The Violent Old Testament God in Sunday School Yesterday

[_CaliforniaKid]

Californiakid, I do not think anybody ever engages in unconditional lovey dovey. I do not believe anybody anywhere should engage in something like that.

Do you believe killing children is an appropriate divine response to sin?

I had supposed that it is clear that it is fiction and engages is the sort of exaggeration that fantasy uses to create questions. . . . Your complaints I do not experience as relevant to a poem. Yet as a poem it should be troubling. Why is life harsh and dangerous? Why do we die? How do we live with honor and courage knowing that we all die? isn't that what Job is wondering about?

The question under discussion isn't whether it's intended as fiction. The question is what kind of God it portrays. The questions Job is asking are good questions, and so is his rejection of the answer offered by his friends. Insofar as the book shows that bad things can happen to good people, the message of the book is good. However, the beginning and ending of the book are seriously problematic. God basically slaughters Job's family in order to prove a point to Satan, refuses to explain himself to Job, tells Job he doesn't have any right to question God, and then gives Job prosperity as if that makes up for all the suffering and death God had arbitrarily caused. For all the book's virtues, it portrays a largely uncompassionate God.

I cannot hear God answering with self aggrandizement. I hear God answering Job with love.

I don't see how you can read God's response to Job and feel that it's an expression of "love." Just a sample, from chapter 38:

3 Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
7 while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels[a] shouted for joy?

You don't tell someone to brace himself like a man if you're going to comfort him. You don't use sarcasm if you're speaking to him in love. You don't start listing your achievements if you're uninterested in self-aggrandizement. This is not a loving response. This is God giving Job what-for.

[_honorentheos]

I don't remember where I read it (I'm thinking it was Ehrman's book on the problem of evil but don't have it handy to check), but as I recall there is also evidence for an alternative interpretation of the last statements of Job. Something about him being sad for man and appalled by God after all God has to say.

The author of Ecclesiastes also seems less sure of a loving God, less sure of many things, and thus professing - "8:15 So I commended mirth, that a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry, and that this should accompany him in his labour all the days of his life which God hath given him under the sun."

In some ways, it seems the Old Testament God is capricious because life is capricious. I'd give the authors some credit for at least attempting to deal with this.

Most of the New Testament authors, OTOH, seem to not like the idea of Jesus being emotional, even angry at times. I think when one gets into the New Testament texts one starts to lose the all loving Christ as well. Or, there are more dimensions to the New Testament Jesus than I, for one, believed. Some are problematic or contradictory to our common notions of Jesus as meek and humble, espousing turning the other cheek, etc.

[_ludwigm]

The resolution is easy. Jesus is not Jehovah.

As the principle of Jesus the Messiah didn't exist in Old Testament times.
For the jews/hebrews/Israel (choose the right) there was one god.
Not two or three, no son, no ghost or spirit, no nobody. One. Called many ways, by the way.

That never made a bit of sense to me.

Because it doesn't make sense... Understandable.



And no marcionism, CaliforniaKid!

[_Drifting]

I think it's great that God is flexible enough to display the behaviours that suit whatever views and opinions people hold about what behaviour by God is or isn't acceptable in societies eyes...

[_Jason Bourne]

I would dispute that characterization of the God of the Old Testament. This kind of impression comes mainly from only reading the "cool" stories, which the LDS Old Testament materials do tend to focus on on. Most LDS (and to be fair, most Christians) glide over the wisdom literature, the prophetic literature, and the legal literature; all of those give a much fuller picture of who the ancient Israelites were worshipping. Just the concept of chesed (roughly "loving kindness"), which is frequently attributed to Yahweh, puts a damper on the idea of God having a baseball bat ready to beat the crap out of everyone and anyone.

So when one reads the Old Testament are the events that are related that demonstrate a quick to anger, jealous(which God says about himself) vindictive,destructive and capricious God are they simply to be set aside?

I added that the really interesting thing is that we have pretty much abandoned the violent Old Testament God in favor of the kinder, gentler New Testament God as revealed in Christ, but we nevertheless believe that Jesus is coming again at which point we fully expect him to act like the Old Testament God once more.

Only if you are a pre-millenialist, which most Mormons tend to be. Those who are post-millenialists or amillinealists (like myself) end up reading the book of Revelation much differently.

[/quote]

So those like yourself simply believe God will rapture all those who have accepted the grace and sacrifice of the right theological Jesus and spare them the atrocities God will inflict on the evil and wicked unbelievers He created. And that makes God kinder exactly how?

[_Aristotle Smith]

So when one reads the Old Testament are the events that are related that demonstrate a quick to anger, jealous(which God says about himself) vindictive,destructive and capricious God are they simply to be set aside?

Yes, I do believe that God is jealous in the sense that he doesn't want people worshipping other Gods. As for God being destructive, capricious, etc., my guess is that you are referring to the standard complaints about the invasion of Canaan or the destruction of the Ammonites. As I have already explained on this thread, since those events never happened, this isn't an issue for God. If you have another episode demonstrating the "vindictive, desructive, and capricious God" then please be specific about which ones you have in mind.

Only if you are a pre-millenialist, which most Mormons tend to be. Those who are post-millenialists or amillinealists (like myself) end up reading the book of Revelation much differently.

So those like yourself simply believe God will rapture all those who have accepted the grace and sacrifice of the right theological Jesus and spare them the atrocities God will inflict on the evil and wicked unbelievers He created. And that makes God kinder exactly how?

In the future, please understand the terms you are using/quoting before hurling accusations. As an amillenialist, I don't believe in the millenium, nor in the rapture. Thus, your accusation misses the mark. Mormons are pre-millenialists, thus they believe in the same thing as pre-millenial dispensationalists, they just don't call it the rapture.

And before you accuse me of ignoring the Bible (again), amillenialism has been the position of the vast majority of all Christians who have ever lived and the position of the vast majority of Christians who now live. Pre-millenialism is largely an American phenomenon that came about in the 19th century.

[_SteelHead]

AS,
If the ammonite and canaanite destructions never happened as there is no archeological evidence for those events, using the same criteria can't we dispose of, oh say 80% of the Old Testament?

[_Aristotle Smith]

AS,
If the ammonite and canaanite destructions never happened as there is no archeological evidence for those events, using the same criteria can't we dispose of, oh say 80% of the Old Testament?

No. There is quite a bit of material for which we have good archaeological data, and there is lots of material unaffected in any way by archaeological evidence (for example Psalms and Proverbs).

But there is also another point that is worth underlining. Lack of historicity doesn't hit the Old Testament as hard as it does the Book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon. The authors of the Old Testament never claimed to be miraculously translating stuff with peep stones and divine intervention. In fact, they never make any claims as to how they came by their information. The best explanation is that they were writing a theological history, utilizing the best historical data they had. In some cases it was very good historical data, in other cases it was what we tend to dismiss as legend or myth.

With the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham you have books that are 100% un-historical with Joseph Smith claiming them to be 100% inspired. There's not much wiggle room there unless like Mopologists you just start ignoring one claim or the other (or switch back and forth from article to article as long as it helps you make whatever case you want to make).

With the Old Testament you have the following:

• Lots of material for which there is corroborating archaeological evidence
• Lots of material which archaeological evidence does not address
• Lots of material for which the archaeology is still unclear and can go either way at this point
• Lots of material that has duplicate/conflicting accounts of the same event. I see this as a sign of honesty of the final redactor, there isnt't a sense of "getting the story straight" before pulling a con. For example, there are multiple accounts of the settlement in Canaan, that in Joshua and that in Judges 1-2. Archaeology tends to support the Judges 1-2 account. Thus when I claim that archaeology doens't support the invasion of Canaan, that has to be balanced by the fact that archaeology does seem to support the shorter, less cited account in Judges 1-2.
• No doubt that the book is ancient and that the authors utilized sources more ancient than they were. In some cases their sources were good, in other cases not so much.
• No claims to infallibility or divine intervention in the authorship of the books. All claims to biblical infallibility are modern ones.
• Because the authors were writing a theological history, even when they get their history wrong, there is still a lot of good information. It reveals that biases of the author. Because it's theological history, the theology still survives.

[_Bret Ripley]

ETA: Why is the board software automatically abbreviating "could.of course" as "could've course"?

Not sure. Asperger's?

This and other auto-correct faults have been pointed out to Shades before. He fixed some of them but not that one. You can turn this "feature" off in UserCP>Board Preferences>Edit Display Options by setting "Enable Word Censoring" to "Dear God No".

[_huckelberry]

I don't see how you can read God's response to Job and feel that it's an expression of "love." Just a sample, from chapter 38:

3 Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
7 while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels[a] shouted for joy?

You don't tell someone to brace himself like a man if you're going to comfort him. You don't use sarcasm if you're speaking to him in love. You don't start listing your achievements if you're uninterested in self-aggrandizement. This is not a loving response. This is God giving Job what-for.

California Kid, we are trying to communicate across a complicated subject. I could confess that there are ways I can see your point of view. There are pieces of the Bible I view as disgusting. I realize I distance my heart from some images of God in the Bible. Yet I see very differently than you. You have quoted one of my lifelong favorite passages in the Bible, one that presents meaning when dogmas turn to wood.

I believe "brace yourself" can be a most loving expression though obviously not always.