Thinking Christian

The God of the Bible is often charged with gross immorality, especially for ordering entire nations to be destroyed in the Old Testament. He commanded Israel to cleanse Canaan of its immoral, idol-worshiping nations after the Exodus, and in 1 Samuel 15 he instructed them to destroy Amalek completely, “man and women, child and infant, oxen and sheep, camel and donkey.”

This post is the first of at least two I will write on the genocide question. I will begin by working out a more careful definition of the question. We know what genocide is, of course: it is the attempt (successful or not) to eliminate an entire race, tribe, or nation of people. It is murder writ very large, involving many co-participants in evil and resulting in the deaths of many.

There is no hiding what God told Israel to do. The question is whether God or the Bible are free of the guilt we normally attach to genocide.

I do not propose to answer that question now. I believe there is an answer, but I will save that for the next post (and possibly beyond). The first task is to reflect on what makes genocide the extreme evil that it is, for definition of that sort is essential to the next steps.

For example, one thing that makes genocide so evil is the sheer numbers of deaths that result. In Rwanda, the dead numbered in the hundreds of thousands; in the Holocaust, they totaled many millions. To bring about that many deaths is unspeakably wrong. A believer in the Bible must be prepared to say how God could be free of blame for ordering thousands to die.

Genocide is also wrong in that it:

• Originates from a heart of hate
• Involves a desire to dominate
• Ignores justice and mercy toward the victims
• Targets its victims indiscriminately, without respect to guilt or innocence, age, status in life, sex, or ability to defend themselves or to be aggressors themselves
• Generally entails taking the law into one’s own hands
• Is oriented against the ultimate establishment of justice and mercy in the land
• Provokes severe terror
• Forces huge hardship (massive displacement, refugee situations, economic hardship that may extend as far as nakedness and famine)
• Tears apart families
• Seeks to systematically destroy not only individuals (in large numbers) but also their cultures or ways of living
• Rends the conscience of the perpetrators

What did I miss? It’s easy to overlook things when one tries to systematize in this way. That is essentially the question for today’s post, and you’re welcome to extend my list by adding comments. Even from this, clearly there is something about genocide that is more wrong, and more obviously wrong, than just about. Yet we who believe in God continue to believe that he is holy, good, and just. How can we do this?

I am setting up the question today, not answering it, but I will preview the manner in which I’ll be answering by offering a partial response to the first point raised here: the sheer number of deaths. My approach will be to treat each of the bulleted points separately first, and then later to integrate those treatments into a combined closing response. Therefore, for now, I’m separating out the matter of the number of deaths from the other listed issues. My first look is not at the way they died, or the terror that accompanied it, or any of the other related aspects, but at just the number of those who died. Can God be free of blame in calling for so many deaths?

Let’s be very realistic: on that matter, if God has a problem, it’s far greater than just these genocides. From the very beginning, from the time of the Fall, God has watched over the deaths not of thousands or millions but billions. Some have lived long lives (by human standards), some have been cut off very early, by disease, malnourishment, neglect, injury, or violence. But every victim of genocide was destined to die, even apart from such violence. We have three options in assessing this. Either:

1. God is morally blamable for all the deaths in history, and genocide is just another instance of this (though a special case due to the other factors already named), or
2. God is not blamable for all the deaths in history, but genocide is nevertheless a special case for the reasons listed, so he remains culpable in the case of the OT genocides, or
3. God is not morally blamable for all the deaths in history, and for reasons to be discussed later, he is also not morally blamable for the OT genocides.

The three options are very different, yet they have something very important in common with each other. You can take your pick of any of the three, and no matter which one you choose, inevitably you see that the issue is not the same for God as it is for humans. There is no way it could be the same: we have not looked on the death of every human that has ever lived. God has. If we consider God’s role in these genocides the same way we do humans’, then we are certain to get it wrong, for God’s role and relation to the events is not the same as ours. We need to think through these differences. The reflexive reaction we all have toward mass killings requires more reflection in God’s case.

That last point bears repeating. This whole matter is laden with emotion, and rightly so, based on our experiences over the last century and more. I respect that depth of emotion, and will continue to do so. But I will also lead us to consider whether those feelings tell the whole story with respect to God’s actions in the Old Testament. The question must be asked that way, because we have seen, the issue for God is not the same as it is for humans. We’ve demonstrated that already. The question is not whether it’s different for God, but how it is different for God, and whether that makes a difference.

It also bears repeating that I have not yet begun to answer the questions raised here. I think it may be premature even for commenters to start in with answers, because it’s so crucial to get the question defined clearly first. I would prefer it if we could all focus our comments on defining the question for now. We’ll start working on answers soon enough.

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Early this week we started to take a look at whether God is guilty of genocide, in various places in the Old Testament where he commanded Israel to destroy certain nations. The question was whether these acts of God were evil, as genocide certainly is in any normal instance. In that first post I bulleted-listed several factors that make genocide the evil that it is. If God is free of the guilt of genocide, then he must be free of guilt on each of those specifics.

And here we must take time to examine just what kind of case the Christian must make in order to show that God is not guilty of genocide. Lacking clarity on that, we would run the risk of a comment battle over irrelevancies. So allow me to explain the case that I intend to make.

(A) God is free of guilt with respect to the specifics listed in the first post.

God could be free of guilt with respect to those items in either of two ways. Either:

(A1) he has not committed the acts named there, or
(A2) if he has done one or more of them, he has done it in a way that is not morally blameworthy.

(B) God’s goodness in these acts is consistent with his character as revealed throughout the Scriptures.

Statement (B) actually flows from (A), but it has an importance to this discussion that is best shown by contrast. The Christian is not responsible (in this case) to demonstrate:

(~B1) that God’s goodness is consistent with any individual’s conception of goodness, or
(~B2) that God is actually good.

Let me explain each of these, beginning with (~B1). The Christian obviously has no commitment to any conception or definition of goodness other than that given by the Bible. God is not subject to human standards. For example, if the skeptic says, “God’s acts are clearly genocide, and genocide is obviously always wrong,” that is an external standard that the Christian need not accept; he may use God’s entire revelation to examine and possibly to reject it. Or if the skeptic says “Anything as horrifying and terrifying as this must be wrong,” that is likewise an external standard. The issue is not whether God lives up to any individual’s standard of goodness, it is whether God lives up to God’s standard of goodness. It is a question of consistency or coherence, or conversely, about whether God contradicts his own character.

This leads to (~B2). Obviously I affirm God’s goodness, as do all Christians. To demonstrate his goodness, however, or to prove that he is good, is not a part of this discussion. The skeptic’s question is not (or at least should not be), “Can you prove that God is good, even though he ordered Israel to wipe out other nations?” The problem with formulating the question that way is that there are two quite distinct sub-questions hidden in it:

(SQ1) Can you prove that God is good? and
(SQ2) Don’t the acts of genocide in the Old Testament contradict his goodness?

Both of them are worthwhile questions. But every experienced blogger and commenter knows what happens when you get two different questions running through a discussion without carefully distinguishing them. It’s confusing and fruitless. (SQ1) is a good question, but it’s not the question at hand. (SQ2), which is the question form of statement (B), is where we must focus for now.

The question on the table is one of internal consistency. An internal consistency discussion may take the form:

1. Assume characteristics x of person Y.
2. Y has done deed z.
3. Is z consistent with x?

It is perfectly legitimate in this case, it is not arguing in a circle, to start with a set of assumptions, because in the end those assumptions will be tested. Therefore to (A) and (B) we may add one more aspect describing the case Christians must defend:

(C) Assuming that God is good, and assuming that goodness itself is adequately and accurately defined by the Bible, it is no contradiction to God’s goodness that he ordered certain nations to be killed.

Combining statements (A), (B), and (C), we arrive at the three-part statement I intend to defend.

(D) Assuming that God is good, and assuming that goodness itself is adequately and accurately defined by the Bible, God’s ordering certain nations to be killed is no contradiction to that goodness; it is consistent with his character as generally revealed in the Scriptures. More specifically God is good (free of guilt) with respect to the issues listed in the first post in this series.

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Matthew Anderson signaled this to us, and I want to be sure we all have opportunity to look at it: a continuing discussion on the question of God and his alleged acts of genocide in Philosophia Christi.

Two of the papers are available online, both by Paul Copan:

Is Yahweh a Moral Monster? The New Atheists and Old Testament Ethics

Yahweh Wars and the Canaanites: Divinely-Mandated Genocide or Corporate Capital Punishment?

For those who want the quick version, Jason at Thinking Matters has summarized the second of these, and fleance7 at Cloud Of Witnesses has provided abstracts to other papers in this issue of the journal.

The first of these papers, “Is Yahweh a Moral Monster” places the question where it belongs, in the context of the ancient Near East (ANE). Copan points out that while God’s actions are shocking to 21st-century Westerners, they were surprising in a completely different way in the ANE. He cautions us that “We must allow the OT ethical discussion to begin within an ANE setting, not a post-Enlightenment one.” It ought to be obvious but still it needs to be said (as Copan does), that “the ANE world is ‘totally alien’ and ‘utterly unlike’ our own social setting.”

Now, does this make a difference in an ethical discussion? Relativists certainly ought to be saying Yes! to that question. But we are not talking about relativism in the case of God. We are instead talking about God’s leading his people through (in Copan’s words) “Incremental ‘humanizing’ steps rather than a total overhaul of ANE culture.” Israel was surrounded by slavery, monarchy, patriarchy, war, and more. I will quote at length here:

Rather than attempt to morally justify all aspects of the Sinaitic legal code, we can affirm that God begins with an ancient people who have imbibed dehumanizing customs and social structures from their ANE context.[39] Yet this God desires to draw them in and show them a better way:

if human beings are to be treated as real human beings who possess the power of choice, then the “better way” must come gradually. Otherwise, they will exercise their freedom of choice and turn away from what they do not understand.

To completely overthrow these imbedded ANE attitudes, replacing them with some post-Enlightenment ideal, utopian ethic would simply be overwhelming and in many ways difficult to grasp. We can imagine a strong resistance to a complete societal overhaul. Think of the difficulty of the West’s pressing for democracy in nations whose tribal/social and religious structures do not readily assimilate such ideals.

(The second paragraph there is a quote from Alden Thompson.) Copan recognizes that some of the OT “reflects a less morally-refined condition;” yet he also notes that every questionable practice in the OT has “contrary witness” elsewhere, and that Scripture itself can guide us to discerning what was local/contextual, and what is universal.

The surprise that God’s law must have presented in the ANE was its humaneness. Copan compares the OT to other ANE codes, showing its marked superiority over the others in areas including slavery, punishment for crimes, warfare, and the sexes. Yet in keeping with the earlier point of “incremental humanizing,” there is a progression of moral expectation over the years throughout the OT period (culminating in Jesus Christ).

Copan speaks to warfare as well, and on this topic I am hesitant to summarize. It is the most involved and difficult question he tackles, and to shorten it would be to distort it, so I encourage you to read at least that much of it directly from the source. His perspective on God’s prerogatives over human life, and on the fact of the afterlife, are particularly important. They figure crucially in my own answer to the question we’ve been discussing, as is also “the seriousness of sin and the sovereign prerogatives of Yahweh.”

Copan closes the paper with three comments directed toward objections raised by “New Atheists:”

A. Naturalism’s foundations cannot account for ethical normativity; theism is better positioned to do so.

B. The new atheists ignore the sui generis [one-time only] status of Israel’s theocracy.

C. The new atheists wrongly assume that the OT presents an ideal ethic, while ignoring the OT’s redemptive spirit and creational ideals.

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To finish my series on God and his alleged acts of genocide in the Old Testament (OT) will take a longer post than usual. I’ve divided it up into four entries, but there’s no good way to split this last one.

First I want to remind you of something I mentioned very briefly last time, and to expand on it. There is room for doubt that God actually called on Israel to do anything of the sort. This Paul Copan article draws from Ancient Near East (ANE) scholarship and archaeology to show that:

• The language of “every man, woman, child, and beast” was very likely hyperbolic (exaggerated);
• God made provision for how Israel should relate to their neighbors in Palestine, implying that he did not expect them all to be exterminated;
• The cities for which God commanded complete destruction were likely military garrisons with few civilians in them;
• The command was never to attack the countryside, but only the cities; and
• At least one of those garrison cities, Jericho, appears from archaeological research to have had a population of only a hundred persons or so.

Copan takes this as a tentative solution to the “genocide” problem, since the verdict on all this is far from clear. Not having any training in ANE scholarship, I must be even more tentative. It’s a solution that seems attractive, and it may be true. Even the possibility of its truth weakens skeptical claims (like Richard Dawkins’s) that the OT God cannot be regarded as anything other than a homicidal, genocidal maniac. There is the possibility that what he called on Israel to do was nothing at all like genocide; it was standard warfare.

Even though it is attractive and may be true, however, and even though it weakens skeptical claims, it is still inadequate. It was still warfare of aggression, and it may have been warfare of complete extermination, something like genocide. Can we regard God as having sound ethical reasons for doing it?

At the start of this series we talked about what makes genocide the real ethical and existential horror that it is. In the second post we talked about conditions under which God could potentially be free of blame for the acts (apparently) ascribed to him. I intend to close my case here by following statement (D) from that second post:

Assuming that God is good, and assuming that goodness itself is adequately and accurately defined by the Bible, God’s ordering certain nations to be killed is no contradiction to that goodness; it is consistent with his character as generally revealed in the Scriptures.

More specifically God is good (free of guilt) with respect to the issues listed in the first post in this series.

(The assumptions and conditions contained in this statement were defended in that post.)

Holopupenko rightly described that my approach here as minimalist. My intent is simply to show that it is not logically or morally necessary to conclude that God is (borrowing Paul Copan’s words) a “moral monster.” One could certainly say more of a positive nature than that, but my purpose in this series is less ambitious, and I think appropriately so. Given that God is good, which is knowledge available through other avenues, the question is whether these OT acts contradict that goodness. If we can show that the apparent contradictions can be resolved, then we can rationally continue to accept that God is good.

Thus I do not propose to satisfy any atheist’s or skeptic’s personal sense of moral outrage toward what they believe the OT says God did. It would be unrealistic to think I could accomplish that. I simply intend to show that it is rationally possible to hold to the goodness of God in the OT; that it is a belief that can be held without contradiction.

So can we rationally regard God as free of guilt with respect to the issues listed in the first post in the series? Yes, we can, as long as we bear in mind who God is: he is the sovereign creator and master of all life, he is fully holy and just, he is all-knowing, and he holds eternity in his hands. (It’s not necessary for me here to prove this about God. I accomplish my task if I show that this view of God can be maintained without contradiction.)

Some items on the list from my first post have easy answers, but I’ll save them for last, and begin with the harder ones. Genocide is extremely wrong in that it:

• Ignores justice and mercy toward the victims
• Is oriented against the ultimate establishment of justice and mercy in the land
• Targets its victims indiscriminately, without respect to guilt or innocence, age, status in life, sex, or ability to defend themselves or to be aggressors themselves

God’s justice and mercy are not subject to human limitations. We will not grasp God’s actions clearly by thinking of him the way we think of ourselves. Our own capabilities for justice are so very extremely limited: we understand only some of what constitutes the ultimate good, while God knows it fully. None of us are without sin, but God is holy. We have no ability to mete out justice in proper measure according to the offense, but by his wisdom God can do this. Very often we do not know what a person has done, whether right or wrong—we presume innocence in court because we know how easily we can make mistakes, and we want to err on the side of grace rather than condemnation. We could never know what each person in an entire nation has done. God knows exactly.

Most importantly, our options are limited to this life, while God can render justice beyond this life. Suppose an innocent person is killed along with the guilty. God can still make it right; for what happens in this short life is of little account in comparison to the rest of eternity, and temporary injustices can permanently be made right agin. By this means God can also dispense mercy as well as justice.

God’s holiness and justice also provide him with moral justification for this further item from the list:

• Seeks to systematically destroy … cultures or ways of living

These were cultures that needed destroying. They were idolatrous and rapacious. They practiced a host of moral outrages including ritual prostitution and child sacrifice. Israel, by contrast, was intended by God to be a holy people, set apart for himself so that through them he could reveal his reality and his character. This purpose for Israel could not coexist with the Canaanite nations’ practices.

Destroying their culture was quite intentional on God’s part, and fully justified. God is not a cultural relativist. He does not regard every culture’s different practices as, “it’s not wrong, it’s just different.” Some differences he celebrates, to be sure, but some are wrong, and some cultures are more pervasively corrupt than others. By his sovereignty, wisdom, knowledge, and holiness, God has the moral and legal capacity to judge nations. Again, no human (or group of humans) is able morally or mentally to make that kind of judgment, but God is.

On the first post I also had this to say about genocide, that it:

• Provokes severe terror
• Forces huge hardship (massive displacement, refugee situations, economic hardship that may extend as far as nakedness and famine)
• Tears apart families
• Involves huge numbers of deaths

Some of this pain was justice being enacted on earth. Consider the case of a single offender being sentenced to execution or life in prison for murder. That individual will likely experience the same emotions named here, and will in the end (sooner or later) die without another moment of freedom. Most of us regard this as justice being served.

The Canaanite nations as a whole were guilty of gross crimes, and for those crimes the same kind of justice was served on a large scale. If you think it is wrong for persons to experience suffering and terror as a result of their sins, you fail to see what sin really is in the eyes of God. No one escapes God’s punishment for sin, except through the grace given through Jesus Christ. Now obviously it is impossible for us humans to imagine individual justice being scaled up to justice on a national level, but it is no stretch for God to think in that way.

Of course there were probably some persons involved who were innocent of these gross crimes, especially if there were children who were really caught up in the exterminations (which, as Copan has shown, is at least questionable). But God has the ability to make it right for them, even after death. His goodness is great enough to prevail even over temporary failures of justice. God’s people in both the OT and the New Testament recognized injustice happening on the earth, and looked to God to make it right. Until late in OT times, knowledge of eternal life was dim, yet still they trusted in God to accomplish justice somehow, some day; see Psalm 55 or Psalm 56, for example. In the NT it became clear that it would be accomplished through God’s judgment applied to each person after his or her death.

That leaves one final difficult issue on our list of what makes genocide so awful:

• Rends the conscience of the perpetrators

One wonders how the Israelites who were ordered to carry out these acts were able to do it without being seared in their consciences. William Lane Craig considers this to be the hardest issue of them all. He answers it in terms of the cultural conditions of the ANE:

Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.

But then, again, we’re thinking of this from a Christianized, Western standpoint. For people in the ancient world, life was already brutal. Violence and war were a fact of life for people living in the ancient Near East. Evidence of this fact is that the people who told these stories apparently thought nothing of what the Israeli soldiers were commanded to do (especially if these are founding legends of the nation). No one was wringing his hands over the soldiers’ having to kill the Canaanites; those who did so were national heroes.

This was not the day of modern liberal democracies, and to consider our own sensitivities as normative for them is temporally chauvinistic. Nevertheless I find that for my own satisfaction I must resort to the same answer as I have given above: God is able to make it right for those who must experience tragedy or horror, in this case the horror of being used as God’s instrument to carry out such large-scale justice.

The final three issues from our list are the easy ones:

• Originates from a heart of hate
• Involves a desire to dominate
• Generally entails taking the law into one’s own hands

Simply put, none of these apply to God. He is the sovereign lawgiver, so it is impossible to say he errs by taking the law into his own hands—that’s where it belongs! Similarly, what would a “desire to dominate” mean for a good God such as he is? And the answers to the above-listed issues show that his motivation is not hatred—at least not hatred toward person. He did (and does) hate sin.

So it is possible to resolve all the apparent contradictions here, and to continue to believe in God’s goodness. Some readers may have noticed a further condition upon which this defense of God rests: that these acts were fully his doing, and Israel was his instrument. It’s something only God can initiate, and given the massive changes in the world and in the way God interacts with the world since that time, there is no question about this being a guide or norm for any human action today. This is not about whether genocide could be okay under any circumstances today. It’s about whether we can rationally hold that acts ascribed to God in the Bible could be consistent with his goodness.

My minimalist approach to this will not satisfy everyone. Atheists and skeptics will continue to express indignation at what they think are God’s moral outrages. I have shown that there is no rational necessity to view it that way, but I doubt that will stop them. Some Christians will wonder why I didn’t express a more positive case for the goodness of God. The basics are there, in the eternal justice, mercy, and holiness I have affirmed of him, but admittedly this has been a defense of those attributes, not a positive Biblical case in favor of them.

If I had more time and space I would love to present that positive case, for quite positively God is good. God is good even in respect to situations we understand very dimly—including long-ago, immensely alien situations like these, which, as Paul Copan has told us, may never even have taken place in the way they appear to have happened.

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