Liberating you from bad ideas about God
In light of my series on the violence of God in the Bible, in which I said that the Bible is the most violent religious text in the world, someone sent this picture to me. It made me think… Hmmm, why do I want my children to read the Bible again?
Go here to see some more humorous Christian memes.
Last week I wrote a post about the inspiration of Scripture and the inspiration of other religious books which struck a cord with a lot of people.
One blog reader, Jake Yaniak, left a comment that he had written something similar just a week or so earlier. I read Jake’s blog, but somehow I missed that post of his… When I went and read it, I was impressed at some of the ideas he was expressing. So I decided to post some of it here for you to read:
What do I believe concerning the Holy Bible?
Well, I must say that I am very much in agreement with the Westminster Confession, though with this difference: I also believe in a sovereign God.
This might sound strange considering the fact that it is often to the Westminster Confession that men appeal when they speak of God’s sovereignty. The confession states, powerfully:
“God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.”
But they do not apply this belief to the Scriptures – or rather, they do not apply it to non-Scripture.
They state under the category of the Holy Scriptures that, “The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture, and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.”
How can this be when they affirm that God is sovereign?
They speak like Calvinists when they write about God’s sovereignty; and they dodge the moral implications of Calvinism with the empty statement ‘neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures,’ ignoring the logical consequences of determinism like men who plant rhubarb and then hope to grow apples.
(And please do not plead “paradox” with me – it is only those who lack the “ground of truth,” as Hans Denck put it, who retain both thesis and antithesis without resolving them.)
But suddenly they speak like Arminians when they wish to cast off the Apocrypha, calling them “human writings” as if there could be such a thing in determinism.
If God, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordained the precise wording of Bel and the Dragon, the action-packed sequel to the Book of Daniel, then how is this different from inspiration, where he is said to have ‘out-breathed’ or ‘spoken’ his Word to the prophets and apostles?
ALL things are created by his Word.
That includes the Apocrypha.
That includes the Bible in its original manuscripts.
That includes the manifold corrections, glosses, errors, typos, alterations and duplications it has seen since its writing.
That includes the NIV.
That includes both the long and short endings of Mark, as well as the original, lost ending.
That includes the Zend Avesta, the Mahabharata and its vampires, the Quran and the Lord of the Rings.
God is existence, and he speaks in all things, for all things are made by his Word and according to his irresistible, omnipotent will.
“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.”
This is just part of Jake’s post. The rest of it goes on to lay out this idea in more detail and defend it. I invite you to go read the whole post here and interact with Jake on it.
We are looking at 4 reasons the Bible is unique. Here is a brief summary of where we have been so far:
This leads us to the fourth reason the Bible is unique:
Yes, every book in the world is a human book, but the Bible is a uniquely human book. Let me explain what I mean.
Usually when theologians say that the Bible is a human book, they mean that the Bible has human authors who use human words to discuss human ideas to human readers with human ways of thinking. When speaking this way about Scripture, most theologians are about to say that as a result of the Bible being a human book, it should not surprise us to discover that the Bible has errors.
I intend to make no such claim.
I do, however, agree that the Bible is a human book.
It is not that the Bible is in error. No, quite to the contrary, the Bible accurately reveals to us what is in the heart of man. God knows what is in the heart of men (Jer 17:10; 1 Cor 2:11), and He reveals it to us through Scripture. It is my conviction that Scripture does not so much reveal God to us as it reveals us to us. Scripture is a mirror which God puts up to our own hearts to reveal what is in man (Jas 1:23).
And what does Scripture reveal? It reveals that evil is in our human hearts. “It mirrors our best and worst possible selves” (Stark, The Human Faces of God, 218).
But more than that, Scripture reveals that when humans act upon the evil that is in our hearts, we like to blame God for our actions.
When we are violent, we make God the scapegoat for our violence. We learned this practice from the father and mother of humanity, Adam and Eve. After they ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the serpent, but both inferred blame upon God. In blaming Eve, Adam said “the woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate” (Gen 3:12). Adam implies that if God had not given the woman to him, Adam never would have sinned. It was God’s fault. Eve’s attempt to blame God is not so obvious, but in blaming the serpent, it seems that she implies that if the serpent had not been in God’s Garden (for didn’t God create all the animals?), or if God had given to Eve the same instructions He had given to Adam (for didn’t God only give His instructions about the forbidden fruit to Adam?) Eve would not have been deceived.
Adam and Eve’s descendants learn the blame game well. Cain becomes angry when God accepts Abel’s sacrifice rather than his own (Gen 4:5), and after he kills Abel, claims that it is not he who is supposed to take care of Abel, that he is not his brother’s keeper (Gen 4:9). The implication once again is that if God wanted to protect Abel, God should have done so. Following this example, after Lamech killed a man for wounding him, Lamech says that he had more right to commit murder than Cain did, and therefore, God shouldn’t punish him, but should protect and avenge him (Gen 4:23-24).
This sort of pattern continues throughout the entire Bible, even if the human tendency to blame God is not always so evident.
This tendency to blame God continues all the way up into our own day as well. When bad things happen to us, we say, “Why is God doing this to me?” When we observe evil occurring elsewhere in the world, we wonder, “Why isn’t God stopping that evil?” When natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes come upon neighborhoods, towns, cities, and countries so that homes are destroyed and lives are taken, we call these horrible events “acts of God.” When people commit crimes of lust or passion against others, they often explain their actions by saying, “God made me this way. He gave me these desires. I cannot help myself.”
History reveals that humans love to blame God for the evil that is in their own hearts.
This tendency is laid bare in nearly every violent event in the Bible, which is one reason why the Bible can be said to be inspired by God. The Bible reveals to humans what we are really like. In this way, the text is also inerrant. Much of the Hebrews Bible inerrantly records not what God has done for mankind, but what mankind has tried to do for God using the weapons and ways of the world. These “failed attempts to act on behalf of God” (Stark, The Human Faces of God, 232) were done with evil in our hearts and the name of God on our lips, and thus reveal to us not so much of what is in the heart of God, but what is in the heart of men.
In this way, we can say that the Hebrew Scriptures are more of a revelation about man than a revelation about God. Though we have often thought that the Bible reveals God to us, it more accurately reveals man to us.
The Old Testament is not primarily a sourcebook for “Theology Proper,” the study of God, but is primarily a sourcebook for “Anthropology,” the study of man. The Bible reveals to man what is in the heart of man more than it reveals to man what is in the heart of God. Certainly, there is revelation about God in the Old Testament—and this is especially true once we get to the New Testament where Jesus perfectly reveals God to us—but for the most part, the Old Testament contains inspired and inerrant records of what God wants us to know about ourselves.
The Bible reveals that we are sick, twisted, evil, and hell-bent toward violence.
But more than that, it reveals that when we lash out in violence and bloodshed toward others, we love nothing more than to blame God for this violence. We kill others and say, “God told me to.” We murder others and say, “It’s because they were evil and God wanted them dead.” When natural disasters occur, we shrug our shoulders and say, “If they hadn’t sinned so much, God wouldn’t have killed them.”
This is what we find over and over again within the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures, and which, if we are honest, we find in our own hearts as well. God is not violent; we are. But when we act upon the violence in our hearts, we make ourselves feel better by blaming God for it. These texts “remind us of the kind of monstrous people we always have the potential to become in the name of some land, some ideology, or some god” (Stark, The Human Faces of God, 232).
This is what the Old Testament texts reveal to us, and it is this perspective that Jesus affirms over and over through His own life and ministry.
Jesus not only reveals to humanity once and for all the depth of depravity that is within the hearts of men, but in Jesus, we finally see what it means to be truly human, and therefore, truly divine. While it is true that Jesus reveals God to us, we must also recognize that before Jesus can reveal God to us, we must allow Him to reveal us to us. In this way, by the most shocking of theological twists, we learn what God is truly like only after we have learned what a human is truly supposed to be. And both are revealed in Jesus Christ.
So far in this short series on why the Bible is unique among the spiritual writings of the world religions, we have seen that the Scriptures reveal human mimetic rivalry and the scapegoat mechanism, and that Jesus fulfills the Hebrew Scriptures (just as He fulfills other religious writings as well).
The question we concluded the previous post with, however, was that if Jesus fulfills the hopes and dreams and ideals of other religious writings as well, why did Jesus come specifically in fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures. This post seeks to answer that question.
And here is the answer:
The third reason the Hebrew Scriptures are unique among all religious writings in the world is that they are the most violent religious writings in history.
I do not say this lightly.
While I do not consider myself an expert on all the religious writings of all of the main religions in the world, I have read most of the main religious texts for most of the main world religions, and while it is not uncommon to find violent events being described in these other religious books, no other set of religious writings comes even close to describing the violence and bloodshed that one finds within the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures.
And I am not referring to simple descriptions of human violence, though there is a lot of that within the Bible. I am talking about direct commands from God for His people to go and commit violence. I am talking about commands from God for His people to engage in genocide. I am talking about descriptions of God intentionally setting plans in motion to wipe out entire groups of people (such as the Amalekites), and to kill through natural disasters millions (or maybe even billions) of people (as in the flood).
When taken as a whole, the Bible is the most violent religious text in all of history. Not even the violence of the Muslim Qu’ran comes close to describing and divinely sanctioning the violence that is found within the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures (see Jenkin’s book, Laying Down the Sword).
This certainly makes the Bible unique! Though it is not in a way most Christians are comfortable admitting.
And yet, there is a deep truth here we must not miss. I ended the previous post by asking why God would have Jesus come to fulfill the Hebrew Scriptures if Jesus can conceivably be the fulfillment of other religious Scriptures as well.
I believe that one of the reasons God chose to have Jesus fulfill the Hebrew Scriptures is because they are the most violent Scriptures.
Did God choose to do this because He Himself is utterly violent? No! Quite to the contrary, the God which Jesus reveals to us is completely non-violent.
The God revealed in Jesus Christ would rather die for the worst of His enemies than seek the death of any one of them.
Why then did God choose to send Jesus to specifically fulfill the most violent religious writings of all time? So that He could do what only God can do: So that He could redeem it.
God wants humanity to understand that nothing and nobody is beyond the scope of His redemptive purposes, and so by sending Jesus as the fulfillment of the most violent of religious texts, God not only revealed Himself by way of a stark contrast to that violence, but also showed how to reinterpret and understand those violent events in light of the self-sacrificial God dying on the cross for the sins of the whole world.
People rightly question how a good and loving God can allow violence in the world. God answered this vital question by sending His Son, Jesus, as the fulfillment of the most violent religious writings, to show us that He had nothing to do with the violence, but was instead dying along with us in the midst of the violence, taking our sin and suffering upon Himself, bearing our guilt and shame in His own being, all for the sake of those He loved.
Jesus fulfills the hopes and expectations of the violent Hebrew Scriptures by suffering instead of conquering, by serving instead of killing, and by dying so that others might live.
Though we may not always understand why and how sin and suffering enters into God’s world, one thing we can know through the crucifixion of Jesus is that God does not send sin and suffering, but rather, is a victim of it along with us.
With every shed tear and every cry of pain, God suffers. This is why God chose to have Jesus come in fulfillment of the most violent texts. He wanted to show us that God’s role in those violent religious texts is not in the inflicting of pain and suffering of others, but in receiving and suffering that pain along with us.
In Jesus, we see that God is not against us; God is with us.
Are you shocked yet? Well, it all comes together tomorrow with one last post about how the Bible is unique. We will see that, based on the first 3 shocking ways the Bible is unique, we have been reading the Old Testament wrong all along. Join us tomorrow for the conclusion of this study…
In yesterday’s post I suggested that if we understand the inspiration of God as the “whisperings of God” then it makes sense to think that God has been whispering truth not just to the authors of Scripture, but also to people who wrote the writings of other religions. And yet, I do not believe that this makes the writings of other religions equal to that of Scripture. The Bible is unique.
In this post, I share the first reason the Bible is unique.
The first reason the Bible is unique among all the writings of the world religions is that the Hebrew Scriptures contain an early unmasking and critique of what René Girard calls “mimetic rivalry” which he claims is not found in any other religious writings.
In his books, Girard goes to great length to show how rivalry between humans develops and how this rivalry leads to violence, until eventually, this violent rivalry evolves into blaming and violently killing an outside third party so that the original two factions can once again live at peace.
Girard shows how this theme is found everywhere in ancient mythology and religious writings, but how only the Hebrew Scriptures begin to reveal that the third party, upon whom blame was laid for the original violence, was really an innocent scapegoat.
It is this unmasking of the scapegoat mechanism which led Girard to believe that the Bible was unique among all religious literature, and therefore, uniquely deserving of being called “inspired.”
The Hebrew Scripture contain a truth which is not found in any other religious literature in the world, and which could not have come in any way, shape, or form from the mind of man.
As such, this truth proves that Scripture is inspired of God. What truth is that? It is, to use René Girard’s terminology, the single victim scapegoat mechanism.
Though all religious literature contains stories of scapegoats and victims, all religious literature also assumes the guilt of the scapegoat victim and the innocence of the crowd that kills them. It is the Hebrew Scripture alone throughout all the religious writings of the world which reveals the guilt of the crowd and the innocence of the scapegoat victim (I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 114, 107-120, 184).
Such revelation could have come only from God.
This divine revelation which is only hinted at in the Old Testament is made explicitly clear in the New Testament, and especially in the Gospels. “The Gospels reveal everything that human beings need to understand their moral responsibility with regard to the whole spectrum of violence in human history and to all the false religions” (I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 125).
When God does finally reveal Himself in the person and work of Jesus Christ, the pinnacle and apex of this revelation is seen on the cross where Jesus takes the sin of the world upon Himself and dies as a criminal for all to see.
There, on the cross, when God truly reveals Himself as He is, and in the process also reveals His vision for mankind, there is no hint of violence to be seen. Instead, God is most fully revealed as God when He soaks up the sin and violence and evil of the world onto Himself, and allows people to think of Him as accused, outcast, accursed, despised, and rejected.
On the cross, God becomes both the curse and the cure for the sin of the whole world.
