Moral Approaches of Christian Readers to Divine Action in Scripture
Premise: The Bible describes God ordering the Israelites to conduct cherem warfare against the Amalekites (1 Sam 15:3, 18), which involves the latter’s total destruction as a sacrifice (!) devoted to God, which amounts to genocide. In short, God orders genocide. (This is based on the most plausible exegesis of said passages.¹)
The moral issue: “The commanded Israelite genocide of Amalekites is, morally speaking,
- …good, because God commanded it (and whatever God commands must be good since God is good) (and ‘his ways are higher than our ways’, so we should suppress any moral intuition we could have to the contrary).”
- … good, because the Amalekites deserved it through their immoral actions (and their babies, unborn infants even, deserved it through ‘original guilt’) (and this would highlight the righteous and holy attributes of God, who does all things for his own glory).”
- …bad, like any genocide, because it doesn’t respect the God-given dignity of Canaanites (whom God created in his image and for whom Jesus died) — and/or the inherent goodness of God’s creation (including animals), which is inflicted indiscriminate violence (if one holds to a ‘just war theory’, it undoubtedly fails the test).
- …bad, because it doesn’t maximise the ultimate well-being of all people involved (which God would strive after since he is omnibenevolent/pro bonis/Love [as revealed by Christ — a ‘Christocentric hermeneutic’]).”
- …bad, because it’s not reflective of a virtuous character worthy of worship and imitation (and we are called to become imitators of God, Eph 5:1) — and/or, it does not promote the love of God and neighbor (Augustine’s ‘hermeneutic of love’).”
- …bad, because of our properly basic moral intuition that it is so, which is sufficiently attuned to ‘natural law’ —and/or, which is significantly shaped by a living, experiential relationship with God through Jesus and the indwelling Spirit, in the context of the church” (cf. Luk 12:57).
In the past, I have made exhaustive and, in my view, decisive arguments against the presuppositions of 2, respectively about God’s ‘glory’ and human desert:
What can be said against 1, besides points 3–6, is that it leads to a kind of moral relativism, in which the same thing, say genocide, is a moral horror of unspeakable proportions when committed by a human party without being commanded by God (say, the Holocaust), but when it’s done with such a command, it’s a good and righteous thing, even a praiseworthy act of obedience! (Saul was rebuked for not obeying and would arguably have been praised if he had obeyed.) Apparently, there is nothing that makes a genocide morally horrific except for the fact that it’s not done following a command by God. (Saul, if he had obeyed, would have been both a Hitler-like figure, decimating a people, and a biblically praiseworthy one.) In other words, situations of ‘hell on earth’ are only worthy of moral indignation on the condition that they are not the result of divine commands. This could be said to be a kind of moral relativism, in which there is no intrinsic ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ to any human act or situation, but only extrinsically, namely in relation to the presence or absence of a command of God.
This is greatly exacerbated by 2, in which hellish human suffering is not just emptied of intrinsically negative moral content, but is given intrinsically positive moral content — it constitutes righteous and good punishment at God’s hands which all humans deserve because of their actions (or those of Adam). People should be thankful if they’re not tortured by God in this life!
Such a God is, to be clear, not worthy of anyone’s worship; it makes him practically indistinguishable from Satan — ‘God’s ways are higher than our ways’, but not than Satan’s, apparently. And, looking at the Amalekite case specifically and at the broader conquest and monarchy narrative more broadly, God’s ways are not even higher than that of the emperors and fascist rulers of human history, who similarly like to ‘purify’ the ancient homeland from all ‘vermin’ to establish a totalitarian rule for ‘the people’; in such a situation, subjects similarly have no rights but depend on the gracious paternal care of the leader, who mercifully crushes the ‘them’ to protect the ‘us’, and who is fundamentally ultimately all about power and his own glory.
See also my earlier article on this topic:
When the word ‘righteous’ is applied to such a God, it loses all meaning, since it stands in no continuity with, or even in a directly contradictory relation to, usage of the word ‘righteous’ in the human realm — a point David Bentley Hart makes in That All Shall Be Saved. For example, if humans are righteous in that they do not lie, but God, who is righteous in all he does, is said to lie, then what does it even mean to say that God is ‘righteous’? The same goes for texts involving moral atrocities as described above.
Moreover, the formative influence of such views on people’s moral sense, outlook, and actions cannot be underestimated. Since suffering is not something negative (say, for reasons of human dignity or divine benevolence or care), there is no reason why people should care about the suffering of others, let alone exert themselves to alleviate it. Why would you be a good Samartian?² Compassion — the key to human flourishing on all levels — becomes something frowned upon, or perhaps something morally supererogatory — in any case, the exception (and if it’s not the exception, then people, thankfully, have escaped the logical implications of their own views for those of, I’d argue, more genuinely Christian ones). (The idea that the earth could end anytime soon does not help either.) Furthermore, this sociopathy could lay the groundwork for supporting sociopathic politicians, which we see happening all around us.
In addition, these views often induce a life-long suppression of one’s moral intuitions, however strong (and ‘properly basic’) they are. How many Christians have confided in me that secretly they have always struggled with the ‘genocide stories’ of the Bible! But they’ve not been allowed to struggle with it, to really struggle with it, because the starting and end point of the discussion is that God’s moral actions as ‘literally’ described by Scripture cannot be questioned; whoever does that has left the true faith. And thus, what ends up being questioned, or rather jettisoned, is human reason, conscience, and/or intuition.
But the biblical texts can, of course, be questioned, because the fundamentalist, inerrantist, ‘literal-only’ reading of Scriptures such as 1 Samuel 15 is not the only hermeneutic on the market, let alone the most desirable, sustainable, or rooted in tradition (or the Bible itself!). There are ways of reading Scripture that allow one to maintain one’s moral sanity as well as the morally edifying character of Scripture. For example, one could adopt a ‘spiritual’ hermeneutic, in which the moral problem of the text is said to be put there by the Spirit as a ‘stumbling block’ to train one’s moral sense and drive one toward the spiritual meaning of the text, for example in relation to our battle against sin.³
Resources
1. For the exegesis, see the following resources:
Kipp Davis, “The Conquest of Canaan did not happen, Pt. I. A response to apologist Gavin Ortlund, @TruthUnites.”
— , “The Conquest of Canaan did not happen, Pt. II. A response to apologist Gavin Ortlund @TruthUnites.”
2. One could of course say, ‘because the Bibble tells me to’. However, this would be an example of a morally irresponsible biblicist and extrinsic ethics. According to such a way of thinking, an action (1) is only normative if you can find a Bible verse that says it is, and (2) is only carried out because of the threat of divine punishment (or the promise of reward) — instead of, say, your moral sense or ethical system (which, to be clear, the Bible does not and cannot provide you with) telling you an action is normative and you carrying it out because it is good in itself.
For an overview of more bad apologetic arguments, see here.
3. On alternative hermeneutics, see:
Aidan Kimel, “David Bentley Hart, Divine Violence, and the Figurative Interpretation of Scripture,” Eclectic Orthodoxy.
— , “‘For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn’: St. Gregory of Nyssa and the Allegorical Sense of Scripture,” Eclectic Orthodoxy.
David Bentley Hart, “Good God? A Response,” Theopolis.
Taylor Ross, “Origen Among the Critics,” Public Orthodoxy.
Videos:
“David Bentley Hart on the Intersections of Scripture and Theology.”
“The Spirit and the Text: Assessing Biblical Inerrancy (Full Documentary),” Love Unrelenting.
