"Sure, God condemns homosexuality in the Old Testament, but he also condemns hot dogs and orders the stoning of disobedient children." We hear this on pop "news" programs a lot. At the outset of Is God a Moral Monster? you write that you were motivated to address this issue because of misrepresentations of violence and ethics in the Old Testament. Can you give us some examples of what you mean? Since 9/11, the New Atheists have not been content to simply blast Islam; now all religion is seen to be evil. Many of the arguments used are derived from examples of violence in the Old Testament: for example, when God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, or even more strongly, the command to kill the Canaanites. They use terms such as genocide and use strong emotional language to say that if this is the kind of God the Christians worship, then they don't want to have anything to do with him. So I use the title Is God a Moral Monster? The phrase "moral monster" actually comes from Richard Dawkins. There's a long quotation where Dawkins calls God "a petty, unjust, unforgiving, control freak, vindictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." That's how he views the God of the Old Testament.
Dawkins describes Israel's campaign against the Canaanites as "bloodthirsty massacres carried out with xenophobic relish." We often hear people talk about the wars recorded in the book of Joshua as a form of ethnic cleansing. What's wrong with this particular way of characterizing these texts? For one thing, it's not ethnically motivated. To throw "ethnic" in there makes it sound like something you'd hear about in Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia’that is, motivated by tribal or ethnic divisions. Indeed, the condemnations are not solely for the Canaanites; God brings judgment on all kinds of people in the Old Testament. And it's not as though Israel can do no wrong. He warns that if Israel is wicked like the Canaanites, then they too will be vomited out of the land.
That's an important point. We're told that the Israel that God brought out of Egypt was a "mixed multitude" (Exod. 12:38-39): Moses married an Ethiopian; Rahab and her Gentile family are added to Israel's ranks; and King David descends from Ruth the Moabite. Israel was supposed to show concern for aliens and sojourners in the land, and so forth. Are you arguing that there are plenty of these passages, but that the New Atheists don't really address them? Exactly. There is little concern for ethnic differences based on, say, skin color or tribe. When we read about this, it's very much connected to idol worship and God not wanting his people Israel to be contaminated by the immoral and idolatrous practices of those who are in the land of Canaan.
The God of the Covenant
When I read xenophobic, nation-glorifying histories of particular cultures, the one thing I don't expect is exactly what I find in chapter after chapter, book after book of Israel's history’namely, that God in fact declares war on Israel for violating the covenant. If you're trying to write your own national history and using God as a mascot, you're hardly going to have your God turn on you, are you? And it's very interesting that God himself in this covenant, which he makes with Israel in Deuteronomy, tells them that he's not choosing them because they're some select people. He reminds them that they're a stubborn people, that they're rebellious and wicked, that they have done wrong. God does not select them for their moral qualities.
This actually highlights God's mercy. Why do you think God called the Israelites to kill and destroy the Canaanites instead of him wiping them out with fire and brimstone as he did with Sodom and Gomorrah? There was a close connection between the deity of, say, the Canaanites and the land in which they lived and the people with whom the land was identified. To expel the people was actually an indication that the God who was driving them out was greater than the god of that land to whom those people were connected. So you see commonly that there is a driving-out language or a dispossessing language used that doesn't include killing.
You observe that God didn't allow Israel to have a standing army and that Israel's wars were not for professionals, but for amateurs and volunteers. What is the significance of this? It's a reminder that if Israel is to inhabit the land and to be victorious over her enemies, it is not by any virtue that the Israelites have by trusting in their own armies and their own strength; rather it is clearly through the working of Yahweh, the God of the Israelites, that this victory comes about. So you see that with Gideon, for example, when he amasses thousands of people, God says he's only going to work with three hundred to show the greatness of his power over the Midianites. God wants his people to be reminded that they're not to put their trust in political alliances, in horses and chariots and so forth, but rather in the name of the Lord.
Understanding Old Testament Rhetoric
You write that God told the Israelites that the process of driving out the Canaanites would be a gradual one (Deut. 7:22), but then we're told by Joshua in sweeping terms that Israel wiped out all of the Canaanites, just as we might say that a sports team blew their opponents away or slaughtered or annihilated them. The author or editor likewise followed the rhetoric of his day. Is that the best solution to the problem? For example, when Joshua says that none of the Anakim was left in the land (Josh. 11:21), was this an exaggeration or hyperbole, or did it have to do with the field of battle’in other words, a total defeat of all the Anakim soldiers? It seems to reflect the very language of the ancient Near East where you do have strong exaggeration. You will have, for example, a war text like the book of Joshua, which resembles these ancient Near Eastern war texts, where you have people described as having been utterly destroyed, yet you will see survivors. Even at the end of the book of Joshua, Joshua mentions that there are many nations still living among the Israelites that need to be driven out. In fact, as we read Judges, the next book in the canon and literarily connected to Joshua, we see that there are groups of Jebusites and so forth’that is, part of the Canaanite people who cannot be driven out. This is something we need to come to terms with. What I therefore try to do in my book is deal with the language of exaggeration and hyperbole common in the ancient Near East.
In Deuteronomy 20, for example, we have a difficult passage that people love to quote: "You shall save nothing alive that breathes, but shall devote them to complete destruction." Man, woman, child, infant, ox, donkey and sheep’everyone and everything has got to go. Doesn't this sound like jihad? Is our God no different from the Allah of Islamic terrorists? This is one of the questions emerging on university campuses and in much of the popular and scholarly literature, so I think it is important for us not to take for granted a Christian consensus. We need to be able to address these sorts of concerns. What we see is that even in Deuteronomy 20, Moses uses this language of leaving alive nothing that breathes, to "utterly destroy." But it's interesting that, as I mentioned, the same term is used when we get to Jeremiah 25: the word herem is used of the people of Judah, where God says he is going to utterly destroy them, that he will leave their cities an everlasting desolation. But as you get to the end of the book you see that this actually does not happen. You do see Judah incapacitated by the Babylonians and their religious, economic, and political system utterly destroyed, that they are now vulnerable in the hands of their enemies’deported and displaced. It's basically ruination for the nation, even though there are many survivors who are either in Judah or deported to Babylon. So again, that term "utterly destroy" is being used in not such a literal fashion, but it has that sense of disabling, incapacitating, and so forth.
Pastorally speaking, would you suggest that instead of standing over these texts in judgment, we allow them to accuse us? We are the Amalekites and the Canaanites. We are the ones God should drive out of the land; and in the book of Revelation, we're the ones who shouldn't have our robes dipped in blood. We're not the ones who should be part of the choir singing "Glory to the Lamb"; we should be among the slaughtered. Should this drive us to our knees in gratitude for God's grace and mercy in Jesus Christ rather than turn us into, finally, judges and murderers of God? This is a sobering reminder that it's easy to become triumphalistic and high-minded about our own status as Christians yet fail to see that there but for the grace of God go I. So I think that when we have an understanding not only of God's judgment but also of God's mercy and grace, we can have a clearer perspective of these issues.
Can Christians invoke these "texts of terror," these holy war texts for, let's say, whatever enemy we as Christians happen to have, whatever geopolitical force out there is against us, or maybe in defense of America? Can we appeal to these texts to justify just wars even as holy wars? No, we certainly would not use those texts to justify holy wars. Those would have to be on principles of common grace available to all people. The texts written about the Canaanites or Amalekites were unique and part of God's unfolding salvation history for particular persons who were surrounded by signs that vindicated the commands given by Moses and by Joshua.
We have to admit that there's a long history of Christendom, crusades, and so-called holy wars for so-called holy land. But the New Testament treats the old covenant theocracy as limited in both time and space, as a type of future things and as now "obsolete" (Heb. 8:13). The Quran doesn't recognize any distinction between old and new covenants, type and reality, promise and fulfillment. The example of Mohammed is normative and he had his Medinan (tolerant) and Meccan (jihadist) periods. So, is it fair to say that when medieval knights cleaved the skulls of Muslims crying, "Christ is Lord!" they were violating Scripture, while Islamic terrorists today are living out the Quran in daily life? That is a nice overview of what is taking place. In the Bible, we do not have warrant for sacralized violence today; there is no divine sanction given to violence as a means to advance the Christian faith or to expand God's kingdom, whereas in Islam there is.
Understanding Covenant Context
How important is it to distinguish between what God is doing in the old covenant from what God is doing in the new covenant? In other words, to see the old covenant as a play within a play’as in Hamlet’that is pointing to something. It's not the real thing; it's the anticipation of something that's far broader, fuller, and more final. But we're living in this time between the two comings of Christ, where it is a day of common grace and just wars, not holy wars. I think that's an excellent point. When we look at the development of Israel as a nation transformed into an interethnic people of God, not bound by ethnicity or geography, the picture does indeed change. In the New Testament, we see more of an emphasis on not wrestling against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers’not that spiritual warfare wasn't taking place in the Old Testament. In a sense, spiritual warfare was displayed in the battles against Canaan or when God opposed Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt. It was a clear demonstration of the superiority of the one true God over these false gods that the Egyptians were worshipping. And so we see, in a sense in ancient form, a picture of spiritual warfare that continues.
So there is that continuity, but the way in which it is waged is going to be different, given the constitution of the people of God, the true Israel today. So yes, we do see a certain progression taking place. But we are reminded in both testaments that there is a spiritual battle going on that is destructive both spiritually and morally if we capitulate to those powers, and that God is moving his purposes forward through his people in the Old Testament, preparing the way for the coming of the Messiah. And then in the New Testament and beyond through Jesus Christ and the new Israel he's established, we set back the powers of darkness in the way we live as salt and light in the world. As we read in Ephesians’in our attitudes and in not letting the sun go down on our wrath’we are not to give Satan a foothold in our lives. By having reconciling, forgiving relationships, we set back the powers of darkness in our everyday lives. This is how spiritual warfare is conducted indirectly. Though, I would argue, there is certainly a place for exorcism, for battling malevolent powers that act directly on human beings just as Jesus encountered in his ministry in Israel.
Would you say that the real difference is not between two different Gods, but between two different covenants’the old covenant and the new? Absolutely. There is no question about the unity of the God of Scripture. There is no dichotomy between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament, but God is working in different ways under these two covenants. The first covenant is a precursor, a preparation for what is to come for the second. It sets the context for the new covenant in Jesus Christ through which all of these other events, pictures, and institutions’the priesthood, sacrifices, and so forth’make sense in light of what Christ accomplished.
