Maybe the challenge to us today - it doesn’t seem to have been a challenge to the NT authors - of the apparently questionable ethical activities of God in the very varied assembly of texts of the OT writings, raises another question: how else should the deity have acted, given the groundplan for his basis of operations through a nation living amongst other nations? (That’s assuming he is open to suggestions).

Nation states and their rulers engage in violence with competing nation states and empires. That is as true today as it was then. It’s part of the territory of realpolitik - ‘war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means’. It’s part of the system - unless one could visualise Israel as a contemporary Sweden or Switzerland living as lambs and doves amongst the voracious wolves and serpents of the ancient middle east. Jesus radically changed the groundplan, for reasons which could be enumerated. But it seems to me one should take seriously the issue of the OT deity (or any transcendent deity) working within the national, political and cultural contexts as they existed - in all their fallenness. He (YHWH) didn’t create these contexts - they were the product of a world spinning out of control, as portrayed in early Genesis. Israel of course was something he created - but it still operated in the same world dimension as other nation states, though with YHWH’s apparent intention of presenting an alternative model.

I suppose the OT deity could have created an entirely other-worldly nation state in Israel, in which non-violence was always protected from the predations of other states by magical supernatural intervention. But that the deity worked through warrior people in armed conflict, and was described as a God of war, seems more in keeping with his policy of working along the same grain or in the same worldly dimension as the nations of the world, rather than operating continuously through magical supernatural interventions - although the OT contains its fair share of these too. If the latter were to be the norm, the question would arise: at what stage does a nation cease to belong to this earth at all (if God always supernaturally imposes his will, ethically and supernaturally, on his own people, as well as on others)?

One could say the same, or something similar, about YHWH’s sanctioning of violence as penalties for internal infringements of law within the state he brought into being. Given the contextual, cultural norms of the time (concerning laws and penalties), and the need to bring home the seriousness with which YHWH (through Moses) took opposition to the practices and behaviour of neighbouring peoples (even within the land, as Israel’s neighbours), how else was the imprimatur of YHWH to be given to these laws? What alternatives were there to death by stoning for infringements which required capital punishment, and maybe an expression of the collective will of the entire community? There are good reasons why particular laws and their penalties are not normative for today, although it’s interesting that a similar kind of imposition of law and penalty has brought an end to the anarchy of lawless militias in the Mogadishu of Somalia. The more lawless the society, the greater the need for harsh sanctions? The harsher the sanction, the greater the emphasis on the nature of the offence so penalised - in Israel’s case, its association with the cultic practices of the neighbouring communities?

It’s interesting to note how YHWH’s attitude to violence, when examined carefully, is often at the least ambiguous, if not explicitly disapproving of it. One thinks of the prohibition on David building the temple, on the grounds of his being ‘a man of blood’. Or how often kings who engaged in armed conflict for national protection or advancement, and who may have been, on the whole, national role models, had their blind spots, feet of clay, Achilles heels, whichever way you want to look at it. Even monarchy seems not to have been a direct intention of YHWH, and the deliverers of the book of Judges to have been stop-gap provision for the failures of Israel rather than the blue-print for Israel’s national identity through her warrior credentials.

I’m suggesting that apparently obvious ethical problems (from our perspective) concerning the nature and mode of operations of the OT deity, are often not quite so simple when examined carefully. Also on the issue of systematic theologies, which we all have in one form or another, I’m not sure the object is “To assemble all of Scripture into an internally coherent systematic theology”, or that “These orthodox systems require that all of God’s actions as recounted in the Bible be deemed consistently and perfectly good”. I think that is overstating the case. There is still room for uncertainty - even within systems which seek to provide harmonising perspectives. It is perfectly possible (to my mind) to hold that God is essentially benevolent, even when some actions seem not to agree with such a belief. New, and previously hidden or undiscovered perspectives can provide different understanding. My assumption, taken from the unifying perspective provided by Jesus, is that YHWH is essentially benevolent. Evidence which belies this belief may eventually undermine it altogether, but the proof from my own experience (increasing with time), combined with the experience of the church from over two millennia, and the combined perspective of both on the relationship of OT writings to the NT, suggest that the belief may actually not be without foundation. But it’s always fascinating and instructive to have the view challenged, and always worth further debate.

Incidentally, I’m slightly disappointed, having now realised that John Doyle is not an English armchair theologian descendant of Conan Doyle. The spelling of ‘maneuver’ in the previous post gave it away.