Human Faces of God chapter 6 - 8

It’s taken me a few days (alright … it’s taken me over a week) to get back to reviews of The Human Faces of God by Thom Stark.  I could say that I’ve been busy with other things (And I have.  There was a funeral, a project for my brother, spending time with my family, things at work, sermons to preach, a camping trip…) but the delay in these reviews was probably less a matter of being busy than of being reluctant.

If you’ve been reading my blog posts on this book you might have noticed that the author - Thom Stark – himself responded to some of my questions and concerns.  And he really took me to school.  Public correction is difficult, admitting my ignorance is difficult – especially since, as a pastor, I’m often expected to have the answers.  I try to tell people that I don’t. I don’t know a lot of things, but still they want me to know.  And I want me to know.  I don’t like not knowing.

So the book Human Faces of God has been challenging to me because it has been demonstrating my lack of knowledge in some significant areas.  I don’t know enough about source and form criticism. I don’t know enough about the JEPD authors and editors.  These are things I think I should know.

So I’ve been a little reluctant to get back to these reviews.  But since I’ve started them, it would be a little like giving up if I were to quit posting my thoughts. But I’m back to it now with a few of my thoughts on chapters 6 – 8. 

Chapter 6 – Blessing the Nations: Yahweh’s Genocides and their Justifications

Chapter 6, one of the lengthier chapters in the book, is devoted to the issue of genocide in the bible.

An admission:  In the seventeen years that I’ve been preaching I’ve never, not once, drawn my preaching text from those passages where it appears that God commanded his people to perpetrate genocide.  Even those times when I’ve preached from the book of Joshua and the conquest of the Promised Land I’ve carefully sidestepped the issue of divinely mandated genocide.

We will probably all agree (“probably all” because undoubtedly there are some who will disagree) that genocide is an unmitigated evil.  History, even modern history in our so-called civilized time, has shown us the perversity of deliberate attempts to utterly eliminate a group of people. We recognize this as human evil.  But how do we deal with the parts of the bible where God – the good God – commanded his followers to kill entire groups of people?

Stark shows in his book that these passages have discomforted Christians since the beginning.   The early church fathers avoided the issue by treating those passages with an allegorical reading that emphasized the spiritual lessons, but they were sidestepping the issue just as much as I was. 

Stark also deals with those apologists who have tried to justify God’s command to mass murder and shows that attempts to justify and rationalize those murderous passages are either contradicted by other parts of the scriptures or entail reasoning that would make morality pointless.  Either God is Good and all his ways are good or God a genocidal monster who ordered the slaughter of men women and children. 

I am making a gross summary of Stark’s argument, but he moves very carefully, point by point.  And the question arises: IF we can’t find a good way to save these genocidal passages (and we don’t want to save them at the expense of loosing a good and moral God) can we accept that maybe they weren’t part of what God ordered?  (Of course, this question might mean a radical adjustment of what we believe about the sacredness and inviolability of the text – and that is the whole point of the book)

Stark argues that the genocidal passages come to as documents from the time of King Josiah, whose “unprecedented (and extremely violent) reforms consolidated religious and political power within Jerusalem” and that the stories of Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land function as a sort of propaganda to legitimize Josiah’s reforms, that they are, in effect, origin myths.  “The evidence suggests that much of the history writing in our scriptures falls under this category of ideologically-motivated tradition…” (Page 148).

And this idea is substantiated by contradictions within the text of scripture and by archaeological evidence (or perhaps, by the lack of archaeological evidence).

Part of me used to be really nervous about archaeological studies that seemed to deny the historicity of biblical stories.  I wanted them to be True and Fact – even if they made me nervous and I didn’t know what to do with them.  But it has long been apparent to many archaeologists that the stories in the texts don’t always agree with the stories in the stones.  They may be fictions.  The military conquest of the Promised Land didn’t happen – at least, not in the way that we read in Joshua.

So it comes down to this – what am I willing to give up?  Do I keep the inerrancy and the genocidal God or do I allow for origin-myths and propaganda and keep a God who is good all the time? 

Chapter 7 - The Shepherd and the Giant: Government Propaganda

This, I think, should have been Stark’s chapter exemplar.  It is a clear and concise example of the point that he’s attempting to demonstrate with the book as a whole – that there are contradictions in the bible.

This is a short chapter.  Too short. 

But the case is clear:  one part of the bible says that David killed the Philistine giant, Goliath (1 Samuel 17) and another part says that the relatively obscure Elhanan, son of Jaare-oregim, killed Goliath (2 Samuel 21:19). 

Chapter 8- Jesus was Wrong: Or, It’s the End of the World as We Know it and I Feel Fine

I’ve also been reluctant to get back to these reviews because I knew I would have difficulty with Stark’s dealing with Jesus’ eschatological expectations.

It has long been a criticism of the bible and of Jesus that he was a “false prophet” because of his prediction that his second coming would occur in the clouds of glory within the first century. And here Stark reverses his modus operandi and agues that the gospels have accurately recorded his teachings – but that they never came true.

The first part of this chapter is devoted to showing that Jesus and his followers held an expectation that the end of the age, and the coming of the kingdom would occur within their lifetimes.  And it’s pretty clear. The authors of the New Testament all – ALL – expected that they would live to see the end.  And why did they believe this?  Because Jesus told them they would.

And since I’ve already come to that conclusion myself, this part of the chapter was a pretty basic review. I’d already thrown off the expectation of a future rapture, and tribulation and world wide wrath and destruction. 

The second half of the chapter attempted to demonstrate how this first century eschatological expectation went unrealized – how Jesus’ predictions failed to come true.

And it’s this part of Stark’s argument that fails to convince me. I think a Preterist approach to eschatology makes sense and resolves the issue of eschatology.  (Even if I still have some questions, this approach has answered enough that I can hold it and still work on my questions.)

Stark argues mostly against N. T. Wright’s explanation of Jesus’ end-time, 2^nd coming teaching.  (See his book Jesus and the Victory of God. You could also read Gary Demar's Last Day's Madness: Obsession of the Modern Church, or R.C. Sproul's The Last Days According to Jesus or The Parousia by J. Stuart Russell).   

As I said before, I  hold to a preterist eschatology, I believe that the events Jesus predicted in his Olivet discourse and the events described that book at the end of the bible (the one that everyone talks about but no one actually reads) were fulfilled in the first century – as Jesus predicted.  There are still parts of it I don’t understand.  There are still aspects of this eschatology that I question (I told you before; I don’t have all the answers).  But I don’t think it’s necessary (or correct) to conclude that Jesus was wrong.

Stark admits that reaching that conclusion was a long and painful process for him.  And he encourages his readers to wait for chapters 9 and 10 to see how this is, in his understanding, a good thing.  I don’t know how he’ll resolve that issue yet; I haven’t read the final two chapters.  But I am looking forward to them.  I also want to better understand how he continues to keep and read the bible as it has come to us – even with those unsavory and contradictory passages – since he advocates neither a naïve acceptance of everything in scripture as inerrant nor a Marcion-like pruning of those sections.

As I finish reading the last two chapters I will post my thoughts and questions here.