Henry Imler July 19th, 2008

A few days ago I linked to a an article that addressed the “evil” god found in the Old Testament.  Throughout history different Christians have dealt with the sanctioned genocides and murder of infants etcetera in a variety of different ways.  Some people say God can kill anyone he wants and have anyone kill anyone he wants because he is lord over all.  Others say that god as portrayed in the Old Testament is a different god than the God in the New Testament.  Quite a few Christian groups during the first few centuries after the resurrection were attracted to this idea.  Other people use this issue to deconstruct, discredit, and ridicule Christianity, constructing Christianity as a fragile house of cards as if criticizing one or several things throughout the 4000+ year history/literary development of our faith negates everything else.  With that said though, we Christians need to wade through these issues because we risk becoming that house of cards if we ignore or gloss over this problem. 

Over the last few months, Greg Boyd’s has started to look at these issues.  Tom alerted me to Boyd’s project yesterday; here is Greg’s description of the problem and his aims:

What intensifies this problem even more is that it’s not like Psalms 137 is an isolated case of celebrated violence in the Old Testament. It’s found all over the place! The worst episodes happened when the Israelites enter the promised land. As they approached certain cities, the Israelites were commanded — by God — to slaughter men, women, children and even the animals! Yahweh is aiming at complete genocide of the Canaanite people. Could anything be more antithetical to what we learn about God in Jesus Christ? Honestly (we’ve got to be honest here, even if it hurts) doesn’t this depiction of God look more like the God of Osama Bin Laden than the Father of Jesus Christ?

In my opinion, this is the most challenging objection to the Christian faith and most difficult theological question of the Christian faith. It’s a problem I want to wrestle with in my next few posts. But I want you to be forewarned: If you think I’m going to have nice and tidy answers to this question, you’re going to be disappointed. I don’t. I’m still in process, entertaining a number of possibilities.

So far Boyd has written thirteen posts exploring this topic.  I look forward to reading through them in the near future.

1. Divinely Inspired Infanticide and Genocide?
2. What’s at Stake in Trying to Explain the Violent God of the Old Testament?
3. The Violent Strand of the Old Testament and Our Picture of God
4. OT Violence and Christian Behavior
5. Could Old Testament Warriors Have Been Mistaken?
6. A Defense of Eller’s Thesis
7. A Critique of Eller’s Thesis
8. Craigie: The Problem of War in the Old Testament, Part I
9. Revealing the Horror of War: Review of Craigie, Part II.
10. A Negative Object Lesson: Review of Craigie III
11. “Shadow” and “Reality”
12. Review of Ehrman’s "God’s Problem"
13. The Teleological Exegetical Principle and O.T. Violence

• Ethics , Religion
• Comments(1)