Keith Ward, in chapter 6 of Is Religion Dangerous, deals with the issue of morality and the Bible. He addresses the charge that religious morality is based on an unthinking acceptance of old religious laws. As his example, he brings up one of the most notorious of religious injunctions – Deuteronomy 20:15-18.
“But these instructions apply only to distant towns, not to the towns of the nations in the land you will enter. 16 In those towns that the Lord your God is giving you as a special possession, destroy every living thing. You must completely destroy the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, just as the Lord your God has commanded you. This will prevent the people of the land from teaching you to imitate their detestable customs in the worship of their gods, which would cause you to sin deeply against the Lord your God.
Geno-what did you say? Isn’t that the very piece of evidence that we use to indict the Nazi’s, their attempted genocide of the Jews? If we are to be morally consistent, shouldn’t we reject this piece of the Old Testament and anything/anyone that relies on this passage/the book/the collection of books that uses it. Any religion that accepts this as part of their canon (read: Jews and Christians) are guilty of blindly basing their morality on old and outdated religious laws. There are three ways that religious adherents have approached this problem.
Approach One : The Morally Primitive Imagining History
This approach looks at the historical record first. They notice that the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites keep popping back up in the narrative and the archeological record. As such, the ban was not actually implemented. Secondarily, they note that the text itself was “written” [1] around 700BCE, but are describing events that are much, much older. Taking these two points in tandem, they hypothesize that scribes and priests wrote into the narrative God commanding the slaughter of “present day” rival groups to delegitimize any territorial claims they might have. This moral tradition (that it is ok to slaughter your opponents wholesale for the protection of your group) is morally primitive and is later corrected by the Prophets. [2]
Pros:
- The Genocide did not happen historically
- God is not a mass murderer
Cons:
- The Text is a pack of lies
- The authors of our text are a bunch of evil liars
Approach Two: A Unique Situation
This next approach bites the bullet(s). They say – our text says that God gave the command. However, this is a unique situation and not universally applicable. God only intended it for the Israelites in this particular situation, which was necessary for the perpetuation of the Israelites. We see that it is unique because of all of the other moral injunctions in the Hebrew Bible contradict “the Ban.” This allows us to maintain the integrity of the text while cutting off this law from the others that we can abstract moral principles from. It was said and it happened [3] but it was only for one situation and one time.
Pros:
- Maintains the integrity of the text and its authors
- The Ban was a one-time affair and not repeatable nor abstractable.
Cons:
- God is evil and bipolar
- We have mass murderers in our religious tradition.
Option Two point Five: A developing God
Ward does not mention this, but it is possible that God is developing along with his creation. In order for him to know how and what to be and act, he must have something to act and be contrasted against. After all, how can I know what red is if I have never seen it? Likewise, how can God know what wrong is unless he has done it? This is a Hegelian view of God. Under this view, God had not fully developed his morals yet. The narrative reflects God’s moral at that point in time. Later on his morals developed and he understood that all life had value and that it was wrong of him to order the genocides.
Pros:
- God was not evil – only immature and is now mature through his interaction with his creation
- Maintains the integrity of the text
Cons:
- God is a developing being and is not always right and moral
Approach Three: Morally Primitive People Acting on a Self-Correcting Partial Understanding of God
This third approach tries to address the weaknesses of the other two. It suggests that we have a roughly accurate reporting of what these people think was happening. That is to say, the ancient Israelites thought that God wanted them to purge all peoples who threatened their identity. After all, surviving and maintaining your identity was an incredibly difficult thing to do in the ancient world – something we cannot fully grasp in this blessed age of comfort and inconvenience. They had part of God figured out – that she wants total devotion, but they also had part of him wrong – that he has deemed all human lives of worth and the wholesale slaughter of peoples is wrong. In time, they would discover more and more about God and come to understand this, but at this time in their development, they had not reached this understanding. There is some perception of the divine will, but a limited one. Under this interpretive model, the Bible contains humanity’s developing understanding of God.
Pros:
- God is not evil
- Maintains the integrity of the text and the developing moral understanding of its authors
- The Ban was based on a partial but flawed understanding of God
Cons:
- The Bible is something to be wrestled with, not a direct perfect view of God and its interaction with history (can’t take it at face value)
Out of these three [4] views that Ward presents, I am uncertain as to which I follow. My background tells me that all live is Gods and he can do with it as he pleases. Based off of that, option two seems the most viable. However, I also maintain that God is morally consistent and always has been. This forces me to at least consider option three. If I am forced to choose, this is the option I am going with right now, even though I am uncomfortable with how this view forces me to hold the Bible. As Ward notes on page 138, “Believers have no magical route to moral certainty, nothing that undercuts the hard process of moral analysis and reflection.” But it is the same for nonbelievers. They have to give an account of how life can have meaning in the face of nothingness – or at least fleetingness. If my flame flickers and then is snuffed out – does it really matter what it burned while it was here? I am not saying atheists cannot give such an account [5] – only noting that it too is a path forged through analysis and reflection and is not self-evident.
- that is, the “final” version was edited together around this time – not that these traditions were invented at this time. the traditions behind the text are much, much older [↩]
- see Ezekiel 18:20 [↩]
- or at least was attempted [↩]
- four, if you add 2.5, the one that I added [↩]
- even though I freely admit that I ultimately reject their account [↩]
