The Bible at its worst
Submitted by Heather on July 10 1999 at 14:37:08
In reply to I like that thought Submitted by F.O.D. on July 09 1999 at 15:42:23
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"Heather I don't care greatly for your hypothesis that the Devil was leading the children of Israel into Canaan" I didn't mean that – I'm agnostic on the question of whether God was leading the Jews into the Promised Land. For all I know, he might have been. But when you get passages in which, as Triple Q pointed out, God urges the Jews to obtain their new home by slaughtering women and children and cattle, then one has to ask whether this view of what God wants can be reconciled with the God that Jesus spoke about. C. S. Lewis, from whom I crib everything (as you'll have noticed by now), puts it this way; I've reprinted first the horrendous psalm that he is referring to. Psalm 109. Deus, laudem. HOLD not thy tongue, O God of my praise; * for the mouth of the ungodly, yea, the mouth of the deceitful is opened upon me. 2 And they have spoken against me with false tongues; * they compassed me about also with words of hatred, and fought against me without a cause. 3 For the love that I had unto them, lo, they take now my contrary part; * but I give myself unto prayer. 4 Thus have they rewarded me evil for good, * and hatred for my good will. 5 Set thou an ungodly man to be ruler over him, * and let an adversary stand at his right hand. 6 When sentence is given upon him, let him be condemned; * and let his prayer be turned into sin. 7 Let his days be few; * and let another take his office. 8 Let his children be fatherless, * and his wife a widow. 9 Let his children be vagabonds, and beg their bread; * let them seek it also out of desolate places. 10 Let the extortioner consume all that he hath; * and let the stranger spoil his labour. 11 Let there be no man to pity him, * nor to have compassion upon his fatherless children. 12 Let his posterity be destroyed; * and in the next generation let his name be clean put out. 13 Let the wickedness of his fathers be had in remembrance in the sight of the LORD; * and let not the sin of his mother be done away. 14 Let them alway be before the LORD, * that he may root out the memorial of them from off the earth; 15 And that, because his mind was not to do good; * but persecuted the poor helpless man, that he might slay him that was vexed at the heart. 16 His delight was in cursing, and it shall happen unto him; * he loved not blessing, therefore shall it be far from him. 17 He clothed himself with cursing like as with a raiment, * and it shall come into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones. 18 Let it be unto him as the cloak that he hath upon him, * and as the girdle that he is alway girded withal. 19 Let it thus happen from the LORD unto mine enemies, * and to those that speak evil against my soul. 20 But deal thou with me, O LORD God, according unto thy Name; * for sweet is thy mercy. 21 O deliver me, for I am helpless and poor, * and my heart is wounded within me. 22 I go hence like the shadow that departeth, * and am driven away as the grasshopper. 23 My knees are weak through fasting; * my flesh is dried up for want of fatness. 24 I am become also a reproach unto them: * they that look upon me shake their heads. 25 Help me, O LORD my God; * O save me according to thy mercy; 26 And they shall know how that this is thy hand, * and that thou, LORD, hast done it. 27 Though they curse, yet bless thou; * and let them be confounded that rise up against me; but let thy servant rejoice. 28 Let mine adversaries be clothed with shame; * and let them cover themselves with their own confusion, as with a cloak. 29 As for me, I will give great thanks unto the LORD with my mouth, * and praise him among the multitude; 30 For he shall stand at the right hand of the poor, * to save his soul from unrighteous judges. ". . . there is no better psalm to begin with than No. 109. It ends with a verse which every Chistian can at once make his own: the L ord is 'the prisoner's friend', standing by the poor (or friendless) to save him from unjust judges. . . . If we read only the last verse we should feel in full sympathy with this psalmist. But the moment we look back at what precedes that verse, he turns out to be removed from us by infinite distances; or, worse still, to be loathsomely akin to that in us which it is the main business of life to purge away. Psalm 109 is as unabashed a hymn of hate as was ever written. The poet has a detailed programme for his enemy which he hopes God will carry out. The enemy is to be placed under a wicked ruler. He is to have 'an accuser' perpetually at his side: whether an evil spirit, a 'Satan', as our Prayer Book version renders it, or merely a human accuser – a spy, an agent provacateur, a member of the secret police (v. 5). If the enemy attempts to have any religious life, this, far from improving position, must make him even worse: 'let his prayer be turned into sin' (v. 6). And after his death – which had better, please, be early (v. 7) – his widow and children and descendants are to live in unrelieved misery (vv. 8-12). What makes our blood run cold, even more than the unrestrained vindictiveness, is the writer's untroubled conscience. He has no qualms, scruples, or reservations; no shame. He gives hatred free rein – encourages and spurs it on – in a sort of ghastly innocence. He offers these feelings, just as they are, to God, never doubting that they will be acceptable: turning straight from the maledictions to 'Deal thou with me, O Lord God, according unto thy Name: for sweet is thy mercy' (v. 20). "The man himself, of course, lived very long ago. His injuries may have been (humanly speaking) beyond endurance. He was doubtless a hot-blooded barbarian, more like a modern child than a modern man. And though we believe (and can even see from the last verse) that some knowledge of the real God had come to his race, yet he lived in the cold of the year, the early spring of Revelation, and those first gleams of knowledge were like snow drops, exposed to the frosts." [C. S. Lewis, "The Psalms," Christian Reflections] I think Lewis is being too kind to modern man here; I've met plenty of Christians like that psalmist. Everyone here has; they flock to the boylove boards, and it's quite clear where they got their rhetoric of hate. They got it from the Bible. This is why I think that complainants like Jim and Triple Q have a good case. If we argue that all of the Bible is of equal worth and should be treated with equal reverence, there's no doubt that what follows is viciousness such as we see in Psalm 109. Any Christian who is taught that Psalm 109 is as much representative of God's views as the Sermon on the Mount is going to cause a great deal of destruction in the world. And in fact, many have. Now, I don't think (as Lewis doesn't think) that the solution is to get rid of such psalms. On the contrary, he considers the hateful portions of Psalm 109 to be a cautionary message as to what sort of attitude we shouldn't take toward God. But the only reason Lewis can see this attitude as wrong rather than right is that he doesn't treat every passage in the Bible as equally inspired; instead, he compares every passage in the Bible to Jesus' concept of God and judges those passages accordingly. And in doing so, he concludes that the psalmist had a different view of God than Jesus did (or, for that matter, than many of Jesus' contemporaries did). So what you get in the Bible, as Lewis says elsewhere, is a gradual focussing; some vague early impressions by the Jews that God is concerned with justice, then a gradual understanding (which first appears in the prophets) that God's justice embraces all humans, not just the Jews. And then finally, in the New Testament era, comes mighty stories such as the Good Samaritan, in which the Jews come to realize that God judges everyone on the basis of their love for their fellow humans; praying to God that your enemy's children should have to beg for their bread is simply not going to advance you in God's eyes. So my reply to your question, of how we can figure out "at which points their understanding of what God was communicating may or may not have been faulty" would be: we figure it out by seeing whether the alleged communications by God sound like Christ. Of course, I'm not saying even that task is easy. Heather |