I meant what I said. Iron sharpening iron - and the fact that it works both ways - is a lot of why I come here.
It's been fascinating. My rationalism seemed to be winning hands down - and I wished it didn't; I really, REALLY didn't want it to. I didn't want to be right and even your rear guard action seemed to be a fall back to conservatism, 'mere orthodoxy' at times. Then you rallied and stopped me in my tracks in using my weapons and tactics against me and pushed me back down the hill. Made me reconsider greater implications of the wager, to jump metaphors.
to be consistent we must fear what we hope isn't. Because it might be.
There's that word again.
No position, seemingly consistent or otherwise, that compels us to fear can be a good one. Apart from any effects on our selves, some of the worst evils in the world have been done on that basis.
How can it be avoided? It's inherent in the possibility that God is exactly as described by an inerrantist reading of the OT.
Karl, Karl, Karl. I see your fear. I've always seen it. You're consistent in it. God is not God. God is not the God of the Bible - virtually ANY of it. Any of its attribution to Him. God is not the God we make up in our nightmares. In our fears. I'm not being funny: Stare in to the pit. It will stare back. And it's OK. The pit of eternity from our vantage point of ignorance round it's rim. Jesus, THE divine human, the only one, was HUMAN. Ignorant. Walking on turbulent water in faith.
The tiny mindedness of the God of 99....% of the Bible, of US, is . not . God. As He is. He's bigger. Better. Minded. Why we have to exist at this level of mindless suffering, I don't know. Why we can't be created in Heaven I don't know. But we can't. It cannot be done. Otherwise it would be. Satan is a metaphor for why not perhaps. But I suspect that sentience cannot be created in Heaven. Only in the mundane. Startlingly. Conception can only occur in dirt. Startlingly to me as I've only just thought that: There are no shortcuts in the evolution of complexity to self awareness.
@KarlLB said - It doesn't feel that way to me. It just feels like, well, pretty explicitly what's happening. The OT is full of people committing the sort of acts and instituting the sort of laws we associate with Pol Pot or IS at God's behest and with his approval and I can't see any way through it.
It seems to me that IS worship the same god.
I can only see the god of the OT as a human construct, serving the purpose of the priests/kings etc. The prophets came along to soften the message in many instances and point to a more just/forgiving god.
Well, apart from Elijah and his religiously based mass murder of the priests of Baal for example...
But Elijah is in the historical books—1st and 2nd Kings. It is not part of the writings of the prophets as such. I think the historical writings can and should be approached differently from the prophetic writings.
E., Nick, where are you at? You both believe in God in Christ. Is there any Bronze Age God the Killer in Christ? Or are you, like me, seeing the divine behind the text, despite it? If so, lucky us. And I lose the plot. Big time last year. Realising that Jesus may well have meant everything He said. Good AND bad.
Martin, I've been pondering this for quite a while, and I'm still not quite sure how to answer, even as I’ve written some, then let it marinate for a few days and come back to it. The whole construct of the "Bronze Age God the Killer" doesn't really register with me. Frankly, it strikes me as a warped view of Scripture (as, I’m afraid, the view that Scripture tells us nothing about God, or the “tinymindedness” of the God of Scripture). Perhaps I'm the one who's wrong there, but there it is.
I find myself wondering if it's because I've never been part of a church that took the stories of, say, the genocides in Canaan or of Elijah and the priests of Baal literally. From childhood, I was taught that God is good and God is love, and that that’s the foundation on which everything rests and the framework through which everything is considered. Hellfire and brimstone have never been part of my experience.
I've spent my life in the same denomination. It is a denomination that is not literalist or inerrantist and not fundamentalist. The approach that I have seen all my life is that Scripture is primarily a witness to the Word of God made known in Jesus, so that all of Scripture is to be viewed through the lens of the revelation we see in Jesus, and particularly God's reconciling work in Jesus. ("God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.")
It's a part of a tradition that says that the overwhelming witness of Scripture—from the first verses of Genesis to the covenant with Abraham to the psalms (think Psalm 23 or 136) to the prophets to the Gospels to the epistles—is that God is a god of love, redemption, reconciliation, healing, justice and righteousness. What you might call the "God the Killer" parts have to be considered and evaluated in the light of this overwhelming witness to God's nature as seen in Jesus. If something is attributed to God that is inconsistent with what we see revealed in Jesus, then something other than a straight-up account of God’s nature or work is going on.
But even without Jesus or the NT, I have trouble seeing a”Bronze Age God the Killer” being what is primarily depicted in the OT. It seems to me that if that’s the God the OT presents, Judaism—both 1st Century and contemporary—would look very, very different.
The tradition in which I have lived my life is also one that simultaneously affirms the inspiration of Scripture and the fact that Scripture is the words of humans, conditioned by human understandings and reflecting human limitations.
It’s a tradition that doesn’t really look at Scripture as dictated by God or as a text book on God, but rather sees it as diverse voices of witnesses through whom the Spirit has spoken to the church and continues to speak to the church, primarily as the community engages and wrestles with Scripture. In that regard, it’s a tradition that receives and honors the insights and decisions of the past, but that recognizes at the same time that people and councils can err, and affirms that in engaging with Scripture the church is always being reformed, renewed and called to greater faithfulness.
I don’t know if that tells you anything helpful, or if it even makes sense. But it’s about the best I can do right now.
I think you are wrong Nick. You're projecting your humanist God back on to the bible, down the wrong end of the telescope. Yours is the warped view of scripture if you cannot see the God who killed over two million people by counting in the Bible and at least ten times that many by estimation with billions to come.
The God who ordered the execution of mute rape victims.
And God's nature as seen in Jesus and the Holy Spirit is qualitatively just as lethal. Nothing in Jesus denies God the Killer.
Yes, I've known that for a long time, just as I'm sure you've known that I think you're wrong.
Yours is the warped view of scripture if you cannot see the God who killed over two million people by counting in the Bible . . . .
Only if the passages you refer to must be taken literally and at face value. I don't believe that they must be or should be. Why do you think we do have to take them literally and at face value?
It's about the writers' intent. It isn't literal in the sense of that's how God is. He isn't. But that's how He is projected by the writers from Alpha to Omega. So it tells us virtually nothing about God as He is. We have to infer that from their yearning and our rationality.
But that's how He is projected by the writers from Alpha to Omega.
That’s how God is projected by some of the writers in some passages. It is not how God is described by all writers throughout Scripture. That’s why I described the universalizing of that projection to every writer of Scripture, or presenting it as the view Scripture gives us of God, as a warped view.
The overwhelming view of views from beginning to end is that God, including in Christ and by the Spirit, is pathologically righteous like Grey Area in Ian M. Banks' Excession. To deny that is warped : )
You can't take the nice bits out and ignore the rest. The nicest bit being Jesus. Along with Jonah and Micah and Isaiah and even Ezekiel and Genesis and Job. But even He comes enculturated. Hard. There are bits of Him that have to be rationalized away to make Him in your image. And I won't do that anymore. I do embrace Him, as He was - human AND divine by NATURE, by instinct - and as He is. Post-human.
And I used to LOVE Him as concurrently both. Now I repudiate that. And no, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The baby actually transcends through, above, beyond, below the bathwater. Isn't actually in the texts bar hints and glints, secondary stirrings in the bathwater. God is not the God of the Bible. He has to be inferred despite it.
The overwhelming view of views from beginning to end is that God, including in Christ and by the Spirit, is pathologically righteous like Grey Area in Ian M. Banks' Excession. To deny that is warped : )
I don't think so. I think it's warped to say that "pathological righteousness" (if I understand correctly what you mean by that—I haven't read any Ian M. Banks) is the "overwhelming view of views." It is a view found in Scripture; I don't dispute that at all. But I do dispute that it is the overwhelming view, the primary arc of the story, as it were.
You can't take the nice bits out and ignore the rest.
I'm not doing that. The rest is there, without question.
But by the same token, you can't just focus on the nasty bits and ignore the rest, and that's what it seems to me you're doing when you say the nasty bits are the overwhelming view of Scripture as a whole.
They are inseparable as they are in our hard wired nature from which they stem. God is nothing like that. The God of the Bible is nasty and nice. God is neither. Not anthropomorphically so.
My comment was genuine. Your posts have shown a proper willingness to engage in discussion despite a difference in conclusion. Not just throwing something out.
Comments
It's been fascinating. My rationalism seemed to be winning hands down - and I wished it didn't; I really, REALLY didn't want it to. I didn't want to be right and even your rear guard action seemed to be a fall back to conservatism, 'mere orthodoxy' at times. Then you rallied and stopped me in my tracks in using my weapons and tactics against me and pushed me back down the hill. Made me reconsider greater implications of the wager, to jump metaphors.
Now to Karl!
Karl, Karl, Karl. I see your fear. I've always seen it. You're consistent in it. God is not God. God is not the God of the Bible - virtually ANY of it. Any of its attribution to Him. God is not the God we make up in our nightmares. In our fears. I'm not being funny: Stare in to the pit. It will stare back. And it's OK. The pit of eternity from our vantage point of ignorance round it's rim. Jesus, THE divine human, the only one, was HUMAN. Ignorant. Walking on turbulent water in faith.
The tiny mindedness of the God of 99....% of the Bible, of US, is . not . God. As He is. He's bigger. Better. Minded. Why we have to exist at this level of mindless suffering, I don't know. Why we can't be created in Heaven I don't know. But we can't. It cannot be done. Otherwise it would be. Satan is a metaphor for why not perhaps. But I suspect that sentience cannot be created in Heaven. Only in the mundane. Startlingly. Conception can only occur in dirt. Startlingly to me as I've only just thought that: There are no shortcuts in the evolution of complexity to self awareness.
What do you think? To all of that? Any of that?
Martin, I've been pondering this for quite a while, and I'm still not quite sure how to answer, even as I’ve written some, then let it marinate for a few days and come back to it. The whole construct of the "Bronze Age God the Killer" doesn't really register with me. Frankly, it strikes me as a warped view of Scripture (as, I’m afraid, the view that Scripture tells us nothing about God, or the “tinymindedness” of the God of Scripture). Perhaps I'm the one who's wrong there, but there it is.
I find myself wondering if it's because I've never been part of a church that took the stories of, say, the genocides in Canaan or of Elijah and the priests of Baal literally. From childhood, I was taught that God is good and God is love, and that that’s the foundation on which everything rests and the framework through which everything is considered. Hellfire and brimstone have never been part of my experience.
I've spent my life in the same denomination. It is a denomination that is not literalist or inerrantist and not fundamentalist. The approach that I have seen all my life is that Scripture is primarily a witness to the Word of God made known in Jesus, so that all of Scripture is to be viewed through the lens of the revelation we see in Jesus, and particularly God's reconciling work in Jesus. ("God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.")
It's a part of a tradition that says that the overwhelming witness of Scripture—from the first verses of Genesis to the covenant with Abraham to the psalms (think Psalm 23 or 136) to the prophets to the Gospels to the epistles—is that God is a god of love, redemption, reconciliation, healing, justice and righteousness. What you might call the "God the Killer" parts have to be considered and evaluated in the light of this overwhelming witness to God's nature as seen in Jesus. If something is attributed to God that is inconsistent with what we see revealed in Jesus, then something other than a straight-up account of God’s nature or work is going on.
But even without Jesus or the NT, I have trouble seeing a”Bronze Age God the Killer” being what is primarily depicted in the OT. It seems to me that if that’s the God the OT presents, Judaism—both 1st Century and contemporary—would look very, very different.
The tradition in which I have lived my life is also one that simultaneously affirms the inspiration of Scripture and the fact that Scripture is the words of humans, conditioned by human understandings and reflecting human limitations.
It’s a tradition that doesn’t really look at Scripture as dictated by God or as a text book on God, but rather sees it as diverse voices of witnesses through whom the Spirit has spoken to the church and continues to speak to the church, primarily as the community engages and wrestles with Scripture. In that regard, it’s a tradition that receives and honors the insights and decisions of the past, but that recognizes at the same time that people and councils can err, and affirms that in engaging with Scripture the church is always being reformed, renewed and called to greater faithfulness.
I don’t know if that tells you anything helpful, or if it even makes sense. But it’s about the best I can do right now.
The God who ordered the execution of mute rape victims.
And God's nature as seen in Jesus and the Holy Spirit is qualitatively just as lethal. Nothing in Jesus denies God the Killer.
Only if the passages you refer to must be taken literally and at face value. I don't believe that they must be or should be. Why do you think we do have to take them literally and at face value?
You can't take the nice bits out and ignore the rest. The nicest bit being Jesus. Along with Jonah and Micah and Isaiah and even Ezekiel and Genesis and Job. But even He comes enculturated. Hard. There are bits of Him that have to be rationalized away to make Him in your image. And I won't do that anymore. I do embrace Him, as He was - human AND divine by NATURE, by instinct - and as He is. Post-human.
And I used to LOVE Him as concurrently both. Now I repudiate that. And no, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The baby actually transcends through, above, beyond, below the bathwater. Isn't actually in the texts bar hints and glints, secondary stirrings in the bathwater. God is not the God of the Bible. He has to be inferred despite it.
I'm not doing that. The rest is there, without question.
But by the same token, you can't just focus on the nasty bits and ignore the rest, and that's what it seems to me you're doing when you say the nasty bits are the overwhelming view of Scripture as a whole.