incite David to rely on numbers rather than on divine might. The true source of David’s census was known through progressive revelation. Looking back and reflecting on 2 Samuel’s narrative, the chronicler was inspired to know the specific source of David’s census, Satan.
While it is true that “all Scripture is inspired from God,” it does contain utterances which are later revealed to be satanic. For example, Genesis 3 records the words of an unnamed serpent who Paul later identifies as Satan himself (2 Corinthians 11:3, 14). The key to all Scripture and the ultimate truth is Jesus Christ himself, “the Truth” (John 14:6).
Nonliteral, unhistorical, and pointing to Jesus Christ
Second, in Cowles’s view, the genocidal commands were never literally commanded by God, nor carried out in history. Those parts of the Old Testament are to be interpreted as prophecies of Jesus Christ, his person and work; “what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets” (Acts 3:18). It is the Scriptures that bear witness to Jesus (John 5:39).
Literal commands to slaughter living people could in no way foreshadow the historic Jesus Christ found in the Gospels and Epistles. But they are prophecies of Jesus overcoming “principalities and powers,” the demonic enemies of humanity, sin and the devil. We might add to this that the lack of archaeological evidence for Joshua’s genocidal campaign demonstrates the unhistorical nature of those narratives. They are thus something other than historical in the modern sense. This allows for their “spiritual” interpretation as foreshadowing Jesus Christ.
Parabolic parables about parables
Second, is the view of James Barr that some parts of the Old Testament that are often taken as history are in fact parables. A parable is a fictional narrative with a truthful religious punchline.
The psalmist Asaph sang, “I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from old” (Psalms 78:2-72). He then recounts Israel’s history. It raises the question, are the genocidal narratives in the Old Testament mere fictional narratives with a truthful religious punchline? The church fathers certainly said yes. Origen, Prudentius, John Cassain, and Gregory the Great are well known examples, though they saw these passages more as allegorical, containing many truthful punchlines, rather than one.
On the other hand the Apostle Paul wrote that “these things happened” in Israel’s wilderness experience (1 Corinthains 10:6). So, we can say that some parts of the Torah and Joshua are not history in our modern sense, but truth cloaked in memorable poetry, filled with wisdom and lessons for the reader, ultimately pointing to Christ.
Jesus often quoted the Old Testament to illustrate his teachings. He spoke of his resurrection as “the sign of Jonah” (Matthew 12:38-42). In the same section of Matthew’s Gospel, the point is clearly made that “all these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables; indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable” (Matthew. 13:34). Is the Book of Jonah a parable, illustrative of Jesus’ resurrection?
Entertaining life
Last, there is the view of Don Cupitt, a major expositor of Christian Non-realism. According to Non-realism, “God” is the way that people put spiritual ideas into a poetic form. In this way, they can use concepts about God in real life.
Cupitt has noticed that for the past few hundred years, the word “God” is being replaced with the word “life.” In his book, Life, Life, Cupitt quotes standard idioms about life, such as “Life is good,” or “Life has taught me…” whereas centuries ago people would say, “God is good,” and “God has taught me…”
This view can be applied to many sections of the Old Testament in ways that most Christian apologists would never entertain – that the Old Testament God is simply one big personification of life itself – with all of its beauties, blessings, curses, tribal rage, slaughter, laughter, lust and love. More precisely, the Old Testament descriptions of God are simply descriptions of life in the Ancient Near East. God is sometimes portrayed as a ruthless, bloodthirsty Middle Eastern despot.
Applying Cupitt’s understanding to certain parts of the Old Testament, God, the merciful Father would still be revealed in Jesus Christ, whereas the God of the Old Testament would be ancient poetry about Israel’s experience in a violent age. In this view, when Jesus quoted the Old Testament, he was using the documents available to him and his listeners to illustrate his points. Did he not describe the Torah and Psalm 82 as “your Law” (John 8:17; 10:34)? Why not “our Law”?
The Apostle Paul instructed the Christians in Rome that, “whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Romans 15:4). How inclusive is this phrase, “whatever was written”? The Scriptures are certainly appealed to in Romans 15:4, but the same Apostle found Christian instruction in the Greek poets Aratus and Epimenides of Crete (Acts 17:28; Titus 1:12). He found truth in the Athenian dramatist Menander (1 Corinthians 15:33). It seems that Christians can find instruction in an ancient poem or fictional comedy. Can a Christian find illustrative truth in Bible’s genocidal commands and narratives, even if they are fictitious?
Let’s join hands
No matter what the Old Testament may say about warfare, all Christians agree that in the New Testament age, “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12), and “though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5). It is the job of the government, not the church, to wage warfare. It is the government who “is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (Romans 13:4).
It is the church who is to “love one another, because love comes from God, and whoever loves has been born from God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God himself is love. In this the love of God was made plain among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but instead that he loved us. God sent his Son to be the covering for our wrongs” (1 John 4:7-10). “Love is patient. Love is kind” (1 Corinthians 13:4). The final word of the New Testament is love, not slaughter in God’s name.
Suggested books:
Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide, by Christian Hofreiter
Show Them No Mercy: Four Views on God and the Canaanite Genocide, by Cowles, Gerd, et. al.
Is God a Moral Monster?, by Paul Copan
Fundamentalism and Beyond Fundamentalism by James Barr
Life, Life, by Don Cupitt
