Stark crunches Copan

Oh man, a book-length three hundred and seven page book review! As announced on Religion at the Margins, here is the ultimate rebuttal to Paul Copan's cosy and creative contextualising of the Canaanite genocide (links below). And nobody could bring the passion to the task that Thom Stark does. This guy is like a rottweiler, and while I'm no fan of canine rottweilers, a Canaanite rottweiler is another matter entirely.

In case you missed previous episodes, Copan is a scholar who thinks the nasty genocide stuff in the Old Testament is much overstated. Yahweh is no moral monster, because, um, well, who knows... Maybe because it'd upset the theological, doctrinal and devotional applecart. The task at hand then is to explain away the indefensible. Copan is, on this matter, of the same view as New Zealand Reformed apologist Matthew Flannagan. The task restated, dear reader, is to put your mind at rest, and to salve your tender conscience lest it be disturbed by the blood and screams of dying children murdered at the command of God.

Thom is the author of the brilliant The Human Faces of God, which while coming from a committed Christian perspective, refuses to make excuses for the texts of terror. It is an honest eyeballing of the evidence. An overview has been presented here before. The review, like the book, is approachable by an interested non-specialist, so while the length may be formidable, the content is anything but. Here's Thom's opening paragraph.

I am a Christian. Sure, not by fundamentalists’ standards, but I’m a Christian nonetheless. I say this at the outset because I don’t want my intentions to be misunderstood. In critiquing Paul Copan’s apologetic defenses of our frequently morally problematic Bible, my aim is not to turn anybody away from the Christian faith. In fact, I am critical of apologetic attempts to sweep the Bible’s horror texts under the rug precisely because I believe such efforts are damaging to the church and to Christian theology. After having read and critiqued Paul Copan’s latest apologetic effort, I am obliged to say that I can only recommend this book to atheists who are looking for a good book to give to their Christian friends to show them what’s wrong with Christianity.

Ouch!

Anyone who has been seduced by the arguments presented by the genocide deniers badly needs to download Stark's review. If you have an eReader that handles PDFs, that could be a nifty way to engage with this amazing review.

Links:
Thom's brief introduction on Religion at the Margins.
The Review in PDF (all 307 pages).

Another Apologist Mops Up the Blood

Another day, another apologist trying to save Yahweh from himself. This time it's Douglas Earl riding in to the rescue on a nag entitled The Joshua Delusion.

Thom Stark, who reviews the book on Religion at the Margins, puts Earl's work in the context of earlier attempts by Paul Copan and New Zealand's very own Matthew Flannagan. In a lengthy but tightly argued piece he (forgive the metaphor) puts it to the sword.

Why do people insist on excusing the inexcusable? What possible motivation has anyone got to sweep the texts of terror under a rug of exculpation?

There's a lot worth saying in Stark's review, despite its somewhat intimidating length. Maybe it's appropriate to put in another plug here for Thom's The Human Faces of God which I count as one of the best (and most honest) discussions of these issues in print. But if you're even faintly interested in the horror passages of the Bible, and how they relate to an informed and compassionate Christian worldview, for heaven's sake steer well clear of the Lord's "bush lawyers."

Stark choices: the final instalment

The last chapter in Thom Stark's book is called Through the Looking Glass. After a pitiless exposé of the problematic nature of scripture, and the dark passages that appall people of goodwill, the time has come for the author to show his hand on "these damnable texts."

...they must be retained as scripture, precisely as condemned texts. Their status as condemned is exactly their scriptural value... The texts themselves depict God as a genocidal dictator, as a craver of blood. But we must condemn them in our engagement with them... That they stand as condemned is what they mean for us as scripture.

So, what does that actually mean?

Rather than ask whether a text is revealed... it is better to ask whether a text is revelatory, whether we learn something from it about human nature or about the way the world works.

Still unsure where this is going?

Our scriptures have trained us to reason like war criminals.

Now that's quotable. Damnable texts force us, in Stark's view, into moral choices. We have to make a stand, not just utter platitudes. And we already do this on a limited scale.

The church has long used flawed biblical characters in this way... [David's adultery and Abraham's lying are cited]... This is not a new way to make problematic texts useful as scripture.

[W]e need these texts to remind us of the kind of monstrous people we always have the potential to become in the name of some land, some ideology, or some god.

Here's a salient point that is well made:

The truth is we do not depend upon the Bible for our knowledge of what is moral. If we did, we would be paralyzed in a world vastly different from the biblical worlds. Moreover, if we did depend upon the Bible for our morality, we would not be able to mount moral arguments against the institution of slavery, or against patriarchal polygamy, among other things. Everything the Bible tells us about these institutions is that they are morally permissible...

That should be self-evident, but the reality is otherwise. For every sane, considered voice there are a thousand others, fueled by biblicism of every stripe, armored with apologetic illogic, exhorting us to do otherwise. Therein lies the problem.

A tremendous book full of straight talking. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Stark choices (8)

So how do we deal with the "texts of terror" in the Bible, or even just the terminally embarrassing ones?

Thom Stark begins (in chapter 9) by outlining three widely used reading strategies, each of which he judges to be problematic and inadequate.

1. Allegory: I first remember hearing the allegory strategy being trotted out from the pulpit of my highly fundamentalist church many years ago. The context was the liquidation of the people of Canaan by the tribes of Israel. Bob Morton fiddled with his glasses and explained in his faux American accent (he was a Kiwi) that the text was a difficult one and far too complex to explain fully in the sermon, but that we needed to think of it in terms of rooting out the spiritual "Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites and Jebusites" in our own lives. Even then I thought it was a pretty lame approach.

Stark notes - correctly in my view - that this kind of allegorization is "an evasion of the truth; it is just one more way to doom ourselves to repeating history." These readings "do not directly confront the text; they simply discard the text's meaning." Equally important, "such readings are profoundly disrespectful to the actual victims of genocide, and to their survivors and descendants... In effect it makes us the equivalent of Holocaust deniers."

2. Canonical Readings: These, Stark explains "seek to discover the macro-narrative that underlies the minutiae. The important thing is the forest, not the trees." Anyone who has followed recent posts here knows my position on macro/meta/grand narrative claims already, but Stark puts it more lucidly: "the diverse voices of scripture are lost, and the problematic texts are swept under the rug... Problematic texts are immunized by appeal to some supposed grand narrative that recasts their significance." Again, "the reader does not seek to be faithful to the individual text; rather, the individual text is remade to be faithful to the reader's own conception of a broader canonical message."

3. Subversive Readings: This critique took me by surprise, as I assumed that this was what Stark was leading up to. But no. The example used is of the subversion of Roman imperial language (e.g. son of God, saviour, lord) by the early followers of Christ. This seems a brilliant strategy at first blush, but consider its down side. Stark writes: "If Jesus' language was a subversion of the official transcript, the reality is that his language has only been subject to counter-subversion by the ruling elites ever since." Who could deny that? The persecuted became the persecutors. The categories remain intact, lying in wait to pounce on future generations.

Well, what alternatives remain? That's the concern of the tenth and final chapter, and the concluding post in this series.

Stark choices (7)

Child sacrifice - faithful Abraham? (R. Crumb)

I intended to structure the Stark choices series as a review of The Human Faces of God, but that's clearly not the way it's working out. Thom Stark just has so many worthwhile things to say it's tempting to just précis some of that material. That's a compliment to Thom, but cause for a bit of self-inflicted wrist slapping on my part. Truth to tell, the sting in this series comes at the end, with the two final chapters, and I'm longing to get to that point. But, hey, there's just so much good stuff leading up to there, so maybe it's time to scan through chapters 4 through 8.

Ch. 4. Yahweh's Ascendancy: Whither Thou Goest, Polytheism?

Ch. 5. Making Yahweh Happy: Human Sacrifice in Ancient Israel.

Ch. 6. Blessing the Nations: Yahweh's Genocides and Their Justifications.

Ch. 7. The Shepherd and the Giant: Government Propaganda.

Ch. 8. Jesus Was Wrong: or, It's the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine.

There's enough here to keep us going till next Xmas. This is quite a tour de force, but any further summarising on my part won't do justice to the book itself. If I had to pick the chapters that most had me riveted, they'd probably be the ones dealing with human sacrifice in the Old Testament (hide your firstborn!) and the following one on the genocidal dictates of an angry deity. I'd thoroughly recommend this book, though, on the basis of any one of the above chapters.

Along the way Stark deals to the arguments presented by such apologetic luminaries as Walter Kaiser, William Lane Craig, Gleason Archer, Christopher Wright, R. A. Torrey, Eugene Merrill, Eric Seibert and Paul Copan. Even N. T. Wright doesn't escape.

Okay. Decks cleared. Next time we'll move into chapters 9 and 10.

Stark choices (4)

Forget the people - save my tree.

[Continuing a review of The Human Faces of God by Thom Stark]

Chapter 1 is called The Argument: In the Beginning Was the Words. Apart from wanting, due to force of habit, to take a red pen and cross out 'was' (surely it should be 'were,' regardless of intended biblical allusions), it's an impressive beginning.

Section 1 contrasts the tendencies to universalism and xenophobic nationalism that yell at each other throughout the biblical narrative. The exemplar offered is one I'd never noticed before, the relative value of human life and woody plants.

No, really. The passages in question are in Deuteronomy and Jonah. Here's the former.

But in the cities which Yahweh gives you as an inheritance, you shall not leave anything that lives. You must destroy them all according to the law of anathema - the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites - as Yahweh, your God, has commanded you, that they may not teach you all those evil things which they have done to honor their gods, for by imitating them you shall sin against Yahweh, your God. If, on attacking a city, you have to lay siege to it for a long time before capturing it, you shall not destroy the fruit trees around it nor cut them with your axe, that you may eat their fruit. Do not cut them, then. Are the trees of the field men that they should also be stricken? (Deut. 20: 16-19)

People can be butchered freely, but for heaven's sake don't touch the fruit trees!

But then, the word of the Lord also came to Jonah, who found shade under a castor oil bush (gourd, KJV) after preaching to the city of Nineveh. The citizens unexpectedly repented and were spared, but Jonah was less than pleased. Yahweh then killed off the shady plant...

When the sun rose, God sent a scorching east wind; the sun blazed down upon Jonah’s head, and he grew faint. His death wish returned and he said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” Then God asked Jonah, “Do you have a right to be angry about the castor-oil plant?” Jonah answered, “I am right to be angry enough to wish to die.” Yahweh said, “You are concerned about a plant which cost you no labor to make it grow. Overnight it sprang up, and overnight it perished. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot distinguish right from left and they have many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned for such a great city?” (Jonah 4: 8-11)

Stark notes: "According to the Yahweh worshipped by the architects of the Canaanite conquest narrative, Yahweh cares more about trees than he does about human beings. According to the Yahweh worshipped by the author of the book of Jonah, Yahweh cares more about human beings than he does about trees. It's an interesting argument." (p.6)

The point being that in scripture there is a conversation going on - a heated conversation that stretches across generations. When we read scripture we're caught up in a debate - a whole series of debates - and not a tidy set of coherent theological positions with handy proof texts. "To put it bluntly: the Bible is an argument - with itself." (p.1) That's not a weakness, in Stark's view, but a strength.

To be continued. Scripture quotations from the Christian Community Bible.

Stark choices (3.5)

Before launching into Thom Stark's book in earnest, a quick dive across the Atlantic to press an ear to Don Cupitt's door at Cambridge. The relevance of this droll quote from A New Great Story will be apparent to anyone who is already familiar with The Human Faces of God.

... much or most of the entire history of religions can be found in the Hebrew Bible - including some startlingly-archaic ideas of God (coupled with indignant denials by God of his own past) ... There are relics of a time when God commanded and accepted human sacrifice, including child sacrifice, together with God's later attempts to distance himself from this very unfortunate fact about his past history. (p.33)

I certainly don't agree with Cupitt on everything, but I admire anyone who can skilfully eviscerate a Calvinist construct before you even notice that he's unsheathed the knife.

Stark choices (3)

Today, in the public mind at least, fundamentalists and their pastel-shaded evangelical brethren, rule the roost. Talk about Christianity to most folk under forty and they think, not of Presbyterians, Christening ceremonies and 'Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah,' but rock-style praise choruses, arm-waving, and motivational pastors in smart casual duds. When they think of the Bible they think of a collection of proof texts and motivational anecdotes designed to elicit an audible 'amen' from the folk in the 'auditorium.' Mention JEPD or Q and everyone looks confused, not only the outside observers (and understandably so), but more particularly those seated with Holman Christian Study Bibles on their laps. Indeed, there's a whiff of sulphur on the breeze when you even hint at a critical approach to the scriptures.

But was it thus always so?

The problem is not just that honest, well-meaning Christians believe Evangelical authorities when the claim is made that this kind of fundamentalism is the only proper way to be a Christian; non-Christians tend to believe them too. But the fact is that fundamentalism as it exists in the Western world today is a relatively new phenomenon and there are many ways to be Christian, some of them much more ancient and developed. Because of the volume at which leading Evangelicals tend to speak, however, this fact is well disguised from the view of many.

Thom Stark writing in the preface to The Human Faces of God.

Enough of the preliminaries. Next time we'll engage with the first chapter.

Stark choices (2)

John Collins

"... biblical scholars, especially those of a more theological bent, have engaged incessantly in an enterprise of apologetics, to try to explain away apparent mistakes or to justify ethical attitudes that we now find unacceptable in the modern world.

"Human sacrifice and genocide are atrocities, whether we find them in the Bible or not. Attempts to save Jesus from apocalyptic delusion are unpersuasive. Those who strive to evade that conclusion only become "enablers," who are complicit in the negative effects of these texts on modern communities."

John J. Collins in the foreword to The Human Faces of God.

Stark choices (1)

Once in a great while most of us encounter a book, whether fiction or non-fiction, that changes the way we view our world. Something 'clicks' as we read the text, and the lights are turned up.

Thom Stark's book The Human Faces of God is for me that sort of book. So much so that I intend to comment on it in a series of postings, each dealing with a chapter. The get the ball rolling, a few general observations.

The foreword is written by John Collins, a biblical scholar with an international reputation (I studied Old Testament at Otago with his weighty textbook as a constant companion.) The book carries endorsements by Dale Allison, Tony Campolo, James McGrath, Edward Babinski, Frank Schaeffer and John Loftus (among others.) That's an unlikely combination, and testimony in itself to the author's abilities.

Stark is a young scholar with fire in his belly. He writes from within the fold as a committed - but far from uncritical - Christian. In his sights is the concept of inerrancy of the Bible, and related assumptions that do far more harm than good. This is not a book intended to bring solace for conservative, Bible-believing Christians of whatever persuasion. More likely it'll deliver a kick in the solar plexus. But, no pain, no gain. For Stark there is no hiding away from the problematic texts in the Bible, whether on genocide, slavery, child sacrifice, the polytheistic roots of Yahwism or Jesus' misplaced conviction that the world was to end in the lifetime of his followers.

Needless to say, the apologists won't be happy. But if you're interested in approaching the Bible with integrity and honesty, and suspicious that the apologists are whistling in the wind anyway, then this may be one of the most important books you read this year. I has certainly been for me.

To be continued.