I just read with interest and horror your attempt to sanitize the biblical account of the Conquest of Canaan under the rubric of "new creation." So what’s the difference in God’s supposed project of cleansing the land so that the Israelites could occupy it free from idolatrous Canaanite practice and the Hutu’s attempt to cleanse their land of the elitist Tutsi `cockroaches?’ Or Hitler’s grand dream of ridding the world of the corrupting virus of Jewish vermin so that the Arian super-race might ascend to its heights?

You ask early in your defense of Canaanite genocide and excellent and—really—the only important question: namely, how can we "get past our moral revulsion" when reading what Phyllis Trible calls "Texts of Terror?" I would gently suggest that the only way we can do that is to leave our fundamental humanity behind. I looked but failed to find any hint that you believed these were human beings created in the image of God and for whom Jesus died that were being indiscriminately wiped out. You—and other evangelicals who defend a literal reading of those texts—speak of the Canaanites with the dispassion of a pest control operator discussing techniques for eliminating termites.

Lest we shrug off too easily the sheer human horror and moral heinousness of genocide—ancient or modern, God-commanded or otherwise—I want to present a haunting portrait of what the warrior God of the Old Testament might well have looked like to the Canaanite or Amalekite about to be devoured by the Israelite sword. It comes from the pen of Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize winning Jewish author, who was caught up in the Nazi holocaust at sixteen years of age and taken to Auschwitz where he, alone among all of his family, survived. He describes his soul-searing experience upon being unloaded from railway cattle cars and being marched to, as yet, an uncertain fate in the camp.

Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load—little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it—saw it with my own eyes … those children in the flames. (Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that? Sleep had fled from my eyes.)

So this was where we were going. A little farther on was another and larger ditch for adults. I pinched my face. Was I still alive? Was I awake? I could not believe it. How could it be possible for them to burn people, children, and for the world to keep silent? I heard my father whisper, "May His Name be blessed and magnified . . ."

For the first time, I felt revolt rise up in me. Why should I bless His name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank Him for?

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget those things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never. (Elie Wiesel, Night (Avon Books, The Hearst Corp., N.Y., N.Y.), pp. 42ff., p. 78)

I ask myself: can I imagine the God I know and worship stoking those flames? Can I envision Jesus at the wheel of that truck, backing it up and pulling the lever which dumps living children and babies into the flames? If this approximates the character, will and purposes of God—past, present or future, then I too, like Elie Wiesel, must turn away in horror from such a Hitler-God. "Over against such a monstrous concept of God," protest Walter Wink, "atheism is an act of pure religion."

As I have struggled with this problem of the character and nature of God in the face of these horrific texts over an adult lifetime, I have come to some conclusions which, I admit, cannot be supported from all parts of the Scriptures. For that matter however, very few Christian doctrines enjoy consistent affirmation from all parts of the Scripture such as the doctrine of the trinity or salvation by grace through faith. As I try to resolve the inherent tension between the love and holiness of God, I have come to the following convictions.

1. God is, in His Essential Nature, Always Consistent with Himself.

"For I, the Lord, do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed" (Malachi 3:6). When we are confronted with different and apparently contradictory portraits of God’s character, action, and purposes in the Bible, we must assume that the problem lies with human understanding of God’s will and activity, and not with God Himself. There is a difference between what God was saying and human understanding of it. God’s truth is without error but human perception of that truth is not.

2. God Has Disclosed Himself Fully and Finally in Jesus of Nazareth.

The unanimous claim of NT authors echoes Paul when he describes Jesus as the very "image of the invisible God" in whom "all the fullness of deity dwelt in bodily form" (Col. 1:15, 18; 2:9; II Cor. 4:6). In Jesus of Nazareth we see "the glory of God in the face of Christ" (II Cor. 4:6). God is the kind of Father who could have a Son like Jesus (II Cor. 1:3).

The Christian conviction is that God is like Christ. The author of Hebrews implies that there was a vast difference between the clarity of God’s revelation made known "long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways," and the revelation of His true character through "His Son" who "is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature" (Heb. 1:1-3). We see this process of the unfolding understanding of God’s revelation of himself in the way the New Testament portrays large portions of the Hebrew Scriptures—including many direct commands of God—as being superceded in Christ, thus no longer of binding force for Christians: for example, animal sacrifices, works salvation, circumcision, capital punishment, divorce laws, cultic ritual, Saturday worship.

All concepts of God, therefore, must be measured against the full and final standard of God’s revelation of Himself in Jesus, whom He once and for all vindicated as Lord and Christ by raising him from the dead. Paul, who grounds the story of salvation through Christ upon God’s revelation in and through the Hebrew Scriptures, revels in the fact that the old covenant came with such radiant splendor that the sons of Israel could not look intently at the face of Moses because of the glory radiating from him. Yet, even as the old came with glory, so the new has come with even greater glory, "the glory of God in the face of Christ" (2 Cor. 3:13; 4:6). The old covenant, for all of its admitted glory, was nevertheless "fading away," while the new is ever enlarging from "glory to glory." The former was "engraved on tablets of stone" but the latter is etched "on tablets of the human heart." The old inaugurated "the ministry of condemnation and death" while the new "abounds in glory" with "the Spirit of the living God." Paul draws a sharp contrast between the "letter that kills" and the "life-giving Spirit." The "veil" that had for so long shrouded the old covenant, obscuring the radiant beauty of the glory of God, "is removed in Christ."

The happy result is that "we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory." And what is that glory? "The glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For God, who said, `Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ" (2 Cor. 3:1-4:6).

3. The God Revealed in Jesus is Nonviolent.

The most incisive critique of God as destroyer occurs in the context of Jesus’ final journey to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51-56). Jesus and his traveling party were not permitted to lodge in Samaritan territory "because He was journeying with His face toward Jerusalem." The historic and bitter animosity between Jews and Samaritans cut both ways. James and John, to whom Jesus had previously given the name "Sons of Thunder" (Mark 3:17), responded typically by asking, "Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" They were ready to consign all of Samaria to destruction because of the inhospitality of a few. Apparently, it never crossed their minds that not only would the recalcitrant males perish but women, children, babies, and the aged and infirm as well. Their warrant for even imagining God doing such a thing undoubtedly was the story of Sodom and Gomorrah’s fiery demise.

Jesus not only rebuked his disciples for entertaining such a thought but replied, "You do not know what kind of spirit you are of; for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them." Jesus made it crystal-clear that the "kind of spirit" evidenced in such a request, even though it had clear scriptural precedent, was totally alien to his heavenly Father’s character. The spirit that desires to see people burn, for whatever reason, is anti-Christ. Neither did Jesus lend his support to the deeply held conviction that those executed by political authorities or killed in natural disasters were being punished by God (Luke 13:1-5).

The God refracted through the prism of Jesus’ person, message, and mission did not come as the anticipated preacher of divine vengeance. His mission was not to call down the fire of God’s wrath upon the unrighteous and those excluded from the blessings of God’s chosen. As John Dear observes, "Jesus begins his public work with the scandalous, radical, earth-shaking news: Our God is nonviolent and is liberating us all, beginning with the poor and oppressed, from our addiction to violence and death." He upon whom the Spirit was conferred and to whom God said, "Thou art my beloved Son, in Thee I am well-pleased" (Luke 3:21-22), never used his supernatural miracle-working power to hurt, maim, coerce, conquer, or destroy. Jesus is the embodiment of God’s Servant who "will not cry out or raise His voice, nor make His voice heard in the street. A bruised reed He will not break, and a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish" (Isa. 42:3).

4. In His Essential Nature, God is `Holy Love.’

Because God is Holy, He hates sin. Because He is Love, He loves sinners. His wrath is directed against sin because sin destroys the object of His love: namely, humankind. It is because God loves passionately that His wrath burns hotly against sin. God loves sinners with eternal, unconditional, and unchangeable love (John 3:16). God’s love does not represent a change in His attitude because of Christ, but rather a full revelation of His character through Christ. There is nothing that humans can ever do which, in and of itself, will change God’s love into hate, or mark an end to His patience (Romans 2:4-11). The problem of estrangement from God has always been on people’s part, never on God’s. His heart has always been for humankind, reaching out to people in redemptive love: "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself" (II Cor. 5:19).

5. It is sin and not God that Destroys.

The "wrath of God" is against "all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men," not against men themselves (Romans 1:18-33). God’s love is experienced as wrath when men "exchange" the truth of God for a lie (1:23, 25), and thus bind themselves to that which God hates. Then God "gives them over," in freedom, to become what they have chosen to be (1:24, 26, 28). Consequently, they suffer the "wages of sin which is death" (Rom. 6:23). God’s wrath must not be seen as the dark side of God’s nature, nor does it signal the end of His patience with people. God’s wrath is the necessary corollary to his great love. Death was never a part of God’s original intention for humans or for His creation: neither will it be a part of the "new heavens and new earth" (Rev. 21:1ff.). Death came into the world through sin (Rom. 5:12ff.). Death is an "enemy:" the "last enemy" to be destroyed by Christ (I Cor. 15:20-28). God does not do evil that good may come, nor does He utilize "the enemy" for His own purposes.

God’s love is so great that he has given to human beings full freedom to choose their own destiny. This is a wonderful and yet terrible potentiality; for when people turn away from God and bind themselves to that which God hates, then God’s love is experienced as wrath. For example, there is one sun in the heavens. It melts butter but hardens clay. Even so, God is One in holy love. Whether humans experience God in the melting creativity of holy love or in the hardening destruction of wrath depends entirely upon their response to the eternal, unconditional, and never changing grace of God. If they bind themselves to sin unrepentantly and irrevocably, then they too will be finally subject to the wrath of God, and will hear those fateful words on the day of judgment: "Depart from Me, you who keep on practicing lawlessness" (Matt. 7:23).

Here is the good news of the gospel: after sin has run its course, resulting in death, the God who raised up Jesus is the One who continues to raise, in the newness of life, those who are "dead in trespasses and sins" (Eph. 2:1-9).

6. God’s Love is Revealed Most Compellingly On The Cross.

If ours is a Christ-like God, then we can categorically affirm that God is not a killer. He is not involved in punitive, redemptive, or sacred violence. Violence is Satan’s business (John 8:44). The wages of sin is [violent] death (Rom. 3:10-23; 6:23). Rather than sinners being exterminated, children dashed to pieces and wives raped in the "day of the Lord’s coming, cruel, with fury and burning anger," as envisioned by Isaiah (12:9-16), God in Christ allowed Himself to be violently seized, beaten, and crucified. God would rather die than destroy, would rather die than damn, would rather be crucified than hurt or harm the littlest child, and was.

Instead of destroying sinners God allowed Himself in and through His Son to be slain by sinners on the cross. "But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8). Jesus did not die to appease the wrath of an angry God but to demonstrate the love of a gracious God. Jesus did not die to earn God’s forgiveness but to express it. Jesus’ death was not a sacrifice offered up by humans to God but by God to humans! God is saying through the sacrifice of Christ: "I love you this much!" Jesus did not die to change God’s mind about humans but to change people’s mind about God. God’s mind was, and forevermore shall be, one of unremitting love for human beings, Canaanites included.

God’s attitude toward sinners is best seen in how Jesus treated Judas. Even though he knew what was in Judas’ heart and what Judas was about to do, he loved him to the end. His love was expressed through gentle warnings, by making him the guest of honor at the Last Supper, by offering him—along with the other disciples—the cup of forgiveness, and by greeting him in the Garden of betrayal as "friend". What is hell? It is to reject Christ and yet hear His words calling out for all eternity, "Friend, Friend, Friend." Conversely, what is heaven? It is to receive Jesus as Savior and Lord, and hear His greeting through all eternity, "Friend, Friend, Friend."

7. So what about `Scriptural Authority?’

What makes a Christian a Christian as opposed to a Jew, at least in part, is precisely a Christocentric orientation toward the Hebrew Scriptures. In opposition to the second century heretic Marcion who sought to dispense with the Old Testament altogether, believers from apostolic times to the present take its testimony with all seriousness, especially since “these are the Scriptures that testify about [Jesus]” (John 5:39). Yet at the same time they affirm that the full and final revelation of God’s nature and character is to be found “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (2 Cor 3:3). The primary purpose of “the holy Scriptures,” claims Paul in another context, is “to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim 3:15).

Our final authority in exegeting "texts of terror," then, is Jesus to whom the Scriptures give a faithful and true witness, attested by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us. Calvin taught that “It is Christ alone on whom … faith ought to look… . [our faith ought] to be fixed on Christ.” John Stott reminds us that “Our Christian conviction is that the Bible has both authority and relevance … and that the secret of both is Jesus Christ.”

For John Wesley, the sun and center of God’s character, incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, is the kind of generative agape love that sees every person as a choice and chosen human being, fashioned in God’s own image, and imbued with his life-giving spirit. It is a love that sees people as worthy of the supreme act of divine self-giving love, even the gift of God’s “one and only son” (John 3:16). The sanctify of human life established in creation, reaffirmed after the flood, and codified in the sixth commandment (“you shall not kill”), reaches its ultimate affirmation in Jesus.

Alice McDermott rightly points out that “the incredible notion of God made flesh … changing forever the fate of humankind … cannot logically be sustained, if any single life [is] expendable. Any life, under any circumstances… . If any one life can be dismissed as meaningless, so too can the life of Christ.”

Note: A more complete discussion of this issue can be found in C. S. Cowles, et. al, "Show Them No Mercy: 4 Views on God and Canaanite Genocide" (Zondervan, 2003).