Old-Testament genocides

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Some thoughts on these...

Two Christian philosophers, Peter van Inwagen and William L. Craig (I think are their names), have offered arguments for why God's complicity (we'll call it) in genocides by ancient Hebrew military forces, does not detract from God's glory or moral stature. The main thing to have to "defend" is always the murder of Caananite/et. al. children. It is not a pleasant picture, imagining oneself as a child of the Amalekites, watching one's family being cut down around one, the screams and pain (of being the child run through with a spear or sword or whatever); and it is even less pleasant, having to imagine being God, even the eternal form of the Son, looking upon this terror and (metaphorically) smiling with delight. So, Craig, though, I think claims that the temporary suffering of the murdered children is compensated for by their instant beatification upon death. But generally Craig's argument, IIRC, struck me as rather distasteful, offensive, disturbing, etc. Inwagen's was more like, "Well, every tribe in the area had a propensity to genocidal violence, so if God was going to pick a tribe in the first place, He can't be blamed for having to pick one that went to genocidal war with its neighbors here and there--He had in mind a long-run pacification of the elect tribe, so His 'complicity' is acceptable in that (eternal) light."

Although for independent reasons I admire Inwagen in his own way, I will have to lump him together with Craig as missing the actual larger picture, theologically, of the Old-Testament era genocide legends. The problem I will highlight with the following observation:

Craig-like theories about the genocides are strongly associated with more conservative/right-leaning/w/e Christian perspectives. What I mean is that saying, "Well, if God commanded them, they had to be right to do for some reason," is likely to show up in relevant comments from such perspectives. A "liberal" or "left-leaning" or whatever attitude would probably read more along the lines, "God would never have commanded such things, so we have to interpret those passages of the Bible non-literally at best." Now the problem with the conservative interpretation (I'll call it that) lies in asking, if God can sometimes command mass rape and murder, and this be good, why can't He command, say, a gay sexual relationship, and this be good? Or any number of things.

Indeed, one wonders why a God made of love would come up with excuses for unremitting savagery but not for two men sleeping with each other in the context of some romantic involvement. This line of reflection either brings out or accents the even deeper problem, though:

If God is omnipotent, then why can't He help defeat the Caananites, Amalekites, et. al. in a miraculous, but non-murderous, way? He's performing miracles (e.g. at the siege of Jericho, implicitly); this is not supposed to be a matter of, "Why is God letting evil exist?" because His guidance of the Israelites was a way for Him to directly disallow evil (the evil of the Israelites' oppression). Or, from the Inwagen POV, if God can harden the Pharaoh's heart, why can't He soften the Israelites', so that they would immediately obey His true, loving commands, rather than have to be cultivated over the centuries until Mary and Christ?

With such possibilities apparently in mind, I am tempted to gloss the OT-genocide stories, then, as not inspired by divine thoughts, but as expressive of human feelings of ethnic contempt, hate, rage, or whatever. This undermines their status as scriptural (supposing that anything at all is genuinely scriptural). It also undermines traditional Christianity, and various offshoots in the modern period. For the above theological situation is revealed to us not by the traditions or scriptures of historical mainstream Christianity as such, but by ordinary reasoning. Christ has to be partly relativized to a more absolute standard of truth. Proclaiming, "Christ just is the Truth," ends up being a false judgment of things, which ends up being disrespect for Christ Himself anyway! For if He existed and in the way of the stories we typically accept of this existence, He Who emptied His Person of the divine nature, so that He could assume Himself for a man Who redeemed the world, well, that Person would expect us to believe the truth in itself, whatsoever it truly was, first, and to find in this His more particular factuality (if it is there to be found, as we have faith).

[Obi-Wan Nihilo]

The only way this can be rationalized is with the idea of original sin. Still, it's startling how similar Hitler was to Moses.