God and the Weird Old Testament

Joshua 10: 28 - That day Joshua took Mekkedah. He put the city and its king to the sword and totally destroyed everyone in it. He left no survivors.

Joshua 10: 40 - So Joshua subdued the whole region... He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel had commanded.

Joshua 11: 20 - So it was the Lord himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as the Lord had commanded Moses.

Joshua 23: 12 - But if you turn away and ally yourselves with the survivors of these nations that remain among you and if you intermarry with them and associate with them, then you may be sure that the Lord your God will no longer drive out these nations before you.

(from the TNIV)


I heard Paul Copan, who is a really good philosophy professor at Palm Beach Atlantic, give a lecture-response to the New Atheist Club on God commanding acts in the Old Testament that seem unethical. The most popular example of this is when God tells Joshua to completely wipe out all the Canaanites in the book of Joshua.

First, Copan suggested that the O.T. texts be handled with more care than the New Atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, etc) have done in their recent books. Then he gave several suggestions on how to better read and understand the texts, some of which I thought were really helpful. Here are his suggestions:

-Israel would not have been justified to attack the Canaanites without YHWH's command
-Wiping out the Canaanite's religion was the goal
-The language of Joshua was hyperbolic (compare Joshua 23 with 9-12, where 9-12 utilize Ancient Near Eastern terms of warfare)
-The crux of the issue is that if God exists, he has prerogative over human life, whereas the New Atheists seem to think he should have no special place)


I really liked his third point the most, where when the two texts mentioned are compared, you can come away with a sense of hyperbole within the text. He spoke more on other issues involving the O.T. (law of Moses, slavery, sex, etc.), that I might put up later because I really learned from all of the lecture.

All the Earth is the Lord's

I think one of the drawbacks of the reformers (among the many excellent things they did) was their negative attitude toward natural theology. But I am excited now because I think that nature is beginning to make a comeback in theology. Hopefully a correct view of nature in Christian doctrine can help us better refute statements like this:

“Evolution is part of a much broader and older inquiry and a deeper contest for our intellectual commitment, a contest between a world system that expects every part of the cosmos ultimately to be explainable in terms of natural properties and processes and one that maintains the existence of a fundamental core of unknowability, of supernatural mystery and controlling hand of an eternal non-worldly Being. This may be humankind’s oldest intellectual puzzle.” (from the preface to Keith Thomson's Before Darwin)

Now, my main disagreement with this sentiment is that modern science was founded upon the Christian belief that if God made nature then it would have order and be worth studying. But now certain individuals within the scientific community want to assign a God-of-the-gaps to Christianity, and then dismantle that God by showing how orderly and knowable the world is (Not that we really know that much about the world now).

I just got Allister McGrath's The Open Secret: A New Vision For Natural Theology and am really excited about it, not only as a means of the defense of nature as God's creation but as an eye opening account of nature that leads me to worship God more when I look out at the night sky.

Possible Textual Worlds

The original text from Mark 1: 1-12 has really moved me in a new way lately as I've thought about it. But what if the ending was slightly changed?

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from Mark 1:

A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. So many gathered that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them. Some men came, bringing to him a paralytic, carried by four of them. Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus and, after digging through it, lowered the mat the paralyzed man was lying on. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven."

Then, turning from the paralytic on the mat, Jesus continued teaching all those in the house. And when Jesus was done teaching, the man's friends carried him away.

M83 Appreciation Post

i love M83 because they make me feel like John Hughes is filming my life. They also make me do John Bender fist pumps into the air.



i can't stop listening to this song.



kim and jessie.

Those Emergents

I've read two new books in the last week on the emergent church, one as a pro and one as a con to the movement and its philosophy and theology.

The first is called Why We're Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be). Ed Stetzer recommended this book when he was giving a talk on the emergent church a couple of weeks ago on campus, and I noticed that it sold out at the campus bookstore that afternoon. I'm not going to review it now, but I will say that while I don't think it's a great critique in any sense, it is more helpful than some of the other strawman books that have come out on the subject (coughjohnmcarthur).

The other book I read is The New Christians by Tony Jones. As a full disclosure, the only other Tony Jones book I own (The Sacred Way) literally sits under my book shelf to help prop it up. Now, having said that, I will say that I LOVED this book. It offers a background for the group, a look into theology, and a look at some of the churches in practice. I would encourage everyone I know to read it. The emergent idea of a humble hermeneutic is opened up throughout. I don't agree with how far he takes that idea, but it really made me think about my own views of hermeneutic and gave an understanding to where they are coming from.

Getting Past the 'Yom' Debate

This week I wrote down two questions that I have been thinking through related to inerrancy and Genesis.

1. Did the Biblical authors have special insight into how events happened and/or the workings of the laws of nature?

or

2. Did the Biblical authors use common description of events in order to serve their own purpose(s)?

To affirm question 1, a person would argue that God spoke plainly to the writer or gave that writer some sort of mystical insight in some other way.

To affirm question 2, a person would argue that the author of the text used a common cultural story of the creation of the world in order to tell who created the world.

I will say that I am much more persuaded by view 2 than by view 1, despite what many people will see as problems within the view. View 2 cuts through all of the infamous yom debates (did it mean a literal 24 hour period or a much longer span of time) because it isn’t worried about reconciling scientific understanding of the world with scripture. In taking view 2, it could be argued that the author isn’t wrong about the length of time it took to bring about complex life in the world, because the author isn’t arguing for that, but simply adopting that understanding in order to affirm the Hebrews' God.

Now, I do realize that people will have problems with this view and I expect my own view to be much more refined and nuanced with greater understanding in the future (I’m psyched about finally getting John Sailhamer’s Genesis Unbound to help me with some of my continuing questions). But it does help me gain understanding into the text. I can say that the reason the author seems to be describing normal 24 hour days with evenings and mornings is because that is what the author is describing. If the author intended for yom to mean thousands or millions of years, then he does not do a great job at conveying that through the way that he writes. But the cool thing is that it doesn’t really matter. When faced with cultural explanations with how the world was created, the author’s rebuttal seems to be, “Yeah, well our God did it.” I have a slight feeling that if the author was confronted with modern understandings of the creation of the world he would say, “Yeah, well our God did it.” And that seems to be the greater point of the passage.

I’m not totally satisfied with this view and I hold it extremely loosely. I know that it will bring up questions of what inerrancy means, and those are questions I'm still working through.

Also, to see both sides of the argument dealing with yom, read this post by Justin Taylor and the ensuing comments.

To get a description of what Sailhamer lays out in Genesis Unbound, read this review.

3 Conversations

I've had three conversations in the last three or four days with people who would claim varying degrees of spirituality, but who reject Christianity.

The first conversation was with a girl whose main problems with Christianity are seeming contradictions, some within scripture itself and some with other fields of thought, mostly related to science.

The second conversation was with a girl who could not come to terms with education and Christianity. She believes that the more educated you become, the less you are able to rationally believe Christian theology. She argued that faith is the antithesis of education.

The third conversation was with an older man who came in to where I work for some coffee. He was buying a book called "I Ching," about eastern spirituality. He told me that he rejected orthodox Christianity, and gave me reasons ranging from hypocrisy to inconsistencies from within and outside the text.

Here is a break down of each of the individual arguments:

1.-The creation account in Genesis conflicts with modern scientific understanding of the world
2.-There are contradictions within scripture
3.-Christianity is not compatible with an educated understanding of the world
4.-Many within the church, especially preachers, are hypocrites
5.-History shows contradictions within scripture, such as Josephus not reporting the mass murder of babies that the Gospels claim that Herod ordered
6.-Many of the so-called miracles within scripture could actually be associated with Satan himself, parading as an angel of light
7.-Jesus was not the Son of God, simply a good teacher who at times had his own share of doubts ("Father, why have you forsaken me")

Three people, from three totally different walks of life and stations in life, and yet all but two of their arguments can be split into two basic categories: contradictions and mistakes within scripture and the relation of Christianity and science. Only arguments 4 and 6 would not fit here. But the important thing is that I believe that a correct understanding of scripture can answer every one of these arguments. That's why I'm going to really try to deepen my grasp of what scripture is over the next few weeks.