Command: followup Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc To: spok@gs6.sp.cs.cmu.edu Subject: Re: Does the inerrantist position necessitate condoning genocide? Distribution: References: <1937@csm9a.UUCP> <2500@unisoft.UUCP> <1943@csm9a.UUCP> <6531@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1970@csm9a.UUCP> <6555@pt.cs.cmu.edu> In fact I don't believe that the Bible is inerrant, but I'm not sure that comes into this discussion. The fact that the Bible reports the Israelites as slaughtering the Canaanites isn't what I'd call an error. Although the accounts of the settling of the land may be somewhat idealized, I assume that such slaughters did occur, and even at the command of men of God. So at least for the purposes of this discussion I think we can accept the Biblical accounts as accurate. The question is not whether the Bible is accurate, but whether we in the 20th Cent. should emulate behavior that people in the 12th Cent. BC (+- a few hundred years -- I make no claims to being an historian) believed they were called by God to do. This is not an issue of inerrancy, but of what I call the "immediate applicability" of the Bible. I.e. whether you can take a command appearing in the Bible, and apply it immediately without having to worry about whether there is anything different about our situation. (Of course this is an extreme. No one really believes that one can completely ignore the historical context of portions of the Bible. But people certainly differ in their willingness to say that particular instructions do not apply to us or apply in modified form.) In my previous posting I didn't say clearly whether I thought God's commands had changed, or whether people have simply come to understand them more fully. In some sense I'd have to say "both". Ultimately, I don't think God's will for us has changed. But we can't see God's mind directly. All we have to go on is what has been revealed to us. And I think the Biblical record shows that this has changed over time. It certainly looks like in the early days of Israel's history, God acted rather like a tribal war god. It's always dangerous to try to second-guess God's reasons. But a plausible hypothesis is that this is all the Israelites were ready for. So at that point God's commands concentrated on abandoning idol-worship and a fairly blunt concept of justice. I still maintain that the commandment against killing/murder (translations differ) ultimately does prohibit war. I don't think God's basic principles for human life have changed. So one can say that even in 1200 BC genocide was sin, and the wars against the Canaanites were a violation of God's will. But this is probably being unfair to the Israelites at that time. I think you have to judge people against the standards of their time. I see no evidence that God had yet revealed the complete implications of the commandment against killing. Indeed even now the process isn't complete. At the moment the concept of the "holy war" is fairly generally discredited, and I think all Christians agree that starting a war is wrong. But even now most Christians do not believe it is practical to avoid fighting under all circumstances. (Note that I am not a pacifist. There are situations where I don't know of any alternative to fighting. But I do regard it as at best a lesser of evils. Perhaps a few centuries from now civilization will have advanced to the point where people have to make allowances for my limited perspective.) Here are some of the major advances that we see in the OT: - the understanding that a person is responsible for his own behavior, and sins should not be visited on parents and children (Ez 18) - the understanding that God is interested in nations other than Israel. (The most interesting reference here is Jonah.) - the understanding that there is not a direct connection between sin and punishment. (Job, and in a different sense the "suffering servant" passages of Is., such as Is 53) You suggest that I have a model of the Bible approaching an inerrant limit as people come to understand God. I guess I don't object too greatly to this. But there are three adjustments I'd make. 1) The situation in the earlier segments of the Bible is not so much error in the Bible as the fact that there are things that God hadn't revealed yet. Of course they may be errors on the part of the people at the time. There are plenty of cases where God had revealed something and people misunderstood or simply ignored it. I do not accept the concept that sin is simply misunderstanding. People do often know what is right and choose to do something else. But this dicussion isn't about sin. It's about apparent changes in God's instructions to humans. 2) I do not subscribe to the model of monotonically increasing righteousness, either in the Church or in civilization as a whole. I see periods of time sometimes measured in centuries when serious regression took place. Nor do I automatically prefer ideas because they are new. However I do see a general trend if you look over the centuries that we understand things about God's will for us that we didn't understand before. The trick of course is to make sure that these new understandings aren't balanced by giving up some of our old ones! 3) I see new understandings developing even after the 1st Cent. Let me hasten to say that I do believe in the Bible as authoritative, and do not expect to see some new method of salvation that is not described there. But I think the example of slavery shows that the Church can come to understand things which the NT authors did not understand. However we can see how the understanding follows from the principles that they taught. (In Christ there is neither slave nor free, and you must treat your slave as a fellow brother in Christ.) ----- Command: followup Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc To: tookey@sabertooth.CS.WISC.EDU Subject: Re: Does the inerrantist position necessitate condoning genocide? Distribution: References: <1937@csm9a.UUCP> <2500@unisoft.UUCP> <1943@csm9a.UUCP> <6531@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1970@csm9a.UUCP> <6555@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <8895@spool.cs.wisc.edu> >However, this [i.e. that God is continuing to help us understand more >of his will as time goes on --clh] doesn't seem to square with the >standard Christian doctrine of Christ's sacrifice being all we need >for all time. Why should God stop sending us prophets if we still >need growth, and are growing? In my view, Christ's sacrifice is the basis for our redemption. I certainly don't believe that God will establish a different basis later. Nor do I think that he will reveal anything that directly contradicts what Jesus taught. But I also don't believe that the full consequences of Christ's action were understood immediately. It took several centuries for the church to come up with theological formulae that they considered were adequate to understand what had gone on. (Even then, I don't think anybody claims we completely comprehend it.) Similarly, I think our understanding of the ethical consequences and other consequences for how to live as a Christian continues to develop. It's not inconsistent to think that a specific event in the past is the key to the meaning of life, but to also think that our understanding of how to use the key changes over time. Whether God has stopped sending prophets depends very much upon what you mean by the word "prophet". No Christian that I know thinks that God's spirit has left the Church. People continue to be guided by the Holy Spirit. In fact Christians often talk about the "prophetic role of the Church", by which they normally mean the Church's responsibility to hold society to standards approved by God. The business about there being no more prophets is closely connect with the closing of the canon, i.e. to the reason why you shouldn't expect the next edition of the Bible to have a few more books added. These debates get rather technical, and I'm very reluctant to reopen that can of worms here. But in general I'd say when people say that there are no more prophets, they are thinking of a very specific, divinely-established role and mode of revelation. They are not saying that God has stopped being present, or has ceased to speak to and through the Church. I guess I think there's some difference in the nature of the growth before Christ and after it. After all, we claim that in Christ, we encounter God directly. This implies a sort of finality that I don't think applies to previous revelations of God. I am willing to explain away some aspects of how the Israelites saw God, as being appropriate to the level of understanding at the time. I can even say that Paul didn't yet see all of the implications of what he taught (as in my example of slavery). But given our understanding of Christ, if I had to explain away features of Christ's behavior or teaching, this would be very embarassing. Yet even though I'm willing to say that the picture of God that we see in Christ is authoritative, that doesn't mean there is no room for growth. Christ did not speak on every possible issue and answer every possible question. He left us free to grow into an understanding of what it means to be Christians.