CHAPTER 14
Does God Approve of Slavery, Misogyny, and Other Evils?
Hell: Is Permanent Punishment Just?
PART III: Is There a Solution?
The Imperfections of the Old Testament
The Cross: The Greatest (In)Justice
Part I
Confronting a Conundrum
Chapter 1
Gut Reactions to the Old Testament God
I remember his face. My friend was outraged. He asked, “Can you envision grabbing a little boy by his curly hair and slitting his throat with a sword—all in the name of God?” His gestures displayed the grotesque act, and his expression revealed his anger at my obstinacy. I found myself in the awkward position of trying to defend the seemingly indefensible, the command that God gave to his people in the Old Testament to conquer the Canaanites and kill every man, woman, and child. The horror of this command and its practical consequences prompted my friend’s outburst. I wanted to explain but was at a loss for words. I wanted to show him how this terrifying instruction fit into the plan of a loving, merciful God who sent his Son to die for our sins, but I couldn’t formulate a convincing explanation.
You don’t have to look very far in the Old Testament to find some “problems” to deal with: Why does God strike down the Egyptian firstborn? Why does God order Abraham to sacrifice his son? Why does Elijah slaughter the four hundred fifty prophets of Baal? Why does God send plagues on his people that wipe out thousands? Why does God approve the seemingly vigilante justice of “heroes” such as Phinehas, who skewered an adulterous couple with a spear? If you’ve spent considerable time reading the Bible, you’ll have a whole laundry list of “problems.” By problems, I mean those events or teachings in biblical history that don’t easily line up with what we know about God from the New Testament and the teachings of the Church.
At times, the problems can prompt you to shift in your chair or feel a bit squeamish. But other times, the problems can result in a crisis of faith. In fact, many atheist writers cite the challenging passages of the Old Testament when they rail against Christian belief and practice. Not everyone demands a solution to these thorny issues, but many use them as a reason, or perhaps an excuse, to dismiss the God of the Bible as an angry, harsh, cruel power-monger. Oftentimes we are left without answers, without an adequate response to offer to those who challenge our faith because of these so-called dark passages. Yet it is crucial that we can respond well—for our own faith, for our Christian friends whose faith may be tested by the dark passages, and in a special way for non-Christians who resist the Gospel because of the Old Testament. If we can show how the dark passages comport with an ethical Christian worldview, how they reveal God, how they prepare for Christ, then perhaps we can be better witnesses for him.
Solutions Good and Bad
Unfortunately, Scriptures that make us squirm are tough to deal with. Their very darkness can lead us into overly simplistic or simply incorrect interpretations. In order to read Scripture correctly, we should be looking for what the human author and divine Author intended, how the whole fits together, and how it can be understood in the context of the Christian tradition.1 But before we get down to the details of applying such an approach, we need to look at a few bad solutions to our problem. The bad solutions are tempting because they are easy. They avoid the hard questions, and they let us off the hook. The trouble is that they don’t say what needs to be said. They don’t address the atheist’s deep question. They dodge the problems rather than taking them head-on.
The first bad solution is what I call the “shrug.” The shrug happens when a Bible reader is happily reading along, perhaps even praying the Psalms, and comes across a line like, “Blessed is the one who seizes and smashes your children against the rock” (Ps 137:9). Rather than being startled, getting angry, or standing in awe of God’s mystery, this Bible reader says to himself: “That’s weird! Well, it is the Old Testament.” He shrugs, moves on, and doesn’t give it another thought. This easy solution is practical, but it is simply a dodge of the problem, not an explanation. It cannot survive the onslaught of hard questions from doubters. The shrug avoids the issues, but can’t answer them.
Unfortunately, Scriptures that make us squirm are tough to deal with. Their very darkness can lead us into overly simplistic or simply incorrect interpretations.
The second bad solution is a form of spiritualization. There is a good kind of spiritual reading, and I’ll talk about that later in the book. But this bad form of spiritualization dodges the issues by reading every tough problem only at the spiritual level, without honoring and respecting the foundational importance of the literal sense. It says that Psalm 137:9 is about destroying the beginnings of sin by smashing temptations against the rock of Christ, not about smashing the babies of Babylon. This avoids, rather than solves, the problem with which this passage confronts us. St. Thomas Aquinas and other theological authorities such as the Pontifical Biblical Commission warn us that every spiritual interpretation must be founded on the literal sense.2 We can’t escape the centrality and priority of the literal sense. If we over-spiritualize the text and don’t honor what the words actually convey, then we strip it of its power, steal its significance, and undercut whatever spiritual meanings we might be trying to construct.
The third bad solution originated in ancient times, but many modern people succumb to it. This solution separates the “God of the Old Testament” from the “God of the New Testament.” It pits the two main parts of the Bible against each other, claiming that the two “Gods” we find in them are different. The ancient heretic Marcion proposed this idea: He and his followers actually threw out the Old Testament and used only some of the New. This also is an easy solution, a dodge, which promotes the New Testament as a trump card over the Old Testament. In this view, the Old Testament can’t really reveal God to us; it just gives us a false, menacing portrait of God that doesn’t tell us who he is. Now Marcion and his followers died a long time ago, but it is tempting for us to become practical Marcionites,