Untangling Cliché: "God's Justice," Part II

A stoning, the biblical prescription for stepping out of line. If you're curious about modern stoning, you can do the Google search. I can't bring myself to include the images here. To this day, the "justice of God" covers a multitude of interpretations of "sins" too disgusting for word or image.From the Mailbag:

Okay, but - apart from "because the Bible says so" - what would be my reason for even starting with the idea that God *is* just?  That such things as "God's Justice" even exist?
I can't really look around at how things go and be able to consistently come to that conclusion.  Sometimes it may seem that way, and sometimes it doesn't at all.

Before getting into your question, let's appreciate the problem again.

For those whose religious vision begins (or begins and ends?) with the Bible, of course that's enough.  The Bible says that God is just. 

Oh, and that he demanded:

the death of young brides whose hymens had been broken for any reason (Deuteronomy 22:13-21);and

he demanded (Judges 7:1-22) the unqualified deaths of the Midianite men, women, and children;and

he sanctioned the rape of the Midianite virgins (Numbers 31:7-18 and Deuteronomy 20:10-14);

he commands that a rape victim must marry her attacker (Deuteronomy 22: 28-29);

and god kills an infant boy for the sins of his father (II Samuel 12:15-20; see also Deuteronomy 24:16).

We could go on at great length, but you get the idea.  I have no interest in toting up the Bible's abominations this way, as people less sympathetic to it than I am have done it better than I could, but I think it's worth appreciating the problem of "justice" and God.  I've described the Deuteronomistic history of Deuteronomy / Joshua / Judges as perhaps the most immoral literature the world has produced, if they're read "straight."  They lay all kinds of injustice at the feet of the ancient god of Israel and make ethical demands out of them.  (Indeed, Deuteronomy prescribes death for anybody who doesn't adhere to their religious vision.)  They use the concept of herem, the dedication of a thing to a god, as an excuse for genocide, something I would never accept in any other religion and something I see no reason to accept in the Bible.Nicolas Poussin depicts Joshua doing the right thing by the Amorites. Just ask yourself, What would Joshua do?

Anyway, it's thought though that there can be no contradiction between the justice of God and the apparent injustice the Bible sometimes lays at his feet.

I'd like to give such a religious person the benefit of the doubt, and speak with his or her voice: I've had many, many conversations on these topics with religious conservatives and fundamentalists.  You hear things like, "God's justice is higher than our comprehension," and "The Midianites were pagans who did great evil.  If any had survived they would have passed on things like human sacrifice."

The hollowness of those arguments should be evident: if God's justice is so much higher than ours, then why bother to say "God is just"?  You don't know what you mean by justice anyway.   In a world where genocide and rape are sometimes just, you might as well stop talking about justice.

And then, too, you have no vocabulary for saying God is not just.  If a tsunami wipes out 30,000 people in two hours, well, it must have been the right thing to do.  Had to be.  God did it, or allowed it, and I don't think there's any way to short-circuit that except by limiting your god and saying "It wasn't my god that did it," or "my god had no control over that."  Which is a huge theological step.

As for the Midianites, I think it's a silly argument to say that they had it coming.  I can't see how that doesn't add up to saying, "We killed the Midianite children because they might grow up to kill Midianite children."  Oh.  Well.  Sure.  That makes sense.

That they might contaminate the purity of Israelite religion is unquestionable.  That the solution to that is genocide is not worthy of respect, let alone worship.  What it amounts to is a war of racial and religious superiority, and I think that deserves as much of our negative judgment in 2000 B.C.E. as it does in 2000 C.E.

Such readers are probably right to accept all this justice-talk "blindly" (because I think it really is blind): their religion begins (?and ends) with the Bible, which by the way is not biblical.   But they should understand that they're using language in a way that the rest of us have no access to.  Justice no longer means what we recognize as just, it just means what the most powerful person on the block (their god) is capable of doing.  Might makes right, whatever he does is okay.

So back to your question.

You might begin not by assuming there is a god and he is just, but rather by worshiping whatever it is in the universe that actually is just.

I think we get god backwards, in other words.

We assume "God exists," and then quarrel about his characteristics.

This is largely because you and I grew up in a world where it was assumed that God was all-powerful, all-knowing, completely just (because if he wasn't, that was just too freaking scary).

The most looming hole in that equation was, if God was all powerful, he couldn't be all just, and if he was all just, he couldn't be all powerful unless we shrouded his purposes in incomprehensibility.

Everybody dies.  Some die violently.   Most of humanity dies, I think, unjustly, in starvation and violence.

Very often this is the injustice of humanity, of human choice, and I'm the first to say "Let's not lay that at God's door.  If we will not bother to feed those children, let's not bother to say God didn't do it.  We haven't the standing."

Having said that, nature is presumably under God's control, and it's a bitch, and takes the lives of humanity without regard to innocence or guilt, without reference to justice at all, whatever the Bible might say.

But the Bible was produced in a strange way.

And I think it's worth thinking about that.

The ancients worshiped what they thought was good, was useful, was right.  They worshiped Yahweh in Israel because they had a story that claimed that this god had delivered them miraculously from a greater power: Egypt.  The Book of Exodus is written in such a way that it makes clear that the god of this little backwoods Western Semite tribe could defeat the gods of the mighty power of Egypt.The bush burns. But a detail sometimes not noticed is that it is not consumed. It's a symbol of unlimited power, an idea central to Exodus, not because it wants to say something incontrovertible about Yahweh but because it is central to the story.

It's worth remarking that the the themes of Exodus are Yahweh's limitless power and self-definition.  Out of a bush that burns but is not consumed, a symbol for limitless power, he tells Moses "I am that I am,"  removing any possiblity that he might be limited to one place or function, as gods typically were.

But this is in Exodus not a statement designed (I think) to express God's ontology, what he is in himself, but to emphasize what he is in the story: bigger than any god the Egyptians can produce, sufficient for the deliverance of the people he claims, and not to be limited by a place.  (The wandering in the wilderness represents or capitulates the history of a tribe of Semites.  I can't overstate the importance of having a portable god in the ancient world.)

Putting the whole thing another way, their god comes to them not as a theological proposition ("I am all powerful, all knowing, utterly just") but as a story in which things that are in this world (a Semitic tribe delivered from Egypt in a way they saw as miraculous) become entangled with things that are not visible.  But they are not "false": they are images.  They are poetry.  They are stories.  And they're the best way of saying what it is that the story-teller wants to say.

When you read Exodus theologically, you run into all sorts of problems, beginning with justice: what's the "justice" in Yahweh playing both sides of the chessboard and "hardening Pharaoh's heart" just so he can show his glory?  That means that Yahweh actually prevents Pharaoh from doing the right thing and then punishes him for not doing it!  Where's the justice in that?

If we read it theologically therefore, and not as story, we are senseless in terms of justice.

But at the heart of Exodus is the belief that there is a force strong and just, or at least strong and on the side of the storyteller, who defines justice for himself: not being enslaved to a foreign power.

This is not a "universal" definition of justice.  But it is not untrue.  Notice that we are thrown back on saying that Yahweh is defined here as just in (and only in) terms that the storyteller defines.  And that definition is thrown down into history where we have happened to be shaped by that story and agree, "Yes, it is better that mighty powers do not enslave the weak.  And there is a force in the world that throws down even the mighty, and this is worthy of worship by those who are so liberated by it."

What that force is in itself is not addressed, or capable of being addressed.  But whatever it is, it's worth your worship.  Especially if you happen to be weak.

If you're a tyrant, it's worth fearing: it's more powerful than you are.

What is justice to you?  Where do you see it given life and force?

Look for a chance to tell that story.

Sing about it.

Make laws in accordance with its habit of delivering the meek.

Write that justice large.

Give it a name.

Call it "god" if you like.