Michael Knowles: the Church and its Scriptures 3

The Church and its Scriptures Michael Knowles

Old Testament Texts

“The Lord your God”, said Moses to the assembled people of Israel –he was now one hundred and twenty years old, unable to get about as he used too, forbidden to cross the Jordan and enter the Promised land and about to die -“will cross over at your head and destroy those nations before your advance, and you shall occupy their lands; and as he directed, Joshua will lead you. The Lord will do to these nations as he did to Sihon and Og, kings of the Amorites, and to their lands. He will destroy them. The Lord will deliver them into your power and you shall do to them as I commanded you. Be strong. Be resolute” (Deut. 31.1-6). How do we get out of that? Hardly just by saying we don’t have to take it seriously. How can we pray the lovely prayer of Psalm 136 “It is good to give thanks to the Lord for his love endures for ever” when in verses 17-21 it rejoices that the Lord “struck down great kings....slew mighty kings...Sihon King of the Amorites...Og the king of Bashan” and “gave their land to Israel”? Try asking the Palestinians, Moslem and Christian, to recite that psalm, as they cling on with their fingertips to their waterless, besieged, harassed and bulldozed villages and olive groves in Gaza and the West Bank, under attack from Jewish fundamentalists claiming the land is their land because their God –our God- has given it to them.[1]

Brian is forthright in saying that he considers Samson’s actions downright immoral. Indeed if one puts the very first paragraph of his paper next to his final paragraph 16 pages later, the conclusion must be that he holds, contrary to what the Old Testament –the Word of God- in Judges asserts, that Samson’s action was “one of the most blatant examples of evil anyone can think of”. It was “the intentional killing of the innocent”; and we “had better” come right out and say that, whatever the approval the Word of God might have given it. Judging by the reception his paper received, it would seem that the members of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain present agreed with him. Vox populi, vox Dei?

But what are we voicing here? If, as we all agree, the murder of the innocent is evil, are we repudiating the assertion of the Book of Judges, which is of the Word of God, that what Samson did was done in “the spirit of the Lord” (15. v14). When the Bible relates the story that he slew a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass,[2] are we repudiating the assertion of divine approval of the action as expressed in Samson’s triumphant cry “It was the Lord that let me, thy servant, win this great victory”(v18)? Are we rejecting his claim that he was the Lord’s servant when he slaughtered these people? And are we disagreeing with the Biblical writer when he goes on to assert there was divine approval for the massacre in the stadium when Samson wanted “revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes” and got his revenge through the Lord “giving him the strength” to bring down and kill “the lords and all the (3000) people who were in it” (16.v27-30). If we agree with Brian that this massacre was evil, how can we profess as our faith that the Bible is the Word of God if it approves of something the Christian faith disapproves of, in this case the murder of innocent people?

This is an issue which must be resolved. It is difficult, if not impossible, to present the Bible as God’s revealed word and to defend Christianity as an acceptable form of religion if Christianity holds that God approved of murder. Unless it is resolved, we are in a situation where we are representing God as an author of evil. We are in the theological position of the authors of some of the books of the Bible such as Joshua and Judges, Deuteronomy and Numbers, for whom an action is right if it promotes the welfare of the Jewish people (which attitude reverberates down to the present day).[3] We are in the theological position of Mohammed in passage after passage of the Koran when, similar to OT morality, he finds a justification for violence if it is committed in the interests of religion. “Idolatry is worse than carnage” he declares in the Koran (2.19), about which he affirms “Our Book records the truth” (23.62). All three monotheistic religions have a very bloody history. We have all sinned.

The Book of Joshua (6.21) informs us that the Israelites destroyed “everything in the city (Jericho). They put everyone to the sword, men and women, young and old, and also cattle, sheep and asses”; and that when it came to the attack on the kingdom of Ai (8.2.) the Lord ordered Joshua to deal with it “as you dealt with Jericho” (except that they could keep the cattle and other spoil this time! Economic realism triumphed). 8.23-29 records the massacre that followed, described in brutally graphic detail –“following the word of the Lord spoken to Joshua”. The massacres described in Chapter 10 of Amorites, Makkedah, Libnah, Gezer, Lachish, Eglon etc are stomach-churning. “So Joshua massacred the population of the whole region –the hill country, the Negeb. The Shephelath, the watersheds, and all their kings. He left no survivors, destroying everything that drew breath as the Lord the God of Israel had commanded” (10.40ff, my underlining)). Samson’s exploits were a side-show in comparison.

The point is an obvious one. The Old Testament says this of God. How then can it be the Word of God? It’s not just the Old Testament that has this problem –a problem for us that is. So too has the Koran with which it has many similarities, particularly in the way it too provides justification to acts of war and violence, and discrimination against women?[4]

It is our faith that the Old Testament is the Word of God. It is divine revelation. The God we believe in -we believe- does not order the massacre of the innocent in defence of anyone, least of all to get people to worship him or in order to promote one nation at the expense of another. “God has no favourites” as that man of visions, the Apostle Peter, came to realise (Acts 10. 35). The God we believe in is the God of both the Old and the New Testaments. There is but one God. And the God we believe in does not contradict himself. God is one and timeless.[5] What He said to the Israelites was simultaneous in our sense of time with what he said to mankind through Jesus. The one cannot contradict the other. God’s timelessness is beyond our understanding. Our order of being is not his. God cannot change. There are no ‘accidentia’ with God –dry words but full of profoundest mystery and attraction to those who have ears to hear and eyes to see. There is only one God. He cannot share his being. He can only attract us to it like a moth to a flame which does not harm or burn up but transforms as fire transforms metal.

So, we have a problem. Hebrews chapter 11, which is an account of what faith achieved in the lives of major Old Testament characters from Abel onwards, speaks approvingly of Samson. Verses 32-34 bracket Samson with Gideon, Barak, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets, saying “Through faith they overthrew kingdoms, established justice, saw God’s promises fulfilled. They muzzled ravening lions (which relates of course to Samson’s exploits), quenched the fury of fire”. Verses 39-40 tell us their faith will find fulfilment and perfection in God’s plan in Christ. The New Testament, of which the Letter to the Hebrews is a part, is the record of the faith of the Apostolic Church. Furthermore the story of Samson’s conception and birth appears to have heavily influenced the actual composition of the Annunciation Story and the story of Elizabeth mother of John the Baptist as we have them. That would indicate that his story was highly regarded in the apostolic church when the stories of Jesus were being transmitted and worked on meditatively and theologically and in due course put into the gospel form. In the New Testament Samson is put forward as an example of men and women (eg. Rahab the prostitute)[6] who had faith and by their faith “established justice, saw God’s promises fulfilled” and in due course in the plan of Christ “entered upon the promised inheritance”. The OT, the Word of God, endorses Samson’s actions, one of which was the murder of some 3000 innocent spectators in a stadium as done on behalf of God. We cannot resolve this problem by saying we don’t have to take it seriously.[7]

“In another way we do have to take the Samson legend seriously” says Brian, by putting “the rights of the Philistine crowd, who are out for a jolly day in the sunshine, at the centre of the action”. That’s all very well to say but the reality is that God’s own Word did no such thing on this occasion. Rather it represents God as the monster behind these atrocities and behind lots more and lots worse besides. The God of Christianity, who is the one same God of the Old and the New Testaments, by his own Word is undeniably portrayed as a slayer, a murderer and destroyer of the innocent. The problem is very acute for Catholic theology. For us it is axiomatic that faith and reason cannot contradict each other. God cannot contradict himself. Hence the problems Augustine and Aquinas had with the story as Brian has described. We have to find a response which is in agreement with Catholic faith and the Catholic philosophical perspective.

[1] Beyond any doubt this situation in Israel and Palestine is unbelievably bad. It has reached the point where biblical promises to Abraham and Moses are now exploited as excuse and justification for blatant racism and programmes of ethnic cleansing, extermination and deportation. Faced with a situation where the USA effectively supports these policies and Britain as America’s willing ally keeps stumm, we feel helpless. Has the Holocaust trapped us into a silence which makes us part of ‘a religious industry for justifying killing the innocent”? This is one pressing reason for the topicality, the urgent importance of Brian’s paper. Religion is being dragged into the gutter. Religion is being used as an instrument of war. Faced as we are by these multiple perversions, how can we protest? Hasn’t the time come to stand up openly against this form of Judaism and denounce it as totally irreligious? It dishonours the Holocaust dead not to defend the living. What’s worse, it is not as if the Zionists in powers in Israel in 2003 are somehow departing from the principles of earlier leaders. Theodor Herzl, (1860-1904) the founder of Zionism wrote in his diary in 1885: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying any employment for it in our country…..Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly” (taken from “The Clash of Fundamentalisms” page 94 by Tariq Ali. Verso Press 2002). A proposal chillingly anticipatory of elements of the Nazi Holocaust. By 1948 the Jews still formed only 25% of the population of Galilee which caused Yigal Allon the commander of the Jewish military forces in Galilee and later Deputy Prime Minister of Israel a lot of concern. “We saw a need to clean (sic) the Inner Galilee,” he wrote in his memoirs, “and to created a Jewish territorial succession in the entire area of Upper Galilee. We therefore looked for means to cause the tens of thousands of sulky Arabs who remained in Galilee to flee…. Wide areas were cleansed”. (taken from ‘From the Holy Mountain’ page 364 by William Dalrymple, Flamingo, 1997). Ethnic cleansing of Moslems by Christians in the Balkans rightly got very harsh treatment. Yet at the time of writing this the ethnic cleansing, even the deliberate and targeted murder, of Arab Moslems and Christians by Jews in Israel, is openly tolerated, indeed in effect even supported both politically and with military aid. We live in a very twisted world. Judaism needs to take a long hard look at itself, not least before all the warnings of the OT prophets about how God will punish Israel for its godless ways kick in. That applies to us all.

[2] Some jawbone! Some ass!

[3] The Book of Judges is Judaism at an early moment of its development in God’s plan (Heb.11.40) towards fullness in Christianity. It is useful to compare it with the Koran in which Mohammed argues time and again that violence can be good if done, as he sees it, on behalf of God. I employ N.J.Dawood’s translation of the Koran (Penguin.. 1990). “Carnage is better than idolatry” Mohammad states (2.91). “Fight against them (unbelievers) until idolatry is no more and God’s religion reigns supreme” (2.193). Within the political and cultural context of his time and place it is understandable that he merged political with religious status. Possibly his treatment of the Jews of Medina is an example. They would not accept him. Consequently he drove two of their three tribes in Medina into exile, the Banu-‘n-Nadir and the Banu-n’Qainuqa, and divided their estates among his followers. He then had between 700 and 800 Jewish males of the Banu-‘n-Quraiza executed and sold their women and children into slavery (cf. Surah 5). His message was “He that obeys the Apostle obeys God” (4.80). Like the rest of humanity Muhammad was a creature of his culture. He was a tribal leader in a culture where war was a way of life. He himself commanded armies. The Koran 8 1.-8.75 (Chapter ‘the Spoils) for example celebrates his victory (the battle of Sadr 614) over an army from Mecca when the Meccans came to the defence of an unarmed caravan belonging to the Quarysh of Mecca which Mohammad operating out of Medina was attacking. The chapter opens with “They ask about the spoils (of the battle). Say: ‘The spoils belong to God and his apostle (Mohammad)…Obey God and His apostle if you are true believers”. A contrast with Christ who repudiated violence and indeed submitted himself to it is instructive. It is possible that the life and teaching of Mohammad are read by some believers to justify their acts of terrorism. It must also be one of the major tragedies of human history that the personal example and the teaching of the founder of Christianity in this area have not been followed by all his followers and time and time again have been heinously disregarded by his church.

[4] For explicit endorsement of discrimination against women in the Koran see chapter “The Cow” 2.222 to 2.236, and the whole of the chapter “Women” which contains the statement “Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other and because men spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient” 4.34. There is a lot more to be said about this of course, and I make some points later in this paper. However, there are issues here which are dealt with more adequately in the paper that follows on this one, namely “The Christian and the Islamic Understanding of Revelation”.

[5] Catholic Catechism para 102.

[6] Jesus kept company with sinners. He stood by the woman caught in adultery. A sinful woman –a prostitute?- wiped his feet with her hair. Ruth, a Moabaite girl, one of his ancestors, encouraged by Naomi her mother, slept with Boaz . “Turn back the covering of his feet and lie down”. She had a son, Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of David, to whose house belonged ‘Joseph the husband of Mary who gave birth to Jesus the Messiah’. Of the only two women mentioned by Hebrews in the long list of OT people from Abel down to the prophets one is a prostitute.

[7] I found it most interesting that when Brian said that we don’t have to take Hebrews seriously, he was not greeted with objections from his audience of theologians at the CTA conference, when, as I have said, our Christian faith consists in part in taking the NT seriously. Is it an indication how deeply biblical criticism over the last two centuries has penetrated and formed the mind of Christian academia, both Catholic and Protestant? Is an intriguing ambiguity at work here?. On the one hand the liturgy of both Catholicism and Protestantism present the Bible as an object of immense reverence and source of revelation, while on the other the whole thrust of biblical research has been towards a secular analysis which consciously or subconsciously almost places the human mind in judgement over it. When a Christian theologian asserts that we do not have to take this or that biblical verse seriously and his academic audience concurs, is he, and they, placing himself, and they themselves, in judgement over God’s Word. Have I, an individual Christian, any right to act in judgment over Psalm 137 verses 7-9?. The psalmist, sitting beside the waters of Babylon, tears flowing down his cheeks and praying the prayers of God, says that the person who can seize hold of the children of Babylon and in revenge for all it has done to Jerusalem dash their brains out against the rocks is blessed. Have I the right to repudiate verses which form part of the Word of God? I think I have. But on what grounds? That is what I am exploring in this paper.