Matt Flannagan and Paul Copan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary of Chapter 23: “Turning the Other Cheek, Pacifism, and Just War.”

Did God Really Command Genocide? 

It might be worth asking whether we can say something more general about warfare, moving beyond divinely commanded fighting. Contrary to the claim that the Bible endorses pacifism, certain instances of violent means seem justified to fight injustice. N. T. Wright thinks one of the insights of the imprecatory psalms is that evil is real and that it needs to be actively battled. Yale professor Miroslav Volf affirms the compatibility of loving one’s neighbor and using force to protect the neighbor. Romans 13 affirms that God does not always carry out divine wrath directly but has partly delegated this task to human governments.

Biblical Considerations

               The Teaching of Jesus

Jesus died for the sin of the world and took the curse of our exile and alienation from God on himself. He stormed into the temple to cleanse it. Although many assume Jesus prohibited any use of force, F&C have their doubts.

Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek (Matt. 5:39). But this admonition is not the response to an attack of violence, but to a gross insult. Jesus is prohibiting returning insult for insult. He is exhorting his followers to break the vicious cycle of exchanging insults and to move toward reconciliation and peacemaking with our personal enemies—even with Roman soldiers who might commandeer Jewish citizens to carry their loads for them for a mile.

Jesus does not absolutize loving one’s enemies. He denounces his opponents in very harsh terms in Matthew 23. He exemplified a spirit of remarkable forgiveness on the cross, but for forgiveness to be complete, it presupposes the offender’s repentance. Even when Christ instructs his disciples to forgive extravagantly, he continues saying that those refusing to forgive will incur the wrath of their master and be handed over to the torturers.

When Christians call for the forgiveness of the likes of Osama bin Laden, we must ask: Is that our rightful place? Unlike the Son of God, how can we simply forgive the offenses of others? What about the victims of their assaults? Should we forgive terrorists while they are planning another attack?

What about not resisting the evil person? For one thing, Jesus himself is constantly resisting evil. Matt. 5:39 is better translated as not resisting “by evil means” rather than “the evil one/person.” This is how other NT writers interpret the words. And even if we take this passage in the traditional way, once again we do not have an absolute prohibition of resisting evil persons. Jesus is routinely driving out evil spirits. The God-ordained state is called to resist evildoers, etc.

While Jesus welcomes sinners and forgives them, he also threatens judgment on his opponents. Repeatedly, we see that Jesus himself doesn’t absolutize forgiving enemies.

Other Voices in the New Testament

Elsewhere in the NT we see the imprecatory psalms reenacted. Romans 12 and 13 illustrate the complementarity of the personal and the official. Romans 12 features Paul following Jesus’ commands to break the vicious cycle of personal animosity to work toward reconciled relationships. Rom. 13 features state officials whose role has been ordained of God to protect the innocent and preserve the peace and punish evildoers.

We also encounter general biblical principles that lend support to the idea of a just war. There is a time for war. Soldiers and centurions are treated quite favorably in the NT. Their status isn’t presented as inherently immoral. The scriptures exhibit a complementarity between being a disciple of Christ and involvement in the God-ordained state.

Historical Considerations: Constantinianism and Christian Soldiering

               Before Constantine

Bainton and Yoder have maintained that the church was uniformly nonmilitary from the second century until the rise of Constantine (AD 312). It’s the spirit of Constantinianism, so the argument goes, that has given rise to the church’s compromising entanglement with the state.

The evidence for this uniform pacifism is not all that tidy. NT is not nonmilitaristic. What about beyond the NT? After the NT and up to the mid-second century, we have silence on Christian soldiers. But after this time, we have clear evidence of Christian soldiers in the Roman army. Nonmilitaristic perspective of several church leaders does not necessarily represent a uniformly held, empire-wide Christian belief during this time. We see hints of just war in Tertullian and Origen, and beyond this, there are a number of complicating factors. Perhaps Christians saw some violence as inappropriate, or some causes unworthy of participating in, but that doesn’t mean all.

The Advent of Constantine

With the ascent of Constantine, the Christian outcast minority would become part of the “establishment.” Constantine is often depicted negatively, but surely his rule was a relief to a once persecuted minority. The church made some big mistakes with the temporal power, but Constantine brought about many positive moral reforms—banning gladiatorial games and the abandonment of children, segregated prison cells for men and women, charitable ministries, etc.

A Brief Discussion of Just War

After the rise of Constantine, thinkers like Ambrose and Augustine would advocate principles for a just war—a view that held sway until the twentieth century. Can there be a just war? Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are examples of those who brought about change nonviolently. But perhaps it’s worth noting that their nonviolent resistance succeeded because the governments to which they appealed were fairly humanitarian and better informed by biblical values than the vast number of ruthless regimes that have existed over time.

Principles of Just War

The just war theorist attempts to deal realistically with unpreventable violent aggression against the vulnerable. Just war theory recognizes the justice of protecting innocent nations from thugs, bullies, and tyrants, recognizing that attempts at negotiation and peacemaking with ruthless tyrants will often be fruitless and that “trust” may be nothing more than gullibility.

Military historian Victor Davis Hanson reminds us that war or military strength has helped bring an end to chattel slavery in America, Nazism, Fascism, and Soviet Communism. Wars don’t always come about because of failure of communication or misunderstanding, or from poverty or inequality. They begin from malicious intent and the absence of deterrence. Often nations become accomplices to evil through inaction.

When it comes to articulating what just war involves, there are seven criteria, although the first three take priority:

1. Just Cause
2. Just Intent
3. Lawful Declaration
4. Last Resort
5. Immunity of Noncombatants
6. Limited Objectives

F&C elaborate by making several points. First, in the context of just war principles, which are universally applicable and rooted in God’s general revelation to all people, it may be helpful to distinguish between “force” and “violence.” Appropriate force is motivated by both justice and love of neighbor; it is aimed at restoring peace; it is carried out by a proper authority. Second, a nation or group of nations may engage in a truly just war, but the fact that missteps may be made does not undermine the overall justice of the war. Third, a war that is just should ultimately exhibit love for one’s neighbor, but we must not confuse what love requires. Love for the victim may require removing the source of harm, for example. Fourth, the pacifistic understanding of “turn the other cheek” raise questions about protecting the innocent from injustice when it’s in our power to do so. Finally, we should simultaneously support “just peacemaking” efforts to build bridges of understanding and partnership between nations and communities while not neglecting the appropriate use of force against thus and tyrants when necessary.

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Flannagan and Copan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary of Chapter 22: “Did Old Testament War Texts Inspire the Crusades?”

Did God Really Command Genocide?

One of the most common objections raised by critics of Christianity concerns the Crusades.  I often have heard statements of how the church massacred thousands of innocent Muslims in the holy land in order to obtain riches and retrieve lands for the purpose of establishing holy shrines.  Unfortunately many of these criticisms are based on misinformation about the purpose, nature, and historical events that make up this period of church history.  F &C turn to this topic in the 22nd chapter of their book and expose and address the myths that are often assumed to be true concerning the Crusades.  They divide the chapter into five common myths.

The first myth concerns the purpose of the crusades.  Many think they were “unjustified military campaigns against peaceable, tolerant Muslims.”  F&C point out that this is historically inaccurate.  Beginning with the first crusade in 1095, they show how each crusade was a response to Muslim aggression.  Using the just war language of Augustine, F&C show that the original intent of the crusades was to protect and rescue those Christians in Asia minor (and later Edessa in 1144 and Jerusalem in 1187) from Muslim attacks in those areas. They quote crusade scholar Thomas Madden, who states, “The crusades were in every way a defensive war.  They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world.” This is not to say every action in the crusade was morally justified or that abuses did not occur, but the general purpose was to defend innocent Christians and not to pillage and rape innocent Muslims as is often claimed by critics such as Karen Armstrong.

The second myth also concerns the purpose of the crusades.  Some claim that the church’s real purpose was to accumulate great wealth by looting the Muslims.  F&C acknowledge there was a financial aspect to the crusades, but argue this was an incidental aspect behind their purpose. The crusades were very costly to the average crusader and they often had to raise four to five times their annual income in order to make the long journey to the Holy land and fight for the church.  Therefore some form of financial remuneration was expected as a part of being involved.  However, they point out that nobody got rich from the crusades and much more money flowed from the west to the east than the opposite.

The third myth concerns the often held belief that the church was trying to gain converts by force.  F&C point out that there is no evidence for this claim and that “the crusades simply did not have a view to force or pressure Muslims to change their faith” (293).  The purpose was protecting Christians and shrines from attacks by Muslim aggression.  This does not mean that some individuals did not reach out to Muslims, such as Saint Francis, but that was not part of the general purpose.

The fourth myth claims that “Muslims have held the crusades against Christians since the Middle Ages” (293).  F&C show that, while this has become a popular view (expressed in such films as Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven), this is actually a recent view that has become most popular in the last few years as Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism has arisen.  Cambridge scholar Jonathon Riley-Smith argues that “Muslims had pretty much forgotten about the crusades since they had won.”  The crusades were raised by some Muslims around the same time Israel’s nationhood came about.  It was not a long-standing grudge that Muslims have been holding for centuries.

The final myth goes to the heart of F&C’s project in this book, the relationship of the Old Testament conquests to the Crusades.  Some, such as Roland Bainton, have claimed that the “architects of the Christian crusade . . . drew their warrant from the books of the conquest and of the Maccabean revolt” (295).  F&C acknowledge that there are isolated incidents in which one finds those who used the conquest narratives to justify aggressive actions against others, such as some Puritans who came to America.  However, they marvel that more of this was not done, especially by the one group that one would think would use such texts to justify violence with others, namely, the Jews.  The largest problem with this claim by Bainton and others is that there is simply no evidence to support it.  It is merely an assertion.  We do not find any of the original supporters of the crusades appealing to the conquest narratives in the book of Joshua as scriptural support for the crusades.  In fact the most common scriptural passages appealed to come from the Gospels and the mouth of Jesus.  What is appealed to are passages where Jesus claims one needs to take up one’s cross and forsake all to help others.  So again, another myth is shown to be false concerning the motivation behind the crusades.

While the popular beliefs concerning the crusades continue to cling to the myths we have seen above, serious scholarship continues to reveal those myths to be false and without warrant.  F&C perform a vital service contributing to overcoming the overwhelming mythology promoted by misinformed critics.

Find the other chapter summaries here.

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Matt Flannagan and Paul Copan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary of Chapter 21: “Are Yahweh Wars in the Old Testament Just Like Islamic Jihad?”

Karen Armstrong and Philip Jenkins, among others, have argued that there’s far more violence in the Bible than in the Koran. Jenkins refers to the Old Testament’s ethnic cleansing, institutionalization of segregation, and hate and fear of other races and religions. F&C review some of these themes they’ve already covered: In terms of ethnic cleansing, what we find in the OT instead is “moral cleansing,” and long-awaited judgment on a wicked people whose time had finally come. And God warns the Israelites will experience the same judgment if they commit the same sins. The OT represents a God whose salvation is intended to affect all the peoples of the world. In terms of segregation, Israel was to be distinct morally and spiritually, but they were repeatedly commanded to care for the alien and sojourner in their midst since they too had been aliens in the land of Egypt. In terms of other races and religions, the charge of hating and fearing other races is clearly false, though the Bible is opposed to idolatry, and God brings judgment on ancient Israel for engaging in idolatry and breaking covenant with him after promising to love, cling to, and obey him.

Biblical and Koranic Texts

We see many Koranic references to warfare, and this warfare is not simply defensive but offensive as well. F&C give copious examples; here’s just one: “And those who are slain in the way of God, He will not send their works astray…. And He will admit them to Paradise, that He has made known to them” (47:4, 6).

Clear differences obtain between the Bible and Koran. First, military events captured in a biblical canon are merely descriptive of a unique part of the unfolding of salvation history. Second, whereas the biblical texts offer descriptions of unique history, the Koranic texts by contrast appear to be issuing enduring commands. Islam has exhibited a militaristic aggressiveness from the beginning, and this aggressiveness has been fed by Koranic texts that many Muslims throughout history have taken as normative or binding, enduring throughout history, and worldwide in applicability. Third, the distinctions between divinely commanded wars in the OT and Islamic jihad are much more pronounced than their similarities.

In addition to being unique and unrepeatable events within scripture itself, these wars are restricted to a relatively small portion of land, and accompanied by widely witnessed miracles. By contrast, the “revelations” to Muhammad were private and not publicly available for scrutiny or reinforced by dramatic signs and wonders. What’s more, Israel was an instrument of divine judgment on wicked people, unlike Muhammad, who attacked and overtook even those who were “People of the Book” (Jews and Christians)—part of the global reach to which Muhammed and his followers aspired.

Muhammad’s Example

Consider now Muhammed himself, the supreme human example for Muslims to follow. His goal was “to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no God but Allah.’” He died in AD 632 with his own plans for attacking neighboring nations unfulfilled. In his career, he fought in an estimated eighty-six military campaigns. The first authoritative biography of him covers his battles in 75 percent of its 813 pages, and includes depictions of assassination, rape, and cruelty that met with Muhammed’s approval. In one instance he said, “Kill any Jew that falls into your power.” A number of instances recount his approval of violence. According to the Koran and the traditions about Muhammed (Hadith), he permitted his soldiers to have sex not only with their wives, but also with female captives and female slaves.

The Early History of Islam and Its Ongoing Encounters with the Non-Muslim World

Although the Koran affirms that there should be no compulsion in religion, this verse is contradicted by other passages within the Koran. It’s also contradicted by the example of Muhammed himself. In terms of the word “jihad,” the Koran has a place for an “internal” sense of spiritual struggling or exerting within oneself for Allah, which is called the “greater jihad,” but the Koran also clearly indicates military struggle and connects jihad to physical fighting (the “lesser jihad”). As David Cook indicates in his book Understanding Jihad, there is little support in the Koran and Hadith for the notion of jihad as internal struggle.

Not only did early Islamic history continue the militaristic spirit of its founder; Islam’s history reveals an oppressive stance toward non-Muslims under Islamic rule. F&C adduce several examples.

Conclusions

The claim that the Bible’s warfare texts are “just like” the Koran’s is incorrect. The Hebrew scriptures portray unique, unrepeatable events of Israelite warfare—unlike the ongoing and normative aspect of jihad in the Koran and under the leadership of Muhammed. Unlike the biblical text that stresses God’s judgment against specific people, the Koran and Muhammed placed no such limitations on jihad, as the opponents of Islam are non-Muslims remaining in the “abode of war” rather than the “abode of Islam.” And while the scriptures emphasize a limited geographical area of military engagement, the Koran and Muhammed placed no such limit.

Another point of contrast is the nature of God in the Koran and the Bible. The Koran portrayed a deity who loves only those who love him. Those who reject Islam are “the worst of creatures.” Here God’s love is conditional, depending on the response of human beings. The love of the biblical God is unconditional. He does not merely love those who love him. Rather, God loves all people and even his enemies (cf. Matt. 5:444-48; John 3:16; Rom. 5:6-10; 1 John 2:2). He seeks to make salvation available to all, including the very enemies of his people Israel (e.g., Gen. 12:1-13; Ps. 87:4-6; Isa. 19:23-25; Zech. 9:70).

The contrast between Yahweh war in the OT and Islamic jihad becomes clear when considered are issues of geography, historical length/limit, objects of warfare, objects of God’s love, the standard of morality (God’s loving nature versus Allah’s sheer will that commands indiscriminately), signs and wonders, and the normativity of war.

Find the other chapter summaries here.

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Flannagan and Copan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary Chapter 20: “Does Religion Cause Violence?”

Did God Really Command Genocide? 

With Chapter 20, F&C enter the fourth part of their book, which both expands the discussion of the OT God and explores a number of related questions concerning theism and violence.  In this chapter they take on the general question of the relationship of religion to violence.  A number of writers suggest that there is an inherent relationship between religion and violence such that religion will inevitably lead to violent acts.  Charles Kimball declares in his book When Religion Becomes Evil that “religion has caused more violence than any other ‘institutional force in human history’” (259).  Mark Jurgensmeyer states that “religion is violent by its very nature because it tends to ‘absolutize and to project images of cosmic war’” (259). In her book, The Curse of Cain, Regina Schwartz claims it is not just religion, but monotheistic religion in particular, that leaves violence in its wake. Belief in one God is an exclusivistic claim creating outsiders who “will be ostracized, abhorred, even obliterated because they fail to acknowledge ‘the one true God’. Monotheism inevitably leads to an us-versus-them mind-set” (259-260). Instead of religion, these authors endorse the employment of the “enlightenment values” of tolerance, diversity, and pluralism.  These authors suggest that abandoning one’s religious commitments and adopting enlightenment values will significantly reduce the amount of violence in the world.  F&C spend this chapter examining and refuting these charges against religion.

They begin their exploration by examining the meaning of the concepts of “religion” and “enlightenment values.”  One irony they recognize at the outset is that “the pro-enlightenment advocates and/or ‘religion’ attackers are not even clear on what ‘religion’ is” (260).  Because there is little widespread commonality between traditional religions, F&C suggest “we would be wise to think in terms of an all-encompassing ‘worldview’ or ‘philosophy of life’ instead of the misused and abused term ‘religion’” (261). Such a worldview would be marked by three characteristics: comprehensiveness, incapable of abandonment (as it shapes the identity of the self), and of central importance.  Religions certainly fall into this concept but so do many secular worldviews such as humanism, post-modernism, and Marxism.  A second irony noted by F&C is that “political visions – even allegedly secular ones – often take on strongly ‘religious’ overtones” (262). Political leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, and Kim Jung II have been practically deified by many of their followers. “The line between the religious and the secular is quite clearly irrelevant when it comes to the phenomena of exalting dictators” (262). A final irony is that “secular ideologies can readily compete with the most fanatical and dangerous elements found within traditional religion” (262). F&C raise the question, “Why single out religion?”  Numerous examples can be drawn from political and secular instances of violence and war and they list several examples of totalitarian societies, many of which had completely abandoned religion.

F&C apply these three ironies in their examination of the “religious wars” of 16th and 17th century Europe and ask the question, did the enlightenment make a difference?  To begin with, they point out that, with the onset of the enlightenment, the political power of the church was replaced by that of the state.  The 20th century shows that violence and tyranny can be just as, if not more, prevalent in the name of nationalism and atheism (witness the holocaust, and the atrocities of Stalin and Pol Pot, just to name a few).  Second, “the ‘religious wars’ were in fact not predictably divided along doctrinal lines, but rather political ones” (264). F&C list a number of examples of the so-called religious wars of the 16th century. Third, the supposed “enlightenment values” that are often touted by today’s critics of religion were not nearly as enlightened as they are often promoted to be.  For example, many “enlightened” thinkers supported slavery while it was mostly the Christian church that opposed it.  David Hume referred to those who believe in miracles as “ignorant and barbarous” peoples – an obvious reference to non-white religious people.  Third, rather than opposing violence in general, many of these modern enlightened thinkers (including the new atheists) advocate violence against traditional religionists. Sam Harris advocates a nuclear strike against Islamic fundamentalists while Christopher Hitchens advocate beating and killing the “enemies of civilization” (religious persons).

F&C go on to point out that not all religions are the same and that they should not be lumped together and treated as if they are.  There are religions that have done much good for society and some that have been harmful.  They argue that Christianity falls into the former group on the basis of three lines of evidence.  First, many scholars, including some atheists, have documented the benefits that Christianity has brought into the world.  They quote at length from Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, and the Time magazine correspondent David Aikman, among others, who praise many of the humanitarian accomplishments done in the name of the Christian faith.  Progress in the west has been attributed to the Protestant work ethic by a number of scholars.  Second, Christian faith has not only elevated the west, but has made a significant impact in non-western nations as well.  Robert Woodberry performed a study of the impact of western missionaries and shows how they were responsible for “the development and spread of religious liberty, mass education, volunteer organizations, most major colonial reforms . . . and the codification of legal protections for nonwhites in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (268-269). Third, F&C point out that any attempt to attribute these gains to other sources, such as Greek ideals or the enlightenment, is inadequate.

In the final sections of this chapter, F&C take on the particular criticism by Regina Schwartz that somehow monotheism or the biblical account of the curse of Cain are ultimately responsible for much of the violence in the world.  They ask first why one should think that God’s oneness has anything to do with violence?  Besides the fact that Yahweh is often described as compassionate and patient, there is nothing about oneness that automatically sets up an “us-or-them” mentality.  Second, there are plenty of examples of violent polytheistic religious tribes as well as non-religious groups responsible for much violence.  Finally, even if monotheism could be held partially responsible for certain wrongs, it should not be considered the sole factor.  As far as the curse of Cain, Schwartz does not take a number of factors into account in her criticism of the story from Genesis.  First, Cain wasn’t so much chosen by God to be cursed as he himself chose to disobey and dishonor God.  He was given opportunities to alter his course and chose not to do so.  Second, the same opportunities were given to Jacob and Esau.  God did not play favorites.  Third, God’s election of Israel as the chosen people, rightly understood, was nothing that they could brag about – it is made clear in scripture that they were not chosen because of some superiority on their part.  Fourth, Schwartz fails to distinguish between the non-elect and the anti-elect.  Most nations were of the former category and Israel was allowed to engage in cordial relations with them.  It was only three nations (Amalekites, Canaanites, and Midianites) that they were to have nothing to do with.

F&C close this chapter with a reference to William Cavanagh’s observation that “the notion that religion causes violence is one of the most prevalent myths in the West” (274).  Such a charge is simplistic at best and misguided and misleading at worst.

Matt Flannagan and Paul Copan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary of Chapter 19: “The Role of Miracles and the Command to Kill Canaanites.”

Morriston raises this question: If God decrees something at variance with universal commands by special revelation through a human representative, then how can the commandee know that this mouthpiece accurately speaks for God and that this command is neither a delusion nor a demon? This chapter will give a further response to Morriston’s worry. Imagine you’re a skeptical soldier in Moses’s or Joshua’s army and that you ask yourself the question, “Why should I obey Moses’s call to war against the Canaanites?” How would one know that a good, just God is behind such a command? And could one find warrant for condemning violence done in the name of God in the present?

The concern is that in very unusual circumstances in the past, God commanded people to kill the innocent, exempting them from a moral principle that otherwise binds them. But if God did this in the past, why not now? But if awareness of such an exemption comes through one’s mere inner (subjective) sensing, there would be no way to verify this is God’s will. So there would be no way to know whether or not the individual was really commanded by God to kill innocent people.

Miracles and the Will of God

Matthew Rowley has written an essay on sacralized violence in the exodus under Moses and during the conquest under Joshua. His argument addresses this concern. His key argument is that the biblical narrative suggests that in those situations, God desired to safeguard against the misunderstanding of his will; so he chose to validate this new knowledge with clear displays of miracles. When a new revelation issues the extraordinary command of taking another’s life, it does not come through one’s mere inner subjective sensing. Rather, God chooses to unite this new knowledge with miracles, in such a way that the individual or onlooker can validate the message. (See Josh. 3:7.)

Miracles in the Old Testament Narrative

Rowley identifies several different categories of miracles. Category 1: Miracle of creation, showing God’s power, intelligence, and creativity. Category 2: 2L (lesser), 2M (moderate), and 2G (greater)—on an epistemic spectrum. 2L miracles are visions, dreams, or small-scale events like a burning bush. 2M are smaller miracles that go against the normal pattern of nature, meriting skepticism. These experiences should be held loosely. 2G miracles are harder to misinterpret and are impossible to fake, like God feeding Israelites for decades with bread from heaven.

Unlike private revelation claims made by Muhammad or Joseph Smith, Moses’s prophetic message is authenticated by Category 2G miracles. See Exod. 9:15-16; cf. Rom. 9:17.

Evidence, Miracles, and Moses’s and Joshua’s Believability

Imagine a skeptical soldier in Israel under Moses or Joshua who wonders whether a harsh command is truly from Yahweh. The Israelites, soldiers included, were to learn two chief lessons from the miracles surrounding the exodus out of Egypt: first, that Yahweh is supreme above all gods in power and authority and, second, that Moses was “like God”—God’s representative—before Egypt and Israel (Exod. 7:1; cf. 4:16). The narrative suggests that they should have been believed because of the confirming miracles God performed through them. No wonder that at the exodus itself, the people “believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses” (14:30-31).

Moses’s unique role further confirmed in the dreadful direct revelation at Sinai (Deut. 5:23-27), which the Israelites could see, hear, and feel. The Ten Commandments begin with the affirmation of the exodus miracle to confirm both Yahweh’s and Moses’s believability. A large number of the commands in the Mosaic law are grounded in the exodus event. The questioning Israelite solder doesn’t simply have to take Moses’s word for it; he is in a position to see firsthand God’s miraculous actions.

As for believing Joshua’s commands, scripture uses the same language as it does of Moses. And the Israelites themselves and their enemies knew that Yahweh was truly with Joshua. Remember these two points: God’s presence was highly visible—ever “in the sight” of Israel whether on the move or settled. And second, the tabernacle would continue to move until a more permanent house of God—the temple—was established where God would cause his name to dwell and where the glory of God would be visibly manifested. Not only did the Canaanites and Philistines hear reports of Yahweh’s miraculous activity, but they also could see the manifestation of Yahweh’s presence as Israel camped or moved about.

The Storehouse of Divine Validation

Unlike any person today who advocates violence in the name of God, the Israelites who engaged in life-taking obedience had a storehouse of indicators of miraculous divine validation. The large cluster of weighty miracles performed while Moses led Israel would reinforce the believability of the less-weighty miracles like the burning bush. The shock and awe 2G miracles gave more credibility to the 2L miracles. Looking back, the soldier can come to trust Moses’s testimony about the burning bush because he is gazing at the pillar of fire in front of him.

Moses, Miracles, and the Ancient Near East

The miracles recorded in Exodus through Joshua uniquely single out Moses and Joshua. It is the difference between saying, “I speak for God,” and “I speak for the God who just dried up the sea, who is leading you by a pillar of fire, and who is feeding you daily with bread from heaven.”

Prophetic Punctuated Equilibrium and Inheriting Ripples

The biblical narrative suggests a pattern—namely, large-scale miraculous activity and increased prophetic utterances are connected to a call to restore order from chaos through destruction. F&C see a connection between evidentially weighty miracles and sacralized violence—what Rowley calls prophetic punctuated equilibrium: spurts of miraculous “mutations” occurring within a short time—clustered around the old covenant and new covenant—followed by longer periods when relatively fewer miracles take place.

The conquest narratives serve as a reminder of God’s clear and inimitable workings in the course of salvation history and a call to remember his faithfulness in bringing his purposes to fruition.

Conclusion

In a post 9/11 environment, Morriston’s arguments strike a significant chord. But F&C have made several points here. First, Morriston’s argument wrongly assumes that prophetic utterances like those recorded in scripture continue after the closing of the biblical canon. Second, one can rationally attribute to God a command that under ordinary circumstances would be immoral to carry out only on two conditions: (1) that the command does not contradict a nonnegotiable moral principle, and (2) that, on the background evidence accepted by a biblical theist, the claim that God issued the command is more likely than the claim that the action is wrong. Third, even if the command meets these criteria, further tests must be passed—tests not met by contemporaries who claim God told them to kill: alleged prophets must have a track record of true predictions and have proved themselves authentic; their message must not contradict previous revelation or commands recorded in scripture; their character must show fruit of the Spirit in their life, and must have a lifestyle of sincere obedience to God’s commands; and if prophets announce an exemption from the normal rules against killing, this message will be authenticated by Category 2G miracles.

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Flannagan and Copan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary Chapter 18: “What if Someone Claimed God Commanded Killing the Innocent Today?”

Did God Really Command Genocide?  

In this chapter F & C wish to examine a concern that many have: “If we say that God commanded an exemption to the crucial moral principle in scripture and that he commanded an occasion in which the killing of the innocent was justified in the past, what is to stop some religious fanatic from claiming that God would do the same today?”  At first glance, this may seem like a legitimate concern.  However, in this chapter F & C suggest several safeguards and criteria to test such a claim as genuine.

Before addressing the main question, F & C tackle a related objection often raised by the skeptic: Unless one can know the reason for why God would issue such a command, one is not justified in saying they know that God issued such a command.  F & C point out a number of problems with this objection.  Using Alvin Plantinga’s well-known noseeum inference (pronounced no-see-um) which he effectively employs in discussing the problem of evil, they show that just because one does not know the reason for why God might command something does not entail that he has no reason.  This is to confuse an ontological problem with an epistemological one.  The fact that I do not know something exists (including a reason in the mind of God) does not necessarily mean that it does not exist.  F & C raise the idea of the skeptical theist, one who acknowledges that God may often act without explaining why he does so, as a realistic concept that completely counters this objection.  In fact, if this objection really had any power, then it would entail that we could not know that God had ever made any moral commands because, ultimately, we do not know why God commands that any good be promoted and any evil avoided.  As F & C put it, “The problem this poses is obvious: if we can’t justifiably attribute a command to God unless we know why he commands it, then we won’t be able to attribute any commands to God, even a general command to not kill.” (235)

F & C approach the main question by referring to Wes Morriston’s hypothetical situation in which a Texas governor believes God has spoken to him and commanded that all members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints should be killed.  Morriston suggests that such a situation is analogous to the Old Testament reports of divinely mandated genocide.  If we would reject such a command to the Texas governor as coming from God, we need to do the same with those in the Old Testament.  F & C, though, suggest a number of reasons why such a scenario is disanalogous and why God wouldn’t make such a command today.

While they do not deny that divine revelation is not limited to the biblical era, they affirm that individual divine guidance is different from the authoritative utterances proclaimed by God’s appointed prophets and apostles of biblical times.  All three branches of Christianity affirm that the biblical canon in closed and that there are no new divinely authoritative utterances equal to that of the prophets and apostles.  F & C state, “We have good reason to accept that the Scriptures are the sure and final authority for the believer and that with the death of the apostles, there is no longer any authoritative revelation on the level of Moses and Paul.” (238) [Note: It would have been helpful and made their case stronger had F &C gone into what exactly these reasons might be rather than just asserting that they exist.]

A second reason F & C believe that Morriston’s hypothetical scenario is disanalogous concerns recognizing moral defeaters.  Morriston wonders how we know when a command is from God as opposed to when it is not?  The answer: when it accords with our moral and religious practice.  F & C point out that one aspect of appealing to moral practice is to consider it from within the Christian moral community of which one is a member. Christians as a community affirm certain doctrines as being true and they operate from within these doctrines and may appeal to them when considering claims of commands coming from God.  In addition, F & C suggest two guidelines that help in determining when a purported rare incident might occur in which God’s command would be an exception to the crucial moral principle.  These two guidelines are:

1. One should dismiss any purported divine command that violates a non-negotiable moral belief
2. One should reject any purported divine command to do X that contradicts a negotiable moral belief when the claim “Action X is wrong” has greater plausibility or is more validly knowable than the claim that God commanded it. (239)

With these two qualifications in place, F & C show that the rare exception is not a problem for the Christian theist.  A true prophet will not affirm a command from God that violates guidance #1, so if our Texas governor’s scenario involves something of that kind, it will be rejected.  If it violates a negotiable moral belief, it will be judged by criteria of plausibility that will probably, indeed almost certainly, arrive at the conclusion that the Texas governor is not a prophet or apostle in the line of a Moses or Paul.

F & C finish off this chapter by listing a number of other scriptural criteria for testing if one is a prophet with divine authority to declare the commands of God.  They first consider the nature of the medium and ask if the word was received through some form of divination.  Second, one criterion of truth asks if the prophecy actually does come true.  Does the person proclaiming the command have a track record of true prophetic fulfillment in the past?  Third is the consistency with previous revelation.  Is it consistent with other doctrines we know to be revealed by God?  Fourth is the moral character of the person proclaiming the command. Does he or she live a virtuous life?  All of these could be applied to the Texas governor scenario to help in determining if his proclamation was really of divine origin and had divine authority behind it.

Find the other chapter summaries here.

Image:"Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich - The Sacrifice of Isaac - WGA6338" by Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich - Web Gallery of Art:   Image  Info about artwork. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christian_Wilhelm_Ernst_Dietrich_-_The_Sacrifice_of_Isaac_-_WGA6338.jpg#/media/File:Christian_Wilhelm_Ernst_Dietrich_-_The_Sacrifice_of_Isaac_-_WGA6338.jpg

Matt Flannagan and Paul Copan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary of Chapter 17: “Is It Rational to Believe God Commanded the Killing of Innocent?”

Did God Really Command Genocide? 

It’s been argued that it’s rational to believe the Crucial Moral Principle is not absolute and this claim is rationally believable when the grounds for thinking God issued such a command are stronger than the ground for thinking killing innocent is always wrong. But does the biblical theist have adequate grounds for thinking that God on these unique occasions issued such an exemption? Wesley Morriston has recently argued that the biblical theist can’t have adequate grounds for thinking this. His claim is twofold. First, the relevant biblical texts explicitly state what God’s reasons are for issuing the commands. Second, we have good grounds for thinking these reasons are inadequate ones for commanding the killing of innocent people. The four relevant texts to consider are Deut. 20:16; Deut. 7:2; Numbers 31:15; and 1 Samuel 15:3.

Deuteronomy 20:16: “Save Alive Nothing that Breathes”

Morriston cites Swinburne’s defense of the destruction of various peoples. Swinburne likens the spiritual condition of the relevant peoples as an infectious lethal disease in need of eradication. Morriston replies that such reasons for their destruction are inadequate. He says the obvious worry is that this line of argument may have wider application than Swinburne intends it to have. Should a law be passed to silence or kill evangelical atheists?

F&C argue there are three problems with Morriston’s argument. First, contrary to what Morriston asserts, Deut. 20:16-18 does not explicitly state that God’s reason for issuing the command was to prevent the Israelites from being taught to follow the abhorrent practices of the Canaanite nations. It gives the Israelites a reason to obey a command God has already laid down. The reasons for issuing a command and the reasons why people should obey the commands are not always the same. As Richard Brandt argues, what justifies someone in promoting the acceptance of a code or set of rules is not necessarily the same as the motivation or reason people have for following those rules.

A second problem with Morriston’s argument is this: all his argument shows, if successful, is that Swinburne has failed to defend these reasons. The failure of one person to defend a position is a far cry from the claim that the position itself is problematic.

Third, Morriston’s critique of Swinburne is unpersuasive because it misses some important disanalogies found in Swinburne’s defense. Swinburne doesn’t just mention “spiritual infection”; he refers to a specific type of infection that includes child sacrifice. It was a defensive measure necessary to preserve the identity of the people of Israel and was limited to the nations the Lord gave them as an inheritance. Such features call into question Morriston’s analogies. If Dawkins was trespassing on church property, refusing to leave; leading people not just to apostasy but to human sacrifice of infants; and threatening the entire community of God’ s people, in principle frustrating God’s mission to bring salvation to the world, then perhaps he should be silenced or isolated from the rest of the population!

Deuteronomy 7:2: “Destroy Them Totally”

In this passage God is reportedly commanding the Israelites to totally destroy the seven Canaanite nations. Morriston makes two claims. First, he asserts that this passage teaches that God’s reasons were to prevent the Israelites from marrying Canaanites and worshiping other gods. Second, he offers an argument that this reason is inadequate. F&C think both moves are questionable.

First, the text doesn’t portray God as commanding genocide. Nor does the command commit Israel to kill people with the intention of physically destroying the whole or a substantial part of an ethnic or religious group. The text states that the Israelites must totally destroy the Canaanites after God had driven out these Canaanite nations. Only those who stayed behind to fight would be subsequently defeated. And again, the text doesn’t cite the prospect of intermarriage as the reason God issued the command. Contrary to what Morriston says, in this passage God doesn’t state explicitly what his reasons are at all.

Morriston’s second assertion is also problematic. He argues that intermarriage and apostasy does not constitute a sufficient reason for God to command such violence. He provides two grounds for rejecting this purported reason for God’s command: (1) God had other (presumably less morally reprehensible) means of achieving this goal, and (2) this method failed to achieve the goal in question anyway.

Morriston’s first point proves too much by making this assumption: A loving and just God would not command people to suppress some evil he desires to be suppressed if God has a more efficient means of suppressing that evil himself. But this is clearly false. If it were true, then we would have to give up almost everything we take for granted about morality. Consider, for example, the existence of courts which suppress crimes such as theft and rape. Clearly God could suppress such crimes far more efficiently without relying on human beings. Does it follow that a loving and just God would never permit human beings to set up courts that punish crime? Of course not.

Similar problems afflict the second justification for Morriston’s argument—that God’s chosen method did not get the job done. The biblical record shows that the Israelites did not follow God’s command and that the Canaanite nations and religion were not destroyed. The problem is that this is again true of many actions which a loving and just God would plausibly prohibit. God would command people not to murder, steal, and cause harm, but people continue to do so. Does this mean God would not issue commands to refrain from such actions?

Number 31:15: “Have You Allowed All the Women to Live?”

The third example Morriston cites to make his point is the defeat of Midian as recorded in Numbers 31. The Israelites fought against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and killed every man (v. 7). After the battle, however, Moses commanded Israel to kill all the boys and every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. Morriston says Yahweh was angered by the fact that some young Israelite men had worshiped Baal alongside their new Midianite brides, writing, “Not only must the Israelites be punished, but the Midianites must be punished for causing the Israelites to be punished.” God’s stated reasons, according to Morriston’s thinking, are inadequate.

But Morriston appears to have misread the text. First, consider his claim that the text explicitly states that God’s reason for commanding the killing of the Midianite women and boys was “spiritual infection” because “some young Israelite men had worshiped Baal alongside their new Midianite brides.” There are several problems with this.

First is the fact that, in the text Morriston cites (Num. 31:17-18), God himself does not explicitly command Israel to kill all the Midianite women and boys. God’s command to Moses regarding the Midianites is actually recorded in Numbers 25:17-18 and 31:1-2. God explicitly commands Israel to respond to the Midianites’ spiritual subterfuge by fighting against the Midianites and defeating them. The reasons why Israel is to obey isn’t the spiritual infection of women as Morriston says, but rather the fact that Midian has been hostile toward and deceived Israel.

The Numbers 31 text does not explicitly attribute the command to kill the women and boys to God, but to Moses. Morriston acknowledges this, but suggests three reasons why this observation doesn’t come to much. (1) Moses is regularly characterized as being very close to Yahweh, faithfully obeying his instructions most of the time; (2) Yahweh expresses no disapproval of anything Moses does in this story; and (3) Yahweh himself is the principal instigator of the attack on Midian.

These responses, however, are inadequate. Consider the last point first. The fact that someone is the “principal instigator” of an attack doesn’t entail that he approves of every single action that takes place within the battle in question. Similarly with 2: the lack of explicit disapproval in the text does not entail approval. Morriston’s argument is an appeal to ignorance; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is not uncommon in biblical narratives for authors to describe sinful behavior without expressing explicit disapproval. In most cases, no doubt, the author expects the reader to know certain actions are right and wrong.

Finally, regarding 1, the fact that someone is portrayed in the text as close to God or faithful to him does not mean that every action he is recorded as doing is commanded or endorsed by God. Consider David, or Abraham.

A second instance of Morriston misreading the text is that not only does he attribute Moses’s reasons to God; he also misstates the reasons Moses does give in the context. The real issue is that the Midianite women had been following the devious advice of the pagan seer, Balaam, who had been explicitly commanded by God not to curse Israel. Balaam had led the Israelites into acting treacherously at Baal-Peor. This is the clearly stated issue (31:16). What occurs, when the background is taken into account, is not that some Israelites marry Midianite women, but rather these women use sex to seduce Israel into violating the terms of their covenant with God—an event that threatened Israel’s very national identity, calling, and destiny. This act was in fact deliberate.

So Morriston’s comments are far off the mark when he insists that the Midianites could not have been trying to harm the Israelites by inviting them to participate in the worship of a god in whom they obviously believed. The whole point of the exercise was to get God to curse Israel so that a military attack could be launched by Moab and Midian. The picture isn’t one of innocent Midianite brides, but acts tantamount to treason and treacherous double agents carrying on wicked subterfuge.

Note that the problem wasn’t God’s opposition to Israelites marrying Midianites per se. Indeed, Moses married Zipporah, a Midianite, and he received wise counsel from his father-in-law, Jethro, a Midianite priest.

1 Samuel 15:3: “Do Not Spare Them”

Morriston’s final example is the account of Saul’s destruction of the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15, which he juxtaposes with Deut. 25:17-19. He rejects interpretations of the passage proposed by Stump, who suggests that God made a reckoning of what the Amalekites had done hundreds of years previously. Morriston dismisses this as unsupported speculation, which fails to do justice to the text. He writes that the implied reason for waiting a while to deal with the Amalekites has nothing to do with future Amalekite transgressions, but with the urgent need to get the Israelites safely settled in Canaan.

But Morriston’s own claim that the reason for waiting a while to deal with the Amalekites has nothing to do with future Amalekite transgressions is refuted by the text. 1 Sam. 15:18 puts the emphasis on the present wickedness of the current Amalekites. Likewise with Agag’s personal involvement in aggressive wars. In chapter 14 we see evidence of Amalek’s present aggression against Israel, and a reason for Saul’s military response.

So F&C suggest the best way to understand this passage is not just to read it alongside Deut. 25:17-19, but also alongside a passage like Jeremiah 18:7-10, which makes clear that announcements of future judgment against a nation are conditional, and can change if the nation repents. The book of Jonah makes a similar point. If prophetic pronouncements of doom are conditional, then this nicely explains what we see in 1 Samuel 15. Morriston similarly misreads 2 Kings 23:25-27.

Final Thoughts on Divine Judgment

How do we square God’s judgment with God’s love? God’s judgments are done with a heavy heart. God states emphatically that he does not take pleasure in punishing the wicked. Divine judgment can’t be characterized as indifference. Judgment is not opposed to God’s love and compassion, but rather springs from the character of a loving, caring God. F&C quote Yale Theologian Miroslav Volf, who experienced the horrors of war in the former Yugoslavia, who comments on the relationship between the two, concluding this: “Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.”

Matt Flannagan and Paul Copan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary Chapter 16: “Can One Rationally Believe God Commands a Violation of Innocent Human Beings?”

Did God Really Command Genocide?  

In our last chapter we read that it is possible for God to command the killing of innocent human beings on those rare occasions where some greater good might prevail. The prohibition against taking innocent life is understood as one that normally holds, but is not one that is an absolute against all circumstances. In this chapter, F&C examine some objections that might arise to this reasoning.

They first begin to examine an objection that comes from the mind of one of the greatest German philosophers of modern times, Immanuel Kant. Kant’s objection arises from his consideration of the biblical account of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. F&C cite Kant, “That I ought not kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God – of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even if this voice rings down to me from (visible) heaven” (195). Kant is pulling a Hume-like “weighing of the epistemic evidence” move in his argument. His point is not so much that God could not issue such a command, but that one could not have apodictic certainty that such a command came from God. It would always be possible that one’s understanding or interpretation of the command could be in error. However, one can have such certainty when it comes to the moral law concerning the killing of the innocent. This we know for certain is wrong. Hence it is a weighing of epistemic certainty or knowability that is at issue. According to Kant (ala Hume) one should always go with that which has more epistemic certainty, which in this case, will be with the moral law rather than the divine command.

F&C point to Phillip Quinn’s two pronged response to Kant’s objection. Quinn’s first prong is to question Kant’s “optimistic view” of our ability to achieve apodictic certainty concerning our moral judgments. Quinn acknowledges that this might be the case with certain moral claims, such as torturing little children for fun, but it seems overly optimistic when it comes to moral claims across the board or in general. Philosophers have become more comfortable with thinking of moral duties as having prima facie standing as opposed to thinking of them as absolutes. The very fact that we serious debates about moral issues such as capital punishment, euthanasia, abortion, participation in war, torture, and many other issues of which many good and intelligent scholars hold differing views should give one pause about taking such an optimistic attitude. Quinn’s other prong is to question Kant’s doubt that one can never be rationally certain of knowing a command came from God. He sees no reason one could not, in principle, be as certain or more certain that God is speaking than they are that the moral claim holds in a particular situation. This is especially the case if one takes the first prong seriously. There is no reason to assume that moral claims always have a higher epistemic status than theological claims. In answering the objection, “But this is killing the innocent, certainly we are certain about this moral duty,” F&C state, “We agree that in normal circumstances it is wrong to kill innocent people . . . However the claim that it is never permissible under any circumstance is extremely controversial.” (197)

F&C go on to examine the objection by Randall Rauser that a literal reading of the command by Yahweh to kill babies is “really stronger” than the moral duty not to kill the innocent. They explore an answer to four specific objections Rauser raises. Rauser’s first objection is the assertion that “every rational properly functioning person cannot help but know that it is always wrong to bludgeon babies” (197). In support of this claim Rauser offers several examples of moral atrocities of which, he claims, any “intellectually honest human being will condemn these events without question” (197). Rauser’s argument is that since we do not need any qualifications or further information to condemn such actions, such actions are always wrong without exception. However, this simply does not follow. While a particular example of wrongdoing can be condemned “without qualification,” that does not imply that another example of the same actions might have a qualification for which the action can be morally acceptable. The point of the arguments being presented by F&C is that an action that might normally or regularly be condemned can be morally justifiable in a rare case. They provide an example in which terrorists are going to crash a hijacked plane into a building in which thousand may be killed and the option of shooting the plane down to stop the terrorists from accomplishing their goal. Certainly innocent people will die, but many “intellectually honest” persons will hold such a shooting as morally justifiable in such a case.

Rauser’s second argument stems from the idea that commanding others to perform moral atrocities such as killing the innocent often has detrimental effects on those commanded to perform such actions. He cites examples of those in the military who experience PTSD from traumatic experiences as support that commanding someone to do such actions is a moral atrocity itself. F&C point out that this reasoning backfires on Rauser himself, who advocates active involvement in just war where certainly the possibility of PTSD is highly possible. In fact any activity in which one could be seriously psychologically affected would have to be placed under Rauser’s condemnation and could not be commanded including many necessary activities of firefighters and police officers.

Rauser’s third argument is the idea that acceptance of a literal interpretation of these conquest passages leads to “the ubiquitous human tendency to rationalize illegitimate violations of the principle of universality” (201). The “principle of universality” is the basic idea that we should apply to ourselves the same standards we do to others. Rauser offers two criteria for distinguishing a legitimate exception to this principle from an illegitimate one, and then claims that the conquest narratives fail to meet the criteria. F&C reply first by showing that the view they are promoting does not violate the principle as they are not claiming the exception they offer (that God commands it) does not just apply to us but to anyone whom God commands. They then suggest problems with Rauser’s criteria. The first, “criterion of extraordinary exceptions,” simply states that the more radical the exception the stronger the rationale is needed. However, F&C point out that is the very point of the idea of prima facie prohibitions: one needs a rationale for violating the prohibition. However, the context determines the level of rationale. One cannot apply an abstract principle and then form a judgment. Rauser’s second “criterion of common origin” is also problematic. The criterion states that one should be suspicious of a rationalization if it “conforms to a well-established pattern of rationalization.” However, F&C point out that one cannot decide a rationalization is illegitimate purely because it follows a particular pattern because examples can be provided of acceptable rationalizations that follow such patterns and they proceed to provide one.

Rauser’s final argument is a more pragmatic one based on practical consequences. Rauser contends that a literal interpretation of the conquest narratives has “contributed to a long history of moral atrocities” (204). Rauser appeals to both John Howard Yoder’s claim that from the time of Augustine Christians have appealed to the conquest narratives to justify genocide and increase the empire as well as Jeremy Cort’s claim that there is a link between the violence of Canaan and the Crusades. F&C will deal more fully with this discussion in later chapters, but at this juncture they simply show that, first, these charges are dubious at best. Augustine is the father of the just war doctrine and advocated against the ancients like Aristotle and Cicero in conquering weaker and inferior peoples. Mainstream Christianity followed Augustine in this doctrine, and F&C cite Aquinas and Francisco Vitoria as example of mainstream thinking concerning the treatment of the innocent: “Let my first proposition be: The deliberate slaughter of the innocent is never lawful in itself” (205). They also briefly address the common assumption concerning the crusades and point out that in a study of medieval texts, scholar Douglas Earl shows that very little appeal is made to the conquest narratives to justify the crusades, but instead appeals to the teaching of Jesus were much more prominent in justifying the crusades. Finally F&C explore the underlying assumption behind Rauser’s argument: “If a belief as contributed to a long line of historical atrocities, then we should reject that belief” (206). However, they point out that many atrocities have occurred in the name of good things, such as the splitting of the atom or the reign of terror, but that does not mean we should reject the good because people have used it for bad.

F&C conclude by showing that the objections raised against the idea that God could on rare occasions abrogate a moral duty that normally one should keep fail and that the principle holds.

Image: "Abraham's-sacrifice-from-Raduil" by Edal Anton Lefterov - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abraham%27s-sacrifice-from-Raduil.jpg#/media/File:Abraham%27s-sacrifice-from-Raduil.jpg

Matt Flannagan and Paul Copan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary of Chapter 15: “Can One Coherently Claim that God Commanded the Killing of Innocents?”

Did God Really Command Genocide?  

Accepting DCT doesn’t mean accepting that God commanded the killing of Canaanite noncombatants. The further claim is needed that in very unusual circumstances in the past, God commanded people to kill the innocent for the sake of some greater good. This chapter responds to the charge that affirming such a proposition is incoherent. (The next couple chapters after this one will respond to the claim that even if it is coherent, one can’t rationally claim God has ever issued such a command.)

Can One Coherently Claim that God Commanded the Killing of Innocents?

Several writers have suggested the claim that a loving and just God could command the killing of the innocent is simply incoherent. Cowles, Seibert, and Bradley have all given variants of this claim. They all seem to consider such a command so utterly beyond the moral pale that we can’t coherently claim a perfectly good God could issue it, on pain of our language being implicated in rabid equivocation.

Calling Right Wrong and Wrong Right? Robert Adams’s Version of the Coherence Objection

More careful and plausible versions of this argument have been developed by Robert Adams. The DCT’ist, he writes, must appeal to the fact that God is essentially good. This means there are limits to the commands one can coherently attribute to God. Adams argues it follows that God can’t coherently be called good if what he commands is contrary to “our existing moral beliefs.” But, as one like Bradley argues, the Crucial Moral Principle—that it’s wrong to kill innocent human beings—is one of those beliefs. So we can’t coherently attribute this command to a loving and just God.

A Reply to the Coherence Objection

Adams’s argument is too quick. God can’t issue a set of commands too much at variance with the ethical outlook we bring to our theological thinking, but the phrase “too much” suggests that one can accept a set of commands somewhat at odds with the outlook we bring to our ethical thinking. Adams in fact elsewhere makes the same point, saying we can’t identify moral obligations with God’s commands if what God commands is contrary to “an important central group” of what we consider to be right and wrong. He grants that it would be “unreasonable” to expect God’s commands to “agree perfectly with pre-theoretical opinion.” An ethical theory may give guidance in revising one’s particular ethical judgments, but there is a limit to how far those opinions may be revised without changing the subject.

Adams makes two points that suggest this qualification is necessary. First, while we do have some grasp of what is good and some idea of what is right and wrong, it is clear that our moral judgments can be fallible. Second, our moral concepts are subject to revision. Indeed, Adams accepts the possibility of a conversion in which one’s whole ethical outlook is revolutionized, and reorganized around a new center, though not to a wholesale replace of good with evil.

Such points limit Adams’s conclusion. It’s not that our existing moral beliefs are sacrosanct, but rather that certain types of our existing beliefs serve as a constraint on our beliefs about what God commands. What he has in mind are those ethical beliefs that are so central to our concept of goodness that rejecting them would create a moral revolution of sorts in which good and evil switch places.

James Rissler gives two examples of cases where a purported divine command violates a nonnegotiable belief. The first is where God issues a command to reverse one’s conception of right and wrong or issues a set of commands that negates a large number of moral imperatives that one currently accepts. Second, he suggests that a command might contradict a moral belief sufficiently integral to one’s conception of morality that abandoning that belief would force such a radical revision as to destroy one’s concept of goodness altogether.

The key question, then, is not whether the Crucial Moral Principle is one of our existing moral beliefs, but whether it’s nonnegotiable. Can it be overridden in rare circumstances of supreme emergency? Such as the alternative is, say, tolerating significantly greater evils? To think so is not obviously incoherent. So, taken as a universal, the Crucial Moral Principle about the wrongness of killing innocent people is not a nonnegotiable principle.

Once this is realized, it’s evident that the arguments of Cowles, Seibert, and Bradley fail. The claim that God on rare or highly unusual occasions allows exceptions to a general rule against killing for the sake of some greater good does not violate a nonnegotiable moral belief. Hence one can coherently attribute it to God.

Rauser offers an argument in favor of an absolute prohibition against killing the innocent, which could be used to contest what F&C have argued. Rauser assumes that the command to kill the Canaanites is a command to physically slaughter an entire society, but F&C already argued against this assumption.

But this brings us to Coady’s argument against alleged exceptions to an absolute prohibition on killing noncombatants. Coady notes that the criteria for extreme emergency is “conceptually opaque” and requires calculations that are difficult to accurately weigh in situations where people are prone to rationalize their behavior. For this reason, adopting an absolute rule against killing the innocent will have better results morally than allowing an exception. General acceptance and conformity with an absolute rule will bring about more good than the acceptance of a rule allowing supreme emergency situations.

Nathanson and Donagan make similar criticisms. A categorical prohibition will produce better overall results. What’s more, humans have the pervasive tendency to rationalize and be tempted to apply exceptions when it isn’t legitimate. Escape clauses to traditional morality will cloud moral judgment in the heat or tension of the moment.

F&C have considerable sympathy with this argument. But they make two replies. First, they write, the permissibility of killing noncombatants in some rare cases is not incoherent at any rate. Second, whereas humans are limited in knowledge and moral judgment, in the matter under discussion it isn’t a human being making calculations that allows for the exceptions, but God, who isn’t prone to bias or temptation and is omniscient, making the exception. So it seems perfectly coherent to attribute an occasional command to a good and just God who has some greater good or purpose in mind and is not erroneous in his judgment.

Find the other chapter summaries here.

Image: "The canonised Joshua and Samuel. Lithograph by J.G. Schreine Wellcome V0034403" by http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/9a/06/910917420c0c7eb93974d7fd24f2.jpgGallery: http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/V0034403.html. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_canonised_Joshua_and_Samuel._Lithograph_by_J.G._Schreine_Wellcome_V0034403.jpg#/media/File:The_canonised_Joshua_and_Samuel._Lithograph_by_J.G._Schreine_Wellcome_V0034403.jpg

Flannagan and Copan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary Chapter 14: “Other Euthyphro-Related Objections”

Did God Really Command Genocide? 

In the previous chapter F&C examined objections to divine command theory that flow out of Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma. In that chapter they claimed that most objections can be divided into two basic categories: arbitrariness objections and emptiness objections. The last chapter was concerned with the most common arbitrariness objections. In this chapter they examine a few more arbitrariness objections before moving on to the emptiness objections.

Some arbitrariness objections concern God’s omnipotence. Wes Morriston argues that God’s goodness and his omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If he is omnipotent he can do anything including commanding one to do unnecessary and capricious evil such as rape. However, because he is all good, he cannot make such a command and therefore these two foundational characteristic for theists are mutually incompatible and one must be forsaken for the sake of the other (or both must go). F&C offer three responses to this objection, all of which either clarify or qualify the meaning of omnipotence. Most theists (and even some atheists) respond that this objection misunderstands the traditional understanding of omnipotence. Omnipotence does not mean God can do absolutely anything, but only that God can do that which is logically possible. Hence one does not need to deny omnipotence, for one can respond either that there is no possible situation in which God chooses to issue an evil command or that it is not logically possible for an all good being to make such a command. Another alternative is simply to qualify what is meant by omnipotence by making it something weaker, such as the claim that “God has as much power as is compatible with essential goodness.”(173) The point is that one can escape Morriston’s objection by reconceptualizing his idea of omnipotence.

A second group of objections uses counterfactuals as a way of showing the divine command theory is problematic. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong acknowledges the theists’ point that “If God is good, he would not command us to rape,” but then goes on to claim, “Moreover, even if God in fact never would or could command us to rape, the divine command theory still implies the counterfactual that, if God did command us to rape, then we would have a moral obligation to rape. That is absurd.” (174, emphasis theirs) He offers no reason for why it is absurd and, in fact, F&C argue that its absurdity is not that obvious, “According to the standard view of modal logic, a conditional statement with a logically impossible antecedent . . . is true. So Sinnott-Armstrong’s suggestion that the consequent is obviously false is far from obvious.” However, Sinnott-Armstrong replies to this objection by simply claiming that the proposition ‘If God commanded us to rape, then we would have a moral obligation to rape’ “seems plausible to most people regardless of technical details about counterfactuals.” (174) The main problem F&C raise if one takes that tactic is that logical consistency demands one applies the same counterfactual to any ethical theory, rendering them all arbitrary and ineffective. So, for example, regarding utilitarianism, “Even if rape never would or could maximize utility or usefulness for society, utilitarianism still implies the counterfactual if rape were to maximize utility, then it would be obligatory.” (174-175)

Another critic, Eric Wielenberg, suggests that “God does have the power to make any logically consistent claim but that it is only His character that prevents him from exercising this power.” (175) He asks us to imagine a situation in which God does not have that character, but is instead cruel and capricious. According to Wielenberg, if this counterfactual were the case, DCT would entail that gratuitous assault would be morally obligatory. However, the main problem is the terms as we have defined them. As the maximally greatest being, one worthy of worship, God would not be cruel and capricious. In order for Wielenberg’s argument to be successful, he must propose a world that is not possible, where a maximally great being is one full of hatred and cruelty.

Sam Harris attempts to critique DCT by saying that “we are being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude.” (177) He makes three claims: First, DCT entails the following conditional: If God commands you to blow up a bus full of children, then you are required to do so. Second, the truth of this conditional requires a psychopathic perspective. Third, accepting the conditional easily rationalizes the slaughter of children. F&C answer Harris by noting that, while the first claim is true, it is (1) a conditional claim that says nothing about what God actually commands, and (2) it is only morally obligated if God commands it. However, as has been stated several times, the conception of God being argued for is a morally perfect being who would not and cannot command such a thing. The hypothetical conditions are logically impossible. As far as the second claim, it only requires a psychopathic perspective if one is talking about blowing up buses per se, but it does not if the hypothetical conditions hold, i.e. that it is not unloving, unjust, and irrational. Hence F&C hold that Harris’s second claim is incoherent. As far as the third claim, F&C state, “A divine command theory insists that an action is obligatory only if God actually commands that action. It does not contend that an action is obligatory if someone claims or believes that God commands it.” (179) F&C point out that we can reject that God has made some such command for the same reasons that Harris does, because a good and just God would not do so.

Having successfully explained the arbitrariness objections, F&C spend the remainder of this chapter briefly examining two emptiness objections. The first of these is suggested by Peter Van Inwagen. Van Inwagen claims that God does not have any moral obligations, so nothing he does can be considered right or wrong. This of course would be true if one was to conceive of God’s moral perfection in terms of obligations and duties. However, F&C point out that many theologians and philosophers do not think of God’s goodness so much in terms of duties as character traits such as truthful, benevolent, loving, and gracious. It is certainly possible to exhibit such traits without reference to any particular duties.

The other emptiness objection comes again from Sam Harris, who claims that, if God is not bound by moral duties then he does not have to be good. (183) F&C respond by clarifying what is meant by “God does not have to be good.” If it means, “he is not under an obligation to be good” then of course the implication holds. However, if Harris is implying that “God does not have to be good” implies he can be evil, then the implication does not hold, for the term ‘God’ means a maximally great being, which includes moral perfection. Hence, by this conception, it is impossible for God not to be good.

Matt Flannagan and Paul Copan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary of Chapter 13: “Arbitrary Divine Commands? The Euthyphro Dilemma.”

Did God Really Command Genocide?  

The reason critics typically see a divine command theory as coming to ruin is due to a more substantive family of objections clustered around an argument known as the Euthyphro dilemma, which comes from an early Socratic dialogue. The dilemma arises from this central question from that dialogue: “Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?” Adapted to a monotheistic context, the dilemma can be recast like this: “Are actions wrong because God prohibits them, or does God prohibit them because they are wrong?” Either way we go, James Rachels argues, we seem to run into a problem. Either God’s commands are arbitrary and the goodness of God is rendered meaningless, or we admit there is a standard of right and wrong independent of God’s will.

Rachels offers two fairly standard criticisms of divine command theory. The first is that a divine command theory (DCT) makes God’s commands arbitrary. This is the arbitrariness objection. The second is that DCT renders empty or meaningless the doctrine that God is good. To say “God is good” is to say nothing more than that God is what God commands. F&C call this the emptiness objection.

The Arbitrariness Objection

F&C distinguish two versions of this objection. One is that a divine command theory implies that God’s commands are arbitrary—that God can have no reasons of any sort for commanding as he does and that his decisions are purely whimsical and capricious. The other version is that a divine command theory implies that the content of morality is itself arbitrary. Both will be discussed, along with the “prior obligations objection.”

“Arbitrary Because God Has No Reasons” Objection

Shafer-Landau (henceforth ‘S-L’) argues that God can have no reasons for issuing the commands he does on DCT. Either God has reasons for his commands, or he doesn’t. If he does, those reasons, and not God’s having commanded various actions, make those actions right. If he doesn’t, God’s choice is arbitrary.

This argument is flawed because he gets slippery with his terminology. He says that if God has excellent reasons for his commands, then those reasons—and not the command—make the commanded action seem right. But in this context, the word “make” can be used in two very different senses—the constitutive explanation and the motivational explanation.

Constitutive explanation: This kind of explanation explains or lays out the factors that make up or constitute a thing. What makes a cup of clear liquid a cup of water is the fact that the liquid is H2O.

Motivational explanation: This kind of explanation attempts to tell us why an agent acted the way he did by giving us the reasons or motivations the agent acted on. A parent’s love for his child makes him persevere over the long haul of parenting. This is a different explanation from laying out factors that constitute a thing or make it up.

If S-L is using the word “makes” to refer to a motivational explanation, then his affirmation is quite correct. If God has reasons for commanding as he does, then those reasons do motivate God’s decision to command what he says. But when DCT claims that God’s commands make an action wrong, it’s not claiming that among God’s reasons for commanding something is that he has commanded it!

DCT offers a constitutive explanation of moral obligation. So what happens when S-L uses the word “makes” to refer to a constitutive explanation, not a motivational one? The adjustment looks like this: If God’s commands are based on reasons, then it is those reasons and not God’s commands that are identical with moral rightness. But this seems clearly false. If a judge has excellent reasons for issuing a verdict in a case, S-L’s reasoning would entail that those reasons are the verdict. Or if a university has good reasons for conferring a degree on a doctoral candidate, then those reasons are identical to the conferral of a degree. Such inferences are obviously flawed.

Another argument S-L gives to show that DCT makes morality arbitrary is this: Absent divine disapproval, nothing is immoral. This, though, is mistaken. God could prohibit rape for reasons other than the fact that rape is morally wrong, and the prohibition could still be backed by the right kind of nonarbitrary reasons. Among those nonarbitrary characteristics: an action could cause severe harm, violate someone’s autonomy, show contempt for a person, etc.

Recall that DCT is a theory of moral obligation, not moral goodness. Just as there is a distinction between the good and the right, there’s a distinction between badness and wrongness. The badness of an action could be part of the motivating reasons for prohibiting it.

Perhaps the perceived problem here is that the existence of such goodness-enhancing reasons makes a divine command theory appear explanatorily unnecessary. This perception is mistaken for at least two reasons. First, it relies on fallacious reasoning. Even if certain characteristics of an action provide God with a sufficient reason for prohibiting that action, it doesn’t follow that (apart from God’s issuing a command) we have sufficient reason to refrain from it. God doesn’t have our epistemic limitations. Second, even if one grants this kind of reasoning, it’s not clearly a problem for DCT. We may have sufficient reasons to perform some action, but these still may not obligate us to carry out that action apart from God’s command. Moral obligations are not identical with what one has good reasons to do. Obligations involve a certain type of reason to act: one that involves a demand with which we must comply, one by which others can rationally blame us and reproach us for failing to do, and the like.

Excursus: God’s Commands and Prior Reasons

Mackie and Cudworth raised a prior reasons objection to DCT: God can only make something obligatory by commanding it if there’s first a general obligation for us to obey him. God’s commands thus can’t be the source of moral obligations. Despite its initial appeal, this argument fails for at least two reasons.

First, the argument generalizes. It applies to every account of moral obligations within any given ethical theory, secular or theological. Take social contract theory, which says moral obligations are those requirements that rational, impartial persons in a society would agree to. But one could argue that we are morally obligated to such a contract only if there is already an obligation to follow such hypothetical agreements. So the hypothetical agreement can’t itself be the source of moral obligation. The same can be said about every major account of moral obligations defended today.

What has gone wrong with the argument? It plays on an ambiguity between two claims—what is called “the fallacy of equivocation.” Note the ambiguity between the following two claims:

1. If God commands X, then we have an obligation to do X, and
2. There is an obligation to do what God commands.

Only the second of these claims affirms the actual existence of an obligation to obey God. The first claim does not. Rather 1 makes a conditional claim: it claims that if God commands a specific action, then we have an obligation to do that action. 1’s truth is compatible with there being no obligations at all.

Mackie’s central claim is false that DCT requires 2. All DCT needs is 1. 1 is based on God’s particular status as a moral lawgiver. God jointly possesses various characteristics or traits such that his act of commanding is sufficient to constitute moral obligations. This is what Adams was getting at in discussing issues like creation, benefaction, and covenant as contributing to God’s will being a constitutive rather than a derivative moral standard.

“Divine Command Theory Makes the Content of Morality Arbitrary” Objection

This objection says that if DCT is true, then God could have given us different commands just as easily. God could have commanded atrocious acts which would have then become obligatory. This sort of objection can be put in argument form:

1. If DCT is true, then if God commanded us to rape, we would be required to rape.
2. God could command us to rape.
3. It is absurd that we could be required to rape.
4. So, DCT is absurd.

The key claim is 2—that God could command us to rape, which is seriously questionable. DCT doesn’t maintain that moral obligations are identified with the commands of just anyone. God is understood as a personal being who is all-good, all-loving, and the like. Claim 2 holds only if it possible for the Greatest Conceivable Being, who is necessarily good, to command rape. What’s more, scripture itself makes clear how misguided such criticisms are. Because of his intrinsically good nature, God just could not command certain things (Jer. 19:5). God also can’t break promises (Ps. 110:4; Heb. 7:21) or lie (Rom 3:4; Titus 1:2; Heb. 6:18). Nor would God command us to hate him rather than love him or torture babies for fun.

This response to the arbitrariness objection is the essential goodness response—that an essentially good God could not command what is intrinsically evil. Are there difficult divine commands in scripture? Yes, but not impossible or intrinsically evil ones.

Flannagan and Copan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary Chapter 12: “The Divine Command Theory of Obligation: What It Is – and Is Not”

Did God Really Command Genocide?  

In the last chapter F&C introduce the idea of the divine command theory (hereafter, DCT). There are a number of versions of the DCT that have come down to us throughout the history of western thought. The specific version F&C wish to explore and defend is expressed by William Lane Craig. This is a version of the theory that has come to be known as a “modified divine command theory” most closely associated with Robert Adams. Craig states it as “the thesis that our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a loving and just God.” (F&C, 146)

Throughout much of the last century the DCT was generally disregarded as an ethical theory. Even currently many textbooks on ethics will relegate the DCT to the status of an archaic theory that is inadequate to function as a satisfactory theory due to a number of fatal problems often associated with voluntarism and the Euthyphro dilemma (these will be discussed in further chapters). However F&C point out that in recent years the DCT has been undergoing a revival and a number of robust defenses of modified and nuanced versions have been authored by several significant philosophers. Today one cannot easily dismiss the theory as once one was thought able to.

To understand Craig’s formulation of the DCT, one must begin with an understanding of his use of the term “God.” For Craig, God is the title we give to a being who is maximally great or, in Anselmian terms, “the greatest conceivable being.” Only such a being is worthy of worship, and this is part of the very meaning of the term God. Just as we identify water with H2O, we identify God with a being who is morally perfect as that is part of what it means to be a maximally great being. This is why we cannot have a God who is evil, because then the being would not be God in much the same way that a married male cannot be a bachelor. As the meaning of the term “bachelor” includes an unmarried male, so the meaning of God includes “morally perfect.” It is impossible for God not to be essentially good. As F&C affirm, “This point is an important one. We will argue that some important celebrated objections to Craig’s divine command theory fail precisely because they do not note this point.” (150, emphasis theirs).

Craig also clarifies two very important aspects of his version of the DCT. The first has to do with the distinction between “right” and “good.” This traditional distinction has been introduced by others but it is very important for Craig’s argument. The term “right” specifically concerns our moral obligations or duties. The term “good” is a broader term that speaks of values that we hold not just in morality but in aesthetics, rationality, etc. For example, while it would be good for one to use one’s skills and become a surgeon, one does not necessarily have a moral obligation to do so. There are many actions that are good, but which one does not have an obligation to perform. This is an important distinction as many critics confuse the right and the good (as we will see later, this is the heart of the problem presented in the Euthyphro dilemma).

The second aspect that Craig wants to clarify is a distinction between the claim that moral obligations are identical with God’s commands and two other claims: “(1) the claim that the word ‘wrong’ means ‘prohibited by God’ and (2) the claim that one cannot know or recognize one’s moral obligations.” (151) Craig’s point is that we can know the meaning of a term and know our moral obligations without necessarily consciously associating the moral obligation entailed with God. So, some critics of DCT might assert, “Well I know that rape is wrong without referencing God, or believing rape is prohibited by God. I just know that it is wrong.” Craig’s point is that by holding a DCT which claims that “our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a loving and just God” he is not affirming that one must necessarily be aware of or agree to such a theory for it still to be true. Using the example of “light” he shows that, while “light” can properly mean “a certain visible range of electronic spectrum” one does not have to be aware of or even agree with this meaning to correctly use the term. I can recognize what “light” means and use it without knowing its basis, origin, or nature. This goes to the heart of many objections raised by non-theists who claim “I don’t need God to be moral.” Nobody denies that, but that has nothing to do with accounting for the origin, basis, or nature of morality. One can employ a concept without knowing anything about it just like one can drive my car without knowing where it came from or the nature of how it works. Craig’s point, then, is that one can affirm DCT as the foundation for our moral obligations even though those who employ such moral obligations may not affirm that foundation.

F&C raise two kinds of mistakes critics often make, one semantical and the other epistemic. The semantic mistake simply confuses the terms “right” and “good.” Some critics think the DCT is about “goodness.” Some versions may, but not the modified version Craig is supporting. It refers instead to “rightness,” specifically moral obligation. The epistemic criticism simply claims that, since one can know what our moral obligations are apart from any divine revelation of God’s commands, a DCT which affirms “our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a loving and just God” is false. This objection fails to make a distinction between epistemology (how we come to know our moral duties) and ontology (the foundation or grounding for those duties). One may come to believe one has certain moral obligations from all sorts of possible sources. However, the question is not what do you know, but what is true. If you really have such obligations, what are those obligations grounded in? The claim of DCT is that they are grounded in the commands of a loving and just God. Again, one does not have to be aware of or agree with that for it to be true.

Finally, some have revised the criticisms away from epistemology to a discussion of the nature of commands themselves. Some, like Wes Morriston, raise the issue of a command as a “speech act” that must be heard from someone in authority. However, the “reasonable non-believer” who does not believe in God cannot “hear” God issue such a command as there is no such being to do so. “God cannot command people to do something unless they recognize that they have heard the command and that it is God doing the commanding.” F&C find such a scenario implausible. One often heres commands without knowing who authored them. We are often under legal obligations to follow certain commands without knowing who authored such commands, the federal or state government. They summarize their response, “To be ‘subject’ to the command in the sense mentioned, one does not need to recognize that the command has a divine origin. One simply has to recognize an action as prohibitive and the prohibition as being authoritative and having a claim on one’s own behavior.”

In the next chapter we will examine the most often raised objection to DCT, the Euthyphro dilemma.

Find the other chapter summaries here.

Image: Rembrandt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Matt Flannagan and Paul Copan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary of Chapter 11: “Divine Command Theory: Preliminary Considerations.”

Did God Really Command Genocide?  

Chapter 11 marks the transition into Part 3 of the book, entitled “Is It Always Wrong to Kill Innocent People?” Part 2 gave reasons to call into question the claim that a biblical theist is committed to 4’’’—which says that the divine author of the Bible uses the text to perform the speech act of commanding us to perform acts that violate the Crucial Moral Principle. Part 2 did not attempt a moral evaluation of what these texts say.

Making Moral Assessments: What if Some Innocent Persons Were Killed?

At this point, however, moral evaluation clearly comes into play. In granting the general wickedness of the Canaanites and the presence of extensive hyperbole, it seems implausible that in such battles no innocent people were killed—or that every single innocent person escaped destruction. So even if God does not command us with these texts to kill innocent people, and even if the texts don’t envisage genocide, they still seem to suggest that a loving and just God did command killing the innocent on a particular occasion. This would mean that God on at least one occasion endorsed violations of the principle of noncombatant immunity.

How many women and children is it acceptable to slaughter before it becomes morally problematic? This brings us to the next question: Can the biblical theist reject 3? Proposition 3, recall, states: “It is morally impermissible for anyone to commit acts that violate the Crucial Moral Principle”—namely, that “it is morally wrong to deliberately and mercilessly slaughter men, women, and children who are innocent of any serious wrongdoing.” Plenty argue the biblical theist can’t reject 3 without endorsing the atrocities of Genghis Khan or Hitler.

William Lane Craig’s Argument

Craig has provided a straightforward way that a biblical theist can deny the Crucial Moral Principle without embracing nihilism (the view that denies the meaningfulness of objective morality). Craig argues that, technically, the Crucial Moral Principle is not an exceptionless principle. Reflecting on God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Craig argues that in this highly unusual case, God, for the sake of some greater good, exempted Abraham from a moral principle that otherwise would be binding on him by commanding him to kill his son. Craig suggests that the “same considerations are relevant for the case of the destruction of the Canaanites at God’s command.”

Examining Three Claims

Craig’s support for this conclusion consists of three premises:

1. “Our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a loving and just God.” (Craig here proposes a divine command theory of ethics whose thesis is analogous to the way water is constituted by H2O; just as one can know what water is without knowing it is H2O, so one can know one’s moral duties without knowing they are divine commands.)
2. A loving and just God, in normal circumstances, prohibits killing the innocent.
3. In very unusual circumstances in the past, God commanded people to kill the innocent for the sake of some greater good.

These three claims entail that 3—it is morally impermissible to violate the Crucial Moral Principle—is false. Now a and b entail that killing the innocent is normally wrong. But a and c entail that killing the innocent in those highly unusual situations is morally permissible, where a loving and just God had morally sufficient reasons and valuable ends in mind when commanding killing in these instances. Hence, strictly speaking, the Crucial Moral Principle does not hold for all persons, places, and times.

Craig’s claim is not radical or novel. The idea that God, on rare occasions, might grant exemptions to the moral rule against killing the innocent has been entertained by Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Duns Scotus, John Calvin, and a great many other thinkers through the generations. The history of this idea is rich and interesting.

Craig’s argument suggests a way that biblical theists can reject 3—that violating the Crucial Moral Principle is never morally permissible—without committing themselves to the problematic implications that various critics point to. It retains the conviction that killing innocents is generally wrong, and it doesn’t entail the endorsement of atrocities by the likes of Stalin or Hitler. A biblical Christian may have theological reasons for thinking that such commands would not occur outside the extremely unusual events of salvation history recorded in scripture.

The success of Craig’s position depends on whether a biblical theist can rationally accept a, b, and c. The next three chapters will defend a and b, starting with divine command theory. (Then the next three chapters will defend c.)

Image: By Robert W. Weir (photograph courtesy Architect of the Capitol) - Architect of the Capitol, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1381170

Matt Flannagan and Paul Copan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary of Chapter 9: “Objections from the Biblical Text to the Hyperbolic Interpretation.”

Did God Really Command Genocide?  

This chapter answers various objections to the claim made in the previous chapter that biblical affirmations such as “they completely destroyed it and everyone in it” or “left no survivors” are to be understood as hyperbolic.

The first objection is based on 1 Samuel 15 and Judges 1. Wes Morriston writes that it’s a stretch to imagine that a God who said all should be destroyed would be displeased if all were destroyed. His first line of argument from the Bible is 1 Samuel 15. King Saul had been commanded to strike Amalek and put to death everyone, including the animals. Saul is said to destroy all the people with the edge of the sword, but he destroyed only the livestock that were despised and weak, sparing Agag the Amalekite king and the best sheep and cattle. The passage Morriston cites recounts God’s response to Saul’s actions. Because Saul did not follow God’s instructions but instead “rush upon the spoil,” God regretted making him king.

Morriston’s suggestion is that Saul was rejected for not taking the command literally. If the command had been hyperbolic, Saul’s behavior would have been compatible with what was commanded. But Morriston is wrong here. Even on a hyperbolic reading that describes “disabling raids” rather than all-out extermination, Saul’s actions of sparing the best sheep would still violate God’s command. Such livestock as was spared had not been taken, but left, and were subject to destruction. God’s recorded response, then, is compatible with either a literal or hyperbolic reading of the command.

But a literal reading of the passage is not compatible with other features of the text. The text takes for granted that Saul “utterly destroyed” the Amalekites, a point that can’t be taken literally in light of the latter chapters of 1 Samuel. Saul’s disobedience wasn’t that he hadn’t “utterly destroyed” the Amalekites, but that he preserved animals left behind that he should have destroyed and that he allowed the king to remain alive.

It seems implausible that we should interpret the command in verse 3 as literal but the fulfillment, just four verses later, as hyperbolic. The key areas of failure had to do with preserving the livestock that had been left behind rather than destroying them. Samuel challenges Saul on his incomplete obedience by focusing on the animals. Saul responds to the charge of disobedience by blaming the people for keeping the animals. Samuel rebukes Saul by saying God had given him a command Saul disobeyed. And Saul again blames the people for his failure in leadership. Samuel focuses again on the livestock and addresses the central concern that Saul listened to the people rather than God. Finally, Saul’s reply acknowledges that he has failed to be a leader but instead listened to the people about the animals.

Nevertheless, we have reason for taking the text hyperbolically. The narrative goes on to say not all the Amalekites were wiped out. So while Saul’s condemnation is compatible with both a literal and hyperbolic reading of the command, a literal reading contradicts the remaining narrative, whereas a hyperbolic reading coheres with it.

So Morriston’s argument features a subtle incoherence. He defends a literal interpretation because he wrongly thinks that a hyperbolic interpretation is inconsistent with other things affirmed by the text. So the grounds he mistakenly provides for rejecting hyperbole are also grounds for rejecting literalism. Finally, not only does a hyperbolic interpretation cohere with the text better than a literal one, there is evidence within the section from which Morriston quotes that suggests it contains rhetorical exaggeration and hyperbolic syntagms like “utterly destroyed” or “left no man of them alive.”

First, the way 1 Samuel 15 uses the language of how Saul “utterly destroyed” the Amalekites “with the sword” is the same syntagm that was repeatedly used as hyperbole in Joshua (8:24; 10:28; etc.) as well as 1 Chronicles 4:41. Second, the language of the command is very similar to the hyperbolic syntagm in 2 Chronicles 36. In light of such texts, we have good reason for thinking that these similarities in language and context offer good grounds for seeing God’s command to Saul to “utterly destroy” the Amalekites and his clearly carrying this out as indicative of hyperbole. Third, one feature of ancient war reports is the hyperbolic use of numbers, where the size of armies is exaggerated for rhetorical effect. Exaggeration makes the best sense of the immense numbers cited, as hyperbole was a regular feature of Near Eastern military reporting.

F&C also note that Saul is primarily engaged in battle against the Amalekites in a specific city—not on a massive geographical scale. Firth argues this was probably a fortified military encampment. A closer look at the text of 1 Samuel reveals that Saul is fighting against a smaller representation of the Amalekites—a group that had just earlier engaged in plundering the Israelites and which provoked a military response from Saul.

Morriston commits the fallacy of misplaced literalism—the misconstruction of a statement-in-evidence so that it carries a literal meaning when a symbolic or hyperbolic or figurative meaning was intended.

Judges 1: Israel’s Failure to Drive Out the Canaanites

A second line of evidence that Morriston cites for his rejection of a hyperbolic interpretation of the relevant passages is that, he argues, it was the failure of the Israelites to destroy all the targets of the genocide that prevented one of the very things that God was supposed to be trying to do, namely, destroy the Canaanite religion. This left the Israelites in the situation God was allegedly trying to change: one of continual temptation to intermarry and join the Canaanites in their religious worship. Indeed, the Israelites repeatedly succumbed to this temptation.

Morriston is wrong about this. Suppose the command was merely to drive out the Canaanites, killing only those who remained and did not flee. That would have avoided the temptation to continually intermingle with the surrounding people, since those people would no longer be there. The text itself helps clarify the point. The later temptations to intermingle and marry the surrounding people was a result of the failure to “drive out the Canaanites.” The end of Judges 1 repeatedly emphasizes the failure to drive out the Canaanites. The issue is failure to drive out, not failure to exterminate. Moreover, Joshua is said to have obeyed God, yet not all the Canaanites were exterminated, which makes good sense on a hyperbolic reading, but not a literal one.

The Case of Rahab

Another objection comes from Douglas Earl, who disputes the hyperbolic reading of the story of Rahab in Joshua 6—the kind of reading advocated by Wolterstorff. Rahab is a Canaaanite woman who shows faith in God and is saved from destruction, whereas Achan is an Israelite who disobeys God and is destroyed. The juxtaposing of these episodes and the similar language leads Earl to conclude that the author here is making an explicit point: it’s faithfulness to God’s commands, not one’s ethnicity, that makes one a true Israelite. And it’s disobedience, not ethnicity, that makes one subject to destruction. The objector suggests that, once one sees the point being made, the total destruction of every single Canaanite is essential to the story. Otherwise Rahab’s survival could have been explained in ways other than as a reward for her loyalty to God.

But such a conclusion doesn’t follow. If the text tells us that Rahab was spared because of her fidelity to God, then that could be true whether or not others are spared or not for whatever reasons. Also, if the real point of the story is that it is disobedience and not ethnicity (or national identity) that makes one subject to destruction, then surely it is the literalistic reading that contradicts the point of the story, not the hyperbolic reading. If God had commanded the “total destruction” of the Canaanites not just in Jericho, but in the entire Promised Land, that would shift the focus to ethnicity rather than disobedience, which goes against the Rahab-Achan contrast.

Judges 20-21

Another objection is based on Judges 20-21, in which the allied tribes of Israel attack armies from the morally degraded tribe of Benjamin. After several Israelite defeats, they eventually prevail, and a small number of Benjamite soldiers escape. After the battle, the allied forces proceeded to kill every last woman and child in the land of Benjamin. The story occurs as one of many illustrations of Israel’s moral degeneration.

What’s relevant here is that this account does not appear to be hyperbolic. Some critics argue that Judges 20-21 uses language similar to Joshua. Because the passage uses the same language as Joshua, and because the account in Judges is clearly not hyperbolic, the account in Joshua can’t be hyperbolic either.

There are two problems with this reply. First, the language in Judges 20:10 doesn’t use the language of herem (“utter destruction”) that is used in Deuteronomy and Joshua. Second, even if Judges 20-21 did use language similar to Joshua, this comeback fails to understand that the same language, even the same phrase, can have different senses, whether hyperbolic or literal, depending on the context. And context shows Judges 20-21 is just the opposite of what we find in Joshua. In Joshua, the language of wiping out all the inhabitants is included in narratives that assume the inhabitants were not wiped out and even existed in large numbers. One can therefore read one account literally and another hyperbolically because they occur in different contexts.

Midian

Lastly, consider the apparent genocide of the Midianites in Numbers 31. On the face of it, the text affirms that every Midianite was killed and only female virgins survived so they could be assimilated into the Israelite community. Some critics insist these texts can’t plausibly be understood as being hyperbolic. Even if this passage is to be read as literal, though, that wouldn’t mean the relevant passages in Joshua and Deuteronomy aren’t hyperbolic. But interestingly enough, Milgrom makes the case that the Numbers 31 account does contain extensive hyperbole, and he notes several features of the text that suggest this.

First, Milgrom notes several cases of obvious rhetorical exaggeration. Second, when we turn to the book of Judges, if we take that narrative literally, it states quite emphatically that the Midianites were not wiped out at all. Also, later in the book we observe the distinction between God’s command and an additional command from Moses that went beyond the command from God. F&C make three responses to this: First, God’s command centered on the Midianite men being killed, since they had been complicit in this national Midianite plot hatched by Balaam; this was a corporate endeavor to incite Israelite treachery against Yahweh’s covenant with them. Second, while Moses’s command does highlight the women’s guilt and judgment-worthiness, the text still indicates a distancing of the divine command (and its completion) from Moses’s own command. Third, as Goldingay notes, we are not told that Moses’s command is actually carried out, and we well know that the OT does not shrink from mentioning deaths by divine judgment.

F&C note the way even various OT scholars themselves have engaged in a careless reading of biblical war texts, particularly Joshua, encouraging OT scholars, in Kenneth Kitchen’s words, “to read into the entire book a whole myth of their own making, to the effect that the book of Joshua presents a sweeping, total conquest and occupation of Canaan by Joshua, which can then be false pitted against the narratives in Judges. But this modern myth is merely a careless falsehood, based on the failure to recognize and understand ancient use of rhetorical summations. The ‘alls’ are qualified in the Hebrew narrative itself.”

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Matt Flannagan and Paul Copan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary of Chapter 8: “Genocide and an Argument for ‘Hagiographic Hyperbole’”

  Did God Really Command Genocide? 

In the previous chapter F&C introduced a two-pronged argument by Nicholas Wolterstorff: “First, it is quite implausible that those who authorized the final form of the text [of Joshua] were affirming that all Canaanites were exterminated at God’s command. Second, the accounts that appear to say otherwise are utilizing extensive hyperbole and are not intended to be taken literally” (84-85). In that chapter F&C explored and defended the first prong of the argument. In this chapter they examine and defend the second prong.

Wolterstorff uses the term “hagiography” to refer to the specific type of hyperbole employed in Joshua. While the term can often have negative and derogatory connotations (as in an uncritical adoration and idealization of a subject beyond what the evidence suggests), Wolterstorff wishes to use it to refer to exaggerated accounts of Joshua’s military endeavors: “The book is not to be read as claiming that Joshua conquered the entire promised land, nor is it to be read as claiming that Joshua exterminated with the edge of the sword the entire population of all the cities on the command of Yahweh to do so” (quoted by F&C, 94-95). Wolterstorff points to several formulaic literary conventions that are repeated throughout the book of Joshua that indicate hyperbole was frequently employed in describing the events and results of the conquest narratives. He compares these to the more down-to-earth historical descriptions found in the book of Judges which tends to give a more accurate historical account of the state of affairs at the end of the conquest period. “Wolterstorff argues that Judges should be taken literally whereas Joshua is hagiographic history, a highly stylized, exaggerated account of the events designed to teach theological and moral points rather than to describe in detail what literally happened” (95, emphasis original).

As evidence to support this claim, F&C offer studies of other ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts where the use of hyperbole and formaulaic styles, often referred to as “transmission codes,” similar to those found in Joshua are employed in a variety of ways such as appeals to divine intervention and in similar structural relationships. Most striking are where victories over enemies are described in exaggerated hyperbolic terms of “total conquest, complete annihilation and destruction of the enemy killing everyone, leaving no survivors, etc.” (97). F&C cite renowned Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen as affirming this point:

The type of rhetoric in question was a regular feature of military reports in the second and first millennia, as others have made clear. . . . In the later fifteenth century Tuthmosis III could boast “the numerous army of Mitanni was over thrown within the hour, annihilated totally like those (now) non-existent” whereas, in fact, the forces of Mitanni lived to fight many another day in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries. Some centuries later about 840/830, Mesha king of Moab could boast that “Israel has utterly perished for always”—a rather premature judgment at that date, by over a century! And so on ad libitum. It is in the frame of reference that the Joshua rhetoric must also be understood. (quoted by F&C, 97)

Lawson Younger is also cited as offering many examples such as Merneptah’s Stele describing a skirmish in which Egypt totally annihilated Israel and Sennacherib’s claim that he cut down the soldiers of Hiramme and “not one escaped” (98). Several other examples are cited by F&C to drive home the point that it was common for the extensive use of hyperbole to be employed as description of battle and victory over one’s enemies in ancient Near Eastern literature.

It is evident that such hyperbolic rhetoric was never meant to be taken literally. This can be seen especially in biblical texts where such a literal interpretation would not even make sense given the entire context of the passage. Oftentimes a text will make a claim that all of the inhabitants of a city were eradicated only to speak of survivors later in the passage, sometimes in the very next verse. Hence, for example, when one reads of the battle of Ai in Joshua 8, one stumbles upon a number of contradictory statements that make no sense if the passage is meant to be taken literally. In vs. 22 we are told the inhabitants were struck down “leaving no survivors or fugitives.” Yet in vs. 24 we are told they killed all the men in the wilderness where they chased them. If they were all previously struck down, then who was chased in the wilderness? Perhaps one of the most obvious examples of such absurdities is found in Joshua 10:20 which reads, “It came about when Joshua and the sons of Israel had finished slaying them with a very great slaughter, until they were totally destroyed, and the survivors who remained of them had entered the fortified cities.” Here in the same verse we have men who were destroyed and survivors. The point is that ancient writers knew what a contradiction was. Therefore, the best explanation of these and like passages is that the writers were employing a standard hyperbolic language that was common to ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts.

F&C nicely summarize the conclusions to their study of hyperbolic language in ancient Near Eastern texts in comparison with the Joshua narratives:

1. Such accounts are highly hyperbolic, hagiographic, and figurative and follow a common transmission code;
2. Comparisons between these accounts and the early chapters of Joshua suggest Joshua is written according to the same literary conventions and transmission codes;
3. Part of this transmission code is to hyperbolically portray a victory in absolute terms of destroying the enemy or in terms of miraculous divine intervention: “such statements are rhetoric indicative of military victory” not literal descriptions of what occurred;
4. The same language and phraseology has a well-attested use in Joshua and elsewhere throughout Scripture. (103)

However, a question might remain in the mind of the skeptic. What if Joshua simply failed to perform to the extent to which God commanded him? While hyperbole might explain how the conquests were described after they occurred, the use of hyperbole in the book of Joshua does not explain the commands of God found in Deuteronomy before the conquest was performed. This is an important question, and F&C address it at the end of this chapter with three implications that can be drawn from their conclusions. First, when one compares the phraseology of thee commands in Deuteronomy with those in Joshua, the suggestion of hyperbole is strong. Second, F&C quote three passages as examples where it is noted that the conquest (using the hyperbole “utterly destroyed”) was performed “just as Moses the servant of the Lord has commended” (Josh 11: 12, 14-15, 20). Hence the author of Joshua understood that what happened was the fulfilment of the command of Moses. And finally, when we compare Deuteronomy with Joshua and Judges, a hyperbolic interpretation seems to be the best way of explaining all of the texts. Therefore, we are justified in claiming that not only was hyperbole employed in the descriptions of many of the conquest narratives, but such an interpretation was intended in the commands themselves.

Find the other chapter summaries here.

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Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary of Chapter 7: “The Question of Genocide and the Hyperbolic Interpretation of Joshua.”

Did God Really Command Genocide?  

Bradley, Sinnott-Armstrong, and Dawkins use Joshua 6-12—in which we read that Joshua “utterly destroyed everything in the city, both man and woman, young and old,” leaving “no survivor”—as evidence for genocide. They have a point that if we read such verses in isolation from the rest of the narrative and do so in a straightforward, literal way, it appears that Israel committed genocide at God’s command. But there are good reasons not to read the text in that way. Nicholas Wolterstorff gives two such reasons. First, it’s quite implausible that those who authorized the final form of the text were affirming that all Canaanites were exterminated at God’s command. Second, the accounts that appear to say otherwise are utilizing extensive hyperbole and are not intended to be taken literally. In this chapter and the next F&C will develop and defend these arguments.

An Argument against Literalism

Then we interpret the book of Joshua as a component within the larger sequence (of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings), certain features of the narrative become apparent. The first feature is that a tension exists between the early chapters of Joshua and the opening chapters of Judges, which is the literary sequel to Joshua. Joshua 6-11 affirms that Joshua took the whole land, then the land rested from war, but the early chapters of Judges, which repeat the death and burial of Joshua, show a different picture, according to which not all the land was conquered. Similarly, Joshua 10-11 appears to state Joshua exterminated all the Canaanites in the land, but the first chapter of Judges affirms eight times that the Israelites had failed to conquer the land or the cities and they could not drive the inhabitants out. This contrast recurs in several passages.

So, on the surface, Joshua appears to affirm that these cities were conquered and their inhabitants completely exterminated. Judges proceeds, though, on the assumption that they are yet to be conquered and the Canaanites still live there in significant numbers, although Joshua gives indications of this as well. Yet Joshua and Judges sit side by side in the biblical canon, the latter being a continuation of the narrative of the former. Even the account of what God commanded differs in the two narratives. So there are obvious tensions between a surface reading of Joshua and Judges, but the same tension occurs within the book of Joshua itself. (Contrast 11:23 and 13:1.) So a surface reading of the passages that Bradley and Sinnott-Armstrong cite not only seems to contradict Judges, but also the preceding chapters of the book of Joshua itself.

Brevard Childs calls it a contradiction, but Kenneth Kitchen instead argues that, when one takes into account the rhetorical flourishes common to ancient Near Eastern war accounts of this sort, a careful reading of Joshua 1-12 makes it clear that it does not portray Israel as actually occupying or conquering the areas mentioned. The editors of the texts were aware of the tensions and contradictions, and weren’t mindless or stupid. So it’s unlikely, when read in this context, that those who authorized the final form of Joshua were using the text to assert literally that Joshua carried out an extermination of all the inhabitants of Canaan at God’s command. Evidently, something else is going on.

The Use of Sources and Not-So-Intelligent Editors

Light the final editors have included blatantly contradictory materials because they weren’t as bothered by them as moderns are? The ancient editors’ literary modus operandi—which included political or aesthetic considerations—was to faithfully preserve the source material despite its obviously contradictory nature when taken literally, so this argument goes. Or maybe an editor would take a well-known tradition that was also subversive to establishment orthodoxy; he might add elements to it in order to conform to the official position.

The problem is that even if it is correct that genuine contradictions exist in the text, this charge fails to show that Wolterstorff’s argument relies on a false dichotomy—the editor was either truly intellectually challenged or not affirming both in a literal sense. For the editor isn’t assuming that both affirmations—extermination and nonextermination—are literally true. The editor would preserve them to show unity, which doesn’t counter Wolterstorff’s assumption; in fact, Wolterstorff would affirm this. The editor clearly has something else in mind in preserving statements that affirm both extermination and nonextermination.

Consider the even clearer example of Ecclesiastes, in which we find two “voices”; there is the cynical “Preacher/Teacher” and the godly editor, who in the end exhorts the reader to “fear God and keep His commandments.” The final editor is not assuming both positions are true. He repudiates the voice of the Preacher, who did say something provocative and even wise things. But the second voice stands to affirm a hope-filled stance that is quite distinct from the Preacher’s message of cynicism, emptiness, and despair.

Wolterstorff’s first argument appears sound. When the passages Bradley cites are read in context, it seems quite implausible to affirm that the final editor and arranger of Joshua was using this text to assert that absolute extermination took place at God’s command. Something else is going on.

Find the other chapter summaries here.

Image: "Baitenhausen Kirche Empore Gemälde 1 Bundeslade um Jericho" by Painting: Tibri Wocher (Tiberius Dominikus Wocher); Photo: Andreas Praefcke - Own work (own photograph). Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baitenhausen_Kirche_Empore_Gem%C3%A4lde_1_Bundeslade_um_Jericho.jpg#/media/File:Baitenhausen_Kirche_Empore_Gem%C3%A4lde_1_Bundeslade_um_Jericho.jpg

Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary of Chapter 6: “Thrusting Out, Driving Out, and Dispossessing the Canaanites – Not Annihilating Them”

Did God Really Command Genocide? 

A legend is told of a wealthy Texas rancher who owned a sprawling expanse of land in western Texas.  It was hundreds of acres is size and stretched out far beyond the horizon.  On this land he raised cattle that would annually be driven north to Abilene where it would be sold and shipped off to market.  This rancher had a son whom he loved much and, when the son came of age, he managed the ranch for his father knowing one day it would be handed down to him.

One year, taking the ranch hands along, the son led the drive to Abilene.  However, along the way they were ambushed by cattle rustlers who killed everyone and stole the herd.  However, the son did not die, but was severely wounded.  In his attempt to return to his father he incurred several set-backs and at one point was kidnapped and sent off to work on the railroads in China. His grieving father, believing him to be dead, died never seeing his son again.

Over time the ranch was abandoned and fell into disrepair.  Soon scavengers, freeloaders, and squatters began to move on the ranch.  They built homes and developed small communities scattered through the once sprawling land.  After several decades the son was able to escape his fate and began to return to his father’s ranch.  Along the way he gathered together a band of men to whom he promised work if they would follow him to his home.

Upon returning home he discovered the squatters and sent men around to announce that they were on land that legally belonged to him and needed to leave as he was returning to reclaim his father’s ranch.  They could leave peaceably, but, if they did not, they would be forced off the land.  Many, fearing the son and his band, left and moved on to other lands.  However, some decided to stay and fight it out.  The son was able to move back into his father’s ranch house and, over time, was able to clear off most of the squatters and encroachers on his ranch.  The son always attempted a peaceful resolution by allowing the encroachers to just pack up and leave.  However, at times many of these confrontations turned violent and men were killed.

The legend related above is analogous to the Hebrews’ return to Palestine during the Canaanite occupation.  God had promised the land to Abraham and his descendants.  His descendants, Jacob and his sons, sojourned down to Egypt where they were kept in slavery for 400 years.  During that time, different tribes moved on to the Promised Land.  When the Hebrews returned under the leadership of Joshua, they were given the task, commanded by God through Moses, to drive out the encroachers and squatters and retake the land promised to them.

In this chapter F&C wish to clarify and emphasize an important and often neglected aspect of that task:  it was not God’s intention nor command “to exterminate every single Canaanite man, woman and child in the Promised Land.  The dominant language used in Scripture is not of extermination but of ‘driving out’ and ‘thrusting out’ the Canaanites.” (76) They quote and exegete several passages from the books of Moses to argue this point, such as Ex 23:27-31:

I will send my terror ahead of you and throw into confusion every nation you encounter. I will make all your enemies turn their backs and run. I will send the hornet ahead of you to drive the Hivites, Canaanites, and Hittites out of your way. But I will not drive them out in a single year, because the land would become desolate and the wild animals too numerous for you. Little by little I will drive them out before you, until you have increased enough to take possession of the land.  I will establish your borders from the Red Sea[a] to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the desert to the Euphrates River.  I will give into your hands the people who live in the land, and you will drive them out before you.

F&C note how the scriptures make clear that this is a gradual process.  The Canaanites will be driven out over a period of time, gradually as the Hebrew nation retakes the land.  In fact this is what we see when we read the stories of the conquest and in Judges.  Many Canaanites did not leave at first and so they had to be driven out over time.  Many other passages repeat this basic idea of driving the Canaanites from the land (Lev 18: 24-28; Num. 33: 51-56; Dt 4:37-38, 6:18-19, 7:1-5, 17-23).  F&C make a point of showing how this last passage is misunderstood because v. 2 is often divorced from the context.  It reads, “When the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.”  By itself it may seem to teach annihilation of the Canaanites, but when placed in the fuller context the meaning becomes clear:

When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you— and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the Lord’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you.  This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire. . . . You may say to yourselves, “These nations are stronger than we are. How can we drive them out?” But do not be afraid of them; remember well what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt.  You saw with your own eyes the great trials, the signs and wonders, the mighty hand and outstretched arm, with which the Lord your God brought you out. The Lord your God will do the same to all the peoples you now fear.  Moreover, the Lord your God will send the hornet among them until even the survivors who hide from you have perished. Do not be terrified by them, for the Lord your God, who is among you, is a great and awesome God. The Lord your God will drive out those nations before you, little by little. You will not be allowed to eliminate them all at once, or the wild animals will multiply around you. But the Lord your God will deliver them over to you, throwing them into great confusion until they are destroyed.

The context makes it clear that the original intent of God is for the Hebrews to drive the Canaanites out of the land.  Only those who refused to leave are left to be “destroyed” and even then the emphasis is on destroying what has been left: their idols and altars.  One might wonder why it is important to God for the Canaanites to be gone.  One reason can be seen above:  “Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods.”  God foresaw what would, and did happen.  The Canaanites eventually led many Hebrews astray.  But another reason is given in v. 8: “it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors.” God promised this land to Abraham and his descendants and he is keeping his oath.

F&C go on to show that when you look at all the passages concerning the Hebrew treatment of the Canaanites, the language of “dispossession” and “driving out” outnumbers that of “destruction” by 3 to 1.  Quoting from a study by Glenn Miller they state, “This would indicate the dominant ‘intended effect’ was for the peoples in the [Promised] Land to migrate somewhere else.  So consider Deut. 12.29[-30]: “The LORD your God will cut off before you the nations you are about to invade and dispossess.  But when you have driven them out and settled in their land, and after they have been destroyed before you, be careful not to be ensnared by inquiring about their gods, saying, ‘How do these nations serve their gods? We will do the same.’” (81, see footnote.)

However, this does raise the question of the conquest narratives in the book of Joshua where we are told that Joshua “utterly destroyed everything in the city, both man and woman, young and old.”  This is the subject of the next chapter.

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Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary of Chapter 5: “Does the Bible Portray the Canaanites as Innocent?”

The command to exterminate the Canaanites was an occasional command, not an application of a general rule relevant to all people throughout history. What should be quite clear is that God does not command us to violate the Crucial Moral Principle, even if the killing of Canaanites did.

But even this more limited thesis is not as clear as it seems. Merciless slaughter is not how the biblical text portrays the situation. While some Canaanites may have been innocent (like the children), the Bible does not portray the Canaanites in general as innocent of any serious wrongdoing. Three features of the narrative make this plain.

Feature 1: Israel’s Legal Ownership of Canaan

First, the text indicates that the Canaanites are occupying land of which Israel has legal ownership, and without the consent of the owner. The command of destruction only applied to those cities that had been given the Israelites as an inheritance. They were prohibited from conquering neighboring nations such as Moab, Ammon, and Edom. The Canaanites are squatters on Israel’s land, so Israel had a right to drive them out or dispossess them in a way in which they do not have a right to drive out others. God had promised Abraham and his descendants the land, telling him he would be a blessing and his name great. The land was given as a means to bless the whole world and reverse the curse of Babel. God would use the land to call all nations to himself. This is repeated six times in Genesis and is clearly a central dimension of Israel’s election. Abram would even give Lot the most valuable acreage. The making of a great name is predicated on an act of generosity rather than legal entitlement. Because of his generosity and willingness to share the land with others, Abram (later Abraham) and his offspring were given eternal title to the land.

The commands occur in the context of the Canaanites living on land that Israel’s ancestors had lived on, owned property in, and to which they had legal title for the purpose of establishing a community through which salvation would be brought to the world. The Canaanites are, strictly speaking, trespassers. Rahab admitted she knew the Lord had given the Israelites the land and that a great fear of the Israelites had fallen on the Canaanites, so that “all who live in this country are melting in fear of you. We have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt” (Gen. 2:9-10). Similarly the men of Gibeon tell Joshua they were “clearly told how the Lord your God had commanded his servant Moses to give [Israel] the whole land” (9:24).

So the Israelites weren’t conquering or attacking an innocent nation and stealing their land; rather, Israel is repossessing land that already belongs to them and evicting people who are trespassing on it and refusing to leave.

But what of the charge that history is written by the winners, who rationalize their own behavior? First off, this appeal is circular. The very claim being considered is whether the Bible is trustworthy because it commands extermination. To assume unreliability is there while interpreting the text and using that interpretation against its reliability is to assume what one wants to prove. Moreover, it also fails to address the issue being discussed: whether one who accepts the Bible as the Word of God, and hence authoritative, is committed to holding that God commands the killing of innocent people.

What if the Israelites were in the land, and another group attacked them claiming divine justification for doing so? Problems with this scenario are at least twofold: first, they implicitly deny the historicity of authoritative, though challenging and perplexing, divinely mandated events. Second, such questions ignore the entirety of the biblical narrative. To remove a fully wise, good, and just God from the Canaanite warfare accounts in scriptures and then attack that narrative would be to gut and destabilize it.

Feature 2: Israelite Refugees and the Sins of the Amorites

Despite being given the land, Abram and his descendants couldn’t take immediate occupation. 400 years of captivity would come first. Two things are noteworthy here. First, the nation of Israel will gain possession of the land only after they have been oppressed in Egypt for several generations. The Israelites were refugees who had experienced hundreds of years of oppression in a foreign land and needed a place to live; they were attempting to gain a homeland.

Second, in spite of having a legal title and a divinely approved claim on the land, Abram and his descendants could not take immediate and total occupation of the land. They had to wait until the “sin of the Amorites” had “reached its full measure.”

So during the days of the patriarchs, Abraham’s offspring were forbidden to engage in violence against the Canaanite nations occupying the land. It’s only when certain immoral practices had been culturally entrenched in the Canaanites for centuries without repentance that Israel would be permitted to drive them out.

Centuries later, we read in the Pentateuch, Israel is divinely authorized to take the land because the Amorite iniquity was finally complete. Deuteronomy states that Israel could drive out the nations on account of their wickedness, including incest, adultery, bestiality, ritual prostitution, and homosexual acts; and, most significantly, Deut. 12:29-31 singles out child sacrifice as particularly abhorrent, against which the Prophets, Psalms, and historical book had inveighed.

Feature 3: Corrupting Influences and the Risk of Assimilation

The text also repeatedly warns of the corrupting influence of the practices of Israel’s neighbors on the embryonic Israelite nation in the land of Canaan. Ex. 23:33 is explicit: “To not let them live in your land or they will cause you to sin against me, because the worship of their gods will certainly be a snare to you.” The Hebrew scriptures take seriously this life-and-death struggle for Israel’s own national and spiritual integrity. We could rightly argue that anything threatening to tear apart the moral and spiritual fabric of Israel could be compared to acts of treason in our own day.

So, contrary to Bradley, the Bible does not portray the Canaanites in general as innocent of any serious wrongdoing. If the Israelites lived in their midst and freely intermingled among the Canaanites, Israel’s own identity, integrity, calling, and destiny would be undermined—a scenario comparable to treason.

Finally, there are also hints in the text that Canaanites who rejected these kinds of practices were to be spared and could live in the land among the Israelite community. Three examples:

Rahab

The tavern-keeper who was exempted from death at the hands of the Israelites. Contrary to Morriston’s claim that Rahab was just trying to save her own skin, the evidence suggests otherwise. The wording of her confession is found in only two other places in the OT: Moses’s confession in Deut. 4:39 and Solomon’s confession in I Kings 8:23. Rahab states that she and the whole country of Canaan had heard of God’s miraculous signs and wonders in the exodus and knew that God had given the land to the Israelites. As the story unfolds, Rahab shows strong faith in God and is saved from destruction. The contrast with Achan is also telling. The juxtaposing of these episodes with their similar language and linguistic parallels leads many commentators to conclude that the author here is making an explicit point: it is faithfulness to God’s commands (or lack thereof)—not one’s ethnicity—that makes one a true Israelite, or makes one subject to destruction. Hebrews 11 interprets Rahab’s story this way—that she was saved by her response of faith.

Caleb

Though part of one of the nations marked for destruction, Caleb too was saved after following the Lord wholeheartedly.

Shechemites

At Shechem, those who heard the Law being read included not only the assembly of Israel but also the strangers who were living among them.

So the Canaanites are not in general portrayed as innocent. They are trespassers. Their dominance meant Israel couldn’t live in the land alongside them without being absorbed into a culture engaging in abhorrent practices. Yet the text suggests that Canaanites who turned from these practices could be spared. So Bradley’s picture is misleading.

Israel too is told that if they themselves act in the same way as did their enemies, they too would be vomited from the land. Indeed, as the narrative continues, God tolerated Israel’s continual and repeated violations of the covenant in their engaging in these practices for several centuries before sending both Israel and later Judah into exile.

Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary of Chapter 4: “Does the Bible Command Us to Kill Innocent Human Beings?”

This chapter is titled with a simple question: Does the Bible command us to kill innocent human beings? And we can summarize the entire chapter with a simple answer: no.

I could easily stop there, but like many simple questions and answers, there is more beneath the surface. And a certain amount of explanation is necessary to fully understand both question and answer. First, as to the question. We have seen that F&C have used the argument of Raymond Bradley as typical of those who see the OT commands concerning the treatment of the Canaanites as problematic for the believer who wishes to ascribe authority to scripture. Bradley affirms that the Bible commands us, as in contemporary Bible believers, to fulfill the commands found in the OT to kill innocent human beings and that such action would be contrary to the Crucial Moral Principle (F&C will take up the questions of (a) the actual commend to kill and (b) innocence in subsequent chapters).

As to the answer, F&C are quick to point out that it simply does not follow that, just because God commands Joshua to carry out the commands he has given for treatment of the Canaanites, we are required to do the same actions towards other innocent human beings. This seems patently obvious. Jesus told Judas, “Do quickly what you have to do,” in his act of betraying Jesus. Certainly that command should not be taken that all believers are to betray Christ (and to do so quickly). Yet this answer does need some explanation, for believers are encouraged that “All scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training for righteousness that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3: 16-17). The idea of application of scripture is an important part of the believer’s life. It is certainly possible that some believers might take the actions of Joshua as archetypal for how we should treat those outside the faith.

F&C point out that there are two distinctions one must consider when it comes to application of these commands in Joshua. The first concerns the distinction between those commands given for all mankind and those given specifically to the nation of Israel, God’s chosen people. Jewish rabbis made this distinction themselves when they distinguished between Noahide Laws, those that apply to all men, and Mosaic Laws which were meant specifically for the chosen people. All people are to follow commands concerning basic moral treatment of other men, such as those regarding rape and murder for example. Before one considers the application of a particular command, it is important to note for whom the command is meant.

So what of the command to destroy the Caananites? Citing Dt. 7, F&C state, “An examination of the command to ‘destroy’ or ‘drive out the Canaanites’ in their [sic] historical and literary context makes it clear that this is a command specifically given to Israel in virtue of the special covenant God made with that nation as his chosen people” (p. 57). Hence it is inappropriate to apply these commands towards any people group outside of ancient Israel, including modern believers.

[su_dropcap style="light" size="4"]T[/su_dropcap]he second distinction is also important in understanding to whom these specific commands apply. This is the distinction between occasional commands and universal commands. Occasional commands are those given to a particular person or group of person for a specific occasion at a specific time. Universal commands are meant either for all persons at all times, or perhaps, for a specific group of persons for all occasions. An example of an occasional command would be the command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. An example of the first type of universal command would be general commands, such as commands against murder that apply to all persons in all situations. An example of the latter type of universal command would be the law of circumcision which was given to a specific group of persons, the Jewish people, but were to be maintained for all time.

F&C make clear that the command to destroy the Canaanites was not a universal command, which means, not only would it not apply universally to all persons, but it would not even apply universally to the nation of Israel. Citing Dt. 20:10-18, they show that these commands are occasional commands. These command were for a specific time, the return of the nation to Palestine after the Exodus, and were to be carried out in a very specific way. Dt. 20:17 lists the specific nations that were to be utterly destroyed (Hittites, Amorites, Caananites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites). So this was not to be interpreted nor applied as a command to destroy anyone that Israel felt was in their way. And it certainly is not a command for modern believers to kill innocent persons.

F&C summarize the results of their study succinctly: “. . . a careful examination of the commands to which Bradley refers suggests two things: First, these commands were given specifically to Israel in a particular historical context and not to all peoples everywhere; second, even when occasional commands were given to Israel in specific circumstances, we should understand that these are not general rules to be applied in future situations. In this respect they are like God’s commands to Abram to leave Ur. Such are commands to specific persons to carry out specific actions in the founding of Israel as a nation, not a command to all people for all times” (p. 56-57).

Find the other chapter summaries here.

Image: "Moses" by Froberg. CC license. 

Did God Really Command Genocide? Summary of Chapter 3: The God of the Old Testament versus the God of the New?

Marcion (born ca. 100) took troubling Old Testament passages and rejected them along with the “lesser” Creator God of the Jews, the God of justice and wrath. Marcion considered the God of the New Testament quite different from that of the Old, but was he right? Did Jesus attempt to distance himself from the God portrayed in the Old Testament? Is there a wide gap between the worldview of ancient Israelites and the teaching of Jesus?

Peter Enns doesn’t think the Gospel permits, condones, or supports the rhetoric of tribal violence in the OT, but he denies being a Marcionite. Eric Seibert, too, writes that not everything in the “good book” is either good, or good for us, while still repudiating Marcionism. They reject the notion that there are two distinct Gods in view; they claim that the testaments portray God differently.

Both Enns and Seibert claim that their interpretive frame of reference is Jesus of Nazareth. F&C say this is praiseworthy, but that we are presented with a limited picture of Jesus and one that ignores authoritative affirmations by NT writers and speakers about Yahweh and his actions in the OT.

Seibert argues that the OT is part of the reason the Bible has been used by some to justify violence, colonialism, and the abuse of women. The OT writers, he thinks, often appropriated the values and beliefs of their own ancient Near Eastern context, including its ethnocentrism and patriarchy, which don’t reflect the character of a compassionate, merciful God.

Seibert distinguishes between the textual God (the author’s literary representation) and the actual God (the living reality), especially in the OT, where the gap between them is sometimes wide. The OT authors made assumptions we should reject, looking to Christ instead and construing God’s judgment as eschatological and not temporal, and that end-time judgment need not be violent.

Seibert urges us to read the Bible carefully, conversantly, and critically—not compliantly. For example, carefully follow the rule of love, a commitment to justice and valuing people. Remember some OT voices challenge “virtuous violence.” It can be read as subverting a picture of pitting bad Canaanites against good Israelites. Another strategy is to read with the victims and their families. Read the Bible from the margins, from the outsider’s point of view. Seibert also thinks we should name the killing of the Canaanites “genocide.”

The God of Jesus Is the God of Moses

F&C make a few replies. First, it is true that we should think more deeply about difficult, ethically troubling OT passages rather than gloss over them. And notable scholars have been doing just that. F&C also agree we should be distressed by professing Christians’ abuse of scripture, using such texts to justify the subjugation of women, the horrors of the slave trade, and the oppression of people groups. At the same time, they would note all the moral gains brought about by Bible-reading Christians—moral reforms, protection of indigenous peoples from colonial powers, literacy, human rights, women’s rights, civil rights, abolition of slavery, etc.

Second, Seibert’s negative comment that the church “grandly proclaims” the Bible to be God’s Word is rather unfair. Jesus himself does so! Likewise Paul. Ironically, while Seibert claims that Jesus is the hermeneutical key to his ethic, he does not actually adopt Jesus’s own attitude toward scripture.

Third, we must be careful not to appeal to Jesus’s authority selectively. Jesus regularly engaged in denouncements and threats of judgment, both temporal and final. And Jesus takes for granted the general theological outlook of the OT.

Fourth, we must not pit Jesus’s teaching (or a certain understanding of it) against the affirmations elsewhere in the NT. The problem for both Enns and Seibert is that Jesus and the NT writers don’t actually read the OT in a nonviolent way. None of them shrink from the God of the OT, or from an assumption that the relevant OT texts were historical.

To impose a nonviolent or pacifistic grid on the words and actions of God/Jesus requires significant hermeneutical gymnastics—an approach that creates an interpretive straitjacket. To proclaim an absolute pacifism and a rejection of any association between God and violent action requires dismissing or ignoring Jesus’s own authoritative statements, vast tracts of scripture pertaining to divine judgment, like the prophetic books and the book of Revelation. It’s also to ignore God’s ordaining of the state to bear the sword.

Note that the NT is filled with words about divine justice. Paul said those who refuse to love the Lord are “accursed”; he even wished that those troubling Judaizers would go the whole way and mutilate themselves. He called them “dogs,” and Jesus used similar language about those who despise the sacred things of God, calling them “dogs” and “swine,” and did so in the context of the Sermon on the Mount, in which he speaks of loving enemies! Even expressions of satisfaction at divine wrath and judgment can be justified (Rev. 16:6), and this does not oppose Jesus’s call to love and pray for our enemies, indeed to desire their salvation.

“Behold then the kindness and the severity of God” (Rom. 11:22). Reading the scriptures with discernment shouldn’t mean an undiscerning selectivity that ignores the very stance of the NT and Jesus himself. Even the chief OT text describing the God of Israel as “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in loving kindness and truth” (Ex. 34:6) immediately is followed by, “He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.”

Jesus and his earliest followers took for granted the same unchanging character of the God of the Hebrew scriptures. F&C finish this chapter with a flourish: “To assume that Jesus rejected divine temporal judgment in the Old Testament Scriptures runs contrary to Jesus’s own assumption of the historicity of these events, his own wrathful pronouncements, and his strong identification with the Old Testament worldview. So we should carefully study and qualify the nature of violence in Scripture, but we must not do violence to Scripture in the process.”