Confronting Old Testament Controversies by Tremper Longman III

Author:Tremper Longman III
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian Apologetics;Old Testament—­Socio-­rhetorical criticism;REL067030;REL006090;REL006210
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2019-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Silencing a God of Judgment

Before presenting my view on God’s violence, we need to examine some recent attempts to erase divine violence from the biblical text or at least explain it away. Before describing and challenging these rereadings of the biblical text, I do want to say that they are sincere and honest attempts to deal with a perceived problem, at least to a twenty-first-century Western audience.

Of course, divine violence has unsettled some Christian readers in the past, but over the years the church has pretty much rejected as misreadings such attempts to erase this theme, seeing them as committing the fundamental error of failing to affirm the Old and New Testament canons as authoritative for Christians.

The classic case of this in church history is that of Marcion (AD 85–160), a popular preacher and theologian in Rome. Marcion found the Old Testament substandard to a Christian ethic because of its violence, so he argued that it was no longer authoritative for the Christian. Christ was the standard of what God really was like, and the Old Testament God did not live up to that standard. After a while, it became clear to Marcion that even the Jesus of Revelation did not live up to the standard of Jesus in the Gospels, and so it too was effectively removed from his canon. Indeed, Marcion found more and more of the New Testament to reflect Old Testament ideas and ejected those parts of it from the canon, so that at the end of the process very little was left.

In response, the church censured Marcion and his followers. In the next generation, the theologian Tertullian wrote a famous critique of Marcion’s views. And over the centuries the church has essentially affirmed its early rejection of Marcion. After all, reading the Gospels, we can see that Jesus fully affirmed the Old Testament. He did not critique or reject the picture of God that we find there.

How do some recent attempts to deal with divine violence relate to Marcion’s perspective? As mentioned, both outside and within the church there has been a vociferously negative reaction to the picture of God as a warrior. Atheists like Richard Dawkins have pointed to this theme to try to turn people away from the biblical God. The God of the Bible is a moral monster, according to Dawkins. Who would ever worship such a God (as though we get to define the God we would worship)?

I have to be honest. There is no way to satisfy the Dawkinses of the world. They begin with the premise that there is no God. They don’t accept the Bible as divine revelation. All the attempts to mollify this type of criticism are bound to fail. I am not really interested in responding to Dawkins. Responding to Dawkins is a bit like Eve feeling it necessary to respond to the serpent in Eden rather than simply ignoring its attempts to undermine her and Adam’s relationship with God.

I am interested in speaking to the

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