September 5, 2006

Dear Colleague,

   The Bible is a library of books written by scores of people over hundreds of years, and so it is not surprising that their picture of God ranges from the homely and sublime to the horrifying and utterly repellent. For me, among the most repellent is God's command to Abraham to kill his own son as a token of his submission and obedience. The command is that of a sadistic tyrant, and I am surprised that not many human tyrants have been inspired to follow suit. Did the Roman emperor, Nero, require a senator to plunge a knife into his own child to demonstrate his obedience? Did Caligula? Here are three more examples of divine sadism. A man was caught gathering sticks on the Sabbath. Moses didn't quite know what to do with him. God helped him out by commanding him and the whole community to "stone him to death outside the camp." And so it was done. Sometimes modern sensibility just can't stand this gruesome image of God. For example, in the Anglican lectionary, the reading retailing the storming of Jericho by the Israelite army under Joshua ends at chapter 6, verse 20, thereby omitting the concluding verse: "Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep and donkeys." The omission may be dishonest, but it does credit to heightened moral sensibility. And for my third example, there is God's command to Saul to commit genocide against the Amalekites: "Don't leave a thing; kill all the men, women, children and babies; the cattle, sheep, camels, and donkeys" (1 Samuel 15:3)

    God's penchant for genocide is a hint of who God really is in the Old Testament—nature. Katrina, to take a contemporary example, is God in action, killing impartially "men, women, children, and babies" along the Gulf coast. (We call it an Act of God, don't we?) In the war against the Medianites, Moses's soldiers, under God's command, killed all the men, but kept the women and boys as captives. Moses was angry and asked that the women and boys be killed too (Numbers 31). What nature God would tolerate exemptions—dare show acts of mercy? Destruction and killing had to be impartial and total in the manner of tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes.

    The New Testament has fewer examples of drastic and summary punishment. One example is the sudden death of Ananias and Sapphira after committing an act of deceit (Acts 5: 1-11). There is no mention of God carrying out the execution, or of God's follower doing the deed. It just happened as a sort of automatic divine retribution, and so can seem less cruel. Finally, how is this as an instance of cruelty to animals? Jesus cured a man of possession by evil spirits. He cast the spirits out of the man and sent them into a large herd of pigs nearby, feeding on a hillside. The result is that "the whole herd—about two thousand pigs in all—rushed down the side of the cliff into the lake and was drowned" (Mark 5: 9-13).

    The innocent—children and babies, above all—are punished. That's what bothers us the most. The New Testament does one better than the Old Testament in having Innocence Incarnate (someone who is without sin) tortured, humiliated, and killed (John Polinghorne, Science and the Trinity, Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 47-48).

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu