"The problem of biblical violence"

I'll comment on a hobbyhorse by apostate Randal Rauser:

https://randalrauser.com/2020/03/christians-you-are-allowed-to-wrestle-with-the-problem-of-biblical-violence/

Rauser is an articulate spokesman for progressive theology. That makes him a useful foil. As I've remarked before, it's striking how little he stands for. He has a menu of biblical teachings he constantly attacks, but he spends little time defending his alternative because his own theology is so thin. 

Imagine for a moment that you are in conversation with a person from another religion and you discover that their sacred text describes their deity as commanding genocide on entire peoples. 

The Bible doesn't command genocide on entire peoples. 

If you’re like most people – including most Christians — then this discovery would provide a significant obstacle to you considering that religion any further.

Yet just one paragraph down, he says:

Historically, many Christians have not shied away from this fact.

Now he's now offered two contrary generalizations about how Christians respond to these passages. 

As you may know, the Christian faces a similar dilemma since the Bible appears to depict God as commanding and commending violent actions that appear to be immoral…

Immoral from Rauser's perspective. 

...including the mass targeted killing of entire civilian populations (e.g. Deuteronomy 20:10-20; Joshua 6; 1 Samuel 15). 

Pagans who remain behind in the Holy Land, despite fair warning to evacute, become war casualties. 

Given the emotional and ethical challenge presented by these texts, it should be no surprise that the recognition of biblical violence has come to provide an enormous obstacle to Christian belief.

That has a refining effect, winning the wheat from the chaff. If you can't accept biblical revelation, that ought be an obstacle to Christian faith. Don't fool yourself. Don't pretend to be a Christian unless you believe in biblical revelation. 

More to the point, however, is the prior question: is the defense of these narratives as such part of the ground level of Christianity? Or is it part of the secondary opinions of the second floor that is maintained by some Christians but not others?

This presses us back to a prior question. Is it part of that ground-level mere Christianity to believe that God commanded actions like the genocidal slaughter of entire peoples? I certainly do not include that claim in my understanding of mere Christianity; nor is it a feature of mainstream creeds and confessions. So why include it at all? Why not instead place it on the second floor as a secondary opinion held by some Christians but rejected by others?

Because Biblical revelation is a unit. 

Now I agree with the gist of that response wholeheartedly: plenary inspiration and biblical authority matter! 

Says Rauser with fingers crossed behind his back. He regards the Bible as an anthology of conflicting theological voices, riddled with erroneous moral, factual, and theological teaching. 

Indeed, they belong on the ground floor of mere Christianity. But I would immediately add that we must be very careful about assuming that some particular reading of scripture is required by that commitment to plenary inspiration and biblical authority.

That's a standard ploy. Affect the posture that this is about interpretation. But that's not his true position. He thinks the Bible is often dead wrong.

That said, there is a limited range of topics for which a particular interpretation of Scripture is required at the ground level. That list includes reading the Bible consistently with essential doctrines such as the Trinity and the incarnation and bodily resurrection of Jesus.

But it does not require particular readings of biblical passages that are not part of that ground level. So, for example, the young earth creationist may believe that plenary inspiration and biblical authority requires a reading of the Genesis creation as including literal 24 hour days. They are mistaken.

I’d say the same thing in this case. The ground level of mere Christianity includes a commitment to the plenary inspiration and authority of Scripture. But it does not require one to accept that God literally commanded the slaughter of entire civilian populations any more than it requires that one accept God literally created in six 24-hour days.

i) But that's completely illogical. Even if we classify some biblical teachings a ground-level compared to second floor teachings, that's irrelevant to what they mean. We don't have one hermeneutic for ground-level teachings and a different hermeneutic for second floor teachings. That confuses the relative importance or normativity of particular teachings with what the texts mean. But the exegetical principles are the same. 

ii) Moreover, he repeatedly misstates the biblical record. There was no divine command to search and destroy all Canaanites. There was no mandate to seek out Canaanites wherever they could be found to eradicate that people-group. Rather, it was about the removal of pagans within the borders of Israel, not outside the borders of Israel. 

I have several responses. First, one might say that the practice of reading the Bible as repudiating slavery is also a suspiciously modern phenomenon driven by “modern sentimentalism.” But that fact doesn’t lead us to reconsider slavery readings (at least it shouldn’t!). Rather, we retain our “modern” reading while insisting that in these points, at least, the  tradition that believed the institution of slavery was consistent with Scripture was wrong.

Progressives use slavery as a wedge issue, but conservatives accept what the Bible teaches about slavery. 

Gregory concludes that it just cannot be so. God could not have done this. Unlike Origen, Gregory is not satisfied simply to add a non-violent spiritual layer of meaning to the text to avert our gaze from the literal carnage. Instead, he appears to propose an alternative spiritual meaning which obliterates the historical reading, as such.

But that's just make-believe. 

And that noble tradition of wrestling with the biblical text as Jacob wrestled with the angel continues today. In recent years, many theologians have proposed various ways of reading and appropriating violent biblical texts.[8] And in all these contexts, the revisionist readings are not simply a matter of biblical exegesis. Instead, they are also formed by attention to extra-biblical sources including secular history (e.g. archaeology) as well as the reader’s moral intuitions. In addition, there are internal biblical principles to guide the interpretation such as the principle that scripture interprets scripture coupled with particular principles like the interpretive priority of the peaceable Jesus in interpreting the entire Bible.

i) There's nothing inherently wrong with challenging traditional interpretations. Archaeology can indeed correct or clarify our understanding of Scripture. 

ii) Appealing to the reader's moral intuitions is contradictory since, by Rauser's own admission, many Christians in the past (as well as the present) don't shy away from these passages. And the biblical narrators didn't share Rauser's so-called moral intuitions. Conflicting moral intuitions cancel each other out. 

iii) Moreover, he immunizes his own moral intuitions from challenge or correction. That's morally dangerous. That's fanatical. 

Some people will be uncomfortable with the bald acknowledgment that extra-biblical sources like archaeology can shape the reading of the biblical text. 

It also depends on your expectations regarding the surviving evidence. 

It shouldn’t be. Our rational and moral intuitions – or conscience – may not be infallible, but they are nonetheless God-given resources for seeking truth and pursuing theological reflection. 

One problem is Rauser's inability to distinguish between God-given moral intuitions and trendy social conditioning. A Christian can be both a moral realist and moral skeptic. Moral realism is a metaphysical position regarding the existence of moral facts. Moral skepticism is an epistemological position regarding our access to moral facts. You can believe there are moral facts, but also believe that what we're pleased to call moral intuition is hit-and-miss. Moral intuition is not consistently reliable. 

You see, according to Calvinism God elects some people for salvation while passively or actively willing those who are not so elected to experience eternal damnation. This doctrine understandably horrifies many non-Calvinists, and McCall makes precisely that point.

As a Calvinist, I'm unimpressed by Rauser's comparison. 

There are things in the Bible that make my skin crawl. But there are things in the modern world (and medieval world) that makes my skin scrawl. The Bible doesn't present a special difficulty in that regard. It all goes to the general problem of evil, for which we have a variety of theodical strategies.