Moses says to Israel:
Deuteronomy 7:1-2 "When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than yourselves, 2 and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.
What can a biblical Christian make of this? The word of God, or the word of Man?
19 comments:
My thoughts on this, and the ensuing discussion, can be found here:
http://christandcovenant.blogspot.com/2007/01/merciless-evangelism-exploration-of.html
fwiw.
D.
Your question itself raises an interesting question as to what constitutes biblical Christianity.
If mercy is "not getting what you deserve" then in this instance Israel is commanded to give these nations (on God's behalf?) what they deserve. According to Deuteronomy such an action is God's call.
Hey MPJ
Isn't the standard answer (which I believe) that this is both the word of God and and the word of man?
Or have I misunderstood the question.
MPJ -- What do think is the actual problem that would give rise to your question?
Biblical Christians have always believed in judgement as well as GOd reaching a point in which mercy runs out.
I get the emotional question.
The old question of whether God sanctions genocide.
If we say these peoples "got what they deserved" then all sorts of evil can be argued for: the Holocaust, Rwanda, Sudan, the Crusades.
If they didn't, then is it the "word of the Lord"? Polemical writing to shore up a national identity?
I incline more to the latter, and I don't think it necessarily inconsistent with "biblical Christianity" (whatever that actually is).
Everyone: my question is, given that Christians who determine to submit to the authority of Scripture do not have the option of merely excerpting inconvenient sections from their Bibles: what are we to make of the God we encounter in these passages? How are we to answer the charge that God condones - nay, commands - the killing of a whole race including its children?
The 'got what they deserved' argument I don't think is actually relevant to the other genocides in that no-one is arguing that this command still has force today. The question is: can we countenance, or make some sense of, the God we know in Christ commanding this?
Or: must we resort to saying 'this is polemical writing etc...'
I suppose we could countenance the God we know in Christ depending on how seriously we take the fact that the Father has handed over judgment to the Son - the one whom we must kiss lest he be angry with us and smash us to pieces along with all the other kings and rulers of the world who rise up against him.
But - ethnic cleansing? When did the three year old son of a Girgashite mother 'rise up against him' exactly?
I think we can and must countenance this as the word of YHWH. The text certainly attributes this to the YHWH - Deut. 6.1.
And it is entirely appropriate - isn't God simply carrying out what he promised in Genesis 15.6. The sin of the Amorites has now reached its full measure, so the Israelites can justly take the land and devote to destruction its inhabitants.
Sin is that serious. We do see this same God in the Lord Jesus Christ. The punishment that will be given on the last day will be even more striking than that of Deuteronomy 7, in terms of severity and scope "inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospelof our Lord Jesus, eternal destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might" 2 Thessalonians 1. 8-9.
As for the ethnic cleansing thing with the slaughter even of the children - haven't we all sinned in Adam? Are we not from our mothers' wombs heirs of Adam's fallen nature and guilt? Although they may have had less opportunity to commit actual sin than a seventy year-old, do they not still deserve it?
What is more to be wondered at is God's grace in saving Israel, who were by nature no different, and indeed all of us.
cyberpastor I think your earlier statement, that all this raises a question as to what constitutes biblical Christianity, is a better way into the topic than your second post.
I have elsewhere remarked that I find Evangelical rhetoric about "[obeying whatever the Scriptures are found to teach]" unhelpful. Not, I hope, because I am disobedient, but because it is strident on resolve while being silent on what it is to obey, and what it is for Scripture to teach something: both highly nontrivial things. The same could be said of (B/b)iblical Christianity, or for that matter Michael's opening alternatives, "The word of God, or the word of Man?". I could accuse you of mischievousness, MPJ, but as discussed our tastes in controversy are different, so this is just to rehearse an unresolvable disagreement.
IMHO the so-called Biblical Theology habits we learned at Moore make it more difficult than it need be to open up an ethical gap between ourselves and some particular text: a difficulty that other conservative Christians do not feel. If I may be allowed an extended Oliver O'Donovan quote (since he always says it better than I can), from "Scripture and Obedience" (4th in his recent Sermons on the Subjects of the Day, discussed elsewhere on this blog):
In a thousand ways the texts that lie between the covers of our Bibles show that they are the product of painstaking and creative human labour and reception. But we must be careful what we make of that word "human"... The humanity of the Scriptures does not entitle us to patronise them... The perfection of the letters of Paul does not consist in their being the highest examples of epistolary elegance. Neither does the perfection of the historical books consist in their being the most unambiguous records or the most discerning evaluation of sources. The only perfection that counts is this: that God truly attests himself and his deeds through this poetry, these letters, this history.
And then later:
That something will have to be said of the "timebound character" of some judgements in the Old Testament will surprise no-one [who has read Hebrews] ... To take just one example from that book: the way we think of Joshua's wars of conquest will be affected by our looking for a "heavenly" rest. The conquest narratives will not be taken to afford, directly or indirectly, a moral norm for war-making, and that not because of changed situations or perceptions, but simply because their salvation-historical position has been, as it were, overwhelmed by the Advent of Christ.
Someone will then ask, am I not then allowing for a gap between what YHWH says in some OT text and the full opinion of God concerning whatever was going on on the ground, "behind the text". Maybe. But these are speculative matters and I don't think we are required to have a definitive position on them for the purposes of this discussion.
As for "sin is that serious" and "haven't we all sinned in Adam?", I am sorry Daniel, but this does not cut it. You are not talking about God raining fire on these guys or the ground opening, but of commissioned genocide. The instinctive reaction is in any case to this point, not to the deaths themselves: the outrage is at the idea that this is being commanded to people in whose position we are maybe being asked to place ourselves. One of the key points at issue is what is involved in saying that it isn't so addressed ...
To what extent is this helped by seeing the law as our tutor to lead us to Christ?
(I think there's the potential for fruitful discussion that way...)
Forgive me, Bruce, if I'm missing what you're getting at, but is your distinction between God raining fire on the Canaanites and commissioned genocide a false one. Are not the people of God here the agents of God's judgment on them for their wickedness? Even though the people are commanded to devote the Canaanites to destruction, YHWH is still the one who is said to destroy them and drive them out (e.g. Deuteronomy 9.3, 5).
This doesn't seem a million miles away from the promise of the Lord Jesus in Revelation 2.26-27 to persevering Christian believers:
"The one who conquers and who keeps my works until the end, to him I will give authority over the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron, as when earthen pots are broken in pieces, even as I myself have received authority from my Father."
Maybe this wasn't quite what you were getting at, Custard, but the law here does of course lead us to Christ - he is the true Israel who will destroy the unbelieving nations.
It is often easy for us to judge God in other peoples's stories. But the only story God will ever fully reveal to us is our story. It is good to study these things, because sometimes God reveals truth in them. However we will never fully understand all of God's Word, because we still live in sin. So no matter how unmerciful God seems in these passages, we must trust in his Faithfullness, Love, and mercy, as well as his holiness...which was poured out onto his son. We will never fully know these Nations relationship to God, and all that had transpired between them and God.
I saw a documentary on the Band Aid project recently, and they recorded Bono's reluctance to sing the line "tonight thank God its them instead of you". Apparently he said to Bob Geldof "no, please don't make me sing the god line". Its a line written by an atheist, sung with breakout passion, unwillingly by a christian, and its a line I hadn't really thought about before. Its has a pragmatic selfishness that is very real... and it has a great facile ambiguity in the use of "thank God"... it could be a prayer or a blasphemy. I don't really think about the 3 year old Girgashites, I have looked in my heart and I feel that kind of selfish pragmatism... thank god its was them and not me. Its natural and right to construct and expect a morality of God, to demand he keep his promises, but ultimatley he is above morality.
Oh, and I meant to weave in something about how unrealistic it is of us to expect a clear course for God acting in a world of sin... he dirtys his hands, so to speak, and chooses to use bad things to doing his will, which makes judging gods actions impossibly murky and hard. It is a nonsensical course of action somehow connected with his mercy... if he were not merciful, he wouldn't be speaking into the israelites situation at all.
Daniel you are questioning the relevance of my distinction, not whether it is substantial. Clearly there is a distinction to be made between deaths via inanimate agents, which have no moral life, and those via armed forces, which must harden their hearts and slaughter fellow human beings. This distinction may not be the first thought on the mind of the Pentateuch writers, but you nevertheless know it perfectly well and it is no credit to Scripture or yourself to pretend otherwise.
This discussion has been framed as one on mercy and its absence, and (although the terminology is anachronistic) genocidal injunctions. It has not been framed as one on Divine wrath in general: if it had, we would be discussing the ground opening to swallow the rebels in the wilderness, the destruction of the cities of the valley, or the like. But we are not: we are discussing "show no mercy", so the distinction is a propos.
As to the promise to the faithful of Thyatira, that (using imagery from the Psalms) they will rule with the Lord's anointed: you wish to use this to assert not vindication, nor rule, nor exaltation, but genocide? Really? Do I have to spell out, via the parallels in the letters to the other churches, how implausible this is on its face? Perhaps the classical scholars amongst us can tell me if there is an expression in the original Greek, equivalent to our "drawing a long bow"?
Please understand me: I have no quarrel with what I will (no offence intended) classify as the humble believer position on these matters, exemplified by Jesse's post. But if we are going to try to mount some systematic and doctrinal position, then there are standards to be kept.
Yes, it would be just random stuff that happens...
With that whole song: I always thought that line was terrible, as terrible as singing 'Do they know it's Christmas?...let them know it's Christmas time' when in fact most of the people concerned were muslim...
Daniel: you don't distinguish between original sin and original guilt then?
I distinguish, but affirm both.
D.
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