God Delusion and The Bible
The major complaint that I have about the treatment of the Bible in The God Delusion is that it is somewhat superficial. Particularly in the section on the Old Testament, Dawkins merely points out problems that we should recognize as real with scriptures. (For another approach see Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?.) I would say that someone who can read Judges 17-21 or Numbers 31 without serious concern has a problem with their moral compass.
Passages such as those are a key reason why I do not look at the Bible using the “boy scout manual” metaphor. The Bible is almost completely unlike a boy scout manual or the instruction book for your car or an appliance. It is, instead the story of people experiencing God. (See my essay Inspiration, Inerrancy, and Authority.)
I do not believe the inspiration of the Bible can be successfully argued outside the concept of the community. That doesn’t mean that there is nothing that can be said for or against. It simply means that acceptance of the Bible as a source of authority, and appropriate use of it must occur in a community of faith.
One might expect that this would be an area in which I would spend the greatest portion of my time, since it is my specialty, but it would be hard for me to emphasize enough how un-earthshaking Dawkins’ arguments about the Bible actually are to me. They do bring up a serious point in terms of Christian education, however. There are many, many Christians who don’t know about these things and have never taken them into consideration in their own understanding of the Bible. They loudly proclaim that they keep every command in the Bible and do everything the Bible says, but very fortunately they don’t actually do that.
Preachers and teachers who don’t want to deal with the difficult questions have a tendency to read only those portions of scripture that are easy to understand and will comfort the congregation. Some versions of the lectionary, for example, leave off the last two verses of Psalm 137 in reading because they will obviously disturb some members of the congregation, or don’t appear to fit with the rest of the reading. But one needs to face the fact that the did fit to the original author.
I have blogged on this topic before: Slavery and the Bible, Biblical Decision Making, Slavery and the Bible Condensed, and The Danger of Unchanging Truth.
One last thing, and this is addressed more to my fellow Christians, especially moderates and liberals, than to Dawkins or other atheists. It is not sufficient to tell someone that they should not take the Bible literally. There are many varieties of not taking the Bible literally. Take Numbers 31, for example. If you say not to take it literally, you might be suggesting that the story never happened, or that it did happen, but that Moses imagined God’s commands, or that the entire story was intended as an allegory (meaning what?), or perhaps that it’s historical but not normative. Again, I’ve blogged on this before here and here.
I would say that someone who can read Judges 17-21 or Numbers 31 without serious concern has a problem with their moral compass.
Judges 17-21 is simply a story about some very regrettable things which happened a long time ago. Similarly brutal events were common in the ancient world and still happen in some areas today. Of course I condemn such happenings, but so does the Bible (e.g. Judges 21:25), so I have no moral problem.
Numbers 31 does cause more concern because these brutalities appear to have been commanded by God. But in fact were they? The LORD commanded a war of “vengeance” against the Midianites, a response to their part in causing the plague which killed 24,000 Israelites. This reminds me of the USA’s response of “vengeance” against Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11. But there is no sign that the LORD commanded the genocide of the Midianites which follows; this seems to have been Moses’ idea.
This is not to say that there are no places in the Bible where God commands things which by our own modern and moderate standards are repulsive. And we need to find ways to deal with these without rejecting the Bible out of hand. But we also need to choose our examples carefully, and realise that often the Bible is an account of very wrong and immoral things which happened and which are certainly not to be taken as normative.
I think you have some excellent points on those particular stories, but very much like liberals often just say “don’t take it so literally” without specifying just how one should take it, many conservatives in my experience try to cover all the violence in the Old Testament with “God commanded it, so it’s OK.”
I’m particularly distressed to encounter Christians who are completely unaware of these passage and who are then severely shaken when someone points them out. That seems to me to be an important function of Christian education programs in churches.
The book Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God? is by one of my undergraduate professors and takes many of these passages head on.