quotation marks

Thanks, Andrew, for setting me up with a password on your new site. I’ll use it at least this once.

Whoever regards the Bible as a true telling of God’s deeds must come to grips with the genocide perpetrated by the Israelites, at God’s explicit command, on the peoples of Canaan. I can think of four reasons to buffer the impact of the word with irony quotes:

1. It wasn’t really a genocide. My dictionary defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group." That’s exactly what God is talking about in Deuteronomy.

2. The genocide didn’t really happen; the events aren’t historically true. I haven’t heard that argument put forth here.

3. The slaughter was justifiable. First you’d have to accept that God really did command this genocidal purge, just like the text says, rather than the Israelites simply attributing their own ruthless cruelty to God. Then you have to accept that it’s right and just for God to punish sinful peoples, even to the point of utterly destroying them man woman and child. If you accept both of those contentions, then you’re prepared to regard this godly slaughter as justifiable genocide. Certainly that’s been the Judeo-Christian tradition over the centuries.

4. The victims didn’t really count as people. I think this interpretation too is supported by the Biblical text. God’s main expressed concern is to protect the purity of HIs chosen people from the pollution of living in proximity with other nations. The nations of Canaan may have been sinners and idolaters, but you get no sense that God is chastening them in order to bring about their repentance, like He does when the Israelites perpetrate these very same insults to God’s authority. He’s not correcting the Canaanite nations. God lets the survivors of the ethnic purge live not so they might repent and be grafted into the people of Israel, but in order to teach the Israelites the art of warfare by serving as their enemy and also to provide an ongoing test for Israel’s faithfulness by offering temptation to disobey (Judges 3:1-4). It’s not that the Canaanites are intrinsically less moral or less powerful or of inferior racial stock; it’s just that God didn’t choose them.

So if you accept the OT as God’s word, and if you believe that God is right and just in all His dealings, then I suppose you’re justified in enclosing the word "genocide" in quotation marks. You can use the same quotation marks when you talk about the Flood, which was genocide on a far vaster scale than the slaughter in Canaan. The same can be said for the Last Judgment. Some interpretations of Scripture effectively quarantine God’s "mass murderer" phase from His relatively more benign dispensation in the New Testament; others see more historical continuity. Either way, the conservative tradition accepts the idea that it’s okay for God to perpetrate genocide and to order His followers to perpetrate genocide in His name. Thinking of the Church as being enclosed in a protected microcosmic new creation that’s separated morally, covenantally and even creationally if not ontologically from the rest of the human race probably helps distance Christians from the horror of genocide. I presume this microcosmic bubble could even protect its occupants from any sense of real complicity if for reasons of judgment or purification God were once again to command His people to slaughter the masses of the unchosen. But even if you don’t accept the microcosm theory, even if you regard the world as the mission field where there is neither Jew nor Gentile, you still have to accept that God may kill en masse people who are ordinary human beings just like you, that He may even command you to be one of His agents in this purge, one of the killers of your fellow men.

I’m dismayed that Christians would accept the possibility that their God could call for the purposeful and systematic slaughter of whole populations of people who don’t worship HIm, who don’t obey Him, who might never even have heard of Him. I used to believe it; I won’t believe it any more. I would have hoped that the idea of an "emerging" post-evangelicalism would disavow this sort of criminal anti-humanistic religion once and for all.

I can live harmoniously with people of faith, any faith, even if I don’t believe the same things they do. But if a particular religious sect believes that God would go out of his way to kill me and my kind for not being among His chosen people, and especially if that sect believes that God has in the past and might in the future call His people to pursue a holy war or a systematic execution of the infidels, then I’m going to have to stand in opposition to that sect. Even if just such a sect is part of my cultural heritage. Even if I once was a member of just such a sect.

Many, perhaps most, evangelicals are fine with that, fine with my little stance of resistance. Historically the Judeo-Christian tradition has acknowledged a radical distinction, even an at times violent antagonism, between God’s people and outsiders. This antagonism is built into the Biblical record. To set aside the us-versus-them mindset would require setting aside the literal hermeneutic, which deems all these violent outpourings of God’s wrath as true representations of the way God acts in the world. Many Jews and Christians have done just that, regarding the genocidal passages as tragic misunderstandings or purposeful misrepresentations of God’s real nature. It’s possible to retain one’s Christian faith without retaining the literal accuracy of all Scripture. To regard these genocidal passages not just as true but as pivotal to understanding God’s dealings with His people throughout history is, in my judgment, willfully to embrace the antagonistic stance that pits Christian against non-Christian, even unto death if need be. I would hope that Christians of good conscience would turn their backs on this vile and dangerous tradition and look for some other way forward.