Category Archives: Theology

Reparameterizing Time

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In recent posts I’ve been discussing whether the universe began or not.

Perhaps the most important issue which I have not yet discussed, is the idea (I think originally due to Charles Misner, first pointed out by St. Edward Arthur Milne, and independently by St. Charles Misner) that it may not be well-defined whether time has a beginning or not.  That is, suppose you have a model in which there is a time coordinate \(t\), and time has a beginning in the sense that the only allowed times are \(t > 0\).  Well, in General Relativity we are free to use whatever time coordinate we like, and nothing stops us from defining a new time coordinate in terms of the old one, let’s say \(\tau = \log(t)\).  If you look at a plot of the log function, you’ll see that \(\tau\) ranges from \(-\infty\) to \(+\infty\).

However, this type of time reparameterization may not be very physical once you get down to the Planck time, about \(10^{-43}\) seconds, when quantum gravity effects become important.  Times less than that might not be well-defined.  In any case, the Misner argument suggests that we need to be more careful to define what we mean by time having a beginning.

Similarly, atheist philosopher Quentin Smith has argued that the standard Big Bang Model is inconsistent with divine creation, due to it not really having a beginning, even though the past is finite.  Smith argues that because the time \(t = 0\) is singular, technically it shouldn’t be included in the spacetime, so actually only times with \(t > 0\) exist.  That means that there is no initial moment of creation, and therefore, he claims, God cannot have created the universe.

This is somewhat reminiscent of Hawking’s claim that the no boundary proposal doesn’t have the right sort of beginning, and it seems to me that my Fuzzing into Existence post is also applicable.  If God is like an author, then he can make a story in which time works in whatever way he pleases.

According to Smith, each time \(t\) exists because the preceding times exist, and indeed the laws of physics hold at a given time \(t\) (according to him) because they hold at earlier times.  Since each moment of time is fully explained by those before, he claims that the universe is therefore self-caused and therefore fully explained, with no more explanation possible.  (Of course, if time is continuous, then we could make a similar infinite regress of times going back closer and closer to any finite time \(t\).  Smith has to struggle a bit to explain why his argument doesn’t apply there…)

Now to me, this seems like the sort of explanation which is really no explanation at all.  A satisfying worldview should explain as much as possible with as few assumptions as possible.  If the laws of physics have some property \(X\) (e.g. having an electron field, or whatever) now because they were like \(X\) a minute ago, and so on all the way back arbitrarily close to the beginning, that doesn’t in any way satisfy my curiosity about why they are like \(X\) instead of some other way \(Y\) (say, having no charged particles).  For if they had been \(Y\) for all time, I could have made the same argument.  So it seems that there is a potentially meaningful question “Why are the laws of physics like \(X\) rather than like \(Y\)”, which Smith’s statements do not really explain.  Maybe there is no explanation, and we have to take \(X\) being the way it is as a fundamental fact.  But to say that there could not possibly be an explanation seems rather dogmatic.

And if God exists, then he can explain this fact.  God’s will chooses what the laws of physics will be for all time.  So he can choose for the universe to be like \(X\) instead of like \(Y\).  This would be the fundamental explanation.  Whether or not it is a useful explanation for us as human beings, would depend on whether our puny minds can identify the actual reasons why God might prefer \(X\) over \(Y\).

The Kalam argument has some intuitive appeal if you think that the universe could not have begun without some causal reason.  Evaluating this claim requires an analysis of what causation is, and why one would think in various situations that a cause is necessary.  But the first preliminary question is whether there are any facts to be explained by the putative cause.  It seems to me that there are.

All of the same reasoning about \(X\) and \(Y\) would also apply if time stretches back to \(-\infty\).  There would still be various timeless facts about the universe which would not really be explained by the infinite regress.  This suggests that the Kalam argument may be misguided to the extent that it attempts to prove God from a temporal beginning a finite time in the past.  The most important issues are the same whether time goes back finitely or infinitely.

But having said all this, it does seem a little bit weirder that the universe should exist for a finite amount of time with no external explanation, than that it should exist for an infinite time with no explanation.   Historically, many materialists (such as Lucretius) have believed that time is infinite, due to their belief that it is impossible for something to come from nothing.  Conversely, monotheists have mostly believed that the universe has a beginning, either for philosophical reasons or because the Bible says so.  (St. Thomas Aquinas argued that God could have created an infinite past, but that divine revelation tells us he didn’t.) To that extent, Big Bang cosmology appears to vindicate the standard religious view over the standard nonreligious one.

(Of course, the same cannot be said if—unlike St. Thomas or St. Augustine—one also takes the 6 day creation about 6,000 years ago literally.  Some fundamentalists have argued that this problem can be solved by reparameterizing our coordinate system, but that just seems silly to me.  Also, the days are not in the right order to correspond to the scientific chronology.)

But a Theist could believe that God created time going back infinitely, without contradicting themselves, so long as they are prepared to be flexible about what “creation” means.  Similarly, an Atheist could believe that the universe just started existing 13.8 billion years ago for no reason, without contradicting themselves, so long as they are prepared to be flexible when deciding when explanations are called for.  All four views are logically consistent; the real question is which viewpoint explains the most with the least.

Fuzzing into existence

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In the last couple of posts, I’ve discussed the Hartle-Hawking proposal and the math behind it.  Now let’s discuss the theological implications.

In his Brief History of Time (written 1988; I’m just going to be engaging with this book and not with any of his more recent pronouncements), Hawking has the following famous saying about the Hartle-Hawking state:

The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe.  With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people [!] have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws.  However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started—it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork, and choose how to start it off.  So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator.  But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither a beginning nor end: it would simply be.  What place, then, for a creator?

The first question to ask here is who counts as “most people”?

The majority of people in the world believe in some type of God or gods capable of supernatural intervention.  Even in the Western world, the majority of people believe in God (as Hawking indicates), and the majority of those believe in a religion called Christianity which teaches that God does produce miracles from time to time.

If Hawking means the English or the Europeans, then admittedly there has been a marked decline in religious faith in Europe (much less so in the US) and many “Christians” there have a merely nominal or cultural affiliation.  But belief in miracles is still far from nonexistent.

In any case, I am obviously not the target demographic, since I believe that God has done some remarkable things since that moment, perhaps 13.8 billion years ago, when he set the ball rolling.  Or was there such a moment?

Hawking suggests that (if his model is correct) there was no such moment of creation.  Not, according to him, because the universe goes infinitely far back in time—he says that it doesn’t.  Rather, because the geometry of spacetime is rounded off like a sphere, so that there is no special beginning point, but rather a whole region of points none of which would be any better or worse as a beginning.  As he says:

The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside of itself.  It would just BE.

Now this only works if you go to imaginary time to describe the universe.  With respect to real time, the Hartle-Hawking state does go back forever in time (with high probability).  So if real time is what is important, then what Hawking says about the absence of a beginning is still true, although for a different reason.

If the Hartle-Hawking proposal is right, this could itself be taken as good reason to endorse an “imaginary time” view of the universe, although I’m not sure that’s a consistent thing to do given that we at any rate seem to live in real time.  But Hawking himself expresses a more ambivalent view:

So maybe what we call imaginary time is more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like.  But, according to the approach I described in Chapter 1, a scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations: it exists only in our minds.  So it is meaningless to ask: which is real, “real” or “imaginary” time?  It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description.

Yet on this more positivistic view where the model is only aiming to be a “useful description”, how could one use it to draw the metaphysical deductions Hawking wants to make, about there being no “place” for a Creator?  But let’s leave that aside, and accept the “imaginary time” point of view for purposes of our theological excursion, since it doesn’t much matter whether the universe lacks a beginning because it’s closed off like a sphere, or because it goes back in time forever.

Now when Hawking asks rhetorically whether there is a “place” for a Creator, the context suggests that he’s not so much asking whether there’s good reason to believe in a Creator, but whether there even could be a Creator, given the absence of a clear first moment of time.  What would there be left for him to do?   Aside from deciding that there should be a universe, selecting the laws of physics for said universe, deciding that the Hartle-Hawking state is the prettiest state for it to be in, and then (according to Hawking) deciding not to intervene even if it turns out we could use some help.  Other than that, it seems like there is nothing left for God to do!

Really, Hawking is assuming (quite explicitly) that Science has already displaced God to such an extent that the only “place” that could be left for him is to push the button to make everything go, and then “sit back and watch”.  (This view is often called Deism nowadays, although historically Deists actually had a much more robust view of divine providence, and merely rejected the miracles and special revelations of particular religions.)

This rather limited God is the type of bad theology which makes religious people throw around the phrase “God of the Gaps”, although I still believe that this term is highly misleading and should be retired.  I tried to express a better set of points in that post:

1. Any time we ever believe in anything rationally, we do so because there is some kind of “gap” in our understanding of how the universe works, which is filled by postulating the existence of that thing.

2. All phenomena which occur in Nature do so because God sustains the world in being, thus (at least indirectly) causing everything.

Hawking allows no role for God as the Sustainer of all existence.  But God’s role in “sustaining” the world is not really a different type of act from his act of “creating” it.  Hawking invites us to look at the world from a 4-dimensional perspective; in this perspective all points of spacetime exist because God gives them the power to exist, delineating the role that each one plays in the bigger scheme of things.  From that perspective, Creation is something which is happening NOW, not just something which happened (or didn’t happen) 13.8 billion years ago.  Stated in a tenseless way, for all the things that exist, they exist because God chooses for them the conditions of their existence.  (One of those conditions being that they are causally related in particular ways to the events before, after, or around them.)

God’s role in creation is not a “mechanical” one, providing the initial impetus or force to get the machine working, which can then run for a while on its own.  God is more like an Author writing a story.  An Author stands outside the time-stream of their own story.  As my Dad said in a Slashdot interview:

Once you see the universe from that point of view, many arguments fade into unimportance, such as Hawking’s argument that the universe fuzzed into existence at the beginning, and therefore there was no creator. But it’s also true that the Lord of the Rings fuzzed into existence, and that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a creator. It just means that the creator doesn’t create on the same schedule as the creature’s.

If God is creating the universe sideways like an Author, then the proper place to look for the effects of that is not at the fuzzy edges, but at the heart of the story. And I am personally convinced that Jesus stands at the heart of the story. The evidence is there if you care to look, and if you don’t get distracted by the claims of various people who have various agendas to lead you in every possible direction, and if you don’t fall into the trap of looking for a formula rather than looking for God as a person.

To think that God creates the universe and then stands back to watch it, is like thinking that an Author only has to write the first sentence, and then they can read the rest.  Bad news for aspiring fiction writers: you have to write the whole thing.  Maybe once the plot gets into full swing, the characters will start having a “mind of their own”, and fail to act in the way the Author originally intended.  But the Author is still in charge.

Nor does he have to “intervene” in order to get things to come out the way he wants them to: everything in the book is subject to the control of the Author, both the parts which follow naturally and inevitably from the previous scenes, and the parts where the Author does something totally unexpected.  In any case, the main “point” of the story is seldom found right at the beginning, but develops as the story progresses.

Traditionally, books have a fixed and determinate sequence of letters, but if the Author wants to start out with something which doesn’t have a definite time order (say a map on the first page) then that doesn’t impugn their authorship of the rest of the book.  And if the Author wants to make their book be infinitely long in both directions….well, that would probably be easier for God than for a human writer, wouldn’t it!

So I think that belief in the creation of the universe does not really depend on there being a first moment of time.  Conversely, this might also make one suspicious of the kalam argument championed by St. William Lane Craig in the debate.  If the doctrine of Creation is not about there being a first moment of time, then there’s something dubious about arguing for it as though it were.  This doesn’t automatically imply that St. Craig’s argument is unsound, but it does suggest that it might not be the best way of looking at things.

Of course, we should also keep in mind what I said in my original post, that the Hartle-Hawking proposal is a speculative idea.  It is a very beautiful idea, but it is difficult to make well-defined, and there is no direct evidence for it.  While there was originally some reason to think it might predict inflation, the current indications seem to be that it predicts the wrong type of universe.

I remember my surprise when, several years ago, I read an article by the atheist philosopher Quentin Smith, showcasing the Hartle-Hawking state as an argument for Atheism.  Never mind his actual argument, which makes no sense.  In a talk given to some atheist club, he stated that his argument “is the strongest scientific argument there is against theism. I think it’s even stronger than Darwin’s theory of evolution.”

Oh my!  Neither Stephen Hawking nor Jim Hartle would make the claim that the Hartle-Hawking state is anywhere near as solidly supported as Darwinian evolution; in fact Jim told me just the other day that he isn’t particularly committed to it being true.  (People often assume that if a scientist thinks of an interesting, publishable idea, they must believe in it, but they might only think it is worth considering!)  In fact, I think that only an outsider to the field of quantum gravity could take the “no boundary proposal” as anything other than a provisional, interesting idea worth exploring, which at best might be true.

I’ve discussed a lot of speculative physics in these last several posts, and I wouldn’t want anyone walking away thinking that the physics is more clearly established than it is.  In our current state of knowledge, any statements about the beginning of the universe are necessarily speculative, and if we rest our theological beliefs (for or against Theism) on that shaky foundation, we are setting ourselves up for trouble.

The Name

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A reader named Ken Murphy asks:

In Ps. 110:4 the word LORD is spelled in all capitals. Why?

It stands for YHWH, the proper name of God which was revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:14-15), which is in turn short for the divine proclamation I AM WHO I AM.  This title declares God’s eternal self-existence.

Thus, the words “the Lord” are not actually a translation, rather it is a substitution performed throughout translations of the Old Testament in order to avoid writing the Sacred Name.  In some of these translations, the word LORD is placed in all capital letters so that you know when this was done.  (In some Jewish versions of the Bible, they instead substitute HaShem (which means “the Name”).  There is another Hebrew word “Adoni” which actually means a lord (this word could be used of a human ruler as well as of God), so that way you can tell which word is being used.  (These types of things can be learned by reading the “translator’s preface” in the uninspired pages of your Bible located before Genesis 1:1.)

In the first verse of Psalm 110, we actually have both types of “Lord” appearing together.  King David prophesies of a greater king than himself when he says:

YHWH said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. (Psalm 110:1)

Since Hebrew was written at the time written with consonants only, the vowels in between these four letters are unknown, but modern Hebrew scholars tend to think it was pronounced something like “Yahweh”.  The old-fashioned pronunciation “Jehovah” was based on inserting the vowels in “Adonai”.

The Third Commandment says “You shall not misuse the name of YHWH your God, for YHWH will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.” (Ex. 20:7).  God made himself more tangibly present to the Israelites by giving them his Name, but in doing so he opened up the possibility that his Name could be abused and used flippantly or as a curse, instead of as a blessing.  For this reason, God commanded that his Name, which made the Israelites holy, must be held with respect.  Vulnerability is the flip side of intimacy.  As it is written:

I will walk among you; I will be your God, and you will be my people. (Lev 26:12)

Some people might think that misuse of God’s name can’t really matter very much, but that would mean that using it doesn’t matter either.  If reverent use of the Name sanctifies God’s people, then irreverent use will, conversely, coarsen and corrupt the sense of being dedicated to God.  For this reason Jesus taught us to pray, “Hallowed be your Name” (Matt. 6:9).

This is one of several ways in which the Torah says that placed aspects of himself among the Israelites, others being the Holy Spirit, the Shekhinah [Glory Cloud], and the Temple.  Somewhat surprisingly, the Temple is often referred to as the place where God’s Name dwells.  For example, when God promises King David that he will have a descendent who will reign forever, he says:

He is the one who will build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.  (2 Samuel 7:13)

Here “my Name” is a metonymy: it stands for the presence of the God whose Name it is.  As it is written:

Then I will dwell among the Israelites and be their God.  They will know that I am YHWH their God, who brought them out of Egypt so that I might dwell among them.  I am YHWH their God.  (Ex 29:43)

It was always part of God’s plan to find a place to rest on the Earth.  Not that he can really be confined to a Temple built with human hands, for as Solomon says:

But will God really dwell on earth?  The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!  Yet give attention to your servant’s prayer and his plea for mercy, Lord my God.  Hear the cry and the prayer that your servant is praying in your presence this day.  May your eyes be open toward this temple night and day, this place of which you said, ‘My Name shall be there,’ so that you will hear the prayer your servant prays toward this place.  Hear the supplication of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray toward this place.  Hear from heaven, your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive.  (1 Kings 8:27-30)

Nevertheless, his Name can be spoken, and in this way he can be honored or dishonored.

At first, the Jews freely used the name YHWH to refer to God, even in ordinary conversation, as can be seen from the Old Testament.  However, as time went on, this came to be regarded as unsafe and presumptuous.  Eventually, the rabbis decided that the best way to satisfy the Third Commandment was never to say the Name at all.  That way there would be no chance of accidental blasphemy.  The High Priest could use the Name on Yom Kippur [The Day of Atonement], but that was it.  After the Temple was destroyed, the Name was never spoken again by halakha-compliant Jews.

This was the opposite mistake from careless or flippant use of the Name.  Instead they played it so safe that God may as well not have revealed the Name in the first place.  God had put himself on a first name basis with Israel, so to speak, and they declined to exercise the privilege.

So what did God do?  Did he rectify this situation by telling people they were missing out?  Did he put things back the way they were before?  No, instead, in his divine wisdom he had a completely different plan.  As it is written:

Shout and be glad, Daughter Zion. For I am coming, and I will live among you,” declares YHWH. “Many nations will be joined with YHWH in that day and will become my people.  I will live among you and you will know that YHWH Sabaoth has sent me to you.  YHWH will inherit Judah as his portion in the holy land and will again choose Jerusalem.  Be still before the Lord, all mankind, because he has roused himself from his holy dwelling.” (Zech. 2:10-13)

Rather than restore the old intimacies, God gave new ones.  He himself came and lived among us.  Greater intimacy implies greater vulnerability.  The new name he has given us to speak aloud is the name of “Jesus”,

Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.  (Phil. 2:6-11)

When Paul says that God gave to Jesus “the name that is above every name”, there is only one Name which a first century rabbinically educated Jew could have in mind.  The first century Christians might not have ever spoken the name YHWH, but in passages like this there is an implicit allusion to the Name of God.

When you see the name Lord in the New Testament, this is the Greek word kyrios.  In principle, this word, like Adoni, could itself refer to an ordinary human being.  However, the New Testament writers continually quote from the Greek Septuagint, which uses kyrios as its substitution for YHWH.  This puts an important overtone into the word.

People argue about whether the New Testament really refers to Jesus as God.  What they don’t realize is that in the Greek linguistic context, calling Jesus theos is actually a surprisingly ambiguous statement of Jesus’ divinity (and many of the passages calling Jesus theos can be explained away).  What is quite unambiguous is calling Jesus kyrios and then applying to him Old Testament passages in which kyrios is a substitution for YHWH.  For example “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (Rom 10:13)”

To those of my readers who are baptized, remember that you have been dedicated into “the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit”!   What name is this?  It is a singular name.  “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” is grammatically plural, not a single name.  So the “name” must instead refer to some unmentioned title which belongs to all three persons equally.  The mystery of our faith is that all three persons are one YHWH, the eternal existence.  This passage is another example of an implicit reference to that Name which no first century Jew would ever say.

This is the Name into which you were baptized, making you into God’s Temple.  If you defile this Temple, you also dishonor the Name which God placed in you.   But if you honor him, he will honor you, by coming to live with you.

When God kills the Innocent

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A Christian reader named Paul wrotes to me from New Zealand with the following common question.  With permission, I am posting his question and my answer on my blog.

St. Paul writes:

A few months ago I discovered your blog via the Biologos website. It has been a real encouragement for me to read your articles and I can honestly say that I enjoyed everything that I’ve read.

Anyway, a Church friend and I have been meeting up every few weeks to have discussions about tricky issues in Christianity and something that has come up (and was always bound to…) is the depictions of God in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God is often depicted as acting violently and sometimes in ways that can seem barbaric. For example, God gives instructions for the Israelites to kill people. Likewise, an atheist friend of mine was shocked when I referred to God as “just” because he had just read about the exodus and the plagues.

The issue for me is not that God doesn’t have a right to judge/ punish guilty people (for example the Canaanites), but the fact that innocent people are also involved in some of these situations. For example children and babies. In some verses they seem to be explicitly mentioned (i.e. 1 Samuel 15:3). I realise this is only a single example, but there are one or two other examples that are quite easy to find.

The most common response of Christians seems to be that God created all of us and therefore He can do whatever He wants. I agree that God is sovereign, but these actions seem inconsistent with the nature of God revealed clearly in Jesus.

I have some ideas about what to make of it all, but I thought that I would ask you what you make of these sorts of verses? I realise that you must be very busy (and you don’t know me!) so please don’t feel obligated to reply! However, if you have the time and the inclination I would really appreciate it.

My reply:

This is a tricky problem in theology, isn’t it!  But it isn’t just an Old Testament vs. New Testament thing.  The following verses are all God speaking in the Old Testament:

  1. “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.” (Ex. 20:5-6)
    .
  2. “My angel will go ahead of you and bring you into the land of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hivites and Jebusites, and I will wipe them out.” [including the children, as other parts of Scripture make clear] (Ex. 23:23)
    .
  3. “Fathers are not to be put to death for their children or children for their fathers; each person will be put to death for his own sin.  Do not deny justice to a foreigner or fatherless child, and do not take a widow’s garment as security.  Remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. Therefore I am commanding you to do this.” (Deut. 24:16-18)
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  4. “Yet you ask, ‘Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?’ Since the son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live. The one who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.” (Ezekiel 18:19-20)

The tension lies within the pages of Hebrew Scripture itself.  We have to understand in what sense all of these Scriptures can be true.

The Righteousness of God

Let me start by demolishing the idea that “God created all of us and therefore He can do whatever He wants.”  If this were true, there would be no meaning in saying that God is just and righteous in how he treats us.  It wouldn’t allow us to predict anything whatsoever about what he would do.  Yet St. Abraham—our father in faith—pleads for Sodom and Gommorah by asking: “Far be it from you to do such a thing–to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Gen. 18:25).  God does not respond by saying “Whatever I do is just by definition”.  Rather, he grants Abraham’s requests, and goes beyond them to ensure that, in this case, the innocent are not punished alongside the guilty.  The fact that God is just, implies that there are some things which he won’t do—because they are unfair.

Because of this, I reject any “divine command theory” in which morality is simply a matter of what God happens to arbitrarily command.  No, morality is rooted in God’s own character, in his essential and immutable goodness and love!

As St. Geroge MacDonald wrote:

If you say, That may be right of God to do which it would not be right of man to do, I answer, Yes, because the relation of the maker to his creatures is very different from the relation of one of those creatures to another, and he has therefore duties toward his creatures requiring of him what no man would have the right to do to his fellow-man; but he can have no duty that is not both just and merciful.  More is required of the maker, by his own act of creation, than can be required of men. More and higher justice and righteousness is required of him by himself, the Truth;–greater nobleness, more penetrating sympathy; and nothing but what, if an honest man understood it, he would say was right.  If it be a thing man cannot understand, then man can say nothing as to whether it is right or wrong.  He cannot even know that God does it, when the it is unintelligible to him.  What he calls it may be but the smallest facet of a composite action.  His part is silence.  (Unspoken Sermons)

St. MacDonald himself was famously unwilling to accept any doctrine (however much theologians might claim it was supported by Scripture) that would paint God’s character in a bad light.  I myself take a more conservative point of view regarding the reliability of Scripture, but this does not change the fact that, as I wrote in another post:

The doctrine that God is good is more fundamental even than the doctrine that the Scriptures are inspired.  So that if it were necessary to choose between them (which it is not!) one should certainly pick the former over the latter.  This is the faith of Abraham, who lived before any part of our current Bible was written.

Even Abraham, when he God asked him to sacrifice his son Isaac, started to obey God only because he believed that God intended it for good.  As the New Testament interprets the story:

By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had embraced the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.  (Hebrews 11:17-19)

And this interpetation can be shown to be reasonable in the original text based on Abraham’s own words:

He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”  (Genesis 22:5, emphasis added)

In other words, Abraham believed that Isaac would somehow be returned to him, even after having been sacrificed.  He made the decision to interpret even God’s most terrible command in a way that was consistent with his goodness, and faithfulness to his promises.  In this way he is a microcosm of our decision, whether to obey God even when it may (falsely) appear that he is acting malevolently towards us, or another person.

Furthermore, as Christians, we interpret the entire Bible (as well as all the evil that appears in the world) in light of the love which Jesus showed on the Cross.  Jesus is the highest revelation from God, the place where God’s character becomes most clear.  Every other place in the Bible (especially the Old Testament, where God was revealing himself in a more imperfect way to people at a lower stage of spiritual development) must be interpreted in light of this.

So in light of all this, what do we make of passages in which, e.g. God orders the genocide of various ancient Caananite tribes?

Wrestling with the text in silence is one possible answer, as St. MacDonald suggests above.  But I think there are at least a few things that can be said, from our own limited human perspective.  (If nothing else, we can always remind ourselves just how limited our own perspective must be, in comparison with that of God, who sees everything!)  As the sovereign Lord who loves humankind, God’s orders to kill simply cannot be regarded as being at all similar to that of a human murderer.  This is true for at least four reasons:

I. God has rightful authority over human life, humans do not

God IS the ruler of the universe.  This gives him the authority to make decisions which ordinary human beings are not allowed to make.  Just like an earthly Governor or Judge has authority to do some things which ordinary citizens don’t have the right to do, God has the authority to do anything, i.e. any type of act.  For example, everything belongs to God, so when he takes things from us it is not stealing, but doing what he likes with his own property.  Similarly, if God kills people it is not murder, because our lives belong to him (Deut. 32:39).

(This does not, I think contradict the point of the previous section, in which I rejected the theory in which morality reduces to arbitrary divine commands.  The scope of authority is different from how one uses that authority.  God has the authority to do anything, precisely because, since he is perfectly good, he never abuses this authority, but only does what is just and right.)

Note that, as the ruler of the universe God actually kills everyone.  All people are mortal, some of them die young, and God is responsible for this state of affairs.  Sometimes he does it miraculously in order to make a special point, but more often it he causes it to happen naturally.  Before I ask whether I can trust a God who killed the Caananite children, I first need to ask whether I can trust a God who will kill ME.  As Christians, we trust that God is using death as a tool in order to turn us into the people he wants us to become.  Partly, we trust him because he came to Earth as Jesus, and died for us on the Cross, so he isn’t asking us to suffer anything which he hasn’t gone through himself.

II. God is always benevolent, human killers are not

God’s motivations for killing people are not the same as that of a human murderer.  Most of the time, people kill other people out of hatred, because they want something bad to happen to them, or because they don’t care about them.  But God solemnly swears to us that this is not why he does it. “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live” (Ezekiel 33:11)

To illustrate this: Suppose that a baby is very sick and a surgeon cuts his chest open in order to operate on his heart and save his life.  Now the surgeon’s act of cutting open the baby cannot be regarded as being in the same moral world as if he were a Nazi, cutting open the baby’s chest cavity out of callous indifference.  It is in fact totally the opposite because it is done with the intention of healing, rather than harming, the innocent.

Now Jesus is “the Resurrection and the Life” (John 11:25).  So when he chooses to take a child to himself (ending its earthly life), this is because he is able to give it a heavenly life which is far superior to anything it would have on Earth, in the bosom of the Father who cares for him.  If we have faith in God, then we must believe that whenever he takes the life of an innocent person, he is much more like the diligent surgeon, then he is anything like the Nazi.  In other words, we believe that he is acting for the good of the person concerned.

Since we on this side of the curtain of death and can only speculate about what is on the other side, we do not have any such authority over the lives of our felow human beings.  God expects us to obey the commandment “Do not murder”, which means that, apart from exceptional situations (just war, punishment for crime, etc) we are not to kill other human beings.  However, this situation does not obtain in biblical situations where God himself orders people to kill, since there God is exercising his own authority over life and death, and is using the humans involved only as his instruments.

III. God is incorruptible, humans are not

God is unchangable.  If you or I killed somebody, we would become more violent and hateful people who would be more likely to kill someone else.  Whereas God’s character, being eternal, cannot be corrupted.  Paradoxically, this means that a perfectly good being may be more likely than a good human to do bad things in order to produce good consequences.  Unlike us, he doesn’t need to worry about his motivations being wrong, or it producing bad habits of character.

(This consideration does not apply completely to cases in which, rather than taking a human life himself, God orders another person to do it; since that human being could certainly be norally corrupted.  In this case, it would have been important to make sure that the humans are acting solely based on obedience to God’s command, and not for the sake of the benefits they might receive.  This may be why God strictly commanded the Israelites not to take any plunder from the Canaanite cities they conquered—a rule that was enforced in Joshua 7—in order to make it clear that they were acting as agents of divine wrath on those cities, and not for personally selfish reasons.)

IV. God has complete knowledge, humans do not

God is omniscient, so he knows when a group of people have become so wicked that it would be bad for them, and for their children, and for the rest of the world, if they remain alive to keep sinning.  For example, the Canaanites sacrificed their children as part of their religion, and if God hadn’t put an end to them, we might still be doing that today.  It may seem ironic that God also ordered that their innocent children be killed, but remember that they would not have remained innocent if they had been able to come to maturity.  Instead they went to Heaven, which might not have been possible if they had been corrupted by the religion of their parents.

We humans, on the other hand, have a very limited ability to guess the future.  Therefore no human being could ethically order a genocide on his own cognizance, because we are never really in a good position to be morally certain that the speculative goods arising from the elimination of a culture outweigh the immediate and obvious evils involved in killing a large cultural group.  Furthermore any such decision would almost certainly be tainted by prejudice and racism, rather than being an act of impartial justice.

Unlike humans, God is free from such favoritism (Acts 10:34), and only acts in ways that he knows are just and merciful (even if his reasons may sometimes be obscure to us).

Group vs. Individual Justice

This brings us back to the group justice vs. individual justice question.  Ultimately, I believe God is committed to bring justice and vindication to every innocent person, including those who were victims of bad circumstances.  On the other hand, God has also set up the world in such a way that our good or bad actions can have an effect on other people: if we sin against others, they are harmed, and can be tempted either to hate or to imitate us.  This is especially true in the case of our parents, who bring us into being and choose what enviornment we will come to maturity in.  Because of this strong moral influence, it is inevitable that to some extent our moral and cultural condition is inherited from others.  Alcoholic parents often have alcoholic children.  We may resist this influence and become different people than our parents, but there is a correlation which cannot be entirely removed.

As a result, in his role as Judge of the Earth, Guardian of Human Culture and Supervisor of the Gene Pool, God must necessarily engage in some amount of group justice as well as individual justice, because that is the nature of how humans propagate ourselves (and our ideas).  He does not, however, delegate this authority to us.  The ordinary Israelite judicial system was based strictly on individual actions (although even there, indirect punishment of others is inevitable: see the story in 2 Samuel 14:6-7 for an example).  Apart from this, the Israelites were also commanded to exterminate certain people groups, but had no authority to decide which ones—God provided them with a specific and limited list.

In the end, God will provide us all with individual justice.  But I think that once everything is revealed, our moral interdependence will prove to have been a means of grace.  If no innocent people ever suffered punishment for guilty people, then Christ could not have saved us, and we would be dead in our sins.  If we ourselves struggle, if sins have been transmitted to us by others, or if the punishment of others has ruined our lives as well, then what?

I think that by forgiving our forbears, and by seeking God’s help for our problems, we become imitators of Jesus, as St. Peter says:

For you were called to this,
because Christ also suffered for you,
leaving you an example,
so that you should follow in His steps.
He did not commit sin,
and no deceit was found in His mouth;
when He was reviled,
He did not revile in return;
when He was suffering,
He did not threaten
but entrusted Himself to the One who judges justly.
He Himself bore our sins
in His body on the tree,
so that, having died to sins,
we might live for righteousness;
you have been healed by His wounds.
For you were like sheep going astray,
but you have now returned
to the Shepherd and Guardian of your souls. (1 Peter 2:21-25)

If Christ—the Innocent One—suffered for the sins of others and brought about the redemption of the world, then all of us who in lighter measure bear the sin of others, will also recieve through Christ this redemption.  From the the infants killed by St. Joshua for the sins of the guilty Canaanites, to the infants killed by wicked Herod in place of the innocent Christ-child, everyone who has a share in the sufferings of Christ will also rise with him in eternal glory.  This is both a justice and a mercy beyond our comprehension.

[Note: I expanded this blog post significantly on Aug 16, 2021. 

Also, there are a lot of people who have read this post and comment on it solely for purposes of expressing their anger against the God of the Bible, or that anyone could believe in such a Deity.  Most of these comments don’t engage in any substantive way with the things I’ve written.  If you wish to make an argument against this blog post, please make sure to re-read the four sections labelled I-IV and then make sure that what you are saying is actually responsive what I’ve written.  Thanks!—AW]

The Teacher

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But you are not to be called `Rabbi’, for you have only one Master and you are all brothers.  And do not call anyone on earth `father’, for you have one Father, and he is in heaven.  Nor are you to be called `teacher’, for you have one teacher, the Christ.  The greatest among you will be your servant.  For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.  (Matthew 23:8-12)

Only one teacher!—and he is Christ.  None of the rest of us can claim that status, which he reserves for himself.  Yet for that very reason, all instruction which is true instruction must find its origin in him.  Those of us who are earthly instructors must therefore recognize, that if there is any wisdom in what we say, it comes from the Son of God.  We are not the teacher, but we allow God to be the teacher.

In every form of knowledge, there is both a spiritual opportunity: seeing Jesus as your teacher, and a spiritual danger: idolatry.  Idolatry comes when we see ourselves or others as the teacher, and don’t allow the knowledge to lead us onward to God.  In some ways, the more noble the pursuit, the greater the danger of idolatry.  When scientists are satisfied to learn about creation without learning about the Creator, Science becomes a mere distraction to occupy the mind.  Maybe this is the real reason why fewer scientists than ordinary folk believe in God.  Science is so interesting that one doesn’t feel the need to investigate deeper questions . . . and so the opportunity for salvation slips by, unnoticed.

On the other hand, the spiritual opportunity is present no matter how “low” on the scale of spiritual values is the thing which is being taught.  So long as the thing contains within itself something that is good, whether physical or mental, aesthetic or practical, there is a spiritual lesson to be had in it.  Any craft demands that one humbly learn from some particular Reality what is the right way to approach it: the corollary is the need to repent of your bad habits and learn how to do the thing properly.  Different tasks demand different skills, but the skill of humility is always the same.

To the extent that any earthly teacher is worthy of the name, it is only because they are first and foremost a student of the Reality being studied.  Even Jesus is the Teacher only because he is the Student:

The Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.  For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does” (John 5:19-20).

Within the Trinity, the Son receives everything he is from the Father.  (Indeed, the Father’s identity consists entirely in his love, that is, in his breathing the Spirit into his Son.  As Christians, we must not think that our Father is anything more or other than the Father of Jesus Christ, or that the Father held back anything of himself when he gave his Son.)  The Son’s divinity consists entirely of learning from the Father.

We also see this play out in the humility of his earthly life:

In the same way, Christ did not take on himself the glory of becoming a high priest. But God said to him,

“You are my Son;
today I have become your Father.” [Psalm 2:7]

And he says in another place,

“You are a priest forever,
in the order of Melchizedek.” [Psalm 110:4]

During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him and was designated by God to be high priest in the order of Melchizedek. (Hebrews 5:5-10)

Now as our teacher, Jesus taught about the Kingdom of Heaven using stories taken from the crafts of his day.  After instructing his disciples in the meaning of his parables, he says this:

“Have you understood all these things?” Jesus asked.

“Yes,” they replied.

He said to them, “Therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.” (Matthew 13:51-52)

If Jesus is your teacher, he will also teach you about the Kingdom using your own craft, whatever it is.  Not that your craft is God’s Kingdom, but any time you have the bracing shock of really learning something, there is some way in which it is going to be similar to the Kingdom.

In college, I did some fencing.  Recently I decided to take it up again, since this August.    The game consists of trying to trick people into allowing themselves to be stabbed with a metal stick.  But to explain how this connects onto spirtual topics, I need to go a little further back.

In high school I briefly took instruction from a karate instructor named Rob, for high school credit.  (My mother and brother had much more extensive lessons though).  Now St. Rob is a Christian, and he said that learning martial arts was very informative for his spirituality.

One learns about original sin—prior to being instructed, your instincts about what to do are pretty much always going to be wrong.  Your stance is wrong, your posture is wrong, and your motions are wrong.  The first thing you have to do is accept this as a fact, swallowing your wounded pride, and trust your teacher to correct you.

Then you have to actually do what the teacher says, without sliding back into what seems “natural”—until what is correct becomes second nature.  (I’m pretty sure there’s something about a second nature in the New Testament somewhere or other.)  Rob also liked to say “practice doesn’t make perfect, practicing perfect makes perfect”.

Progress in holiness doesn’t come about from “gradual improvement”.  Rather, it comes from being “perfect, just as your father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).  (By the way, in Greek the word “perfect” means complete, not flawless.) Of course, you can’t do it.  So the teacher comes alongside of you and moves you into the right shape.  Jesus, the same personality who lived, died, and rose again, is there beside you showing you what to do.  That’s what we believe.

Then you become perfect—forgiving your enemies and loving the unlovable—for about five minutes, perhaps, before relapsing again.  But at any time you can come back again.

The spiritual journey is more like continually being recalled back to what we ought to be, than like walking down a road to a destination.  Getting into shape may take years, but getting into the right posture only takes seconds.  In the same way, you can be who God wants you to be in a matter of seconds, if you really choose.  Sanctification involves making that choice over and over again.

This may sound like hard work, but it isn’t salvation by works.  There’s no nonsense about merit or deserving here.  “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick” (Mark 2:17).  And when corrected, you don’t have to waste time agonizing about it.  That’s just pride.  Just allow yourself to be corrected, and then think of the next thing.