Ethics

How do we make sense of difficult passages in the Bible? What about the violence or apparent contradictions? Peter Enns addresses these concerns in his book The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It. Enns is concerned that instead of honest engagement with Scripture some Christian thinkers make unreasonable attempts to cover up or explain away the challenges. He specifically sees this occurring among those who treat the Bible like a rule book of fixed, timeless truths. Instead of a rule book, Enns suggests we read Scripture in the genre of storytelling, with inspired examples of how God-fearers of the past have wrestled with their faith.

To be clear, Enns affirms the value of Scripture—we know God better by reading it—but he believes we have erroneous expectations of it. He wants to help his readers understand the nature of Scripture and, therefore, how to correctly read and apply it. Instead of diminishing reverence for the Bible, Enns seeks to affirm it by accepting it for what it really is: an inspired but messy text.

Before I provide my own reflection on the book, here are the stats. The book is divided into seven chapters that each have multiple, short readable essays. He centers his thesis on three primary realizations that challenged him to re-think the nature of Scripture. The Bible depicts:

Review: The Bible Tells Me So by Peter EnnsRead More »

Numerous books have been published in recent years addressing challenging passages in the Old Testament. Many of them have focused on the Israelite conquest of Canaan, while others discuss a palette of “problems.” In this post I review three books that engage these challenges. I especially consider how they handle violence in the Old Testament.

Book 1: Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with the Justice of God (BakerBooks, 2014)

Did God really command the Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites? That is the moral dilemma that Copan and Flannagan take up. These scholars offer an apologetic response to philosophers and New Atheists who dismiss the Old Testament as barbaric. But, does their apologetic meet the task? Yes and No.

The book has four parts:

• Genocide Texts and the Problem of Scriptural Authority
• Occasional Commands, Hyperbolic Texts, and Genocidal Massacres
• Is It Always Wrong to Kill Innocent People?
• Religion and Violence

The book is largely a summary of the apologetic arguments espoused by William Lane Craig and Nicholas Wolterstorff with atheist philosopher, Wes Morriston, serving as one of their primary opponents. In this regard, the book serves as “Cliff Notes” to broader conversations happening on the topic. The authors begin by asserting that the words of Scripture are not the result of mechanical dictation. In other words, they acknowledge the human side of Scripture; God does not always affirm what the human author affirms, such as psalms of vengeance (28). That is, we must consider whether or not what the human author wrote is what God wants to say to us today through Scripture. God might want to appropriate the words of Scripture for an intention different than the original authors. The original meaning might have been important only for the Israelites’ time and place, and now we have to draw a general principle from the text. At the same time, Copan and Flannagan reject the dichotomy between the Old and New Testament God (war God vs. loving God), as well as Seibert’s distinction between the “textual” God (how the Israelites imagined God to be) and the “real” God (who is not always like the Israelites portrayed God to be; 39-44).

Three Reviews: Ethics and Old Testament ViolenceRead More »