As I try to move toward an idea about how to understand the violent portrayals of God in the Hebrew Scriptures, I posted two introductory posts on the subject, here and here, and then had planned to present my thesis….
As a result of those two posts, I received numerous emails and Facebook messages from people who had their own theories which I did not cover. Thank you for sending these in!
Of course, I always think that if one or two people have a question about something I wrote, dozens more probably have the same question and just didn’t write in or leave a comment.
By my most recent check of email and Facebook, I have eight additional views!
So in an attempt to be fair (and in a way that I hope will not bore you), I decided to spend several more posts looking at other ideas about how to understand the violent portrayals of God in the Bible, before finally getting to a post that reveals my idea.
One of the things that I hope this series of posts accomplish is to show you how difficult the problem is, and how creative some of the “solutions” get. This problem has not been “solved” and will likely not be solved by me either. But through my posts I hope to move the conversation in a particular direction, so that maybe together we can come up something that raises appreciation for God rather than alarm.
A Violent God Does Not Exist Because No God Exists
So one view which almost everyone is aware of, but which I neglected to write about in my previous posts, is the view of atheism.
When dealing with the problem of violent portrayals of God in Scripture, some simply say that the Old Testament is wrong in its most basic premise, namely, that God exists.
This is the view of atheists who argue that there is no way a God of love could command the Israelites to do the things they do in Scripture, and there is also no way a God of love could send the flood, the plagues, and the other natural disasters that are described in the Old Testament, and so the best option is simply to believe that God does not exist, and that the people who wrote these texts ascribing these actions to God were simply deluded.
Just like the ancient Mesopotamian people had creation myths, and the Egyptians had tales about Amun, Ra, Seth, and the rest of their gods, and the Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Romans all developed their various pantheistic beliefs to explain weather patterns and the movement of the sun and stars across the sky, and why bad things happen to some people, so also, the Israelites developed and invented their own “fairy tales” to describe events and situations in their life which they did not understand or comprehend.
However we understand the Imago Dei, the image of God in which humans were created, most of us would agree that all people were created in God’s image.
In a recent post called “
It is not at all uncommon to hear Christians have conversations like this:
I am beginning a short series of posts on how to understand the Old Testament passages where God commands Israel to slaughter people. I have an idea “in the works” for how to deal with these troubling texts.
In numerous places in the Bible, God seems hell-bent on slaughtering people, including women and children. One of the most gruesome texts in all the Bible (maybe in all of history) is found in Psalm 137:8-9:
If you haven’t struggled with these depictions in Scripture, either you are not reading your Bible or you are not hanging out with non-Christian people (This is the most common criticism of the Bible from non-Christians).
How can a God who says "Love your enemies" (Matthew 5:44) be the same God who instructs His people in the Old Testament to kill their enemies?
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