God is Good

It took me a while to gain enough confidence to finally confront the Genesis account of creation and to be able to call it what it is - sacred myth.  There were two critical realizations that led me to this point.  First is the belief is that God would not create absolutely overwhelming and obvious evidence that the universe is billions of years old if in reality it is only thousands of years old.  Since God is good, He would not try to fool me into believing a lie.  I am free to believe my own eyes when I see proof of the universe’s age.  I don’t have to pretend the proof doesn’t exist in order to please God.  The second was that I saw that the Genesis account contains clear spiritual lessons.  I saw that the purpose of the story was not to answer how God created the universe, but rather why he created it.       

Though these two realizations helped me accept the Bible as inerrant when it is read correctly, it set up for me a future dilemma.  I would soon be forced to deal with some other O.T. passages.  For example, God specifically commands barbaric war crimes including the killing civilians, pregnant women, genocide, and infanticide in a few different places (including 1 Sam 15:1-3 and many others in the book of Joshua).  And it is pretty clear he is authorizing the rape of the captured women by His army in the book of Numbers 31:17-18.

Even if I take these passages to be historical fiction, I am left with the question of what am I supposed to learn from them?  Why would God want these evil commands attributed to Himself?  What am I to learn about morality and God’s character?  I hear the easy answers about how this demonstrates his “holiness” and his “hatred of evil”, but how can God be “holy” when He behaves humanly?  How can he hate evil when He commands evil? 

C.S. Lewis addressed this problem in a personal letter in the following manner:

 On my view one must apply something of the same sort of explanation to, say, the atrocities (and treacheries) of Joshua. I see the grave danger we run by doing so; but the dangers of believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him ‘good’ and worshiping Him, is still greater danger. The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of Scriptures is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two. Indeed, only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissible.

At this point Lewis abandons the doctrine of inerrancy.  In other words, the Bible is just plain wrong when it asserts God commanded such atrocities.  The authors of the Bible wrote these words for other reasons.  It is easy to see why men would want to justify their own behavior by attributing it to God’s will (some people still justify the USA’s treatment of the Native Americans on the same grounds).  I really like how C.S. Lewis simply pits the doctrine of God’s goodness versus the doctrine of inerrancy.  Which is higher?  It is obvious.  It is much more important to my faith and to my understanding of who God is to believe that He is good rather than hold on to the less important doctrine that the Bible is inerrant.

So now when I read the Bible clearly devaluing women such as in the book of Leviticus 12:1-5, I am free to realize that this may have been men once again justifying their own oppression of others (other people groups or other genders) rather than God actually commanding that women are to be viewed lower than men.  It is amazingly freeing to no longer have to try to ignore/rationalize/apologize for certain passages or Biblical statements that are clearly wrong, oppressive, and/or barbaric.