Most people experience God at times as incredibly near, as if we are dwelling in the very presence of God. Yet at other times God seems remote or distant, and we seem to be dwelling in a cloud out of which cannot see. I am glad then that David Lamb, in his excellent book, God Behaving Badly: Is the God of the Old Testament Angry, Sexist and Racist?, probes this question: Is God distant or near?

How do you explain this distance-nearness dialectic? What do we mean when we say “near” or “distant”? What is your experience in these kinds of issues?

David begins where one ought to begin on this topic: with the lament psalms, those psalms where the psalmist complains about God’s distance or about God’s non-involvement, or even God’s seeming lack of care. As in “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” He focuses a little on Psalms 13 and 22.

Those laments work like this: invocation, complaint, petition, trust and praise. The notable feature of these psalms is that they emerge from a kernel of faith, and the psalmist prays because he or she believes in God and believes there’s some hope by speaking with God. In this one finds a critical feature for the experience of God’s distance.

But at work in all of this is the stubborn, rugged presence of God with God’s people: the biblical expression is that God is with us. David has one of the best sketches I’ve seen of this “with us” theme in the Bible. God speaks and God walks with Israel and Judah and the church. (more…)

Is the God of the Old Testament rigid or is that God flexible? David Lamb, in his excellent book, God Behaving Badly: Is the God of the Old Testament Angry, Sexist and Racist?, probes this question.

Do you think God changes his mind? Does God change? [Like David Lamb, I have no intention here to open up the “open theism” can of worms.]

The answer is No and Yes. No, God is unchangeable; Yes, God is changeable. That’s biblical, and here’s why…

Num. 23:19     God is not a human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?

1Sam. 15:29 He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he is not a human being, that he should change his mind.”

Psa. 110:4       The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind: “You are a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.”

Mal. 3:6        “I the LORD do not change. So you, the descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed..

Very good evidence that God does not change. But, there’s even more evidence that God does change: (more…)

Is the God of the Old Testament a legalist? David Lamb, in his excellent book, God Behaving Badly: Is the God of the Old Testament Angry, Sexist and Racist?, probes into this question by examining how the God of the Old Testament (and New Testament) is depicted when it comes to giving laws.

The caricatures abound, from H.L. Mencken’s view that a Puritan was someone who lived with the fear that someone out there might be happy, or the nuns on The Simpsons who are singing “if you’re happy and you know it, it’s a sin.” Laws are demands, and boring, and oppressive. So laws means legalism. [Actually, there are lots of folks saying things like this.]

How should we envision the God who gives laws? What terms come to mind?

David Lamb disarms this by saying the first two commands in the Bible are “have lots of sex” and “eat lots of food.” Read Genesis 1 and you’ll find just this. David also contends that it was Satan who first dreamed up the idea that God’s laws indicate that God is mean, stingy and legalistic. Read Genesis 3.

What struck me about this chp is the reminder that God is good and laws are given by a Good God for the good of God’s people. [He says we should not be asking why bad things happen to good people but why good things happen to bad people, and his point is that no one is good.]

He sketches the many laws, the random laws and the harsh laws — again observing that Mosaic laws (there are many) are not random or harsh but pointed into specific contexts and are redemptive in their time. (more…)

Does the Old Testament teach us about a God of violence or a God of peace? Apart from the “just because it’s in the Bible doesn’t mean it is condoned” approach, a proper method for answering a question like this is to probe the texts and find the patterns and the contexts and see what is happening in that text in that day. So David Lamb, in his excellent book, God Behaving Badly: Is the God of the Old Testament Angry, Sexist and Racist?, begins by examining a seemingly clear case of God behaving badly: Elisha’s praying for bears to destroy some boys (2 Kings 2:23-25, after the jump).

It is too easy to read this text quickly, see the horror and pounce on YHWH and Elisha and Judaism and Christianity. And many prefer that method, but there are factors here that deserve some consideration: first, the word “boys” is not gradeschoolers but probably teenagers, and they appear to be a gang or pack of boys up to no good in the wilderness. Second, though not our world, an insult of someone as worthy and noble as a prophet was serious — both violent words and an assault on the social order. This is not a harmless set of words by a group of innocent boys out playing a prank. [That’s the superficial reading.] Third, Elisha a peace-seeking and healing prophet. Finally, the text does not say they were killed but “mauled” — short of death. It is severe, no doubt, but David Lamb says it is more an incident of God’s protection of a noble prophet.

Recently I’ve been pondering violence and God some, and I wonder if violence isn’t the way of the world and that God is depicted as entering into the violent ways of humans in order to redeem us from the ways of violence. Anyway, how do you deal with these texts of violence? Ignore, suppress, minimize, or ponder?

What then of the Canaanites being drive from the Land? David sees this as forced migration, it was not as severe as many text suggest in their hyperbolic forms, and the primary form of “violence” — if that is what you want for a term — is “driving out” and not “death.” David responds briefly to Eric Seibert’s (at times Marcion-like) suggestion that the God of the Old Testament, when he doesn’t conform to Jesus, needs to be rejected, but David prefers a method that seeks to get to the bottom of the text in another way.

(more…)

Is the Bible racist? Richard Dawkins thinks so, and the big reasons given in this general accusation are these: some 19th Century Christians justified new world slavery by appealing to the Bible; and YHWH commands Israelites to kill all the Canaanites. But “racism” is about “race” and most ancient Semite people are of the same race, but … but … but if we understand racism as prejudice based on nationality or ethnicity, then find texts in the Bible that can be taken as racist. David Lamb, in his excellent book, God Behaving Badly: Is the God of the Old Testament Angry, Sexist and Racist?, examines with this question: Racist or Hospitable?

Any attitude that denigrates any human on the basis of ethnicity or race is contrary to God’s creation of all humans as divine images. This insults God. David contends the geneaologies show that all humans derive from one family — that is a biblical perception of all humans.

Can this theme in the Bible be adequately explained by appealing to election, to wickedness and to God’s holiness that leads to judgment? This stuff is in all our Bibles: What do you do with the material?

Further, he agrees with Bill Webb that the biblical material, while not what we believe today, struck redemptive moves in the ancient world.

Fine, but what about the genocide texts? Here are two texts, the first from Joshua 10:40 and the second from Josh 11:14-15:

So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with all their kings. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded.

¹⁴ The Israelites carried off for themselves all the plunder and livestock of these cities, but all the people they put to the sword until they completely destroyed them, not sparing anyone that breathed. ¹⁵ As the LORD commanded his servant Moses, so Moses commanded Joshua, and Joshua did it; he left nothing undone of all that the LORD commanded Moses. (more…)

It’s a risk to ask if God behaves badly in the pages of the Old Testament, a question asked by David Lamb in his book God Behaving Badly, and it’s the same to ask with Mark Strauss about Jesus Behaving Badly, but there’s less risk to ask with Randy Richards and Brandon O’Brien about Paul Behaving Badly. But some get nervous here because they fear that one is getting near irreverence toward Scripture, and then the come back that Paul, after all after all after all, was not God. To affirm Scripture is not to affirm everything said or done by the people in Scripture.

We encourage you to stay with us while we investigate the case against Paul…. Some may feel we’ve been unfair to him or that we’re abusing Scripture or being irreverent. We assure you that our motives are pure. Bear with us. When it is done, we think you’ll be satisfied (9-10).

Randy and Brandon have what is typically called a “high” view of Scripture; they believe it and teach it but think the case against Paul deserves a good hard look. Which they do.

Many today love, love, love Jesus but they have problems, problems, problems with Paul. Many, thus, will welcome a hard look at Paul.

What are their problems? Here is Brandon:

I (Brandon) understand where Paul’s opponents were coming from. There was a time while I was in college that I didn’t much care for the apostle Paul. I believed his writings were Scripture, that they were true and divinely inspired, so I didn’t question whether Paul was right about the theology he propounded. But, boy, did he rub me the wrong way. He struck me as arrogant about his superior spirituality. … In the words of Paul, I heard the arrogance of a handful of church leaders I knew, each of them insisting they were “God’s man” and that their opinions were therefore divinely inspired. Disagree with me, I could easily imagine Paul saying, and you’re disagreeing with God (12).

Randy found Paul’s theology hard to comprehend, but they both come forward with this:

Matters became more complicated for each of us when, deeper into our theological studies, we discovered that there is no shortage of people who totally reject Paul’s perspective on the Christian life. We thought Paul was arrogant, but others believed he was a misogynist and that his view of women was responsible for generations of gender inequality and the patriarchal subjugation of wives and daughters. We thought he was insensitive, but others considered him a racist and antiSemite. The charge certainly seemed to stick since Christians have quoted Paul to justify their persecution of Jews and the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in America. We felt he failed to embody the meekness and gentleness of Jesus. Others claimed he had invented Christianity. Jesus went around preaching, “The kingdom of heaven is near.” Paul preached about blood and faith and resurrection. Some learned critics argued Paul’s emphasis on sin and atonement departed radically from Jesus’ simple gospel of peace and forgiveness. Not only that, they claim, but this departure from Jesus’ teaching was no accident. The preeminent Jesus scholar Albert Schweitzer wrote of Paul, “If we had to rely on Paul, we should not know that Jesus taught in parables, had delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and had taught His disciples the ‘Our Father.’ Even where they are specially relevant, Paul passes over the words of the Lord” (13-14).

The stakes are high.

We are, however, willing to admit that the charges against Paul have merit. We cannot merely harrumph and dismiss charges of immorality, misogyny and racism as trivial. So what we propose to do in the remainder of this book is to put Paul on trial as people have done for two thousand years. E Each chapter compiles the common charges against Paul—that he was rude and arrogant, a chauvinist and racist, a prude and a homophobe, a hypocrite and a twister of Scripture (15).

Reading Paul is a challenge: (1) we get his letters and not those to whom he is responding; (2) we bring to Paul our own beliefs, and (3) sometimes Paul offended his contemporaries on things we are offended by too while other times he offends us and other times he offends both us and his contemporaries. Another problem is that for some — Augustine and the Reformation are only partly responsible here — Paul is on a pedestal of almost deity.

The authors want to “humanize” Paul.