No. 384  |  Nov 18, 2012   Intro   Start   STUDY   Pilgrim's Progress   Family Ties   Giving Thanks   Joy & Jubilation   Donate   Previous   Home

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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No. 384  |  Nov 18, 2012   Intro   Start   STUDY   Pilgrim's Progress   Family Ties   Giving Thanks   Joy & Jubilation   Donate   Previous   Home