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Jan 9, 2024

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God in the Old Testament, Violence, and Progressive Revelation There are very famous and troubling violent passages (i.e. genocide of various peoples considered to be the enemies of the Israelites; God sending an evil spirit on Saul; God hardening the heart of Pharaoh) in the Old Testament. These passages are not just about the inexplicable suffering that God permits . Rather we have God commanding and even directly causing violence, i.e. what seems to us to be at times morally frivolous divine behavior. Later we see a transition, especially with prophets like Isaiah and Amos and Hosea, to a more reasonable and more moral understanding of what God should be. In fact, one of the strengths of biblical revelation is its emphasis on righteous behavior, i.e. on the practice of justice and mercy toward our fellow human beings over ritual sacrifice or burnt offerings. This is where the idea of progressive revelation comes in to help make sense of the contradictions between earlier and later biblical depictions of God. Progressive Revelation is the idea that teachings about God become gradually clearer, more inspiring, and more reasonable in the course of Israel’s long history with God. There is a developing awareness of just who God is as biblical history unfolds. It is not God who changes, but rather the biblical writers’ understanding of God that changes in time. By the end of the Old Testament God is no longer as unpredictable and violent as in the earlier books. It is finally the prophets of the Old Testament who give us the most accurate understanding of God. These prophets announce 1. that God is one (i.e. the God of the Israelites is not just one God among many) and the creator of all 2. that God desires the happiness of all people and not just of Israel and 3. the necessity of practicing justice and mercy instead of mere ritual practice in order for a person to be in a righteous and wholesome relationship with God. This is a historical development of the understanding of God and God’s will by the chosen people. What does not change is the place of the covenant in Israel’s relationship with God. God is faithful to the covenant despite Israel’s lack of faithfulness. See also Adam Hamilton , “God’s Violence in the Old Testament,” in Making Sense of the Bible (2014), pp. 207-217. Hamilton distinguishes two basic approaches to understanding God’s violence in the Old Testament: 1. The literalist readers of the Bible interpret the violent commands and actions of God as historically true. Those people who were destroyed, especially the enemies of God’s people, deserved to be destroyed because of their wickedness. Or, in the case of the Israelites, God punished them in order to bring them back to obedience to God’s will. So violence would seem to be justified. But Hamilton also gives many examples of shocking violence from the Bible (pp. 208-211) that seem to call into
question the necessity of violence or the goodness of God. We will read these examples very soon as we continue our journey through the Old Testament. 2. Though the Bible’s basic teachings about God are true (God is a good, just, patient, and all-powerful Creator who commands mercy, justice, and compassion), some of the stories in the Old Testament about God are not entirely true, as they are the work of human beings who, in the way they articulate their stories, reveal how much they are a product of their time. The Bible, writes Hamilton, “was written by human beings whose understanding and experience of God was shaped by their culture, their theological assumptions, and the time in which they lived .” (213) “The violence of scripture is a reflection of the values and the theological and moral vision of some of its human authors, not of the God they sought to serve.” This ancient view of God that we find with some of the Bible’s authors assumed that violence was one of the ways that God dealt with humanity. One reason why this second interpretation of biblical violence, which focuses on the flaws and limitations of the biblical authors, exists at all is that the first interpretation, which sees (and accepts) God’s extreme violence as true, cannot be harmonized with the picture of God that Jesus proclaims in the New Testament. So this second option or second interpretation fits very well with the idea of progressive revelation: there is a gradual development of the understanding of God’s true nature that we find in the Old Testament writings, and this development continues into the New Testament and reaches its peak there in the radical teachings of Jesus as presented by the New Testament writers. Thus the Old Testament is evaluated in light of the New Testament. Marcion (85-160 CE) Marcion was an early Christian theologian who was very disturbed by what he considered to be the violent, petty God of the Old Testament. He drew the conclusion that this must be a very different God from the God of love proclaimed by Jesus. For him the God of the Old Testament was a lesser God, not the highest God or the true God. He thereby rejected the Old Testament and taught that Christians should not be reading it. The Old Testament should not be included as part of the Bible at all. Marcion’s attempt to reject the Old Testament and assert that there were two Gods, one evil and one good, was rejected by the early Christian Church for a number of reasons: 1. The Old Testament was Jesus’ Bible (there was not yet a New Testament, since it emerged only after Jesus’ death). In the New Testament Jesus often quotes the Psalms and the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, both of which are part of the Old Testament. 2. Early Christians were already using the Old Testament as their Bible even before Marcion objected to it. 3. The Old Testament, especially the Book of Isaiah (also called the Book of the Prophet Isaiah), was seen to contain passages and promises that were eventually fulfilled in Jesus. 2
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