Cannanite Conquest & Lewis
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 at 7:00AM | by Otter Undeception, a blog worth tucking into your biblical study bookmarks no matter what your spiritual inclinations, contains this gem from C. S. Lewis that actually makes a terrific point that Touchstone, myself, and others are constantly at pains to make to Christians: that God is either not worth worshiping or that he is good, and where the Bible says he is not good, we mustn't hesitate to identify the conflict for what it is: a serious problem for views of inerrancy (or at least the inerrancy of a simplistic historical reading of those texts).
The Undeception blog entry is specifically in reference to the Canaanite genocides described in the Bible's Deuteronomistic history, passages where the God of Israel demands the obliteration of ethnic communities.
That's not to say that subtleties are not possible. But they are not endlessly possible or even desirable to any great extent.
Lewis:
On my view one must apply something of the same sort of explanation to, say, the atrocities (and treacheries) of Joshua. I see the grave danger we run by doing so; but the dangers of believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him ‘good’ and worshiping Him, is still greater danger. The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of Scriptures is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two. Indeed, only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissible.
Reader Comments (1)
The goodness of God stems from His perfection, not in the sense of being flawless, but in the sense of being complete. God is the absolute undiluted concentration of all that is good: love, mercy, peace, grace, honor, etc..., but He is also capable of undiluted concentrated cruelty, jealousy, murder and hatred. The bible records God saying, "I create evil." (Isaiah 45:7 - I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.) To ignore either end of the spectrum of God is to flatten Him into a fictional character on a page.
This is the terror of God: Deuteronomy 32:39 See now that I, even I am he, and there is no god with me: I kill and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand.
But, this hard God of Deuteronomy has more to reveal: His astonishing mercy: He often chooses to exercise His mercy over His jealous justice, and the fact that He does this is evidence of the power His love wields. This is the Triune God, the God that must divide Himself into the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He causes the sun to rise each morning, bleeds that we might live, and chooses to live within us, though we often make for a pretty dirty house.
This is the Awesome God Rich sang about. We turned that song into something stupid and trite, just like we have done with God, (humanity has a desperate need to shrink God so they can pretend to be equal to Him), but the lyric is devastating none the less: "there is thunder in His footsteps, and lightening in His fist."
I think, deep down, people know this, but our insistence on worshiping the God we've created for ourselves makes us reluctant to get close to the Perfect God. Getting closer to God means you have to accept all of Him: the beautiful and good, along with the ugly and bad. Job understood this. Job was closer to God than most, because he knew and accepted that he was innocent and he suffered at the hand of God. God revealed Himself to Job in a complete way: with both mercy and cruelty, because Job was very close to Him. And Job was brave enough to look God in the eye.