This Week In God's Word
“Nobody’s ever talked about the holocaust here [in America]. There were, conservatively speaking, nineteen million Indian people living in North America. Nineteen million. By 1970, there were 260, 000. Where did they go? What most people in this country fail to realize is the model for [the Jewish Holocaust] was the treatment of Native American people. [Hitler] said so, he wrote it down: the model for the [Nazi] concentration camps were the [Indian] prison camps here. Also, the whole notion of turning a people against themselves, keeping them busy within the prison camps, was also born here. Hitler thought it was a very good plan, and he admired [U.S. President] Andrew Jackson. Nineteen million. That’s not a holocaust?”
Phil Lucas (1942 – February 4, 2007) was an American filmmaker of mostly Native American themes. He acted, wrote, produced, directed or edited more than 100 films/documentaries or television programs starting as early as 1979 when he wrote/co-produced and co-directed Images of Indians for PBS - a five-part series exploring the problem of Indian stereotypes as portrayed and perpetuated by Hollywood Westerns.
Robots
Genocide, the massacre of a group of people based on political,
ethnic or religious bias, has been one of mankind’s most hateful
and evil practices. Ethnic or racial “cleansing” is usually
carried out at the direction of a single person—a political,
religious or military leader—who is, typically, a fanatical
egoist who rules a nation, tribe or even a church by means of
fear and intimidation. The people carrying out the genocide are,
just as often, fanatical believers in not necessarily an ideal
or goal but believers in the egotistical, self-absorbed
megalomaniac leading their nation or cause. It is unimaginable,
to me, to think any rational person could expect to achieve
anything worthwhile by slaughtering innocent men, women and
children. It is also difficult for me to comprehend that, even
in this modern age, genocide is a common practice, executed
typically by a sole lunatic like Syrian dictator Hafez al Assad
or Sudanese strongman Omar al-Bashir. These are unimaginable,
hateful crimes, nearly beyond our comprehension. Yet, year after
year, we hunker down on Thanksgiving Day without giving much of
a thought to the millions slaughtered overseas, or the millions
slaughtered here at home.
Thanksgiving commemorates a crime, the genocide of an indigenous
population. I’ve met few black Christians who are much aware of
the ongoing African genocides, and almost none who know anything
about the genocide of Native Americans—what we call “Indians”
–here at home. What we know about Thanksgiving is traffic will
be bad, tempers will be short, and food will be plentiful. I
have not once attended a Thanksgiving dinner, with a family of
any ethnicity, who paused, even momentarily, to consider the
plight of the people this holiday’s mythical foundation is based
upon.
As we’re discussing the
Native American Holocaust this week, it’s worth noting
genocide was common and, yes, God-ordained in the bible. I am
seeing a lot of Christian apologists (defenders of Christian
doctrine) make estimable attempts to claim that isn’t true, that
there is no God-blessed genocide in the bible. These learned
individuals invest themselves, as many of us do, trying to
reconcile the vengeful God of the Old Testament with Christian
values of faith and love found in the New. The urge to reconcile
the two stems from philosophical questions of moral evil versus
natural evil, and something called a theodicy, or an attempt to
reconcile the evidential problem of evil with the divine
characteristics of an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient
God. In other words, how could a loving God allow suffering and
evil, let alone cause or ordain it.
In most cases, these people are looking for ways to embellish
the story: to make the bible more consistent in its view of God
and approach to the characters in it. What these people do,
however, is miss the point that the Holy Bible is not a novel,
not a book as we know books. “Bible” literally means “many
books.” Many books by many writers. There is no consistent
narrative, no “Once upon A Time,” from Genesis to Revelation.
The personality of the characters, and even of God Himself, may
seem inconsistent from one book to another. Inconsistencies and
contradictions can cause us to question or even lose faith. So
there’s usually somebody like me jumping out ahead of the
controversy trying to craft a narrative that smooth south the
rough edges of the biblical record.
This practice is entirely wrong. It’s not our place to tamper
with, smooth over, or obfuscate God’s word for any reason
whatsoever. Yet, that’s precisely what has happened. Over the
millennia, editors have tampered with various translations
either out of religious fervor or political compulsion. Many of
our pastors have likewise struggled to construct a narrative
that frees God of the accusation of having ordained the genocide
of indigenous peoples; to make God the Good Guy consistently
throughout the scriptures. This is severely faulty doctrine.
Biblical examples of genocide include;
The worldwide flood at the time of Noah as described in Genesis, chapters 6 to 8. From the description, it almost completely wiped out the human race, with the exception of Noah, his wife and sons and their wives.
The Passover incident described in Exodus chapters 11 and 12, in which all of the firstborn of all Egypt were slaughtered. This included newborns, children, youths, adults, the elderly—both human and animal.
The conquest of Canaan, in which God ordered the Hebrews to completely exterminate the Canaanite people -- again from the elderly to newborns and fetuses. This is described throughout the book of Joshua as occurring in Jericho and other Canaanite cities.
The near extermination of the entire tribe of Benjamin by the remaining 11 tribes, triggered by the serial rape and murder of a priest's concubine by a few Benjamites [Judges 20]
The Bible explains that God was primarily responsible for the first three of the above genocides.
The Will of God: Staring at skulls of slaughtered innocents in Rwanda.
God Is Not A Super-Hero
The problem comes in where we attempt to reconcile what we know
and believe is a God of love with the heinous crime of genocide.
Our confusion and consternation over some Old Testament passages
stems from our improper approach to God’s Word. Our task is to
receive God’s word without injecting our own opinion,
assumptions, or righteousness. We pollute the record by twisting
it to somehow make God the Good Guy, the hero of every story.
This is how our minds have become acclimated, from childhood, to
sort complex human issues and questions of existence and
relevance of God, into simple plotlines involving a hero and
villain. Assigning those values to God is completely
wrongheaded, because God is beyond such concepts as Good or
Evil. God created both Good and Evil. Why? You’ll have to ask
Him. There’s a whole train of thought about the theology of free
will, about how evil is a consequence of God allowing a flawed
humanity to become more like Himself. But that’s for another
time. At the moment, I need to stress for anyone actually
reading this: God Is Not A Super-Hero. He’s God.
As I’ve said, repeatedly, here, Christians assuming or insisting
the bible holds up a moral standard are abusing God’s word
through distortion and misappropriation. I’m seeing dozens of
essays, espousing varying levels of tortured contortion, that
refute the idea of God affirming genocide of indigenous peoples.
This is a ridiculous waste of time. God *clearly* not only
affirmed or rewarded genocide, in many places He commanded it.
The problem is not with the biblical translation and, surely,
not with God. It’s with us. It’s with our wrongheaded assumption
that the bible upholds a moral standard. It does not.
The bible is, literally, the orderly and progressive
self-revelation of God. It exists to teach us Who God is and to
tell the story of His Son, Jesus Christ. Morality (the quality
of being in accord with standards of right or good conduct) is
relevant to the community and times you live in; in other words,
our view of what is moral changes with our circumstances. In and
of itself, morality has no external or infallible truth to it.
Theology (rational inquiry into religious questions), ideally,
should be based on eternal truths, which have nothing to do with
morality per se, other than that our adherence to these eternal
truths forms opinions we express as guidelines governing our
moral conduct. Theology and morality are hardly one and the
same. A decent and moral idea, rule, or concept can still, in
all of its purity, transgress the holiness of a divine God. As
such, our sense of morality is of not much use to God (Isa
64:6). Churches relying on their sensibilities of what is good,
right, and moral to dictate their interpretation of scripture
is, in and of itself, faulty exegesis. The Church should not be
in the business of dictating morality, but should be proclaiming
truths both eternal and infallible. We, as individuals, having
been presented with these truths, are a people at liberty to
embrace or reject those truths, and our sense of morality is the
expression of that decision.
People come to the bible expecting fairness, that things will
work out for the characters in the stories recorded there. That
rarely happens. The Apostle Paul was lynched, Stephen was stoned
to death, John The Baptist—last of the great Prophets—was
beheaded. Noah had drunken sex with his own daughters. King
Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, fell into apostasy and
worshipped false Gods. Few of the bible stories end well. Jesus
was resurrected, hence our hope for a life after death. But,
look what God put His own Son through.
War Paint: Lied to, exploited, slaughtered.
Making Excuses For God
Should anything in the bible justify genocide? Well,
that’s a different story. According to the bible, time is
measured by units we think of as dispensations. We are now under
the Dispensation of Grace, where God’s grace (or unmerited
favor: think of it as Dad being patient with us when we’ve been
bad) is the environment in which we live. During this phase of
time, getting to know God requires very little effort or
sacrifice: you simply have to choose to know Him. Sadly, many
people ignore this free gift, not realizing or caring Who God is
or that this specific phase of time has a beginning and end,
after which knowing God becomes much more difficult and will
require
enormous sacrifice. However, under Grace, the
order of the day is love. Unlike the previous Dispensation of
The Law, under Grace we are commanded to love our enemies. Jesus
died for His enemies. He is coming back for his friends.
It is simplistic to say, “Genocide was okay then—in the Old
Testament—but it’s wrong now.” Genocide was never okay. The
sixth commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” actually means, “Thou
Shalt Not Murder.” [Ex 20:13] This suggests killing, in
self-defense or to defend someone else (including your country)
is sometimes necessary. Murder, on the other hand, suggests
killing when we or our loved ones are not in danger. It presumes
aggression and malice, and that is the prohibition God put in
place on Mount Sinai.
Making excuses for God is a bad idea. Was wiping out all of
those indigenous peoples so Israel could have a home wrong? By
today’s moral standard, absolutely. But, applying a 2012
standard of morality to a 1400 B.C. commandment of the Living
God is the very definition of arrogance. Beloved: there are
simply things in the bible we cannot explain or reconcile. There
is no Spirituality For Dummies book that fills in all the
answers to every question. That’s where faith comes into play:
making a conscience choice to trust God, through Jesus Christ,
and to recognize that Christian values cannot always be easily
explained or justified to events, motives and actions of a
previous dispensation. The bible teaches us that
this very dispensation will close with God’s judgment, with evil
loosed upon the world. How to we reconcile that prophecy with Irenicism and the (wrongly) perceived pacifism of Christian
life? We don’t. Or, if you want to look at it this way, God The
Father loves us enough to warn us to get out of harm’s way.
Christopher J. Priest
17 November 2012
editor@praisenet.org
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