Shedding innocent blood

As a rule, Lydia McGrew is equally adept at bioethics and apologetics. She recently did a post critiquing Paul Copan's handling of OT commands to execute the Canaanites. I think she did a fine job of exposing the exegetical inadequacies of his position. The problem is her own position. 

She did a post at Extra Thoughts, which she cross-referenced at What's Wrong with the World. I'll be quoting her from both sources:

i) In responding to one commenter, she makes a passing reference to the OT prohibition against "shedding innocent blood." It's hard to tell from her post if that's a major factor in her overall argument. But assuming that's the case, she's ripping those passages out of context. Verses which prohibit the "shedding of innocent blood" (e.g. Exod 23:7; Deut 19:10; 21:8-9; 27:25) concern crime and punishment, not warfare. 

That doesn't mean anything goes in war. War doesn't suspend morality. Rather, that's why the Bible contains the laws of warfare (e.g. Deut 20). War had different objectives than crime and punishment. So different considerations apply. 

ii) By the same token, death isn't necessarily punitive. For instance, there were pious Jews who died the fall of Jerusalem, both in 70 AD and the Babylonian exile centuries before. God wasn't punishing them. But due to the fact that humans are social creatures, divine punishment has an incidentally collective aspect. Some innocents are swept up in the current.

One piece of good news, as far as it goes, is that there is nothing about the slaughter of the Canaanite children that is theologically necessary to the truth of Christianity. Unlike, say, the historical existence of Adam, the killing of Canaanite children is not woven into the warp and woof of Christian theology, doctrine, or ethics. Very much to the contrary.

That's seriously confused. It's true that commands to execute the Canaanites are not as intrinsically important as the historical Adam. However, the principle of divine revelation is as intrinsically important as the historical Adam. To deny that God said what Scripture attributes to him denies the revelatory status of Scripture. 

Yes, I'm certainly willing to consider that this portion of Scripture might be incorrect, that God didn't really order that. In fact, I'm _hoping_ God will tell me that when I get to heaven!! My only reason for not _definitely_ saying it is that I have no independent _textual_ reason for doing so. (I'd love to be handed one, though, that would stand up to independent examination.)
Why assume that we know what passages belong in Scripture better than we know what is absolutely and intrinsically evil when it comes to harming babies?
Nonsense. Over and over again in the OT we find that false prophets crop up or that God takes his hand off of a particular leader or deliverer. Why not think this had happened to Moses when he started telling them to slaughter children? Or why shouldn't Saul think it of Samuel in I Samuel 15? That he had gone off the rails? An endorsement of a person as a prophet was never automatically an endorsement for life and for every possible thing the person could say.

i) It is theologically catastrophic to say the OT misrepresents the true character of God. Fundamental to the OT is contrasting the one true God with false gods. The OT presents itself as a corrective to pervasive misconceptions of the deity in the ANE. If, however, Yahweh is just a variation on Baal, Molech, Dagon, Ishtar et al., then it's arbitrary to elevate the OT above other ANE literature.

ii) The NT isn't separable from the OT. The truth of the OT is foundational to the truth of the NT. The NT itself makes that point repeatedly. 

Jeff, I have been intrigued to see how the hard-line response (George's comment is yet another example) seems to be fairly popular. So far I've had quite a number of people, both on blogs and on Facebook, taking a hard-line response of the kind that would make Copan's whole literary approach unnecessary.

True.

The consequentialism really is shocking. Hey, if killing baby boys so they don't grow up to be a later army against you is fine and dandy (assuming that the "you" is some specially important and favored people group), then that opens up all kinds of convenient doors, doesn't it? 

That's a caricature. The point is not that consequences always justify a particular course of action. The point, rather, is that every ethical decision isn't reducible to what's intrinsically right or wrong. Although some things are intrinsically right or wrong, there are other cases in which the circumstances do make a difference to the licit or illicit nature of the action. 

George, I find it a continual astonishment how easily some people just _leap_ over that step where they say, "If God can take a baby's life, then why can't he delegate that to me?"
The answer is so obvious: Because _my_ taking a baby's life is a paradigm case of what we call "murder."

Notice that Lydia's response is fatally ambitious. What, exactly, is she objecting to? There are two different possible positions, which she fails to distinguish here:

i) it is permissible for God to take a baby's life, but impermissible for God to delegate that task to a human party

ii) It is impermissible even for God to take a baby's life 

If her position is (i), she needs to explain why it's permissible for God to directly end a baby's life, but impermissible for God to indirectly end a baby's life, via a second party. For instance, what about the death of the firstborn by an angel?

If her position is (ii), natural evil seems to present counterexamples in which God indirectly ends the lives of some babies, viz. Noah's flood, firebombing Sodom and Gomorah. 

Likewise, even if she doesn't think the "angel of death" is really a second party, that would mean she does think it's permissible for God to end a baby's life (unless she denies the historicity of the Tenth Plague). But in that case, why would it be impermissible for God to authorize a second party to carry out the death sentence?

Furthermore, to say that my_ taking a baby's life is a paradigm case of what we call "murder" assumes the very thing she needs to prove. Is ending a baby's life always equivalent to murder? That's not something she's entitled to stipulate, then deploy against Biblical revelation.
But as I said to Mike T., if you are really willing to consider that our moral intuitions about the wrongness of raping babies might just turn out to be wrong, then all natural law reasoning is o-u-t, out the window. We really have to hold that we know so little about right and wrong that there's no point in arguing against anything, from abortion to unjust war to sexual ethics to...anything, on the basis of the natural light. More or less, the natural light doesn't exist in any remotely reliable form if we could just "turn out to be wrong" about raping babies.
This is obvious from the fact that, if a person stands up in court and says, "God told me to kill that baby," even we Christians don't (or, heaven help us, shouldn't) for a moment consider the possibility that the statement is _true_. We don't think that we should investigate the nature and track-record of the defendant's voices-in-the-head to find out if maybe that really was just the delegated means by which God released the baby in question from the toils of this world and took him to heaven in his innocence! We assume that the defendant is crazy. Why? Well, obviously: Because for human beings deliberately to kill babies is wrong. Therefore we assume that God wouldn't tell a human being to kill a baby.

There are multiple problems with that argument:

i) I wouldn't assume the killer is crazy. Maybe he (or she) is. But, unfortunately, people don't have to be crazy to murder kids. Just evil. 

A killer might say that because the insanity defense is his best shot at getting a lighter sentence, and not because he heard a voice telling him to do that. 

ii) The holy war commands have a specific context: the cultic holiness of Israel. That isn't something which carries over into the new covenant era.

iii) Suppose I'm a juror and the defendant says "God told me to drown my baby." So what? Since God didn't tell me that he told her to do that, I have no evidence that he told her to do that. There's no presumption that God told her that. So why would that carry any weight in my deliberations?

iv) Finally, her position logically extends to Gen 22, a paradigmatic redemptive event. Speaking of which:

Re. Isaac: I knew somebody would bring up Isaac. I frankly admit that in some ways the story of Abraham and Isaac brings up the same issues I have brought up here. I have thought about it myself in those terms repeatedly. There is, however, one thing that gives us more wiggle room with Abraham and Isaac than we have in the case of the Canaanite slaughters: Abraham had a promise from God that "in Isaac shall thy seed be called" and that "thy descendants shall be as the sand of the sea" and "in thee all the nations of the world shall be blessed." Every indication in Scripture is that the promise was given with at least as much evidence that it came from God as the later order to sacrifice Isaac. They are both just things that the Lord "said" to Abraham, whatever that experience was like for Abraham. Therefore, Abraham had at least as much evidence that Isaac, who had never yet fathered a child, would somehow live on and have children and many further descendants. The Apostle Paul glosses this as Abraham's believing that God could raise Isaac from the dead. Notice, too, that Paul credits Abraham with faith *in God's promise* of many descendants from Isaac. If this is correct, then Abraham never believed that he would be killing Isaac in the same sense that one kills a person in any natural situation--where the person just stays dead. Call this the "zombie Isaac" theory if you like. We also have Abraham's own cryptic words to Isaac, "God will provide for himself a sacrifice," where Abraham seems to be holding out the possibility that God would, as God did in the end, remit the order.

Here she's appealing to God's promise. But that frame of reference is only reliable if we can identify divine revelation in the first place. Lydia has called that into question. 

Part of the question here is whether we have _any_ notion of what it means to say that God is good. If literally _anything_ can be in Scripture attributed to God and we have to bite the bullet on it, then apparently we have _no_ idea what good and evil are, and we might as well not bother with the natural light at all.
Let me ask the hard-liners this: Suppose that some book of the Old Testament recorded that God sent a prophet to tell a king to have a woman seized and her unborn child aborted. You can make up your own frame story as to why this was supposedly necessary. Would you just say, "Oh, well, I guess abortion can sometimes be ordered by God. I guess we can't draw the line there"?
Mike, a problem with that is that it seems to allow no limits or pushback from the actual content of the putative order, even at this point, thousands of years later, where we are deciding whether or not this statement in the Bible that God ordered this is actually accurate. If that conjecture about the voice of God just takes care of the problem, couldn't you apply it to anything? Suppose that this experience, whatever it was, which is supposed to tell you "from every fiber of your being" that God the Father is speaking, seemed to contain the content, "Go and rape Canaanite children"? What about adultery? Sexual orgies? Torturing the kids? Etc., etc. There has to be some kind of reductio where we say that the true God _wouldn't_ order such a thing and that therefore we have a problem if a text tells us that He did. My line just apparently falls elsewhere from where it falls for some other people. Because I assume that you do have a line, some act so obviously vile and contrary to the character of God as revealed both in Scripture and in the natural law, that you would not bring that forward as an answer.

i) Is Lydia posing a hypothetical question? If I were not a Christian, but I'm considering religious conversion, then there'd be the question of how to sift rival revelatory claimants, viz. the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, the Arcana Cœlestia. In that context, we can raise hypothetical questions about what a candidate for the true God would be prepared to say and do. 

I'd add that people often convert to Christianity, not by engaging in comparative analysis, or applying generic criteria, but by fostering a religious experience. They expose themselves to gracious influences. Fellowship with the community of faith. Cultivating the means of grace. 

But if I'm already a Christian, then that presumes that I've already resolved such questions in my own mind. To be a Christian believer is, among other things, to affirm the revelatory status of the Bible. That becomes the benchmark. 

ii) If, however, we reject revealed moral norms as our standard of comparison, then I think moral skepticism is the logical alternative. Yes, we may feel that certain actions are intrinsically evil, but that's the effect of our social conditioning, natural instincts (which varies from species to species), evolutionary programming (or whatever). 

The thing is, we pro-lifers have been making these natural law arguments for years about, say, the intrinsic evil of abortion. Now suddenly all of that is supposed to be out the window? 

I wouldn't say that abortion is intrinsically evil, if by that she means abortion is wrong is every conceivable situation. For instance, I think it's generally permissible to terminate a tubal ectopic pregnancy. In that situation, both mother and child will die unless one dies. 

The whole thing about everybody being a sinner from conception, etc., proves too much, as I said in the original post over at my personal blog.If _that_ sense of "guilt" is enough to remove the "innocence" label from newborn infants (or even unborn infants), then why in the world do _we_ still have to use that "innocence" label when it comes to defining murder for the purposes of human society? Every abortionist in the world _could_ give (if he so chose) a theological defense that he did not kill an innocent human being because "there is none righteous," and all murder laws would fall to the ground.If the innocence of the newborn infant *in the relevant sense* for purposes of the concept of murder can survive the concept of original sin, then the problem of the Canaanite slaughters remains.You cannot just trot out the doctrine of original sin when you need it to indict every infant in the world and make us feel better about mass slaughter and then pack it back up tidily again and let us all get back to calling babies "innocents" for other purposes. Logically, it doesn't work that way.

I myself haven't used that appeal at this stage of the argument. That said, her inference is fallacious. Crimes aren't synonymous with sins. Original sin is not a crime. The fact that no one is innocent in reference to sin doesn't mean no one is innocent in reference to a particular crime. So guilt in that sense wouldn't obviate laws against murder. 

Compare these two statements from her post:

Any attempt to answer the problem by saying that original sin means that no one is really innocent proves far too much, for it removes the rationale for regarding the killing of infants generally as murder.
Steve, I don't have time to answer every point, but actually, *all* human death is indirectly the result of man's free will. The Apostle Paul makes it clear that man would not die if Adam had not sinned.

How can she invoke original sin to justify death by natural evil, but reject original sin to justify death by divine command? 

Here's yet another odd combination of statements:

For a human being to do this meets the definition of murder which it is necessary for us to use to explain to, e.g., pro-aborts why murder is wrong. (For example, "the direct and deliberate taking of the life of an innocent human being.") Implicitly, this definition means _our_ direct and deliberate taking, etc., not God's. But to do it "by God's command" is still for me to do it, not for God to do it directly. I still must act as an agent to aim the gun or swing the sword, doing it deliberately in such a way as to cut off the life of that particular infant. To all appearances, this is murder *by me*.

The wording of this statement seems to be modeled on the double effect principle. She apparently makes approving use of the double effect principle. I don't know what else to make of her distinctions ("direct" and "deliberate") unless she's alluding to the double effect principle. 

I don't want the entire thread to go into a discussion of double effect. I'm generally quite a hard-liner on that one. But we can all agree that in the case of slaying the Canaanite children no double effect was involved. They were _trying_ to slay _those_ individuals. We're talking about aiming your sword *so that* it will cut off the head of *that* child. As far as I am concerned, that is obviously intrinsically evil for innocents, with no exception.

I can't tell from this statement which side she comes down on respecting the double effect principle. But if she endorses the double effect principle, then she can't say taking the life of innocents is intrinsically evil simpliciter. Rather, that will have to be qualified by double effect distinctions. 

Actually I disagree that the verses you probably have in mind in the New Testament actually teach pacifism, but that's a whole different subject.

It's hard to see how she could simultaneously reject pacifism and the double effect principle inasmuch as rejecting pacifism commits her to situations in which the death of innocents is a necessary, albeit incidental, result of securing the strategic objective.