Eyre Lines

I’ve been looking at a friend’s analysis of the Fall, and considering how different his conclusions (which are the conventional ones) are from my own.

The story is contained in Genesis 2-3. The relevant parts are (it seems to me), taking these from Bible Gateway NIV:-

2 ⁸ Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. ⁹ The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground – trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. …..
¹⁵ The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. ¹⁶ And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; ¹⁷ but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.’

3 Now the snake was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say, “You must not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ ² The woman said to the snake, ‘We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, ³ but God did say, “You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.”’ ⁴ ‘You will not certainly die,’ the snake said to the woman. ⁵ ‘For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ ⁶ When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. ⁷ Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realised that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. ⁸ Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. ⁹ But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’ ¹⁰ He answered, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’ ¹¹ And he said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?’ ¹² The man said, ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’ ¹³ Then the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The snake deceived me, and I ate.’ ¹⁴ So the Lord God said to the snake, ‘Because you have done this,‘Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. ¹⁵ And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.’ ¹⁶ To the woman he said, ‘I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labour you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.’ ¹⁷ To Adam he said, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, “You must not eat from it,” ‘Cursed is the ground because of you;through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. ¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. ¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are  and to dust you will return.’ ²⁰ Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living. ²¹ The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. ²² And the Lord God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.’ ²³ So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. ²⁴ After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

Now I look at this passage as a lawyer, and the first thing I note is that by implication, until Adam and Eve have eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they must not have knowledge of good and evil. Two things follow; firstly they cannot be thought of as understanding that to act contrary to God’s command is evil, as they have no knowledge of good and evil; secondly, they fall into the category of people who in systems based on English Common Law do not have criminal responsibility. This encompasses children, the severely mentally challenged and the severely mentally ill, and in English law none of these can be held responsible for their actions.

I think the category of “children” works best here. Clearly, both are represented as “new creations”, and the story moves directly from their creation in Gen. 2:5 and 22 to the “Fall”.

So, I ask myself, how, when our rather imperfect legal systems recognise that it is unconscionable to bring the weight of the criminal law to bear on children who are under the age of criminal responsibility, can God be considered to be acting reasonably in exacting a stringent penalty (even if this is not, in fact, death) for a transgression? Even more so, how can it be considered just for this to be imposed not only on those responsible but also on countless generations of their descendants, who have not (at this point) contravened any directive? I note, for instance, that the same God says through his prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 18) that the sins of the fathers are not held against the sons or future generations, and it is clearly the case that a transgression by a parent whether before or after conception is not inherited by the offspring; genetics is not, after all, Lamarckian but Darwinian.

Even more, having lived with dogs for many years, taking them as not really having adequate knowledge of good and evil, I am extremely conscious of the fact that if you forbid them something, given enough time they will eventually do it. Actually, it seems to me that the same goes for children, and very frequently adults. The only way to prevent a behaviour which is not desired is to associate it with bad results via appropriate punishment on many occasions, or to avoid the behaviour completely. A God with even reasonable foresight (far less than the omniscience which is traditionally ascribed, though this seems problematic given that God apparently cannot find them in the garden) would have known that sooner or later Adam and Eve were going to eat the fruit – and the obvious course would have been not to have the trees of the knowledge of good and evil and of eternal life in the garden (and so within reach) in the first place.

Thus, at the least, if I were to take the traditional understanding of the passage (at least Augustine’s understanding), I would want to argue entrapment as well as lack of criminal responsibility. As Omar Khayyam put it “Oh, Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin beset the road I was to wander in, Thou wilt not with predestin’d evil round enmesh me, and impute my fall to Sin?” And I would expect a just and merciful God not to impose a draconian penalty, and certainly not expulsion from their rather cushy life in the garden or painful childbirth for billions of women, rather to use moderate punishment as a teaching opportunity.

There clearly has to be a meaning to this other than the standard “they disobeyed and therefore they and all of mankind must be punished forever”, and I’ll come back to that a little later. Judaism, interestingly, never developed a concept of original sin, and doesn’t regard the Fall in the same way as has been the case in Western Christianity since Augustine.

Let’s now look at what God says and what the serpent (who probably should not be identified with Satan; certainly Judaism does not make that identification) says.

God is placed as saying:- ¹⁷ but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.’

But, of course, in fact they do not die (and it is a fair translation of the original to put “in the day when you eat it you will certainly die”); they are instead banished from a life of ease and condemned to hard labour (pun intended). God is not telling the strict truth here, according to the writer.

The serpent says:- ⁴ ‘You will not certainly die,’ the snake said to the woman. ⁵ ‘For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’

And, in fact, the snake is telling the truth. This is confirmed by God:- ²² And the Lord God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.’ As an aside, this rather negates the traditional statement that death came into the world at this point; death was already implicit unless the fruit of the tree of life were eaten, which it was not.

The poor snake comes out of this really badly; a severe penalty for telling the truth (“giving the game away”, you might say), assuming for a moment that this is a serpentine equivalent of the Darwin fish (the one with legs) and his legs are stripped from him – and also, it would seem, the power of speech.

I clearly know that God’s dictum can be regarded as parental overstatement in order to keep the children safe “If you keep doing that, I’ll rip your arm off and beat you to death with the soggy end”. I’m well aware of arguments that a command overrides any consideration of knowledge of good and evil (and I reject those; laws are, after all, commands, and the principle of lack of criminal responsibility should hold). I don’t hold that no punishment of children is justifiable either – understanding of good and evil is, to a significant extent, imparted by parental punishment. But this is a draconian punishment and not one which is calculated to teach. In fact, it’s the way it is, according to the text, because God fears Adam and Eve becoming immortal as well, and not for any reason of education.

So I look for some other explanation, and find it in something which actually IS inheritable. At some point in the evolution of humanity, there will have been a beginning of self-consciousness, the “sense of self”. I actually think you can see the start of such a consciousness in some primates, and possibly in other species, but not developed to the extent that it is in adult humans (though I could be surprised by, for instance, dolphins…). In the absence of such a sense of self, there is no embarrassment about nakedness, for instance (I think it extremely telling that this is mentioned); there is also, and crucially, no possibility of self-assessment, of any true sense of guilt or shame due to ones past actions.

Is this truly describable as a “fall”? Not really. Prior to development of self consciousness, instincts rule, and instincts are generally amoral; nature unmodified by something like human consciousness has a tendency to be “red in tooth and claw”, though there are identifiable mechanisms which produce some cooperative and even apparently altruistic behaviour in some species. Self-awareness can, indeed, be regarded as a “step up”, allowing for a sense of morality. What Paul says of “the Law” in Romans 5:12-20 and 7:7-20 – “sin is not counted where there is no law” (Rom. 5:13b being the crux of this argument) – is particularly true where there is no ability to reflect on ones deeds with a self-critical stance.

However, the sense of self also allows for self-centredness, selfishness and self-seeking fear, all of which are less than admirable. Arguably, inasmuch as one is self-centred, one is unable to be God-centred, one is unable to love either God or ones fellow human beings and so cannot abide by the Great Commandments, and this is reasonably equated with sin.  Certainly this gives rise to feelings of guilt and shame. In this sense, therefore, sin did enter into humanity with the advent of self-consciousness, colourfully portrayed in Genesis as resulting from eating a fruit but in fact the result of evolution, and it was inheritable, as the genes which produced this mental change will have been heritable.

At the end of this meditation, therefore, we have a form of original sin, due to not so much a fall as a change in humanity, with good and bad aspects. And, of course, definitely not the cause of death entering into the world, nor something meriting punishment in and of itself.

It is, of course, true to say that the basis of penal substitutionary atonement is removed by this reading of Genesis. I don’t consider that a significant loss to theology, though!

Last Sunday was Remembrance Sunday; Monday (the 11th of the 11th) being Remembrance Day proper. For friends who aren’t from the UK, firstly this commemorates the armistice signed at Compiégne which took effect at 11 o’clock on the 11th of November 1918 and effectively brought World War I to an end, and is the commemoration of those who have given their lives in the service of the country in war. During the weeks leading up to it, imitation poppies are worn, bought by a donation to the Royal British Legion, a charity for servicemen and their families, which recall the poppies which grew in profusion throughout the fields of Flanders where the greatest fighting of the Western Front took place. In the States, this is “Veterans Day”, with some of the same connotations. There’s a rather good blog post about the difference here.

11/11 18 was the end of the “Great War”, called at the time “the war to end all wars”.

Would that that title had been correct.

It is, however, the war which has had the greatest impression on me, due to two things. In 1968 at the age of 14 I went on an exchange holiday to Northern France, exchanging with a young French lad of my age. When he came over here, we took him to see some local sights and also up to Edinburgh, talking about the “auld alliance” between Scotland and France prior to the complex arrangement whereby Scots monarchs acquired the English throne for a while and, by and large, the English acquired Scotland. When I went over there, a large proportion of what I saw was the WWI battlefields and the cemeteries associated with them. And the rows of white headstones seemed to go on for ever… I walked for quite a while in one of them, looking at the names and not infrequently lack of names on them. It was, for me, an intense experience.

It was also clear, looking at the ground within a local wood where Hervé liked to cycle (pre BMX but pretending it was moto-cross), that the ground was still scarred 50 years later with the relics of trenches and bomb craters all over the area; it went on for miles and miles. The sheer scale of devastation struck me really forcibly, and I began reading about the history of the period. It was the first war in which slaughter was truly made into an industrial process, and, for the most part, was largely futile as neither side could break out of the trench systems for some three years, just pushing forward and back in an ebb and flow of constant carnage.

The year after that, Selby Abbey had its 900th anniversary, and the town had a festival (in which my parents were prominent organisers). One event was a reunion at the British Legion club in town of a lot of First World War ex-servicemen (that year also being the 50th anniversary of the formal termination of hostilities, which was in 1919). I went along, and was privileged to hear some of the old soldiers actually talking about what it had been like to fight. Some of them were survivors of the Bradford Pals. This was the 16th and 18th batallions of the West Yorkshire regiment. On July 1st 1916, 2000 of the Pals emerged from their trenches to attack on the Somme in the morning; by lunchtime 1,770 of them were killed or wounded. As they were raised from local areas, this meant that something like three quarters of the young men of these areas would never return. Whole streets had lost an entire generation. Part of this I learned from listening to them talk, part I had to research. Some of them, however, were willing to open up a bit, something which my father (who served in the RAF in World War II) was never really willing to do. Several of them had been about the age I was then when they lied about their ages in order to enlist at 16 rather than 18, because it was their patriotic duty, so I could engage with the person they had been a little, and feel all the more for the late adolescence they had never had.

I never felt the same about the Second World War as about the first, anyhow. The second was against a foe who I could reasonably consider sufficiently dangerous and evil to require all possible efforts to be made to wipe them out; not so the first. The German rulers of WWI were not particularly evil and frankly were not even particularly dangerous to England (though they were to France); we entered that war because of our involvement in one of two networks of alliances which had been built up to provide a balance in Europe, which network melted down as a result of an assassination in Sarajevo. We had no particular interests in the conflict between Austria and its Balkan nationalist separatists, but Russia did, and it was allied with France, and so were we and Italy, and Germany was allied with Austria and Turkey, and suddenly the fragile balance of European alliances fell apart. Or alternatively, it can be regarded allegorically as a bar fight...

Once that happened, Germany invaded France, and after a short period of “war of movement” bogged down in trench warfare which lasted over three years and stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss border through Belgium and northern France. It wasn’t the first taste of trench warfare with machine guns which the world had seen (and previous experiments should have convinced everyone concerned that this was a very nasty way to kill off a very large number of soldiers) but it was the biggest by far. For three years, England, France, Belgium and Germany poured their young people into a country-wide industrial mincing machine and received back the shreds of a generation. The generals didn’t know what else to do, hoping above all reason for a “breakthrough”, which was not going to come until some improvements in technology allowed that and the German economy was faltering seriously in continuing to provide an endless supply of munitions. Italy and Austria were busy doing the same in the Alps between their two countries as well, and for a brief period we threw the young of New Zealand and Australia against prepared Turkish positions at Gallipoli to similar effect.

So when we get to that time of year when almost everyone on the street is wearing a poppy, this is what I remember. The sheer waste of millions of young lives. We remember the armistice of 1918 rather than the peace treaty (Versailles, 1919) which finally ended the war because at the time veterans objected to any celebration of victory, and I am in complete agreement with them. As the blog post I linked to above indicates, for the most part we remember in a low-key and dignified way, pace some people who feel that the whole thing has now been co-opted by politicians and media into something more akin to a celebration of more recent wars. We remember loss, not victory.

And it can be argued that Versailles was not really a victory, because the peace treaty was perhaps the worst which has ever been negotiated. Its scheme of reparations against Germany did much to ensure the collapse of the German economy in the 1920s and 30s and produce immense resentment in Germany which gave the background in which Hitler could rise to power, such that in a very real sense World War II was just the “second half” of World War I. The associated treaties were as bad; the botched settlement in the Balkans can be argued to have been partly responsible for the various more recent Balkan conflicts including Bosnia and Kosovo, and the settlement in the Middle East out of the collapsed Ottoman Empire (Turkey) bears considerable responsibility for conflict in (for example) Palestine, Syria and Iraq, which is still an unfinished story.

It wasn’t the war to end all wars; in a sense it hasn’t actually completely ended yet itself, as the repercussions rumble on. I suppose that if you regard the second World War as merely a continuation, it may have ended all wars within Europe, as most of the countries involved are now part of the European Union (the original motivation of which was to stop this happening again) and are fairly unlikely to go to war with each other again, and that is no mean feat considering the previous history of the continent. But it was an appalling and abhorrent waste of a generation from several countries, many of whom went to battle filled with patriotic zeal. That is also large in my remembering when I wear a poppy, and during the rest of the year when I consider that wars are still occurring, and wasting the potential of young lives and the hopes of generations, and that patriotic zeal is often part of the picture. Eric Bogle wrote about this, and his words “It all happened again, and again and again and again and again” ring in my ears.

There has been a Christian concept of “just war” since theologians became aware that Christianity was becoming the religion of the then premier world power and they felt a need to curry favour with the secular power and circumvent the ethos of non-violence which had previously characterised Christianity (to my mind, in complete consistency with the gospel). World War I was not one of them on any reading of the theory. World War II, however, just might have been – unless you see it as a continuation of World War I, in which case it was preventable and should have been prevented not by “appeasing Hitler” but by not getting into the position, through war, where Hitler could rise to power. Almost none of the subsequent wars have been “just” in the Christian sense, but that isn’t something we seem to reflect on much these days.

But the poppies in particular urge us to reflect on World War I, and that should be sufficient to convict us that war is a very great evil indeed. And that it is still the eleventh hour, almost too late for us to stop, and “study war no more”  – but not quite.

In a group on Thursday, we looked at the parable of the Prodigal Son. Now, I’d sat through the sermon on this twice on Sunday (I was sticking around to sell Alpha launch tickets) and I’ve heard sermons on it at least twice this year previously, so when the group leader turned to me and asked “What new inspiration do you get from this, Chris?” my first response was to say that my new inspirations were all played out for this year, please ask me again in twelve months or so.

However, what I did was blurt out an actual new thought which had come to me. The Prodigal is one of the parables where it’s a natural thing to look at it from the point of view of each of the characters, father and two sons. I like looking at stories from the point of view of the different characters, and in some cases it can throw up a really interesting line of thought. What had come to me was “What about the viewpoint of the fatted calf?”

There was hilarity. There was dumfounded silence. There was “Oh well, it’s Chris, trust him…”

However, there’s much more to that with me than just a joke. I posted recently about some aspects of the “zap” experience and the new viewpoint this gave, how the boundaries of “self” dissolved and everything was in some way “me” (and even more to everything was God). I found in the weeks and months following the experience that I was having difficulty maintaining a view of animals as being different, unconnected, something other, something not to be concerned about. Hey, I’m English, and that came really naturally to me anyhow – we’re inclined to value our neighbours pets more than we do our neighbour, after all. I now had, however, a really good reason for taking this bond, this sameness and in a way this identity really seriously.

Obviously there is a difference. I cannot see the fatted calf, for instance, dwelling on the transitory nature of all things and finding comfort in something like “The rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt. 5:45) or the hope of heaven or resurrection. I can envisage something more like “Good grub, good grub, good grub, terror, pain, end” being about the sum of the calf’s reactions. But even if you don’t share my disindividuated viewpoint, the fatted calf is also one of God’s creatures, and an omnipresent God is present in the calf just as he/she/it is in you or me.

I went through a fairly extreme period of soul searching at that point. Should I be eating meat, and therefore complicit in the pain and killing of one of God’s creatures? I learned a little of Jainism around this time, and some very observant Jains go so far as sweeping the path in front of them lest they inadvertently step on an insect and kill it. Even an insect is, after all, one of God’s creatures as well.

This is already at the point where living in the real world becomes just about impossible, but I’m fond of “reductio ad absurdum” and kept up the thinking. What about bacteria? They’re also living creatures, and I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t had courses of antibiotics at one point of another, or if I didn’t kill off a few bugs before I started preparing food. I supposed I could lean on sentience as the governing factor, but it seemed to me that this was a continuum and that I’d eventually have to draw an arbitrary line without any justification other than practicality. Then there were vegetables, also living… and eventually there were rocks. In which God was also manifest.

I eventually arrived at the idea that, in order to exist, I must perforce do things which were (from the point of view of some part of existence) evil. A new conception of “original sin” perhaps, which didn’t need to get as far as Genesis 2 and 3. Countless decisions I make rest on thinking of myself as separate rather than as part, and this in and of itself is “separation from God”, which is one definition of sin. The end of self is the end of sin.

But then, I thought, there is the idea of the world and everything in it as God’s creation, and God rather consistently saying that it was good in Genesis 1. Indeed, that is something which was also forcefully imprinted on me in the initial “zap”. And so somehow, the fact of my being here, forced to sin against God’s creation (which I see as God’s very self) in order to exist, is also, somehow, good. It is, it would seem, good that I exist, just as it is good that everything else exists – and were I the fatted calf, that would be enough. Most of the fatted calf’s story is, after all “good grub”, and the terror, pain and end is a mere speck in its lifetime.

I am aided in being able to take the view of the whole rather than the part rather easily, and from the view of the whole, the existence or non-existence of a part, the pain or joy of a part is of relatively small import, being in any event fleeting in terms of the atemporality of God. Ups and downs are two sides of a coin, you cannot have just “up”; without pain, there is no goodness in lack of pain, without death there is no goodness in life, in existence.

This is, therefore, as it should be (it is “good”), but could it be better, could it be perfect? If it could be perfect, would not an omnipotent God make it so? Now, I am not a fan of omnipotence as a divine characteristic, and Charles Hartshorne has usefully written in “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes” a philosophical argument indicating that it cannot actually be so. John Caputo, in “The Weakness of God” has written a fine rethinking of Christianity in terms of God as an essentially weak force. However, I don’t think I need to go as far as that; the easiest critique of omnipotence is to ask if God can make something which he cannot move (or destroy, or take some other action against), and this exposes the fact that omnipotence cannot really be “omni”; there always have to be boundaries. At the most, we could say that God could do anything which it was possible to do; is it therefore the case that in creating (which I am obliged to see, due to my “all things are God, all things are within God” experience, as a creation out of God’s own substance), God has limited the scope of what he is able to do, whether by actual limitation or limitation of will?

I end up seeing the creation as the original act of kenosis, of self-emptying, thinking of the words of Phil. 2:6-7 “⁶ who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, ⁷ but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant,being born in the likeness of men.” (ESV from Bible Gateway); thus the kenosis attributed to Jesus is a symbol of the greater kenosis of God. In that act of pouring himself out into existence, which I interpret as God becoming creation (thus, perhaps, “Original Incarnation”), God has thus potentially created the best existence which could then be created, given the individuality, the separateness of its constituent elements (that is not to say that this existence is the best existence there could ever be in the future, though; the elements within creation develop and evolve, and I do not think that is a zero-sum game even had Jesus not pointed to the Kingdom of God on earth as a present and growing actuality).

Returning to the fatted calf, it does not, as far as we know, have the capacity to do much more than “live in the moment”; it will not be asking questions like those I am asking. The mental apparatus to weigh courses of action and decide which is good and which is evil are, with the fatted calf, instinctual, not subject to conscious control.

I therefore arrive at the story of Genesis 2-3 and the “Fall”; I don’t see this as an actual Fall, that having taken place at the point of creation and being only a descent (or ascent) from unity into individuality. It does, however, involve the eating of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge, specifically knowledge of good and evil.

Over at Jewish-Christian Intersections, Larry Behrendt has started a series on Problem Texts, and I’ve been spending some time exchanging comments with him. The second of these deals with Deuteronomy 20:16-17, which reads:-

¹⁶ However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. ¹⁷ Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. (NIV from Bible Gateway).

It seems to me that this reveals a vitally important issue to deal with for both Judaism and Christianity (and also for Islam, which also shares a degree of allegiance to the Hebrew Scriptures). As I touch on below, this is just one of a host of injunctions to violence in the earlier books of the Bible, and not just violence but extreme, genocidal violence in total war. We have here what all the religions of the book regard as inspired scripture in which God is portrayed not merely as accepting, but as approving and instructing xenophobia, genocide and wars of annihilation. Historically in Christianity, the words “smite the Amalekites” have occurred far too many times in wars (and sometimes not even in wars) to justify extreme, exterminating violence; violence without compassion or remorse.

There are, I know, groups within all of the religions of the book nowadays who accept these passages literally and are prepared to act on them, just so long as they can identify another group as Amalekites or Hittites (or, as we see later, home grown idolaters).

I think Larry sensibly chooses Deuteronomy 20, as it is part of the Torah (for Christians, the Pentateuch), which is arguably in both cases the most foundational group of texts in scripture. Not only is this scripture, therefore, but it is the earliest and (at least in Judaism) most revered part of scripture. It is also not quite as extreme as the injunctions regarding the Amalekites (Deut. 25:17-19) which, as they provide three of the 613 Jewish commandments or mitzvot, are of another level of difficulty.

It is, I believe, supremely necessary to find ways of dealing with these texts, and unless we wish to regress several thousand years, not by following those groups which regard them as evidencing revelation for the nations of today, and not merely regarding them as obsolete (or, as Anthony LeDonne comments in a reply to Larry, lead us to a Marcionite rejection of the Hebrew Scriptures). They are scripture, they are capable of great damage, and they must be addressed fully.

Larry writes:- “If I adopt an historical perspective, I can easily dismiss this text – it’s not historically likely that the Israelites conquered Canaan in the way the Bible describes. But if this conquest never happened, why does the Old Testament remember God’s war instructions in this way? And worse, what kind of God would order the wholesale murder of conquered men, women and children? What happened to the God who was willing to spare Sodom if there were ten righteous people living there? Were there not ten righteous people among all of the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites?”

My immediate response was “So, what we have in Deut. 20:16-17 is a situation where the Israelites have appreciated that they have a relationship with God and that God is good in respect of them; they haven’t yet grasped that God is the God of the Canaanites as well or that the good of the Canaanites is something to be taken into account. They have a partial revelation (otherwise, why bother with prophets/rabbinic schools/yeshivas or prophets/Jesus/Paul/theologians?).

The problem with this way of presenting it is that some will say that even at the earliest stage, the whole revelation is already there. This is possibly implicit in Torah-only thinking, it’s certainly implicit in some conservative Christian explanation. As a result of that, there’s a danger of being caught up by the Myth of Redemptive Violence (http://www2.goshen.edu/~joanna…).” I was there quoting an article by Walter Wink, author of the “Powers” trilogy, which I highly recommend.

I am, of course, advancing an idea of progressive revelation; I amplify that later by saying:-

“… Religious traditions undergo continuous development… If I follow Isa. 55:8 and 1 Cor. 13:12, I can argue from scripture both that it is entirely right that they do so and that there will always be more work to do (thus securing the theologians’ future employment). I don’t merely think of this in terms of “progressive revelation” in the sense that God grants revelation in bits and pieces as he considers humanity to be capable of receiving it (although I do think that that tends to be the effect); I also consider either that the revelation may be in effect constant but (1) mediated to such an extent by the recipient’s capacity to understand (whether by virtue of language, philosophy, societal imprinting or otherwise) that nothing more than what we now see was capable of being transmitted, (2) that there may have been much fuller expressions of revelation, but that the fact that the society of the time was incapable of understanding or appreciating them meant that they were ignored or deliberately adjusted by third parties, or (3) that the recipient received what he could, thought “I can’t possibly say all of this” and deliberately moderated it to what he judged the audience could receive.

I don’t know how you would tell which of those had been the case with a particular writing. I suspect that no.2b or no.3 might display some characteristics in writing fluency if the passages hadn’t been redacted afterwards, but I’m not equipped to judge that kind of thing.

Incidentally, no.2a represents a kind of “natural selection of inspired writing”, which I think could be a powerful concept, and nos. 2&3 illustrate ways in which you could explain (the passage from Ephesians 5 discussed previously); complete gender equality was an unattainable objective in the circumstances of the time.

However, following the above lines of thinking, I do note that Deut. 20:10-15 displays a technique which would probably have been regarded pre-5th century BCE as fairly morally advanced, namely always to offer surrender to a city and content ones self with forced labour thereafter; sadly this was not extended to the immediately neighbouring “usual suspects”, 16-17 being an exception to that rule. I could definitely see this as still a case of God moving the Israelites as far as it was possible to move them in the moral climate of the time”.

In one of those coincidences which part of me dismisses as such and another part suspects of being divine providence, a sermon I heard yesterday drew on 2 Chronicles 14:1-13 and 16:1-12 in order to illustrate the importance of and benefits of reliance on God as helper. However, if you read through the missing portion, you find a charming tale of ethnic cleansing and religious intolerance in pursuit of a Judah free from the presence, worship or worshippers of idols. Personally, I would never want to preach from texts with this kind of context without addressing the disconnect between the morality displayed there and that which is taken as advanced in the society in which I live.

(There is also a series on violence in scripture starting at Patheos today, and a recent book on the subject. A surfeit of coincidences?)

I do think that the Myth of Redemptive Violence is very active in the historical parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, and it also figures greatly in the various New Testament apocalyptic passages, notably Revelation but including the apocalypses in Mark 13, Matthew 24-25 and to an extent Luke 21:7-28. However, I think that in the passages from Deuteronomy and Chronicles there are also another two factors which are operative.

The first of these is that “bit players are expendable” – as Terry Pratchett comments, when the cry “Guards, guards” goes up, you know that a set of people are going to arrive and be killed or, at the least, neutralised. The story does not expect that we should have any identification with the guards. I have some difficulty reading the book of Job, for instance, which is a good example of this. I have no doubt that the writer did not remotely expect the reader to be agonised by the massive injustice wreaked upon Job’s children with the sole intent of teaching Job a lesson, but my focus goes to them immediately. They are, however, bit players, and to an extent the idol-worshippers of 2 Chronicles and the Hittites and others of Deuteronomy are bit players; we are not expected, I think, to consider their positions; it is the internal situation of Judah and Israel which matter.

The other factor is the sheer tribal egocentricity and xenophobia of the tale (which feeds into what I indicated above). The Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, and the worshippers of idols are “other”, to be feared and shunned and utterly destroyed. Orson Scott Card writes in “Ender’s Game” and “Speaker for the Dead” (extended with lesser effect through “Xenocide” and “Children of the Mind” a splendid dissection of the moralities surrounding his invented categories in which the “other” can be placed. There is Utlanning (a member of the same species from another place), Framling (same species but from another planet), Raman (a different species with which communication is possible) and Varelse, a different species with which communication is impossible (there is also Djur, which lack the capacity for thought and self-awareness).

It is always the case in Card’s universe that the Ultanning or the Framling is definitely “one of us”; the Raman may be attacked, but their position needs to be considered and accommodation with them is possible, but the Varelse needs to be exterminated, as there is no possibility of accommodation. The first two books hinge on the initial categorisation of an insectoid species as Varelse, the realisation that they are in fact Raman, and the resulting moral situation and then the extension to something (a virus, in fact) which appears to be Djur, even more requiring extermination.

In Deuteronomy 20, earlier on rules are set down for warfare with other nations which are, arguably, morally advanced for the time; they are treated as Raman (much on a par with the Levitical instructions for relationships with domestic animals – another species which can be communicated with), and “one of us” clearly doesn’t extend quite as far as that yet. However, the specific exceptions are those given in vv. 16-17, which are treated as Varelse, requiring to be exterminated – and they are by and large the closest nations to the historic Israelites, countering what would be the normal assumption that the named nations would be Framling to the Raman previously considered, in other words to be treated better, as being more “one of us”. But they are not; they are to be largely exterminated.

The assumption I make here is that in the historical actuality (which as Larry links to was probably not that the Israelites entered Canaan with a divine mandate to take it over, but a situation where they coexisted uneasily with neighbours from a very early stage) relationships had become based on a series of revenge attacks, probably initially based in Mimetic Rivalry, the various nations competing for resources, land, population and status, and the resulting vendetta appearing impossible to resolve; there was too much “bad blood”. It’s also possible that a result of the mimetic rivalry was to “scapegoat” neighbouring nations.

We should not here forget the more extreme case case than the Hittites et al., namely that of the Amalekites as mentioned above (Deut. 25:17-19, Judges 6, 7, 10, 15, 20, 27, 30; 2 Samuel 1, 8; 1 Chronicles 4) where the failure of Saul to eliminate every last one of them was grounds for his losing his mandate as King, and there remain three commands among the 613 relating to them, one of which is still to eliminate every Amalekite descendant. This is a clear vendetta situation.

The opposition in a vendetta situation becomes, effectively, Varelse; they cannot be made peace with, accommodated or accepted not because they cannot be communicated with, but because their attitude prevents any understanding; they will not listen. I think that we have the textual relics here of a set of vendettas with immediately neighbouring nations.

Once the other is Varelse, of course, they are not regarded as human. Morality ceases to enter into the equation, as the non-human is not entitled to moral consideration; the wasp stings and you swat it, wasps sting you regularly and you destroy the nest.

When you get to 2 Chronicles 15, however, you are seeing something slightly different; the idol worshippers are definitely either “us” or at worst Utlanning. Where do we get the extermination reaction? I think the answer is seen in the fact that they follow a different religious meme, and one which is seen as contagious. They are therefore harbouring something analogous to a virus, which on Card’s scale is Djur. The only answer to a virus is elimination. In Card’s imaginary universe in “Speaker” and “Xenocide”, it is the unfortunate fact that the virus is housed in a planetary population; it still must be eliminated because of the degree of threat, and so the population will be “collateral damage”. In Chronicles, the idolatrous religious meme is housed in the idolaters, with the same result.

I have to ask myself here what level of divine inspiration would be necessary to overcome a societal identification of a nation or group as Varelse or Djur, and the answer I arrive at is “cataclysmic”. If the recipient could indeed make any sense of a divine instruction to treat Djur or Varelse as “one of us”, the instruction would either fall on completely deaf ears or would be modified by the recipient to something less incomprehensible – for instance, a shift in regard of former “Varelse”, incomprehensible foreigners who might have been exterminated, to the more beneficial status of Raman/Framling, having a status somewhere between a beast of burden or slave and a foreign resident in the society. This occurs in Deut. 20:10.

Of course, all religions can look to later scriptures to modify what they see here; the period of the Prophets in Judah and Israel led by stages to very considerable modifications of the earlier calls to violence to establish and make strong the “people of God”; the start of one such can be seen in 2 Chronicles 16:1-12, where potentially non-violent reliance on God’s aid is placed above paying another neighbouring state to act against the perceived enemy (in this case Israel); that trend continues. By the beginning of the first century CE, Jesus’ injunctions against violence (which are too numerous to address here) were not a massive stretch from the position of Judaism generally, although I would maintain that they were radical in their effect. However, we need to justify why we take the later scripture over the earlier (and Larry has mentioned that in Judaism this becomes particularly difficult).

Some schools of thought in Christianity would appeal to the concept of “dispensations”, ascribing these passages to the dispensation of Law, and stating that this is superseded by the dispensation of Christ, of Grace or of the Church. This will at some point in the future be superseded again by the Millenial, Kingdom or Zion dispensation. I have problems with this concept for a number of reasons. First, it does nothing to answer the issue as to why God’s commandments to us in one age are different from those in another age, if they were valid in the earlier one. Secondly, it involves supersession of Judaism; while this is a different argument, I find it impossible to extract from Jesus’ words as reported by the gospel writers the concept that this thoroughly Jewish preacher and teacher (and that is not intended to be an exhaustive description) intended to do away with the system of Law in which he operated rather than to reform and amplify it. Lastly, it is normally connected with an understanding of the last (or penultimate) dispensation of the Kingdom as involving an apocalyptic and extremely violent change affecting the entire earth (as one interpretation of Revelation would argue), which I see as being so tainted with the Myth of Redemptive Violence rejected by Jesus as to be worthy of wholesale rejection.

I thus return to the concept of progressive revelation in a less quantised manner, as proceeding steadily through multiple prophets (in which I would include Jesus, Paul and, reluctantly, the author of the Fourth Gospel) and continuing, albeit in a more subdued way, through multiple subsequent theologians or, on the Jewish side, Rabbis.

I do however need to address the issue as to whether this progressive revelation has in all cases resulted in moral advance, rather than moral retreat. In fact I do not think this is the case; the previous “problem passage” discussed was Ephesians 5:22-24 (which advocates subjection of women to their husbands). My considered opinion of that passage is that it constitutes a retreat from the more advanced sentiment of Galatians 3:28 “[In Christ] there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. In the same way while I regard Augustine as being inspired to make an advance in respect of some things (such as the requirement not to read scripture literally when that results in conflict with the evidence of creation), I consider that his doctrine of original sin was retrogressive, fixing Genesis 2-3 with an over-literal interpretation.

So, why do I feel such confidence that in this respect the advance must be in the direction of reducing human violence and renouncing revenge? In the first place this is what the Spirit tells me is the case. However, that is my own personal experience and cannot be more than minimally persuasive to others. Secondly, however, it is part of a broad arc of movement throughout the Hebrew scriptures which progressively reduces occasions when violence is to be permitted or endorsed, just as the arc of equality of humankind moves from the tentative steps of recognising some rights of slaves and foreigners in the Law through Gal. 3:28 to, I hope, the realisation that tribes, races and nations are all as naught against the requirement to love our neighbour as ourself.

And we do not do that by violence, still less war, still less total war and genocide. Scripture points away from these things in stages, but leaves us in these passages with a reminder of where we have come from. This, perhaps, is the wisdom of the redactors of the Hebrew Scriptures; that they retain the reminder.