The Violent Old Testament God in Sunday School Yesterday

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_consiglieri
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The Violent Old Testament God in Sunday School Yesterday

Post by _consiglieri »

I arrived a bit late to Sunday school yesterday and sat next to Mary after our conversation in the chapel after sacrament meeting.

The discussion involved reading a number of verses from the D&C about Jesus, together with the teacher’s attempt to get comments from the class after each verse.

Toward the end of the class, the teacher mentioned a verse that says Jesus “received grace for grace,” indicating to her he grew in his development of godly attributes.

An elderly member of our class took this to heart, and made the genuinely interesting observation that maybe this accounted for why Jesus, as the God of the Old Testament, behaved so badly there but by the time of the New Testament was more forgiving and kind.

The teacher didn’t really like this observation and so wanted to open the subject up for discussion in order to, I think, get a more correlated answer on the table. She asked how it is that we “resolve” this issue.

Here I raised my hand and said roughly the following: “I think it is normal for human beings, both as individuals and as a society, to take the attributes that they think of as good, multiply them to perfection, and then attribute those attributes to God. Today, we tend to think of love as a good attribute, and so we say that God has perfect love. We also think of forgiveness as being positive, and so attribute perfect forgiveness to God.

“In the Old Testament, however, the ancient Israelites thought of power and might as positive attributes, together with not taking any guff off of anybody, and responding with immediate violence when one’s honor was impugned, even though such response might involve a lot of collateral damage. Because the ancient Israelites saw this as a positive attribute, they multiplied it to perfection, attributed it to God, and then told stories that illustrated these attributes.”

Not unexpectedly, this comment evoked some reaction from other students. One said she was recently reading the Book of Jeremiah, and that she was struck by how often God warned the Israelites to repent; over and over he warned them, and he only punished them when they refused to heed all the warnings he gave them.

I said that we are not just talking about the Israelites here, but also about the other nations, such as the Ammonites, whom God commanded the Israelites to destroy; every man, woman and child, and even in some cases all their cattle; that the failure to actually kill all the cattle could result in a curse from God, as was the case with Saul.

Another class member then said he didn’t think Jesus (as God) was really changing that much, but said he had eight children, and he responded differently to his children depending on how they behaved.

The teacher agreed, and referred back to the Shari Dew talk about the baseball game, saying that sometimes we take our children aside and give them a good talking to, and other times we put our arm around them and speak encouraging words.

I commented that the Old Testament God didn’t do either of those things, but picked up the baseball bat and began hitting his daughter in the head with it; and then went out to the ball field and began using the baseball bat on the heads of all the members of the opposing team.

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.

By this point, we were running out of time and so the discussion concluded.

All the Best!

--Consiglieri
You prove yourself of the devil and anti-mormon every word you utter, because only the devil perverts facts to make their case.--ldsfaqs (6-24-13)
_Blixa
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Re: The Violent Old Testament God in Sunday School Yesterday

Post by _Blixa »

The resolution is easy. Jesus is not Jehovah. That never made a bit of sense to me.
From the Ernest L. Wilkinson Diaries: "ELW dreams he's spattered w/ grease. Hundreds steal his greasy pants."
_Res Ipsa
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Re: The Violent Old Testament God in Sunday School Yesterday

Post by _Res Ipsa »

Interesting discussion. I'll bet the responses to your comments can't be found in the manual.... ;-)
​“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
_Fence Sitter
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Re: The Violent Old Testament God in Sunday School Yesterday

Post by _Fence Sitter »

When is the last time the Prophet called the LDS Church as a whole to repentance and threatened consequences?

When is the last time he singled out a specific group of people or government as sinners/evil?

Could it be that as a religion becomes more firmly established its God becomes less demanding?

When you belong to a worldwide religion, enemies are difficult to find.

It is not only our God that is getting kinder and gentler.
"Any over-ritualized religion since the dawn of time can make its priests say yes, we know, it is rotten, and hard luck, but just do as we say, keep at the ritual, stick it out, give us your money and you'll end up with the angels in heaven for evermore."
_Aristotle Smith
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Re: The Violent Old Testament God in Sunday School Yesterday

Post by _Aristotle Smith »

consiglieri wrote:I commented that the Old Testament God didn’t do either of those things, but picked up the baseball bat and began hitting his daughter in the head with it; and then went out to the ball field and began using the baseball bat on the heads of all the members of the opposing team.


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.

consiglieri wrote: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.
_consiglieri
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Re: The Violent Old Testament God in Sunday School Yesterday

Post by _consiglieri »

I appreciate your comments, Aristotle.

I believe different views of God are represented in the Old Testament.

I think it pretty clear, though, that at least those who constructed the historical books (as well as the books of Moses) had no problem envisioning a God for whom destruction was the first option whenver his divine will was contravened.

What do you think?

All the Best!

--Consiglieri
You prove yourself of the devil and anti-mormon every word you utter, because only the devil perverts facts to make their case.--ldsfaqs (6-24-13)
_Aristotle Smith
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Re: The Violent Old Testament God in Sunday School Yesterday

Post by _Aristotle Smith »

consiglieri wrote:I believe different views of God are represented in the Old Testament.


Yes, which is why I'm confused as to why you end up singling out a violent God as the overriding character of Yahweh in the Old Testament. It's almost like describing Martin Luther King Jr. as a serial adulterer. True enough, but it doesn't exactly do justice to the sum total of his life.

It's also worth considering that this is largely a Christian reading of the Old Testament. Jewish readers, for whom the Old Testament is the Bible, tend not to see it that way. Comparisons which make the New Testament look good at the expense of the Old Testament tend to be superficial and polemical, not scholarly nor well reasoned.

consiglieri wrote:I think it pretty clear, though, that at least those who constructed the historical books (as well as the books of Moses) had no problem envisioning a God for whom destruction was the first option whenever his divine will was contravened.


I would agree with the fact that those who wrote them had no problem envisioning God as imposing destruction when His divine will was contravened. However, I see zero evidence that they considered it a "first option" or even a second or third, etc. I don't fault them for this as I see the Bible as an incarnational book, one that depends on humans to write the words down. God uses faulty humans to get his point across, and to look for perfection is a misunderstanding of how God operates.

I would also add to large caveats to your previous quote. First, the Old Testament is also clear that destruction was not simply the result of contravening God's will, it was also the result of obeying God's will. The clearest example of this is the book of Job. You also see this in later, more apocalyptic thinking, such as the book of Daniel. My point is that the Old Testament is not a univocal celebration of God destroying the bad guys. It's much more realistic about how human life actually operates.

Second, the archaeological evidence is pretty clear here, there is no evidence for, and lots of evidence against, Israelites going out and wiping out Canaanites, Ammonites, etc. Thus whatever later Israelites thought, either God never commanded such a thing or Israelites were either incapable or unwilling of destroying their neighbors. My guess is that God didn't command it and they were incapable of doing that. While this creates lots of problems for inerrantists, it does eliminate the biggest latter day complaint about the nature of God in the Old Testament.
_consiglieri
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Re: The Violent Old Testament God in Sunday School Yesterday

Post by _consiglieri »

Thanks for your well reasoned reply, Aristotle.

As usual, it is hard for me to disagree with anything you say.

My comments in Sunday school were not meant to address every aspect of God's Old Testament representation, but rather to put at least that one, primary, aspect front and center, as it had already been brought up by another class member.

After that, my ensuing comments were intended to prevent this unsavory (to moderns) aspect from being swept under the rug with the usual platitudes.

All the Best!

--Consiglieri
You prove yourself of the devil and anti-mormon every word you utter, because only the devil perverts facts to make their case.--ldsfaqs (6-24-13)
_Chap
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Re: The Violent Old Testament God in Sunday School Yesterday

Post by _Chap »

Fortunately, since there is no real entity corresponding to 'The Old Testament God', there is no problem about different texts written by different people at different times saying different things about the deity they describe.

They don't have to be consistent. We don't have to worry about which is the 'over-riding' characteristic of 'The Old Testament God' either. He is not just a literary creation, but a series of different literary creations who relate only thematically.

There - that's nice and simple, isn't it?
Zadok:
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Maksutov:
That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
_Aristotle Smith
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Re: The Violent Old Testament God in Sunday School Yesterday

Post by _Aristotle Smith »

Chap wrote:Fortunately, since there is no real entity corresponding to 'The Old Testament God', there is no problem about different texts written by different people at different times saying different things about the deity they describe.

They don't have to be consistent. We don't have to worry about which is the 'over-riding' characteristic of 'The Old Testament God' either. He is not just a literary creation, but a series of different literary creations who relate only thematically.

There - that's nice and simple, isn't it?


Yep, just like Aristotelean physics, nice and simple! Unfortunately, it also shares the same problem that Aristotelean physics has - that of being wrong.
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