One of the most popular theories in New Testament study is that the Gospel of Mark was written first, and that both Matthew and Luke were based upon Mark and another source called “Q” which no longer exists. “Q” comes from the German word “quelle” meaning source, and it supposedly contained matters in Matthew and Luke that are not found in Mark.
Part Five
These days we’re (mostly) discussing why the God of the Hebrew Bible sometimes commands people to slaughter enemies, including women and children, while Jesus reveals that God dies for enemies and longs for their forgiveness. Based on our recent exploration of Peter Craigie’s The Problem of War in the Old Testament, I’m in the process of formulating what I might call The Teleological Exegetical Principle. (Remember folks, I’m thinking out loud here. I’m exploring possibilities, not giving absolute conclusions). Basically, this principle stipulates that, all other things being equal, we should always interpret the beginning of any divine program from its end (telos).
Let’s first apply this principle to the law of the Old Testament. The Old Testament law initially looked like it was given to make us righteous before God, but it failed (as Paul frequently notes). Given that it ended in failure, the Teleological Exegetical Principle would lead us (along with Paul) to presume that this was the point (or at least one of the points) of God giving the law all along. He was proving to us that we can never be made righteous before God by striving to obey the law alone. In the light of this failure, we (along with Paul) can view the law as a “shadow” pointing us — as a negative object lesson — to the reality of “Christ.” Its failure prepared us to humbly accept God’s righteousness as a gift given through Christ.
If Craigie is right, this principle also applies to nationalism and violence (they are inseparable) in the Old Testament. Divinely sanctioned nationalistic violence initially looked like it could establish the Kingdom of God, but it failed. The nation of Israel tried to live by the sword but it ended up dying by the sword (as Jesus said would always happen). Given that nationalistic violence ended in failure, the Teleological Exegetical Principle would lead us to presume that this was the point (or at least one of the points) of God using nationalistic violence all along. He was proving to us that his Kingdom can never be brought about by nationalism and violence.
This negative object lesson laid the groundwork for the coming of the anti-nationalistic, anti-violent Kingdom, inaugurated through Jesus. And this leads to yet another application of the the Teleological Exegetical Principle.
Jesus’ death — which was brought about because Jesus refused to be co-opted by nationalism or to resort to any violence — initially looked like a failure but ended up in victory. Jesus’ sacrificial death defeated the Powers, set captives free, reconciled us to God and established the Kingdom of God on earth. Given that Jesus’ death ended in victory, the Teleological Exegetical Principle would lead us to presume that this was the point of Jesus refusing nationalism and violence. He was proving to us that God’s Kingdom can only be brought about by refusing nationalism and violence as we rather choose to love and sacrifice for our enemies, even to the point of death.
So, if the God who sanctioned genocide in the Old Testament looks antithetical to the God who died for his enemies on Calvary, this is because it’s supposed to! If you’re offended and angered when you read about Yahweh commanding the slaughter of women and children or David celebrating infants being smashed against rocks, it’s because being offended and angered by this sort of barbarism is the point. Only if you see how grotesque and futile this nationalistic violence is will you be able to fully devote yourself to a non-nationalistic and anti-violent Kingdom.If Craigie is right, God was reluctantly condescending to the violent mindset of the world and playing the part of a tribal warrior god in order to ultimately show us (among other things) that he’s not at all like this. Or, if you will, God entered our violence filled Matrix (recall the movie) and played along with its violent rules, but he did this in order to wake us up to our bondage to this ugly, illusory Matrix. Once freed, we are empowered to see who God really is and who we really are. Christ is the “reality” to which all Matrix “shadows” point. In Christ we see that God is a God who would rather give his life for enemies than kill them. And in Christ we see that all people, including enemies, are worth God giving his life for.Now, I’m not pretending this explanation for God’s treatment of enemies is without problems or is adequate in and of itself. But I AM convinced that something like this was going on in Yahweh’s sanctioning of violence in the Old Testament and that this must be part of a comprehensive explanation of this violence.More to come. In the meantime, imitate God as he is revealed in Jesus (Eph. 5:1-2), not the God revealed in the Old Testament’s warfare tradition.
Posted at Christus Victor Ministries
Part Four
In the last post we discussed Craigie’s view that one of the central purposes why God involved himself in using violence to establish and preserve Israel was to provide humanity with a negative object lesson: namely, nationalism and violence can never bring about the Kingdom of God. I agree with this perspective, but it seems to me Craigie’s thesis could be strengthened by showing how it’s rooted in the New Testament itself.
In the book of Colossians Paul says that, in the light of Christ, all the rules and regulations of the Old Testament must be seen as “a shadow of things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ” (Col. 2:17). The author of Hebrews teaches the same thing when he says that “[t]he law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming – not the realities themselves” (Heb 10:1, cf. 8:5). Now that “the reality” (Christ) has come, we can and must abandon the shadow. This is closely related to Paul’s teaching in Galatians that the law was intended as a tutor to lead us to Christ (Gal 3:23-24). The law exposes our sin and thus reveals the truth that we cannot reconcile ourselves to God on this basis (cf. Rom. 7: 6-20). In other words, the law is a shadow that points beyond itself by providing us with a negative object lesson.
If Craigie is right, God’s involvement in nationalistic violence can be understood along similar lines. As the law was intended to lead us to Christ by showing us how not to try to be reconciled to God, so nationalistic violence was intended to lead us to the true Kingdom of God by showing us how not to try to establish God’s Kingdom. As the failure of the law points us to Christ, so the failure of nationalistic violence points us to the Kingdom of God. As the law is a shadow of the reality of Christ, so nationalistic violence is a shadow of the reality of the Kingdom of God.
In fact, one could argue that these two negative-object lessons are implied in each other, for the law structured the way Israel existed as a distinct nation and it was premised on divinely sanctioned violence. The failure of the law to bring us into alignment with God’s will is thus related to the failure of the nation and its intrinsic violence to bring us into alignment with God’s will. Both reveal that we are too sinful to reconcile ourselves to God and bring about his Kingdom. And God used both to prepare us to embrace a Savior who saves us by grace and whose Kingdom transcends all national boundaries and refuses all violence.
These reflections take us a long way in reconciling the Old Testament’s God of war with Jesus’ teaching to love our enemies and abstain from all violence. If the God and the ethics revealed by Jesus seem to at points contrast sharply with the God and ethics of the Old Testament’s war tradition (and they certainly do), this is because they’re supposed to! This is the point!
At the same time, we can’t pretend for a moment that this explanation alone is adequate. For example, Craigie’s thesis doesn’t even address the issue of God’s direct use of violence in the Old Testament. I’ll address this and a multitude of other questions in future blogs.
Posted at Random Reflections.
Review by Thomas Wagner.
I thought it would be appropriate to write a review of one of the most logical and well reasoned publications about the Resurrection. Frank Morison was a lawyer by profession. He set out to write a book that logically disproved and once and for all settled the question that many people have: Could the Resurrection have happened?
After much research and diligent “discovery of facts” to use a legal term, Mr. Morison ended up writing a book that was completely the opposite of what he had originally set out for. To be sure that was not at all his intention. He most definetly was not a religious zealot or highly spiritual individual. He was a man like many others with some vestiges of religion left over from his childhood. Instead of disproving the notion of the Resurrection, Mr. Morison writes that having seen all the facts one is left with only one conclusion - yes it happened.
As strange of an idea as it maybe. Just like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes - Mr. Morison showed logically and diligently that after all the facts have been weighed, the solution that is supported by those facts - however unlikely it may sound or look - would have to be the truth.
Guided by his legal training, Frank Morison takes the reader through the last two days of Jesus’ ministry, as well as evaluating what information is available on early Christianity during the time of Paul. He dissects all available information and walks his readers through a time table that shows so many unusual and inconsistent events that one is left to wonder how one could have missed these clues in the original Scripture.
Click here for the full article.
Part Three
We’re discussing Peter Craigie’s work, The Problem of War in the Old Testament, as part of a broader discussion on the problem of violence in the Old Testament. So far we’ve seen that Craigie argues that God’s involvement in war in the Old Testament was a concession to human sinfulness. One of God’s purposes, we saw, was to reveal how horrifying war is. We’ll now consider an even more fundamental purpose Craigie finds in God’s involvement in war. In my opinion, this is the single most insightful aspect of his book.
Craigie notes how God’s decision to work with a nation (Israel) to move towards his Kingdom objectives in creation required, as a matter of necessity, that God be willing to get involved in war. Given that God’s usual mode of operation is to work through “normal human activity” and “normal human institutions” as he finds them (70-71 [all numbers refer to Craigie’s work]), there was no way for a state to be established and preserved in the ancient world (or the modern world, for that matter) except by relying on military force. All national relations in the ancient (and modern) world hang on a balance of power (69). Hence, Craigie argues, “[a]s a nation state in the real world of that time, Israel could not exist without war” (71). With Jacques Ellul, Craigie argues that statehood and violence are inextricably linked together (71-72), a fact that simply reveals how deep violence is lodged in the human heart (73).
But why did God choose to work with a nation, and therefore to use violence, in the first place? To understand this, Craigie argues, we have to look at how the whole enterprise ended up. We have to interpret the beginning of God’s establishment of Israel through violence from the perspective of the end. And the end was utter defeat for this chosen nation.
As Israel was established by war, Craigie notes, so “the end too was to come in war” (76). Craigie details how the Israelites fell violently to their enemies after the reign of David (76-77). This defeat was “a reversal of their own conquest” (77). Just as God had earlier used the Israelites to judge the Canaanites, so God now used other violent nations to judge the Israelites (77). As Craigie says, “It was becoming evident that God was no respecter of persons, and though the providence of God might not always be fully understood, a certain justice was becoming clear in his dealings with men” (77).
Yet, out of the darkness of this stunning defeat, a radically new vision of the Kingdom began to emerge, according to Craigie. For example, Jeremiah, who lived through the critical years of the end of the state of Judah, announced the coming of a new covenant (Jer. 31:31-34). “Whereas the old covenant had an external form in the nation state,” Craigie notes, “the new covenant would be marked by an inner work of God in man’s heart” (79). (As an aside, Craigie wrote in the seventies and thus fails to use inclusive terminology). For Jeremiah, “the failure of the chosen people to fulfill their high calling pointed to a deeper need in man which could only be met by a work of God in man’s heart” (79).
Click here for the full article.
The other night I read Bart Ehrman’s new book, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer. Since it touches on the issue of violence in the Old Testament and since I’ve received so many e-mails asking me about it, I thought I’d post a review.
This book was better than I expected. I really disliked Ehrman’s earlier best-selling book Misquoting Jesus. Ehrman’s conclusions were very biased and went far beyond what the evidence warranted. Yet he presented his arguments in such a way that laypeople unfamiliar with the science of textual criticism could (and many did) find convincing. Consequently, I initially resisted reading God’s Problem. I figured if Ehrman’s work was poor in his area of expertise (Ehrman is a New Testament textual critic), it would probably be atrocious in an area where he isn’t a specialist (viz. dealing with the problem of evil). Nevertheless, a friend (Paul Eddy) compelled me to read it and, much to my surprise, I actually thought it was pretty good. It was certainly better argued and fairer than his Misquoting Jesus.
I’ll make six comments that roughly follow the outline of Erhman’s book.
1) Ehrman does a masterful job presenting the problem of evil in its full horror. His book is permeated with horrific examples of evil, and he gives these because he rightly surmises that most westerners (certainly most western Christians) wrestle with this issue in a detached, theoretical manner. They are thus inclined to accept easy answers that are woefully inadequate. I couldn’t agree more.
2) Ehrman notes how Old Testament authors viewed suffering as divine punishment (chapters 2-3). He presents this material — much of which we’ve covered the last couple weeks on this blog — in all its barbaric horror. I would quibble with some of his interpretations (e.g. his view that animal sacrifices were meant to appease God’s wrath), but overall his work here is solid. Ehrman concludes this section (as he does each section) with a critique. He forcefully argues that, as a comprehensive explanation for why humans suffer, this just doesn’t work. What’s odd, however, is that Ehrman correctly notes that Old Testament authors never presented God’s judgments as “a universal principle, as a way of explaining every instance of suffering” (49). Yet, he still critiques the punishment motif as if it was meant to be an exhaustive explanation of evil. His criticisms are valid against the divine punishment theodicy, but not at all against the Bible.
3) Ehrman nicely expounds on a biblical motif that views suffering as a consequence of human sin — revealing that biblical authors had some sense of free will (chapter 4). In this context he discusses the “free will defense.” Ehrman notes that there’s a tension not addressed in the Bible between affirming human free will, on the one hand, and affirming an “all-powerful Sovereign…who foreknows all things” (113). Elsewhere in the book Ehrman adds that the free will defense doesn’t explain “natural evil” (12-13). Those who are familiar with my work (e.g. Is God to Blame?, God of the Possible and Satan and the Problem of Evil) won’t be surprised to hear me claim that neither objection is very strong. Given that the free will defense is the most common one appealed to by Christians, I was surprised at how brief and unpersuasive Ehrman was in trying to refute it.
4) Ehrman proceeds to discuss a wide variety of biblical passages that suggest, in various ways, that God uses suffering to contribute to the greater good (ch. 5). I felt that both Ehrman’s presentation of the biblical material and critique of the greater good defense in this chapter were strong. Erhman rightly exposes the injustice involved in the idea that God allows or ordains suffering in some in order to benefit others. He also rightly rejects the mistaken notion that God allows suffering because we couldn’t appreciate good without it (147-48). Moreover, while Ehrman agrees that good can sometimes come out of evil, he objects to the idea that “something good always comes out of suffering”(147). To the contrary, he insists, “most suffering is not positive…” (ibid).
The trouble, however, is that Ehrman seems to think he’s exposing a weakness in the Bible’s view of suffering when he offers these criticisms. He’s not. Yes the Bible presents a God who is always working to bring good out of evil, and yes it depicts God as always using evil for his own good purposes. But nowhere does the Bible intimate that all suffering is “positive” for those who suffer, and nowhere does it suggest that all evil is allowed “for the greater good.”
Click here for the full article.
Part Two
I’m in the process of critically reviewing various perspectives on the problem of violence in the Old Testament. My goal is to extract principles along the way to hopefully arrive at a comprehensive explanation for why the warrior portrait of God in the Old Testament seems so radically different from the God revealed in the crucified messiah. I’ve appreciated all the feedback I’ve gotten on the posts thus far.
In my previous post I began reviewing Craigie’s book The Problem of War in the Old Testament. We saw that Craigie holds that the metaphor of God as a warrior reveals that God is not above getting involved in sinful human activity — even activity as sinful as war. As much as God hates war, he is willing to use it for his own purposes. God’s involvement in war reveals his remarkable willingness to accommodate and utilize human sin, but it reveals nothing about God’s true moral character, according to Craigie. To discover this, we must look above all to Jesus Christ.
So, what are the purposes for which God involves himself in war, according to Craigie? This is the question that this and the next post will address.
War id Hell
According to Craigie, one of purposes Yahweh had in getting involved in war was to expose its true, horrifying character. Craigie discusses the views of the famous Prussian soldier and philosopher of war, Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831). In his book On War, Clausewitz argues that the main objective for any nation going to war is to utterly demolish the will and ability of their opponent to ever rise up against the nation again (Craigie, 47). He held that “to introduce into the philosophy of war itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity” (Clausewitz, On War, Penguin edition, 1968 [1832], 102). The only type of war that makes any sense, according to Clausewitz, is one that is willing to do whatever is necessary to permanently vanquish the enemy.
In this light, Craigie criticizes Just War theory which attempts to spell out the conditions under which war can be justly entered into and fought. Following Clausewitz, Craigie holds that the idea that war can be moderated in a just manner is “unrealistic,” for the truth is that war is “essentially lawlessness” (53). As General Sherman so eloquently put it, “war is hell.” It’s not a “game played by rules,” Craigie says. Only after a war has ended do we pretend that there were rules people were supposed to abide by. In this way the victors (and only the victors!) can “indict the loser for ‘war crimes’” (53).
Craigie interprets the several divine commands given to Joshua and others to slaughter all the Canannites (e.g. Deut 2, 7; Josh. 6) to be a “massive and solemn warning” about the true, hellish nature of war. They reveal that, as much as we might try to sanitize war with our unrealistic theories, there are, in truth, “no half-measures in war” (53). The macabre warfare narratives of the Old Testament “destroy any illusions we may have about war being ‘not all that bad,’ a kind of sport played by gentlemen.” (As I mentioned in the previous post, this is why Craigie refuses to follow the tradition of calling these “holy wars”). These narratives, Craigie argues, are “a safer guide to the reality of war than are the various formulations of the “Just War” theory that have emerged in the history of Christianity” (53).
Any person who is committed to taking all their cues about what God is like and about how humans are to live from Jesus Christ must be completely revolted by the Old Testament narratives in which Yahweh commands the extermination of the Canaanite people. If Craigie is right, this is precisely the point of these passages!
Click here for the full article.
Part One
Today I’m returning back to my “thinking out loud” about the problem of violence in the Old Testament. My posts on Vernon Eller’s War and Peace From Genesis to Revelation produced some interesting reactions in readers. On the one hand, I received a number of e-mails from people who were quite relieved to find that I ended up rejecting Eller’s view that the divinely commanded violence of the Old Testament should be understood to be merely part of its cultural packaging. I apparently had them worried. Others, however, were disappointed (and several even angered) that I ended up rejecting Eller’s thesis. I want to reassure these latter folks that I fully understand where they were coming from. I would love to embrace Eller’s perspective. But, at least at this point in my life, I honesty just can’t reconcile it with my submission to Jesus as Lord.
In the next few posts I want to assess Peter Craigie’s views expressed in a small but insightful book entitled The Problem of War in the Old Testament (Wipf and Stock, 2002 [orig. 1978]). (All numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in The Problem of War).
To begin, Peter Craigie doesn’t pull any punches in laying out the problem of war in the Old Testament. When we read of God commanding the literal slaughter of men and women, young and old, it is (and should be) disturbing (10). This material poses three distinct sets of problems, according to Craigie.
First, it creates a theological problem, for the portrait of “God as Warrior” seems incompatible with “the New Testament description of God as loving and self-giving” (11.) Second, it creates a problem of revelation, for we have to wonder how a book so filled with ruthless violence can be considered God’s word (11). Third, the war material in the Old Testament creates an ethical problem, for, in contradiction to the New Testament, this material has often been used to justify killing – and in God’s name. (11-12).
This last problem is particularly challenging, since throughout Church history “the opposition to war has been proclaimed by lonely voices” (15). Indeed, Craigie briefly traces the influence of the war tradition of the Old Testament throughout history and shows how it influenced the violent tendencies in Islam as well as in Church history (chapter II). Starting with Augustine’s appeal to political authorities to punish heretics and extending through the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Reformation, the Conquistadors, and even going up through the American civil war, Christians have relied on the Old Testament war traditions to justify Christians butchering enemies rather than serving them, as Jesus taught (27-29). Indeed, many still skip right past Jesus and appeal to the Old Testament violence to justify Christians participating in war or using violence for other reasons.
Craigie acknowledges that one might be tempted to simply dismiss all the war material in the Old Testament as a residue of the barbaric cultural packaging revelation had to come in (34-35). (This is basically the avenue Eller and many others take). But Craigie argues we have to be very hesitant to do this. For one thing, the warfare material is central to the Old Testament (36-37). Rejecting this would require dismissing a good deal of the Bible! Even more importantly, Jesus and the first Christians regarded the whole Old Testament as God’s Word (12, 35, 37-38). For Craigie, therefore, dismissing this material is simply not a viable option for Jesus’ followers (38). At the same time, given the significant problems this material poses for theology, revelation and ethics, we have to study it very carefully to make sure we are not misunderstanding and misapplying it. (32).
Craigie’s small book contains a number of insights that I believe can help us begin to reconcile the “God as warrior” motif of the Old Testment with the self-sacrificial God revealed in Jesus Christ. In this post I’ll discuss the first of these insights, to be followed by several others in subsequent posts.
Click here for the full article.
By John Fernandez
One of my favorite stories is found in chapter seven of the Gospel of John. Jesus is teaching to a crowd as Jewish religious leaders look on. Many in the crowd believed that Jesus was the expected Messiah, and they began to discuss that among themselves. This troubled the Jewish leaders and chief priests who saw Jesus as a threat to their authority. So they immediately sent out officers to arrest Him.
Jesus was in the midst of teaching when the officers arrived: ”If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” (John 7:37-38) The Scripture Jesus was referring to is the Hebrew Bible, known by Christians today as the Old Testament.
The Jewish people were expecting a Messiah as prophesied in the Hebrew Bible, hence the phrases “come to Me and drink” and “rivers of living water” would have been familiar to them as the expected life-giving characteristics of the Messiah, as alluded to in Isaiah 12:2-3, 44:3-4, and 58:11. By using these phrases, Jesus was clearly claiming to be the prophesied Messiah.
So, what did the arresting officers do? Having decided not to arrest Jesus, they went back to the chief priests empty handed, saying ”No man ever spoke like this Man!” (John 7:46)
“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” Matthew 24:35; Mark 13:31; Luke 21:33.
The doctrine of the Incarnation (God in the flesh) stands at the very heart of historic Christianity. This biblically derived doctrine teaches that the eternal Word, the second person of the Trinity, took unto himself a human nature and became man without in any way diminishing his deity (John 1:1, 14, 18; Philippians 2:5-6; Colossians 2:9; 1 John 4:1-3). Christian orthodoxy therefore views Jesus Christ as a single person who nevertheless possesses both a divine and human nature. Those two natures (divine and human) find their union in the person of Christ (hypostatic union). This theological understanding of the Incarnation led the ancient Christians to refer to Jesus as the theanthropos (Greek: the “God-man”).
Some people today, however, think that the idea of Jesus possessing both a divine and a human nature is logically contradictory. The specific charge is that Jesus’ human qualities and characteristics (the limits and boundaries of his human nature) cannot be connected with his divine qualities and characteristics (the unlimited and boundless character of his divine nature). This challenge can potentially stand as an obstacle to a person who is genuinely considering the truth-claims of historic Christianity.
In this brief article, I will offer a way to think about the union of Christ’s two natures that may avoid this logical entanglement. Remember, however, that I am posing this idea as merely a hypothetical way to resolve this challenge. I am not suggesting that this is the only or even the best way to respond to the issue. I am engaging in what I hope is a helpful form of speculative philosophical theology. The recommended reading at the end of the article offers other suggested philosophical-theological approaches.
The Union of the Two Natures of Christ
Couldn’t Jesus have what amounts to a “special” human nature? That is, maybe Jesus’ human nature is both like and unlike the common, generic nature that the rest of humanity possesses. After all, while Jesus was fully human (like every other human being) he was not solely human (unlike every other human being). In other words, maybe Jesus’ human nature was distinct from the typical nature that every other human being possesses. In this way, Jesus holds a fully human nature that is still compatible with a person who is not solely human (also possessing a divine nature). The idea is to rethink the exact nature of Christ’s humanity without diminishing it.
If Jesus possesses a special human nature (call it “fully human plus”), then maybe he could suffer real limitations in time, space, and knowledge, yet the limited human nature would not conflict with his simultaneous possession of an unlimited divine nature. Accordingly, one could argue that the way in which Jesus was limited (special human nature) is in a different respect from the way in which he was unlimited (divine nature).
The law of noncontradiction asserts that two contradictory propositions cannot both be true at the same time and in the same respect. Formulated as I have stated it, the Incarnation (a fully human but not solely human nature that is uniquely compatible with a divine nature) wouldn’t necessarily violate the law of noncontradiction.
Of course, the doctrine of the Incarnation involves much divine mystery and my “fully human plus” theory also relies upon the miraculous creative power of God. Obviously, my brief venture into speculative philosophical theology definitely needs to be tested by Scripture, orthodox theological standards (creeds), and reason (1 Thessalonians 5:21).
For more on the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, see chapter nine of my book, Without a Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions. For another thoughtful approach to the issue of Christ’s two natures, see Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate.
