(3) “The Bible is clear” implies that God’s character can be well-understood from reading it, but the “God of the Bible” is very hard to pin down.
I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, but there is a lot of really fucked up shit in the Bible.
Drowning the world’s population (Genesis 6), genocide commanded by God— and don’t forget to kill the infants (Deuteronomy 20: 16, 17), sex trafficking (Numbers 31), parents eating their children (Deuteronomy 28:53-57), concubines being gang-raped and dismembered (Judges 19), God asking Abraham to kill his own kid as a test of faith (Genesis 22), God ordering the stoning of rebellious children (Deuteronomy 21: 20, 21), human sacrifice (2 Kings 23:20-25), God decreeing that non-bleeding brides should be stoned to death on their parents’ doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:20), God killing all the firstborn Egyptian boys to manipulate Pharaoh (Exodus 11:5), — there’s a lot of flat-out horrific and disgusting passages.
Even Jesus gets raised eyebrows from me on one point, which pains me to say…but it’s hard to read the accounts of his interaction with the Syrophoenician woman and not be seriously uncomfortable when he ignores her pleas and then calls her a dog before he ultimately (after having a lightbulb moment?) heals her daughter. Was Jesus racist is not a question that makes me feel good or at-all settled about the character of God. (Matthew 15:21-28, Mark 7:24-30).
So it definitely can create some cognitive dissonance (psychological whiplash?) when people wax eloquently about God’s love, insisting that the “God of the Bible” is loving and good, but you’ve read these other parts of the Bible, and they don’t exactly feel like “God’s love letter to you.”
What are we to think of God when we read these “texts of terror” as scholar Phyllis Trible describes them? Countless Bible verses depict God as loving, merciful, compassionate, good, forgiving, just, slow to anger, even perfect. But verses like the above and others describe a very different deity. Is God cruel? Heartless? Deranged? Abusive? Sadistic?
The honest reader must conclude that the Bible portrays God as complex at best and a volatile monster at worst, flip-flopping between love and extremely disturbing violence. If we center the Bible in our Christian life, and especially if we give it a place of supreme authority, assuming the same God who “so loved the world” also so destroyed the word, it may come with a high emotional cost: acceptance of God as highly unstable, liable to have compassion and abundantly pardon one day (Isaiah 55:7), and “send on you curses, confusion, and rebuke…until you are destroyed” (Deuteronomy 28:20) the next.
Who is God? The Bible says different things about it.
Additional reading/listening:
- For a brilliant take on Jesus’ interaction with the Syrophoenician woman, read this by scholar/professor/priest Will Gafney: The Woman Who Changed Jesus
- “Taking a Shot at Divine Violence” with Pete: Episode 30 of The Bible for Normal People podcast, as well as Episode 28 “Jesus and Divine Violence with Greg Boyd” (pastor and author)
“If the Bible teaches that God is love, and love can look like genocide and violence and rape, then love can look like . . . anything. It’s as much an invitation to moral relativism as you’ll find anywhere.” — Rachel Held Evans (1981-2019)
Photo credits in order:
- Photo by Bjørn Tore Økland on Unsplash
- Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash
