Genocide and new creation

John, thanks your careful, articulate and forebearing response on this difficult subject. I did not use quotation marks around ’genocide’ for the sake of irony as you appear to suggest, but I’ll address your four points seriatim.

1. As I said elsewhere, I’m still not sure it’s correct to say that the Canaanites were killed because of their race. The biblical witness appears to be that they were cut off from the land because of their idolatry and wickedness. Nevertheless, the word ’genocide’ carries an appropriate emotional and moral weight in this context.

2. Whether or not events actually happened as described in Joshua, the conquest of the land remains central not only to the story but also to the foundational promise to Abraham. The whole narrative from Genesis 12 through to Joshua is basically about how Israel will come into possession of the land and how the people will live in it once they get there. Moreover, the hope of restoration to the land is central to the ’salvation’ imagined by the prophets (eg. Jer. 30:3). Isaiah’s vision of the ransomed of the Lord returning with singing to Zion with everlasting joy upon their heads (Is. 51:11) presupposes the conquest, the occupation of the land, the displacement of the Canaanites by the migrating Hebrew tribes.

The destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, to my mind, puts a final end to this land-based nationalism (indeed Zionism) and the church must find a more dispersed, scattered, fragmented way in which to be a sign of God’s sovereignty over the whole earth. But I don’t think that that allows us to dismiss or diminish the significance of the earlier narrative conception of the people of God as a creational microcosm that needed to possess the land in order both to recover the original blessing and to be a blessing to others. Obviously the dispossession of the Canaanites creates an immediate moral and indeed theological problem, but I am reluctant to resolve it either by ignoring it or by denying the centrality of the land for Old Testament theology.

3. It seems to me that both the Old and New Testaments generally regard catastrophic disasters as instances of divine judgment on human sinfulness: the flood is a judgment on humanity’s propensity for violence; the conquest is a judgment on the wickedness and idolatry of the Canaanites; the Assyrian invasion is a judgment on the sinfulness of the northern kingdom; the Babylonian invasion is a judgment on Judah for walking in the corrupt ways of Manasseh; the Persians are God’s instrument of judgment on the hubris of Babylon; the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans and the death of a million Jews, if Josephus is to be believed, is God’s final judgment on a persistently rebellious and stiff-necked people; and, I would argue, the eventual collapse of pagan Rome is roughly speaking God’s judgment on the power oppressed the church and exalted itself against the creator.

More often than not the Jews are on the receiving end of divine ’punishment’; only rarely are they the agents. How much of a difference is there between God’s ’punishment’ of the Canaanites by the invading Israelites and God’s ’punishment’ of Israel by the invading Babylonians? The fundamental point, it seems to me, is that Israel had to make sense of its painful and conflictual political existence theologically: if God is sovereign over the nations, then these major events must have theological - and ultimately covenantal - significance. Obviously, in the case of the conquest this could be regarded as self-serving, but Israel is always acutely aware of the fact that it was liable to the same judgment.

4. I agree that Judges 3:1-4 is problematic. It sounds like a rationalization of certain non-complying historical contingencies. However, I disagree that God’s main concern is to protect the purity of his chosen people. The main concern is that they should come into possession of the land - this is why the Canaanites are not really given the chance to repent (though Peter’s mention of Gen. 15:16 is at least partly relevant). Notice that cities outside the land (if I’ve understood this correctly) are treated differently (Deut. 20:10-18). Notice also that God hardens the hearts of the Canaanites so that they do not make peace with Israel (Josh. 11:20) so that Israel might receive the land as an inheritance (11:23). Again, this is not put forward as a justification of the ’genocide’. I simply draw attention to the fact that the conquest is the means by which a central element of Israel’s self-understanding is achieved, and I’m not sure that the right response is simply to ’disavow’ it.

I think that the New Testament sees in Jesus a fulfilment of the vocation originally given to Abraham not merely to save individuals from their sins but to model and embody a ’new creation’. The foreseen possession of the land was an intrinsic and necessary part of that original vocation. That means that we have to deal with the conquest of Canaan and the mandated destruction of the Canaanites - and with it the various objections that you raise. I don’t have the answers, but I don’t see at the moment that it invalidates the basic argument that Israel was conceived from the start as a ’new creation’, a response or counterpart to a macrocosm that had repeatedly rejected the creator.

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 have never argued that this ’microcosm’ has a protective function, that it is a ’bubble’. The point of the terminology was to suggest that the church should see itself not as a narrowly spiritual entity with its final destination in heaven but as a people called to represent in its corporate life, both actually and prophetically, the full possibilities of being in concrete, creational relationship to the living God. Nor is it my intention to distance us from the ’horror of genocide’ - on the contrary, by bringing into focus the full scope and missional significance of the promise to Abraham I seem to have obliged us to acknowledge the critical significance of the conquest.

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.

That is a problem for any theology that thinks that the God of Jesus is the same God who revealed himself to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, et al. My understanding of New Testament eschatology, however, suggests that AD 70 constituted a final and irreversible judgment on the land-based, Jerusalem-centred form of the microcosm, as an outworking of the Law. Since it is pretty much only in relation to the possession of the land that Israel was instructed to eliminate impurities in this way, and since Jesus taught his disciples to love their enemies and allowed himself to bear the destructive brunt of God’s judgment on Israel, I don’t see any danger of God commanding the church to ’slaughter the masses of the unchosen’.

Incidentally, why is the suggestion that the people of God as descendants of Abraham should see itself as a creational microcosm any worse than more traditional conceptions of the church as a ’chosen people’ or ’elect’ or ’saved’ or destined to live with God for ever?