The reader with biblical questions continues:
2. What about God giving commands that seem to our post 9/11
consciousness to be more like those given by Osama Bin Laden: i.e., I
think the prophet Samuel tells Sauls to kill all the women and children
of some town that they are fighting.
The
Church has not yet given guidance as explicit on this question as it
has on the previous one, but it has already recognized that there is a
divine pedagogy in which the children of Israel were led over the
course of time into a fuller and fuller understanding of God’s will.
Thus polygamy was tolerated under the Old Law but is not under the New.
Similarly, divorce was regulated at the time of Moses, strongly
discouraged during the time of the Prophets, and remarriage following
divorce was forbidden under the New Covenant.
In dealing with the commands in the Old Testament that seem
particularly barbarous, the logical approach would involve taking
account of this pedagogy and recognizing that God was gradually leading
his people into a fuller understanding of his will. In earlier times
(when these occurred), he was dealing with a people that had not yet
been fully catechized in his will and who were still heavily influenced
by the warfare practices of the cultures around them (which included
genocide). He was thus dealing with a "blunt instrument" in
moral-cultural terms and this may play a role in the bluntness with
which some of these commands are expressed.
This bluntness undoubtedly plays a role in these commands, but one may see the bluntness playing out in different ways:
1) On one interpretation, God himself may have decided that the
people of Israel were not yet at a stage of moral-religious development
in which they could approach the question in the nuanced manner that we
today can (and must!) approach it. Therefore, he gave them blunt
orders, these being the only kind they could effectively implement.
2) On another interpretation, one might say that God himself gave
more nuanced orders but the consciousness of the prophet or the
biblical author was not sufficiently nuanced to be able to articulate
these orders in a nuanced form. Whatever nuanced motions of grace the
prophet or author may have received, they ended up expressing
themselves in a blunt fashion due to the intellectual condition of
their day.
3) On a third interpretation–which grants the most nuance–one
might say that these accounts are written after the fact and the blunt
commands were not given in the original historical circumstances but
instead were written to symbolically express the unconditional break
with paganism that the children of God must make.
Each of these interpretations has challenges to face. The first one
is hard to square with the absolute goodness of God. If he is
absolutely good, why should he give such blunt commands? Against this
it might be argued that God is the author of life and so it is up to
him when and how one dies. All life is a gift, and if God chooses to
give some people less of it than others and to have them die in
particular ways, that is his choice.
The second interpretation is hard to square with God’s absolute
truthfulness. Since very assertion of sacred Scripture is an assertion
of the Holy Spirit, how could God allow such blunt commands to find
their way into the sacred text? In the case of the historical reporting
of what prophets said, this could be explained. If Samuel issued blunt
commands then the sacred author might accurately report this without
endorsing these commands (at least in an unqualified sense). However,
the same kinds of commands appear in non-historical texts, such as the
books of Moses, where this explanation is not as clearly available.
The third interpretation has the challenge that it is not obvious
(to us) that this is what is going on in the sacred text. However,
despite the fact that the ancients were at a lower level of moral
pedagogy than we are, they were at a remarkably high level of literary
development and thus capable of recognizing the non-literal nature of
many texts that we today tend to take literally (e.g., Genesis 1). This
being the case, the ancient audience reading the biblical text might be
much more able to recognize the symbolic nature of these commands and
that they were not necessarily given in the original historical
circumstances.
Not all ancient readers might have recognized this, but God has
shown that he is willing to write in a way that not all people will
understand.
Further, one might point out that few ancient readers at the time
the texts were written would be in a position to commit wholesale
genocide but all were in a position in which they needed to understand
the decisiveness of the break with paganism that God required.
As indicated, each of these views have challenges to face, though I
suspect that the third interpretation would be the preferred one of the
current pope and most current members of the Magisterium.
The religion correspondent for the Time of London–Ruth "I’m Too Dangerously Unqualified To Keep My Job" Gledhill–has given vent to her spleen again in another tantrum disguised as a news story.