The Amalekites, the Creation Hymn, and the Hebrew Learning Curve

I'm redating my post on difficult passages in the Old Testament. I would just add that the what is being referred to as the chaos argument is one that I would be inclined to resist, but has to be taken seriously.

Wagner said: Victor, it seems that you believe in some form of inerrancy.But how do you reconcile inerrancy and a "evolving moral consciousness"? Could you please recommend some essential reads about this problem?

With respect to inerrancy, I start by saying I don't especially like the term, and am not sure quite what is supposed to count as an error. I've covered the Amalekite massacres before here, and my view is that they strike me as morally unacceptable per se from a moral standpoint, suggesting that either there is something I don't understand about the situation, or the actions are wrong, and Scripture reflects what we now know to be an inadequate moral awareness.


It could turn out that, given where the Hebrews were on the moral learning curve, and given their proneness to be influenced by the more agriculturally sophisticated Canaanites, the best thing for God to tell them was to kill everybody in those tribes, even though someone with a better developed moral sense could not be told to do such a thing. It was an essential part of God's plan to sustain a nation of people dedicated to monotheism, and perhaps, under the circumstances, that's what God had to do. It is hard for me to imagine that someone who absorbed the message of the Good Samaritan, which teaches us essentially that there are no national boundaries on neighborness and hence no national limits in the requirement to love our neighbors, could engage in that type of conduct. What is worrisome to us about this is partly the fact that, even if the Amalekites and Canaanites were immoral people, God orders children to be killed, who could not possibly be responsibe for the evils of the tribes. But even the notion of individual moral responsibility doesn't come out of the chute immediately for the ancient Hebrews. It gets clearly articulated in Ezekiel 18, but I am not sure where before that.

The link didn't work about my holding to some version of inerrancy, so I'm not sure what I said. I think there is a lot of vagueness attached to the term. Interpreted broadly enough, I'm sure it's true, but I know those who use it have a more precise meaning in mind, and some, in the name of inerrancy, impose hermeneutical constraints that proscribe interpretations that I would accept. I know that there are passages in the Bible that sound as if they teach the righteous are rewarded and the wicked punished on earth, but then Job and Ecclesiastes come along and deal with the fact that, so far as we can see, that ain't happening.

The creation hymn in Genesis seems appropriate to an early stage on the scientific learning curve, and I see it's message as metaphysical (the monotheism of the hymn vs. the polytheism of the Enuma Elish), rather than scientific. I don't think its literal words need to be defended vis-a-vis modern science.

In saying all this I am sure I am profoundly disappointing both the inerrancy police (putting your moral intutitions ahead of the Bible, tsk tsk), and the skeptics among you.

Of course, it is surely open for the skeptic to say that God could, and should, have given the Hebrews a faster learning curve, both morally and scientifically. That's, I suppose a version of the argument from evil. Why didn't God dispel scientific and moral ignorance more quickly than he did. I don't subscribe to a theodicy sufficiently fine-grained to give an answer to that question.

Soulforce on the Bible and Homosexuality

A pro-gay Christian perspective on the Bible.

Notes on the Christian Delusion: The Bible-bashing chapters

Having read through The Christian Delusion, I have some comments. I have given some a few posts back, and I have some now.

I must admit that the target of the book is somewhat confusing. It seems to target "evangelicalism" primarily, though its claim is that all Christianity is bunk. A number of the chapters are what I would call Bible-bashing chapters. The trouble here is that these chapters seem to me to have paid no attention to attempts on the part of Christian theology to read Scripture in a nuanced way. It is hardly the case that atheists are the ones who have discovered difficulties with the Old Testament, or the New Testament for that matter. Even if we restrict ourselves to those who hold to "inerrancy" or "plenary inspiration" there were no references, so far as I could see, to the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which is where that doctrine was clarified and developed in a sophisticated manner. And then there are other attempts to come to terms with the Bible as in some sense God's word while distancing oneself from inerrancy. C. S. Lewis is a certainly a highly respected figure amongst evangelicals, but he didn't accept inerrancy, and he also raised questions about the moral character of the Old Testament in Reflections on the Psalms. Lewis is a profoundly orthodox Trinitarian Christian, but certainly not a hard-line inerrantist.

In Tobin's essay, you get a brief treatment of "liberal" theology, as if the only deviations from the evangelical hard-line is going to a full-blown liberalism. Stephen Davis's book on inerrancy and infallibility represents a moderately conservative view, as would Pinnock's The Scripture Principle. There's no attempt, in the Christian delusion, to grapple with people like this.

The Bible God Should Have Written: Randal Rauser responds to Babinski

Why do skeptics like to out-fundy the fundies?

More on Sodom and Sodomy

Genesis does not mention consensual gay sex. If one is entitled to assume that the only people who would try to force themselves on an outsider were people who enjoyed consensual gay sex amongst themselves, then one could make an inference that consensal homosexuality was rampant in Sodom, but I don't think we are entitled to make that assumption.




Ezekiel is consistent with homosexuality, in and of itself, being part of the problem, but it clearly implies that other types of problems existed. So, any attempt to say that homosexuality is the one sin that makes God so angry that he zaps people for it (as opposed to all the other deadly sins), collapses on the basis of Ezekiel.



Jude is probably the best passage for the anti-gay case, but are we entitled to identify perversion with homosexuality? The Sodomites may well have been motivated by sadism, and were intending rape. I consider rape and sadism to be sexual perversions in and of themselves, whether directed toward the same sex or the opposite sex. Sadism and rape also fit better with the passages suggesting that the sin of Sodom was related to arrogance.



Hypothesis: The sin of Sodom was the sin of arrogance on the part of the rich and powerful toward the poor and powerless, which expressed itself in sexual terms through acts of sexual domination, even toward sojourners. Such acts could well have been both homosexual and heterosexual, but the defining feature of this perversion of Sodom was domination, not homosexuality.



Can this hypothesis be refuted?

Bible Lesson Time

Q: What was the sin of Sodom?

A: Ezekiel 16: 48-49. "This is the sin of Sodom; she and her suburbs had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not help or encourage the poor and needy. They were arrogant and this was abominable in God's eyes."

What did you think it was?

Bible-pounding atheists

Here is a typical argument used by many atheists, the argument against Scripture.


Is this just proof-texting and bad hermeneutics? Or is there some substance to this line of argumentation?

Exodus and abortion

Is there a case to be made for abortion in Exodus 21:22? This site comes from Liberated Christians of Phoenix, whose views are, uh, er, out of the evangelical mainstream. Interestingly, the claim has some support from philosopher James Rachels, who writes:

The scriptural passage that comes closest to making a specific judgment about the moral status of fetuses occurs in the 21st chapter of Exodus. The chapter here is part of a detailed description of the law of the ancient Israelites. Here the penalty for murder is said to be death; however, it is also said that if a pregnant woman is caused to have a miscarriage, the penalty is only a fine, to be paid to her husband. Murder was not a category that included fetuses. Clearly, the Israelites regarded fetuses as something less than full human being.[29]

To which his son Stuart Rachels, a philosophy professor (and an International Master in chess) at the University of Alabama, added:

We say that the Bible does not treat abortion as murder: Exodus 21 says that the punishment for abortion is only a fine. (5/e, 65; 6/e, 60) I now refer to three more biblical passages which support the same conclusion: three times the death penalty is recommended for women who have had sex out of wedlock, even though killing the woman would also kill any fetus she might be carrying. (Genesis 38:24; Leviticus 21:9; Deuteronomy 22:20-21; see 6/e, 59-60)  

However, one of the reviewers for Rachels' book on Amazon suggests that this judgment might be exegetically suspect:

Rachels might have a PH.D, but he is no Hebrew scholar. The mistranslation of "yatsa" as miscarriage in the NAS version implies the death of the fetus, but it still takes conjecture and speculation on Rachels part to conclude that the baby definitely died upon leaving the mother early. With easy access to other biblical translations and the Internet (just type Exodus 21:22 in a search engine like GOOGLE) there is no excuse for Dr. Rachels shoddy academic discourse on such a salient issue in today's society.  

 I'm guessing that the Amazon commentator is right. If there's a biblical case to be made on either side of this issue, it's going to take more work than Rachels has put in.

 

Does Archaeology Support the Bible?

I knew about these types of arguments when I was a teenager, reading Halley's Bible Handbook. But some archaeologists are arguing quite the opposite.

This is a discussion of the Bible and homosexuality

Is the anti-gay reading of Scripture a slam dunk? There are alternative interpretations available.

Some biblical support for gender equality

What the Bible says about hate

The Book of Hezekiah

It's sometimes just as important to know what isn't in the Bible as what is in the Bible.

Scripture and Poverty

One of the clearest teachings of Scripture concerns poverty. For every verse on homosexuality therre are about 10 that deal with caring about the poor, and that's a conservative estimate. So why are so many Christians opposed to programs like universal health coverage, which are designed to help the less fortunate in our society? I think there are three theses which can be used to defend this kind of position.

1) The poor deserve it, since they're so lazy. (Hardly biblical, to say the least).

2) If government lets big business run its course, the benefits will trickle down to the least fortunate. (On this I agree with Ross Perot. Trickle down didn't trickle).

3) Private charity does it better, more efficiently than government programs. (I'd like to see real hard evidence that private charity picked up the slack when many of the mentally ill were put back on the street during the Reagan adminstration.)

On my view, none of these propositions is true,

A Metaphysical Club post on slavery and the Bible

A post from the Metaphysical Club on slavery and the Bible. Was the slavery of the Old an New Testaments the same as the slavery written about in Uncle Tom's Cabin?

Homosexuality and Romans 1

Someone asked me to address the issue of homosexuality and the Bible. Rushing in like a fool, I wanted to examing this passage in Romans 1: 26-27.

Romans 1: 26-27 reads

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
Does this passage provode an argument that homosexuality is always sinful? The "pro-gay" response goes like this: Yes, of course, if your natural sexuality is heterosexual and you "exchange" that for homosexuality, that would be wrong, but what if your natural sexual orientation is homosexual? Then you really haven't exchanged your natural desires for anything, since you were naturally homosexual to begin with.

Or is Paul implying that there are no people whose natural orientation is homosexual? What is clear is that it is not directly taught in the passage. Perhaps what this shows is how little can be demonstrated by appealing to a single passage.

The following is a link to viewpoints on the issue, but pro and con.