As Promised...

Here are my thoughts on Paul Copan's article Is Yahweh a Moral Monster?

The objections he is answering come from the pens of the neo-atheists.  They assert that God is a moral monster, not worthy of our respect, love, or obedience.  I won't get into details, but they are quite vehement in their attitude toward God.

In responding to this objection, Copan relies heavily, and rightly so, on the idea of redemptive history.  God did not give his people everything they needed to know in one moment right at the beginning, but in his wisdom he used a long process of training and revealing to get his people where he wanted them to go.  God accommodated himself to our speed.  This idea is a very useful tool for those who want to understand the Bible, especially the Old Testament, since there is much there that is confusing otherwise or could be wrongly understood and misapplied.

In his response, Copan organizes his answers under a few major headings.  The first has to do with the difference between morality and legality.  Mere keeping of the law does not make a person moral.  Morality has to do with more than just laws, it has to do with all of life.  And to make this point God did not simply give his people a list of commands, but showed them the lives of those who have gone before them, lives lived in relationship with God.  The lives, of course, were not perfect, and so we cannot simply look at these people (like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc.) and do what they did.  We cannot jump from the 'is' of their lives to the 'ought' of our lives.  We have to read God's revelation wisely.

The second section shows more of this.  Copan argues that many contemporary discussions of the Old Testament start from the wrong point.  They begin by projecting our modern, post-enlightenment morality back to pre-enlightenment times.  The proper way to understand scripture, however, is to understand it in its context.  This section provides a comparison of the Biblical law code and the law codes of the Ancient Near East (ANE), and shows how God used these ANE codes, but made them better.  The laws in the Bible do not match up to what we want to see now, but they are far better than the laws which were contemporary with it.  God was showing to the world around Israel the better way to live--not an alien way, but a better way--by redeeming their codes of law.

The third section is where Copan really gets to the heart of the matter.  Instead of the God of the OT being hard and cruel, Copan shows how God, even in the OT, wanted his people not simply to obey, but to love him and respond to him out of that love.  There is, Copan writes, a warm moral tone throughout the OT that cannot be represented by mere lists of laws.  The laws are necessary, of course, but to stop at the laws and not see beyond them is missing the heart of the Old Testament.  God was forgiving of his people time and time again.  He dealt with them in compassion, he made it possible for them to have a relationship with him, sinners relating to a holy God.  This is not the picture of a moral monster, this is the picture of a loving God who truly wants his people to love him.  Through the OT, God is leading his people to Christ, where the true nature of God is clearly and powerfully shown.  The read the OT without looking ahead to Christ is to not read the OT properly.  There are not two gods, but there is only one God, who is God both of the Old and the New Testaments.

But what do we do about the less appealing bits of the OT?  What about the Canaanite conquest?  Copan provides a good response here as well.  The war against the Canaanites was not a war against people, but a war against their religion, a false religion (see Deut 7:1-6 -- they would not be totally destroyed, but their way of life and their religion would be rendered powerless).  But the most important point to remember is who God is.  As the Creator and Maintainer of all creation, he has some authority over all of life, including human life.  The Canaanites, practicing false religion, are not honouring God as they should, and so are to be punished (as Israel herself was when she turned away from God in disobedience).

The question is, do we hold God to our moral standards, or does God hold us to his?  I prefer the latter, since God is wiser and better than myself.  And if we read the Old Testament properly, this is clearly shown.  Especially when it is read in light of the development of the New Testament.  Then the objections of the neo-atheists come to nothing.  God is no moral monster, he is instead a loving and compassionate Creator, working in history to bring his people back to him out of the pit of sin.

To see anything else is to look with closed eyes, seeing only what you want to see.