{"id":977,"date":"2012-04-29T16:03:30","date_gmt":"2012-04-29T21:03:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/?p=977"},"modified":"2012-05-03T09:20:43","modified_gmt":"2012-05-03T14:20:43","slug":"why-christians-love-the-bible-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/why-christians-love-the-bible-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Christians Love the Bible (part 3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the previous post, I talked about objections that many people lodge against the Bible and thus against those of us who understand it as a book representing in some fashion a window onto the true character, practices, and convictions of God.\u00a0<\/strong> Obviously, the discussion here can only hint at some of the depths of the issues.\u00a0 For some of them, you might consider the profound new book by Feldmeier and Spieckermann, The God of the Living<\/a><\/em> (Baylor University Press, 2011).\u00a0 It\u2019s not an easy read, but is well worth the effort.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The final two objections I noted consisted of the claims that the Bible advocates the mistreatment of various groups of vulnerable people, most notoriously the Canaanites but also women.\u00a0 Let me briefly think about those issues.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 First, the Canaanites.\u00a0 A number of biblical texts seem to advocate the eradication of the aboriginal settlers in Palestine.\u00a0 The Bible never advocates ethnic cleansing of anyone else, indicating that the writers considered the Canaanites a special case.\u00a0 The authors of Deuteronomy and the texts influenced by it (notably, Joshua) were concerned lest the local people persuade Israel to practice idolatry, or at least those are their stated reasons.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Does the fact that the Canaanites present a special case reduce the horrible level of immorality associated with their extermination, if it actually happened?\u00a0 No, of course not.\u00a0 Can we reasonably argue that, well, they were uniquely horrible human beings and so their removal was justified, much as some people believe capital punishment for heinous criminals is justified?\u00a0 Doubtful, since it is hard to imagine an entire population, including women and children, so sunk into depravity that execution was the only way to prevent the spread of their contaminating influence.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There is, we must admit, not easy way to deal with the case of the Canaanites.\u00a0 Christians who take seriously Jesus\u2019 calls to love or the earlier prophets\u2019 call to justice will find it impossible to work toward a fully convincing defense of the anti-Canaanite texts.\u00a0 There are a few qualifications to be made, however:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The ethnic cleansing never happened.\u00a0 There is no archaeological evidence of mass destructions of the pre-Israelite population.<\/li>\n
  2. In fact, the Canaanites survived as a recognizable population for centuries after the birth of Israel.\u00a0 Solomon impressed them into forced labor, for example.\u00a0 They were \u201cthe other\u201d for much of this time, but were not eliminated.<\/li>\n
  3. The texts advocating their elimination seem to be much later than the events they purport to describe.\u00a0 The first few chapters of Deuteronomy, for example, assume settlement in the land and arguably even exile and deportation for Israel and Judah (scholars debate this point).\u00a0 That is, the call for elimination seems to be a sort of historical fiction retrojected into the past in order to show how things went off the rails. \u00a0(Remember what I said last time about how texts may not be what they seem at first.)<\/li>\n
  4. This means that the texts about the Canaanites aren\u2019t really about them at all, but about the desire for a sort of national purity.\u00a0 Still a problematic idea, perhaps, but not the same as massacre and mayhem.<\/li>\n
  5. And, yes, the Bible does contain some apparently old stories about how various Canaanite individuals and groups became integral parts of Israel.\u00a0 Think of Rahab, the ancestor of David, and also the Gibeonites.\u00a0 There must have been many others, and probably a DNA test of these ancient people, if such a thing were possible (which it is not), would have found lots of Canaanite ancestors for some Israelites at least.\u00a0 This is not very surprising, by the way.\u00a0 You may have seen the recent study of the gene pool in Scotland, which found lots of folks with Moorish, Asian, Corsican, and other gene markers in people with unobjectionable Scottish names like Hamilton, McDonald, and Stewart.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    There is more to say here \u2013 much more \u2013 but maybe this suffices for now.<\/p>\n

    \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But what about the women, to paraphrase Abigail Adams?\u00a0 We have to acknowledge two things: (1) ancient texts assume a world of limited choices for many people, including women; and (2) Christianity has a very mixed record of validating the lives of women.\u00a0 Here a good bit of history would help us.\u00a0 We would learn that the history of women\u2019s roles in Christianity has been very complex.\u00a0 On the one hand, Christianity made space for women to be something other than a commodity under the control of a father or husband.\u00a0 The creation of monastic life for men and women in the Middle Ages made space for a new way of living that made gender roles worked out in the dominant culture far less important.\u00a0 Many of the modern moves toward full equality have their foundations in this earlier period.<\/p>\n

    \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Moreover, it should be clear that much of the contemporary religious defense of sharply delineated gender roles has little real backing in the Bible itself.\u00a0 For example, conservative Christians often speak of male headship and the need for women to have a primary responsibility in the home while men work outside it.\u00a0 Both of these are simply bogus ideas.\u00a0 Or at least they are greatly oversimplified.\u00a0 Male headship is not a biblical term or concept in any meaningful sense.\u00a0 It is a ghost idea, a misreading of texts. \u00a0And the situation in which home and workplace are sharply differentiated is a product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not the first.\u00a0 Much of the current discussion in church thus seems to reflect a fairly gross ignorance of history.\u00a0 It is almost as deep as the ignorance outside the church.<\/p>\n

    \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Having said all that, on the other hand, we should not pretend that the Bible is really a modern feminist tract very cleverly disguised.\u00a0 Rather, I would argue that the Bible reports gender roles of past eras without necessarily endorsing them, and that, more importantly, it shows how real human beings work toward general principles of dignity and honor for all within the realities that they face<\/em>.\u00a0 Today we face different realities, but we still seek the dignity of human beings before God just as our ancient forebears did.\u00a0 We could simply reject that history and the texts that came from it, but as the historian Simon Schama put it once in an interview on Dutch television (which you can see on Youtube), to be ignorant of the past is to be locked inside the mind of a small child aware neither of where we come from nor where we might go.\u00a0 So we do not ignore this history or dismiss this book simply because it does not reflect our own historically conditioned, flawed, and temporary perspectives.\u00a0 Rather, we seek to find behind the surface appearance of things the ideas that really matter. \u00a0When we do, we learn that all human beings are made in the image of God and are worthy of the fullest consideration.<\/p>\n

    Next time, Part 4 of 4 will appear!<\/strong>\u00a0 We will return to the original topic of why we Christians love the Bible, in spite of all the difficulties we can name, of which we are all certainly aware.<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the previous post, I talked about objections that many people lodge against the Bible and thus against those of us who understand it as a book representing in some fashion a window onto the true character, practices, and convictions of God.\u00a0 Obviously, the discussion here can only hint at some of the depths […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3538,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy Christians Love the Bible (part 3) - ACU Graduate School of Theology<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/why-christians-love-the-bible-part-3\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why Christians Love the Bible (part 3) - 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