Randal Rauser's Blog, page 37

Why don’t we take ‘mere Christianity’ seriously?

Every day, people leave Christianity because they have been taught that the religion…

requires one to reject the reigning theory of origins in biologyor that it requires one to accept that women should submit to menor that ‘wicked’ people should and will writhe in torment in a lake of fireor that you need to pray a sinner’s prayer in order to avoid the fiery furnaceor that gay people should not be allowed to marryor that Jews have been ‘grafted out’ of God’s planor that God has a special plan for the Jewish nation, a plan that justifies steamrolling the rights of Palestiniansor that serious disciples of Jesus abstain from alcoholor that real Christians don’t swear or watch ‘R’ rated moviesor that Jesus died only for his special elect peopleor that God will destroy the earth in the immediate future and thus that we don’t need to be concerned about environmental issuesor that God commanded the slaughter of ancient societiesor that God’s perfect law required particular offenders to be pelted to death with rocks

And on and on and on it goes.

Christians disagree in good conscience on all of these topics. None of them is part of the basic Euangelion or “Good News”. Despite that fact, each one of these claims (and many more) has been taught as if it were part and parcel of real, genuine, mere Christianity. Each one constitutes a significant stumbling block, an obstacle to faith, a reason to reject it altogether. And thus, including such disputed claims as part of the basic presentation of mere Christianity has wrought untold harm in alienating people unnecessarily from the faith.

The lesson: think hard about what the essence of Christianity is. Be very careful not to add unnecessary claims to the basic package lest you fall under the indictment of Matthew 23:4: “They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.”

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The Ten Worst Defenses of the Canaanite Genocide

Christian apologists have offered many bad arguments to explain how God commanded the genocidal slaughter of ancient peoples. In this video, I survey the ten worst.

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God of Genocide? My Debate with John Loftus

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Why I don’t Recommend William Lane Craig for Church Apologetics

William Lane Craig’s book “Reasonable Faith” is a very fine apologetic textbook for a Christian apologetic subculture that is interested in this set of questions. But in this video, I explain why it is less relevant to the average churchgoer.

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Canadian Primal: A Review

Mark Dickinson. Canadian Primal: Poets, Places, and the Music of Meaning. McGill-Queens University Press, 2021.

It was a rainy afternoon in February in the late 1990s and I was jogging by Fort Langley (east of Vancouver). The clouds had been socked in heavy and dark for days blocking out the spectacular, jagged peaks of the North Shore mountains. And it left me feeling dark and claustrophobic.

That experience came back to me as I read Canadian Primal, an impressive new book by scholar (and personal friend) Mark Dickinson. Equal parts biography, philosophy, and literary exposition (with just a dose of literary criticism), the book weaves together the stories of five Canadian luminaries that Dickinson calls the “Thinking and Singing Poets”: Dennis Lee, Don McKay, Robert Bringhurst, Jan Zwicky, and Tim Lilburn.

The group is impressive in their diverse and eclectic experiences and interests: Lee, icon of Canadian publishing best known as a children’s poet of such literary classics as Alligator Pie; McKay, long-time editor and dedicated birdwatcher; Bringhurst, restless globetrotter of towering intellect who seeks to retrieve lost indigenous voices; Zwicky, razor-sharp analytic philosopher disenfranchised by the limited horizons of the discipline; and Lilburn, wandering mystic sourced in the Christian tradition.

Diverse though they may be, and spanning the country from Victoria to St. John’s, these five poets together invite us to seek the ‘primal,’ a transformative experience that becomes constitutive of one’s identity. Canadian Primal weaves the lives, poetry, and primal experiences of these five poets in a sort of apprenticeship of awareness for the reader. As Dickinson puts it, “a whole other world is hidden in plain sight all around us. They offer five different paths to that world….” (230)

The poets are well honored and we are well served by our guide: Dickinson’s erudition and reverent passion for his subject matter are on display with every finely crafted sentence. So it is not at all surprising to learn in the “Personal Coda” that the project was nearly 18 years in the making. It shows.

As I said, while reading Canadian Primal I thought of the darkness and claustrophobia of yet another rainy afternoon in greater Vancouver. The reason this experience came to mind is because of what came next. As heavy raindrops began to fall yet again, I experienced something of an epiphany. Rather than perpetuate the futile human absurdity of cursing the weather, I decided to take that moment as an invitation. Rather than complain that the sun and sky and North Shore mountains were now inaccessible to me, I opted to take those raindrops as an invitation to shift my gaze downward. And so, I paused my run and knelt down to examine the thick ferns and grasses jostling for position on the shoulder of the trail, each one cradling dozens of crystalline raindrops in a wonderland of fecundity. At that moment, I knew that I had a decision going forward: would I choose to live a life that curses the sky or one that exults in the foliage?

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Genocide In The Bible? An Interview with Non-Alchemist

For my first interview for Jesus Loves Canaanites, I was delighted to appear on Non-Alchemist’s YouTube channel. We had an engaging and wide-ranging conversation.

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Driving Out the Canaanites? On a failed attempt to re-brand biblical genocide

The heart and foundation of Christianity is belief in a God who is worthy of worship: in the words of Anselm, that being than which none greater can be conceived. And so, when the Bible depicts God as acting in a manner that appears to be less-than-perfect, this creates a challenge for the Christian reader. There is perhaps no more glaring an example of this problem than God’s command to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 20:16-17:

“16 However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you.”

The problem, to put it bluntly, is that it looks like God is here commanding genocide. Needless to say, genocide is widely recognized to be an unconscionable evil, a crime against humanity. And no perfect being worthy of worship would command people to carry out an unconscionable evil.

Christians have offered many solutions to resolve this difficult issue but in this article I will focus on an approach that is currently quite popular: I call it the Just War Interpreter. According to this position, while the texts might appear at first blush to entail genocide, a closer reading warrants the conclusion that God was actually commanding actions consistent with just war.

Just War Interpreters offer several arguments for their position. For example, they claim that the language of Deuteronomy 20:16 -17 should be interpreted as hyperbolic. Further, they assert that the cities such as Jericho and Ai which are the primary targets for mass killing were, in fact military outposts serving a largely rural population. And finally, they argue that the primary directive within the text is not eradication but rather removal of that rural population: in other words, God’s primary intent was always to drive the Canaanites out of the land rather than to kill them en masse. In this article, I am going to offer a rebuttal to that third argument, the one that appeals to the theme of displacement. I will argue first that displacement still entails another war crime, that of ethnic cleansing. Second, I will argue that a closer consideration of the act suggests that it still qualifies as genocide even when the primacy of the language of displacement is taken into consideration.

Genocide and Driving Out

Let’s begin with a definition of genocide. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide offers the following legal definition of the concept in Article II:

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” (link)

It certainly appears that the command in Deuteronomy 20:16-17 to “completely destroy” these people groups such that no members are left alive would meet the first and most overt example of genocide, that of killing members of the target group on the basis of their identity as group members.

However, the Just war Interpreters offer a different view. As I noted, they argue that the language of total eradication in Deuteronomy 20:16-17 should be interpreted in light of the central theme of expulsion. For example, in his book God Behaving Badly, David Lamb writes that “the primary image to describe the Canaanite conquest is not of slaughter.” Rather, “Yahweh tells the Israelites that he will drive out the people of the land….” Similarly, Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan argue that the language of displacement is predominant in Deuteronomy and Joshua: “Israel’s chief responsibility was to dispossess or drive out the Canaanites rather than kill them.” And as Joshua Ryan Butler observes, “Being ‘driven out’ is the language of eviction, not murder.” Underlying the entire account is an assumption that the Canaanites were illegitimate squatters who had no right to live on the land.

We should keep in mind that the question before us is whether the actions of the Israelites meet the above-cited definition of genocide which is operative in international law. With that in mind, we can set aside attempts to justify the action based on God’s command because divine commands are not relevant considerations in international law. To put it simply, whether or not you believe God commanded the action is not the issue: the issue, rather, is whether said action would be recognized as genocide by way of established definitions in international law. So do the Just War Interpreters succeed in recasting the directives as being actions consistent with international law?

Ethnic Cleansing

Let’s begin with the concept of ethnic cleansing. While this term has been much discussed in recent years, it only entered common usage in the early 1990s during the conflict in Yugoslavia. While the term as yet lacks a formally recognized legal definition equivalent to the definition of genocide cited above, Klejda Mulaj provides a helpful working definition:

“Ethnic cleansing is considered to be a deliberate policy designed by, and pursued under, the leadership of a nation/ethnic community or with its consent, with the view to removing an “undesirable” indigenous population of a given territory on the basis of its ethnic, national, or religious origin, or a combination of these by using systematically force and/or intimidation.”

So here is our first question: does the Just War Interpreter’s account of driving out of the land satisfy Mulaj’s definition of ethnic cleansing?

Note first that at the time of the conquest, the Canaanites would have been resident in the land for several centuries. That would be sufficient to describe them as an indigenous population. Moreover, they are then targeted for expulsion because of their cultural-religious identity, and this expulsion comes through a military invasion that involves targeting population centers like Jericho and Ai, driving out the rural population (Deut. 7:1), and destroying their cultural products: “This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire.” (Deut. 7:5)

To conclude, this picture of driving out an indigenous population by force and destroying their remaining cultural products would indeed appear to be a textbook instance of ethnic cleansing by Mulaj’s definition. While ethnic cleansing may not be quite as morally problematic as genocide, it still is a war crime. And it still appears deeply problematic to construe a perfect God as commanding war crimes.

Genocide Revisited

Ethnic cleansing is bad enough, but a closer look suggests that the Just War Interpreter’s focus on expulsion fails to exempt the Israelite actions from qualifying as genocide. To see why we can begin by noting that the Just War Interpreters tend to avoid a very important question: what happened to the rural Canaanites who failed to outrun Israel’s advancing armies? The answer provided in texts like Deuteronomy 7:2 and Joshua 6:21 is that they would have been slaughtered.

With that grisly detail in mind, we can now put together the picture provided by the Just War Interpreters. While the Israelites did not enter the land intent on killing every single Canaanite, that intent is not required for an action to qualify as genocide. However, they did enter intent on forcibly driving out the Canaanites, slaughtering every Canaanite who remained, and destroying every manifestation of Canaanite culture to the end of destroying Canaanite identity as such. The assertions of the Just War Interpreters to the contrary notwithstanding, these actions clearly do conform to the definition of genocide in Article II (a-c). Just imagine a contemporary situation where one religious-ethnic-cultural group attacked another to the end of displacing the other group, killing members of that group based on group identity, and destroying all aspects of the target group’s culture. Would anyone seriously dispute that these actions would qualify as genocide?

There is one final point to note, a point that is regularly overlooked by Just War Interpreters. Ask yourself: in any given society, which residents are the least mobile? The answer is the poor, the elderly, the very young, and the mentally and physically handicapped. In other words, the Canaanites most likely to escape the advancing Israelite armies would be the rich, powerful, and influential while those most likely to be left behind to face mass slaughter at the hand of the Israelites would be the weakest and most vulnerable. Does that sound like a just, wise, and merciful policy from a perfect God?

Conclusion

To conclude, the Just War Interpreters offer some important caveats when reading the biblical text, not least of which is their attention to the primacy of the language of displacement over that of eradication. Nonetheless, it must be said that their argument ultimately fails to justify reclassifying the directives as being consistent with principles of just war. Rather, those actions continue to look very much like not one but two distinct war crimes: ethnic cleansing and genocide. That would suggest that a more radical approach to the problem may be required.

This article is a brief synopsis of one topic I address in chapter 9 from my book Jesus Loves Canaanites.

Lamb, God Behaving Badly: Is the God of the Old Testament Angry, Sexist, and Racist (InterVarsity Press, 2011), 100.

Copan and Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with the Justice of God (Baker, 2014), 81.

Butler, The Skeletons in God’s Closet: The Mercy of Hell, the Surprise of Judgment, the Hope of Holy War (Thomas Nelson, 2014), 232.

Mulaj, Politics of Ethnic Cleansing: Nation-State Building and Provision of Insecurity in Twentieth-Century Balkans (Lanham: Lexington, 2008), 4.

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What if Jesus Loves Canaanites?

In this video, I introduce my new book “Jesus Loves Canaanites” by outlining the problem of the biblical genocide and outlining a solution rooted in the radical life and teaching of Jesus Christ. You can get your own copy of the book here: https://amzn.to/3eptjs7

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Jesus Loves Canaanites is Now Available in Paperback

“On December 22, 2020, I participated in a debate with atheist Dan Barker on the topic “Is the Christian God Worthy of Worship?” The debate was hosted by Cameron Bertuzzi of Capturing Christianity. In preparation for it, I mapped out several points I wanted to address, points which were the culmination of my thinking on the topic of biblical violence, theology, and hermeneutics dating back to 2008. A few days later, on December 26, I decided to turn those rough notes into a book and so I started writing. I kept writing through January and finally completed the manuscript two months later, in late February. “ (quoted from the Foreword)

At that point, I switched to final editing and typesetting. And now, at long last, Jesus Loves Canaanites is finished.

I anticipate that this book will take fire from all sides. Conservative Christians will be incensed that I critique their interpretation of the Bible as immoral and inconsistent with Christian formation. Meanwhile, atheists and other assorted skeptics will be indignant that I maintain a commitment to Scripture as divine revelation, even to the point of doggedly defending biblical inerrancy qua the divine authorial voice. And various other folks will likely complain that I don’t provide the one golden key to unlock the whole and explain biblical violence in one neat, theoretical package.

But I can say this: in writing this book, I have been true to my own convictions. And along the way, I do believe that I have staked out a distinct position based on careful attention to moral intuition and my sustained critique of various other perspectives.

At this point, the book is only available to order in paperback at Amazon.com. Other sellers will be coming online in the coming weeks. And the Kindle version should be available in a few days. Be prepared to wait for a few extra days as the book will go into print in the coming week.

You can order it at Amazon by clicking here.

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Euthanasia in Canada: A Panel Discussion

In this video, I have a discussion with four medical practitioners/caregivers in Canada about euthanasia, palliative care, and Canada’s MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) legislation. To let your political representatives know about your concern with MAID, visit the website https://www.canadiansforconscience.ca/.

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