Again: Ohlendorf and the OT Texts of Terror
If you are just dropping in here with this blog post, you need to go back and read the previous one. This is an addendum and response to critics of what I said there.
Very few, if any, of you who responded to the previous blog post “caught” the main point. Or, if you did, you ignored it. Let me repeat it:
Otto Ohlendorf was right when, during his Nuremberg trial for war crimes, he argued that IF you believe God commanded Israel to commit genocide you cannot believe or claim that genocide is always, automatically a crime against humanity. In at least one case, then, you believe it wasn’t.
People: it’s a matter of logic. There’s no getting around it. IF you believe that God commanded genocide, something completely foreign to the character of God revealed in Jesus, by the way, you cannot LOGICALLY claim that genocide is automatically, always a crime against humanity.
Then I will add that IF you believe God commanded Israel to commit genocide, you MUST be open to the possibility that God has commanded it again. God did not say that he would never command it again. According to the story, God did promise never to send a universal flood again. But he did not promise never to command genocide again.
What he did was send himself to reveal his true character and Jesus did and was that—the perfect revelation of God’s character. And you cannot imagine Jesus commanding his disciples or anyone to slaughter children.
And please don’t play the “Revealation-apocalypse” card! Nowhere does the New Testament say that Jesus will slaughter children or commit genocide.
Finally, to those of you who worry that IF the Bible is wrong about God commanding genocide, it’s not a perfect revelation of God’s character and will, we need to talk about WHY we believe the Bible is the Word of God written. As John Calvin rightly said, and as many, many Christians have believed, we believe the Bible is God’s Word because of the “inner testimony of the Holy Spirit.” So go take it up with Calvin and numerous other highly regarded Christian thinkers. Even most biblical inerrantists don’t think we believe the Bible to be God’s Word because of its alleged inerrancy. If that were the case…we would be in deep trouble because no Bible we have is inerrant.
I again strongly recommend that you read two books: Scripture, Tradition, and Infallibility by Dewey M. Beegle and The Scripture Principle by Clark Pinnock. The first one disproves inerrancy and the second one shows why it doesn’t matter.
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