The Coherence of Christian Theism
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Violence in the Old testament
The moral perfection of God is integral to classical theism. In Chapter 4, I noted Swinburne’s suggestion that we understand this to entail that, “God performs only morally best actions of many kinds and no bad ones.” The Old Testament, meanwhile, contains many passages in which God commands or condones violence. For example: In the First Book of Samuel, God commands Saul to smite the Amalekites, adding, “Slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” A verse in Psalm 137 appears to bestow a blessing upon one who seizes a Babylonian child and dashes it against a rock. And in the twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy, God orders the Israelites to conquer Canaan—the sixteenth verse concluding: “Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.” And so on, bloodthirstily, in several other passages.
Drawing attention to both the claimed moral perfection of God and the violence in the Old Testament is a popular tactic among modern critics of the Christian faith. Typically, the objection goes something like this: "On the one hand, Christians believe that God Incarnate commanded us to love our enemies; on the other hand, Christians believe in a divinely inspired book in which God commands Israel to slaughter her enemies." The skeptic asserts that this is a moral paradox and the only way to resolve it is to conclude that either God is not all loving or that the Bible was not inspired by God. Christianity, he suggests, entails contradictions and so should be dismissed out of hand.
The General Principle of Interpretation
The problem is not a new one and nor are skeptics the only ones to notice it. In fact, it was grappled with and pondered by some of the earliest Christian theologians. In the second century, two schools of thought went so far as to suggest that the Old Testament should be jettisoned completely. The Gnostics and Marcionites both claimed that Jesus was the revelation of the true God and the Old Testament was the revelation of a separate and morally inferior deity. However, this view was rejected as heresy by the Church which, led by Irenaeus, reasserted the orthodoxy of the Old Testament but insisted that it be read through the prism of the New Testament. Both books, the Church said, must be read together as the common witness to the true God. [1]
Having adopted this guiding principle of interpretation three difficulties remain. The first is show what justification there is for it; the second is to explain exactly how violent passages in the Old Testament can be understood in light of the moral teachings of the New Testament; and the third is to explain why those violent passages are in the Old Testament at all. Such is the basic structure of this chapter—a continuation of Swinburne’s argument from the previous chapter.
The Truth Conditions of Sentences
The meaning of a sentence, notes Swinburne, is determined not merely by the dictionary meanings of the words it contains but also its literary, social and cultural context. By literary context he simply means the work of which the sentence forms a part; by social context the human writer and his intended reader; and by cultural context the shared beliefs of the culture in which the writer and reader live.
By way of illustrating all these points, consider the single sentence, Larry is an elephant. To understand this sentence we will first need to know its cultural context because this will tell us the literary genres available to its author—perhaps zoo guide, children’s fiction and personal letter; and when we know that, we will then need to know its literary context—perhaps that it indeed occurs in a zoo guide; and when we know that we will finally need to know its social context—perhaps that it was written for the London Zoo of 1950. Only when all three contexts are known will the “truth conditions” of the sentence be known. And then the sentence will be true if it is true that there was an elephant called Larry in London Zoo in 1950 and false if it is false.
Sometimes, and relevantly to my purposes, the truth conditions of the sentence can make it clear that its author intended it to be understood metaphorically. Thus if the sentence Larry is an elephant occurs in a personal letter from a mother about her son, it cannot possibly be understood literally if both the writer and the reader know that Larry is human. It will, rather, be ascribing to Larry some quality possessed by elephants (being large, say, or having a prodigious memory) and so must, in this context, be understood metaphorically. And if the sentence Larry is an elephant occurs in a work of children's fiction it will be neither true nor false—though if the story has a moral or metaphysical message the whole story will be true if its moral or metaphysical message is true and false if it is false.
The Truth Conditions of Biblical Sentences
The relevance of all this to the Bible can now be shown. As pointed out in the previous chapter, the Bible is a big book slowly put together from smaller books of many different literary, social and cultural contexts. These smaller books, moreover, were put together from still smaller units of text of many different contexts themselves put together from still smaller strands of text of yet other contexts. Strands, units and books were then put together by compilers with the aid of connecting verses into the books of the Hebrew Bible which was itself, finally, incorporated into the Christian Bible as the Old Testament.
Sewing texts together in this way gives them a new literary, social and cultural context: That of the compiler. “The most familiar modern secular example of this,” says Swinburne, “is where one author puts a number of his previously published papers together into one volume and adds a preface explaining that while he republishes the papers in the form in which they were originally published he now wishes some of them to be understood with certain qualifications.” And when the papers are placed in this context the author is not expressing the views contained in the papers so much as quoting them. The meaning of the whole book will then be whatever the author says it is in the preface with the qualifications he makes therein.
There are already examples in the Old Testament of additional text changing the whole meaning of a whole text in this way. Thus to the end of Ecclesiastes are annexed verses purporting to summarise its message but which actually give to it a radically new meaning: a message of existential resignation (“All is vanity!”) becomes an exhortation to repose our hopes in God who alone “endures forever.” Similar examples are found in Daniel and Genesis.
From all this it follows that each sentence in the Bible has many different possible meanings according to the many different literary, social and cultural contexts of that sentence at each stage of its inscription. The question arises: What is the context by means of which Christians should understand a sentence of the Bible?
It was noted earlier that the social context of a sentence is just the writer and intended reader. The claim of the Church is that, “The Bible is God’s letter to his creature,” where this is understood to mean that God inspired human writers and compilers to write and compile texts in order to communicate his message to humanity. This, then, is the exotic social context of the Bible. The literary context is the compilation of all the books of the Old and New Testaments into Holy Scripture. And the cultural context is that of the Church of the first centuries of Christianity which put the Bible together by the criteria of the revelation it claimed to have received from God Incarnate. So: While the original author of, say, Isaiah 77 is of considerable historical interest, it is not what that sentence means in that context that the Church purports to be revealed truth. Rather, the revealed truth is whatever meaning the sentence has if the Bible has the unique social, literary and cultural contexts the Church claims and which I have just set out.
The remainder of this chapter considers the meaning violent sentences and passages in the Old Testament have under these unique truth conditions which are the truth conditions of Christian orthodoxy. We shall see that when the Bible is read the way the Church that compiled and presented it to the world authorised, the skeptic's moral objections to the Old Testament lose all force.
Application of the Principle of Interpretation
A sentence should always be understood in the most natural and literal sense possible given its social context: It will be literal if its author and reader know it to be true and metaphorical if, understood literally, they know it to be false. However, it follows from the social context of a biblical sentence as we are now understanding it that this determination is relative not to the beliefs of its original human author and his contemporaneous human readers but to the beliefs of God which the Church claims were revealed by Jesus and the beliefs of human readers of the Bible in every age and place; that is, it will be literal if it is consistent with God's moral beliefs as revealed in Christian doctrine and as understood by the Church and false if it is in conflict with the same.
The moral beliefs of the Christian God include, ex hypothesi, the moral beliefs of the Sermon on the Mount. And so it follows that if a sentence taken literally contradicts the Sermon on the Mount or Christian doctrine more generally we must understand it in some other sense. The Church Fathers, as I say, were well aware that there are passages in the Old Testament that contradict Christian doctrine. And they claimed that these passages must be interpreted in a way consistent with that doctrine even if that interpretation is less natural.
Psalm 137:9, as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, pronounces a blessing on those who smash against a rock the children of the Babylonians. This is in clear conflict with the command of Jesus to “Love your enemies” and so stands in the same relation to the Bible as the sentence Larry is an elephant to a mother’s letter about her son. And here, as there, the incompatibility is resolved by understanding the sentence as metaphorical. The interpretation could then be filled out as follows: Since the Jews had become enslaved in Babylon, Babylon represent evil. Jesus had compared relying on him to building one's house upon a rock. Psalm 137:9 was then interpreted by many of the Fathers as a blessing on those who take the offspring of evil, which are our evil inclinations, and destroy them through the power of Jesus Christ.
Origen, applying the principle in a very general way, claimed that the whole Old Testament should be read as a symbolic prefiguration of the New Testament teaching of the Kingdom of God: The Kingdom of God was a New Jerusalem, the Church a New Israel and Jesus the new Moses who leads the people of a New Israel to the New Jerusalem in the way that Moses led the people of the Old Israel to the Promised Land. And so Old Testament mention of “Jerusalem” can be understood as referring to a heavenly Jerusalem even if it can also be understood as sometimes referring to an earthly city; and so Old Testament prophecies that mete out fates to earthly enemies of Israel, Origen continues, in fact prophecy that God will mete out different fates in the afterlife—a difference of moral relevance being that those sinners really would have the vices unfairly imputed to Tyre or Egypt in toto. Origen’s method of reading the Bible was adopted by Gregory and eventually Augustine and became a standard approach to the Bible.
Justification of the Principle of Interpretation
We have seen that the method of interpretation adopted by the Church Fathers resolves the moral conflict between the Old and New Testaments. But with what justification can a modern Christian accept it? There are three important points to note.
The first is that the need to interpret biblical sentences and passages in a metaphorical way existed before Origen, Gregory and Augustine developed the method of interpretation under discussion. For example, the biblical sentence, “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” would, if taken literally, be telling us that God is a pair of Greek alphabetic letters. The Song of Songs is an erotic love poem which, included in "God's letter to his creature," must be understood in a metaphorical way if it is to have any spiritual meaning at all. And if Moses were taken to be the author of the book of Deuteronomy a literal reading of its closing lines would imply that Moses were himself describing his own burial. “If Origen and others needed biblical authority for their method of interpretation,” adds Swinburne, “they would have to look no further than Saint Paul who explicitly denied that the Old Testament command, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox while it’s treading out the grain,’ should be interpreted literally. Its meaning was, Paul said, that congregations should provide adequate remuneration for church leaders.”
The second point to note is that while the metaphorical way in which Origen, Gregory and Augustine interpreted some of the Old Testament may seem unnatural today they developed it in a cultural context where large scale allegory was very natural and so in no way ad hoc. The Jewish philosopher Philo, for instance, had already given allegorical readings of Genesis and other Old Testament books in the first century BC. Several commentators of classical Greek literature even interpreted Homer in allegorical ways: The Iliad and The Odyssey, which purported to tell the story of the Trojan War and of the return of Odysseus to Ithaca, were read as metaphors—as a treatise on medicine, by one of them. In doing so it was usually claimed that the text had a metaphorical meaning in addition to its literal reading. And while it is natural to think of a sentence written by a human author as always having some literal meaning, sometimes, with good reason, the Church Fathers denied that a biblical sentence had a literal meaning at all. In these cases it followed that the human author himself did not know the divine meaning of what he wrote. But this, too, can claim biblical authority: The author of the book of Daniel claims not to understand his own prophecies. "I heard," he writes, "but understood not."
The last point to note was stressed in the previous chapter and should be stressed again here: Augustine, Origen and Gregory were not minor theologians. The influence of each on early Christian doctrine was formative and profound. Gregory, for instance, was one of the leading bishops at the Council of Constantinople which produced the Nicene Creed—the formal statement of Christian belief in wide use today. This states that, "God spoke by the prophets," meaning, inspired the Old Testament. And Gregory, and so the Church, understood this to amount to a belief that God had given the Church both a Bible and a method of interpreting it: The so-called, "Patristic Method" which has just been set out. There is no justification for accepting the authority of the Bible without also accepting the interpretative method which the Church gave the world together with the Bible after claiming for the latter its unique authority.
The Purpose of Violent Passages in the Old Testament
The Patristic Method of interpretation resolves the moral conflict between the Old and New Testaments and we have seen that its application to the Bible is rationally and historically justified. However, the argument just given would also seem to entail that God inspired passages of scripture that, at least at the time of their inscription, were approving a view of God and of human behaviour which we now recognise as immoral. Is it really plausible to think that God would inspire passages which, as then understood, suggest he is violent and vindictive? In short: The question arises why the Bible contains these passages in the first place, and in response to it, Swinburne suggests there are three things to say.
Inspiration and Context The first is that the doctrine of inspiration is not committed to any view about exactly who was inspired—whether the original author of a sentence or the one who compiled it into a larger unit and thereby gave it a new social, literary and cultural context and so also a new meaning. “The smallest unit,” says Swinburne, “may not have been inspired at all.” And even just read against the broad context of the whole Old Testament (that is, the Old Testament before it was combined with the New into the Christian Bible) these units of text have a different meaning. Consider: At the same time that Psalm 137 was written, Jeremiah wrote a letter to the Jewish exiles in Babylon telling them in God’s name, “to seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and to pray to the Lord on its behalf for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” If both contemporaneous works were read as revealed truth by the Jewish exiles, Psalm 137 would not have the same message it would seem to have in isolation.
The Principle of Accommodation The Fathers also recognized a Principle of Accommodation. This is the idea that just as a human parent may need to use crude simplifications to help a child understand things that would otherwise be beyond them (such as during a talk on “the Birds and the Bees”) so God may have inspired passages that allowed an unsophisticated audience to obtain a rudimentary grasp of concepts otherwise beyond them in order that these concepts may be developed into a more adequate form later on. Novatian, thinking of the attribution to God of “bodily emotion,” said, “The prophet was speaking about God at that point in symbolic language fitted to that state of belief—not as God was but as the people were able to understand.” The Principle of Accommodation plausibly applies to moral instruction as well.
“There are certain moral truths,” Swinburne suggests, “which a primitive people are too primitive to grasp or at any rate to continue to hold.” One possible example is as follows: Individuals suffer as a result of the sins of their parents. This is because God gives to parents responsibility for their children and wrongdoing by parents has negative consequences on the development of the children. However, an individual who suffers due to the sins of his parents is not guilty of the sins of his parents. “But maybe,” speculates Swinburne, “this subtle distinction between suffering in consequence of sin and being guilty of sin was beyond the capacities of the first recipients of Exodus chapter 20 with its attribution to God of the intention to punish children for the sins of their parents.” And later parts of the Old Testament make it very clear that children are not guilty for the sins of their parents. Jesus himself seems to have recognized that God was constrained in how strong or how clear a message he was able to get home to ancient Israel. For when Jesus prohibited all divorce with one possible exception and the Pharisees pointed out that Moses had allowed it, Jesus replied, “But Moses only wrote this commandment because of their hardness of heart.”
But if primitive people can not readily learn sophisticated moral truths a final question arises: Why create primitive people? “It’s good for people to have the opportunity to work out things for themselves,” Swinburne says, considering this point, “even if they need and get quite a bit of help from God in due course.” He concludes by suggesting it is plausible to suppose God inspired the writing and compilation of the Bible even if some parts of the Bible introduce concepts which as originally understood have an inadequate morality that is capable of being understood in a more adequate way only later.
The Unique Rights and Reasons of God The last point in response to the question of why there are violent passages in the Bible is, says Swinburne, to consider the possibility that some of them are to be taken literally and then try to make sense of this by deeper reflection on the unique rights and reasons of God to command certain actions which it would be immoral for anyone without such rights and reasons to command.
Consider for a moment the supposition that God really did command the Israelites to kill the Canaanites. Because God is our holy creator and sustainer from moment to moment our life is a temporary gift from him which he can take back when he chooses. Swinburne reasons out the rest as follows: "If A has the right to take something back from B then A has the right to command someone else to take it back from B. God therefore has the right to command someone else to end a life on his behalf." It is, meanwhile, a moral truism that we have a duty to please our benefactors and as our holy creator and sustainer God is our supreme benefactor. Pleasing a supreme benefactor entails obeying his commands when it is possible to do so and the commands are morally justified.
It is important to remember here that you cannot postulate that God gave this command without postulating that God exists and all that that entails. And what that entails is that human beings have souls that survive into the afterlife. On an atheistic ontology the death of a Canaanite or anyone else is eternal; but on the theistic ontology we are considering death is a painful but rapid process of metaphysical relocation. So: God’s command, if such a command really were given, was not in fact to “kill” the Canaanites as atheists understand it but to “metaphysically relocate” them—each then delivered to his respective moral renumeration including, for some, eternal bliss.
So much for the rights of God. But what possible reason could God have had? According to Swinburne, the Old Testament says the command was issued, "to protect the young monotheistic religion of Israel from lethal spiritual infection by the polytheism of the Canaanites—a religion which included child sacrifice and cultic prostitution." If Jewish monotheism was in fact the beginning of the true revelation of God that would culminate in the Incarnation, a lethal spiritual infection would endanger the spiritual wellbeing of the world—though once monotheism was more firmly established in Israel, such measures, according to the Old Testament, were not required again. Even if God does not exist or exists but did not give this command, taking extreme measures of some kind to end the practice of child sacrifice would have been justified. But if God does exist and did issue the command then moral reasoning shows both that God had the right to issue it and the Israelites had a duty to obey him.
A final question is why God might command the Israelites to kill the Canaanites rather than send them a plague or himself miraculously annihilate them. The Israelites had been given the awesome responsibility of receiving and sharing with the world a revelation from God. There can be little doubt that the command, if it were really issued, brought home to them the fearful importance of worshipping the God who had revealed himself to them and no other God and thereby vouchsafed the revelation they had received and ensured that it was made widely available to future generations.
Swinburne stresses that the answer to violence in the Old Testament is the Patristic Method with which the bulk of our discussion has been concerned. All these final points are made merely to show that deeper reflection on the rights and reasons of God, “may lead us to recognise more inspiration by God of the early Israelites than we are at first sight inclined to recognise.”
Conclusion
In this chapter it has been my concern to disprove the claim that violent passages in the Old Testament are incompatible with the moral perfection of God. To do this I introduced the Patristic Method of interpretation developed by the Church Fathers who compiled the Bible. This was shown to be rationally consistent with basic principles used to interpret texts and to have a historical provenance in the early life of the Church. And since there is no justification for accepting the authority of the Bible without also accepting the interpretative method which the Church gave the world together with the Bible after claiming for the latter its unique authority, I conclude that there are no indefeasible moral objections against the Christian Bible.
[1] To this basic principle of interpretation the influential theologian Origen of Alexander added an important refinement: We must, he said, read the whole Bible from the perspective of the last book of the Bible. And there, interestingly, we find a scene that allegorises and narrowly specifies the principle of interpretation which the Church was adopting: In Revelation a scroll sealed with seven seals descends from heaven. No one is able to open until a lamb appears which, “stands as though slain.” Taking the scroll to represent the Bible, the seven seals the difficulty of interpreting it, and the image of the wounded lamb who alone can unlock it Jesus Christ, the Church concluded that the Old Testament should be read not merely through the prism of the New Testament in general but through the prism of Christ crucified in particular; in other words, our guiding principle for interpreting the Old Testament is, according to Church orthodoxy, an image of God as a figure of supreme meekness and mercy.