How do we understand the biblical stories involving destruction, terror, and death? Are they, as a literal reading often indicates, examples of divine wrath and retribution? And how can such horror be understood as compatible with the supposed loving character of God?
Retribution and related words, of course, can mean different things. John W. Wenham, for example speaks of “beneficent retribution,” which in The Goodness of God (InterVarsity 1974), he explains as different from revenge. In other writings, such as this article, retribution refers to some sort of pay-back, which is one way to describe revenge.
Wenham got my attention because he was one of the first conservative evangelical writers to publicly call into question the traditional doctrine of hell. Interestingly, however, he believes that God directly causes everything, including the evil things in the world. He supports this by appealing to the way the Bible treats the forces of nature and the devastation from military aggression.
I find the notion that God is the cause of all the evil in the world to be a reprehensible idea. If I thought that devastating hurricanes, for example, constitute supernatural temper tantrums, I would have serious reservations about God’s character. Of course that brings up an interesting philosophical question: is God good just because he says he is? Or is God good because he is good in an objective and observable way? I won’t take the space here to thoroughly explore that issue. Suffice to say that if “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8) actually means something; we must believe that God’s goodness remains observable to human beings. God is good, not just because he says he is, but because he really is good in a way that humans can understand.
One of the problems in understanding those tough biblical stories is that we come to those accounts with 21stcentury expectations and assumptions. We forget that people in ancient times lived in a very different world. For example, if it rains today, we readily accept the meteorological explanation involving seasons, cold fronts, jet streams and cloud layers. We know that weather is a very complex but somewhat predictable system of evaporation, water and air currents, temperature changes, precipitation, and so on. (For a wonderful essay on this subject, specifically how biblical material relates to science, see “Then a Miracle Occurs” by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull, published in Spectrum, 32/2, Spring 2004).
An ancient Israelite, however, saw the rain as God’s direct action. If it rained and gave him a good harvest, he would think that God was happy with him. If a storm wiped him out, he would think that God was angry. People like John Wenham think we should continue to think this way. My point is we don’t. And it is no use trying to turn back the clock and accept the ancient world view of things. We simply have too much reliable information that tells us otherwise. And instead of solving anything, it simply makes the problem of evil that much worse because God is now the source of random, destructive events.
One reason we have the book of Job is because the Deuteronomist system of blessings and curses was rigidly applied to everything and did not work out in real life. Sometimes droughts happened to people who worshipped sincerely while wicked people got plenty of rain. Sometimes good people suffered from unprovoked aggression from their enemies while wicked people stayed in power.
Unlike his contemporaries, Job saw his troubles as completely independent from his behavior and character. Since he lived in an ancient culture he still thought his troubles were caused by God. He just didn’t think he deserved them. But his was a minority opinion. Most, including his closest friends, figured that good things always happen to good people. And bad things always happen to bad people. If a lightning bolt hit the house; that was an obvious sign of personal guilt and God’s displeasure. Even insurance adjusters today talk about “acts of God.” But we know that the term simply refers to random natural occurrences; not literal intentional acts of God. But the majority view in ancient Israel was that of Job’s friends.
God’s problem, of course, is how to communicate with people who think like Job’s friends did. God seems to have partially addressed that problem by taking responsibility for everything, even evil things. One example of how that played out is the account of Micaiah talking to Ahab and Jehosephat (1 Kings 22). When Micaiah explained why Ahab was about to go to war he resorted to a fantastic tale that described God on his heavenly throne talking to his ministering spirits. God asked for a volunteer to go down and tell Ahab lies so that he would be killed in battle. One spirit agreed and with God’s approval promptly became a lying spirit in the mouths of Ahab’s prophets.
This story illustrates a couple of things about presuppositions in ancient times. First, the logic of the Bible writers is not the logic of God. Inspiration does not eliminate the human element. Nor does it erase cultural beliefs, assumptions and expectations. Micaiah’s audience did not blink at the implications of the story he told because in their view, God was obviously responsible for both good and evil in the world. So if God wanted to send a lying spirit to trick Ahab; that was just the way things were. Of course they might have asked the question, why then did God send a prophet to try to undo the deception? To us it might seem that God was contradicting himself. But to the ancients that did not matter. That was just the way God kept things under control.
Second, we must remember that cultural standards of what is harsh or what is appropriate have changed over time. Life was tough in ancient times and filled with cruel events. During some periods, life expectancy for men was 40 something; 30 something for women. Of course the overall mortality rate was likely affected by a high rate of infant death. And a woman’s chance of dying during childbirth was about 50%. In addition, violence and revenge were often part of everyday life. Tribal dynamics being what they were, survival often meant personally killing someone. Civil justice was taken care of by the next of kin. And in an honor society, revenge was the only way to set things right. The old “eye for an eye” rule was given in that context in order to limit the violence, not to prescribe more. And warfare was always up close and very personal. If it was not the neighboring nations invading, burning crops, killing, raping and kidnapping; other Israelite tribes were often just as much of a threat. And this all happened literally in the backyards, if not in the houses, where people lived.
When David’s father sent him to find his brothers in Saul’s army and give them some food, he knew they were in a place easily accessible to the young shepherd boy. And you thought violence on the TV in your living room was a threat. Think about sending your young son to witness blood and gore first hand. Judging by the brother’s reaction, David seems to have had the same interest in seeing the battle that kids today have in watching action movies. He could hardly wait.
I have long wondered about the reality of the David and Goliath story. We naturally tone it down a bit, especially when we tell it to kids. But the truth is Goliath was not dead when the stone hit him in the forehead. David had to use the giant’s own sword to kill him. Then he hacked off the huge head, picked up the bloody trophy, and carried it back to Jerusalem (1 Sam. 17:54) where you can be sure it was put on display. But the story does not end there. The Israelites ran after the retreating Philistines and slaughtered as many as they could, leaving a bloody trail of death all the way to the Philistine towns of Gath and Ekron.
If we were to meet an ancient soldier, whether Israelite, Philistine, Amorite or other, he would not understand our modern sensibilities regarding rules of warfare and genocide. “Why wouldn’t you slaughter as many of your enemy as you can?” he might ask. “To do otherwise would be to invite disaster later on. And if given the chance, killing civilians is simply the right thing to do. As for all the plundering and kidnapping; that was simply the just reward for soldiers who put their lives at risk for God and country.” Thus Deborah could rhapsodize about the benefits of her God-given victory: “Are they not finding and dividing the spoil?— A girl or two for every man; spoil of dyed stuffs for Sisera, spoil of dyed stuffs embroidered, two pieces of dyed work embroidered for my neck as spoil?” (Judges 5:30).
Part of the thinking of that era also had to do with group identity and responsibility. If Aachen, for example, deserved to be punished, then according to cultural norms, his entire family should logically share in the punishment. Likewise, killing an attacking army and wiping out their entire city or even nation was an acceptable strategy. The questions we raise about genocide and the appropriate treatment of one’s enemy remain valid and important questions. But they are modern questions that simply did not occur to the ancient soldiers or civilians. Furthermore, whatever cruel fate befell them at the hands of their enemies was automatically interpreted as the appropriate judgment or discipline of God. Just as surely as God sent the rain, he also sent the marauding soldiers, raping and pillaging in their land. God did not invent this type of thinking. But he had to work with it.
Ancient religious expectations were also often twisted and brutal. When Jephtha (Judges 11) made a vow that he would sacrifice as a burnt offering whatever first came out of his house to meet him, he was appalled to be greeted by his daughter. But rather than repenting of making a foolish vow, he felt obligated before God to go through with it. Even his daughter understood the appropriateness of her fate. (Alden Thompson wrote a great little book related to these issues called Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God.It is available on Amazon.com.)
In trying to understand the tough stories of the Bible, it helps me to see the destructive, violent, and genocidal events in the Bible as reflecting the cultural milieu of the time, both in cause, and in the religious interpretation at the time, not the character of God. That God was seen at the time to be using these events as discipline or payback has more to do with the wickedness of the people than the kind of person God is. In the ancient Hebrew accounts, God takes responsibility for both the good and the evil that happened. And we should keep in mind that the biblical accounts were interpreted and written down by people who were part of that cultural milieu.
I am not impressed by those who exhort us to have a “biblical world view” of things. Which “world view” expressed in the Bible are they talking about? The world view in which human sacrifice and genocide are acceptable? The world view in which handicapped people are excluded from the place of worship (see Lev. 21:16-23); or how about the world view in which requiring a girl to marry her rapist seems to make good sense (Deut. 22:28-29)? The point is the Bible doesn’t have just one world view. It has many and they changed over time. God’s character was not perfectly revealed. And spiritual truth is always progressive.
But shouldn’t we expect a good God to rise above a culture of violence? In that regard, there is ample evidence that God worked to raise people above the depravity of their culture. As Wenham points out, for example, Israel was known to be more merciful to their enemies in battle than other nations were. And God sometimes intervened in a direct way in order to raise the level of morality and religious fidelity. But he always had to work within the boundaries of what people understood at the time. In that context we can see that he never did anything in order to get revenge – even if on the surface it seemed to be written that way. Take the story of Uzzah for example (2 Sam. 6). When Uzzah died, David was angry. He was probably not angry so much about the fate of Uzzah but about his kingly plans being interrupted. But he finally got the point. Were we to interview David later and ask him about the apparent severity of killing someone who was only trying to help, he would not see the same difficulty that we do. If God needed to put a scare in people by killing Uzzah, it was quite appropriate for him to do so. And by the way, the text says nothing about Uzzah’s eternal destiny.
God was not trying to discipline Uzzah (someone who is dead doesn’t learn anything) as much as he was trying to get David’s attention. And David took the lesson to heart, eventually. He was about to use the ark as his trophy and put it on display in his capital city. He was about to treat the representation of God’s relationship with Israel as a prize of human achievement. Neglecting the priestly responsibility of caring for the ark had greater implications than just carelessness. David was making the national religion all about him. And thus the authenticity of Israel’s relationship to God was at stake. So Uzza’s death was interpreted as God intervening in an extreme way; apparently the only way possible under the circumstances.
In both the Old and New Testaments, God’s wrath appears to come not necessarily from God directly but from the natural results of sin. Even the blessings and curses in Deuteronomy 28 that give a foundation for God’s severe judgments present the curses as a result of sin itself, even if God is still viewed as the agent. Some call this “reflexive justice” because sin is the very thing that brings about the punishment or discipline. Even today we realize that those who cannot control themselves create a situation that brings about external controls.
Time does not permit me to explore the implications of all the problem passages in the Bible. But to summarize, those passages where God appears to be the source of severe, out of proportion revenge, can be best understood as the product of a culture, circumstance, and a depraved humanity that could not have understood anything else. To the extent that God was understood to be directly responsible, the extreme measures matched the circumstances and provided a language of divine intervention.
Let’s not, however, look with arrogance at the “primitive” understanding of ancient cultures. Given the evil present in today’s world, and given the twisted way many people understand God’s actions and motives, we dare not claim any moral high ground. Even today, many people have a hard time respecting God unless he is connected somehow with natural and even military devastation. The language of the Old Testament still speaks.
There is much more to the story, however, than just realizing the cultural and religious context. The rest of the story has to do with the progressive revealing of God’s character culminating in the person of Jesus. Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament expectations and remains the clearest picture of God—because he is God. He is Yahweh. And through Jesus we know a God who forgives his enemies and who promises a kingdom not of this world to all who believed in him. This kingdom is built on the principles of agape love and remains open to all; the poor, the broken down, the sinful and the hopeless. Rather than excluding the foreigners and the handicapped, Jesus’ kingdom remains inclusive of all. In Jesus’ own words, he came to “proclaim the year of the lord’s favor,” not to take revenge.
Philosophical Concerns
I mentioned John Wenham a few times in the above article because he provides a well thought out and consistent view of retribution and God’s character. I have great respect for his thinking. I especially appreciate the questions he raises regarding hell. But he also presents a set of assumptions that I find inadequate, even though I suspect they represent a majority opinion among conservative Christians. Foremost among his troubling assumptions is that God intentionally and directly causes everything including evil.
In his defense I will acknowledge that part of his argument makes sense. He notes that the problems we have with harsh biblical events are the same problems we have with evil that occurs throughout history. And that is true. After all, if God is all loving and all powerful, it makes little difference whether he permits evil or directly causes it to happen. Either way he is responsible for it. And Wenham would add that God’s ultimate purpose in everything is for good. Therefore it is a good thing he is in control of everything because he will make it all work out right.
But to my mind that makes the problem of evil even more acute. How can we understand God’s character to be good if he is responsible for the very things we need him to eliminate? Furthermore, if both good and evil remain under God’s immediate and personal control, why is it necessary for there to be a prolonged process of working things out for good? It seems like God could have found a much less damaging and more efficient way of redeeming the world. And why would the world ever need to be redeemed anyway? Sin could have been prevented instead of dealt with after the fact.
In the on-going debate about the existence of God, the problem of evil poses an almost insurmountable problem for Christian apologists. If a good God exists he would not want evil to exist. But since truly great evil continues to exist and has for millenniums at the expense of huge numbers of innocent people, either God is not powerful enough or not good enough to solve the problem. That he will solve the problem in the future does not undo all the horrendous evil that has already caused so much meaningless suffering.
Theistic philosophers (who are not deterministic) tend to agree that there is only one real solution to that argument against God’s existence. That solution involves freedom of choice. With choice come consequences for which God cannot be held responsible. Thus evil exists, not because God purposely allowed it or caused it but because beings with choice caused it.
But that poses a problem for our Calvinist friends and good folks like John Wenham. They do not want to admit to anything out of God’s direct control. To them that would violate a fundamental characteristic of God; his omnipotence. But if you believe that God causes everything, freedom of choice gives way to determinism. And in spite of its consistency, a belief in God’s absolute control and strict determinism creates more problems than it solves.
If we accept the existence of a loving and all-powerful God; and if we accept the fact that his creatures have caused great evil that he did not want and from which he personally suffered; it appears that God valued beings with freedom of choice so much that he was willing to risk the security of the universe when he created them. Apparently God wanted beings with whom he could have a real relationship; who would love him because they chose to rather than because they were programmed that way. And within that context we must face the apparently contradictory situation that there is something God cannot do. He cannot control the choices of a being with freedom of choice. But of course that is not a real contradiction. It is a fallacious contradiction similar to the false dilemma of whether or not God can create an object so big he can’t move it.
I cannot accept the notion that God directly causes all things. Furthermore, I prefer an explanation of events that preserves the freedom of choice with which we were created. In that sense we have to be careful how we use the term “permit” to describe God’s attitude toward evil. God never wanted evil to exist. And he wants it to cease as soon as possible. Therefore, the only reason evil exists is because the alternative would destroy the very fabric of the universe. What really holds the universe together is not gravity or quantum mechanics. What holds the universe together and makes it meaningful is the principle of love, which was exemplified by Jesus Christ. The reason that remains the most powerful force in the universe is that it will win the war against evil not by force but by sacrifice. The lamb slain from the foundation of the world does not force our loyalty. He wins it because he deserves it.
So in a real sense evil will end up destroying itself. God will not do the destroying. Although evil initially appeared as a viable option; an alternative to God’s way; it will prove its own undoing. And love, although appearing weak compared to the force of evil will establish its supremacy through the self-sacrifice of its creator. Once those universal issues have been settled, then and only then can the creator/redeemer cut short the process in righteousness.
