Thread: Kerygmania: Jack Bauer and the OT God Board: Limbo / Ship of Fools.
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Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
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Three caveats:
1) I know there have been umpteen threads in Kerygmania about how to deal with the sometimes very off-putting impression the Old Testament gives of God. So if this makes you want to ![[Snore]](graemlins/snore.gif)
, quit reading now. (Apologies in advance to Moo and Pyx_e.)
2) I know this is too long for an OP -- if my thinking were clearer, it would be shorter.
3) I tried this idea out on my EFM group, and they thought it was nuts.
In the first year of Education for Ministry, as many of you know, you read the OT, and you spend a lot of time reading the Deuteronomist history, wherein God's people to do things like slaughter their enemies wholesale (the book of Joshua, for example), sucker an enemy into a tent and drive a tent-peg into his head (Judges 4-5 -- somewhere near Mt Tabor there's a tombstone that reads "Killed by a girl") and other equally fun things. All along, we're reading the EFM commentary which keeps telling us that the point of all this is that God is running the show: "The Deuteronomist never looks from the standpoint of political theory. As far as D is concerned, YHWH ruled. If his people were faithful to him, all went well. The ills and misfortunes that befell the people were caused by faithlessness to the covenant with YHWH" (EFM, Year One, p. 324).
So I have been trying to get with the program and stop feeling sorry for the poor Moabites, Amorites, Edomites, et al. who are in the way of God's people, which is hard. I think I finally got it, though, while watching a recent episode of 24 in which the main character, Jack Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland), threatens someone with torture in order to get the guy to give up information Jack needs to save the country. It was a great scene in a great episode, with Jack pressing a knife into the guy's cheek and saying, "You've read my file [i.e., you know I'll really do this]. First I'll cut out your right eye. Then I'll cut out your left eye. And then I'm going to keep cutting you till you tell me what I want to know!"
Now, in real life, I would want Jack Bauer locked up in a heartbeat. His propensity for beating up and killing his fellow human beings is more than a little bit scary, not to mention wrong. But in the context of the narrative, I accept that he is the hero of the piece, that he has the country's best interests at heart, and that he is doing the Right Thing, because the show just doesn't work for me if I don't buy into that.
So if I simply accept the narrative viewpoint that the various heroes of Israel are heroes when God says they are (and aren't when God says they aren't -- poor Saul), that the Israelites are supposed to be the good guys and all the other -ites would in a Hollywood movie be the Russians (the leader to be played by a British actor, naturally ![[Biased]](wink.gif)
), then the Deuteronomist's history works. As soon as I try to resist the point of view the narrative is pushing, it unravels.
I tried reading this way for a few weeks, and so far it has helped me a lot, though it feels a bit strange to be going along with the narrative when I got so much training as an English major in reading against the grain. What I'm wondering now:
1) Is this idea really as nuts as my EFM group thought it was?
2) I go along with the narrative viewpoint of 24 because it's more entertaining that way. The OT is certainly more entertaining when I'm not thinking that it's completely unfair that the Philistines get stuck being the Hollywood Russians of the OT, but what am I learning about God when I don't resist the narrative? I know when I watch 24 that I don't in real life think it's okay to torture people or that a rogue counter-terrorist agent is likely to save the US by throwing aside rules and protocols every 30 minutes and doing what he thinks is best. If I truly went along with 24, I'd be going along with a lot of things that go against my basic beliefs, starting with the fact that I don't think the good guy vs. bad guy distinction is very useful in real life. Even with my very liberal approach to the Bible, which accepts a narrative with a high level of fictionalization and mythologizing, I expect to be learning something about God when I read it, and I expect it to be real on some level and to have a bearing on my real life. The EFM commentary keeps telling me that I'm learning about God's rule, about God's call to his people and about God's responses to the faithfulness and faithlessness of those people. But I keep feeling like I'd be learning a whole lot of really nasty things as well, possibly without even noticing, if I persisted in going along with the narrative -- starting with a belief in the existence of "good guys," i.e., chosen people, something that is vital to the Biblical narrative, but that in real life seems like the basis for things like the horrible American triumphalism espoused by some Christians.
[ 07. January 2007, 23:13: Message edited by: Kelly Alves ]
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
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quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
The EFM commentary keeps telling me that I'm learning about God's rule, about God's call to his people and about God's responses to the faithfulness and faithlessness of those people. But I keep feeling like I'd be learning a whole lot of really nasty things as well, possibly without even noticing, if I persisted in going along with the narrative -- starting with a belief in the existence of "good guys," i.e., chosen people, something that is vital to the Biblical narrative, but that in real life seems like the basis for things like the horrible American triumphalism espoused by some Christians.
Ruth, I love how you put all this. I also get the connection with Jack Bauer, having seen that particular episode and having the exact thoughts you describe.
I guess I both agree with the EFM and your gut instincts about this.
The way to resolve it, in my opinion, is to realize that in reality the Israelites were in no way the "good guys." In reality the residents of Canaan, who were not necessarily any better or worse than Israel, got a raw deal. God doesn't really "give" people physical property.
At the same time, just as Jack Bauer "does the right thing" in the narrative flow of 24, Israel plays a similar role in the Old Testament. All narratives like this are metaphors. They set up situations that play out as classic struggles between good and evil.
So Israel isn't really the "good guys." Instead, Israel merely plays that role, illustrating the classic struggle between good and evil.
But it only works if you go with the flow of the story. David therefore has to be a hero, even though, if you really examine what he does, he is anything but. Same with Samson. If you can accept them as heroes, you can get a lot out of the stories, and their struggles. They are said to pre-figure Jesus' struggles.
To my mind the key is to grasp the peculiar symbolism that runs like a thread through all of the Old Testament stories. God took a very ordinary people, the Israelites, and made their story into His story. The point was not to glorify them, but to provide a narrative that could be imbued with meaning, and made into the story of how good can triumph over the power of darkness.
So I like the EFM's advice, and I also agree with your instincts about this. Go with the stories, and their judgment of right and wrong. It just seems more palatable to me when seen metaphorically.
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
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RuthW: quote:
So if I simply accept the narrative viewpoint that the various heroes of Israel are heroes when God says they are (and aren't when God says they aren't -- poor Saul), that the Israelites are supposed to be the good guys and all the other -ites would in a Hollywood movie be the Russians (the leader to be played by a British actor, naturally ), then the Deuteronomist's history works. As soon as I try to resist the point of view the narrative is pushing, it unravels.
I think there's an analogy here with Deut. 13 which looks like a set of criteria to establish what and who a real prophet is. Butit boils down to "A real prophet is one who said what YHWH told him to." In other words, there is no criterion independent of what God wanted, which is what actually happened.
As with so much else, the glory of the Deuteronomistic History is also its biggest problem. It understands the historical traditions of Israel as the organ through which the body of Israel learns about God - a bit like animals which use the whole of their skins, the whole of what's in contact with "outside reality" to sense what's out there. However, when the Deuteronomists (sic) theorize an understanding of God from the historical traditions of Israel, they then re-apply it to their own narrations of that history They acquire a "God-point-of-view" from the stories they are custodians of, and then assume it, and re-tell the story from it.
In that sense, if we're singing from the same hymn-sheet, I think the OP is substantially correct. And will shamelessly purloin it for a sermon ASAP. (You'll be in the credits, RuthW)
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
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I said: quote:
It understands the historical traditions of Israel as the organ through which the body of Israel learns about God
It would have been better put like this: quote:
It understands the historical "experience" of Israel deposited in her traditions as a sort of "group memory" as the organ through which the body of Israel learns about God
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
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I think we are singing from the same hymnsheet, psyduck. But what do you do with the problem presented by the glory of the Deuteronimist history?
Self-referential systems and "hey, it's just a metaphor, it didn't really happen that way" bug me when we're talking about the Bible. If we're talking about Paradise Lost or 24, I love them. But self-referential systems are self-justifying systems, and while reading lots of the OT stories as extended metaphors, as Freddy suggests, seems really great to me for a while, and a lot of things make a heck of a lot more sense that way, as soon as I realize that logically I have to extend this to the NT, I come to a screeching halt. My faith would quite honestly be at risk if the resurrection stories and the book of Acts were all just metaphors for how the disciples got the idea that Jesus' teachings could live on after his death. (Though I think Freddy's discussion of metaphor is really helpful, especially what he says about heroes.) I feel stuck between knowing that the Biblical accounts have been re-written, edited and re-edited, fictionalized, and mythologized (in the good sense -- I think myths carry the deepest truths we know) and wanting something in all of that to be real.
And what do we do with the Deuteronomist history if it's supposed to have some bearing on our lives? What is it that Israel learned about God, through their nifty reapplication of the lessons of their stories to the stories themselves, that we're being told about? Do I get to work that same nifty trick? (It would come out differently if I did, I imagine.) And do the wonders of this history also carry the basis for things like American and Christian triumphalism that I really loathe?
Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on
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RuthW
You've found a very helpful way of looking at the OT stories. Essentially, they are partisan, and contain, therefore, a view that God is partisan. (Why does that remind me of a certain strand of Christianity to be found in the US? I think it was Jim Wallis's wife - who is English - who observed that 'God Bless America' was not in the Bible).
And perhaps that is a good consequence. From the comic Jonah/Ninevah tension through the much more serious "light to the Gentiles" and the "Samaritan"-type references in the gospel, we reach, eventually these two references is our understanding of partisanship.
quote:
Acts 10:34 (New International Version)
34Then Peter began to speak: "I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism
quote:
Galatians 3:28-29 (New International Version)
28There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.
Through which an unthinking partisanship seems to me to be firmly set aside.
Loyalty is a good thing, partisanship is a dangerous thing. I think we can get that from the Bible, but only if we are prepared to accept that part of its inspiration is that it reveals, sometimes very clearly, the limitations of its human authors. And some people are always likely to have difficulty with that POV.
"God's politics - why the Right gets it wrong and the Left doesn't get it" has just been published in the UK and I've just started to read it. Apparently it has sold very well in the US. I'm rather hoping that one of the reasons is that people are waking up to the partisanship and privatised religiosity often to be found in some US expressions of Christianity. So I think you may be making a political point as well as a religious one.
[ 26. February 2006, 08:35: Message edited by: Barnabas62 ]
Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on
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Should have said "references to help our understanding". Sorry
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
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RuthW: quote:
Self-referential systems and "hey, it's just a metaphor, it didn't really happen that way" bug me when we're talking about the Bible. If we're talking about Paradise Lost or 24, I love them. But self-referential systems are self-justifying systems, and while reading lots of the OT stories as extended metaphors, as Freddy suggests, seems really great to me for a while, and a lot of things make a heck of a lot more sense that way, as soon as I realize that logically I have to extend this to the NT, I come to a screeching halt. My faith would quite honestly be at risk if the resurrection stories and the book of Acts were all just metaphors for how the disciples got the idea that Jesus' teachings could live on after his death.
We're still singing from the same hymnsheet. My attitude to this, crudely, is that "narratives are generated", because stuff happens. One of the difficulties that standard liberal* approaches to the stories of the faith run into - and shares with standard conservative approaches - is that this™ either did or didn't happen. For a liberal approach it didn't happen, because it couldn't because it's scientifically impossible. For a conservative one, it did happen because it's in the Bible and God can do anything.
But what we have are stories. Something generated them. We have no access to what that was except through - or rather in - the stories themselves. But here's the postmodern thing. We can't know in principle. And - this is the postmodern mindset - that's OK. What we need to do is to believe what the stories tell us. And what the stories tell us isn't That This Definitely Happened (a la conservative approaches) or That What Happened Was/Meant/MightActuallyHaveBeen This (a la liberal approaches. What the stories tell us is - well, what they tell us. I think that's the meaning of Karl Barth's point that the Bible invites us into a strange alien and different world - and I think that that, in 1919, was a prescient postmodern point. (It's also why, I suspect, John Baillie spent a whole afternoon tryng to persuade Barth that surely Methuselah didn't really live to 969 years old.)
Our faith is contained in the stories, not in abstractions from them. Our faith is fed by receiving them, not by turning them into Enlightenment fact, which is what both conservative and liberal approaches do.
Works for me, anyway.
Lets me say "Christ is risen" and mean it.
Jesus loves me, this I know/For the Bible tells me so.
*I use the term in a technical sense, as a modernist theological mindset that subordinates Biblical narrative to a scientistic world view and, in this area, the assumption that "That sort of stuff doesn't happen, so that can't have happened."
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
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quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
while reading lots of the OT stories as extended metaphors, as Freddy suggests, seems really great to me for a while, and a lot of things make a heck of a lot more sense that way, as soon as I realize that logically I have to extend this to the NT, I come to a screeching halt. My faith would quite honestly be at risk if the resurrection stories and the book of Acts were all just metaphors for how the disciples got the idea that Jesus' teachings could live on after his death.
I'm in agreement about the resurrection stories.
But don't misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting that the OT stories are in any way untrue. They weren't just a written metaphor, they were a true life metaphor. As I understand, it these things, miracles and all, had to actually happen in order to pre-figure Christ.
And the metaphor does not need to extend into the NT. The life of Christ is the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets. He made the OT meataphor real. So the two Testaments are parallel. While Jesus certainly did symbolic things, and told metaphoric stories, He taught the truth at a much higher and clearer level than was possible before.
The point is that Jesus came to bear witness to the truth, and so to overcome the power of darkness in this world, setting us free of its power so that we can choose to believe in and obey Him. The Old Testament depicted this as a struggle for territory against wicked nations, complete with setbacks, but with the repeating promise of future victory and glory. Jesus had similar struggles and the apparent setback of the crucifixion. But He rose again and promised a future return followed by everlasting peace.
All of this has to do with reforming the world, and bringing peace to the human race - a process that will take a long time to complete. Jack Bauer will hopefully bring something similar to 24, but it may take several more seasons.
Posted by Moo (# 107) on
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The Old Testament is God's word filtered through the understanding of very imperfect human beings. Everyone who has a story to tell tells it as they see it. By our standards their viewpoint was distorted, but it's very interesting that even while they slaughtered babies, they still believed in a God of justice. They weren't amoral; they simply had a lot to learn about justice. They loved God and said things like, "Taste and see, that the Lord is good."
quote:
Originally posted by Freddy
David therefore has to be a hero, even though, if you really examine what he does, he is anything but.
I disagree with you on this. I was once part of a Bible study that read all the passages about David to see why he was so special.
That is tangential to this thread, so I will start a new thread when I get back from church.
Moo
Posted by Calvin Beedle (# 508) on
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Hello, I'm new here so please bare with my inexperience. I also apologise for raising more questions than I attempt to answer.
1st. Earlier Ruth said:
"My faith would quite honestly be at risk if the resurrection stories and the book of Acts were all just metaphors for how the disciples got the idea that Jesus' teachings could live on after his death".
I understand this but would ask why we seem to be able to view the O.T as metaphorical, whatever we may mean by that, but are much less happy to do this with the N.T. Is there really anything qualitatively different about N.T scripture? It still contains some disturbing ideas that many of us struggle with and it's still a record written and formalised as scripture by people. Much like the O.T.
2nd. Rowan Williams talks about not seeing the past as "the present in fancy dress". It's not surprising to find weird ideas in any ancient literature and both conservative and liberal Christians have been guilty of missing the strangeness of scripture in order to make it more accessible. Sometimes we have to admit that we simply don't understand how some parts of scripture can function today without radically changing their meaning to suit. This doesn’t mean ditching the parts we don’t like, but being fair with ourselves and not getting too hung up.
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
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Hi, CB - welcome! Good to have on board a person of taste, who starts off in Kerygmania. No doubt a host will soon etc. etc., yadda yadda - it is their place to do the official welcome thing, and we must fulfil all righteousness!
Interesting post, too. I'll get back to you later, when I get back in.
Posted by LutheranChik (# 9826) on
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Ruth, I went through much the same thought process reading the OT for my lay ministry training (very analogous to EFM, from what I've heard from my 'Piskie friends). Getting through the Pentateuch was rough sledding for me because I kept thinking, "I really dislike this Yahweh maniac."
What was interesting to me was taking a short online class on Torah/Talmud/Mishnah with a rabbi (a female lesbian rabbi no less) who identified herself as Conservative at heart if Reform on paper. She acknowledged a lot of the really difficult passages in these texts...but the way Jews on the Conservative-Reform end of the continuum do Torah is very loose and fluid and intuitive, and they don't seem to obsess over these incongruous, vicious images of God that we do...for one thing they don't sign onto the same truth-vs.-factuality false dichotomy that many Christians labor under, but...I can't even really describe this, it's such a different, non-Western way of thinking, but...she got me to a point where I wasn't hating the texts and the images of God in them anymore.
Posted by Rossweisse (# 2349) on
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A great OP, Ruth. Thank you for presenting an interesting concept so well; I hadn't thought of it in that way.
![[Overused]](graemlins/notworthy.gif)
I find it helpful to remember, while I'm trying to digest the Israelite viewpoint on slaughtering their neighbors with Yahweh's blessing, that -- as you know -- an awful lot of the icky stuff recorded in the OT didn't really happen. There is no archeological evidence for the supposed destruction of all those cities when the Israelites were moving in. So this is projection about how they WISHED it had gone. (I find that disturbing, too, but in a different way: at least God didn't really bless all that infanticide and whatnot.)
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Calvin Beedle:
I understand this but would ask why we seem to be able to view the O.T as metaphorical, whatever we may mean by that, but are much less happy to do this with the N.T. Is there really anything qualitatively different about N.T scripture? It still contains some disturbing ideas that many of us struggle with and it's still a record written and formalised as scripture by people. Much like the O.T.
Welcome, Calvin Beedle. I see what you mean. I guess there are a lot of the same types of stories, such as Jesus' parables of people being destroyed because they wouldn't come to a wedding feast.
Most of the New Testament, though, in my opinion, is qualitatively much different than the OT. Jesus' qualifications and explanations of Old Testament laws reveal a much more humane and compassionate ideal than that presented in the Law and the Prophets. Similarly, the idea of God is strikingly different. At least most people seem to think so.
Of course, the Apocalypse are something else again.
Posted by Cheesy* (# 3330) on
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If I'm understanding the thought process correctly, I was thinking the same kind of thing whilst reading LOTR. There are quite a lot of bad things that go on - but it is ok cos the Orcs et al. are horribly deformed, smelly, and so on.
And in the context of a fast-moving narrative story of good vs evil, elf vs orc, I think the bible stands up. At least it did when I was 13 and reading LOTR and the OT side-by-side.
On the other hand, you get somewhat bogged down if you try to interpret and extrapolate from particular instances into life situations. But then I'm guessing you probably would if you tried to do the same with LOTR.
A few years back I was involved in a notorious series of bible studies looking at OT characters and situations. Things boiled for a while until we hit Ruth. Things became completely unhinged when we tried to discuss what it meant for Ruth to lie at the feet of Boaz. The idea that it could be a euphamism for Ruth sexually 'throwing' herself at the potential suitor was more than some could take. It is very easy to see what we want to see and become completely immune to what the text is actually saying.
Soon after, I studied the same passage from a different perspective (ie who was the 'Goliath' in my life, what kind of 'Ruth' risks was I prepared to take, etc) which were much more helpful.
I guess I'm saying that I very irregularly read these stories, and am a bit concerned about the way they are taught to my children.
C
Posted by Calvin Beedle (# 508) on
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Hi Freddy,
I agree with you on that but perhaps I wasn't clear enough. What I was getting at was the nature of Scripture itself which obviously has a bearing on how we read certain parts. I can’t really see why the N.T is different as Scripture. I wonder if the main reason we’re more reluctant to question say, the gospels, is because it cuts much nearer the heart of the Christian faith story. It’s also easier to talk about loving enemies (note, I said talk, not actually do it) than it is to discuss slaughtering entire nations. But I think I’m going down the Dead Horses road a bit here so I think I’ll leave it there.
Also, while I’m here,
Good point Cheesy. I remember leading a small church group for people with learning difficulties and some of the material was appalling. I still don’t know how we got from the plagues of Egypt to Jesus loves you all in one easy ten minute session.
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
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I think I have a similar set of concerns to the OP. Post-modernism is all very well, but I think the old questions are still important, as are the new ones that postmodernism teaches us (e.g. whose interest is this story in?).
I think one thing to think about is that (providentially?) the separate books of the Bible are clearly by different authors. Therefore, they all come with this fact about them attached. Just as we realise that 'there is no God' in the Psalms is spoken by the fool - not God - so we can realise that 'blessed will he be who dashes your children against a rock' is spoken by a captive in Babylon - not God - and so when we learn from the Deuteronomist we do so factoring in the fact that it's by the Deuteronomist. (I find that consideration helpful in understanding Psalm 137 for instance.)
Samson and David are heroes in some sense. But they're also pretty flawed characters and I think the Deuteronomist agrees. The Deuteronomist's storytelling instincts sometimes override his? didactic instincts. (Compare Chronicles.)
I think we need both readings: with the grain and against, and then put them in dialogue with each other. Not a brilliant insight I know.
Dafyd
Posted by Dave Marshall (# 7533) on
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quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
I feel stuck between knowing that the Biblical accounts have been re-written, edited and re-edited, fictionalized, and mythologized (in the good sense -- I think myths carry the deepest truths we know) and wanting something in all of that to be real.
I don't doubt there's reality in the Bible stories, but not the direct correlation with historical fact. Is this what you want to be there?
It seems to me it's belief in this kind of correlation that renders faith fragile, because it relies on the rightness of other people's interpretation of history. Letting go of that, shifting the focus onto the stories themselves, frees up the possiblility of connecting with the reality of the human experience behind them undiluted by the need to decide "if this really happened".
Of course this raises the question of why go with the Bible, and Christianity in general, rather than some other inspirational book or religion. I'm still working on this, but I think it only comes up short if we're looking for something with which to refute all the alternatives.
Posted by Callan (# 525) on
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Originally posted by RuthW:
quote:
But I keep feeling like I'd be learning a whole lot of really nasty things as well, possibly without even noticing, if I persisted in going along with the narrative -- starting with a belief in the existence of "good guys," i.e., chosen people, something that is vital to the Biblical narrative, but that in real life seems like the basis for things like the horrible American triumphalism espoused by some Christians.
I suppose a near equivalent would be accounts of history which is seen as progress, or at least where one side are definitely the good guys. A democrat writing about the French Revolution, for example, would deplore what happened to the poor old Princess de Lamballe, the Terror and the rise of Bonaparte whilst feeling confident that, nonetheless, the right side won the Battle of Valmy. Nowadays, this is deeply unfashionable, and the dominant view is what Neal Ascherson once referred to as the Amnesty International school of history, whereby the historian laments the pain and suffering which history deals out impartially.
Of course, the AI school of history has a point (to put it midly) and we should be asking awkward questions about the morality of Joshua's campaining tactics, once in a while, but there ought still to be a role for the progressive school of history. When, this Sunday, we remembered Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration with Moses and Elijah, instead of being embarassed by the company He was keeping we should be grateful that Moses carried off his slave revolt successfully and that Elijah stood up to Ahaz and Jezebel and the Prophets of Baal. Without those victories we would not be able to indulge in the Amnesty International school of history. "I come not to abolish the Law but to fulfil it..."
Posted by Skinhead (# 10658) on
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Hi All, I must thank you for such a profound discussion, I hope I can add to it a little. RuthW, it seems to me that you described the central issue when you wrote about Biblical accounts having been re-written, fictionalized and mythologized. I'd like to suggest that the further back we go in history, the greater is the bardic influence of oral repetition, the bard modifying the tale along the way to hone various points, or to interact with the audience. By the time we get to the NT period, the bardic influence is giving way to a more historical approach, as typified by Luke. As traditions and techniques of copying manuscripts have developed, it has become harder to change the record. However, even in our modern world, politicians and others still use the power of myth - think of Che Guevara, for example. Modern myths are developed somewhat more cynically, using selective or embellished reporting and re-telling. So maybe when we read the Bible we need to be aware of the different writers and their contexts, as Dafyd suggested; and also see each story as having a different level of mythologization. I do believe, however, that the Bible is an incredibly rich spititual resource.
One issue that worries me is that we may transpose the partisanship of the Israelites into our Christianity. So, in the OT, the narrative assumes that Israel are the good guys and the Canaanites are the enemy. And maybe some Christians are in danger of assuming that once they Admit, Believe and Confess (and maybe get baptized!) they have become Christians, are OK, they're on God's side. You know, a bit like when the pastor tells you at the end of the service to go out into all the world and share your Christian joy!
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Rossweisse:
I find it helpful to remember, while I'm trying to digest the Israelite viewpoint on slaughtering their neighbors with Yahweh's blessing, that -- as you know -- an awful lot of the icky stuff recorded in the OT didn't really happen. There is no archeological evidence for the supposed destruction of all those cities when the Israelites were moving in. So this is projection about how they WISHED it had gone. (I find that disturbing, too, but in a different way: at least God didn't really bless all that infanticide and whatnot.)
quote:
Originally posted by Dave Marshall:
I don't doubt there's reality in the Bible stories, but not the direct correlation with historical fact. Is this what you want to be there?
I know it didn't all happen the way it's told in the Bible, and that doesn't bother me in the least. I used to be an English professor; reading the Bible the way I read literature comes quite naturally. It's the stuff that is implied by the way the story is told that bothers me.
quote:
Originally posted by Skinhead:
One issue that worries me is that we may transpose the partisanship of the Israelites into our Christianity. So, in the OT, the narrative assumes that Israel are the good guys and the Canaanites are the enemy.
Exactly. When reading the Deuteronomist history, I have to accept the narrative conventions of a foundational epic tale in order to keep from hurling the book out the window. But with those conventions comes the ideology of good guys vs. bad guys, one I find extremely troubling. I don't see how what we're supposed to be learning about God from the Deuteronomists -- God's faithfulness, for instance -- can be separated from the good guys vs. bad guys thing. God is faithful to his people -- and everyone else gets screwed. God's spirit is with David -- and Saul spends the end of his life in torment and madness.
Posted by Mousethief (# 953) on
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You still seem to be reading it as if God had written it, RuthW, rather than a very partisan Israelite.
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
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No, I'm not. What I'm trying to figure out is whether what we might learn about God from the text can be separated from the partisanship. Given how intertwined they are in the narrative, I don't see how. Because the narrative is so partisan, I find it hard to trust it to tell me anything useful or true about God.
Posted by Mousethief (# 953) on
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quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
No, I'm not. What I'm trying to figure out is whether what we might learn about God from the text can be separated from the partisanship. Given how intertwined they are in the narrative, I don't see how. Because the narrative is so partisan, I find it hard to trust it to tell me anything useful or true about God.
Well, consider a newsmagazine with a known editorial slant. You can expect it to color everything in a certain way, and perhaps if the slant is slanty enough, you can't trust that anything that is printed in it is in fact historically accurate. But you can still learn a lot from it about the people who wrote it, and what they thought about the things that happened, can't you?
Maybe you can't trust 1 Kings to be an accurate history, but you can trust it to be, in spite of itself, a chronicle of what the author(s) and editor(s) wanted to say about what happened, which tells you something about them.
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
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RuthW: quote:
What I'm trying to figure out is whether what we might learn about God from the text can be separated from the partisanship
Surely the answer to this can only be; "Yes, of course it can - but we have to do the separating." The reading of Biblical texts as literature is only one tranche of what we're expected to do. There's also the naive reading of the texts - and I suspect that the conflicts you are speaking of are generated between the naive and the literary readings, which are mutually deconstructive - and the theological application of these texts, which is governed by the particular tradition you stand in, yourself, now. This, it seems to me, is quite analogous to the identification of the multiple "senses" of Scripture which form the ways in which it has been read since antiquity - Aquinas's literal, spiritual, analogical and anagogical, for instance. Or dear old Origen. These schemata aren't just arbitary - they arise at the interface of Brain, Bible, Faith and Real World. Seems to me that this thread is evidence that Christians still need something like this, and tend to produce it spontaneously.
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Mousethief:
Well, consider a newsmagazine with a known editorial slant. You can expect it to color everything in a certain way, and perhaps if the slant is slanty enough, you can't trust that anything that is printed in it is in fact historically accurate. But you can still learn a lot from it about the people who wrote it, and what they thought about the things that happened, can't you?
Maybe you can't trust 1 Kings to be an accurate history, but you can trust it to be, in spite of itself, a chronicle of what the author(s) and editor(s) wanted to say about what happened, which tells you something about them.
Sure, you can learn a lot about the people who wrote it. But I'm honestly not all that interested in the people on their own. I'm interested in learning about God, and don't know why I should trust Thing One these people say about God.
psyduck: so how would you separate what the Deuteronomist history says about God from its partisanship, and what do you learn about God when you do that?
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
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quote:
Originally posted by psyduck:
The reading of Biblical texts as literature is only one tranche of what we're expected to do. There's also the naive reading of the texts - and I suspect that the conflicts you are speaking of are generated between the naive and the literary readings, which are mutually deconstructive...
Actually, come to think of it, my presumably naive reading of the text at about 14 and my current conscious attempt to read the narrative as narrative have left me with the same impression: Israel's enemies get the short end of the stick because God is a bastard.
Posted by Mousethief (# 953) on
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Maybe what you can learn is that God puts up with a lot from very imperfect people? Not saying I have all the answers, just trying to help.
Posted by Skinhead (# 10658) on
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quote:
Actually, come to think of it, my presumably naive reading of the text at about 14 and my current conscious attempt to read the narrative as narrative have left me with the same impression: Israel's enemies get the short end of the stick because God is a bastard.
Ouch, RuthW. Actually, it isn't fair to come to such a conclusion, given that we've already accepted that the Biblical perspective is hopelessly biased towards that of a bunch of Bronze age tribesmen.
Mind you, I'm sure most of us have struggled with this issue, and you've brought it to the fore beautifully through the "24" analogy. In fact, why watch "24", even accepting that it is blatant fiction? The obvious reason is that it gives us a nice feeling. No doubt Psyduck could explain why nice people get a kick out of identifying with a desperado like Jack Bauer. Another reason for watching the series is that you have something in common with other devotees, so it enhances community. It could even be used to illustrate a point in a discussion or sermon, so it enhances communication. On the negative side, I personally find some of the more "shocking" bits, like when the bloke was interrogated using a defibrillator in an earlier series, to be gratuitous and off-putting. But at least "24" comes with a clearly implied "don't try this at home" label, whereas the Bible is often claimed to be the ultimate moral authority, the penalty for disobedience being eternal torment.
To me, the Bible is still precious as it helps us to learn about God from a historical perspective . Some of those insights still apply today, although one has to be discerningly selective about what one takes on board. Most Christians, even Evangelicals, are conveniently selective about stuff from the NT as well - e.g. Paul's unambiguous instructions re women speaking or wearing headgear in Church.
So, can we learn anything new from the Bible? I believe so - I think we do recognize something that's true. As a falling fundamentalist, I used to call it the witness of the Spirit.
The Bible also provides a common narrative for people of Judaeo-Christian background, providing a medium for community and communication.
Psyduck, what do you think about the Bible being a repository of archetypes, which enables us to relate more effectively with our unconscious? - e.g. Samson the dumb hulk, Solomon the wise, Peter the hothead, etc.
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
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RuthW: quote:
Actually, come to think of it, my presumably naive reading of the text at about 14 and my current conscious attempt to read the narrative as narrative have left me with the same impression: Israel's enemies get the short end of the stick because God is a bastard.
I presume that it's clear that I'm not using "naive" as a pejorative term. I think that it's important to grasp that God really is portrayed in some of these texts as a bastard. The "naive reading" is presumably situated where we are - i.e. at the end of 2,000 years of Christian tradition (including the venerable Christian tradition of antisemitism, ironically fuelled by some of the more bastardy bits of the OT - and supremely ironically by the Passion Narrative.) The naive reading is just how it strikes us.
Of course, the point is also that we read these things in terms of an "intertextuality" which includes everything else we've ever read, and a whole lot of stuff we've never read mediated to us by all the stuff we have.
And some of this stuff actually gets in the way of the "naive reading". It's highly non-naive to read the Joshuan genocide texts and think "That's cool! It's God telling them to, after all..." And highly perspectival. As is everything. But unless we can hold together the tension, and contradiction, between different levels of reading, so that even (or especially) when we're "spiritualizing" these stories into God's help enabling us to overcome anything, we don't lose sight of the fact that there are genocidal underpinnings here. But also that this isn't Mein Kapf. But also, that after Auschwitz, there are things here that we can never afford to see the same way again.
I must say that, re-reading the OP, I find myself agreeing with the posters who seem to feel that you want things either to be different, or somehow to be made different, RuthW. I'm not entirely clear how.
Posted by Moo (# 107) on
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quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
When reading the Deuteronomist history, I have to accept the narrative conventions of a foundational epic tale in order to keep from hurling the book out the window. But with those conventions comes the ideology of good guys vs. bad guys, one I find extremely troubling. I don't see how what we're supposed to be learning about God from the Deuteronomists -- God's faithfulness, for instance -- can be separated from the good guys vs. bad guys thing. God is faithful to his people -- and everyone else gets screwed. God's spirit is with David -- and Saul spends the end of his life in torment and madness.
I think something I posted on the David thread is relevant here. quote:
I think that among the earliest OT characters loving God covered a multitude of sins. I've already mentioned Abraham. Jacob was much worse. Yet God was willing to overlook a great deal in these men who loved him.
Perhaps the idea was to get the Israelites familiar with God before teaching them ethics.
This idea has occurred to me quite recently, and I'm still thinking it through.
God wanted the Israelites to be his people and live as he wanted them to. Since what he wanted was very different from the culture of the times, he had to teach them step-by-step. Theology is the why of ethics, so that's where God began.
Those of you who have cared for small children know that there is a limit to how much you can teach them at one time. You have to find out where they are and then ask them to take one step away from that, then another.
When our daughters were very small, they did not want to share their toys. We told them, "If you don't want to share your toys you don't have to, but if you don't let her play with your toys, you may not play with hers." This is not a statement of ethics; it is a crass bargain. The only good thing about it is that it makes perfect sense to a two-year-old.
I think that God dealt with the early Israelites in the way that we dealt with our children. Then the Israelites wrote about their understanding of God's dealing with them.
We have two filters here. One is God's dealing with one thing at a time. The other is the Israelites defective reporting of events.
Moo
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Psyduck:
I must say that, re-reading the OP, I find myself agreeing with the posters who seem to feel that you want things either to be different, or somehow to be made different, RuthW. I'm not entirely clear how.
I'm trying to figure out why I shouldn't be a Marcionite.
I know it has to be read in historical context, I know it takes a highly partisan viewpoint, I know they were bronze age people, I know it's far more theology than history, and I know it's their highly colored conception of God we're getting. Let's say for the sake of argument that it's entirely fiction; no matter how you read it, I think the text yields up a very ugly God. I don't see that different levels of reading give us things we have to hold in tension. No matter which way I turn this thing, it seems to come up wrong.
I went back to Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament last night; he has a very nice little chapter in the middle of the book about holding Israel's positive testimony about God's "faithful sovereignty and sovereign fidelity" in tension with the negativity expressed by things like Psalm 22 and the wisdom literature. The thing is, the Deuteronomist history is supposed to be putting forward the positive testimony about God's sovereignty and fidelity -- and sure, God is sovereign and mostly faithful to his people (except not to folks like Saul), but how is this a good thing when so much crap inevitably and inseparably comes along with it?
quote:
Originally posted by Skinhead:
quote:
Actually, come to think of it, my presumably naive reading of the text at about 14 and my current conscious attempt to read the narrative as narrative have left me with the same impression: Israel's enemies get the short end of the stick because God is a bastard.
Ouch, RuthW. Actually, it isn't fair to come to such a conclusion, given that we've already accepted that the Biblical perspective is hopelessly biased towards that of a bunch of Bronze age tribesmen.
As far as I can see, the bias of the Biblical perspective can't be separated from what it's trying to tell us about God, so this is completely fair.
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
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Skinhead - I hadn't noticed this bit of your post. until now: quote:
Psyduck, what do you think about the Bible being a repository of archetypes, which enables us to relate more effectively with our unconscious? - e.g. Samson the dumb hulk, Solomon the wise, Peter the hothead, etc.
It's maybe a bit Jungian for me, but I can imagine it producing some fascinating readings in the right hands.
RuthW: quote:
no matter how you read it, I think the text yields up a very ugly God.
This seems to be a move on from, and a rejection of, the insight you offer in the OP. I'm not quite sure how your position now pans out.
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Psyduck:
RuthW: quote:
no matter how you read it, I think the text yields up a very ugly God.
This seems to be a move on from, and a rejection of, the insight you offer in the OP. I'm not quite sure how your position now pans out.
Well, I thought I was at least questioning the insight of the OP in the OP:
quote:
... I keep feeling like I'd be learning a whole lot of really nasty things as well, possibly without even noticing, if I persisted in going along with the narrative....
I don't have a position worked out. I'm trying to figure something out. And resist my impulse to be a Marcionite. And make it through the whole first year of EFM.
I'm still wondering how you would separate what the Deuteronomist history says about God from its partisanship, because I haven't figure out a way to do that. I keep turning this over in my head, and I keep coming up with this: The Deuteronomist history is very clear on the point that God is faithful to his people, but inevitably tagging along with that point is the fact that it sucks to be you if you're not one of God's people. It sucks to be you if you're not on Jack Bauer's side in the universe of 24, but it doesn't matter, because it's fiction. The OT is telling us something that on some level is supposed to be true -- not historical fact, but real truth. Most great literature tells us something true about people, or "the human condition" if you like that phrase. The Bible is great literature that purports to tell us something true about God.
Right now I think that the Jack Bauer thing -- accepting Israel as the heroic center of the Deuteronomist history -- works really well if the Bible is just literature about people. But it's attempting something which most literature that depends on a strong heroic center (most epic poetry, for example) doesn't try to do -- it's trying to tell us something about God. Beowulf, The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Gilgamesh, etc, use the hero to tell us about humanity. There are gods in some of these stories, but they're just characters with special powers and not the point of the story. And there's no God in 24! But where Beowulf is the hero of that epic because he is the greatest warrior, and we just accept that as cultural convention, there's a whole nother thing going in the Bible when David, for instance, is the hero, because God chooses him, just as God chooses the whole people of Israel. Beowulf is the hero because he just is; he has the requisite skills and exploits a hero of his day is supposed to have, and we don't say, gee, maybe the bard ought to be the hero, or one of the women who don't get to do much besides pass the mead around. Similarly, Jack Bauer is the hero of 24 because he just is; he's going to save the country (again) with little more than his wits, nifty technology, and his hand-to-hand combat skills. And we can learn a lot about that culture and our own from studying the fictional heroes. But Israel and its patriarchs, leaders and representatives are heroic not simply because the narrative establishes them as such, and certainly not because they have the right skills and exploits, but because God said so. So accepting the narrative convention of the hero in the Bible is fundamentally different from accepting it in other narratives. And accepting that the Hollywood Russians led by Julian Sands in 24 are Bad Guys Who Must Be Killed because the narrative says so is fundamentally different from accepting that the Philistines are Bad Guys because the narrative says God says so.
Or at least, that's what I think tonight.
Posted by Lyda*Rose (# 4544) on
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Ruth, I might suggest you read The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels by Thomas Cahill. I found it very enlightening in how the Judeo tradition moved step by step toward a very revolutionary theological position. I've been told that Cahill isn't necessarily the best historian, pushing and pulling to make his case a bit. But I think he does help keep in perspective primitive Judaism and its maturing sense of who God is and what he wants. The early writers and storytellers who were they were and understood what they understood.
Reading the book gave me a sense of how far they were on the path from the Middle-Eastern religious norm even at the point Abram made his leap of faith. The early Hebrews knew their God was great, the greatest god, faithful, had a plan for them that took them beyond mere revolving cycles of time. All true. But did they really need to consider other peoples chaff to be mowed down in their path? We don't think so, but their world was very different than ours. They couldn't conceive of a God who was for them yet would not humble their enemies, enemies who could well annihilate them. They couldn't see around that corner. But they could see a God worthy of trust and worship, and not one based on manmade images but an ineffable one. They got some things quite right.
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
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Ruth W: quote:
The OT is telling us something that on some level is supposed to be true -- not historical fact, but real truth. Most great literature tells us something true about people, or "the human condition" if you like that phrase. The Bible is great literature that purports to tell us something true about God.
I think this is the problem. Firstly, I have the same problems with "The OT" as I do with "The Bible". "The OT" is a collection of Scriptures, yes organically interlinked in all sorts of ways, but highly polyvocal. It isn't one voice saying one thing.
Secondly, if we confine ourselves to the Deuteronomistic History, I don't see that it's purporting to "tell us something true about God" in the sense of offering an insight into God's nature. The Book of Judges, for instance, clearly suggests that when things were OK, Israel slipped into defection from God. Things then got bad, God handed them over to the power of their surrounding enemies, and they got trashed. At this point, they turned back to God, who raised up a judge to lead them against said enemies and re-establish them. Surely this is a theory of charismatic leadership in the technical sense of the recognition by the confederate communities of the tribes that one person had the gifts to lead them in the emergency in which they found themselves, and the re-operationalizing of a religious-political framework which allowed them to be led together by one person authorized by their shared identity. Which was a religious identity. It's not in the first place about God, it's about what kind of society they were. Martin Noth argued that they were an "amphictyony", a confederation of twelve tribes organized round a cultic focus, a shrine or whatnot, like those found in ancient Greece. The focus of the Israelite "amphictyony" was the Ark of YHWH. You don't have to buy into Noth's theory to see the potential for understanding early Israel as a grouping of semi-nomadic people for whom religion,. politics and sociology were all the same thing. The historical traditions these arrangements generated - more or less successful tribal warfare (they didn't all turn out to fight against Sisera, as the Song of Deborah in Judges 5 makes clear) were subsequently rationalized by someone who came along and applied not the most subtle of theologies to the process - behave and God trashes your enemies, defect and he lets them trash you - to this part of the Deuteronomistic History. Later on in the work, we get kings of Israel and Judah assessed by equally politico-theological criteria.
When you talk about "not historical fact, but real truth" you're making a distinction that doesn't apply to this material, or properly, I suspect to the OT as a whole - with the possible exception of the Shema. And maybe Ecclesiastes - but don't that say it all! I thought of including the Psalms, but they are different again. The prophets certainly present God's demands, and these reflect conceptions of God in terms of his expectations. But they, too, are historicized and politicized. Everything else is conditioned by Israel's historical experience, understood (with varying degrees of subtlety) as the experience of being YHWH's people.
Surely it's as misplaced to be disappointed that God is professed by tribes committing genocide in the OT as it is to believe that God, in the OT, validates certain genocides. What we get, is where Israel went. One thing that classical Christianity and Judaism seem to be completely agreed on is that you can't de-historicize the OT. It's a trace, multiple traces, of a community's experience. It's not about what God is like, as much as it is about a people's identity and history being bound up with YHWH. And how they fall apart when they defect, however much they suffer when they don't.
Posted by Janine (# 3337) on
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Ruth said: quote:
... it sucks to be you if you're not one of God's people... Israel and its patriarchs, leaders and representatives are heroic not simply because the narrative establishes them as such, and certainly not because they have the right skills and exploits, but because God said so...
Well, yeah. This is hard to take because...?
I guess the whole potter/clay, noble/common concept is useless? The idea that we won't be able to tidily reconcile every factoid and thought and apparent truth about God, with our own inner picture of "fairness" and what/who we think God ought to be --
No such thing as simply accepting that we can't see the whole picture now-right-now because we have finite minds? I mean, without chucking out the concept of a basically true and (*gasp*) actually inspired Bible?
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
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First, many thanks to those bearing with me and reading these monster posts. Many more thanks for those responding -- I very much appreciate your willingness to wrestle with me over this, as it's one of the few ways I learn the really important things.
quote:
Originally posted by Psyduck:
Firstly, I have the same problems with "The OT" as I do with "The Bible". "The OT" is a collection of Scriptures, yes organically interlinked in all sorts of ways, but highly polyvocal. It isn't one voice saying one thing.
Forgive my sloppy writing. I got tired of typing "the Deuteronomist history." I was thinking just last night that the view of narrative I'm applying here is going to break down because it assumes an attempt at a unified whole. I would really like to read some good stuff on oral traditions this summer -- if anyone has suggestions, I'd be grateful.
quote:
Secondly, if we confine ourselves to the Deuteronomistic History, I don't see that it's purporting to "tell us something true about God" in the sense of offering an insight into God's nature.
<big snip>
The historical traditions these arrangements generated - more or less successful tribal warfare (they didn't all turn out to fight against Sisera, as the Song of Deborah in Judges 5 makes clear) were subsequently rationalized by someone who came along and applied not the most subtle of theologies to the process - behave and God trashes your enemies, defect and he lets them trash you - to this part of the Deuteronomistic History. Later on in the work, we get kings of Israel and Judah assessed by equally politico-theological criteria.
No argument from me here. Humor me, though, and tell me why we should read this stuff! I honestly am not all that interested in these people and their simplistic and arguably untrue theology if their experience doesn't have any bearing on my life. I'm not reading the Deuteronomist history for its own sake -- I'm reading it because I'm a Christian, attempting to follow the way of one for whom it was a part of Scripture.
quote:
When you talk about "not historical fact, but real truth" you're making a distinction that doesn't apply to this material, or properly, I suspect to the OT as a whole - with the possible exception of the Shema.
I suspect you're right. Which leads me right back to the question of why we should read this.
quote:
Surely it's as misplaced to be disappointed that God is professed by tribes committing genocide in the OT as it is to believe that God, in the OT, validates certain genocides.
I'm no more disappointed that these people professed God than I am that John Milton (one of my favorite poets, but a sexist bastard) professed God. Milton's sexism has to be understood in historical context, and important points in Paradise Lost depend on understanding that Milton assumes a secondary status for women, but that doesn't make sexism okay. I don't believe that God thinks Milton's sexism is okay, and I don't believe that God actually validates genocide. Paradise Lost and the Deuteronomist history each have a point to make which is to my mind inseparable from certain unacceptable assumptions they make. And I think it taints the points they're making.
I keep reading Milton, though, partly because the poetry is fantastic, and partly because he really is trying to tell us something about his understanding of God ("to justify the ways of God to men"), and that's valuable to me, however flawed his understanding is. I'm looking for a reason to keep reading the Deuteronomist history.
quote:
What we get, is where Israel went. One thing that classical Christianity and Judaism seem to be completely agreed on is that you can't de-historicize the OT. It's a trace, multiple traces, of a community's experience. It's not about what God is like, as much as it is about a people's identity and history being bound up with YHWH. And how they fall apart when they defect, however much they suffer when they don't.
Good for them! Why should the rest of us care? If it doesn't tell us about God, why shouldn't we be Marcionites?
quote:
Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:
But did they really need to consider other peoples chaff to be mowed down in their path? We don't think so, but their world was very different than ours. They couldn't conceive of a God who was for them yet would not humble their enemies, enemies who could well annihilate them. They couldn't see around that corner. But they could see a God worthy of trust and worship, and not one based on manmade images but an ineffable one. They got some things quite right.
So we get to just separate out the right things from the wrong? On what basis? Using what criteria? Admittedly, the line of argument I'm pursuing at the moment will logically let me reject the whole thing on the basis of what I think is right, but that seems more respectful of the narrative than sifting through it looking for the things I think are cool and dumping the rest.
quote:
Originally posted by Janine:
Ruth said: quote:
... it sucks to be you if you're not one of God's people... Israel and its patriarchs, leaders and representatives are heroic not simply because the narrative establishes them as such, and certainly not because they have the right skills and exploits, but because God said so...
Well, yeah. This is hard to take because...?
Because the non-chosen people never had a choice in the matter. In the Deuteronomist history, at least Israel got to decide whether or not it wanted to behave and prosper or misbehave and get its collective ass kicked. Everyone else is doomed from the start.
quote:
No such thing as simply accepting that we can't see the whole picture now-right-now because we have finite minds?
Nope, not for me, at least not "simply" accepting -- I resign myself to this sometimes, but I think there is great danger in this -- it can lead to accepting tremendous injustices. Yes, we only see through a glass darkly now, but we still have to live our lives as best we can, which includes applying our sense of fairness. If we're going to accept that the Philistines are bad guys because God said so, who do we see now as the bad guys designated by God as our acceptable targets for trashing when we're living right in the eyes of the Almighty?
Posted by Luigi (# 4031) on
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Ruth you said quote:
And we can learn a lot about that culture and our own from studying the fictional heroes. But Israel and its patriarchs, leaders and representatives are heroic not simply because the narrative establishes them as such, and certainly not because they have the right skills and exploits, but because God said so. So accepting the narrative convention of the hero in the Bible is fundamentally different from accepting it in other narratives. And accepting that the Hollywood Russians led by Julian Sands in 24 are Bad Guys Who Must Be Killed because the narrative says so is fundamentally different from accepting that the Philistines are Bad Guys because the narrative says God says so.
Now if I understand you right you are asking how can we trust a book that, at times, seems to affirm positions that are thoroughly repugnant. (Or at least they are to me.) Do tell me if this is right.
Because when I started asking that question about 6 years ago - I found the answers given, that were pretty similar to some of the ones given here, to be unconvincing. They smacked of evasion. (I normally agree with Psyduck - but I am not sure whether I do here.)
The only answer that I came across that came close to answering it was when I read Walsh and Middleton's 'Truth is stranger than it used to be.' (Middleton is an ot scholar.)
In it they argued that we should be willing to go against the text. Indeed they set out to demonstrate how 'going against the text' has a biblical pedigree. (You could argue that we would still be avoiding menstruating women like the plague if our tradition hadn't found ways of going against the text.)
Now whilst the idea was clear to me it left me with more questions than it answered. It seemed that I needed a leitmotif that helped me to know when to go against the text.
It took me another 5 years to find that leitmotif.
Will expand on that in the morning if my understanding of you is on the right lines.
Luigi
PS cross posted with Ruth W's post above - will read it now
[ 04. March 2006, 20:40: Message edited by: Luigi ]
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
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Luigi: quote:
It seemed that I needed a leitmotif that helped me to know when to go against the text.
It took me another 5 years to find that leitmotif.
Will expand on that in the morning if my understanding of you is on the right lines.
Talk about a cliffhanger!!! J R Ewing, eat your heart out!! ![[Cool]](cool.gif)
![[Help]](graemlins/help.gif)
Posted by Luigi (# 4031) on
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Psyduck - didn't mean to seem a tease. It was just that I wanted to know if I really understood Ruth's position.
This is the problem as I see it. I was brought up to believe in a revelatory God. Also, ISTM, it matters enormously to God how we live on earth. So why on earth does he reveal himself in such misleading ways? Considering the unstable and potentially violent nature humans have, given half a chance, we will look to justify the most horrific of acts. So to have God apparently justifying genocide - and that is just one example - was enormously problematic to me. I couldn't make the pieces fit.
Walsh and Middleton argue that the redemptive voice in the OT is at times the minority voice but that it never gets totally silenced.
This seemed right to me, but hardly helped me to see how the forward momentuum of the OT worked. Also I was left with Ruth's question, how do I know the redemptive voices from the voices of those who got God totally wrong?
I couldn't make it work until I saw it as the story of mankind extricating itself from sacrificial logic and sacrilised violence. Put simply the reason all these terrible things are in there - the marginalisation of women, the demands for genocide etc - is because the Bible is a truly anthopological book. It shows us, for example, why when humans are given the choice between a God who demands we sacrifice our children and one who abhors such practices, nine times out of ten, humans will choose the God who demands child sacrifice. Consequently, we find human sacrifice was ubiquitous in early human history. It shows us the cancer at the heart of the human condition and its link with ancient (and sometimes not so ancient) religion.
That still leaves some pretty important questions - but does this make sense so far. (My guess is that so far you probably come at things from a fairly similar angle.)
Luigi
PS Walsh and Middleton use Trible's 'Texts of terror' and Brueggemann's thinking quite a bit.
[ 05. March 2006, 16:34: Message edited by: Luigi ]
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
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Luigi: quote:
I couldn't make it work until I saw it as the story of mankind extricating itself from sacrificial logic and sacrilised violence... Walsh and Middleton use Trible's 'Texts of terror' and Brueggemann's thinking quite a bit.
Am I also detecting some subtle notes of Girard in this rich bouquet?
Posted by Luigi (# 4031) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Psyduck:
Luigi: quote:
I couldn't make it work until I saw it as the story of mankind extricating itself from sacrificial logic and sacrilised violence... Walsh and Middleton use Trible's 'Texts of terror' and Brueggemann's thinking quite a bit.
Am I also detecting some subtle notes of Girard in this rich bouquet?
You certainly are - though I do wonder if he allows the logic of his position to fully develop. For me Gil Bailie (an unashamed Girardian) - was the one who made it clear to me exactly how this works.
His position is that all mankind has been prone to sacrificial logic (trying to buy off the Gods) and sacrilised violence - we all have the ability to commit appalling acts of violence, particularly when operating as a group / tribe / mob in an extreme situation - and we then have to justify it. Indeed the lengths we go to justify it is genuinely disturbing. And the first people we have to justify it to, is ourselves. Which leads me to....
Another author who really clarified things for me was Stanley Cohen - who wrote a study of 20th century genocides. (Not a Christian author at all.) As I understand it 'States of Denial' is one of the definitive works on the subject. In it he explores how denial is central to being human and iss essential for even those least involved in the acts of violence. You see Cohen's anthropology and Bailie's anthropology were essentially the same. The difference was that one got their anthropology through reading the pentateuch the other found that the worst 20th century violence mirrored the mindset of the writers of the Torah, in truly alarming ways. Though, of course, that wasn't his intention.
Another way of putting it would be to say that wherever religion is infected by superstition it cannot look at itself and see itself as it really is.
Luigi
[ 05. March 2006, 20:26: Message edited by: Luigi ]
Posted by Luigi (# 4031) on
:
Having said what I have Psyduck, how far apart are we? Indeed do you have any comments to make about what I have written so far?
How do we seek to live a life that pleases God if we have a polyvocal text and have no means of discerning which voices are stating truths and which aren't?
Luigi
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
I suspect we're not too far apart in many ways, Luigi. I find Girard's interpretation of the cross very powerful. It seems to me that the sacrificial nature of the cross actually inheres in its unmasking of the logic of sacralized violence. For me, then, what organizes the cacophony of a chaotically polyvocal text is a perspective derived from the intersection of divine love and a crucifying world in Jesus Christ. I would say that, of course. I'm a Christian.
However, the OT was my principal specialism in my first degree, and I do find myself dissatisfied with a position that seems to involve reading it on a criterion that's (just) outside its compass. It seems to me that there are particularly Jewish ways of organizing the polyphony of the OT, and that they seem to draw on an organizing principle that arises from within the OT which is profoundly reflected in the religious integrity of Judaism.
Old Testament theology has always seemed to me to be a subdiscipline that's never managed to become completely convincing. There's somehow often a forced feel to it. Some more than others. I find Bruggeman a lot more artificial, for instance, than von Rad. The most convincing articulations of what the OT is and how it works I seem to find in critical studies rather than theologies. I suppose that's reflected in my long post above.
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Luigi:
It was just that I wanted to know if I really understood Ruth's position.
Yes, quite clearly, thanks. More later -- it's been a very long day.
Psyduck: My questions from a couple of days ago were serious. If the Deuteronomist history doesn't tell us about God, why do/should we read it?
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
quote:
If the Deuteronomist history doesn't tell us about God, why do/should we read it?
Because it's a complex voice from within Israel talking about Israel's experience of God.
If our idea of revelation is of God talking to us through what people write, with all kinds of guarantees in place that what we're getting is 100% God, then we're going to be disappointed. If our idea of revelation is God doing stuff, and people responding to it - then that's perhaps what we have here.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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Wow. I just spend 20 minutes of my life acquiring sophisticated excuses why I can just pick the nice bits from the OT and ignore the nasty stuff. To that I say: bunk. ![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
First, revelation does ramp up in complexity and sophistication with the cultural progress of the people. But that's with regards to what? It's with regards to human culture. Abraham has not been bested in his faith in God, just because people got a lot less primitive. At basically the earliest time when people had a chance of understanding, Jesus steps in and tells us how the human side of life should be handled. But that's His second commandment, "love thy neighbour". The first commandment of Jesus - "love God" - was understood from the beginning. And so Israel walked righteously - and stumbled one hell of a lot - according to the first commandment "Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One...", whereas the second commandment was in the works because human culture has to reach a certain point to achieve that one.
So the OT is a beautiful corrective to the good-works-righteousness that for strange reasons is particularly popular among Protestants: No, it's the Shema first, and then there's a second commandment like it that concerns humans (since humans are like God). And the OT is also a revealing record of the cultural progress that allowed Jesus to finally say what had to be said about human relations.
Second, God does not have an equity comission watching His every move. As far as we can tell, His usual modus operandi is to pick and choose. And worse, His choices are manifestly "unfair" according to human standards. The "chosen people" were hardly the guys I would have put my money on. If God had asked me, I probably would have opted for some Chinese tribe. And then, picking Jesus of Nazareth, what ever was He thinking? He could have just become the Roman Emperor or at least some well-educated Greek philosopher. And let's face it, picking that Jesus character didn't exactly lead to less slaughter till Christendom was finally established, did it now? It just reversed sides (for a while), with the quintessential Christian being a martyr. As far as I can tell God picks whoever He pleases and if a few of His children are meeting Him rather more quickly than expected as a consequence He seems not overly worried.
So second-guessing God isn't magically possible by looking back in history. We may understand a bit more of God's plan simply because we see a bit more. But that's not to say that we "get" God just because we "get" history. We "get" that the Israelites are bronze age barbarians, but we don't "get" why God would want to have anything to do with them. So what?
Third, if the Israelites had all been pacifist do-gooders, then they would have been exterminated long before NT times. It was kill or be killed, and God did want these people to survive and bring forth Jesus, so practically speaking, they had to kill. They were God's tribe. However, that cannot be used as excuse now for gunning down your neighbour or nuking Iran. Why? Because God has now made His covenant with all humanity in Jesus and through Jesus has told us how we are to deal with each other. Actually the latter follows from the former, we are now all "God's tribe" and already Israel knew that you had to treat your own well.
So history is revealed as an ever expanding covenant of God which finally brings all of humanity into "God's tribe". And so when Jesus steps up and becomes the tribal leader for us all, the rules that always applied within the family, the clan, the tribe, the nation - now apply to all. Does that mean that before all those not in "God's tribe" where second-rate humans? Not in the sense that they won't make it to heaven or God doesn't love them as much or whatever. But they were not the ones who were chosen to bring about the ultimate "Jesus tribe". That's fact. And if they happened to stand in Israel's way (at least while Israel was being faithful for once) then they may well have met their maker quickly.
Fourth, people are amazingly good at hearing what they want to hear. I assume God has encountered that phenomenon rather often, and I doubt that the ancient Israelites were an exception. So how much of the recorded will of God is accurately what God actually said is not clear to me. Is it however impossible that God said anything like "Kill everybody in that city."? I don't think so. Given ancient customs of revenging blood, killing every human being of an enemy tribe may on occasion be the only way of guaranteeing survival. In the end it remains guesswork how much of the OT God's commands is human extrapolation. But God isn't a sweet old man who couldn't hurt a fly. Look at the world, it's full of suffering, pain and death. Where's God now? Why doesn't all this crap just stop and we live happily ever after?
So the OT brings the true awfulness of theodicy into a clear focus for us because it's always easier to project moral outrage at a distance. That, too, is God. A God who at least allows genocide to happen, perhaps even commands it, if that suits Him. And that God is the Good and the Just and the Merciful. Can you grap that? Or is it perhaps getting a bit too ineffable? Feeling slightly stretched? But note how the killing and surpressing slowly changes to being killed and surpressed, until it hits a tipping point in Jesus. What is the NT martyr if not an inverted OT warrior? So perhaps the lesson of the OT genocides is to set us a question: are we ready to suffer and die for God, and perhaps one day not as individuals, but as a nation or even as the world? We are still the chosen people, but perhaps we would actually rather be chosen back in the bronze age when that meant others would bite the dust?
I think the OT is good stuff, including the nasty bits. Now what I can't deal with is the endless lists of who fathered whom and how much money each tribe offered and how many goats were killed and... Urgh. ![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
Posted by Kwesi (# 10274) on
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I agree with Ruth there are great problems with the OT from a Christian perspective. Those of us who are Christians need to remind ourselves that Christ is the measure of all things, including scripture.
There is no single coherent view in the OT of the nature of God. The God of Jonah, for example, is completely different from the God of Judges etc..
The OT is also inconsistent in its specific teaching. Take, for example, the opening verses of Chapter 23 of Deuteronomy where it states that Eunuchs and Moabites 'cannot be included amongst the Lord's people'.
Isaiah 56 v 3,directly contradicts the injunction of Deuteronomy. The explicit inclusion of Eunuchs is later underlined in Acts 8 where the first specifically identified Gentile convert is the Ethiopian Eunuch.
The prohibition against marrying Moabites causes a whole host of problems, doesn't it? Ruth was a Moabite, which means that her great-grandson, David, cannot be regarded as part of God's people. So much for Israel's greatest king! It also causes quite a few problems for the credibility of a Messiah emerging from David's line.
Matthew's explicit inclusion of Ruth in his genealogy of Jesus directly challenges the Law of God as revealed through Moses.
The OT should carry a health warning.
Posted by Luigi (# 4031) on
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Psyduck you said quote:
However, the OT was my principal specialism in my first degree, and I do find myself dissatisfied with a position that seems to involve reading it on a criterion that's (just) outside its compass. It seems to me that there are particularly Jewish ways of organizing the polyphony of the OT, and that they seem to draw on an organizing principle that arises from within the OT which is profoundly reflected in the religious integrity of Judaism.
I am not sure what you mean by 'outside its compass'. I am trying to make the Jews part of human history and prone to human failings rather than some different species to homo sapiens. Some seem to think that Homo Israelius aren't really humans at all - one of the reasons I find Wright so unconvincing. Also I am not clear as to whether you think I am looking at the Jews in ways that don't arise from within the OT? I really would like you to explain this more.
quote:
Old Testament theology has always seemed to me to be a subdiscipline that's never managed to become completely convincing. There's somehow often a forced feel to it. Some more than others. I find Bruggeman a lot more artificial, for instance, than von Rad. The most convincing articulations of what the OT is and how it works I seem to find in critical studies rather than theologies. I suppose that's reflected in my long post above.
Brueggemann was the beginning of my journey, and I certainly don't find all his reasoning convincing now. Von Rad I am impressed by - I'd be a fool not to be - but to be honest I don't feel I have read enough of him.
Whilst it is probably clear that I have dropped the more common understanding of the OT being a book in which God reveals himself, I do believe the OT is - quite possibly - uniquely revelatory. I haven't read enough ancient anthropology to make a more confident claim.
Finally, I still don't really get your position on the OT that is being articulated in your reply to Ruth - is the OT there so that we can while away the time in some sort of masturbatory intellectual exercise or are we meant to glean something from it? My guess is that you believe that we can glean something from it that is more than "isn't it wonderful to read a polyvocal text and we can then take whatever we like from it" - but I still can't tell what. Hopefully this doesn't come across to provocatively because I genuinely would like to know more.
Ingo - anyone who has more of a problem with lists than with genocide is someone who a) I hope never comes close to anyone I care for and b) our understanding of life, love and language exist on different planets and probably make dialogue impossible. You probably tick virtually all Cohen's boxes on why humans find it so easy to indulge in genocide AND / OR justify it. Good old Hitler, just making the day that the Jews meet their maker that bit closer! Eh?
Ruth - still interested in your thoughts
Luigi
[ 08. March 2006, 21:42: Message edited by: Luigi ]
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Luigi:
Ingo - anyone who has more of a problem with lists than with genocide is someone who a) I hope never comes close to anyone I care for and b) our understanding of life, love and language exist on different planets and probably make dialogue impossible. You probably tick virtually all Cohen's boxes on why humans find it so easy to indulge in genocide AND / OR justify it. Good old Hitler, just making the day that the Jews meet their maker that bit closer! Eh?
That's an entirely unfair and superficial summary of just one aspect of what I wrote taken out of its context. The suggestion of your last sentence was indeed explicitly argued against, rather than supported, by me. I would agree though that your attitude doesn't bode well for a future dialogue between us. ![[Disappointed]](graemlins/disappointed.gif)
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
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quote:
I am not sure what you mean by 'outside its compass'.
OK - I meant in the first place chronological compass. The New Testament revelation doesn't overlap with the Old, and therefore in some sense it will always be necessary for Christian readings of the OT to posit it's "pointing forward to" Jesus Christ. The only exceptions are those - essentially untheological - literalisms that see the "Bible" as a monad, and subordinate the revelation of God in Christ to "Scripture" read as a monovocal, undifferentiated, Qur'an-like authority.
However, to read the OT this way is always to risk subordinating it to the Christian revelation in such a way that it becoems merely preparatory to Christ, and only to hear its distinctive voices through Christian filters - or even as Christian transcripts. That's what I mean by subordinating it to something "outside its compass". Eichrodt says that it's all very well to read Jesus Christ as the fulfilment of the OT, but only if we bear in mind that he is a very surprising and non-obvious fulfilment. "Reading against the text" is a very important strategy, but it surely means that we read against one text, on the basis of another - or probably many others. If, however, we pre-privilege one text - say the Gospel of Christ - then we're risking modifying, if not silencing, other voices at the outset.
For me, that means that we have to read the OT scriptures phenomenologically - asking what confronts us when we read this text - and critically - which is where we ask how this text fits into, but also challenges, our understanding of other texts, before we integrate them into a Christian, scriptural understanding. Maybe this is clearer if, when you say
quote:
I do believe the OT is - quite possibly - uniquely revelatory.
I think the OT is a collection of texts which are consistently revelatory. And I think that sacral violence, but also henotheism-into-monotheism and the Law, are among the binding themes.
The unity of the OT arises, I think, from the fact that it implies a community. That might seem an odd way of putting it, rather, say, than "arises from" a community. But it's more true to the story of OT scholarship which reconstructs the community out of its scriptures, and not vice versa. The fact that the OT is a corpus is important here.
quote:
My guess is that you believe that we can glean something from it that is more than "isn't it wonderful to read a polyvocal text and we can then take whatever we like from it" - but I still can't tell what. Hopefully this doesn't come across to provocatively because I genuinely would like to know more.
Not provocative at all. Very pertinent. For me, the community dimension is crucial. The OT speaks the voices of an ancient comunity of faith. I certainly don't believe that we can "take what we like" from the OT - rather that because our Christian community - ecclesia, church - understands itself as confronted by its Scripture - and in this sense the OT certainly is our Scripture, as well as Jewish Scripture - it understands itself as hailed by voices which speak to it in many different ways about God - and do so now, for us, in the enlarged context of Jesus Christ as emerging from the history of this community and its interaction with God.
That's the level on which we should expect to "get something out of" the OT. From its context in our community.
If we expect to "get something out of" the OT "as a book" - well, it seems to me that we can get all sorts of stuff, historical, ethnological, etc. etc. But that's not where the reeligious meaning of the OT confronts us.
Am I splitting apart the religious and the literary/scholarly meanings of the OT? I suppose I am. But then, I belong to a tradition - mainstrem Protestant - that expilicitly brings the two back together by the application of scholarship to enable the community to attend more faithfully to what the different voices of Scripture (inc. the OT) are saying, in their particularity and in the many contexts that apply to them - so that these voices confront us. (That's how it's not a matter of "reading what we like into them".)
This is what my community does to retrieve the religuious meaning of Scripture, and it's quite different to what other traditions do.
But essentially, for me, like the NT, the OT articulates its religious meaning for me in the context of the community - even when I'm reading it on my own.
Brief exapmle. The C of S badge is the Burning Bush. That operationalizes the experience of the Exodus community as "our" experience - initially in the seventeenth century "killing times", but also now, in postmodernity. It wasn't the Church of Scotland that God, through Moses, led through the Red Sea. Yet in a sense, it was, too. And that has implications for the present. Not least because the meaning of "Exodus" is also transformed for us by texts like Luke 9.
The religious meaning of the OT. for me, is found in its use, in a community context. And yes, that is separate, but related to and dependent on (in our tradition) its "scholarly" meaning.
Posted by Zealot en vacance (# 9795) on
:
Funny, I did not look at this thread because of the 'Jack Bauer' reference. Great post by Ingo. Now to develop it a little further based on an element of Luigi's later post.
quote:
Originally posted by Luigi:
I am trying to make the Jews part of human history and prone to human failings rather than some different species to homo sapiens. Some seem to think that Homo Israelius aren't really humans at all ..
Is there ever any suggestion in the OT that on being born into this world any particular human is not part of humanity, and thus not part of human history? Didn't think so. And what was foreshadowed in the OT, is fulfilled in Christ, so that all may enter into the community of 'Homo Israelius' by dying to this world, and being born into a new order. Why else do christians say week by week 'We are the body of Christ'? Still in the world, but not of the world any longer, still sinning (just as OT Israel did), but enabled to be right with God (just as OT Israel was).
Here's the marvellous thing. A world of beings that have rejected God, but whom He still loves. His chosen method to begin the reclamation of that world for love is to find a friend, Abraham. Not the coup de main possible for the one true God, but by friendship.
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
IngoB: quote:
Wow. I just spend 20 minutes of my life acquiring sophisticated excuses why I can just pick the nice bits from the OT and ignore the nasty stuff. To that I say: bunk.
Fatuous, distorting rhetoric.
quote:
First, revelation
Enormous begged question. What is revelation?
quote:
does ramp up in complexity and sophistication with the cultural progress of the people. But that's with regards to what? It's with regards to human culture. Abraham has not been bested in his faith in God, just because people got a lot less primitive.
So what's the correlation between "revelation" and Abraham's faith?
quote:
At basically the earliest time when people had a chance of understanding, Jesus steps in and tells us how the human side of life should be handled.
So - let's get this straight. People before the first century AD had no idea how to be human?
quote:
But that's His second commandment, "love thy neighbour". The first commandment of Jesus - "love God" - was understood from the beginning.
Eh? Beginning of what?
quote:
And so Israel walked righteously - and stumbled one hell of a lot
One is inclined to invite you to make your mind up.
quote:
- according to the first commandment "Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One...",
That's actually the Shema. There's probably been a Kerygmania thread on which is the first commandment. Of course you may be thinking of the Gospels, where the question is raised as to which is the greatest commandment. You're actually dealing here with a reductionist summary of the obligations imposed by the Law, not the Law itself. To reduce the whole body of Israelite Law to these two propositions, and then do amateur anthropology on them, is an imbecilic procedure. And, by the way, it reduces a profound religious insight to a soundbite.
quote:
whereas the second commandment was in the works because human culture has to reach a certain point to achieve that one.
I have no idea what that means.
quote:
So the OT is a beautiful corrective to the good-works-righteousness that for strange reasons is particularly popular among Protestants:
![[Killing me]](graemlins/killingme.gif)
quote:
No, it's the Shema first, and then there's a second commandment like it that concerns humans (since humans are like God).
Ah, the old imago Dei.
quote:
And the OT is also a revealing record of the cultural progress that allowed Jesus to finally say what had to be said about human relations.
SO what do we have here? Jesus the great teacher? Didn't have you pegged as a hyperliberal Prot, IngoB.
Although what follows sounds rather hyperCalvinist. Or -since I don't want to be gratuitously offensive, hyperAugustinian.
quote:
Second, God does not have an equity comission watching His every move. As far as we can tell, His usual modus operandi is to pick and choose. And worse, His choices are manifestly "unfair" according to human standards.
quote:
Oh, hang on...
The "chosen people" were hardly the guys I would have put my money on. If God had asked me, I probably would have opted for some Chinese tribe. And then, picking Jesus of Nazareth, what ever was He thinking? He could have just become the Roman Emperor or at least some well-educated Greek philosopher.
It's the Pocket St. Paul that's the hermeneutic key here...
And now - it's Bismarck:
. quote:
And let's face it, picking that Jesus character didn't exactly lead to less slaughter till Christendom was finally established, did it now? It just reversed sides (for a while), with the quintessential Christian being a martyr. As far as I can tell God picks whoever He pleases and if a few of His children are meeting Him rather more quickly than expected as a consequence He seems not overly worried
And maybe C S Lewis...
quote:
So second-guessing God isn't magically possible by looking back in history. We may understand a bit more of God's plan simply because we see a bit more. But that's not to say that we "get" God just because we "get" history. We "get" that the Israelites are bronze age barbarians, but we don't "get" why God would want to have anything to do with them. So what?
And now a veritable smorgasbord of pat interpretations. Picking the influences here could be a parlour game. If a bit
quote:
Third, if the Israelites had all been pacifist do-gooders, then they would have been exterminated long before NT times. It was kill or be killed, and God did want these people to survive and bring forth Jesus, so practically speaking, they had to kill. They were God's tribe. However, that cannot be used as excuse now for gunning down your neighbour or nuking Iran. Why? Because God has now made His covenant with all humanity in Jesus and through Jesus has told us how we are to deal with each other. Actually the latter follows from the former, we are now all "God's tribe" and already Israel knew that you had to treat your own well.
And finally - Ta -DAAAA!!!!
quote:
So history is revealed as an ever expanding covenant of God which finally brings all of humanity into "God's tribe".
Yes indeed. Except not, sadly, by the OT. Rather by whatever denominational mangle you choose to run it through, or whatever pik'n mix compendium of interpretation bits you care to assemble into a hermeneutic.
quote:
Does that mean that before all those not in "God's tribe" where second-rate humans? Not in the sense that they won't make it to heaven or God doesn't love them as much or whatever.
I have no comment to make on this. I just wanted to include it in my citation because there seems something specially cruel in the fate of all those who were eradicated in the genocides of Joshua also get to be patronized, in heaven, by a post like this.
quote:
But they were not the ones who were chosen to bring about the ultimate "Jesus tribe". That's fact. And if they happened to stand in Israel's way (at least while Israel was being faithful for once) then they may well have met their maker quickly.
So with God, the ends justify the means. Ah no! Silly me. With God, there is no need or possibility of justifying him. Except that this argument is clearly a theodicy, an attempt to justify God in terms of the total outcome of creation. Except that we said above... ![[Ultra confused]](graemlins/confused2.gif)
quote:
Fourth, people are amazingly good at hearing what they want to hear. I assume God has encountered that phenomenon rather often, and I doubt that the ancient Israelites were an exception. So how much of the recorded will of God is accurately what God actually said is not clear to me.
"Recorded" how? Did Reuters write the OT? I was going to list some of the other begged questions in this paragraph, but life's too short.
quote:
Is it however impossible that God said anything like "Kill everybody in that city."? I don't think so. Given ancient customs of revenging blood, killing every human being of an enemy tribe may on occasion be the only way of guaranteeing survival.
So that's all right then. The urge to theodicy is never terribly far away, eh no, IngoB? quote:
In the end it remains guesswork how much of the OT God's commands is human extrapolation. But God isn't a sweet old man who couldn't hurt a fly. Look at the world, it's full of suffering, pain and death. Where's God now? Why doesn't all this crap just stop and we live happily ever after?
No - no theodicy after all. And cheek of us for asking for one!
quote:
So the OT brings the true awfulness of theodicy into a clear focus for us because it's always easier to project moral outrage at a distance. That, too, is God.
Alas no, IngoB. It's this post that clarifies the awfulness of this paricular theodicy. Which, whenever it faces hard questions says "God is God and needs no justifying" only to slide straight back into justifying God when it thinks we've stopped noticing.
quote:
A God who at least allows genocide to happen, perhaps even commands it, if that suits Him. And that God is the Good and the Just and the Merciful. Can you grap that?
One of the joys of being a native Welsh speaker is that sometimes you spot little things like the word "grap" - which is a mutated form of the word "crap". But it's worse than that. This is evil redefined as good, this is an historical positivism reading off from the beaten-up world to the thug in the sky who did it.
quote:
Or is it perhaps getting a bit too ineffable?
I forbear to comment in effs. quote:
Feeling slightly stretched? But note how the killing and surpressing slowly changes to being killed and surpressed, until it hits a tipping point in Jesus. What is the NT martyr if not an inverted OT warrior?
Are you really asking this question? No. It's rhetorical, of course. It's also obscene.
quote:
So perhaps the lesson of the OT genocides is to set us a question: are we ready to suffer and die for God, and perhaps one day not as individuals, but as a nation or even as the world? We are still the chosen people, but perhaps we would actually rather be chosen back in the bronze age when that meant others would bite the dust?
There is something profoundly wrong with the moral balance of this whole paragraph - and I'd say with this whole point of view.
Posted by Pyx_e (# 57) on
:
Hosting
IngoB, Luigi & Psyduck
OK enough. The tone of this thread is taking a severe down turn. It will stop now or I will close the thread.
I have to read all this stuff and it is getting incompressible, personal and so up itself as to be risible.
This may be the end of this thread anyway, maybe it can get back on track maybe it can’t but from now on, make one point at a time and deal with all the discussion that arises. Do not attempt anymore shotgun scatter opinions. Do not attempt anymore phrases only you know the meaning off. Be careful that your personal feelings do not leak into you posting. Robust debate, yes. Rudeness, take it to Hell.
Pyx_e, Kerygmania Host.
Hosting
Posted by Joyfulsoul (# 4652) on
:
RuthW, . What a great topic! I just read your OP and read through all the great posts this thread. What a fascinating question and perspectives you have proposed! I haven't read Deuteronomical histories (or Judges for that matter) for a couple of years now because it is my least favorite part of the whole bible. I mean its really hard not to come away with the idea that the God of the crazy rules (especially the ones about women) and genocide is not a bastard.
The best way I have dealt with the tension of God's character and goodness ... and how to spiritually grow from the OT accounts... is similar to what you and others have proposed -- namely, to see it terms of spiritual growth.
It is way, way helpful to look at the OT through the eyes of "Jack-Bauer-is-a-hero." For example, I think perhaps we all to come to God with a past and with baggage. I see the story of the Israelites - as story of people who were enslaved and so they had the mentality of slaves. I think we as Christians are like that, too. I mean I don't think anyone is a born a Christian. It's kind of like God freed them from Egypt but the Hebrews still carried old ways of thinking that prevented them from really being free. At first, they didn't even want to go into the promise land that God had brought them too (again, this from the perspective that Jack Bauer is the "hero") because they had no confidence in themselves or in God, either...
So, I guess perhaps now I can go through the Deuteronical histories and Judges, perhaps, looking at as God wanted them to get rid of old ideas, he wanted to completely cleanse them of bad influences, and have them learn a whole new way...and that's very helpful...thanks, Ruth.
Posted by universalist (# 10318) on
:
The title “God” in the Bible is just that—a title. It can refer to the “God” as Christians know Him/Her, as expressed fully in Jesus. Additionally, “God, or “The Lord” can refer to the devil, as St. Paul used the term occasionally. Referring to the devil, Paul once called him, “the god of this present, evil world.”
Now our job is manageable, knowing that there are two beings referred to as “God” in the Bible. Now, when I read about “God” commanding Israel to engage in ethnic cleansing against its neighbors, I no longer need to force-fit this distorted image of “God” into the referent “Jesus” and all I know about Him. When I view “God” as Jesus, I see quite another God than the abusive one often mentioned in the OT. Jesus forgives his enemies, and suggests that we be kind to those who hurt and persecute us. No longer does my head have to explode with such cognitive dissonance!
Insisting that the voice for “God” in the OT is always the true “God” we see in Jesus, has done much to give legitimacy to the KKK and other conservative groups. They can point with glee to the “God” who whacked Uzza for touching the ark and Ananias and Sapphira for lying to the Spirit (I’d like a dime for every time I lied to the Spirit).
Two starkly different visions of “God” are presented in the Bible. No way in heaven or earth can you have "God" both ways….
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
Pyx_e, noted and sorry. See Psyduck's thread in Styx for more.
[ 09. March 2006, 22:36: Message edited by: IngoB ]
Posted by Luigi (# 4031) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Pyx_e:
Hosting
IngoB, Luigi & Psyduck
OK enough. The tone of this thread is taking a severe down turn. It will stop now or I will close the thread.
I have to read all this stuff and it is getting incompressible, personal and so up itself as to be risible.
This may be the end of this thread anyway, maybe it can get back on track maybe it can’t but from now on, make one point at a time and deal with all the discussion that arises. Do not attempt anymore shotgun scatter opinions. Do not attempt anymore phrases only you know the meaning off. Be careful that your personal feelings do not leak into you posting. Robust debate, yes. Rudeness, take it to Hell.
Pyx_e, Kerygmania Host.
Hosting
Apologies for my part in this. Will seek to avoid doing this again. I hope the thread isn't killed because I think there are still some really important issues that haven't really been explored yet.
Anyway Ofsted in 4 days time ![[Frown]](frown.gif)
so it might be Wednesday before I post again.
Luigi
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
Luigi quote:
I think there are still some really important issues that haven't really been explored yet.
Anyway Ofsted in 4 days time so it might be Wednesday before I post again.
Wot wld U like 2 flag up? I think part of the problem - though a generative and fruitful part - is that I still feel that you and I (and maybe RuthW) are to some extent talking past each other. For my part, I'm not quite clear what RuthW is looking for, for example - though the "persuade me why I shouldn't be a Marcionite" point is a good one. But I'm not sure how far my point about community answered it.
Anyone?
Posted by Autenrieth Road (# 10509) on
:
I think the reason for now at least (what with RuthW being in EFM) to read the Deuteronomistic history, is precisely to understand what was believed then about God. You need to read that to appreciate the changes (or not) that happen in people's understandings of God as you get to the prophets, and then again to understand the background of the NT and the Messianic expectations at Jesus' time.
I read the Bible not so much to find out about God, but to find out what people have thought about God.
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
Autenrieth Road: quote:
I think the reason for now at least... to read the Deuteronomistic history, is precisely to understand what was believed then about God.
Yes, absolutely, and that's very important. But I think what RuthW is asking about is why we should in any way feel bound by anything it says about God. The Qur'an says some beautiful things about God - that he is closer to you than the vein of your neck, for instance - and I can choose to accept that as illuminating and true - or not - because I'm not a muslim.
But why should these OT scriptures have a binding religious authority over me because I'm a Christian? And what would be the nature of that authority? Why can't I just dismiss them? My suppositions about community belong in here somewhere - and interestingly, you seem to presume an aspect of community in this: quote:
You need to read that to appreciate the changes (or not) that happen in people's understandings of God
Presumably, these changes are those that occur within a continuous community of religious belief. Zoroastrian records of belief, or Native American ones, wouldn't reflect changes in belief between them and us. They might reflect interesting internal developments, but they wouldn't really chart a development leading from when they were recorded to where we are now. Not unless we, in some sense, "converted", and switched faith-community or faith-tradition. Of course, we could - and many people do - assemble our own faith, or spirituality, out of bits that appeal to us in one or more of these traditions. But we wouldn't be bound by them. We would be selecting and dropping on the basis of what seemed good to us. (I'm not dissing this at all by the way.)
However, to belong to a tradition is to be bound in certain ways by its texts. (I'm understanding text here in the broadest sense.) But that can't - morally - mean assenting to everything in the tradition. Luigi is touching on something really important here when he talks about strategies of reading against the text. For him and me, a really important resource here would be Girard's understanding of the crucifixion as unmasking the sacral violence, endemic to humanity, which is specific to the OT. But it's not the only one.
Luther's, of a canon within the canon, or the traditional senses of scripture, or Freddy's Swedenborgian approach, would be others. It's a way of being bound, yet also free, in respect of the scriptures of a tradition. From a Christian perspective, the source of all such readings against the text has to be Jesus Christ himself,as the Revelation of God.
But Jesus Christ is also in this sense an interpretive principle "outside" the OT - which is what Luigi was pressing me on earlier. I think to be a Christian is to adopt Christ in this way - but the truth is that that is to run the risk of not hearing the distinctive witness either of the OT as a whole (and there is an organic unity to it, that of the community of Israel and its faith) or of the individual books. Try to reconcile Ecclesiastes with - well anything, really! It looks like a Jewish epicureanism. But it's in there, and is a jagged edge.
One of the things I treasure about my own tradition of mainstream Protestantism, is that it gave the world Biblical criticism, which does enable the silencing of dogmatic voices in order to hear what the texts might be saying. The complex playing-off of this against what the tradition says is what has formed my understanding of the authority of the OT. I see this authority as lying in those encounters I have with it that tell me truth about God. But that truth is a product of the encounter, and not of some frozen truth which lies in the text.
This is what works for me, but won't for others.
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Psyduck:
For my part, I'm not quite clear what RuthW is looking for, for example - though the "persuade me why I shouldn't be a Marcionite" point is a good one. But I'm not sure how far my point about community answered it.
Honestly, for me it didn't answer the question because I didn't follow this bit at all:
quote:
I certainly don't believe that we can "take what we like" from the OT - rather that because our Christian community - ecclesia, church - understands itself as confronted by its Scripture - and in this sense the OT certainly is our Scripture, as well as Jewish Scripture - it understands itself as hailed by voices which speak to it in many different ways about God - and do so now, for us, in the enlarged context of Jesus Christ as emerging from the history of this community and its interaction with God.
I don't get what "the church understands itself as confronted/hailed" is meant to convey.
quote:
Originally posted by Autenrieth Road:
I think the reason for now at least (what with RuthW being in EFM) to read the Deuteronomistic history, is precisely to understand what was believed then about God. You need to read that to appreciate the changes (or not) that happen in people's understandings of God as you get to the prophets, and then again to understand the background of the NT and the Messianic expectations at Jesus' time.
The OT was Jesus' Bible, so as his followers we should read it for background info -- sure, I've got no problem with that. But as I've thought about it a bit more, I think (right now) my question comes down to one of application. Perhaps this is not warranted, but I have been working under the assumption that I'm supposed to be able to apply what I read in the Bible to my life, one way or another. Every model of Bible study I've used has emphasized the importance of there being a take-away lesson, a real-life application. If reading the Bible doesn't sooner or later make me change my life at least a little bit, I tend to think I'm doing it wrong.
This is not to say that every time I crack the Bible open I expect to have a life-changing revelation. But I do expect that extended, concentrated study of the Bible will eventually yield something of value to my life.
It's this assumption that has led me to argue against my original Israel-as-Jack-Bauer idea from the very start. I still like that idea insofar as it's helpful for understanding the point of view. But that, like the proposition that we read the OT for background, makes Bible study all about understanding -- and I think it should be more than that. So when I look at the Deuteronomist history and ask myself what I might apply to my life from a theology that says "if we are faithful to our God he will help us kick your sorry ass," I worry.
If the Deuteronomist history is all just background material, then fine -- but that's pretty much Marcionism.
quote:
Originally posted by Autenreith Road:
I read the Bible not so much to find out about God, but to find out what people have thought about God.
All of the Bible? NT included?
I have to say, I find this really, really hard to understand. Yes, the Bible tells us what those people thought about God -- but if it doesn't also tell us something about God is it because they were all wrong? And why should we care what those people thought about God? Why read what they wrote and not also read what the Greeks thought about God? The Jewish background is certainly vital, but the Greeks are also our religious forebears.
Although it occurs to me that if one reads the entire Bible as things people have thought about God, that's grounds for opening up the Biblical canon to include a whole lot of other things, which I must say I think would be very cool. Not sure how I feel about the other possible effects of no longer privileging holy scripture, though.
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
RuthW: quote:
I don't get what "the church understands itself as confronted/hailed" is meant to convey.
I mean that in a sense the OT speaks to the church as an authority over against the church. We can't change it or omit bits. It's all just there. And that's how we meet it - as a voice - or a collection of voices - from outside. This is a very Protestant way of looking at it, I know. Catholic and Orthodox people will want to say that the Church validates Scripture by recognizing it as such. In a way the difference isn't that great, because the Protestant take is that the church recognizes Scripture by validating it. (Nobody in the early Church, when the concept of Christian scripture was beginning to gel, thought of writing stuff to supplement it and getting that, too, validated as part of the Canon. It was a process of recognizing already extant and authoritative scriptures as Holy Scripture for the Church.)
So my point is that to be a (mainstream) Christian is to belong to a church community, and that means being stuck with the Scriptures that the Church has recognized that she herself is stuck with.
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
Sorry to double post.
No, really, I am. ![[Hot and Hormonal]](icon_redface.gif)
I was re-reading the OP, and this jumped out at me whereit hadn't before. quote:
But in the context of the narrative, I accept that he is the hero of the piece, that he has the country's best interests at heart, and that he is doing the Right Thing, because the show just doesn't work for me if I don't buy into that.
It suddenly dawned on me that I don't seem to watch shows in this way. I think I could watch the programme and enjoy it just as much without buying into the moral assumptions that the hero makes. It confronts me with a situation that makes me think. But the "buying in" thing I don't feel I have to do - and although I've never seen "24" - sorry - and although I can't think of any other examples at the moment, I don't think I invariably make moral identifications like this, or feel any particular need to. Oh, granted, there will be times when I do. But these sorts of stories seem to work for me even when I deplore some of the choices that the heroes make - and even when I can admire and identify with, the heroes to a great extent.
I think that that amounts to a stance of "reading against the text".
Interestingly, in the instance you quote from 24, Ruth, it makes me very uneasy because it sets up a conflict between what I very strongly believe I should do, were I Jack Bauer, and what I fear I might do, put in his situation.
Whereas if I were Joshua, in Joshua chapter 10, I'd probably put my stick down and give the Amalekites a break when I thought they'd had enough. But that's the point. Joshua didn't do that. And (whatever happened to the sun!) we have a tradition which reports and endorses as God's will a battle of annihilation. One of the things that I encounter when I read that text, and realize that I'm "stuck with it as a Christian because it's in the Bible", is a sense of implication and guilt. It's not a nice story and it's not What Jesus Would Do. But it's there. And I have to come to terms with it. I've never done no genocide, and I've not wasted nobody. But I lost my temper today (let the reader understand) and I'm stuck with that too. In this sense, the OT is a mirror held up to me. A bit like 24. If it were my country, my community, my family, I have no doubt I could gouge somebody's eyes out. I do have grave doubts that I might be able not to.
I'm not called upon to swallow it wholesale - but I can't evade it either. It isn't just a primitive deposit. The fact that I can't square it with the centre of my faith, in Christ, but can't get rid of it, is a religiously healthy thing if I can keep the tension. If I lose the tension, and collapse it all into "what the Bible teaches", then I am stuck with Very Bad Religion.
Posted by RuthW (# 13) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Psyduck:
I mean that in a sense the OT speaks to the church as an authority over against the church.
"Over against" is another expression I've never understood. How is it different from "over"?
quote:
So my point is that to be a (mainstream) Christian is to belong to a church community, and that means being stuck with the Scriptures that the Church has recognized that she herself is stuck with.
This really does sound like an argument from tradition to me. Which is okay. But as an Anglican, I get to apply reason as well, which might change things a bit.
quote:
Originally posted by Psyduck:
And (whatever happened to the sun!) we have a tradition which reports and endorses as God's will a battle of annihilation. One of the things that I encounter when I read that text, and realize that I'm "stuck with it as a Christian because it's in the Bible", is a sense of implication and guilt. It's not a nice story and it's not What Jesus Would Do. But it's there. And I have to come to terms with it. I've never done no genocide, and I've not wasted nobody. But I lost my temper today (let the reader understand) and I'm stuck with that too. In this sense, the OT is a mirror held up to me. A bit like 24. If it were my country, my community, my family, I have no doubt I could gouge somebody's eyes out. I do have grave doubts that I might be able not to.
The Bible hands us a tradition which endorses annihilation as God's will, but you don't endorse as God's will having lost your temper today. On what grounds do you reject that tradition when you judge your own actions?
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
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RuthW quote:
"Over against" is another expression I've never understood. How is it different from "over"?
Well, over is what a roof is with respect to me. "Over against" is something that's there, and inescapable, opposite me and confronting and challenging me. Like a fact I'd rather deny. Or like my son, who is sitting here waiting to use the PC... quote:
The Bible hands us a tradition which endorses annihilation as God's will, but you don't endorse as God's will having lost your temper today. On what grounds do you reject that tradition when you judge your own actions?
I'd actually say that the Bible consists of many voices, some of which endorse annihilation and present it as God's will, and others which enable me to "read against the text" and deny that that is ever God's will. People get angry, sometimes murderously so, and this truth confronts me in the tradition as something dark, ambiguous and undeniable about human beings. But for me the Bible is not the final authority. It is only binding on me insofar as it speaks Christ.
Posted by Moo (# 107) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by RuthW
Every model of Bible study I've used has emphasized the importance of there being a take-away lesson, a real-life application. If reading the Bible doesn't sooner or later make me change my life at least a little bit, I tend to think I'm doing it wrong.
Something C. S. Lewis said is relevant here. He was talking about the psalm verse that speaks of smashing the heads of Babylonian babies against a rock. Obviously this is not at all in keeping with the Christian message. He said that Christians should use this to meditate on the kind of fury people feel when they are unjustly treated. It provides a very good reason why we should be just.
I have not tried to apply this to Joshua, so I don't know whether it can be done. If it can, it should be.
There is another thead discussing passages of this type.
Moo
Posted by Autenrieth Road (# 10509) on
:
(Psyduck, RuthW, if I've dropped a point you were probing me on, feel free to ask again. I tried a point-by-point but couldn't do it; so here's trying to think about what you say.)
Why did Marcionism not become orthodoxy? (I don't know, but I'm wondering if those reasons could provide a persuasive answer to the question of "why read the Deuteronomistic History".)
quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
Every model of Bible study I've used has emphasized the importance of there being a take-away lesson, a real-life application. If reading the Bible doesn't sooner or later make me change my life at least a little bit, I tend to think I'm doing it wrong.
I'm all of a sudden thinking one really could apply this style of reading/study to just about everything.
quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
quote:
Originally posted by Autenreith Road:
I read the Bible not so much to find out about God, but to find out what people have thought about God.
All of the Bible? NT included?
Honestly, me, right now? Yes.
quote:
I have to say, I find this really, really hard to understand. Yes, the Bible tells us what those people thought about God -- but if it doesn't also tell us something about God is it because they were all wrong? And why should we care what those people thought about God? Why read what they wrote and not also read what the Greeks thought about God? The Jewish background is certainly vital, but the Greeks are also our religious forebears.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
I'm not so sure we really do learn about God from the Bible. There are bits and pieces that we take as fundamental, and then lots of study and learning in order to explain the confusing bits, and interpretation to square the contradictory bits.
quote:
Although it occurs to me that if one reads the entire Bible as things people have thought about God, that's grounds for opening up the Biblical canon to include a whole lot of other things, which I must say I think would be very cool. Not sure how I feel about the other possible effects of no longer privileging holy scripture, though.
Sounds good to me.
In some ways I'm conservative, and as an institution I'd prefer my church to carry on as it has been. Who am I to say to change it? Especially when my faith is so very unorthodox, and I'm certainly no theologian to be figuring out what's what for the organization.
I guess this is part of the community aspect Psyduck brings up. For 1700 years Christianity has read the whole Bible, so I'll try to read it too.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Autenrieth Road:
Why did Marcionism not become orthodoxy?
For one, this speaks strongly against it in the New Testament:
quote:
2 Timothy 3:14-17 (RSV):
But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
It says all scripture is worthy to instruct us for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. And at the time of writing that was clearly referring to the OT. Of course, Marcion did not include 2 Timothy in his canon of epistles...
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
Moo: quote:
Something C. S. Lewis said is relevant here. He was talking about the psalm verse that speaks of smashing the heads of Babylonian babies against a rock. Obviously this is not at all in keeping with the Christian message. He said that Christians should use this to meditate on the kind of fury people feel when they are unjustly treated. It provides a very good reason why we should be just.
This is pretty close to what I think Luigi means by reading against the text - certainly what I mean by it. But what Lewis doesn't seem to provide is a basis for doing so. As an early twentieth century Anglican, he can just assume that smashing babies' heads against rocks is Just Not Done. The whole culture of Church and Empire is against it, and this is a culture deeply imbued with Judaeo-Christian values, and maybe above all the doctrine of Porgress (of which, I know, Lewis is very critical, but we are all circumscribed by the times we live in, and many of the cultural effects of the doctrine of Progress were just part of the background up to the ned of the fifties) so it doesn't seriously need to be asked why we don't bash our enemies' babies to death and feel that it's legitimate.
Nowadays, faced with a literalism that has not just no doctrine of Progress (not necessarily a bad thing) but also no sense of history and no conception of expertise, there is for many people nothing to stop the pushing of "if it's in the Bible, it must be good/true/OK". Which means that when any of us now pick up the Bible, we have to ask "Why is it that I don't have to take with literal seriousness everything that's in here?"
And this is a question that torments highly-educated, highly-intelligent people (as witness the OP) - not in the form of "It's in the Bible, so it must be true..." but "It's in the Bible - how can I not see it as vitiating the whole Bible?" or just "It's a bit of the Bible, it morally repels me - how can I possibly read round it with any integrity?"
And that's what I don't get from Lewis. I don't think he needed it. I still can't quite believe that we do. But we do. It's another aspect of the postmodern moment. One of the shattering things about the OT is that it's in places like a loudspeaker plugged into the religious id - the unconscous, which knows no morality, and is there in all of us, under all the structures we have in place to keep it down.
Posted by Moo (# 107) on
:
Psyduck, are you sure that the idea that bashing babies' heads is wrong is a result of the idea of Progress?
Jesus didn't talk about Progress, but I'm very sure he didn't approve of bashing babies' heads.
Moo
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
Moo quote:
Psyduck, are you sure that the idea that bashing babies' heads is wrong is a result of the idea of Progress?
Jesus didn't talk about Progress, but I'm very sure he didn't approve of bashing babies' heads.
No, what I meant was that the "The Idea of Progress" (the title of J B Bury's classic) is connected very much with Western modernity, and the "Whig view of history". This would seem to imply that we outgrow - inevitably - the idea that it's acceptable to bash in babies' heads as we cease to be "barbaric". It's what undergirded much of the old-fashioned liberal theology, which collapsed in 1919 after the WWI and Barth's commentary on Romans. There were plenty of people in antiquity who didn't approve of bashing babies' heads. But it wasn't on the basis of a doctrine of progress. It would be on the basis of sheer compassion (which as Schopenhauer teaches us is irrational - it's part of the prejudice associated with the doctrine of Progress that all irrational stuff is bad, and only rational stuff is good) or the developed teachings of the various philosophical schools. Or - yes - on a religious basis. The point about Ps 139 isn't that it's in the Bible, but that something so shocking and obscene should be in the Bible.
I think another aspect of the OP is that we as a society find it difficult to deal confidently with the shocking and the obscene. We either excise reference to it (it doesn't feature in Boney M's version of "By the waters of Babylon" if I remember!) or we uncritically endorse it. There is no agreed framework within which we can discuss it. Which is in a sense the obverse of C S Lewis's situation, only half a century ago, in which the agreed framework was so strong - the idea of bashing babies' heads was so repugnant - that he didn't feel he had to justify his reading of the Psalm which understood it as an obscenity, and the psalm as teaching us a valuable lesson about what human beings do when the "civilized" controls slip. Lewis had an agreed framework - the "Judaeo-Christian ethic" - to refer to. We don't. I submit, subject to criticism, that that's why RuthW may feel the obscenity of some Biblical passages so acutely - not, of course, because she has no "ethic", but because the ethic she cultivates is not one that can be taken for granted as shared by "progressive" Western society any more. And the absence of that taken-for-granted shared ethic - let me use the word, that "metanarrative" - is also why the barmy literalist readings that find endorsement for the "right" genocides in the Bible, which horrify the rest of us, and begin to discredit the Bible in our eyes, also abound. RuthW: quote:
Every model of Bible study I've used has emphasized the importance of there being a take-away lesson, a real-life application. If reading the Bible doesn't sooner or later make me change my life at least a little bit, I tend to think I'm doing it wrong.
Surely there must be an alternative to this?
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
I wonder if the felt obscenity is even more acute than that. Not just that there is no longer a given, Western ethical standard (which I think was an important assumption of most of Lewis' writing) - but because of a feeling that the bible contains a great deal which is beneath current standards.
I certainly feel the obscenity of such passages more keenly because I know how vulnerable it makes my faith to the glare of intellectual honesty.
There comes a stage where one has to read round, apologise for, re-interpret and tiptoe around so much that one wonders whether the whole stinking morass should be abandoned as a bad job.
Perhaps it is a stinking morass because that is what the time was like, and that was how people were then. Life was as nasty, brutish and short. And individuals who were nastier and brutisher tending to find life less short.
I think that is reflected in the history we read. And we seem to read that God was involved despite the nastiness, brutishness.... the genocidal-war-ciminalness of the people who seemed to be chosen ones of the moment.
With David we get lots of insight into the relationship between man and God that we don't get with many other characters - a man who had great depth of feeling for God - and didn't just write violent psalms, was involved in - and perpetrated awful acts of violence. Apparently under God's blessing, and through which God appeared to promote his welfare. All perfectly in line with the ethics of the time.
But then God denied him the right to build the temple - and I think that would clearly have made little sense according to the ethics of the time.
I'm just wondering about an idea which has God involved in the appalling brutality of human life - perhaps not approving of it all, but nevertheless being involved in human history - and just occasional glimpses of his disapproval of it. Although I can squeeze that out of David's story, it's seldom obtainable elsewhere - but perhaps that is just how it was. The divine and the genocidal and nasty human record.
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
mdijon: quote:
Perhaps it is a stinking morass because that is what the time was like, and that was how people were then. Life was as nasty, brutish and short. And individuals who were nastier and brutisher tending to find life less short.
Like the twist on Hobbes!
But my main beef with a developmental approach to the horrors of the OT is that it presumes that we've somehow got these things out of our societal and psychological systems. I don't think we have. I think that the nature of the restraints has changed - but I also believe that it's in the process of changing again, and that aggressive fundamentalisms, and horrible ethnic-based phenomena, are the "return of the repressed", which we are facing blindly because of our refusal to acknowledge them.
These people will always have the genocides in their Holy Books. And they will always read that as legitimation. I really do believe that if we excise those bits from our Bibles, we're refusing to face them in ourselves. Which makes us so much the more defenceless and compromised in the face of them. I've been thinking about this a lot since this thread started. I think maybe, in the end, "reading against the text" means standing up to God. Abraham did it, in Genesis 18. `Job did it, in the sense that he continued to maintain his own righteousness, and innocence. And when they did so, things happened.
Doesn't that make it at least plausible that we have a right, reading the story of Saul - to my mind co- most-distressing story in the Deuteronomistic History - to hold that it was Samuel that Saul really fell out with, not God? Do we really have to buy the spin, to receive the Scripture?
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Psyduck:
I really do believe that if we excise those bits from our Bibles, we're refusing to face them in ourselves. Which makes us so much the more defenceless and compromised in the face of them.
More than that, face to face with a God who is with those people, and prepared to work through people with that kind of blood on their hands. A God who then, we hope, continues to want to be involved with us - representatives as we are of the nastiest species ever to walk the earth.
I'm not quite claiming a developmental approach - except so far as we frown on genocide, and the writers of Judges clearly didn't - more an approach were God is with humanity at its nastiest. Although the international ethical situation has evolved slightly with regard to genocide, I would still portion horrific crimes against humanity to the West. Sanitized in a way, but I agree - I'm not sure humanity has changed.
Funny, I don't feel quite so bad about Saul's rejection. (Although I do feel much worse about the kind of things David got up to).
Perhaps my morality isn't as evolved as I like to think.
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
mdijon: quote:
Perhaps my morality isn't as evolved as I like to think.
Whose is?
For me, the Saul story is particularly abhorrent because (a) he is in soapy bubble with God for forswearing a "genocide" (italicized to try to prevent leeching-in of twenty-first century mindset - impossible, I know,a nd part of the point) (b) the whole incident shows Samuel as a boundaryless fanatic (it takes real effort not to assimilate him not certain contemporary paradigms) and (c) the "evil spirit" that falls on Saul is clearly soemthing we'd recognize as a mental illness. Indeed, there are signs in the text (David's twanging cheering him up) that aspects of illness (without the concept we have) were recognized alongside the aspects of curse and doom.
I haven't preached on Saul for years. I can't remember what I said then, and I don't know hat I'll say when it comes up in the lectionary. (From where certain absences are striking, doncha' think?)
I wonder if perhaps one way to advance this thread might be for people to post problematic stories from the Deuteronomistic History, maybe with indications of difficulties and/or sketched resolutions. But I wouldn't want to derail th ethread. What do others think?
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
Well perhaps we'll start with this one then.
quote:
Originally posted by Psyduck:
(a) he is in soapy bubble with God for forswearing a "genocide"
The details perhaps evade me at the moment - but I thought it was to do with being an arrogant twasock that he got into the soapy bubble...
I'm also not convinced about the mental illness theory - apart from perhaps depression?
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
I Sam 15: He spares Agag the king, and also fails to destroy the good cattle etc. and lets the Kenites who were allied to the Amalekites. It's fairly obvious that the rationale here is that of the herem or solemn ban - the reason that Achan was outed and killed after the debacle at Ai - he'd kept some good stuff from Jericho for himself whereas it was all to be destroyed as dedicated to God.
So it wasn't that Saul was being humane. But it certainly points up the awfulness of the institution of the herem.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
I thought the impatient sacrifice offering and tearing of Samuel's robe was the defining moment?
(Not denying what you've just written)
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
Well, in a work (the DH) which gives four different procedures for selecting Saul as king, and three different ones for David, the occasion for Saul's firing is probably "heavily overdetermined..."
Posted by noelper (# 9961) on
:
Is it a red herring to mention the extremes of desperate measures arising from unrequited and rejected Love?
When the rejected counters abuse and torment, with the only language the abuser can comprehend.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Psyduck:
....the occasion for Saul's firing is probably "heavily overdetermined..."
I do get the feeling he had it coming, though.
And I do get the impression that anyone with judgement would have seen that David was a basically decent bloke (aside from the odd war crime here and there) and Saul was an arrogant tosser.
And it's a great story: Maybe I've been taken in too much by the story line. We seem to be coming full circle to Jack Bauer again.
Noelper, are you suggesting God was responding to unrequited love? I'm going to struggle with that view, I think....
Posted by Skinhead (# 10658) on
:
RuthW, am I right in summing up your problem as a conflict between:
a) Our contemporary assessment of the Deuteronomist's history is that God orders bad things like genocide
and
b) You still want to hang onto the traditional Church idea that the Book of Joshua is part of the Bible, which is Holy Scripture, which is inspired and profitable for training in righteousness etc.
Now, I used to be a literalist, and one of the things that forced me to take a more fuzzy view of life and Scripture, was a consideration of issues such as this.
If you accept that maybe the Bible is comparable to Newtonian physics (i.e. is sometimes flawed, e.g. with regard to relativity), and that this includes Paul's statement about the OT, then it gets a whole lot easier to read Joshua (if you want to) and retain your integrity.
So now,
(a) becomes: "Joshua was a skilful politician and told the Israelites what they wanted to hear - that God's plans just happened to coincide with his plans for domination of Palestine, and God would help them to kick ass."
(b) becomes: "The Bible is a great book but hey, who wants to get too tied down with details when even the fundamentalists have a selective blindness about things like women wearing hats or speaking in church - and that's just the New Testament!"
And - Bingo! no contradiction. ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
Whether or not you can stay on the course is another matter, but reconciling your views with those of the local church hierarchy is on a different plane.
So, what can you get out of reading Joshua? Well, that politicians haven't changed, for starters!
I should like to apologize in advance to people who take the Bible more literally. Been there, done that (for 25 years), got the scars. I appreciate where you're coming from, but I've tried long enough to be able to say, with a reasonable degree of certainty, that it didn't work for me. Not that I didn't suspend my critical faculties (i.e. have faith), pray, get baptised, get filled with the Spirit, speak in tongues, try almost all Protestant denominations, etc etc. ![[brick wall]](graemlins/brick_wall.gif)
I don't have a problem with God, just with the way that God's disciples represent God.
I should also like to stress that this post is deliberately in a more lighthearted, broad-brush style, and should in no way be interpreted as belittling the preceeding lengthy and profound (I mean that) posts.
By the way, in the context of kicking ass, the concept of sacral violence takes on a whole new meaning .
Posted by noelper (# 9961) on
:
quote:
Noelper, are you suggesting God was responding to unrequited love?
I am mdijon; since I cannot conceive a more desperate act than the crucifixion. It also ties in with your earlier point that God is with us in our brutality.
quote:
I'm just wondering about an idea which has God involved in the appalling brutality of human life - perhaps not approving of it all, but nevertheless being involved in human history - and just occasional glimpses of his disapproval of it.
On this reading, the God Who destroyed all the lickle baby animals in the Flood had been very grievously wounded indeed.
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
I see unrequited love as a good explanation for the crucifixtion... it's just with regard to genocide that I'm struggling....
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
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Skinhead: Welcome aboard. quote:
don't have a problem with God, just with the way that God's disciples represent God.
Welcome to my world!
quote:
By the way, in the context of kicking ass, the concept of sacral violence takes on a whole new meaning
Are we talking Balaam's ass here?
quote:
one of the things that forced me to take a more fuzzy view of life and Scripture
Actually, I think this thread - and your post, as I read it - is about the difficulties but necessity of taking non-fuzzy views of life and Scripture, holding them together, and noting the huge difficulties these throw up. As you suggest, politicians have a real knack for fuzzification. Especially ecclesiastical politicians who want us all to have nice agreed reading-strategies.
Posted by Skinhead (# 10658) on
:
Thanks, Psyduck.
quote:
Actually, I think this thread - and your post, as I read it - is about the difficulties but necessity of taking non-fuzzy views of life and Scripture, holding them together, and noting the huge difficulties these throw up.
I like that angle.
quote:
As you suggest, politicians have a real knack for fuzzification. Especially ecclesiastical politicians who want us all to have nice agreed reading-strategies.
Do they also want you to sign up to the agreed reading-strategies so that they can progress the issue and achieve roll-out before they breach the deadline?
Posted by noelper (# 9961) on
:
quote:
it's just with regard to genocide that I'm struggling....
Well, it's the language of common currency which humans speak consistently, and umm... understand. So much so that we repeat ourselves throughout the history of the world.
Posted by Joyfulsoul (# 4652) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by RuthW:
The Bible hands us a tradition which endorses annihilation as God's will, but you don't endorse as God's will having lost your temper today. On what grounds do you reject that tradition when you judge your own actions?
I dunno if God's will is annihilation. I've always found comfort in this transaction:
quote:
Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, "Are you for us or for our enemies?"
"Neither," he replied, "but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come." Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked him, "What message does my Lord have for his servant?"
The commander of the LORD's army replied, "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy." And Joshua did so
(Joshua 5:13-15, NIV)
This is very interesting.
Also, I find King David not being able to build the Temple of God based on the issue that his hands spilt so much blood - also indicative that God is not okay with killing.
All I'm trying to say is that I think it is still possible to sift through and see God's desire for peace and grace and his "neutrality" towards different peoples (i.e. that he is really not on one side or the other).
Weren't the pharisees and scribes accused of not understanding God's perfect and pleasing will? Didn't Nicodemus similarly possess confusion about it?
I'm currently sifting through "A Popular Survey of the Old Testment" right now (inspired by this thread) and the author (Norman Geisler) claims that just as the eunuch didn't fully understand the Hebrew scriptures, so too it might be helpful or revealatory to look at it with eyes that are "christocentric" ... I'm not quite sure how to do that myself though...
[ 13. March 2006, 01:02: Message edited by: Joyfulsoul ]
Posted by mdijon (# 8520) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by noelper:
quote:
it's just with regard to genocide that I'm struggling....
Well, it's the language of common currency which humans speak consistently, and umm... understand. So much so that we repeat ourselves throughout the history of the world.
You might have to unpack this for me... Are you saying that God inspired genocide among us so as to wake us up to his unrequired love? Or to deliver a message?
Joyfulsoul, I cling on to that detail as well. Perhaps because it stands out, perhaps as a mark of how desperate we are to make sense of it all.
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
Joyfulsoul: quote:
I'm currently sifting through "A Popular Survey of the Old Testment" right now (inspired by this thread) and the author (Norman Geisler) claims that just as the eunuch didn't fully understand the Hebrew scriptures, so too it might be helpful or revealatory to look at it with eyes that are "christocentric" ...
With you there. But in a sense, that's the least problematic part of it for me. That God should reveal himself in Christ as the God who is Love, drawing together and completely transforming all that is in any degree revelatory of him in the OT is something I have no problems with. My problem is that if you do that, you are reading the OT in the light of an authority beyond and outside itself.
Yes, it's easy to see the OT as "Pointing towards Christ" - but it was also both saying something to, and reflecting something about, the sense of God in the community out of which it emerged. (Unless, of course, we're happy with the idea that is current in some circles that the prophets wandered around speaking stuff that was gibberish to their contemporaries, and couldn't but be gibberish, because it wasn't going to mean anything for another 600 years...)
SO we're stuck with an OT which contains some profoundly ethical/theological stuff (said prophets) together with some really nasty and exclusivist thinking, understandable in itself, and probably forgiveable, up to a point, in anyone much before the seventeenth century. And we're also stuck with little nuggets of sheer horror. And also an overarching understanding of God as One and Male which has sparked some sublime thinking, but has also empowered all sorts of domination, intolerance and oppression, by far not the least of which is the institution of Patriarchy. And has certainly foreclosed on other aspects of religious experience, which are potentially there in orthodox Christianity. (I'm leaving Judaism out of this, because it seems to me that the Jews have evolved their own, often deeply impressive, ways round these things - but a Jewish peerson would have to speak to that.)
And some of these bits sanction cruelty and unrestricted vengeance in an essentially obscene way.
A Christocentric reading of any integrity is going to be a way of repudiating and shutting up these voices. But they are deeply human voices, and potentially speak from any of us.
I think the basic question here is "What is revelation?" If we believe that the actual words of the book, or even the stories, that could be told in other words, are the revelation, I think we're stuck with things like (1) developmental views (that was OK then, but we've moved on - and see how much we've moved on...) or plenary-ish doctrines of inspiration (It's in the Bible so in certain circumstances it must be understandable/OK/God-commanded (2) or -spiritualizing (there's a lesson in this, and the lesson goes with the grain of the story but doesn't sanction its content as a way of behaving - so Jericho falls, as do any obstacles we face in life which we confront in God's strength, etc.) I'd count some Christocentric approaches in this category.
Is there an alternative?
Well, if you actually take revelation as an event in which God is perceived, and which "makes an impression", then yes, I think there is.
Emil Brunner compares revelation to a bomb going off, and the impression it makes to the crater the explosion leaves. I think we can extend that metaphor, and say that the "impression" is made in the human, social "material" over which the "explosion" takes place. Just as an explosion will leave a different mark on different material, just as the blast-effects will vary, so the impression made on a particular human community will derive from the structure and the culture of that community. And it will affect it, and change it.
That's a very partial metaphor. It doesn't begin to explaint the lasting and cumulative (not the same as developmental) effects of revelation on a particular community and its culture.
But it does make it possible to (a) take seriously as a revelation, without endorsing any of the moral consequences, something that happened, and was recorded "on" (as much as "by") a community very different to our own, and (b) "think the discontinuities" - because the discontinuities are as important as the continuities in Biblical religion: Bang! Abraham understands that God doesn't want child-sacrifice: Bang! The political-ethical emphases of the classical prophets appear in the second half of the C8; Bang! Deutero-Isaiah appears with what looks very like absolute monotheism in the mid 6th century. These are the explosions, but the material they crater is very different at each point.
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
Should have acknowledged that that was a partial response ( more is required) to this from Luigi: quote:
I am not sure what you mean by 'outside its compass'. I am trying to make the Jews part of human history and prone to human failings rather than some different species to homo sapiens. Some seem to think that Homo Israelius aren't really humans at all - one of the reasons I find Wright so unconvincing.
I do fear that if we start characterizing "the Old Testament™" as only preliminary, preparatory, whatever, we tend to view the community which produced it (over 1200 years, from the Song of Deborah to Daniel etc.) as one, inferior religious community. To make "our" Christ stand over against the OT seems to me to threaten to do this. Whereas to stand "revelation" as a category over against all that is human in the whole of Scripture - and all that is human in us, too - might let us avoid this. quote:
Also I am not clear as to whether you think I am looking at the Jews in ways that don't arise from within the OT? I really would like you to explain this more
No, not at all. Not least because your Girardian presuppositions are something I think I can also use to think round this. But again, if we find the unmasking of sacral violence in the crucifixion as the key to understanding sacrifice as "the" religious catgory par excellence, and its inhibiting (!!!) and channelling effects on human violence, it's awfully easy to conscript that to a view of Jesus religion as "superior". You don't do this. But a warning, surely, from Girard is the ease with which we resacralize violence within Christianity qua religion. Not least by violently asserting the superiority of the religion, rather than exploring the shaming profundity of the revelation.
A good postmodern way of putting it would be that we are no better than the Israelites who wiped out the Amalekites. Indeed because we still cling to our sense of superiority, we may be far worse. That's why I introduced the reference to "progress", above.
There's a story of a missionary somewhere in the south seas who had converted a tribe of headhunting Cannibals to Christianity, recently enough for them to be able to hold recollections of former ways and the new faith together. The missionary and the tribal chief were old friends.
It was 1916, and the news of the terrible slaughter in the trenches began to be something the missionary agonized with to his old friend. The chief asked him "What I can't understand is how your people can eat so many of their enemy."
We don't eat them. We just kill them."
You just kill them? That's barbaric!" Possession of some sort of framework is possession of a sense of limit. Maybe we have trouble with the OT not because the Israelites had such "barbaric" limits, but because our culture has none.
Posted by noelper (# 9961) on
:
quote:
Are you saying that God inspired genocide among us so as to wake us up to his unrequired love? Or to deliver a message?
No, I am saying that God used the natural human inclination towards genocide, in a way that confounds the predisposition. That is, to teach and work out His own Righteousness.
By interweaving His Ways with prevailing cultural customs and practises , and developing personal revelatory relationships with those individuals who were prepared to respect and serve Him, the OT God consistently shows how low He is prepared to stoop, in order to win over the human race from mindless cruelty.
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
noelper, I think I see where you want to go, but I'm not sure I understand you. If I do understand you correctly, I'm don't think I can take the route with you to where you want to get to. Could you unpack. please?
Posted by noelper (# 9961) on
:
quote:
I don't think I can take the route with you to where you want to get to. Could you unpack. please?
It's a route where the stepping stones are are not visible, Psyduck. (Think Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade)
The OT God looks down from the eagle's viewpoint onto the carefully laid plans of us mice and men -and loves us ! Enough to enjoin His Righteousness with our brutality to make us His own - the apple of His eye; a new creation; the Redeemed from a lost world of hopelessnees.
![[Yipee]](graemlins/spin.gif)
Posted by Freddy (# 365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by noelper:
quote:
Are you saying that God inspired genocide among us so as to wake us up to his unrequired love? Or to deliver a message?
No, I am saying that God used the natural human inclination towards genocide, in a way that confounds the predisposition. That is, to teach and work out His own Righteousness.
This makes sense to me. ![[Paranoid]](graemlins/paranoid.gif)
If you make wiping out the inhabitants of the land synonymous with wiping out evil you can put a good spin on horrendous acts of genocide.
This is no help to the wickedly genocidal generation, but by casting this shameful history as somehow noble and righteous you can see God as on your side.
Ironically, since God is on your side you are then bound to obey that God. Then it turns out that His rules just happen to be that you are not to wipe out your enemies, but in fact are to love them.
Naturally you feel ripped off about this, but Christians seem to have bought this idea hook, line and sinker.
Posted by noelper (# 9961) on
:
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
Thomas Mann, in a series of famous broadcasts from the US to Germany during WWII, played on the theme that Nazi Germany was actually fuelled to do what it was doing, and to do it more and more, by the belief that "Otherwise, they'll do it to us..." And Mann was basically telling them that retribution was coming, and that what they were beginning to suffer was the mirror reflection of what they were inflicting and had already conceived to inflict. There was a clear invoking of a sow-the-wind-reap-the-whirlwind paradigm. And of course with the classical Prophets, there is the theme that the Assyrian is God's punishing rod. It does sometimes look as though it's being argued that there's an immanent mechanism in the outworking of history that visits consequences on people. And these consequences are understood within (highly) moral paradigms, rather than from a strandpoint of giving-over to barbarity.
But it's still a frightful dynamic. And it works on the basis of guilt reverberating round and round in the system.
And sometimes people conceive of themselves as the executives of this dynamic. General Patton, who was known to be physically ill every time he visited a liberated death camp, made a practice, AFAIK, of getting hold of the local community leaders, and bringing them to see what had been going on. There seem to have been a number of suicides.
I can see all of this as being of a piece with the developed - and I mean developed, as in the prophets - morality of the OT.
But I have to say that for me the central dynamic of the NT is of the Christ who breaks the circle of violence by suffering the violence, not by visiting it.
All sorts of things can emerge out of genocide - as any other human awfulness. And yes, I think that God can and does bring about a fundamental reworking of these things. But I can only see it as happening when God is also somehow among the victims. When God allows himself to be totally destroyed.
The lessons of genocide have mostly to come from the side of the victims. I suspect that the only thing the perpetrators might have to teach us is their horror at what they have done. If they ever reach that point. But maybe, if they do, that's a very important lesson indeed. And I don't really get it from the DH.
Posted by noelper (# 9961) on
:
quote:
And I don't really get it from the DH.
Err sorry...DH ?
quote:
God can and does bring about a fundamental reworking of these things. But I can only see it as happening when God is also somehow among the victims. When God allows himself to be totally destroyed.
At this stage it's no longer about morality - Right v Wrong or Good guys v Bad guys. It's about redeeming the irredeemable and re-igniting Love, where death would otherwise prevail.
Posted by Psyduck (# 2270) on
:
noelper - Sorry - DH = Deuteronomistic History, as per the OP. quote:
At this stage it's no longer about morality - Right v Wrong or Good guys v Bad guys. It's about redeeming the irredeemable and re-igniting Love, where death would otherwise prevail
Hmm - sounds a bit Nietzschean! But then again, one of the big problems with for example conservative Christian portrayals of God is that he's depicted as being so tied up with righteousness, and the consequences of breaking the Law, that he's incapable of simply being compassionate. It isn't just that he kills people in their millions, as in the flood. It's that he justifies himself in so doing. A God who did that in anger, or desperation might be preferable to a God who did it in cold blood, to carry through the consequences of a system he'd set up.
So I'm with you about the inadequacy of the right v. wrong thing.
But a God who berserks through creation, desperately trying to get people to respond to him - is that really what you mean? I see a God like that as a God whose options have run out. Whereas the God who hands himself over to be killed by his creation is a God with one option left. Indeed, if it's an accurate guide to the nature of God - that God is love - then it was maybe the only option that was eevr going to work, and the option to which God had committed himself in the act of creating.
Posted by noelper (# 9961) on
:
quote:
Hmm - sounds a bit Nietzschean!
Dunno about Nietzsche (Does he read this board too? )
quote:
...a God whose options have run out. Whereas the God who hands himself over to be killed by his creation is a God with one option left. Indeed, if it's an accurate guide to the nature of God - that God is love - then it was maybe the only option that was eevr going to work, and the option to which God had committed himself in the act of creating.
As I see it, He committed Himself irrevocably from the first rejection in the Garden - substituting Himself in the first animal sacrifice which was then used to 'cover' the perpetrators in two senses.
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