Better Never To Have Been Born: Is That Like God?

From the Mailbag:

In the story of Noah's ark, its says that God was sorry he'd made all those [wicked] people (that were then wiped out by the flood.)

After Judas betrayed Jesus, Jesus said it'd have been better if Judas had never been born.

Since God knew this before he created them, why did he anyway?

I think it's pretty intense to think that God regrets making certain people...when it's in his power to NOT make them to begin with.

Any thoughts?

Hell yeah.

Notice right away that you're reading the Bible theologically.

That is, you're taking it as an internally consistent, 100% accurate, fact book on a god you believe to be there whether the text describes him or not.

While I think that that's inevitable with any text that claims some special knowledge of a God, it generates lots of problems such as the ones you raise here.

First of all, each of the stories you mention has a purpose that's probably not theological in any narrow sense.  That is, they certainly express the writer's view of god, but whether that view of god adequately describes a god worth worshiping is a different matter.

For reference: in Mark 14:21 (and Matthew following him), Jesus says that it would be better for one to have never been born than to have betrayed him.  Mark's all about the Son of Man, that is the apocalyptic Jewish kingdom arriving.  It's a conspicuously political gospel, with demons that expressly represent the Roman Empire and its foreign spiritual powers.  It's a revolutionary gospel: I'm tempted to call is a Declaration of Independence for the Messiah and his followers. 

And just as each kingdom has its own treason, so does that of Jesus.

You can't untangle God from the kingdom of Mark, it's true.  That's his view of it, and maybe "the view of the historical Jesus," though how you'd know is a difficult question of its own.  I suspect it was the view of Jesus.

Is that your god?  Does the adherence of Jesus in Mark to the rhetoric of "it would be better for hi ever to have been born" reflect adequately the god of Mark's Jesus?  I don't think it does: I think it's a rhetorical demand, accented over and over throughout the gospel, for total allegiance from his followers.

In Matthew, which is far more intentionally "theological" (as opposed to political), matters are a little different.  Matthew's handling of the same story (Matthew 26:23-24) contains a lot of the same words, but because it mutes some of the anti-Romanism of Mark, it's more Judas-focused and a little less kingdom focused.  Consider Matthew 26:25, where Jesus and Judas come to a mutual and hostile understanding: "Is it I?" and Jesus replies "It is you."  No such scene appears in Mark 14, where Jesus emphasizes that it is one of the Twelve (that is, that the act will be treason), but no such exchange appears.

In other words, the spotlight in Mark is on the Kingdom of God, and Jesus there perhaps takes his imagery from the Hebrew Bible and the Book of Job, where we find laments against the day of Job's birth (Job 3:1-15).  I don't think that there we have a theological problem, really.  A rhetorical denunciation of treason against the Kingdom is common to Mark, and fully understandable.  But in Matthew, the person of Judas becomes almost as important as the act of treason itself.  He is scapegoated, standing in for the entire sin and betrayal of Jewish "dabblers" in The Way, and Matthew 27:1-10 has him hang himself on a tree to emphasize that role.  (Luke, unwilling even to give him that much, in Acts 1:18-22, makes him an image of total desolation and abandonment and has him die a quite different death.)

It should be clear that each of the gospels has a slightly different spin on God's role in the affair.  Mark's God will not forgive treasonous "blasphemy against a /the holy spirit" (Mark 3:20-30) that institutes the kingdom.  Fair enough: very Jewish, very Hebrew Bible, very political.  Matthew's gospel by contrast demands a death in exchange for such a treason.

This is why I think it's so important for new and young Christians to get a basic grounding in textual and literary criticism: we're not dealing with texts that have identical theological weight, but Matthew and Luke take Mark's rhetoric and assure that not only would it have been better for him not to have been born, but that that his birth should be undone.  How you resolve that is up to you, but the Bible is clearly not speaking with one voice on this matter, and to sort out what you think, you'll have to consult something besides the Bible.  Your own experience suggests itself.

As for the other story, that of Noah, I'd only add to that the story of Pharaoh (Exodus 4:21), about whom Yahweh says, "When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders I have given you the power to do. But I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go."

Bummer.  Talk about being born to destruction (a theme you can find supported, sort of, in Romans, though I think that epistle too is a little misread by people who did not grow up under the cult of Fate that exercised such influence in Rome... there we have Christian God as master of fate, but that's another blog-post).

These are stories that tell truths, I think.  But the truth is not necessarily that God "for [his] own glory" rigged the game so that humankind loses.  It's that the Jews are privileged recipeints of what they remembered as a fully miraculous deliverance from foreign domination from the West, and it's an attempt to tie their entire identity up in that memory.  I don't really think the passage is about God's omnipotence.  I think it's about his power to save his people and their obligations given that fact.

Of course if you take every detail of every story as being theologically factual, you can't get away with that (hell, Yahweh says "I will harden Pharaoh's heart"), but I don't take it that way.

I think that the point of Noah's story is that God delivers the Israelites through the agency of a chest (or ark) from the chaos of death and destruction.  I think that the Jewish writers re-wrote and re-worked stories that we can find in other forms around the Near East (and even the Far East) to make this point, and they did it in an amazingly complicated and tightly structured way.  (Gordon Wenham worked this out beautifully, and you can see how his pattern for it here in James Michael-Smith's explanation of chiastic structure.)