Randal Rauser's Blog, page 34

Could God Command You to Rape and Cannibalize? If not, Why Think He Could Command You to Slaughter?

Long-time readers of my blog (all fifteen of you!) may recall my past critique of the accommodationist approach to the Canaanite genocide. But others will not. And for those folk, I offer this article.

From a Christian theological point-of-view, it is a truism to note that God accommodates to various suboptimal understandings of the nature of reality. This should not surprise us given that every capable pedagogue accommodates the limited understandings of her audience in order to bring them to a greater understanding. To note a very trivial (but still informative) example that I proferred in one of my books, the grammatician initially teaches her students “‘I’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c'” whilst knowing both that there are many exceptions and that the students will not initially interpret the rule as subject to many exceptions. She accommodates their misunderstanding in order to bring them to a greater understanding … eventually. And insofar as her accommodation to their errant understanding ultimately serves their acquisition of more sophisticated grammar later, it is justified.

Any thoughtful parent will know that similar accommodations are required to create informed and good moral agents. For example, we tell our children “Lying is wrong” and when we do that we recognize the exceptions (e.g. you sure as hell should lie when you’re hiding Jews in your basement and the Nazis come knocking). As with the grammatical exception, that moral nuance can be added later. But for now, we will simply say “Do not lie.”

Some Christian theologians have argued that the herem killing of outgroups can be justified along these lines. For example, respected scholar Christopher Wright has proposed this possibility. On his view, God said, “kill ’em all” with respect to the Canaanites not because God really wanted to kill them all but because that was the best accommodation to the brutish limitations of ANE warfare in which people commonly did kill all the persons of the targeted outgroup including the most vulnerable civilian noncombatants.

This is where I provide my push-back. After all, accommodation surely has its limitations, and in my humble estimation, this is undoubtedly one of them. Think about it like this: in the ANE, mass civilian slaughter was part of the status quo, so Wright proposes that God accommodated that errant, imperfect perspective. But at other points in history, rape and cannibalism of defeated foes and civilians have been part of the status quo. But surely the rape and cannibalism of defeated foes are not intrinsically worse than their slaughter (so I say, anyway). And if you agree, then you have a choice: either God could accommodate to rape and cannibalism by commanding his people in other circumstances to those obviously heinous practices, or God would not accommodate to any of it because it’s all bloody abominable.

I know where my intuitions lie. And nobody has ever given me a compelling reason to question those intuitions.

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Does the Bible include Evil Moral Teaching?

In this video, I argue that the mandate to punish people by pelting them to death with rocks is always immoral and I seek to appeal to the moral intuitions of others in support of this claim by way of an actual modern instance of stoning. If we agree that stoning is always wrong, we must consider standard claims about biblical inerrancy in light of that fact.

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The Treatment of the Canaanites is Unique and Unrepeatable? Rebutting a Popular Genocide Apologetic

One of the common gambits of the Christian apologists who defend the Canaanite genocide is to insist that the narrative does not provide a general justification for genocide because the circumstances were “unique and unrepeatable”. (For example, that is a description I have heard Paul Copan use on different occasions.) The statement seems to have a dual function of (1) reducing the moral offense at the past genocide of the Canaanites and (2) removing the worry that this view would provide a precedent for God to command genocide again in the future. Let’s consider each of these claims in turn.

The first point is, to use a colloquial expression, a matter of attempting to have one’s cake and eat it too. On the one hand, the apologist wants to affirm that God did command these actions in the past, but on the other, he wants to affirm our moral intuitions that indict these actions unequivocally. The problem, however, is that our moral intuitions do not merely indict frequent or occasional appeals to genocide as if a singularly rare appeal can somehow avoid that same indictment. Rather, those intuitions condemn genocide simpliciter. In this regard, genocide is properly classed with a range of other actions which we reject categorically including rape, torture, cannibalism, and mutilation.

Just imagine a man who defended the morality of raping a woman by saying it was a single event when he was a soldier on the battlefield and experiencing significant emotional stress. While such an “apologetic” might provide mitigating factors when judging the immorality of his rape, they would do nothing to render the act itself moral for our moral indictment is not against the frequency of rape or the presence of particular factors that might make it ‘moral’: rather, it is against rape simpliciter. And so it is with genocide.

This brings us to the second aspect of this defense, namely that limiting genocide to the past should remove the precedent for appealing to it in the future. Here’s why this is a bad response: the apologist at this point is appealing to the unique circumstances of Israel’s history as the basis for this exceptional appeal to genocidal actions in the past and then reasoning that Jesus has now come and those circumstances will not obtain again so we can be confident that God will not again command genocide.

The problem is that the apologist is missing the real issue: they have endorsed the view that God will command genocide in exceptional circumstances. We may grant that the specific exceptional circumstances which provided the condition for genocide in Canaan will not obtain again: that is fully consistent with the fact that any number of other possible exceptional circumstances could obtain in the future. Consequently, the apologist who defends the Canaanite genocide as “unique and unrepeatable” must concede that while those circumstances will not obtain again, other circumstances which warrant genocide might.

Consequently, the defense of the Canaanite genocide as unique and unrepeatable is an apologetic without merit. Apologists need to stop repeating indefensible defenses of the indefensible.

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Welcome to my new podcast!

I just launched a new Tentative Apologist Podcast. My first podcast burned me out several years ago so this one is going to be stripped down in terms of production values. You can listen on Spotify here. It should be available shortly on other major streaming platforms as well.

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Jesus Dwells Within You Really But Not Literally

In this video, I explore the importance of metaphor in theological language as a powerful heuristic tool for exploring reality. We focus, in particular, on the spatial metaphor of Jesus and the Holy Spirit dwelling within the Christian.

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Looking to Disagree: The Problem of Pugilistic Evangelicals

The other day, I posted the following tweet criticizing a t-shirt being marketed by evangelical apologist Frank Turek:

“Frank Turek is selling a shirt that replaces the “Coexist” logo with one that says “Contradict” as if belief in the truth of Xianity entails that all the claims of other religions are false. That is wrong. If you only look for disagreement you’ll never find the truth in others.”

I would have thought this to be a rather uncontroversial point: before you look for contradiction, find the concord. Build some bridges before you burn anything. That’s precisely what Paul did in Mars Hill in Acts 17. He began by affirming the altar to the unknown god and quoting from Stoic philosophers before he turned to concepts they did not accept: resurrection and judgment.

Paul provides an invaluable template for us as well: when you speak with others, begin with the point of contact: find that which you can affirm in the view of the other person. Once you have their interest, you can then move on to the points of disagreement.

Needless to say, choosing to frame your opening salvo toward all other religions with the single word “contradict” is an intentional act to frame interactions with your neighbor in terms of disagreement. To be sure, disagreement exists, as Paul illustrates at Mars Hill. But he didn’t begin there and neither should we.

The defender of the shirt will object to my analysis. And they certainly did on Twitter. You see, from their perspective, the issue is about “objective truth” and if we recognize such objective truth then we need to highlight that we disagree with others.

Well sure, but Paul recognized objective truth, too. That didn’t stop him from beginning with agreement in matters of objective truth before turning to disagreement.

Alas, the Turek supporter still looks unhappy: “You don’t get it! The shirt is a response to that ‘Coexist’ logo that endorses religious pluralism.”

But wait, who said the Coexist logo endorses pluralism? Open a dictionary and you will read that “coexist” means “to exist together at the same time” or “to exist separately or independently but peaceably, often while remaining rivals or adversaries.” (source) Neither definition makes any claim about truth, as such.

In fact, the original Coexist logo (pictured to your right) was designed in the year 2000 by Piotr Mlodozeniec to teach religious toleration: i.e. the second definition of peaceful coexistence while remaining adversaries. The sad reality is that evangelicals are often so pugilistic, so combative, so amped up looking for disagreement that they completely miss a message that they should endorse. After all, they surely are not meaning to endorse a strict evangelical version of Sharia law, are they? They do at least think they should tolerate dissenting perspectives, don’t they? I sure hope they do.

There is a lesson here. As Maslow famously said, to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you want to go through life finding disagreement, disagreement you will find. But that narrow, combative approach to reality is likely to miss all the points of agreement you share with others. Truth emerges not merely when you say “No, not that!” but also when you say “Yes, I agree!” How sad that so many evangelicals seem to have forgotten that.

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Atheists “Stealing” From God And Other Apologetic Mistakes

A few years ago, Christian apologist Frank Turek authored a popular book called Stealing from God in which he argued … Well, let’s just let the promotional blurb do the work for us, shall we?

“If you think atheists have reason, evidence, and science on their side, think again! Award-winning author Dr. Frank Turek (I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist) will show you how atheists steal reason, evidence, science, and other arguments from God in trying to make their case for atheism. If that sounds contradictory, it’s because it is! Atheists can’t make their case without appealing to realities only theism can explain. In an engaging and memorable way, Stealing from God exposes these intellectual crimes atheists are committing and then provides four powerful reasons for why Christianity is true.”

So not only does Turek claim that atheists appeal to concepts which, so Turek alleges, can only be defended within a theistic worldview, but by doing this they are stealing from God and thereby committing crimes. Needless to say, all Turek’s points (causality, reason, information, morality) are disputable: even if one believes a particular concept is best explained in theism, it doesn’t follow that it can only be explained in theism.

But I want to focus on the other point, the fact that Turek decides to frame the atheist’s appeal to concepts Turek believes can only be explained in theism as criminal theft. This approach could not be farther away from the Apostle Paul who, when in Mars Hill, did not begin by insulting his Stoic interlocutors and accusing them of stealing from God. Rather, it began with him citing Stoics with approval, “‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.'” (Acts 17:28)

In other words, Paul sought to build bridges where possible, to find points of contact, to affirm the truth that others had discovered, to become all things to all people (1 Corinthians 9:19-23). When people had truth, he affirmed it and then went on to provide a fuller understanding of that truth as he saw it. He certainly knew enough to recognize that there is no reason to alienate one’s audience unnecessarily as incendiary and unwarranted charges of “stealing” would surely do. The differences will arise soon enough, but sound apologetics should begin with an olive branch, not a slap on the cheek.

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The Bible, Divinely Commanded Violence, and Inspiration: My Opening Statement

In May 2021, I debated John Loftus on Modern Day Debate. The debate resolution was “The Bible, with its divinely commanded violence, wasn’t inspired by a perfect God.” Here is my opening statement in full.

Thanks to Modern Day Debate for the invitation to debate and to John Loftus for agreeing to participate.

I’d like to start with a clarification of the scope of debate. My burden is not to provide reasons to believe the Bible is inspired by God. That’s the subject of another debate. Instead, we are debating whether the fact that the Bible includes particular texts describing divine violence is consistent with the Bible’s having been inspired by God. Loftus is arguing that it is not consistent whereas I am arguing that it is.

The way I establish that consistency is by providing a perfectly orthodox Christian account of how to understand the biblical text being inspired by God despite the presence of these troublingly violent texts.

While there are many different types of violence we could talk about, for the sake of time, I will focus on what are arguably the most troubling cases, namely passages where God is described as commanding the destruction and expulsion of Canaanites in Deuteronomy 7:2-5 and 20:10-18 and Joshua 1-12.

Christians have offered various different responses to this problem. One popular approach is to argue that while God did issue these violent commands, they are not themselves problematic when interpreted correctly and understood in historical context. For example, Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan argue in their book Did God Really Command Genocide? that the passages in Deuteronomy and Joshua that describe God as commanding the killing and expulsion of Canaanites from the Promised Land actually conform to the standards of just war.

However, in my book Jesus Loves Canaanites I argue that Copan and Flannagan’s analysis fails and thus that the texts describe actions which meet contemporary legal definitions of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

So it seems to me that the way forward is not to explain how God in fact issued these terrible divine commands; rather, it is to explain how a text that is divinely inspired may consistently include some descriptions of God’s actions that are literally false.

No doubt, some people will find that to be a surprising claim, so it is important to note at the outset that it has always been a standard Christian position to recognize that the Bible contains descriptions about God which are literally false. For example, biblical descriptions of God having a body, or being ignorant of future events or of growing angry or of changing his mind or of acting in time have all standardly been interpreted as anthropomorphic and thus literally false. And that is even if the original human author did not think of them as anthropomorphic.

In addition, central to the Christian understanding of Scripture is the notion of progressive revelation according to which the divine nature and will are revealed more fully over time. For example, Exodus 33:20 says nobody can see God and live, but Jesus reveals in John 14:9 that one can indeed see God in virtue of seeing him. Psalm 11:5 says that God hates the wicked but John 3:16 teaches that God loves the whole world. Such developing theology and internal critique is standardly interpreted in terms of progressive revelation.

It is also understood to be divine accommodation. As any teacher adapts the subject matter to the understanding of the student so God adapts the subject matter of revelation to the audience, and adaptation can allow for some degree of accommodation to the errant, limited epistemic horizons (i.e. errors) of the audience.

To sum up, recognizing the presence of literally false descriptions of God in the Bible, including progressive revelation that involves accommodation to fallible human perspectives just is part of standard Christian Bible reading.

Before we go further, we should clarify how certain popular assumptions about the Bible and the nature of biblical inspiration make it seem problematic that the Bible would include false descriptions. Once we strip away those misguided notions, the perception of inconsistency dissolves.

To begin with, it is popular to think of the Bible as functioning like an owner’s manual for the human person or a set of directions for how to get to heaven. Needless to say, there is no room for false statements within owner’s manuals or life-saving directions, so if that is your assumption as to what the Bible is, you will predictably see a problem.

But that is most emphatically not what the Bible is.

For a more accurate picture, think of a famous textbook: The Norton Anthology of American Literature. This anthology is an expansive and diverse omnibus which spans four centuries of American history, consisting of the writings of men and women from a wide range of experiences, cultures, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The writings in the collection exemplify a diversity of genres and styles including poetry, short story, letters, speeches, novel excerpts, and much more. The editor selected the various texts that fill the pages of the book as a way to tell the story of the American people.

The Bible is a lot like this venerable textbook. Like the Norton Anthology, it is an extremely diverse collection composed by many different people writing in different genres including pithy wisdom sayings, poetry, prophecy, Gospel, apocalyptic, law, epistolary, and so on. The text was composed in three different languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek) and written in several distinct cultural contexts over a thousand years. Far from being like a simple set of instructions for heaven, the Bible rather is a vast and complex collection, an ancient library. And like any library distant from the reader in culture and time, it requires care in interpretation.

Now let’s turn to inspiration. Many people assume this is a process in which God directly acts upon particular individuals, somehow taking control of their cognitive faculties and leading them to write down particular texts rather as a violinist moves a bow over strings. Again, with that image, one is not surprisingly incredulous that God would directly inspire people to write down false statements about God’s nature or his commands.

But I believe this also is a false image, at least insofar as it is invoked as a general account of inspiration. The basic view of inspiration I accept here is a model of appropriation in which God sovereignly works as a divine editor. He perfectly foreknows what particular individuals will write and he appropriates specific writings into his collection much as the editor of the Norton Anthology appropriates the words of various American writers into his collection.

The editor of the Norton Anthology could have many reasons for including texts that convey views divergent from his own and using those texts to convey a different meaning than that intended by the original author. Similarly, God could have many reasons for including texts in the Bible that include views divergent from his own and within God’s collection they come to convey a different meaning than that intended by the original human author.

Jesus: The Hermeneutical End

So how do we interpret this complex library? From a Christian perspective, the interpretive key is conformity to Jesus. In Second Timothy 3:15-17, Paul writes:

from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Paul says here that the purpose of Scripture is to make us like Jesus.

And what does this look like, exactly? When asked in Matthew 22:36 what is the greatest law, Jesus replied to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. And keep in mind that for Jesus, ‘neighbor’ means the outsider: the proverbial stranger, leper, prisoner, tax collector, Samaritan, and so on. “All the Law and the Prophets,” he said, “hang on these two commandments.”

Thus, Christians have always recognized that Bible reading should be guided by love of God and neighbor. As Augustine famously said 1600 years ago: “Whoever … thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up [a] two-fold love of God and … neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.”

Faithful Bible reading is that which brings about the increased love of God and neighbor to the end of becoming more like Jesus. Needless to say, if you interpret a text in such a way that God literally commanded actions which constitute contemporary war crimes like genocide and ethnic cleansing, then you are not loving your neighbor and thus you are not reading the texts as you ought.

Israel: The Hermeneutical Struggle

You might be wondering why God appropriated such a complex collection as his inspired word.

The fact is, however, that this complexity fits squarely within the logic of the Judeo-Christian tradition in which piety and devotion emerge through the very act of wrestling with complexity and asking questions.

The background is found in Genesis 32:22-32, the famous story where Jacob wrestles through the night with an Angel of the Lord who is the Lord. This story functions as an etiology, an account of the origin of Israel as the People of God. As Jacob wrestled with the angel, so to be God’s people is to wrestle with God, and that means to wrestle with the texts of his people.

As Christians, that wrestling should serve the formative end of love of God and neighbor to be like Jesus.

Interpretations

In my book Jesus Loves Canaanites, I describe various ways that Christians have wrestled with these passages in Deuteronomy and Joshua in accord with these formative ethical ends. For example,

Accommodationists like Christopher Wright say the text describes an accommodation to morally imperfect standards of ancient warfare;Ancient allegorists like Origen interpret these texts as symbolic accounts of the soul’s sanctification;Spiritualizers like Douglas Earl interpret the contrast between Rahab and Achan as intentionally subverting the very in-group out-group distinction that makes violence possible;Finally, providential errantists like Eric Seibert find in the text a challenge to the Christian to read in solidarity with all oppressed peoples including Canaanites.

In this opening statement, I have explained how a divinely inspired text may consistently include literally false statements about God. I did so by explaining that the Bible is not a simple road map to heaven but a complex library of divinely appropriated human experience encompassing figurative language that is literally false, progressive revelation, and accommodation to errant perspectives. The Christian is invited to enter into the devotional wrestling with the complexity of the text in community always seeking to cultivate love of God and neighbor to the end of becoming like Jesus.

And so, to conclude, the fact that the Bible includes particular texts describing divine violence is indeed consistent with the Bible’s having been inspired by God.

Cf. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse.

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Frank Turek on the Slaughter of the Canaanites. And My Response.

The perfectly awful apologetic defense of the Canaanite slaughter in this clip concisely captures why I wrote Jesus Loves Canaanites. Let’s begin with the video (it’s only six minutes). I’ll then post my commentary below.

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The video begins with a question posed by the moderator of what appears to be an in-church training event. He asks: “Why would a good God say go into the Promised Land and clear these folks [the Canaanites] out?”

Turek’s reply begins like this: “Normally atheists bring this question up.” At first blush, this is a puzzling claim. After all, the question was just posed by a friendly moderator in a church setting. And there is no doubt but that countless Christians have struggled with this very question. So why is Turek now starting to talk about atheists?

The reason is that it allows Turek then to introduce his first talking point which isn’t about Canaanites at all. Rather, it is about atheists: “They talk about an Old Testament atrocity, I’ll ask them, ‘Um, you’re an atheist. By what standard are you judging the God of the Bible?'” So now Turek can talk about atheists and how they allegedly have no objective basis for morality.

First of all, this is simply not true. I don’t want to spend much time discussing this because I’ve already done so many times elsewhere. Instead, let me direct you to this debate where renowned ethicist Shelly Kagan soundly defeats William Lane Craig on the question “Is God necessary for morality?” Or you could read this book by atheist philosopher Erik Wielenberg. Or you could read the work of philosophers like J.L. Schellenberg and Ronald Dworkin which outline various ways that atheism is perfectly consistent with objective moral value.

Turek’s claim that atheism entails that morality is merely a matter of opinion has been refuted time and again. I don’t know whether Turek is dishonest or just very poorly informed, but his claim is false and he should stop making it.

That said, the way that Turek then relays an exchange with an atheist is just so offputting:

Atheist: “Oh, he murders people.”

Turek: “Why is murder wrong if there’s no God? Who said? You said? Oh, you’re the moral arbiter of the universe now?”

First of all, it wasn’t an atheist who raised the issue, Mr. Turek. It was a friendly moderator. Second, this snarky exchange is meant to humiliate, embarrass, and deflect from a very real question. Turek is much more comfortable mocking fictional atheist interlocutors than he is dealing honestly with the question.

And then comes the icing on the cake: “You’re stealing from God to argue against him.” Turek thinks this line is so clever that he wrote an entire book about how atheists allegedly “steal from God.” Christian apologists who accuse atheists of “stealing” are the equivalent of atheist apologists who accuse Christians of “lying”. Each is an inflammatory, provocative, and wholly unjustified allegation which merely poisons the well of charitable discourse.

At that point, Turek goes on to explain that God only kills people after giving reasons, and the reasons he killed the Canaanites were because they were evil and, in particular, they sacrificed their children. But the Israelites didn’t simply target the subset of the population that practiced child sacrifice: they targeted the entire population including children. If a man kills one of his children, do the police storm his house and kill the man, his wife, and the rest of his children in retaliation? That, of course, is insane. Yet, that is precisely the logic that Turek is proposing we follow here.

Turek describes the way that Canaanite babies were allegedly “cooked” in sacrifice: it’s a clear and bracing appeal to moral intuitions. And yet, Turek is silent on how the Israelites would have hacked Canaanite infants to pieces in retaliation. If our intuitions unveil the heinousness of the Canaanite actions against their infants, those same intuitions rise to condemn the Israelite actions.

Moreover, Turek says the offense was child sacrifice. What he doesn’t bother to mention is that the herem killing described in passages like Deuteronomy 20 provides a cultic, sacrificial framework to Israel’s assault against Canaan. In other words, the Israelites were sacrificing Canaanites (including infants) as well as their property and animals to Yahweh. So apparently, the offense isn’t that the infants were being sacrificed. Rather, it is that the infants were being sacrificed to the wrong deity.

Next, Turek makes what is arguably his most outrageous and appalling claim: “If Christianity is true, people don’t really die. They just change location.” So according to Turek’s logic, the Nazis were just helping European Jews to “change location.” And in 1994, the Hutus merely dispatched 800,000 Tutsis to a new location.

After that, Turek invokes some bad arguments from Paul Copan that I refute in Jesus Loves Canaanites. But I will simply say this to conclude: I am sure Mr. Turek is a nice fellow, but I find his apologetic treatment of the Canaanites to be morally corrupting and deeply counter to the way of Jesus. Apologetics like this does incalculable harm and needs to be openly refuted. And the best way to become equipped to respond to such pastoral and theological malpractice is to read Jesus Loves Canaanites.

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Canaanites, Hell, Demons: The S.J. Thomason Interview

Check out my wide-ranging interview with SJ Thomason here. We start off with Canaanites, but later we segue to hell and even demonic experiences.

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