@Left Coast
Also, looking through this thread - it's interesting to see quite a few of our RF friends referring to the 'abominable conduct and character' attributed to the Abrahamic God.
They speak in terms extraordinarily similar, in my judgment, to what the Early Church Fathers had to say about the Graeco-Roman gods of their era. And for rejecting the amoralism of these deities, the early Christians were of course condemned as atheists by the majority pagan community of the Empire, somewhat ironically.
Consider the North African father Arnobius (died c. 330) writing in his book ''Against the Pagans":
CHURCH FATHERS: Against the Heathen, Book III (Arnobius) (newadvent.org)
We shall bring forward Mars himself, and the fair mother of the Desires; to one of whom you commit wars, to the other love and passionate desire.
My opponent says that Mars has power over wars; whether to quell those which are raging, or to revive them when interrupted, and kindle them in time of peace? For if he claims the madness of war, why do wars rage every day?
But if he is their author, we shall then say that the god, to satisfy his own inclination, involves the whole world in strife; sows the seeds of discord and variance between far-distant peoples; gathers so many thousand men from different quarters, and speedily heaps up the field with dead bodies; makes the streams flow with blood, sweeps away the most firmly-founded empires, lays cities in the dust, robs the free of their liberty, and makes them slaves; rejoices in civil strife, in the bloody death of brothers who die in conflict, and, in fine, in the dire, murderous contest of children with their fathers.
Can any man, who has accepted the first principles even of reason, be found to mar or dishonour the unchanging nature of Deity with morals so vile?
why should we pray them to avert from us misfortunes and calamities, if we find that they are themselves the authors of all the ills by which we are daily harassed? Call us impious as much as you please, contemners of religion, or atheists, you will never make us believe in gods of love and war, that there are gods to sow strife, and to disturb the mind by the stings of the furies. For either they are gods in very truth, and do not do what you have related; or if they do the things which you say, they are doubtless no gods at all.
When these early Christians studied the Bible, of course, they found certain things detailed there too that seemed to conflict - at least on a surface reading - with their doctrine of God as this supremely good, loving communion in Himself, such as the narratives in Deuteronomy and Joshua in the Old Testament where God was described as sanctioning annihilation of peoples, or in Exodus sending a plague that killed all the firstborn children of the Egyptians.
And while this seems to go unrecognized by modern commentators, for instance on this thread, these ancient theologians were as disturbed by these descriptions of God as we are today.
One of the earliest 'heresies' to become widespread in the early church, that of Marcionism (emerging circa. 140–155 A.D.), "preached that the benevolent God of the Gospel who sent Jesus Christ into the world as the savior was the true Supreme Being, different and opposed to the malevolent Demiurge or creator god, identified with the Hebrew God of the Old Testament. The premise of Marcionism is that many of the teachings of Christ are incompatible with the actions of the God of the Old Testament".
The fact that such a movement rose against the mainstream proto-orthodox position that one and the same creator God had revealed both Testaments, is emblematic of the unease which some of these early Christians felt about God being described, for example, as seemingly ordering massacres.
In rebutting Marcionism as heresy and defending the integrity of the Bible, the church fathers were compelled to grapple with these unsavoury passages and moreover recognise (contra Marcion) that the New Testament was not itself entirely unfree of some troubling imagery, even if it lacked the actual violence in the Old Testament.
To quote one scholar, Mark Sheridan:
"A major problem for early Christian writers was posed by the repeated commands attributed to God in Deuteronomy, Joshua and Judges to wipe out, destroy utterly, put to the sword the inhabitants of the Promised Land. The ethnocentric in-group morality expressed in these books was in sharp contrast to the universalist outlook of the gospel. The portrait of a violent and vengeful God could not easily be reconciled with the preaching of Jesus Christ. The language itself of “utterly destroy them,” “put all its males to the sword,” “not leave any that breathed” was as shocking to ancient sensibilities as it is to modern ones....The principal Christian response to these texts was to transfer everything on to the plane of the spiritual life through moral or spiritual allegory" (Language for God in Patristic Tradition, p.149)
The patristic hermeneutical principles that were conceived in response to this problem, were that the meaning given to a biblical text must "be worthy of God" and useful to people as guiding motifs. If unworthy of God, then the literal sense was to be rejected so as to retain the Christian conception of Him as Love.
As Origen stated in his basic work On First Principles (4.2):
"Then, again, the heretics, reading what is written in the Law, ‘A fire has been kindled from my anger’, and, ‘I am a jealous God, repaying the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation’...and reading many other passages of Scripture similar to these they did not dare to say that these are not Scriptures of God... but that when the Saviour had come, he proclaimed to us a more perfect God, whom they say is not the creator of the world … Yet also not a few of the more simple of those who appear to be enclosed within the faith of the Church esteem that there is no greater than the creator God, holding in this a correct and sound belief, but believe such things about him and would not be believed even of the most unjust and savage of human beings.
[The simple] think of Him [God] things such that they would not attribute to the most cruel and unjust human being. The reason why all those we have mentioned have mistaken, impious, and vulgar conceptions about the divinity derives from the incapacity of interpreting spiritually the Scriptures, which are accepted only according to the literal sense....whenever we read of the anger of God, whether in the Old or the New Testament, we do not take such statements literally, but look for the spiritual meaning in them, endeavoring to understand them in a way that is worthy of God” (deo dignum).”
And St. John Cassian: "And so, since these things cannot without horrible sacrilege be literally understood of him who is declared by the authority of Holy Scripture to be invisible, ineffable, incomprehensible, inestimable, simple, and uncomposite, the disturbance of anger (not to mention wrath) cannot be attributed to that immutable nature without monstrous blasphemy." (John Cassian, Institutes 8.4).
A stark example of this exegetical approach, is offered by St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 332-395) in his The Life of Moses. The narrative of the death of the firstborn as found in Exodus 12 is a disturbing one for Gregory, and he feels the need to stress this point. Moreover, he argues that it can be accepted that the 'historical events' perhaps did not actually occur (i.e. the plagues), and that if this were the case, his own allegorical interpretation would still hold true:
"How would a concept worthy of God be preserved in the description of what happened if one looked only to the history?
The Egyptian acts unjustly, and in his place is punished his newborn child, who in his infancy cannot discern what is good and what is not. His life has no experience of evil, for infancy is not capable of passion. He does not know to distinguish between his right hand and his left. The infant lifts his eyes only to his mother’s nipple, and tears are the sole perceptible sign of his sadness. And if he obtains anything which his nature desires, he signifies his pleasure by smiling. If such a one now pays the penalty for his father’s wickedness, where is justice? Where is piety? Where is holiness? Where is Ezekiel, who cries: The man who has sinned is the man who must die and a son is not to suffer for the sins of his father? How can history so contradict reason?...
Do not be surprised at all if both things – the death of the firstborn and the pouring out of the blood – did not happen to the Israelites and on that account reject the contemplation which we have proposed concerning the destruction of evil as if it were a fabrication without any truth.
[O]ne ought not in every instance to remain with the letter (since the obvious sense of the words often does us harm when it comes to the virtuous life), but one ought to shift to an understanding that concerns the immaterial and intelligible, so that corporeal ideas may be transposed into intellect and thought when the fleshly sense of the words has been shaken off like dust."
Hey Vouthon!
This seems to be a long way of saying that God cannot morally do anything to their creation simply because they are the creator, and that any time God is said to have done horrible things in the Tanakh, it's a metaphor.
I expect no less from someone as thoughtful as you. Thanks for the interesting ECF reading.
