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Introduction
The Problem
OT Texts
The Theodicy of the
Book of Job
The Recourse to
Cultural Relativism
A Catholic Response 1
A Catholic Response 2
Back to Hebrews 11
Conclusions
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Conclusions
Violence in the name of religion, religious
fanaticism, religious intolerance, murder and discrimination against women
are explicitly repudiated in those statements of its faith which the Body
of Christ the Church, in which dwells the Spirit of Truth, calls the New
Testament. Any statements in the Old Testament contrary to the moral and
theological doctrine of the Church are wrong. All actions which the church
and its members collectively or individually have committed contrary to its
own faith have been wrong. Wherever
the Christian Church or its members have committed any such action, they
have done so contrary to the explicit teaching of Christ as recorded by his
Church and they are therefore more responsible or guilty of evil than the
people of the Old Testament who lived within a religious culture in which
they were led by their leaders to believe that such actions in the name of
God were righteous actions. There are religions and religious leaders to
this day preaching the same message. It is a total perversion of religion
that God’s name and glory can be used to inflict suffering and death on
one’s fellow men and women. Yet when it is done in the name of Christ, who
by his preaching and his life explicitly repudiated it, the perversion is even greater.
When Christians are faced with statements in the
Bible which are unacceptable morally and/or theologically, they have the
firmest grounds to repudiate them as not coming from God but from men. God
permitted himself to be misrepresented in the Bible just as he submitted to
death upon Calvary in order to achieve our salvation. Where the Bible is
found to be endorsing evil, no weak and inadequate response or statement is
acceptable. That helps nobody, least of all the Church. Whatever
misrepresents God in the Bible is not from God and that should be stated
bluntly.
The one same God of the Old and the New
Testament is good; and that is how Christians and the Christian people as a
body, the Body of Christ, should be. The word for ‘good’ is particularly
identified with ‘love’ in the New Testament where it is always directed to
service of and kindness towards other people. In the New Testament, in what
is the Christian Church’s most fundamental statement of its faith, that is
how God’s first commandment is explained, how religion is intended to be
understood and how we shall be judged.
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