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Chapter 1

Gut Reactions to the Old Testament God

I remember his face. My friend was outraged. He asked, “Can you envision grabbing a little boy by his curly hair and slitting his throat with a sword—all in the name of God?” His gestures displayed the grotesque act, and his expression revealed his anger at my obstinacy. I found myself in the awkward position of trying to defend the seemingly indefensible, the command that God gave to his people in the Old Testament to conquer the Canaanites and kill every man, woman, and child. The horror of this command and its practical consequences prompted my friend’s outburst. I wanted to explain but was at a loss for words. I wanted to show him how this terrifying instruction fit into the plan of a loving, merciful God who sent his Son to die for our sins, but I couldn’t formulate a convincing explanation.

You don’t have to look very far in the Old Testament to find some “problems” to deal with: Why does God strike down the Egyptian firstborn? Why does God order Abraham to sacrifice his son? Why does Elijah slaughter the four hundred fifty prophets of Baal? Why does God send plagues on his people that wipe out thousands? Why does God approve the seemingly vigilante justice of “heroes” such as Phinehas, who skewered an adulterous couple with a spear? If you’ve spent considerable time reading the Bible, you’ll have a whole laundry list of “problems.” By problems, I mean those events or teachings in biblical history that don’t easily line up with what we know about God from the New Testament and the teachings of the Church.

At times, the problems can prompt you to shift in your chair or feel a bit squeamish. But other times, the problems can result in a crisis of faith. In fact, many atheist writers cite the challenging passages of the Old Testament when they rail against Christian belief and practice. Not everyone demands a solution to these thorny issues, but many use them as a reason, or perhaps an excuse, to dismiss the God of the Bible as an angry, harsh, cruel power-monger. Oftentimes we are left without answers, without an adequate response to offer to those who challenge our faith because of these so-called dark passages. Yet it is crucial that we can respond well—for our own faith, for our Christian friends whose faith may be tested by the dark passages, and in a special way for non-Christians who resist the Gospel because of the Old Testament. If we can show how the dark passages comport with an ethical Christian worldview, how they reveal God, how they prepare for Christ, then perhaps we can be better witnesses for him.

Solutions Good and Bad

Unfortunately, Scriptures that make us squirm are tough to deal with. Their very darkness can lead us into overly simplistic or simply incorrect interpretations. In order to read Scripture correctly, we should be looking for what the human author and divine Author intended, how the whole fits together, and how it can be understood in the context of the Christian tradition.¹ But before we get down to the details of applying such an approach, we need to look at a few bad solutions to our problem. The bad solutions are tempting because they are easy. They avoid the hard questions, and they let us off the hook. The trouble is that they don’t say what needs to be said. They don’t address the atheist’s deep question. They dodge the problems rather than taking them head-on.

The first bad solution is what I call the “shrug.” The shrug happens when a Bible reader is happily reading along, perhaps even praying the Psalms, and comes across a line like, “Blessed is the one who seizes and smashes your children against the rock” (Ps 137:9). Rather than being startled, getting angry, or standing in awe of God’s mystery, this Bible reader says to himself: “That’s weird! Well, it is the Old Testament.” He shrugs, moves on, and doesn’t give it another thought. This easy solution is practical, but it is simply a dodge of the problem, not an explanation. It cannot survive the onslaught of hard questions from doubters. The shrug avoids the issues, but can’t answer them.

Unfortunately, Scriptures that make us squirm are tough to deal with. Their very darkness can lead us into overly simplistic or simply incorrect interpretations.

The second bad solution is a form of spiritualization. There is a good kind of spiritual reading, and I’ll talk about that later in the book. But this bad form of spiritualization dodges the issues by reading every tough problem only at the spiritual level, without honoring and respecting the foundational importance of the literal sense. It says that Psalm 137:9 is about destroying the beginnings of sin by smashing temptations against the rock of Christ, not about smashing the babies of Babylon. This avoids, rather than solves, the problem with which this passage confronts us. St. Thomas Aquinas and other theological authorities such as the Pontifical Biblical Commission warn us that every spiritual interpretation must be founded on the literal sense.² We can’t escape the centrality and priority of the literal sense. If we over-spiritualize the text and don’t honor what the words actually convey, then we strip it of its power, steal its significance, and undercut whatever spiritual meanings we might be trying to construct.

The third bad solution originated in ancient times, but many modern people succumb to it. This solution separates the “God of the Old Testament” from the “God of the New Testament.” It pits the two main parts of the Bible against each other, claiming that the two “Gods” we find in them are different. The ancient heretic Marcion proposed this idea: He and his followers actually threw out the Old Testament and used only some of the New. This also is an easy solution, a dodge, which promotes the New Testament as a trump card over the Old Testament. In this view, the Old Testament can’t really reveal God to us; it just gives us a false, menacing portrait of God that doesn’t tell us who he is. Now Marcion and his followers died a long time ago, but it is tempting for us to become practical Marcionites, carrying around only the New Testament, reading only the New Testament, and putting the Old Testament on the back burner as if it can’t really reveal God to us.

But this “Marcionite” solution forgets that the New Testament is based on the Old, that Jesus saw himself not as abolishing the Old Testament Law and Prophets, but fulfilling them (Mt 5:17). The New Testament constantly quotes the Old, and when St. Paul refers to “Scripture”—and how it is God-breathed and useful (2 Tm 3:16)—he is referring primarily to the Old Testament, since the New Testament had not yet been compiled. Matthew, Paul, Peter, and other New Testament writers constantly quote Old Testament texts to prove their points, to show how Jesus fulfills the Old Testament. The two Testaments are inextricably linked. New Testament religion is founded upon Old Testament religion. Even if you wanted to keep the New and not the Old, you would have to cut out vast portions of the New that quote the Old. Marcion’s solution can’t work—again, it sidesteps the issues rather than addressing them.

The fourth bad solution gets closer to the truth, but misses the mark. This solution suggests that each time we confront a “problem” we are really confronting a misunderstanding. For example, those who embrace this view would argue that God did not really command the Israelites to kill the Canaanites; they just misinterpreted what God wanted. Or when Elijah executes the prophets of Baal, these interpreters would argue that he wasn’t really doing what God wanted, but overstepping and engaging in a vicious human act, a crime of murder. The trouble with this approach is that it does not treat the Bible as divine revelation. Rather, it treats the Bible as a storybook that must constantly be supervised, judged, and reinterpreted in light of some external code of morality or justice. The external code—whether it be the New Testament or a philosophical concept of justice—places limits on God’s “behavior” and forces every Old Testament conundrum through an extrinsic intellectual funnel. It prevents the Old Testament from teaching us who God is and instead places us above the text, dictating to it what God must be like and how he must act. This perspective destroys the revelatory power of the Old Testament and confines its role to showing us the acts of many people who misinterpreted God’s commands. Rather than the Old Testament revealing God to us, we must reveal God to it by straightening out all of its imperfections. There must be a better way!

Finding God in the Dark

I don’t want to suggest that I will be able to solve all of your Bible-reading problems, but I can promise not to dodge them. This book is really an introduction to the difficulties.³ My aim is to give you the tools you need to not just apologetically explain—that is, defend—some challenging moments in the Bible, but to show others how even some of the darkest passages reveal God and his plan of salvation to us. For many who reject the Bible or embrace one of the “bad solutions” I’ve mentioned, the Bible seems to present a contradictory vision of God—a God of wrath and a God of mercy, the “God of the Old Testament” and the “God of the New Testament.” I want to show you how these two “Gods” can be reconciled, how it is that we can fully embrace the God of justice and fully receive the God of mercy. In fact, I will argue that the tension between justice and mercy is absolutely necessary for a good understanding of God and of what he has done for us.

Struggling over some of the details in the problematic passages of the Bible should help us arrive at a deeper knowledge of God.

Not only is it theologically necessary to wrestle with these issues, but it is particularly timely. A few years ago, Pope Benedict XVI mentioned “those passages in the Bible which, due to the violence and immorality they occasionally contain, prove obscure and difficult.”⁴ He wrote that “it would be a mistake to neglect those passages of Scripture that strike us as problematic.”⁵ Even he rejected the “shrug” solution! Struggling over some of the details in the problematic passages of the Bible should help us arrive at a deeper knowledge of God, of who he is and how he operates. To abandon some parts of Scripture for the sake of others is to ignore certain parts of God’s revelation to us, to set aside things that he considers important enough to record for us in his Word.

While it may be tempting to give in to your gut reaction, turn the page in disgust, and avoid the hard work of thinking through the difficult problems the Bible presents to us, this book will help you dig in and stand your ground, to let the texts that have proven challenging to you become a source not of frustration but of revelation. In fact, the early Church Father St. Augustine suggests that God deliberately put difficulties in sacred Scripture in order for us to take the time to ponder them, meditate on them, and strive for better understanding.⁶ He considers the obscurity of Scripture to be “beneficial” in this way. I hope that you will find this brief study of scriptural obscurities to be intellectually beneficial and spiritually fruitful. I envision us looking through the window of Scripture at God. Let’s clean the glass so we can get a clearer glimpse!