There is a better way of dealing with the conflicting divine commands regarding the treatment of enemies [than the traditional ways]. It is to acknowledge what is everywhere assumed in the New Testament, namely, that while there are vast and vitally important areas of continuity between Israel’s faith and that of the church, there are significant instances of radical discontinuity as well, none more so than in reference to divinely initiated and sanctioned violence. There were good reasons why the church fathers, in settling upon the canon of sacred Scripture, separated the Hebrew Scriptures from the Christian and gave to the former the designation “old” and the latter “new.” (p. 19)I realize that fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals will howl with righteous indignation at this, but let them explain their own view. I suspect it will make most Jesus-centered Christians’ skin crawl. If we take the deity of Christ and the Trinity seriously, and interpret the genocidal texts of Joshua, for example, literally, as God’s will, then we have to picture Jesus commanding the merciless slaughter of infants. Few conservative evangelicals can bring themselves to say it, but they do not hesitate to condemn others who admit that they cannot say it.I am not going to declare unequivocally about the historicity of those texts; I will bracket them out and say “I just don’t know what to make of them” and “I cannot picture Jesus, who is the God I worship and adore, commanding those things.” And “I look forward to finding out from God himself, from Jesus himself, what I am supposed to think about those texts.”
i) Once
again, notice the parallel between Olson’s attitude towards Calvinism and his
attitude towards the OT. He has the same problem with Yahweh that he has with
the God of Calvinism.
ii) He
has a bad habit of throwing out challenges to Bible-believing Christians as if
his challenges had never been met before. That’s a reflection of Olson’s
studied ignorance. For instance, Christopher Wright has an excellent treatment
of these passengers in his book The God I Don’t Understand (Zondervan 2008).
In chap
4 he evaluates the facile, dismissive “solutions” that Olson is so fond of. And
in chap 5 he explains and defends the passages. It’s a thoughtful, thorough
treatment that respects the inspiration of Scripture and the God of
Scripture–unlike Olson’s Arminian aspersions.
It seems that I can never read one of your quotations of Olson without planting my face firmly in my palm. There is a constant thread of taking an idealized view of God/Christ and foisting it upon the Scriptures so that when the Scriptures do not mirror Olson's idol (I mean idealized version of God/Christ) then it is the Scriptures that are wrong. It seems to me that if we are to take the Trinity seriously then we have to take the Bible seriously since one is revealed in the other. Why take God revealed as Trinity seriously and not take God's word revealed in Scripture seriously? If God said he commanded the "the merciless slaughter of infants" (I'd challenge that characterization) then why not just accept that and adjust our understanding of God, righteousness, holiness, etc. accordingly? It seems Olson does exactly the opposite. So it's no wonder that God looks remarkably like Roger Olson as long as we allow Roger Olson to tell us what God is like.
ReplyDeleteNo day would be complete without another howler from Roger Olson.
DeletePerhaps Olson's belief would be better suited to Mormonism where God was once a man, who then was exalted to God-hood. Likely a God that started as just a man would have the same sensitivities about things here that we have. Problem is, that the God revealed in the Bible is not limited to our very narrow point of view regarding life and death and the implication those things have for us. Just because we can't possibly imagine such things being done, much less commanded, directed or allowed by God, doesn't make God some kind of moral monster. Rather it reveals to us that there are things about Him that we simply can't fathom. He is transcendent. We are limited. He is eternal. We are temporal. We're not out to make God more palatable, rather we're interested in truth. It was God that chose to let those historical references through to us. He must have known that people would struggle with such things. But it helps reveal aspects of God that we might not otherwise have a glimpse of. Regardless of how we feel about those events, God certainly doesn't need us making apologies on His behalf.
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