The Bible the Word of God?

 

Introduction

How can the Bible be the Word of God when it presents God as himself acting immorally and instructing the Jewish people to behave immorally? What’s more, there are some moral instructions in it which some Christians expressly and openly repudiate. I am a Catholic Christian. For me the Bible, from Genesis to the book of the Apocalypse, is the Word of God, by which is meant that it contains God’s revelation of himself and of his redeeming plan for mankind. My faith also maintains that God is good, indeed the highest good, goodness itself. With that background I have long felt uncomfortable with those stories and passages in the Old Testament in which God on behalf of his Chosen People is represented as committing horrendous crimes such a genocide, instructing the Jews to do the same and is frequently presented to us as a God who can be angry and vengeful and cruel; as racist and as regarding women as inferior to men and speaking abusively of them. In the course of this essay I will supply examples. I might add that I am also acutely and joyfully aware of the stories and passages in the Bible in which the overwhelming goodness and greatness of God in creation and in his dealings with all mankind shine out like beacons.

 

How do we reconcile the two? Indeed, can we? Can the God of the Old Testament be reconciled with the God of the New, the God of Jesus? In the second century the Church declared Marcion a heretic for saying that the one was not the other. There was of course much more to Marcionism that just that and his influence was not just in propelling the Church to develop the canon of the NT scriptures. It was active and alive in the Manichaeistic and Gnostic movements which had immense bearing on orthodox doctrinal development for the next three centuries. However, it is one thing just to repudiate Marcionism and affirm that the God of the Old Testament is the God of the New and quite another to reconcile what is attributed to the former with the revelation of himself in the life and words of Jesus, and indeed with our philosophical notion of God.

 

In the August of 2002, while at the annual conference of the Catholic Theology Association of Great Britain which holds a three day meeting for its members once a year, I attended a lecture given by Brian Wicker, an ardent campaigner for a peaceful world, a member of Pax Christi, a person very concerned with the ethics of war and nuclear disarmament and Chairman of the Council on Christian Approaches to Defence and Disarmament. The title of his lecture was ‘Samson Terroristis: We don’t have to take the Letter to the Hebrews seriously’.

                                                                                                

His paper brought attention to the cruel and murderous depravities which have been carried out in the name of religion both in the past and today and to religious fanaticism and intolerance. As I read Brian’s verdict on Samson, which follows, it amounts to a question mark against belief in the Bible as a vehicle of divine revelation, which is the issue I address here. We need to find the answer to the objection –a very reasonable one- that as portrayed in the Bible God commands his chosen people to commit evil deeds, indeed carries them out himself. If he does do all that, as the Bible says he does, then what sort of people are we Christians if we believe that the Bible is the revelation of God? What sort of god is the Judaic and Christian god? It is difficult, if not impossible, to present the Bible as God’s revealed word and to defend Christianity as an acceptable form of religion if as the Bible asserts that that God approved of murder and other evils. Unless this problem is resolved, we are in a situation where we are presenting God not as good, but as an author of evil. What follows is my answer to this very serious, and quite commonplace, objection to the Christian faith.

 

There is natural and there is supernatural revelation. The Creator reveals himself in what he creates (‘actio sequitur esse’). Such is the nature of being (esse). Then there is supernatural revelation, in Jesus Christ who is the Word of God, Verbum Dei, o logos tou Qeou, who became flesh and dwelt among us. Now, where exactly is that Word, which is both himself and his teaching, to be found? In the Holy Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments? Scriptura sola? Well, some Old Testament writings are problematic, as mentioned. Or, to get over that problem, can we say that the Word of God is to be found  just in the New Testament writings? Hardly. It wasn’t till the middle of the 4^th century that there was effective universal agreement as to the canon of the New Testament; and of course the Church was existing and thriving in amazing vigour in all the preceding centuries. Jesus in fact never left us a book, the Word of God left us no writings at all. But what he said he would leave us, and all he left us, was his Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, to teach us all things. We are hardly ‘a people of the book’, of any book. We are the people of the Spirit, his Spirit.

 

Who are we? we might ask. We are the community of the people who believe in Christ Jesus, his body of believers, h ekklesia, the church.  But it is in a book, the New Testament writings, that we find that promise, where we are told of that legacy. Yet the writings in that book were well over half a century in the making. The Church pre-existed all the writings or books that make up New Testament. The New Testament didn’t make the Church. Rather, the Church pre-existed the Book of the New Testament, there is no gainsaying that; it was the Church that decided what writings were to make up the Bible. There is no gainsaying that either.  

 

Take the book we call the Acts of the Apostles. It is an account of a church vibrant, worshipping, believing, converting, changing, growing before any NT text was written. So are the letters of Paul. In the seven letters of Ignatius of Antioch, circa 110, I myself can find make no reference to any NT gospel or letter, likewise in the letter of St Polycarp of much the same date, or the Didache written about then or possibly much earlier. The body of believers in Jesus Christ, all their variety, didn’t need any book to be what they were, namely the Church, h ekklhsia. And as I have said, a second consideration is that it was the Church anyway which decided what the contents of the Bible would be. The book is therefore the church’s statement of its beliefs. It wasn’t the Bible that established the church or its beliefs. The Church, the community of Christian believers, existed before any NT text was written. Christ Jesus left us his Spirit, but no text, no books, no gospels, no letters.

 

Brian Wicker’s paper.

Brian’s lecture was most helpful in making me think more carefully about these issues. His opinion of Samson (quotes from Brian’s paper are given in italics) is that he was “a suicidal terrorist”, a “suicidal murderer”, “the proto-suicidal terrorist”, “a suicidal terrorist hitman” and “a cross between Beowulf and Batman”. The Old Testament saga of Samson, he says, is “a collection of tall and pretty nasty stories bound together by a thirst for endless violence”.  The nastiest, on which Brian focussed, was the extermination of a few thousand Phoenicians when Samson pulled down the pillar of the huge stadium in which, perfectly innocently, they had gathered for the games.

 

However, Brian’s lurid opinion of Samson is not that of the Bible itself. Brian acknowledges as much: “The narrator of Judges regards him as a specially blessed instrument of the divine purpose. So does the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews (chap. 11.32-34). So too do St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas”. Judges attributes “each of his exploits to the Spirit of Yahweh that seizes him at the key moment”, and sees nothing wrong in what Samson did because he did what he did in the interests of Israel. The New Testament, which is the Word of God, in Hebrews 11.32-34 includes him in its list of OT men and women of faith from Abel down to the prophets who “through faith overthrew kingdoms, established justice and saw God’s promises fulfilled” (v.33). Brian repudiates this biblical opinion of Samson. “We don’t have to take Samson seriously as the letter to the Hebrews did”’ and the Book of Judges likewise. “It seems amazing in this day and age,’ says Brian, ‘that anyone should have supposed that this saga was anything but a collection of tall and pretty nasty stories bound together by a thirst for endless violence. Yet scholars from St. Augustine to Milton took it at face value. To them an historical person, Samson, was blessed by God with a power with which to further the divine plan of salvation. The letter to the Hebrews says as much”. Augustine and Aquinas, Brian says, got themselves in great difficulties trying, for example, to reconcile Samson’s suicide with the commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’. “Such questions can only arise if we take the Samson story to be true (Brian’s emphasis) in some sense”. By pronouncing the whole Samson saga “a collection of tall stories”, he is implying it is historical nonsense and he says it “should not be taken seriously”. This then, the argues, spares us any compulsion, such as Augustine and Aquinas felt, to devise ways and means of reconciling Samson’s killing of three thousand spectators in the stadium with our Christian ethic. Instead it’s high time, Brian states, we started doing the very opposite and expose it for what it really is, “the intentional killing of the innocent....one of the most blatant examples of evil anyone can think of”.

 

Brian places one almighty question mark against the Biblical representation of Samson. His statement bears repetition: “the intentional killing of the innocent...must be one of the most blatant examples of evil anyone can think of....Yet even this is not so unambiguously evil that people cannot find religious justifications for it”. He takes us through the Samson story as told in Judges 13-17. He discusses the reference to Samson in the letter to the Hebrews and the problems Samson created for Augustine and Aquinas. He proceeds to describe the different ways in which Samson is portrayed in Milton’s ‘Samson Agonistes’ and in the music of Handel and Saint-Saens. He concludes by presenting us with a problem -“the problem of those innocent civilians on the roof of the Philistine stadium...out for a jolly day in the sunshine” and killed when Samson brought the roof down. The book of Judges, he observes, is “untroubled by their slaughter”. Brian proposes, contrary to that, that if anyone should discuss the Samson legend today “he or she had better put the rights of the Philistine crowd at the centre of the action”. That is the main point he wishes to get across –that any form of religion which advocates violence on behalf of God and which involves the slaughter of the innocent, has got religion fundamentally wrong. That is his opinion of this Old Testament story and of the ‘religious’ mentality of the people who told it.

 

The problem is that the Bible, both OT and NT does not agree with him. Brian proposes that our reply to the problem is not to take the story seriously. However, the Bible in our faith is the Word of God. Taking the Bible seriously is essential to the Christian religion; that is what our religion consists in.  If we are not to take the seriously the Letter to the Hebrews when it speaks of Samson, which we hold to be the Word of God, why need we taken any statement of the Holy Scriptures seriously? By what authority and by what criteria can we pick and choose? The defect in Brian’s paper, a defect which is structural, is that it raises this issue but does not appear to see the implications of what is implied. He does not address them; and by not addressing them, his solution that we resolve the issue of biblical support for violence by not taking it seriously is not just no solution but, in my judgement, it also places a monumental question mark against one pillar of Christian belief, that the Bible is the Word of God. That is easily stated. There are serious problems however.

 

God as author of genocide, unprovoked territory invasion and land theft in the Old Testament. As Christians, if asked, we would say that we would never involve ourselves in anything which contributes in any shape or form to “a religious industry for justifying killing the innocent”. All very well -maybe; all right and prope -maybe. But if so, hadn’t we better repudiate the Word of our God as expressed time and again in the Book of Judges? And in the book of Numbers? And in Deuteronomy? And in Isaiah 10.5f where the prophet ascribes to God the intention to use the Assyrians as the staff of his wrath to punish a ‘godless nation, to spoil and plunder them at will and trample them down like mud in the streets.’ And that most tender and beautiful psalm “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept” where the psalmist cries out “O Babylon, Babylon the destroyer. Happy the man who repays you for all you have done to us. Happy is he who shall seize your children and dash them against the rock” (Ps.137.8f)? Only recently, attending a psalm translation class at Keele, I witnessed a fellow Catholic, very well intended, unwilling to agree to anything that might be critical of Judaism, tieing herself in knots trying to put an acceptable interpretation of those verses.  There is a very considerable difficulty in telling us not to take Hebrews seriously if taking seriously both the Old Testament and the New, which includes both Judges and Hebrews, is one of the main things our religion’s all about. Unarguably and undeniably the Old Testament, which is the Word of God, has God ordering the “killing of the innocent” and bringing it about. So, at least on the face of it, and that very much so, since the Old Testament is our Bible and the God of the Old Testament is our God, it does look as we are dogmatically, as a tenet of our faith, involved in “a religious industry for justifying killing the innocent”. We have to face up to our own texts –which is the point of this paper.

 

“The Lord your God”, said Moses to the assembled people of Israel –he was now one hundred and twenty years old, unable to get about as he used too, forbidden to cross the Jordan and enter the Promised land and about to die -“will cross over at your head and destroy those nations before your advance, and you shall occupy their lands; and as he directed, Joshua will lead you. The Lord will do to these nations as he did to Sihon and Og, kings of the Amorites, and to their lands. He will destroy them. The Lord will deliver them into your power and you shall do to them as I commanded you. Be strong. Be resolute” (Deut. 31.1-6). We cannot get out of that just by saying we don’t have to take it seriously? How can we pray the lovely prayer of Psalm 136 “It is good to give thanks to the  Lord for his love endures for ever” when in verses 17-21 it rejoices that the Lord “struck down great kings....slew mighty kings...Sihon King of the Amorites...Og the king of Bashan” and “gave their land to Israel”? Try asking the Palestinian Christians to recite that psalm, as they cling on with their fingertips to their waterless, besieged, harassed and bulldozed villages and olive groves in Gaza and the West Bank, under attack from Jewish fundamentalists claiming the land is their land because their God –our God- has given it to them as the Old Testament states time and time again. (fn 1).

 

Brian is forthright in saying that he considers Samson’s actions downright immoral. Indeed, if one puts the very first paragraph of his paper next to his final paragraph 16 pages later, his conclusion is, contrary to what the Old Testament –the Word of God- in Judges asserts, that Samson’s action was “one of the most blatant examples of evil anyone can think of”.  It was “the intentional killing of the innocent”; and we “had better” come right out and say that, whatever the approval the Word of God might have given it.

 

But what are we voicing here? If, as we all agree, the murder of the innocent, the wholesale theft of land are evil, are we repudiating the assertion of the Book of Judges, which is the Word of God, that what Samson did was done in “the spirit of the Lord” (15. v14). Almost the whole biblical account of the invasion by the Jews of the land of Canaan is one of genocide and theft, visited upon the existing occupants at the instruction of God himself. When the Bible relates the story that he slew a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass -some jawbone, some ass- are we repudiating the assertion of divine approval of the action which is contained in Samson’s triumphant cry “It was the Lord that let me, thy servant, win this great victory.” (v18). Are we to reject his claim that he was the Lord’s servant when he slaughtered these people? And are we to disagree with the Biblical writer when he goes on to assert there was divine approval for the massacre in the stadium when Samson wanted “revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes” and got his revenge through the Lord “giving him the strength” to bring down and kill “the lords and all the (3000) people who were in it” (16.v27-30). If we agree with Brian that this massacre was evil, how can we profess as our faith that the Bible is the Word of God if it approves of something the Christian faith disapproves of, in this case the murder of innocent people?

 

This is an issue which must be resolved. It is difficult, if not impossible, to present the Bible as God’s revealed word and to defend Christianity as an acceptable form of religion if Christianity holds that God approved of murder. Unless that is resolved, we are in a situation where we are presenting God not as good, but as an author of evil. We are in the theological position of the authors of some of the books of the Bible such as Joshua and Judges, Deuteronomy and Numbers, for whom an action is right if it promotes the welfare of the Jewish people (which attitude holds today with many, possibly the great majority of, the Jews in the state of Israel). We are in the theological position of Mohammed in passage after passage of the Koran when, similar to OT morality, he finds a justification for violence if it is committed in the interests of religion. “Idolatry is worse than carnage” he declares in the Koran (2.19), about which he affirms “Our Book records the truth” (23.62). One might see in this and many similar texts of the Koran, the roots of present day Islamic suicidal murders and acts of terrorism (fn 2), just as the OT is used by present day Jewish extremists to justify their violence against Palestinians, and just as Christians found religious justification for their actions in the Crusades, against the Cathars and against each other in the Reformation.

 

The Book of Joshua (6.21) informs us that the Israelites destroyed “everything in the city (Jericho). They put everyone to the sword, men and women, young and old, and also cattle, sheep and asses”; and that when it came to the attack on the kingdom of Ai (8.2.) the Lord ordered Joshua to deal with it  “as you dealt with Jericho” (except that they could keep the cattle and other spoil this time! Economic realism triumphed). 8.23-29 records the massacre that followed, described in brutally graphic detail –“following the word of the Lord spoken to Joshua”. The massacres described in Chapter 10 of Amorites, Makkedah, Libnah, Gezer, Lachish, Eglon etc are stomach-churning. “So Joshua massacred the population of the whole region –the hill country, the Negeb, the Shephelath, the watersheds and all their kings. He left no survivors, destroying everything that drew breath as the Lord the God of  Israel had commanded”  (10.40f). Samson’s exploits were a side-show in comparison. The point is an obvious one. The Old Testament says this of God. How then can it be the Word of God? In what way is it not just another document of a religious nature (ie. religious in that it is a document that invokes ‘God’), like for example the Koran with which it has many similarities, particularly in the way the Koran explicitly lends a ‘religious’ justification to acts of war and violence, and discrimination against women.

 

It is our faith that the Old Testament is the Word of God, that it is divine revelation, God’s revelation of himself. Therein lies the problem I wish to address. The God we affirm we believe in does not order the massacre of the innocent in defence of anyone, least of all to get people to worship him or in order to promote one nation at the expense of another. “God has no favourites” as the Apostle Peter came to realise (Acts 10. 35). The God we believe in is the God of both the Old and the New Testaments. There is but one God. And the God we believe in does not contradict himself. God is one and timeless. What He said to the Israelites was simultaneous in our sense of time with what he said to mankind through Jesus. The one cannot contradict the other. God’s timelessness is beyond our understanding. Our order of being is not his. God cannot change. There is only one God. He cannot share his being. He can only attract us to it like a moth to a flame, a flame that does not harm or burn up but transforms as fire transforms metal.

 

So, we have a problem. Hebrews chapter 11, which is an account of what faith achieved in the lives of major Old Testament characters from Abel onwards, speaks approvingly of Samson. Verses 32-34 bracket Samson with Gideon, Barak, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets, saying “Through faith they overthrew kingdoms, established justice, saw God’s promises fulfilled. They muzzled ravening lions (which relates of course to Samson’s exploits), quenched the fury of fire”. Verses 39-40 tell us their faith will find fulfilment and perfection in God’s plan in Christ. The New Testament, of which the Letter to the Hebrews is a part, is the record of the faith of the Apostolic and early post-Apostolic Church.  Furthermore the story of Samson’s conception and birth appears to have heavily influenced the actual composition of the Annunciation Story and the story of Elizabeth mother of John the Baptist as we have them. That would indicate that his story was highly regarded in the Apostolic Church when the stories of Jesus were being transmitted and worked on meditatively and theologically and in due course put into the gospel form. In the New Testament Samson is put forward as an example of men and women, such as Rahab the prostitute, who had faith and by their faith “established justice, saw God’s promises fulfilled” and in due course in the plan of Christ “entered upon the promised inheritance”. We have to find a response to the problem of how God is described in The OT which is in agreement with our faith and our moral and philosophical perspective; and examine and eliminate those responses which are not.  We might start with an attempt in the Old Testament itself to find some explanation of God’s perceived involvement in evil.

 

The Book of Job.

The Book of Job addresses the problem of a divine activity which consists of murder and theft. God is very pleased with Job for being very god-fearing and virtuous and the devil doesn’t like it one bit. He tells God that Job’s piety is skin-deep which a dose of misfortune will soon expose. God accepts the challenge and pours all sorts of misfortunes on poor Job’s head.  The writer of Job describes God as responding to the jibes of Satan by killing Job’s sons and daughters with a whirlwind, having the Sabeans and Chaldeans swooping down on his herdsmen and putting them to the sword, sending sheet lightning to burn up his shepherds and his sheep, and letting Satan smite Job himself with running sores from head to foot. God is portrayed by the Job author as cruel, committing both murder and theft, even doing it just to win a wager with the devil. For all that Job, even though he knows God is responsible for it all, does not repudiate him. ‘Naked I came from the womb,’ he says, ‘naked I shall return whence I came. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Throughout all this Job did not sin; he did not charge God with unreason.’(1.v22. the NEB,  ‘with wrongdoing’in the NIV and the NRSV, ‘foolishly’ in the KJV, ‘he did not reproach God’ in the NJB). What he does do however is demand an explanation of God, he challenges God to justify his actions which by our standards are downright immoral. What is most significant is that that is all he does. He does not question the assumption that God is the immediate cause of the evils that has happened to him, which to us are immoral and criminal. He accepts that to be the case.

 

The dialogue between the two of them is surely one of the greatest achievements of all literature. Whoever wrote it was beyond doubt not just a mystic but also a writer of unbelievable imagination, tenderness, observation and skill (to appreciate which these texts, and indeed the whole book, should be read out loud). Job, sitting on a dung hill, suffering the loss of wife, sons and daughters, family, wealth and health, asks God to justify letting such evils happen to him. God, however, will not be put into the dock by anyone. Instead, he says to Job:

 

                “I will ask questions and you will answer.

                

                 Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?

                 Who set its corner stone in place

                 When the morning stars sang together

                 And all the sons of God shouted aloud?

                 Who watched over the birth of the sea

                 When it burst in flood from the womb

                 When I wrapped it in a blanket of cloud

                 And cradled it in fog?

 

                 Have you descended to the springs of the sea

                 Or walked in the unfathomable deep?

                 Have the gates of death been revealed to you?

                 Have you ever seen the door-keepers of the place of darkness?

                 Have you comprehended the vast expanse of the world?

 

                 Has the rain a father?

                 Who sired the drops of dew?

                 Whose womb gave birth to the ice?

                 And who was the mother of the frost from heaven

                 Which lays a stony cover over the waters

                 And freezes the expanse of the oceans?

                 Can you bind the cluster of the Pleiades

                 Or loose Orion’s belt?

 

                 Do you know when the mountain goats are born?

                 Do you attend the wild doe when she is in labour?

                 Do you count the months when they carry their young,

                 When they crouch down to open their wombs

                 And bring their offspring to the birth?

 

                Did you give the horse his strength?

                Did you clothe his neck with a mane?

                Did you make him quiver like a locust’s wings?

 

                Is it for a man who disputes with the Almighty to be stubborn?

                Should he that argues with God answer back?

 

The writer of Job is Old Testament through and through. The prophets unhesitatingly say that God himself directly creates evil to punish Israel whenever she like a faithless wife abandons his way. The authors of the books of Numbers, Deuteronomy and Judges with no theological qualms or misgivings whatsoever say God brings the most terrible evils upon the men, women and children of Israel’s enemies. Likewise Job in the end accepts that God can do what he thinks fit. He can do, and he does do, evil things to Job. God brings about the killing of the innocent, in this case the children and the employees of Job. We simply have no right to question him. Our standards do not apply to him. We are intellectually powerless before God says the writer:

 

“Indeed I know this for the truth,

that no man can win his case with God.

He destroys the blameless and the wicked alike...

God himself has put me in the wrong

and he has drawn his net around me...

The hand of God has touched me

(‘manus Domini tetigit me’ as sung in the Holy Week liturgy)”.

 

And therefore:

‘Then Job answered the Lord:

I know that thou canst do all things

And that no purpose is beyond thee.

But I have spoken of great things which I have not understood.

Therefore I melt away

I repent in dust and ashes”.

 

So there then we have one answer to our problem: What God does, God does, and that’s all there is to it.

 

“Then the Lord answered Job out of the tempest.

I will ask questions and you shall answer.

Dare you deny that I am just?

Or put me in the wrong that you may be right?

Have you an arm like God’s arm,

Can you thunder with a voice like his?”

 

In a way it is like the response a super-power makes when challenged by lesser beings. Like Stalin sneering at the news he’d been challenged by the Pope: “Where are his battalions?” Like a recent US president: “Do you think I’m going to let American soldiers answer to charges in some poxy international court of justice?” For all the insights, for all the sheer incredible imagery and beauty of language, the Book of Job as a theodicy is a disappointment. We cannot as Christians throw up our hands as a gesture of our helplessness to understand and make do with that. There are no contradictions in God. That God is good, indeed is goodness itself, and can neither do nor say evil is both our faith and our philosophy. The Book of Job has God doing evil. It recognises that what God does to Job and his family is evil. However, it sees no solution to the problem it has itself set up except to say that God is God, is beyond our comprehension, he occupies another realm of being and for that reason is beyond any reproach from us. Our sense of right and wrong does not apply to him. All we can do is submit to divine reality, we cannot judge it. That, however, cannot be the answer.

 

(2).  Recourse to Cultural Subjectivity.

Another response might be to treat instances recorded in the OT where God is said to order an evil act like the slaughter of the innocent as something culturally dated and hence dispensable and disposable, something therefore we need not bother about. That’s how Brian Wicker answers to the problem. He repudiates all of it as evil and he does not attribute it to God, he just says we can ignore it when we read about it in the Old Testament. We’ve given examples enough already of God being represented as the killer of innocent people and as robbing people of land and property in the interests of the one particular people whom he has chosen as his own. There are examples also of other attitudes attributed to God which we today would definitely consider objectionable. Take Numbers Chapter 30 which deals with vows made by women. Unlike men’s vows their vows are subordinated to the agreement or disagreement of their father or their husband and if they make a vow and their father or their husband then disallows it, “none of her vows and obligations will be valid” (v.5) That, Moses tells his people, is what the “The Lord commands”. What we often do when we read something the Bible says the Lord commanded, which we know to be sexist (ie unfair to women), is to say that the writer of, in this case the book of Numbers, is just expressing a culturally dated norm, one we can safely ignore.

 

Or take Numbers chapter 5.11-31 where the writer (speaking in the name of Moses), deals with accusations of adultery against women. Not to put too fine an interpretation on it, it is rampant sexism. And nasty at that. And pretty thorough-going witchcraft too. “If she has let herself be defiled and has been unfaithful to her husband, then when the priest makes her drink the water that brings out the truth and the water has entered her body, she will suffer a miscarriage or untimely birth, and her name will become an example in adjuration among her kin...Such is the law for cases of jealousy where a woman, owing obedience to her husband, goes astray and lets herself be defiled, or where a fit of jealousy comes over a man which causes him to suspect his wife. He shall set her before the Lord and the priest shall deal with her as this law prescribes. No guilt shall attach to the husband but the woman shall bear the penalty of her guilt”. Now, even though these instructions and rituals are laid down with the following words “The Lord spoke to Moses and said: Speak to the Israelites in this words” (ibid 5.1), we treat them as peculiar to a particular and outdated culture.

 

We might also consider 1.Cor 11 .2-15 where Paul is very concerned about women in church, though of course it’s nowhere near as offensive as the text just quoted: “Judge for yourselves. Is it fitting for a woman to pray to God bare-headed? Does not nature teach you that while flowing locks disgrace a man, they are a woman’s glory?” (vv13-15). He’d already said: “If a women is not to wear a veil, she might as well have her hair cut off” (v.6).  I am thinking too of Ephesians 5. 22-33. “Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord....just as the church  is subject to Christ, so must women be subject to their husbands in everything (en pavti)”. It is a passage which is read at church only with some embarrassment nowadays. It is also one which is more difficult to talk one’s way out off than with Paul’s instructions about women covering their heads at prayer because the writer of Ephesians supports his argument with very fundamental theology about the relationship of the church as Christ’s body to him as the head. “It is a great truth hidden here (misterion toto mega estin)” says the writer (v.31). I personally know of no one in the Church who would now tell women they’re to be subject to their husbands in everything. I believe it is true to say that we do not in any way diminish the mystery and the dignity of marriage, where, as the writer of Ephesians says, the two become one flesh (oi dio eis sarka mian), which he says is the hidden truth and relates to Christ and his church, when we not only do not draw the conclusion which he draws but we also reject it.

 

When we ignore or repudiate instructions like this, what are we saying about our relationship to the Word of God? We are in very deep waters indeed. Are we not thereby asserting that we stand in judgement on the Word of God itself which yet we say we believe the Bible to be? Are we not saying that the deliberate murder of the innocent as in the case of the invasion of Canann and that of Samson is evil even though the OT lavishes praise on these actions as acquiring and defending the ‘kingdom’? Are we not saying that Deuteronomy 7 vv1-6 is an account of God which we as Christians wholeheartedly repudiate? Are we not saying that discrimination against women as in the Book of Numbers (and many other places too) is wrong even where the Lord is explicitly stated to be commanding it? Are we not saying that the statement of Ecclesiastes 7.v28 about women is not just culturally sexist but also morally most unacceptable? Are we not saying that women should not be subject to their husbands in everything when the NT expressly states they should?

 

In the examples I have given, and there are more besides, the Bible, which we hold to be the Word of God, expressly affirms that God commands actions which are objectively evil, some of them very evil, and has attitudes which are morally wrong. We might argue that what is commanded is culturally peculiar to its time and place and therefore not a moral issue any longer. Yes, the Israelites obviously didn’t consider it immoral to slaughter their opponents, men, women and children if it got them the land of Canaan. The whole culture of the whole region, and beyond, took it as read. And even more so discrimination against women. The idea that women could be equal to men would then have been pure pantomime, as it still in so many cultures, and as it still is in virtually all of that region to this day particularly where the majority religion is Islam. Mohammed in the Koran is uncompromising in this matter: “Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other and because they spend their wealth to maintain them”. 4.34. For reasons provided in another paper Islam cannot depart from this perspective on women, which is that of an primitive 6^th and 7th century Arab tribe, whereas we find Christianity repudiating whatever in its scriptures is expressive of an outdated culture and distinguish between what in its scriptures is its faith and what are just the trappings. But it isn’t men we’re talking about. It’s God. There’s no time and place get-out for God. Murder of the innocent in any place or at any time is a moral issue. Discrimination against women in any place and at any time is a moral issue.

 

Our problem is that the Word of God explicitly states that God is commanding both. To argue that we can respond to this problem by saying we can sieve out and repudiate what is culturally dated just because it is culturally dated is not good enough. It is very useful to look at the Islamic perspective on the Koran in respect of this matter. The Koran is all too obviously a book of its time. Its moral outlook is very much a product of 7^th century Arabian desert tribal society and culture. However, that is not as Moslems read it. For Islam the Koran is the Revelation of God and as it is, they believe, the Revelation of God, we cannot tamper with it. It is God’s, not ours. It is to be taken as it is or not at all. We cannot be in judgement over it. We are subject to it in the here and now.  It is not culturally dated, it is God’s Word down to each single letter. God’s Word is God’s Word and has no time frame. That is an essential part of the Islamic understanding of revelation. It has had, it has, and it always will have, the most significant implications for human behaviour and relationships, individual and social. Its mores are rooted theologically in the mores of a 7^th century Arabian desert tribal society and culture. That is not, however, the Catholic understanding of revelation. The Catholic understanding of what the Old and New Testaments are allows the Church to decide what is acceptable in them from a Christian perspective and  what is not.

 

The issue then is this: God is eternally good and in him there is no evil or cause of evil. God is not subordinate to culture. God cannot be dated. God cannot therefore command things at any time and in any culture which are in themselves evil. Therefore the argument that we can repudiate in the Bible something that is in itself immoral or evil and incompatible with the Christian ethic on the grounds that it is culturally dated is unacceptable for the reason that God cannot issue an instruction in any culture that is evil. The conclusion must be therefore that any such instructions or orders or ritual which the Bible says are from the Lord are not from the Lord; and in that matter the Bible therefore is wrong.

 

There are some commands to do evil which the Bible ascribes only indirectly to God which might be looked at.  Take Joshua 23. 2-6. ‘Joshua was now a very old man. He summoned all Israel...and said to them: “You have seen for yourselves all that the Lord our God has done to these peoples for your sake. It was the Lord God himself who fought for you...He drove them out to make room for you and you occupied their land as the Lord your God promised you”. Here it is Joshua who is said to be speaking, not God directly. Likewise the Book of Deuteronomy. “These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel.....It was in Transjordan, in Moab, that Moses resolved to promulgate the law. These are his words” (Deut. 1.1&5), and what follows is not God speaking directly but what Moses is said to have said in the name of God, like: “The Lord said to me: Do not be afraid of him for I have delivered him (Og, King of Bashan) into your hands and all his people and his land” (3.2.). This method is widespread in the texts.

 

Now we could argue that the author is culturally assuming that God is approving of these actions while the text does not explicitly say that God is. We might argue that this is just a cultural thing. People in those parts in those days (in fact in probably most parts of the world throughout history) didn’t see anything wrong with invasions and occupations. Our Christian history is pretty dismal in this regard –the Americas, North, Central and South, Africa and so on. Islam too. Mohammed regularly operated raids out of Medina on caravans, especially caravans out of Mecca. He wrote verse upon verse in surah after surah to justify it all, just as the OT writers did to justify what Israel did. The formulas “God is Great” and “The Lord said” have a certain efficacy all right. So we might argue that the Word of God (the Bible) isn’t here ascribing evil to God but it’s the writer ascribing what we consider to be evil to God. This puts God at one remove from the evil -a subtle but significant difference, one might say. Does it work?

 

Hardly. The plain intent of the Bible, the Word of God, is to ascribe these things to God. Anyway the Book of Numbers scuppers that argument altogether. While Deuteronomy puts everything into the mouth of Moses, Numbers (Leviticus even more so) has God speaking direct. “The Lord said to Moses: ‘Do not be afraid of him (Og, king of Bashan). I have delivered him into your hands, with all his people and his lands. Deal with him as you dealt with Sihon the Amorite king who lived in Heshbon’. So they put him to the sword with his sons and all his people until there was no survivor left, and they occupied his land”. (Num. 21.34f). The Word of God explicitly ascribes the evil of the slaughter of the innocent to God; and in Num.5 11-31 explicitly ascribes discrimination against women to God.

 

What is quite awful about the Old Testament, which Christians hold to be the Word of the one true God, is its thundering emphasis on war, violence, retribution, punishment as God’s way of dealing with people. It’s everywhere –in the first five books, Joshua, Judges, Kings, Chronicles and throughout the prophets. Even in the psalms in places. And likewise, though of course the topic does not get the same amount of explicit treatment, is the degree of discrimination against women. The OT is through and through a statement of a tribe’s culture within the general culture of the whole Near and Middle East area. It could hardly be anything else but sexist. Leviticus is rank with it. Chapter 8 for example, which describes the consecration of priests, repeats the phrase “Aaron and his sons” eight times. Doubtless the phrase served another purpose as well ie establishing which branch of the Jewish priesthood was the legitimate one depending which kingdom it was meant for, but, though no one would have thought anything else anyway, it’s still sexist. In chapter 12 a woman is unclean for just 7 days when a boy is born, but double that number if she has a girl.

 

I would suggest that all this has gone deep not just into the Jewish consciousness but into the Christian consciousness as well. The Old Testament just cannot be read, and read out loud, day after day over centuries without it informing, moulding and shaping the mind of Christendom to its core. It’s little wonder the Church –by which I mean lay as well as cleric- has a problem with the idea of women priests. .There are moments when I am inclined to believe that the OT should be not be read privately or publicly without a mental and spiritual health warning prominently displayed. That warning was given in no uncertain terms in the Sermon on the Mount, as I will come to, but it has gone unrecognised.

 

But of course every word of the OT must be read, and read aloud, as often as possible. How else can we hope to understand the New? But it must be read with understanding. Nothing that advocates war, violence, retribution, the ill-treatment of women, using animals as sacrifices and much else besides should be read without an awareness of the ‘better plan’ that God has made for us (Hebrews 11.40). It is arriving at that correct understanding which is the very difficult bit and which preoccupied Paul (eg. Romans) and Peter (Acts). Collectively as the Body of Christ and individually as Christians we have to discard “the old nature with its deeds and put on the new nature which is being constantly renewed in the image of its Creator and brought to know God” (Col. 3.10) – a process that just does not ever find a conclusion. We are in sin, in darkness and ignorance and they inform our cultures and every aspect of our relationships and civic life. Inch by inch we struggle through as best we can, individually and collectively, recognising and battling one prejudice after another, decade by decade, every insight met by reaction, every instance of enlightenment threatened by the darkness of prejudice as we stumble towards the light that would enlighten every man. Revelation is simply ongoing. There is no final testament, no last revelation. We see in a glass darkly. Christ is the way, the truth and the life but to follow him is to take up his cross. The mental journey is a Golgotha. We must never rest from mental fight.

 

Our Christian belief is that the Bible, both OT and NT is the Word of God; and as people who do not share our Christian faith, point out, the Bible advocates murder and such like on page after page. Brian Wicker’s solution to that problem is to turn a blind eye to it. That is in fact what we all do. But it is no solution. The issue is this: According to the Bible God does evil things and advocates evil. However, since God to be God cannot do anything evil, the Bible must have got it wrong,. Therefore, it cannot be his Word

 

 

My Response (1).

 

The problem can only be resolved within the context of the essential nature of Christian theology, that it is incarnational and every element is inter-connected. The nature of God’s revelation is incarnational, both in the Old Testament and in the New. In the Old Testament God’s Word revealed itself within the limitations imposed upon it by the human condition, as in an old wineskin. In the New Testament God’s Word became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, who then as he promised sent from the Father the Advocate (paraklhton Jn 14.16), the Spirit of Truth (to pnuema ths alhqeis v.17) who comes from the Father bearing witness (Jn.15.26). It is the moment when an even greater splendour enveloped mankind in the divine dispensation of the Spirit (2.Cor.3.8).  Accordingly, the Letter to the Hebrew must be taken seriously. It cannot be dismissed, it cannot be ignored. The Incarnation made all things new. Christ said “But I say to you” (egw de lego umin). With Christ there could be no reversion to the state of mankind in the Old Testament. That had passed away. The New Testament is “the fullness of time” (to plhrwma tou crovon Gal.4.4), the Old Testament “the pangs of childbirth” (pasa h ktisis sunstenazei kai sunwdivei acri tou nun Rom.8.22).

 

There is an economy in salvation. Salvation has had to proceed at the pace mankind was capable of. God has had to make do with what he made. Either that or create robots. When God created beings with free will, he has had to take the consequences and make the best of whatever happens. There was no way God could bring about the establishment of a kingdom of Israel except the way the Jewish people –and indeed every people at that time, and, sadly, most times- thought they should go about it. The alternative was for God to interfere so aggressively in the minds and mentality of this tiny nation that he would detach them totally from their entire cultural, mental, environmental inheritance stretching back to the beginnings of the human race, and from all the human, cultural and ethical, milieu in which they lived and of which they were a part.  Their whole milieu was that of empires –Egypt, Phoenicia, Syria, Assyria, Babylon, and indeed their own, where life was cheap, where fighting was glorious and women existed for men’s pleasure. As Mohammed put it to the men of Mecca and Medina as late as the 7^th century: “Women are your fields. Go, then, into your fields when you please” (2.223). To expect anything better of the Israelites other than what they thought and what they did according to their lights would give us a God who steps in and waves some magic wand over them to change them into what they were not and just couldn’t be. When the writer of the Book of Joshua, which is the Word of God,  the one and only and same God who inspired the books of the New Testament, wrote: “The Lord said to Joshua: Do not be fearful or dismayed; take the whole army and attack Ai. I deliver the king of Ai into your hands, him and his people, his city and his country. Deal with Ai and her king as you dealt with Jericho and her king” (8.1) the writer wasn’t recording the commands of God to Moses, though he undoubtedly believed he was. And of course the author of Deuteronomy believed it too in 31.1-8. God never said any such thing. What is written is simply not true. The God of Jesus Christ, the Word of God, the God of both Testaments, is a loving God. He is the God of the living, not of the dead. He wants mercy, not sacrifice. How can God be one if in the New Testament he tells us to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us and in the Old he commands the slaughter of enemies?

 

We must conclude that wherever and whenever in the Bible God is said to have commanded something which is wrong in the Christian ethic, which is not acceptable to the Mystical Body of Christ, which is his Church, he did not command it. God gave no such instruction at all, ever, that was even in the slightest degree hurtful or cruel or unkind, let alone murderous and brutal. God gave no instruction at all that was sexist, that in any way subordinated women to men or held them inferior to men. God never preferred one people or nation to any other. “I need not tell you that a Jew is forbidden by his religion to visit or associate with a man of another race. Yet God has shown me clearly that I must not call any man profane or unclean....I now see how true it is that God has no favourites...everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins in his name. God has no favourites” said Peter (Acts. 10.28 & 34f & 43). In other words, Peter saw that the Jews had got God wrong.  Likewise Paul: “There is no such thing as Jew or Greek, slave and freeman, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3.28). Anything else is “the old nature with its deeds” (Col. 3.10). We must “put on the new nature which is being constantly renewed in the image of its Creator and brought to know God. There is no question here of Greek or Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman; but Christ is all and is in all (alla panta kai ev panta Cristos)” (Col.3.10f)

 

We must conclude that God never forced the pace. He allowed evil to happen because the alternative was never to achieve the good. He allowed his creatures to be themselves. He allowed the writers of his Scriptures to write untruths about him. God after all never wrote a single word of Scripture. Human beings, and only human beings, wrote the scriptures. When the OT writers said God commanded this act of slaughter and that, and this act of discrimination against women and that, it simply was untrue. He never did. Rather, he allowed such untruths about him to be written. God just worked with the grain. He led us by the cords of Adam. It was the necessary sin out of which we received such a wonderful saviour. It was the ‘felix culpa’. Slowly, patiently, like a woman passionately in love with a faithless man, like a man passionately in love with a wayward woman, over centuries, working his own economy of salvation, he allowed lies to be told about him, evil to be done in his name. He coaxed, he kept at it.

 

Time and again Israel was “a bird straying far from its nest” (Prov. 27.8). The Song of Songs records it for us. Night after night on his bed he sought his true love who slept though her heart was awake; he sought her but he did not find her. He rose and went the rounds of the city; in the streets and the squares he sought her but he did not find her. He called her and she did not answer. The watchmen met him and struck him and wounded him and took away his cloak, and he was faint with love. His love was a strong as death (to which in the fullness of time it led him), his passion as cruel as the grave (in which in the fullness of time it laid him). No water could quench his love, no floods sweep it away; it was fiercer than any flame. And he did not rouse her or disturb her until she was ready. Then, and only then, when she was ready, did he come out into the open and show himself like a gazelle, a young wild goat on the spice-bearing mountain, the hill of Golgotha, the place of the Skull.. He did not rouse her or disturb his love until she was ready (ibid.8.4). For many centuries she was not ready. She was a little sister who had no breasts (8.8), so the bridegroom bided his time. He bided his time until that moment when she could cry out in pride and happiness: “I am a wall and my breasts are like towers, so in his eyes I am as one who brings contentment” (8.10). At last she was ready. At last she could say “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” (6.3, which surely must be the boldest and proudest and most incredible claim ever made. The creature claims the Creator as its possession. It was the fullness of time when God could consummate union with his people. “O the depths of the wealth and the wisdom and the knowledge in God” (Rom.11.33).

 

This was in a way the first incarnation of God --when God emptied himself, submitted himself to a portrayal of himself as human. He let himself be portrayed as the human lover accepting all the indignities a lover might endure in pursuit of the girl he loves. Israel used its God. Israel even abandoned its God, its tribal god, when another one, a golden calf for instance, looked more attractive, richer, more powerful, a bull-calf before which they prostrated themselves and to it made sacrifices (Ex. 32.8). She flaunted herself like a Jezabel. His anger at his rejection was so immense he was on the verge of rejecting her forever until the pleas of Moses made him relent (ibid. v19-14).That’s how low God brought himself. God the Creator, who brought things into existence, which is impossible to grasp, everything, and holds them in existence, submitted to being described throughout all Old Testament time as a human lover: passionate, angry, jealous, vengeful, in a way foolishly loyal to the nth degree. And patient. O, so very very patient. Long-suffering to a fault. This God, this Almighty Being, this Eternal Being, allows us to put words of extreme pathos into his mouth: “My people. What have you done to me? Answer me”. The lover shut out of the house, weeping at the door, rejected, totally forlorn, humiliated, with the street looking on. What an incarnation this was! God was made flesh all right. Israel “sprawled in promiscuous vice on all the hill tops, under every spreading tree” (Jer. 2. 20) –it could hardly be put more graphically than that.  “Look up at the high places and see: Where have you not been ravished? You sat by the wayside to catch lovers, like an Arab lurking in the desert and you defiled the land with your fornication and wickedness”. And still this God pleaded with her: “Come back to me, apostate Israel” (3.12). “How long”, he asks, his voice breaking with the pain of rejection, “how long will you delay?” (13.27). How long does a man keep banging on the door before rejection and public humiliation make him turn away? In this case he did not turn away, not even when they led him to Golgotha, the place of the Skull, the spice-bearing mountain, and crucified him. Without their infidelity we would not have been healed. O Felix Culpa. The Old Testament is the story of a love affair written, not by the lover but by the beloved. God never wrote a single word. Every letter, every line, every page, every book, was written by, and only by, the people he loved. It is their record.

 

But Jeremiah tells us he wrote what the Lord told him to write, or better, to say what the Lord told him to say. “Then the Lord stretched out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me: I put my words into your mouth. This day I give you authority over nations and over kingdoms, to pull down and to uproot, to destroy and to demolish, to build and to plant...This is the very word of the Lord” (1.9f&19). But how can that possibly be? Take this passage from Jeremiah: “I will make Jerusalem a heap of ruins, a haunt of wolves, and the cities of Judah an unpeopled waste. What man is wise enough to understand this, to understand what the Lord has said and to proclaim it? Why has the land become a dead land, scorched like the desert and untrodden? The Lord said, it is because they forsook my law which I set before them; they neither obeyed me nor conformed to it.....I will feed this people with wormwood and give them bitter poison to drink. I will scatter them among the nations whom neither they nor their forefathers have known. I will harry them with the sword until I have made an end of them. These are the words of the Lord of Hosts” (Jer.11-17). Such violence and slaughter attributed to God are on every page of the prophet. The nations of Egypt, Philistine, Moab, Edom, the Arabs and Babylon are threatened with violent punishment for actions which in reality were no worse than those of Israel against the original occupants of Canaan. Chapter 51.20-24 may be tremendous oratory but ethically its content is simply unacceptable.

 

The opening claim of Jeremiah (1.19) is “This is the very word of God”. But in all honesty how can it be? If we read 9.24 as Christian in its theology we might detect a notion of God which we can endorse: “For I am the Lord. I show unfailing love. I do justice and right upon the earth”. We cannot however read it that way. Jeremiah was not a Christian preacher, prophet or theologian. His religion was ancient Judaism. What else could it be? His theology was tribal. His god was Israel’s god. His God’s unfailing love was for Israel. The justice and right which his God does upon the earth is whatever favours Israel, to which his God subordinates every other people. So when in 51.56 Jeremiah calls God “The Lord, a god of retribution”, who “will repay in full” there is no contradiction with his claim that God’s love is unfailing. God’s love in Jeremiah’s tribal theology has a very narrow focus. It is focussed on Israel only. The immense tragedy of the history of the Jews is that they did not get past that tribal theology. They did not arrive at the insight of one of their own, the apostle Peter, that God has no favourites, an insight the tortuous journey of which the Acts record, an insight which in the light of Jewish history was an incredible achievement. Jeremiah claimed of what he preached “This is the very word of the Lord” (1.19). It just wasn’t in the way he meant it. It just couldn’t be.

 

God drew his people to himself, leading them forwards with the cords of Adam. He worked with his people as he found them. He did not force the pace. Jeremiah is a raging furnace of faith in his people’s God. Nothing less. The fire of his faith burns everything in sight. It is the scorching light he turns on every facet of the history of his people. God couldn’t turn Jeremiah into a theologian of the 21^st century denouncing the murderous barbarities of the Davids and Samsons and Joshuas of Israel as unethical –not without turning him into a robot, divorcing him totally from his natural self. Jeremiah’s God was the one true God. Jeremiah in many grave ways misunderstood and misrepresented the one true God. What makes the Bible the Word of the one true God is not that it contains no error. It contains lots of errors. Some of them grave theological errors. Some of them grave ethical errors.

 

My proposal about this is this, that what makes the Bible the Word of God is that it is the book of the People of God. It was with the people of Israel that he spoke in a special way which ultimately was Christ the Word made flesh. No other people was so favoured. “All nations shall pray to be blessed as your descendants are blessed because you have obeyed me” God said to their father Abraham (Gen.22.18). It is their record of their relationship with the one true God. It is their record of God interacting with them, guiding them, staying with them, keeping faith with them no matter what, never never letting go of them, loving them, sticking by them no matter what: from Ur of the Chaldees in poor bombed strife-torn Iraq, to Canaan, to Egypt, through the desert, to Canaan, to Assyria, to Babylon and back again to the Holy Land where “Mary bore Jesus” as the carol says “our Saviour for to be”. Israel was the first born of the whole family of nations. And will ever be. “God’s choice stands” (kata de thn ekloghn) says St. Paul (Rom.11.28).  No matter how barbaric they behave now they are back in the Holy Land, no matter how cruelly and horribly they treat the Palestinians, he will not let them go. “They are his friends forever for the sake of the patriarchs” (ibid). As Paul says in this same passage, it is an unfathomable and unsearchable mystery. Just as the love of God for all mankind (ibid.v.32) is totally unfathomable, immeasurable, and infinitely reliable. “God has no favourites” said Peter (Acts10.34). The parable of the Prodigal Son has like all parables levels of meaning and application.

 

I repeat what I have said, that what makes the book of the Bible the Word of God is not that it contains no errors, ethical or theological, but that it is the book of the People of God, both old and new. God did not write a single word. The Church embracing all nations guided by the Spirit of God as promised decided what written works would be in it and declared it to be the Word of God. That cooperation between God and his People makes it the Word of God. It is their book and they are God’s people.  “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”.

 

In this way we might understand the scriptures. We the Church are the Body of Christ as from the Upper Room at Pentecost when we were filled by the Spirit of Truth. We are a faith community. Our faith is not in a book but in Christ. No books can encompass our faith. “There is much else that Jesus did. If it were all recorded in detail, I suppose the whole world could not hold the books that would be written” (Jn.21.25). We are not ‘people of the book’ no more than the Jewish people were. It was not texts that made them God’s people but it was God who made them his people. They were what they were by God’s choice. Nothing else. “The Lord cared for your forefathers in his love for them and chose their descendants after them. Out of all the nations you were his chosen people as you are to this day” (Deut.10.15). “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you” (Jn. 15.15).

 

God chose us. God chose to redeem us. God chose to teach us his truth. Not in a book or through a book but through the Spirit of Truth that inhabits and informs the Body of Christ. It is not as individuals that we are taught but within the Body of Christ that is the Church. It was not to individuals that Christ spoke when he said “The word you hear is not mine; it is the word of the Father who sent me. I have told you all this while I am still here with you. But your Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in name, will teach you everything (‘panta’ –everything!) and will call to mind all that I have told you” (Jn.14.24-26). He said this to his disciples gathered around him. It was not a text or a book that Christ promised. It was his Spirit. “But when your Advocate has come, whom I will send from the Father –the Spirit of truth that issues from the Father –he will bear witness to me” (Jn.15.26). We are a community of faith. That faith is handed on to each new member of the community of the faithful. “”And you also are my witnesses because you have been with me from the first” (Jn.15.27).  As the Father sent Christ, Christ sent his disciples. We know our faith as Christ knew himself and his father. As his body we possess his Spirit, the Sprit that proceeds from the Father, the Spirit of Truth (Jn.14.17). What matters is the faith, the truth that Christ has taught about God -Father, Son and Spirit- held and preserved by the Church the Body of Christ through the working of the Spirit of Truth. The Bible, Old and New, is the book of the documents which the Church declared to contain and express its beliefs, its faith; and the Church, taught by the Spirit, has the authority to explain what is in that book and to decide what, in the light of human experience and development and the development of its understanding, is to be retained (eg. Jesus is God) and what discarded (women are subject to their husbands in all matters).

 

The Church decided which writings constitute the canon of the New Testament. In them, as in a mirror, the Church recognised itself. They are not some Koranic text composed in heaven by God himself as from eternity as Moslems believe and communicated into Mohammad’s consciousness by an angel without even the tiniest human participation (which is the Islamic understanding of the divine-human relationship and the model of its civic and social relationships). The biblical texts are human documents. God did not write one single word or line or phrase. Members of the community of faith, to whom Jesus went the Spirit of Truth, wrote them; but wrote them as they understood their faith at that time. They could do no other.

 

So how do we deal with them? As the Body of Christ inhabited by his Spirit the Spirit of Truth we deal with them, to bind and to loose. We look to the Sermon on the Mount to see how the Apostolic Church dealt with the Word of God.

 

My Response (2).

 

We look to the Sermon on the Mount.: Matthew 5.17-48. Matthew’s gospel, like each of the other gospels, is a statement of the faith of the Church, the Body of Christ is a statement of its faith. It was by declaration of the Church that it is in the canon of Scripture. As a piece of writing it might be anything but straightforward from whatever academic discipline one might want to treat of it but it stands first and foremost, and essentially, as a statement of our faith. Historians, linguists, students of comparative religion and others might want to pick, extract, dissect and analyse every strand of hair it is composed of, and they may of course do so, and they serve a useful purpose. The gospels were not however written from any such viewpoint. They were written as statements of the faith of the Christian community, which is our faith. We are instructed in that faith not just by what the gospels say but also by how the Church interprets them. Our faith finds expression in its liturgical prayer (lex orandi lex credendi) which preceded the written texts by decades and some of which was put into the written texts, not least the Letters.

 

The author of Matthew’s gospel in these verses instructs us in our relationship to the Old Testament. He shows us how to deal with it. He tells us that instruction in the Law has passed from the doctors of the Law to Christ. The formula ‘But I say to you’ -egw de legw umiv -is put six times into the mouth of Christ. The Bible is full of formulas and this one, repeated six times within a very short space is among the most important. Christ takes up six themes: the issue of a person with a grievance against another person, temptation, divorce, the swearing of an oath, revenge and ill-treatment, and love of neighbour and attitude towards one’s enemy.

 

I find it most significant how Matthew introduces each theme. Each is introduced with yet another formula: ‘You have learned that the people of old/our forefathers (arkaiois) were told’ with the variation: ‘You have learned that they were told’. In the relevant Old Testament text the formula is significantly different. It is: “The Lord spoke to Moses” Lev. 24.1 for Matt.5.21; “God spoke and these were his words” for Matt. 21.27;  “These are the statutes and laws that you shall be careful to observe” Deut. 12.1 (or more immediately, and loosely, ibid. 24.1) for Matt. 21.31;  “Then Moses spoke to the heads of the tribes of the Israelites and said” Num. 30.1 (and other texts)  for Matt. 21 33;  “The Lord spoke to Moses and said” Lev. 24. 19 for Matt. 21.39.  For the “Love your neighbour, hate your enemy” Matt.21.43 I cannot find a reasonably precise text anywhere in the OT. However. Deut. 7.10 “those who defy him (God) and show their hatred for him he repays with destruction; he will not be slow to requite any who so hate him” contains the message Christ is concerned to repudiate. Its formula of introduction is “These are the commandments, statutes and laws which the Lord your God commanded me to teach you” (ibid.6.1).

 

Matthew of course knew the Old Testament formulas very well. He wrote for Jewish Christians who knew their origins, as well as Gentile Christians,. “He was a scribe versed in Jewish methods of interpretation” (Charpentier). In dealing with each of the six themes, in which he very deliberately and with a most definite purpose contrasts Christianity with Judaism, he did not change the formula by chance. It is not by chance that he changes “The Lord said” and “Moses spoke” to a mere “They were told” with no reference at all to the OT authority and solemnity of their authorship. It cannot be by chance or oversight that he substitutes “They were told”. The very focussed literary and theological structure of his gospel tells us that Matthew weighed his every word with care. What he put in, what he left out, how he expressed himself and how he changed formulas was purposive through and through. I doubt anyone will argue with that.

 

This authoritative statement of the faith of the Church, which is known as the Gospel according (kata) to Matthew, in this way therefore puts a very definite question mark against any claim of a divine authorship of two of the six sets of instructions Christ employs to distinguish Christianity from Judaism. Those two are contained in Mt. 5. 38 and 43. The other four are different. I would suggest that what Christ says regarding those four does not so much repudiate them as develop their message. Matt 5.38 & 43, however, amount to repudiation. Matthew knew this of course. He knew what was involved. By changing the formula and by repudiating what the Old Testament teaches, therefore, he is knowingly denying their divine authorship, plain contrary what the Old Testament asserts. This, coming from the author of the most ‘Jewish’ of the gospels, is most significant. There is nothing haphazard about this gospel. In its theology, method and literary form it is a most careful construct. It is a thought-out statement of the Christian faith. Intrinsic to that faith, our faith, is that the God of the Old Testament is the God of the New. The ‘heavenly Father’ of Jesus (18.18) is the God of creation (19.3-9). Jesus is ‘God with us’ (1.23). The God of Jesus, who is God with us, is ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, the God of the living and not of the dead” (22.32), who does not contradict himself. Matthew would not have been familiar with later philosophical notions of God’s timelessness but the content is exactly the same.

 

In the person of the Matthew writer the Church, the Body of Christ, has looked at the Old Testament with a very steady eye. It has identified crucial areas of disagreement in morality between itself and the message of the Old Testament. It has not just repudiated what the Old Testament has taught in those areas but has concluded that, despite the claims of the Old Testament, they are not what God teaches. In other words the Church in its statement of faith in Matthew chapter 5 has pronounced judgement on the Old Testament. It has stated that God’s revelation is not in a book but in itself, the Body of Christ, as the vessel of the Spirit of Truth. This is precisely what Christ himself did. He said, and the words ring out: Egw de legw umin. ’But I say to you’. He set his authority in the bluntest terms against that of the book of the Old Testament. He is the Word of God. No book is. No words in a book are. “I and the Father are one”. His Body is the Church. “As the Father has sent me, so I also send you”. The Church has the power to bind and to loose. The Church can therefore pronounce judgement upon the Old Testament just as Christ its Head did. The Church can authoritatively pronounce therefore that as Christ repudiated the Old Testament instruction of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth as not of God, so the Church, in exactly the same vein, effectively within the same realm of morality, can repudiate every single instruction of the Old Testament where God is represented as authorising the killing of the innocent, as not of God.

 

So, where the Book of Deuteronomy states; “When the Lord your God exterminates, as you advance, the nations whose country you are entering to occupy, you shall take their place and settle in their land” (12.29), the Old Testament is misrepresenting God, and misrepresenting him very gravely indeed. There is no divine authority for the killing of the innocent, for the annexation of the land of other people, for genocide and for slaughter, for the murder of three thousand Philistines enjoying a day out in the sunshine in a stadium, brutal though their idea of enjoyment may well have been. There can be no religious justifications for killing the innocent. That is not religion. That is anything but. What that is is man’s inhumanity to man. This is so totally basic to the correct understanding of religion, namely that religion isn’t in any way about the glorification of God. The crucifixion put an end to that once and for all –or at least it should have done. Proclaiming the greatness of God just isn’t what religion is about. That is making ‘god’ into man’s ambition for himself. Such a ‘religion’ is nothing else but the glorification of man. God is what he is no matter what we think or do. What religion is about is knowing God and responding to his goodness.

 

Egw de legw umin. The significance of this cannot be overstated. It is the Church stating that in Christ it stands in judgement over ‘what has been written’. As in these verses of the Sermon on the Mount the Church in his name had the authority to change the very formula by which an Old Testament instruction had been written in order to state that the instruction was not from God even where the text declared it was; and had the authority to repudiate any such instruction where it conflicted with its faith. This was precisely what Peter himself did later after the Ascension and the departure of the visible Christ when at the Feast of Pentecost the Spirit of Truth, coming in Christ’s name, had come upon the Church. Then, contrary to one of the most basic tenets of Judaism, declared time and again in the Old Testament texts, he pronounced that the Jews had ceased to be the Chosen People in the sense of it being the sole object of his love and concern. God’s love and his redeeming and glorifying plan is for all mankind. “I now see that God has no favourites but that in every nation (en panti efnei) a man who is god-fearing and does what is right is acceptable to him” (Acts 10.34). Precisely as Paul himself declared: “Through faith you are all sons of God in union with Christ Jesus. Baptised into union with him you have put on Christ as a garment. There is no such thing as Jew or Greek, slave and freeman, male and female; for you are all one person in Christ Jesus (pantes gar umeis eis este en Cristw Ihsou)”

 

I will deal now with the Letter to the Hebrews. I suggest that it is its reference to Rahab the prostitute which should be our guide how to understand the tribute to Samson in the Letter to Hebrews. “By faith the prostitute Rahab escaped the doom of the unbelievers because she had given the spies a kindly welcome” (11.v31). The author of the letter to the Hebrews would not have approved of prostitution (even if the two spies inside Jericho did). What saved her from being massacred with the rest of the inhabitants was the fact that she helped the spies escape. What persuaded her to do that was her belief that the Israelites would conquer Canaan (Joshua 2.v9) and that “The Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below (v.11). It was a faith which showed itself in doing good, doing something which helped towards “seeing God’s promises fulfilled” (Hb, 11.v33).

 

Likewise with Samson. He was a brute, a tough and vicious prize-fighter, really nothing more than the Israelites’ version of whatever thugs the Philistines were using against them. But in the economy of salvation he belonged to the people God had chosen to bring salvation to all. His faith was in the God of Israel. This god was his tribal god. He was this tribe’s warrior against the Philistines’ warriors as his tribe’s god was against their tribe’s god. For Israel their god was their tribal god. In God’s plan it would be to Israel that He would reveal himself in the fullness of time as the one and only God, “God in heaven above and on the earth below” as Rahab said, and gradually transcend and transform their understanding of God. At the time of Samson however the plan was a long way off reaching fulfilment. God had to make do with what there was. He had to work with and from the human condition as it was. He had to put his wine in old wineskins. The alternative would have been somehow to produce a tribe that was separate from, unaffected by, insulated from every culture around it, in some fantastic way morally, religiously not just unadulterated and pure but intellectually amazingly advanced. It would have been totally false, totally artificial. A sort of Midwich cuckoos.  It is not, it could not be, the way of revelation. God took a wanton for a wife (Amos 1.2), a woman loved by another man, an adulteress (3,1) God hoped he’d find grapes in the wilderness, the first ripe figs. No such luck. “They resorted to Baal” (9.10). God chose flesh in the condition it was in. God chose a very human tribe of people.

 

Samson was the tribe’s ferocious patriot. That was the long and short of it really. Totally loyal. Israel was his football team. The god of his tribe his colours. Great to have on your side in a scrap. Putting the fear of God up all opponents. Taking on all comers. No holds barred. Ready to go down fighting. Believing blindly in his club –his tribe and the god of his tribe. However, he is specifically presented by Judges as believing in the power of the God of Israel, which faith made him instrumental in defeating the Philistines who opposed the establishment of the Israelite kingdom, and in that way his faith worked towards “seeing God’s promises fulfilled” (ibid) –which ultimately was fully achieved in Christ (ibid.v.40). So, as I read this text of Hebrews, there is no approbation of Samson’s thuggery and murderous activities, just as there is no approbation of Rahab’s prostitution. Rather there is approbation of their faith which worked towards the establishment of the kingdom. For the Jews, and more importantly for the writer of Judges, the establishment of the kingdom of Israel in Canaan was the fulfilment of God’s promises; and for them it was a matter of indifference how Rahab and Samson contributed to that outcome as long as they did contribute to it. 

 

For Hebrews however the fulfilment of God’s promises is not any earthly kingdom. “For God had a better plan” (11.v40). It is one, to share in which “we must throw off every sin to which we cling” (12.v1). It has no earthly fulfilment. It has no earthly attitudes and purposes such as Samson had, and had in abundance. Instead our eyes must be fixed on Jesus “on whom faith depends from start to finish. Jesus who for the sake of the joy that lay ahead of him endured the cross, making light of its disgrace and now has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God” (12.v2). It is a plan which repudiates everything about Samson except his faith in the power of his God. The life and death of Jesus which is the example of morality which Hebrews enjoins upon us was the very antithesis of that of Samson who was a thug, a lecher and a murderer. The “promised inheritance” (11.v.40) which this thug of an Israeli patriot believed in was nothing like the promised inheritance which was in the plan of God and hence they could not “enter upon” it (v.39) until Christ had endured the cross and made light of its disgrace. Christ is the complete repudiation of everything about Samson except his faith that the God of Israel was, in the words of a prostitute “God in heaven above and on the earth below”. (4)

 

God worked with Rahab and Samson as he found them –a prostitute and a thug. Their faith in him was inadequate, in Samson’s case purely tribal. But that was what God had to work with. They contributed each in their own way to the establishment of a people of God which required in the context of their times territorial definition. No other understanding of a ‘people of God’ was possible in that culture. Then, and indeed as now, the Jews had an understanding of themselves as a ‘people’ which was racial and genetic. One has to read the first fifteen chapters of the Acts, especially those concerning Peter’s spiritual journey in this all-important matter, to appreciate how entrenched that racial understanding of ‘people’ was, and still is, and how immensely difficult it proved for the first Christians to surmount it. It was a faith limited by and to the notion of belonging to a particular tribe, of belonging to a particular tribal god. It was that limited religious understanding that God took up and worked with till, in the fullness of time, his ‘better plan’ could be revealed and executed. Without the narrow and limited faith of men like Samson, for all the evil it was employed by him and others to justify, the ‘people of God’ could never have been established; and from that people came Christ. God worked with fallen humanity as it actually was. He did not intervene in any inordinate and excessive manner. He was patient. ‘Patient’ in both its Latin meaning of ‘suffering’ and its English meaning of ‘waiting and enduring’. The Letter to the Hebrews is a statement of the fundamental facts of the economy of our salvation, that the narrow limited faith in the God of Israel, often very immoral in the way it was employed, of men like Samson and David, laid the foundations on which was built the new Kingdom. The Letter to the Hebrews can be taken seriously for the plain reason that it is a realistic account of the actual economy of our salvation. The foundations of Christianity are laid in the reality of humanity.

 

Christianity both puts forward the problem and tells us the solution. “You have learned what they were told: ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’. But what I tell you is this. Do not set yourself up against the man who wrongs you. If someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn and offer him your left cheek (Mt.5.38f) ....You have learned what they were told: ‘Love your neighbour, hate your enemy.’ But what I tell you is this. Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors” (43f). ‘There must be no limit to your goodness as your heavenly Father’s goodness knows no bounds”. (Matt.5. 38-48). Jesus does not say: “You have learned what the Lord commanded you” or anything on such lines, but “what they were told”. The one God cannot contradict himself. Jesus does not ascribe the instruction to take revenge or to hate your enemy to God his Father. His Father’s goodness had no limits. Neither in time or in terms of people. “God has no favourites”.

 

It is in this light that we must read and understand the Old Testament. All instructions in the OT to the Jews to act immorally or any descriptions of events which involve killing, like the invasion of Canann or the Plagues, or stories such as the Samson stories, which ascribe to God the intent to kill or to approve it, are a misreading of God’s intent. They are human creations. God’s ways are not our ways. God wanted a holy people and through them in the fullness of time a holy human race. But he can only work with what there is.

 

CONCLUSION.

Everything goes back to how we understand in what way the Bible is the Word of God. It cannot be God’s Word in the sense that it is what God himself has ‘said’, or inspired, whatever way he is supposed to have done either, since it attributes to him immoral and unacceptable acts and attitudes such as Christianity would condemn. Besides which of course God never wrote a single word that it contains. I would suggest therefore that the Bible is the Word of God in so far as it is the book of the People of God as I have endeavoured at length to explain. Furthermore, it is the people of God, the Church which Christ has imbued with his Spirit, that has decided what the contents of that book will be and, following the example of Christ, decides how they are to be understood. It can and it does treat the statements of the Bible just as Christ treated them. God didn’t write one single letter, one word or phrase or chapter or book of the Bible. Human beings did. Inspiration does not imply infallibility in every statement. Inspiration amounts to God taking humanity through to ‘the fullness of time’ at the pace it is capable of, in the way it is capable of, warts and all, guiding it in all its imperfections and sinfulness, to the end He intends, which is Christ. I find support for this in the Prologue to the Gospel of John:

                                        ‘When all things began, the Word already was.

                               The Word dwelt with God and what God was, the Word was.

                                              No single thing was created without him.

                                                  The Law was given through Moses

                                            Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

                                                        No one has ever seen God

              But God’s only Son, he who is nearest to the Father, he has made him known’.

 

In the Sermon on the Mount God’s only Son gave us the example; and he sent us his Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and himself, to guide us.

 

                               **************************************************

 

 

Footnote 1

Beyond any doubt this situation in Israel and Palestine is unbelievably bad. It has reached the point where biblical promises to Abraham and Moses are now the explicit excuse and justification for blatant racism and programmes of ethnic cleansing, extermination, theft and deportation. Faced with a situation where the USA effectively supports these policies and Britain as America’s willing ally keeps stumm, we can feel helpless. The poor oppressed people of Palestine, faced with the military might of Israel, are helpless. Has the Holocaust trapped us into a silence which makes us part of ‘a religious industry for justifying killing the innocent”. This is one pressing reason for the topicality, the urgent importance, of Brian’s paper. A version of religion is being used as a justification for of war. But as Christians how can we protest effectively if we do not repudiate firmly and clearly whatever is written in the Old Testament which gives divine backing to murder, genocide, the wholesale seizure of other people’s land and livelihood and attitudes of racial superiority, damning them for what they are, namely the very perversion of religion and not the Word of God at all?

 

Footnote 2

The Book of Judges is Judaism at an early moment of its development towards its fullness in Christianity. Interestingly Judges has a number of similarities with the Koran. There is now a large and growing body of opinion that is re-examining to what extent Mohammad was actually the author of the Koran and whether it was composed well after his death, but taking it at its face value it has Mohammed arguing time and again that violence can be good if done, as he sees it, on behalf of God. “Carnage is better than idolatry” he said (2.91).  “Fight against them (unbelievers) until idolatry is no more and God’s religion reigns supreme” (2.193). He identified himself with God; violence therefore against the tribes or individuals who disputed the religious, and with it the political, status he claimed for himself was in order. “He that disobeys God and his apostle strays far indeed” (33.36). He was a warlord. One example is his treatment of the Jews of Medina. They would not accept him. Consequently he drove two of their three tribes in Medina into exile, the Banu-‘n-Nadir and the Banu-n’Qainuqa, and divided their estates among his followers. He then had between 700 and 800 Jewish males of the Banu-‘n-Quraiza executed and sold their women and children into slavery (cf. Surah 5). His basic message was “He that obeys the Apostle obeys God” (4.80). It might be “ecumenical” in one sense to put Mohammed alongside Christ as founders of important religions but we should be aware of how very different they were. Christ in his life and in his teaching was very different indeed from Mohammad. The difference has had immense consequences culturally, socially, politically.

 

Michael Knowles

 

Congleton, Cheshire CW12 4AE

 

Tel: 01260 271139    Mob: 07929913598

 

Email: mail@michael-knowles.co.uk