Genocide in the Bible: does this trouble anyone else?

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HarryStotle said:
That people are scandalized by God is more a feature of narcissism and egocentricity including the proliferation of hedonistic behaviour than it is about this issue.

People don’t want anyone telling them what to think or do so finding a possible fault in God provides a convenient excuse for getting out of his jurisdiction. The underlying problem is they don’t understand ths nature of God to begin with. In fact they don’t understand the nature of morality either.
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Are you saying those of us who are troubled by this subject are simply narcissistic egoists?
 
Thanks for that. :roll_eyes:
Do you have a comment on Pope Benedicts Verbum Domini sec 42 and 44? Or any of the other resource materials from Church sources?
 
StudentMI said:
Are you saying those of us who are troubled by this subject are simply narcissistic egoists?
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No. It isn’t the “being troubled by” that is the issue. We ought all to be troubled by it just as we all ought to be troubled by the existence of evil and death in the world. It is in the resolution of those with the existence of God that is the challenge. Being troubled by the hard passages is a species of being troubled by the existence of evil and death.

An easy answer is: A good God wouldn’t permit evil and death, therefore evil and death prove a good God does not exist.

It is the same argument with the hard passages. A good God would not command genocide therefore a good God does not exist.

Properly facing up to the existence of evil challenges our concept of God to the core of being. It becomes an existential question and not merely an academic one. I think that is why the passages are in Scripture to begin with. It is God saying: “Make complete sense of these.” We can’t on our own because our own lights do not properly apprehend God, so we are scandalized, just as we are scandalized by God calling Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Or Christ saying, “My flesh is real food and my blood real drink.” People are legitimately scandalized and will walk away because that can’t be so, or they find some explanation: It is only a symbol, he didn’t mean it literally in order to reconcile the fact with what is tolerable to them and keep God under their control by their understanding. Same with these passages.

The conclusion isn’t that God orders genocide willy nilly but that God is not within our purview to scrutinize and explain in ways that we are comfortable with. He is not in that realm of beings.

We are meant to be discomforted because we are not in control, neither of existence nor of morality.
 
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HarryStotle said:
That people are scandalized by God …
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Distortions of God. Distortions.
I’m not talking about people who know the true God and reject God. I’m talking about people who are presented distortions of God. If they have a good conscience, they ought to take what they know and run from the god of arbitrary violence.
 
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I don’t think that’s fair. It’s presenting too big a dichotomy between the Church of different ages.
 
goout said:
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HarryStotle:
That people are scandalized by God …
Click to expand...
Distortions of God. Distortions.
I’m not talking about people who know the true God and reject God. I’m talking about people who are presented distortions of God. If they have a good conscience, they ought to take what they know and run from the god of arbitrary violence.
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Except the violence wasn’t arbitrary, it was an important aspect of a larger narrative, as was the crucifixion that God didn’t walk away from but that we do. Let’s at least face the fact that suffering and death are real and present. We cannot argue them away or be scandalized such that they diaappear from view if we show sufficient outrage at them. That doesn’t work.

So we are left facing our own suffering and death and facing God through those.

He is not the sanitized god of our uprightness and dreams. You merely need to read the Testaments to see he is present in all aspects of life and shares our confrontation with the worst of evil and comes out victorious over it.
 
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HarryStotle said:
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goout:
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HarryStotle:
That people are scandalized by God …
Click to expand...
Distortions of God. Distortions.
I’m not talking about people who know the true God and reject God. I’m talking about people who are presented distortions of God. If they have a good conscience, they ought to take what they know and run from the god of arbitrary violence.
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Except the violence wasn’t arbitrary, it was an important aspect of a larger narrative.
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The violence happened and it is part of a larger narrative of course.
The vision of God that casts him in stone as literally commanding genocide pre-supposes God as arbitrary.
The Regensburg address has a very thoughtful exposition of this view of God as represented in Islam: arbitrary, capricious, and contradictory to God’s very own Logos.
Well worth the read.
 
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No. It can be legitimate development of doctrine per Newman.

There’s also the lack of evidence regarding the conquest…
 
I’d recommend some reading on what the Magisterium is.
And what it means that the Church is living.
The Magisterium is living, Tradition is living, and Scripture is the living word of God.

All three live together in harmony. You can’t take one aspect of revelation out of step with the whole. That tends toward one of the solas.
If you get the Christology straight, all else falls into line. Christ is living, and his bride The Church is living. You live, now, not in ancient Israel.
The context of the living Church encompasses the whole of it, not just the literalist words on the page written centuries ago.
 
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That misunderstands the thought of Newman and Benedict etc. Plus if you’re going that far one of the Church Father’s I believe called for an allegorical interpretation of the conquest. You’re also not addressing the lack of evidence. It’s just not there from what I’ve read.
 
No it can’t. This isn’t doctrine. This is interpretation of the consent of the fathers, who were far closer to Christ than we are now, and our culture is far more warped.

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Misunderstands the nature of the Church. Christ is no less living now that in AD 40 when Paul encountered him, or at the Council of Trent, or at the last conclave. Same Christ, living and true God.
 
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These issues also tend to misunderstand the nature of freedom.
Freedom is not license to do or believe what one prefers because one has the free will to do so. Freedom opens up the responsibility to listen and to conform to what is revealed. And to be docile to it.

I have the freedom to believe the hammered metal dome is literally real because God spoke it. But my free will doesn’t give me a license to ignorance. And I have a responsibility in that regard.

It’s the difference between negative and positive freedom.
 
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goout said:
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HarryStotle:
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goout:
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HarryStotle:
That people are scandalized by God …
Click to expand...
Distortions of God. Distortions.
I’m not talking about people who know the true God and reject God. I’m talking about people who are presented distortions of God. If they have a good conscience, they ought to take what they know and run from the god of arbitrary violence.
Click to expand...
Except the violence wasn’t arbitrary, it was an important aspect of a larger narrative.
Click to expand...
The violence happened and it is part of a larger narrative of course.
The vision of God that casts him in stone as literally commanding genocide pre-supposes God as arbitrary.
The Regensburg address has a very thoughtful exposition of this view of God as represented in Islam: arbitrary, capricious, and contradictory to God’s very own Logos.
Well worth the read.
Click to expand...
The view of God in Islam is that he is arbitrary, capricious and contradictory because his nature is incomprehensible to us and he is not held to any human morality precisely because he is above morality. He is unknowable even by analogy.

That isn’t the God of the Bible who makes himself known in Christ and is the author of human morality, which he has authored as a reflection of his nature to us.

That does not imply he is capricious or arbitrary, but it does imply that it is the nature of God that is the ground for the existence of morality and not the other way around. Evil is an infringement on and an affront to the goodness of God reflected in human nature and creation. Evil is impermissible and we have a responsibility to not let it flourish. The hard passages do capture something of the necessity of ending the proliferation of evil.

Yes they are distrurbing because they bring us to the brink of the battle between good and evil.

This is where words and ideas fail. The solution, though, is not in a facile dismissal to assuage the upright in thought. The down and dirty has always been front and centre in Scripture and for a reason. It is there that we confront the nature of reality and of God. It isn’t in the comfortable ease of academic debate.
 
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You are forgetting what Fr William Most explained about the Syllabus. If one thing in a proposition is wrong then the statement is condemned. The idea that Divine Revelation is imperfect is the condemned idea.
 
Forgive me if I side with St John Henry Newman, St John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
 
goout said:
No it can’t. This isn’t doctrine. This is interpretation of the consent of the fathers, who were far closer to Christ than we are now, and our culture is far more warped.
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Misunderstands the nature of the Church. Christ is no less living now that in AD 40 when Paul encountered him, or at the Council of Trent, or at the last conclave. Same Christ, living and true God.
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And the same Word of God directed events in Scripture through the Old and New Testaments and inspired their writing. He was no less living then than in 33 AD or today.
 
HarryStotle said:
And the same Word of God directed events in Scripture through the Old and New Testaments and inspired their writing. He was no less living then than in 33 AD or today.
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How do you square the lack of evidence regarding the conquest?
 
I’m not sure why babies are so special. Babies die naturally all the time, (even in the womb!) and that too is the will of God.

But as long as we are thinking about babies, what about Psalm 137?

There, the divinely inspired Psalmist is calling for the “little ones” of Babylon to be smashed against rocks.
 
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