In Genesis 18 the Lord comes to meet
with Abraham and tells him of his plans to judge the wicked cities of the
plain. Often we think of only Sodom and Gomorrah but in fact there were several
city states in the plains that were, at that time wicked and cruel. Abraham is
told that the outcry against the people of the plain had become great – they were
violent, oppressive, cruel, perverse and engaged in all manner of idolatry
including continual human sacrifices. Abraham, undoubtedly concerned about his
nephew Lot who went to live in those very cities then begins to plead for their
safety and he says something striking. He asks if God will sweep away the
righteous with the wicked. How will God discriminate between those who are
wicked and those who are not? The text tells us,
23 Then Abraham
drew near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? 24 Suppose
there are fifty righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place
and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? 25 Far
be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the
wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall
not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” 26 And the Lord
said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole
place for their sake.” Genesis 18:23-26
Abraham then “negotiates” God down to
just 10 people in all of the plains before God leaves to go down to the cities.
What is striking is Abraham’s question, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth
do what is just?” This is the question that confronts us in today’s article.
It is common place in the debates
between unbelievers[1]
and Christians for the so called “atrocities” of the Old Testament to be
brought into play. It is not long into the discussion, especially when the
topic is that of morality and the kind of justificatory pre-conditions for
morality to exist at all, that God will be called a moral monster and that the
Bible cannot serve as an adequate foundation for objective morals because it
condones slavery, rape, genocide, and patriarchy, or so the argument goes.
Without delving into the merits or viability of those interpretations of the
Biblical laws and narratives, I want to instead analyze the form of the
arguments that are made. I have been increasingly aware of the diminished view
of God in the west and how it impacts not only the unbelieving community but
the Christian community as well. There was a time that God was viewed as so
holy and righteous that to even use his name improperly was not just a social
taboo but a detestable sin. However now it has become almost common place even
among believers. We are told to make no image of God in the Bible but we are
now in a place where a box off hit like Bruce
Almighty portrays God (as played by Morgan Freeman) as a kind, albeit
passive, sage-like wise man, more holy man than omnipotent Creator. Family Guy
is a hit show across nearly all demographics (Evangelicals included) and what
often makes us balk is not that it portrays God as an old white bearded man
with a somewhat skewed moral compass but rather the kind of off color sexual or
violence based humor that is used. What makes us cringe (but not look away) is
the irreverent and sacrilegious material. The problem is that it is culturally irreverent and sacrilegious
not religiously so. It pushes the envelope on our Late Modern American
sensibilities of sex and gender which seem to not include religious piety even
among the conservatives. What we see is that in the West there is an entirely
diminished theological view of God, even among those who claim to base their
lives on the Bible.
God, for most Americans, is
something like Morgan Freeman in Bruce
Almighty. If he exists, he is an entirely genteel, pedestrian and just
wants us to be good and healthy. He wants us to be nice to our neighbors (so
long as it doesn’t cost us anything) and helps us out every now and then but
largely we are on our own.[2]
Even Christians have largely lost the exalted view of God as holy and
righteous. I’m not even sure those words would be readily understood by an
average church goer. In fact we hardly even know what those terms mean anymore.
We no longer live in a culture of monarchs but rather want a president who is
down to earth and a lot like us. We are egalitarian through and through and
reject any idea of subservience to a higher power unless it makes us better of.
So naturally we imagine that God must be just like us. In order for us to think
that God is good, his morals must be like our morals and his ways like our
ways. He must thinks like us, believe like us, love like us, and act like us or
else he is not only foreign to us but inferior. We have no idea what Isaiah
could have meant when he wrote:
8 “For my thoughts are not your
thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.
9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)
neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.
9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)
Isaiah
is here telling us that God is simply not like us. His ways are not our ways.
He does not think like us. He is not like us. While I can sympathize with the
sentiment that God is one of us because of the incarnation such that Jesus
became like us, it seems that the diminished view of God running rampant in the
West is incarnational theology gone horribly awry. I should note at this point
that I am not trying to here argue that God exists or that he is in fact holy
and righteous and worthy of praise and adoration (though I think all of those
things are true – and unimaginably greatly so). I am simply setting up what the
predominate theological milieu of the day is in the West in which these debates
occur.
When the unbeliever challenges the
Christian about the morality of God in the Bible, often the kind of responses given by Christians are
to give justifications for why what God did in the Old Testament are actually
inline with our current moral beliefs and should not be seen as immoral. They
are, in essence, trying to make God palatable to modern skeptics and so they
try to tame God and cut him down to size. To that extent the unbeliever and the
believer seem to be playing on the same field. They both seem to agree that God
is subservient to the moral law in the same way that we as humans are. It is
this arena of discourse that I would like to challenge in this article.
It is my contention that believers often
do a disservice to themselves by agreeing to play on that turf in the first
place. When we attempt to defend God as moral just like us we may have good
intentions but we are actually capitulating to a weaker concept of God than
what is found in the Bible. To put it bluntly, we have lost the battle before a
single shot is fired because we simply passively accept a kind of
post-enlightenment humanistic slant on what God must be like. Once we realize
this, we can see that the demands of the unbeliever for us to defend God are
strawmen concepts that we should not feel compelled to respond to. It is simply
not the case that God must be moral like we are moral. Not because God is “above
the law” so to speak like some kind of tyrannical brut, but because God is
categorically not like us. God is not a human. God is not a created being bound
to the law of another. God is the ultimate ground of being and is so holy that
we strain to comprehend him. As Christians we struggle to defend God because
the concept of God we are defending is, in effect indefensible. Not because the
Biblical God is indefensible, but the washed out and cheapened concept of God
as a being a lot like us is an indefensible idol. One simply needs to read Job
or the prophets to understand what it means for the Lord to be a holy and all
consuming fire. The reason why we have a hard time understanding the severity
of some of the punishments in the Old Testament is because we do not think sin
is really all that severe, and we do not think sin is all that severe because
we do not think God is all that holy or man all that bad. Both are “basically
good.” We place man higher than the Bible places him with regard to rectitude
and God far lower than the heavens are from the earth. We do not understand the
gravity of sin because we do not think that God is really all that great.
So it is on that playing field that
these debates are played and lost. Let us consider the following two categories
of Biblical teaching and narratives.
Theological Backgrounds
|
Narratives
|
God
is omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, holy, righteous, perfect,
immutable, jealous, and judge of all the earth.
Humanity
is created by God in God’s image, fallen in sin, and deserving of the penalty
due to sin which is death (eternal separation from God).
|
God
commands the conquest of the nations of Canaan.
God
commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to test him.
|
I
chose some relatively simple concepts that are replete throughout the Bible and
so hopefully will not be widely contested as “biblical” concepts. It seems that
in order for the unbeliever’s objection to go forward they must be selective on
which aspects of the Biblical concept of God that are permitted to enter into
the discussion and thus constitute the lesser vision of God than that of the
Biblical writers as we have discussed above. This means that when the
unbeliever asks the Christian why God would command “genocide” they are
poisoning the well so to speak. Because we as humans recognize that mass
slaughter of our fellow humans is a grave moral evil the challenge is posed
that if God were to do it, he would be evil like the mass murderers of our
recent past. The main problem with the question is that God is not like us and
we are not like God.
I used to give the example of the
difference between a private citizen and a judge with regard to a crime such
that we recognize that a judge has a certain authority to pronounce and execute
sentencing and justice against a criminal that a private citizen simply does
not have. For example, a private citizen cannot take a criminal and lock him
away in a cellar whereas a judge has the authority to pronounce a criminal
guilty and sentence him to life in prison. The right to judge a criminal is
simply categorically different
between a private citizen and a judge. I used to think that this was an apt
illustration of the difference between humans and God. I have recently come to
think that while it is a helpful illustration so far as it goes, it is
not completely accurate, not because God is more like us, but because the
distance between us and God is greater than
the distance between a private citizen and a judge. A human judge is still
human. While he has certain rights vested to him by the state to execute
justice, he also has certain moral obligations that he must, in good conscious,
adhere to. This seems to me where God is not only categorically different from
us in the sense that God is the judge of the earth and we are not, but also in
the sense that God is not bound to a standard exterior to himself whereas we as
humans are. God is not vested with
authority to judge. He is, by nature
the rightful judge of humanity and we are not. We have in our common
nomenclature sayings like “to play God.” These were brought into the language
for a reason. Long ago we recognized that God was the author and giver of life and
that it was only by his good pleasure that we came to be and continued to live.
God quite literally had the right to take life when he saw fit for his good purposes
and to execute justice against evil and sin. The saying however hardly makes
sense to modern Westerners because we have become so autonomous that even
Christians do not believe God would be “moral” if he judged us for sin. No, we
think that we can just come as we are and stay as we are and God just
loves us like a senile old grandfather who thinks his grandchildren can do no
wrong. The common Western Christian, whether they know it or not, who believes
that God will not judge sin is like the wicked in Psalm 10 who says to God, “You
will not call to account.” One simply needs to read Lamentations to understand
that God takes sin a lot more seriously than we do.
At this point the unbeliever will
surely protest that I am simply begging the question not only of God’s existence
but also of his holy nature and our sinful condition. I actually concede the
point. I am doing that. Yet it seems to me that I am permitted to by the nature
of the unbeliever’s argument. This is now where what I have been saying so far comes
to full blossom. The objection of the unbeliever that God is a “moral monster”
in the Old Testament is actually an arguendo,
what is commonly an argument of the form, “For the sake of argument let us
assume that X is true and reduce it to
absurdity.” In order for the argument to work, the unbeliever must assume the
existence of God and the accuracy of
the Biblical text even if they are not aware that this is what they are doing.
The argument is, whether they like it or not, if God exists and if the
stories in the Bible are accurate then we can examine the morality of it all and
conclude that God acted wickedly. It is precisely here that the
Christian is then allowed to assume everything
that is entailed within the Bible and Christian theology. In order for the
unbeliever’s argument to work, it must be successful as an argument for an internal inconsistency within the Bible
and the Christian theological system as a whole. It is an attempt to show that
God cannot be viewed as moral and benevolent while at the same time being
vicious and violent and genocidal for example. The unbeliever wants us to
conclude that the Bible admonishes wicked action and therefore the god of the
Bible would be evil (if he existed) and so we should reject both.
So it is precisely here that the
argument fails because it does not allow everything
that the Bible teaches on the subject or that is held by Christian
theology. It selects a slim sliver of the concept of God in the Bible and thus
is only a refutation of a lesser concept
of God. When the full weight of the Scriptures comes to bear on the issue the
problem simply evaporates because the lesser concept of God is plainly not the
Biblical concept of God. We can respond by saying that if God exists as described in the Bible (i.e. holy,
righteous, judge, omniscient, etc) and if
humanity is sinful and wicked as described in the Bible and if the wages of sin is death as
described in the Bible then God acting in judgment against a wicked and
evil people is not genocide or evil. It is the actions of the judge of creation
meting out justice against sin as a holy God.
It is in this regard that I often point
out the inconsistency of arguments like those put forward by people like Christopher
Hitchens who would say that God was evil for judging the Canaanites but then
turn around and say that God is evil for not intervening to stop the Nazis and
the Holocaust. This position states that God was evil for judging a wicked
nation and was evil for not judging a wicked nation. Besides the problem of
ignoring the historic Christian position that Christ is present in all human
suffering and oppression, this objection by Hitchens reveals not only an
inconsistent standard but also that Hitchens is working on a diminished view of
God – something that should not surprise us since he is quite literally a God
despiser. He loathes the concept of God so why should we think that he would
interact with an exalted concept of God as holy, righteous and pure and
humanity as sinful and wicked?
Now at this point the unbeliever may
then double back and say something like, “Well you still haven’t shown that God
even exists in the first place” and that is all true and fine. We haven’t. Yet
at that point he cannot help himself to the conclusion of his objection that
the God of the Bible is a moral monster as evidence against the
existence of God because once we allow the full weight of the Scriptures to
come to bear on the question that diminished view of God is simply not tenable.
While it is not my intention in this
article to prove that the Bible is the revealed and inspired Scriptures
of God or that God exists and has acted in human history, I think what has been
shown is that in order for the “Moral Monster” argument to go through, the believer
must be willing to work with the low and diminished view of the unbeliever
rather than the high and exalted view of God as holy Creator and Judge as found
in the Bible. We should not be afraid to stand our ground and refuse to play on
that turf in order to win a battle that can never be won because we have
already sacrificed the Biblical view of God before we even start.
The day after God destroyed the cities
of the plain, Abraham rushed down to the cliff where he had negotiated with God
and he saw the answer to his question. He may not have known at that time that
God had spared Lot and his daughters but he did see that God had condemned the
wicked of the plains. What we do not see if Abraham questioning if God was
cruel or evil or judging sin. Rather what Abraham saw was that there was not 10
righteous people in all of the cities of the plain. His question was not if God
was holy, it was if humanity was righteous. We must come to a place where we
understand that God is the judge of all the earth and is holy, and that we are
creatures who are created in his image and yet sin against that image and live
on borrowed time and in need of grace. The unbeliever may not believe this, but
we should not be willing to allow a diminished view of God filter into our
theology. The god of the atheist is a moral monster. That diminished and vapid
concept of a god that is just like us, who cannot judge us and who has no claim
on us is indefensible. We stand shoulder to shoulder with the unbeliever. I am
an unbeliever in that god. Thankfully, the holy God who has revealed
himself in the Bible is not that God. The unbeliever may not believe
that such a being exists, he may hate him and kick against the pricks, but once
we allow all of what the Bible tells us about the holiness of God and
the sinfulness of humanity, there is no internal contradiction between God
being all good and God commanding what he wills in the Scriptures.
[1] Here I am
intentionally avoiding the use of the term “skeptics” because I am becoming
more sure that skeptic or its kissing cousin “free thinker” are terms that
Christians can consciously adopt for themselves and should no be co-opted by
the unbelievers.
[2] Sociologist
Christian Smith argues that the
predominate functional religion of most Americans (commonly called “folk
religion”) is that of a kind of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. I largely agree
but would also add that it is functionally Pelagian with a diminished view of
sin on top of a kind of American “can doery” mixed in.
No comments:
Post a Comment