Defending God, No Matter the Cost

 
 
Ever since I wrote a review of David Lamb’s book God Behaving Badly a few years back, I get the occasional email from evangelical apologists eager to defend the violent and vindictive personality of the Old Testament god. Sometimes they’ll send me excerpts of similar treatises in exchange for an honest review. All of them variously yet forthrightly insist that the god of the Old Testament is not actually bloodthirsty and actually he hates violence. There’s never any balance or caveats issued in these responses, only levels of certainty that seem desperate and out of place given the source material.

It reminds me a lot of Trump supporters who insist that 45 never mocked a disabled journalist and actually he didn’t mock Christine Blasey Ford, either. Except he did. How do we know? Because we watched him do it. On camera. We heard it with our ears and witnessed it with our eyes. All of us did. Even you.

Such overt and shameless gaslighting is prevalent in apologist circles as well. Even once we peel past the multiple layers of historical-critical study, the Hebrew texts present an unambiguously bloodthirsty, jealous, vengeful, capricious, ableist, sexist, and provincial god who evinces no apparent continuity with the moral and social sensibilities many of us (especially self-described progressives) possess today. It is there on the page, in every translation, as pervasive as it is troubling. Unless you’re willing to forego intellectual honesty and simply disregard or ignore dozens of stories and passages, I don’t see how one could conclude otherwise.

Now you can say that a lot of what’s described in the Old Testament didn’t actually happen and was merely symbolic anthropomorphism common to the era. Like maybe Samson didn’t actually bludgeon 1,000 men with a donkey’s jawbone. Maybe God didn’t really summon a bear to maul forty-two young boys. Perhaps the Israelites weren’t out there slaughtering their enemies in the hundreds of thousands as the texts allege. Maybe God wasn’t as much of a fan of cannibalism as the prophets seem to think. Maybe it was the ancients, and not the gods in which they professed to believe, who valued virgin daughters as salvageable plunder. Perhaps Bronze Age tribesmen really were just virulent homophobes and imputed these attitudes to the local deities. Perhaps.

But most of the apologists I come across never gesture towards this possibility, declining even to entertain it as a way of defusing the perennial concerns that undermine the Bible’s reputation as a portrait of morality and goodness. No room for fallibility, human or otherwise. It’s inerrancy or bust. Still. In 2018.

One email I received over the summer, which I recently got around to reading, was a mini-pamphlet of sorts which argued that in fact the Old Testament advocates for nonviolence, because Jesus was a pacifist and since Jesus is part of the same triune entity of which the OT god is a part, the OT god must be a god of love also.

I expected a punchline but none were forthcoming. Rather than attempt to piece together that trainwreck of a syllogism, I left it alone to wallow in its own cesspool of surface absurdity. But maybe that’s the point? Provide a few neat and tidy answers to soothe the doubts of uncritical readers. Never mind that these content-free, semi-comprehensible explanations aren’t taken seriously outside fundamentalist circles. Time and again, when faced with difficult questions concerning biblical violence, evangelicals twist themselves in logical knots in their attempts to defend the indefensible.

What the author never seems to address head on is this: If Jesus stands against violence, then why is the Old Testament chock full of it? Instead he shoehorns in a number of undefended presuppositions that, it goes without saying, would almost certainly be rejected by the Jewish community, and inconsistently applies them, all while neglecting Jewish perspectives on the Torah (something I’ve grown particularly interested in as of late).

Through it all, the impulse to justify God’s illustrious roster of misdeeds is ever-present, this despite the fact that most sane-headed people wouldn’t think of justifying such atrocities in any other context. Can you imagine evangelicals defending a state-led policy to cleanse a neighboring territory of their firstborn children, simply because they believed in different gods, as described in Exodus 12? Or a military invasion, rationalized on similarly religious grounds, that razed entire cities — its people and its livestock — à la Deuteronomy 13? Stripped of its biblical trappings, would they endorse the intolerance of Leviticus 21 in which the handicapped and disabled are denied food and other aid because of their physical ailments?

That Jesus embraced and healed the blind and the crippled on multiple occasions only serves to underscore the disparate nature of these texts and why the problem of harmonization remains as hot a topic as it has always been. One is either willing to compromise their values arbitrarily or they aren’t. And the Bible offers a salient litmus test for measuring one’s commitment to moral truth.

Pressed long and hard enough on their forlorn attempts to justify Old Testament violence, evangelicals will at some point invariably punt to the aura of mystery, arguing that God’s will is complex and cannot be deciphered by mere human reason, after which they will no doubt proceed to tell us all about the mind of God — his wishes and desires, his intentions and motives, his values and politics, his gender.

That is, when apologists find themselves beaten back by historically informed argument, they retreat to uncertainty. ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ But not, of course, when it comes to things like gay people and evolution, apparently. You cannot declare God mysterious, ineffable, and unknowable and in the next breath give his Wikipedia bio. ‘We cannot comprehend God. Now I’ll go on to explain what he’s all about.’ No. That’s not how this works.

In the end, Christian fundamentalists want it both ways. They use uncertainty to shield off thorny questions, but on matters that cut close to their personal convictions and theological tenets the indefinite becomes fixed and non-negotiable. Suddenly God’s will is self-evident; skepticism is abandoned for marks of group identity. Beliefs arrived at through such desultory, schizophrenic means become dangerous when pushed into contexts where they do real harm. Far better is it, as many theologians both Jewish and Christian have urged, to grapple honestly with doubt, allow it a seat at the table, than to run circles around it and compromise your moral integrity in the process.

 

Note: This article is adapted from a Facebook post here.

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