The Violent Old Testament God in Sunday School Yesterday
Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 5:21 pm
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
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