In this weeks podcast Joe and I talk about the wrathful God of the Old Testament, you know, the one who is so bloodthirsty that the only way of appeasing him is to slaughter sheep, cows, oxen, some enemy tribes and… er… his son. Yes, we start back in the world of ‘PSA’: penal substitutionary atonement. I don’t want to go into that much on this blog post. Suffice it to say, it’s not a view that ever made much sense to me, even while I was dutifully forcing myself to believe in it. It’s also only one view of the way atonement works, something we discussed on the podcast in two episode recorded centuries ago in 2018. We then broaden the discussion to talk about the God who smites people – or orders others to smite people – in some Old Testament accounts.
I’ve also been on the Renovaré Life With God podcast this week where I chat with Nathan Foster more broadly about the Bible, but also we touch on the same question.
Life with God 275: Nick Page — The Bible as Holy Ground
The issue of the Old Testament God is something which actually was the genesis for my book The Badly Behaved Bible: the most common question I get asked about the Bible is how do we reconcile the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament? Even this week a friend texted me the blunt question: ‘How is (OT) God better than a crazy dictator who smites people because they’re not following what He says?’
In the Mid-faith Crisis episode (briefly) and in the book (slightly less briefly) I look at the arguments usually trotted out to support the idea that it’s OK for God to order mass murder as he does in, for example, Deuteronomy 20:16-18 or 1 Samuel 15:2-3. In the book I come down on two main ways of dealing with them.
- This is story, not history. It’s not history, not only because it never actually happened (i.e. the command was never carried out) but because that’s not what the Bible writers were actually doing. This is a morality story, really, so we can choose to read it that way.
- Whatever people thought God was like in those days, we know different. We know He is Christlike. In the words of Archbishop Michael Ramsey: ‘The heart of Christian doctrine is not only that Jesus is divine, but that God is Christlike, and in him there is no un-Christ-likeness at all.’
Anyway, here’s a brief excerpt from The Badly Behaved Bible to show you my approach:
Ultimately, it seems to me that we are faced with a choice. We can either change our view of the Bible or change our view of God as a God of love.I know that many Christians insist on believing both that God is love and that he also ordered the extermination of innocent men, women and children. Personally, this is not a view I am prepared to share. Anyway, the point of this book is to say that we don’t have to struggle with those theological contortions. What we can do is rethink our view of the Bible - and particularly the way the Bible writers represent history. It’s not the Bible that is at fault - it’s that we are trying to force it into our categories. We have to recognise that what is being presented here is not our kind of documentary history, but a series of stories about identity and purpose and our relationship with God.
And the really important thing is that, whatever viewpoint we hold, we must always rethink our relationship with these stories because of Jesus… However people understood God in the past, we understand him in a different way today. We need to read the Bible in the light of what we know about God. We know that he is Christlike.
Jesus came to show us what God is like. Many people have an image of God that is straight out of Joshua. They think that God really wants to go all Old Testament on us and smite us, yea into many pieces thereof, but that Jesus continually talks him out of it. But the Father and the Son are not playing some nice cop/ nasty cop routine. Jesus is not God’s carer. He is not God’s anger-management coach. He is not God’s tranquilliser. Jesus is God.
Jesus says that he and the Father are the same - ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9). So it’s not just that Jesus is like God, it’s also that God is like Jesus. As Christians, our baseline as to what God is like is the figure of Jesus, and Jesus is the very opposite of a smite-first-ask-questions-later God.
In the Gospels, every time Jesus has the opportunity to do any smiting, he refuses. He refuses to rain down fire on the Samaritan village; he refuses to stone a woman caught in adultery. Dying and bleeding on the cross, he refuses to call down armies of angels to save him.
Instead, Jesus talks of endless, limitless forgiveness. He calls on people to love their enemies, to offer the other cheek. If we believe in the Trinity - really believe in it, rather than just mouthing the words during the Creed - we have to believe that what we see in Jesus is the character and actions of God. Whatever the Israelites heard from God - or thought they did - we cannot possibly behave in the same way. We follow a Christlike God. God is Christlike, and in him there is no unChristlikeness at all. I just want to repeat that.
If we want to read the Bible properly, we must read it through the lens of Jesus Christ. And if one part of the Bible says something that conflicts with what Jesus says, well, I’m going to listen to Jesus first.
That doesn’t mean I reject these kinds of texts, or refrain from grappling with them. I want to keep on praying and talking and thinking about these passages, and asking God to reveal their application for my life. If I put aside the historicity or otherwise and think of the daily battles that I have to fight to take possession of my own life, I have plenty enough ‘Canaanites’ to fight in that context. Canaanites can stand for all the things that tempt us away from following God. We can read these stories as an encouragement to purity and integrity and resisting the culture around us … rather than an encouragement to genocide.
Or I could see these stories as a message about never going into conflict for personal gain. The demand not to take a single item of booty is common to all these texts of destruction.
Or I could reflect on how difficult it is to hear the command of God, and ask myself whether there haven’t been many times in my life when I have mistakenly believed that God hates the same people that I do.
Or I could imagine the victims: their terror, their panic, their grief and loss. Maybe that will inspire me to think about the victims today of all those who kill and maim and bomb, believing that somehow God has commanded them to do it.
Or I could simply contrast this passage with the message of Jesus, and wrestle with the challenge of living a Jesus-shaped life in the midst of a culture that is every bit as addicted to violence as the age of Joshua and Judges.
The same kind of approach is true for so many of these difficult stories in the early parts of the Bible. They are trying to tell us lots of important and true things: that the universe was created by God, that human beings are made in God’s likeness, that cheats, failures and drunkards can still be a part of God’s plan for history, that God is powerful and ever present, and lots, lots more. But they are not trying to be ‘our’ kind of history, because the writers of ancient history (and this is the same for ancient history outside the Bible) didn’t really think that way.
Instead, the Bible simply presents us with these stories and invites us to read.
From The Badly Behaved Bible pp.231-235