How do you reconcile the Old Testament God

Peregrinus wrote: »

Couple of thoughts:

First, this isn’t a problem just for Christians, or a problem that only emerges when you contrast the Old Testament with the New. Even within the OT there are striking disparities between different presentations of God and, anyway, the warlike vengeful picture of God is problematic in itself. So you have, e.g., Jewish commentators addressing the same question (though, obviously, without any reference to Jesus Christ).

Secondly, the approach you suggest here is a common response. God’s revelation of himself unfolds in history, over time, and therefore the way in which God is perceived by his people changes. Scripture can be seen as a record of the evolution of our understanding of God

There are time where is very pointed. For example, in the story of Abraham and Isaac, Abraham starts out by understanding God as the kind of God who demands human sacrifice, and ends up by understanding that God is not that kind of God at all.

It’s stirring stuff, obviously, and loaded with imagery and symbolism. But one of the things that’s going on here is that Elijah is looking for God in nature; in storms, and earthquakes and fires. And he doesn’t find him there; instead he finds God in a tiny interior voice. And the God that he finds there is a God that knows him by name, and that is concerned about him. And, again, if you think this story is about more than just Elijah, what it points to is a people who started out with a nature god, a god of thunder and earthquakes and so forth, but who have come to understand that God is, in truth, quite different from that.

Right. Christians add a further layer to that. We see Christ as the fullness of God’s revelation of himself, and therefore they see the evolving understanding of God that is laid out in the OT as leading up to an understanding shaped by the encounter with Christ. History is unfolding on a Christ-centred plan, in this view of the matter. But, as pointed out, the OT does not belong to Christians alone. Jewish commentators obviously wouldn’t adopt this Christ-centred reading, but I think they’d have no problem agreeing with the foundation of it, that the OT captures a progressively-unfolding understanding of God, and that people who start out looking for protection from storms and earthquakes, or seeking to find security in the ability to smite their enemies, begin by slotting God into that mould, and only slowly and over many generations come to understand God in the way he is, rather than in the way they want or need him to be.

Peregrinus wrote: »

It’s never God speaking.

Before you start piling wood around the stake to torch me, let me explain.

The scriptures (with the exception of a couple of psalms) are not written in God’s voice, or from God’s point of view. There’s an authorial voice telling us that this happened, that happened, so-and-so said this, so-and-so did that. Sometimes, so-and-so is God. In other words, God is one of the characters in an account narrated by the author. Sometimes the author is known. Sometimes the author is pseudonymous, or the text is attributed by tradition to a known person who may not, in fact, have written it. And sometimes the author is completely anonymous. But the author is never God, and never presents as God.

Right. When they author tells us that God said this, or God did that, it’s always in relation to an interaction with other characters. We see little of God’s interior life; nothing of his interaction with angels and archangels; cherubim and seraphim in the courtyards and gardens of the heavens. We never get God’s backstory. And God is never presented as directly addressing the reader; he always addresses, responds to, etc, other characters or events in the story.

From which we conclude; God may be author of creation, but he is not the author of the scriptures. The scriptures were written by humans - humans acting under divine inspiration, maybe, but humans. And the tell a story in which God only appears in his interactions with his people, and those interactions are told from the point of view of the people, never from the point of view of God.

So, the scriptures are not God speaking. They are men and women speaking about God.

So, turning to the story of Abraham and Isaac, one of the puzzling things about this story (apart from the obvious thing) is that God is presented as changing his mind. In verse 2 he wants Abraham to kill his son; by verse 12 he wants the exact opposite. Yet God is unchanging; the scriptures stress this at several points, and it’s one of the inevitable corollaries of his perfection. So how can an unchanging God change?

He can’t, is the answer, but our perception of him can, and scripture records our changing perceptions. We’re told in verse 1 that the point of the Abraham and Isaac story is that “God put Abraham to the test”. The obvious understanding is that the test was “Are you willing to kill your son for me?” But maybe, actually, there was another test; “Are you able to let go of the preconceptions you have about me, and come to a truer understanding?”

Abraham, as we already noted, is the father of the Jewish people; Abraham’s ancestors are not considered to have been Jews. Let’s call them the proto-Jews. The possibility is that the proto-Jews did practice child sacrifice; we infer this from the fact that when the Jews emerged as a distinct people the cultures around them (and from which they had emerged) practiced it. Most likely the repudiation of a past practice of child sacrifice is one of the things that shaped the Jews as a separate and a distinct people.

But, the thing is, if you’ve been practicing child sacrifice, it’s really, really difficult to repudiate it, since that means acknowledging that you have killed your children for no good reason. Once you have done something so dreadful, you have a really, really powerful need to continue to believe that you were right to do it; that you had to do it, since how else are you to live with yourself? So as a community, making the leap from practicing child sacrifice to condemning it is difficult and divisive and frightening and painful. And perhaps that is the test that this story points to.

Abraham’s initial perception that God wants him to sacrifice Isaac is wholly sincere. When the text says “God said ‘Take your son Isaac [and] offer him up as a burnt offering’”, that is what Abraham understood God to be saying. This account of what God said is offered from Abraham’s point of view, not from God’s. At the other end of the story, God sends an angel to stop Abraham. The angel is significant, because angels in scripture are especially authoritative messengers on God’s behalf. When a prophet tells you what God thinks on a particular issue, you can reject that (and people usually do); when an angel tells you, you listen. So the angel is there to underline the point that Abraham initially thought that God wanted a sacrifice, but now he thinks that God doesn’t - and, this time, Abraham’s got it right; this understanding is authentic.

A-la-cartism suggests that you pick the bits of scripture that appeal to you while dismissing the other bits. And, yeah, that would be easier, to be honest. But you’re right; that’s not good enough. The whole of scripture is important; that’s why it’s all scripture.

I think the right approach is not to see scripture as a series of simplistic statements, some of which must be right and some of which must be wrong. The better approach is to think about scriptural texts as a whole; what the contradictions and contrasts mean, why are they there, what do they tell us? It’s not as though the generations that produced these scriptures, and the countless generations that have read them and engaged with them since, all failed to spot these inconsistencies and we are the first generation to be gifted with the critical insight of noticing them. The people who wrote, edited, compiled and redacted these texts (a) were as capable as we are of spotting these things, and (b) included them nevertheless, and (c) we believe, did so under divine inspiration. These contradiction and tensions and inconsistencies are there because they’re important. And if we find two statements that, read literally, contradict one another so that they cannot both be literally true, that may just underline one of the first lessons that we should be drawing from all of this; an excessively literal reading of scripture is not authentic, and is not what we are called to.

santana75 wrote: »

For a long time I didnt read the Old testament for fear of what I'd find. I recalled stories of fire and Brimstone from my childhood, where a priest would lay it on thick with trowel. But eventually I tipped my toe so to speak, starting with Proverbs, then psalms. I decided then to start from the beginning in Genesis and I couldnt put it down. I looked forward to reading it every day and after a while I started to think the OT was atually better than the NT. There was so much in there, Jesus is all over the OT, which blew my mind. It was only after reading the OT from start to finish that I was able to reconcile the so called genocidal God of that book. To me, I got it, there was no conflicts within me about things God did or said and I think its simply down to the fact that I trust God. Whatever he did I know he needed to do at that time. Take for example God's command to Joshua to go into the land of Canaan and wipe out the inhabitants. To the casual reader that would seem harsh but if you read the whole of the OT you can see what was going on in these places: Sacrificing children to Idols, orgies in the temple of God, sacrificing animals to false gods, sacrificing adults aswell, depraved sexual practices involving humans and animals and children, wickedness of every imaginable kind.......Theres also lots of mentions of the land becoming corrupted as a consequence of how people lived. Which makes me think about Global warming and climate change.
But God had reasons for doing what he did and in the end it comes down to whether or not you trust God and take him at his word.