“To teach us reverence, and whom we are to revere, should ever be the chief aim of education.”
Thomas Carlyle, “Review of Goethe’s Works” (1832)*
Commenter Ian objects to my irreverent opinions of some heroes of the Old Testament. I understand his unease because I long read the OT with the pious presupposition that these characters were indeed heroes. But then one day my pious presupposition was not working and I just read the words.
What is admirable about Abraham? What kind of man pimps his wife and then plays the jealous husband for cash and prizes? Abraham pulls this stunt twice! What is admirable about Jacob? What kind of man steals his brother’s birthright and goes on to embezzle his father-in-law’s sheep and goats? What is admirable about Joseph? What kind of man exploits his government post and a famine to expropriate and enslave the nation he governs? What is admirable about Rahab the harlot? What kind of a woman helps foreign spies so that she and her family can escape a massacre of her own people?
When a pious presupposition is not whispering Hero! Hero! in your ear, your lying eyes begin to see a shifty rat.
Recall that the soul of a people is revealed in its heroes. Whom they reverence and teach their children to reverence (not always the same person) is supremely important. One way to understand a people is therefore to read their legends and folktales and histories and ask, Who are the heroes? Are they brave warriors? Pious saints? Patient scholars? Or are they, as in these cases, shrewd and devious tricksters?
Are they men who outwit unwary yokels with sharp dealings and shrewd fraud?
When I say sharp dealings and shrewd fraud, I do not mean simple intelligence. I believe simple intelligence is in every culture admired. I mean craft; I mean guile; I mean devious design. I mean a man, for instance, who would set another man up to hit on his wife in order to extort cash and prizes.
Imagine that you knew a man in real life who, with his snaky wife, made millions with this loathsome scam. Would you tell your son, “That man is a hero, my son”? Would you say, “Son, I hope you will grow up to be just like him some day”?
All of this makes me wonder what happens to our souls when we read the legends and folktales and histories of a profoundly alien race, and then stifle our natural revulsion with a pious presupposition. “That sure seems rotten, but I guess it must be alright.” What sort of confusion enters into our souls when our hearts recoil from some outrageous roguery, but our heads say, “No, no, this is really a man (or woman) to whom all honor and glory are due?”
Whatever happens, I very much doubt that reading about rascals with a pious presupposition is a hermeneutic conducive to spiritual health.
*) Thomas Carlyle, “Review of Goethe’s Works” The Foreign Quarterly Review 10 (Aug. and Oct. 1832), pp. 1-44, quote p. 8.
The Orthosphere 
Agreed.
What we are probably seeing is the normal tendency towards aggrandisement of those from history who made the clan, founded the people.
That this was “a good thing” is simply taken for granted by the descendants, by “us”- and all that matters is that group-survival and -thriving is achieved “by whatever means necessary”. Morality simply doesn’t come into it (as with the Ancient Greek heroes, and many others).
All that is required is that the hero is A Winner. Whatever is effective is “good”.
Jesus is almost-wholly unlike these tribal founders and promoters. He did not do what the Jews of his time expected and wanted their Messiah to do; quite the opposite. In this-worldly terms, in terms of helping “his people” here-and-now, Jesus was an ignominious failure.
“All” that Jesus did was to be the greatest and most astonishing moral hero and wonder worker of all time; and offer All Men (not just his clan) the chance of eternal resurrected life in Heaven (on remarkably “easy terms”, too)…
And, apparently, there wasn’t much demand for that – and still isn’t.
You are quite right about the difference between Jesus and, say, Joshua, although I do think some national heroes are revered for qualities other than (perhaps in addition to) homicidal ethnocentrism. The brain scrambling begins with the hermeneutic that teaches us to read the stories of homicidal ethnocentrism’s as if they were stories of Jesus.
The point being made in tanakh is that even our greatest have flaws. It helps guard against polytheistic and idol worshipping heresies, like your ternary Certs Mint theology.
Are you sure you want to use “alright?” Don’t you teach English?
Don’t teach English, no. I have heard and even sometimes urged the flawed sinner hermeneutic, but this is a pious presupposition that is absent in the text. If one reads the text without pious presupposition, Abraham’s grift with Sarah is just a bit of sharp practice that worked. One could imagine the story raising chuckles of admiration in a den of thieves.
That’s why we have the Mishnah and the Gemara – to help you with the text.
I also recommend “The Guide for the Perplexed.”
So just what and where DO you teach?
I understand that those are pious hermeneutics in the Jewish tradition. They have no authority for those of us outside the Jewish tradition. Since, by my understanding, all of those interpretive strategies were written by men more or less hostile to my tradition, there is a good chance they will only confuse and mislead me. The New Testament is our Talmud and Guide for the Perplexed, for better or for worse. I understand that very few Jews look to that for illumination, and that doesn’t surprise me. The two interpretive traditions are very different and it is not clear they can learn much from each other.
So just what and where DO you teach?
I am happy to have a civil exchange with you, but only a week or so back you seemed to express a desire to make my private life uncomfortable. Sorry if I mistook your meaning, but that is what it sounded like. I’m not a theologian or a philosopher and write here without academic pretense as a private citizen.
I only want your faculty colleagues to enjoy your prose as much as I do. Think of me as an unpaid publicist.
I have never hidden my prose or my opinions from my faculty colleagues. I long included the address of this blog and even titles of some posts on my c.v. I know there are some people who deplore what I write, or perhaps that I write it, but what is that to me? I’m civil to my critics, just as I have been civil to you. And if a tenured full professor in the United States of America cannot voice unpopular opinion, who can?
So just what and where DO you teach?
You cannot put duck tape over my mouth, but you can waste my time upset my composure by trying. Why on earth would I help you do that. So long as you are not vulgar or offensive, I’ll approve and perhaps even answer your comments. Given this golden opportunity, why would you type emails behind my back.
You want to promulgate Jew hatred without suffering the consequences.
All I want to do is find out where you teach, so I can direct faculty colleagues to your prose here.
Alas, I’m no internet Orkin. My computer skills are abysmal, and I haven’t been able to smoke you out. But if ever I can, I will.
I apparently incite hatred in one Jew, but propagate Jew hatred, no. I am told you are some sort of lawyer, but I’m not about to report your threats to the Bar Association. If you wish to criticize my posts and express yourself in non-vulgar, non-threatening, non-blasphemous ways, I’ll approve your comments. Not interminably, perhaps, but enough of them for you to get your point across. That’s how debate works. Back-biting, scandal-mongering, and defamation are not the marks of civilized, rational men.
Michelle Obama is some sort of lawyer. I’m a patent attorney. Reg. No. 30,841. Please, please, please report me to the USPTO.
And the CAFC! Don’t forget the CAFC!
I’m comin’ up so you better get this party started.
That’s not how I roll. I’m a free-speech kind of guy. You have not broken my leg or picked my pocket, so why on earth would I try to harm you. If I don’t like what someone says or writes about something that is dear to me, I will tell them how I feel, and why. But no one has ever had to look over his shoulder after arguing with me.
You won’t have to look over your shoulder.
I appreciate that. My neck is not as limber as it once was.
Tell me about it.
Ya gotta have crackle or the clock’s not wound.
Roger, when you act like an asshole in public, everyone takes you for an asshole. And then, they totally write you off as a kook, and a fool. Why get started with that?
JM Smith has approved your inimical and indeed rabid comments here. That has not worked to the benefit of your rhetorical purposes, whatever they might be! On the contrary! The rhetorical purposes of Roger Glass, on any topic, have by his published comments here been forevermore savagely and radically vitiated. Indeed, the antitheses of those purposes have by his comments here been amply supported.
Roger, you have armed antisemites (not that any of us here are such; I think we are not).
Sad!
JM Smith has opinions different than yours. Rather than try to cancel him – a cheap, cowardly move, indeed the move of a rhetorical loser who has no other option likely to succeed – why not engage in civilized discourse, and show him to be in the wrong on this or that point (if not to him, then at least to our readers here)?
What are your arguments, other than “I am going to do my best to see that you are destroyed for your heterodox opinions”? Explain your arguments, so that we may evaluate them. That’s what fearless confident rational men do. But, for the love of God and all that is good, do not engage in the politics of personal destruction; do not join in that with the commies, the trannies, and the Democrat supporters of Hamas.
Can you not see that such a move is *lethal to your side* (no matter what it might be)? Surely you must see that it is, i.e., *exactly what we have come to expect* from our leftist, atheist, modernist antagonists, who are almost all entirely incompetent to respond to us on the merits: namely, mere and sordid ad hominem, and in the absurd extreme, an argument from threat of personal destruction (as Tucker Carlson aptly, accurately and succinctly characterizes this move, it consists entirely in an enraged, “Shut up!”). Surely you must see that it makes you look a hateful, ideologically deluded idiot, just like them, and the Stasi, and the Gestapo; no?
Be a man and offer your arguments. I know you, and know that you can do this. So, do it, my old friend. Do not, I beg you, do not descend into the maelstrom of hatred and malice. It will eat you.
You operate at a level above my pay grade. Take it up with Rabbi Tovia Singer on YouTube. I’d like to hear that exchange.
Once you were my friend. I trusted you.
Kristor
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Let them kill each other, and finish killing each other, the sons of Ishmael and those of the Pharisees – both sorts being (from the Traditional Essene/Christian perspective) heretical or hypocritical offshoots (or both – is there a difference that makes a difference between heresy and hypocrisy?) of the cult of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – and let God sort them out. Meanwhile, let us succor our coreligionists throughout Palestine and the Levant, so that when the heretics and hypocrites are done killing each other, those of our own truly Abrahamic sort may remain and again flourish, as of old.
OK, Roger. Good luck down there in the depths of the maelstrom you have chosen for yourself, as your very own. May God be with you, and save you. I love you, and wish you well.
More in sorrow than anger. I’m touched.
Me as Ahab, and Smith my White Whale.
Laura loves me too. She recently said as much. You remember.
You on your high horse. What gall.
You and your minions spew filth about Jews, but I’m the asshole.
By your very own words, the yids and muzzies are morally equivalent, so let them kill each other to clear the way for God’s true religion. And you’re not the least ashamed of such sentiments.
I’m therefore not inclined to consult you for ethical guidance.
Yet I still can’t help regretting your thinking ill of me. Even after all this, I live for your good opinion.
NOW COME BACK TO REALITY LAND!!
Bloody hell. Whatever would you say to Larry? To Tom?
Anyway, if you want someone really pissed off, go to Quora, and read Maarbolet Irene. Please, please, please dialogue with her.
And don’t forget Tovia Singer on YouTube!!
Roger, *you threatened to do your best to destroy the life of an internet interlocutor,* solely because *his opinions differ from yours.*
That’s about as low as it gets. If I were you, I’d be so ashamed I’d never comment at the Orthosphere again.
Remember dialectic? Remember civilization?
NB: I still think well of you. That’s why I’m so disappointed, and sad. I wish you’d come back to us, reasonably, and with a prior supposition that alternative perspectives are reasonable.
Humility is the indispensable first forecondition of all dialogue. So, pride goeth before a fall.
My baby sister the professor told me once that she couldn’t convince her freshman world lit/world civilization students that David was a sinner. That whole Bathsheba thing, you know? Not to mention that the prophet Nathan spells it out. But her evangelical students absolutely insisted that David was blameless from birth to death.
Which must be why certain groups tolerate certain behaviors in their ministers.
If the story of Bathsheba impinged on the consciousness of those students, I’m sure they told themselves that Uriah had it coming.
Uriah was a Hittite, after all … an auslander. As such, less than fully human, therefore expendable, i.e. So saying, I don’t mean to pick on the Israelites. *Every* people that wants to survive must cultivate – must inculcate in its young – some degree of xenophobia, so that they prefer their connationals to all others. The genocidal ancient Hebrews – like their genocidal adversaries – were no different in this respect than other genocidal nations. Genocidal nations are the human norm. We of the Xian West engage in puerile parochialism when we evaluate other nations in different times and spaces by comparison with ours. Not that it is quite possible to do otherwise, but sheesh, have we learnt nothing from our unique approach to cultural anthropology, shared by no other culture?
The Xian West abhors genocide. Is it really true that the West is not genocidal, like other nations?
LOL. To ask the question is to answer it. Look at the GAE. It wants to destroy all other cultures, all other cults … including its own ancestral cult. That doesn’t make it uniquely bad (it is its cult that makes it uniquely bad). It means that the GAE is like all other cultures. They *all* want and try to survive and propagate, as against all other cults and cultures.
To do so does not in these latter days require the physical destruction of people adherent to other inimical cults (as was the case, e.g., with the Amalekites). It rather requires only their prior submission to the prevalent cult of agnosticism.
Anyway, the genius of the OT is exemplified in what happened – after David put out a hit on Uriah – between the ballsy prophet Nathan and his King; and what happened after that between David and his Lord. The national founders of Judea are portrayed in the scriptures of that nation *precisely as fools or scoundrels,* of one sort or another. Moses a murderer, Samson deluded by lust and rage, Aaron an idolater, David a rebel, murderer and adulterer, Saul a madman, Abraham a pimp and child abuser, Israel a liar and a fraud, and so forth. Only a few – Samuel, Nathan, I guess the prophets in general (except perhaps Jonah) – come off as pretty much blameless (albeit, not always sufficiently content with their prophetic lot). Indeed, the Jews forsooth trace their lineage back to Adam and Eve, fools duped by Satan, who doomed and wrecked the entire cosmos. They trace their lineage back to the ultimate sinners, the Original Sinners.
So anyway, these national heroes of Israel are just as messed up as those of the Greeks or the Norse (those stories are *messed up*). The difference is that the Hebrew antiheroes almost all end up trying to be holy. Which is hard. I suck at it, myself. So did Saint Peter. I pray that when my hour comes, I shall welcome martyrdom. He shunned it 3 times in a matter of minutes. And, talk about antiheroes who convert and end up holy martyrs, look at Paul. Sheesh.
Sure, Peter figured it out later, and was crucified upside down for it; Paul figured it out later, and was beheaded for it. *That’s the story arc for almost all the OT scoundrels.* They figure it out. Their lives don’t go along swimmingly thereafter. David suffers tragedy; so does Moses.
So then may we.
There’s not such a consistent track record of eventually figuring out the moral reality in the Greek or Norse myths. When there is, the moral reality figured out in those myths *is a radically different moral reality than the one that we of the Xian West inhabit, and inherited.* It is a moral reality that Nietzsche saw is antithetical to our own. In that pagan moral reality, genocide is cool, slavery is obviously OK, rape is just how it’s done, due process is unknown, law is what the local warlord says it is today, women and children are not quite fully human, and the poor and weak are despised and persecuted, rightly.
Prior to the Christian revelation, this was all just standard, the human default. Since, not.
Why was Jesus the Redeemer of the Cosmos born to the Hebrews? In the first place, it doesn’t matter, God did it, so let’s get on with the next thing. In the second, the Hebrews were in their day uniquely extreme in their monotheism – they had been really into it and thought and argued hard about it for 1,000 years – and that was a good foundation for the appearance on Earth of the Son of the Most High, whom they of all the cults on Earth most at that time recognized as such. Finally, the Holy Land was quite well situated given trade routes, Roman and Parthian civil order, postal services, banking, etc., to be the logistical font of an evangelical religion intended for the whole world. The Hellenic context helped with that, too (most Hebrews back then did not speak Hebrew, but they like everyone else in the civilized world almost all spoke and read Greek, because one just had to back then (as with Latin in AD 1100 and English today); so the LXX and the NT were known to them – and to all the gentiles – in Greek).
We live today in just such a logistically opportune environment for evangelization. So is it that 20% of French converts to Catholicism last year came from Islam (I had this the other day from a friend who has lots of connections in that world).
This is actually a great time to be a Christian evangelist. Why, I can write stuff here in my California study and it can be read in Zimbabwe an instant later. What’s not to like? Go, Orthosphere!
I’m an evangelical and I’m baffled. I have been explicitly taught that David’s crimes were great in evangelical circles every time it came up, and due to my nomadic military brat upbringing I mean I’ve been around many different evangelicals, not a localised bubble of them.
We know explicitly what makes them heroes though, Hebrews 11 teaches us, they believed God. That may not seem like much, because we underestimate it, many, many people do not believe God.
If I can say this charitably, tolerating misbehavior from ministers is not a brick Catholics should be throwing from their particular glass house. There’s plenty of blame to go around on that score.
I think we should not confuse acceptance of flawed humans and acceptance of flawed heroes. Ordinary people are flawed and do shameful things, and so do ordinary ministers and priests. But a hero is not an ordinary person, and is in most cases a myth. The myth may be based on a historical figure, but the history is very severely edited in the myth. Heroes often have flaws, but they are tragic flaws directly connected to their greatness. We do not read about “the wrath of Achilles” and think, “he’s just a poor sinner like me.” So I don’t buy the argument that a hero is humanized when we are told of his random sins. A hero is always a dramatic construct in a culture’s mythos, and “warts and all” is not relevant to this construct.
One might also say that morality is a lot more relative and downstream than we’d like to admit. For many years the moral teaching of God was that Abu Abraham and his tribe were the heirs to the Divine plan, including a recondite codex and liturgy to remind everybody at least once a week.
After Abraham’s heirs split along kinship lines and it turned out the infidels could march into God-promised Zion whenever they wanted, God started teaching that “in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek,” as befits a multicultural, Mediterranean-spanning empire. This is also why, currently, you should tithe to God to fund your own ethnic displacement.
For many years thereafter, God didn’t blink an eye at slavery, until the idea percolated into the collective consciousness that people above a certain level of cognition simply can’t be chattel, and slavery is actually pretty expensive.
A culture’s heroes embodies the virtues of that culture’s morality. That’s why the heroes of our culture are violent men who make lots of money and their lewd consorts. Heroes and morality change with circumstances, as you say. The spiritual confusion arises when the heroes of a defunct or alien morality are held up before youth and said to be heroes of the operational morality.
Actually, I think the most significant thing you say is that these are “histories of a profoundly alien race”. Christians today, however pious their presuppositions, also see Old Testament characters this way: Abraham and Joshua were Jews, part of the same group that runs Hollywood and the ADL. That’s not how Christians used to see “our father Abraham” onto whose lineage we have been grafted, who was saved by his faith and rescued by Jesus Christ when He harrowed hell, and in heaven is now a saint interceding for us sinners on Earth. From a strictly secular perspective, it is anachronistic to think of Abraham either as a Catholic saint or a 21st century immigration-and-sodomy-supporting diaspora Jew, but the latter perspective (the more anachronistic of the two) is what comes naturally to us. This is the fruit of a century of Jewish-Christian dialogue (consisting of Jews hectoring and Christians groveling), and in identifying the Old Covenant with a contemporary hostile group, we have all become alienated from the Old Testament in a way our ancestors weren’t.
In being alienated from the Old Testament, we have become alienated from our own culture. Westerners used to identify with Old Testament Israel more-or-less in the same way they identified with pagan ancient Greece and pagan Vikings. Both were in some sense “us”, although different in important ways from “us” now. I’m not sure if it strictly makes sense, but there was certainly a sense that the Odyssey and the Exodus were both “our stories”. And in the sense of being integral parts of Western culture, they certainly were and are, and it would be unfortunate if we come to regard them as alien. If they, then, are alien, then what is native to us?
I agree with much of what you say, but naming the alienation does not make it go away. Those of us who have become alienated have become alienated for a reason. We have feeling that we would like more distance between these stories and ourselves. Their influence on our souls is no longer altogether benign. Maybe it is like a man who develops dyspepsia and decides he needs to cut back on the pizza.
I don’t necessarily mean to disagree. I’ve noticed a change in myself lately, which I hope to write about. Early in the Great Awokening, I made a sport of pointing out how zealots of the Left were handing Western Civilization to us, saying that all the great men of the past were actually reactionary fascists if you stop to think about it. I, of course, am happy to agree. Lately though, I’ve been coming around to the feeling that there really is something deeply rotten in the foundation of our civilization.
I certainly don’t connect Abraham and Joshua to modern Jewry, except in a loose biological sense. And I suspect many other modern Christians don’t either.
I don’t even think of them as Jews (in part, I suppose, because they antedate actual Jewry).
You are going to have a hard time getting around King David, whose hereditary lineage was proclaimed in validation of none other than Jesus of Nazareth.
This was proclaimed in the hope it would impress the Jews, whom it did not impress. Why on earth should it impress me? King David lived about 900 years before Mary was born, which means more than 4,000 generations. After 900 years and 4,000 generations, every Jew in Judea must have had David’s blood in their veins. A Christian does not care about arguments for the divinity of Jesus that are derived from the Old Testament because a Christian has no respect for the OT until he has already accepted the divinity of Jesus.
If Jesus’s Jewish lineage isn’t important then why was he born of the Jews–just happenstance? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have him born as a Latin? He wasn’t, because his Jewish lineage is part of the Christian founding mythos; it’s how you get to the God-Man Jesus from Adam. It’s why the Eucharist follows from the Jewish ritual slaughter of a paschal lamb.
Christian apologetics are beginning to meander, like a young father grasping at how to wind up a fabulist bedtime story. The exegesis has broken down to the point you have Romantic Christians arguing the only valid text is the gospel of John (Lazarus).
Not that there’s anything wrong with this matter of individual discernment; I’ve got my own ideas too. But at this point religion evaporates into individual affect.
By this point you’ve gotten rid of the Biblical canon, the exegetical scholarship, the liturgics, the ecclesiology and apparently all the theology with the exception of the Nicene Creed. But then we’ve begged the question of how does one come up with the Nicene Creed, and why was Athanasius right and Arius wrong.
As you say, it looks like all the buttresses, spires and finials are coming down. Modernity is blasted them like a leveling wind. To a man who loves old things, this is all very sad, like watching a library or art gallery burn. But it would be far sadder if authorship or artistry died. So long as Christ remains, the holocaust of lumber can be repaired.
Now, this is a post I very much agree with. The stories of the OT heroes do very often read like folkoric trickster tales, the kind that have been popular in most or all world cultures, and perhaps especially so in premodern tribal societies. This goes to the question of the status that Christians should accord the OT, a vexed issue for a very long time. It’s not just that the human heroes are flawed and often not very admirable; there’s also the problem of hearing that God himself gave orders like this: “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” (1 Sam. 15:3) Is that even the same God referred to in the NT? Or are we dealing here, as some argue, with two essentially different religions?
It seems to me that great deal of anthropological and hermeneutic arm-waiving is required to connect 1 Sam. 15:3 with, say, John 3:16, but no one ever lost money betting on mankind’s capacity to wave arms and concoct fables.
Yep, exactly.
Hi Marcion.
This isn’t a new thought and has been dealt with for centuries. Thing is every child that dies even today, dies because God in His infinite wisdom and goodness permits it. It’s another variation of the problem of evil, not just moral evil but natural evil. The fact He commanded these actions at times directly implies it’s something they would not have normally done. It’s not a universal prescriptive but apparently an example of an exceptional punishment. In the light of eternity physical death is not the worse thing that can happen, all of the dead Amalekites are still around, and God has eternity to reward or punish them, to compensate if indicated a life cut short even as a child.
Jesus is very explicit about the Old Testament from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah. Parsing it out like this does not work. We know God is love and if something He does works against that, it’s because there’s something we can’t see.
We are not faced with a binary choice of rejecting the OT entirely or swallowing the OT whole. The first course overestimates the difficulty of resolving the contradictions between the OT and the NT, the second uses hermeneutic fudge to deny there are contradictions. I don’t think your argument from Providence and ultimate restitution cuts it because it can be used to rationalize anything. If I were to take your words to heart, I would become an absolute fatalist. Everything that happens is simply God’s will, and God will repair any injustices in his own good time.
Within orthodox Christianity, Protestant, Catholic, or EO we are forced to choose, the NT rests on the OT, Jesus js explicit about Moses and the Old Testament so far as I can tell. It’s not hermeneutic fudge it’s trying to reconcile what we imagine Jesus and the NT says versus what it actually says.
Whether it can be used to rationalise anything is basically irrelevant if it is in fact true, but that being said it can’t be used to rationalise because you would need a direct warrant from God with grave penalties if you’re wrong.
It’s not fatalism to say God is omnipotent, which is basically the point here. God can be trusted and He is merciful, so we can assume He is getting it right even if we don’t see it.
If you are not a Jew, the OT rests on the NT. Apart from scholars, very few gentiles would read the OT if they had not been swept off their feet by the NT. I don’t know if you are a Tolkien fan, but your argument is analogous to saying that the Lord of the Rings rests on the Silmarillion. This would be true in one sense but false in another. The Silmarillion provides background to the Lord of the Rings, but the interest and value of the Silmarillion is entirely dependent on the Lord of the Rings. Reading the Silmarillion may enhance your appreciation of the Lord of the Rings, but appreciation of the Lord of the Rings is not dependent on it.
Being wrong usually entails grave penalties. That’s why we should keep asking if we’ve gotten things right. There is a non-zero chance that we have not.
As I just said to Arkansas Reactionary, trusting God to get things right does not always mean letting things be. Sometimes it requires patience; at other times it requires activity. Whatever God is doing he is doing through men like you, so trusting God to get things right may mean trusting yourself to act. You are more than a passenger on this earth.
With regard to John 3:16, the question that never seems to get asked is “What happens to those who don’t believe in him? Do they get life everlasting too? Or do they perish?” If it’s the latter, then God in the New Testament doesn’t look quite so nice after all.
With regard to John 3:16, the question that never seems to get asked is “What happens to those who don’t believe in him? Do they get life everlasting too? Or do they perish?”
Have another look at the most recent half-dozen threads here. That question does get lots of discussion and has for a very long time.
Not with regard to John 3:16 it doesn’t. That passage is appealed to in order to portray God as a different kind of being from what we find in the O.T. When in fact it shows just the opposite. God in the New Testament can be every bit as terrible and ferocious. If we don’t see that it’s because we choose not to.
Here’s another example of what I mean : I don’t know how many times I have seen the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant being used to teach universal unconditional forgiveness — even though the parable ends with the Servant being handed over to the torturers, rather than with a second forgiveness. People see in Scripture what they wish to see, rather than seeing what’s there.
The parable is anti-hypocrisy. It is pro-reciprocation and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. If you don’t forgive, then no forgiveness for you. This can also be interpreted to mean that failing to forgive will eat away at your soul and cause you pain so long as it lasts. Thus you will be tortured by this predicament. I knew a Chilean who had been tortured under Pinochet. He harbored revenge fantasies decades later which meant the torture never stopped but now he was doing it to himself.
I agree with your last sentence but opposite to your intention.
But we don’t honor them for these things, we honor them <i>in spite</i> of these things because of their (imperfect) faith and obedience, out of piety for our ancestors in the faith.
How is it any different from honoring St. Peter, in spite of him denying our Lord?
And the NT writers themselves honor many of the O.T. saints by name.
As well, your interpretation of the story of Joseph is very tendentious. You can’t find anything admirable about <i>Joseph</i>?
And of course, some of them do get their comeuppance for their actions: the story of Jacob has a nice symmetry to it, where Jacob deceives his own father, but then he in turn is deceived by his uncle and then later by his own children, which causes him much sorrow.
If you feel alienated from the O.T. saints and refuse to look at the O.T. through the lens of faith (“reading with… a pious presupposition”, i.e., read in the same way that every secular reader reads it who has an axe to grind against Christianity), that’s your problem, I don’t know why you feel the need to try to convince others to feel the same way and share in your misery.
Thank you I’ve of the same mind. I am hard pressed to find any examples where the Bible portrays these negative examples of behavior as positive. Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn said Jews were often hard to like not because they were so alien but because they were so familiar, so human. They’re not known as a reticent, stoic people, they can be nakedly selfish in a way many cultures try to hide, but the impulse is there and disavowed. I’m not so righteous that these stories seem alien to me at all. I can even laugh at their folly because I’m laughing at my own.
Plus, as I wrote in another comment, we know they’re heroes because of Hebrews 11, they believed God. If we think that’s little it’s because we’re fools, many many people never believe God. It’s a bit like Naaman the Syrian, if God had asked him some great task he’d have done it, but he initially turned his nose up at bathing where God told him to bathe.
Finally Jesus said in John 5 if we don’t believe Moses we can’t believe Him. Marcionite tendencies have to go.
Can you really identify with Abraham when he passes Sarah off as his sister and then coming out as the jealous husband for cash and prices? I have capacities for rottenness, but not that one. The extreme compression of OT stories is also relevant because nothing can be overlooked as padding. It is like a man traveling with a very small suitcase. Nothing he packed was packed by mistake. Whatever the trick with Sarah means, it is so essential that the editors of Genesis put it in twice. I can’t believe they did this simply to humanize Abraham. What does it mean?
Can I identify with lying to save your life? Yes, and by being his sister she was now something that could be negotiated over, as opposed to the only way forward being over his dead body. Hope they buy it, and skip town before they get wise. Yeah I can absolutely see why someone would do this.
There is no indication that Abraham’s life was in danger. Everything we know about Abimelech is that he was an honest and God-fearing man. Abraham owed him an apology, not the other way round. Sarah tells Abimelech that God suggested the ruse. Really? Does God encourage you to deceive people?
Hoyos,
JMSmith has no use for the book of Hebrews either, since it was written for Jews, not for him:
https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2024/05/07/the-secret-badges-that-we-wear/#comment-172132
Perhaps next we’ll be hearing that the Blessed Virgin was an overbearing, nagging Jewish mother because of John 2:3 and Luke 2:48. We need to remove our pious presuppositions.
Engage the arguments. If Paul had written a Letter to the Aztecs, he would have had to begin his arguments with propositions that the Aztecs already believed. This is how all persuasion works. If I wish to persuade you of something you do not believe, I must begin with things you do believe. I then proceed by way of inference and new data. This is why all persuasion is tailored to the person or group being persuaded, and why Paul’s Letter to the Aztecs would be relevant only to Aztecs. The aim of Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews is to make Christ make sense to Hebrews, not to any Tom, Dock and Harry.
But Hebrews was written to Christians, so to people whose presuppositions were at least primitively Christian. He’s not trying to persuade pagans.
Of course there are attempts at persuasion in probably all the epistles, but all the books of the New Testament are written to those who already have Christian faith: so the epistles are not intended primarily as an apologetic or evangelistic effort, but to strengthen those in the faith we share, to explicate on the faith, or to attend to some controversy or dispute, to give spiritual council on some matter, etc.
Hebrews was written to a particular congregation (presumably), but it nevertheless has universal applicability, as judged very early by the Church (and whether or not true of Hebrews, others of St. Paul’s epistles were intended by St. Paul to be shared with other congregations). If the New Testament books were limited to nothing more than efforts to persuade particular peoples in particular times and locations, why would the Church have even bothered collecting them into the New Testament, let alone making them central to her liturgical worship and regarding them as sacred?
Personally, Hebrews is my favorite epistle: I read it at least once every year. And from the modern perspective, it seems much more ‘Christian’ than ‘Jewish’, given its focus on priesthood and sacrifice, which talmudic Judaism has nothing to do with.
Every text is written with a particular audience in mind, but the intended audience of a letter is especially narrow. This does not mean that a letter cannot be read with profit by persons other than the addressee, but that those persons reading the letter should never forget that they are not the addressee. I greatly enjoy reading a great man’s published correspondence, but I read his letters very differently than I read his essays or books.
I don’t think this changes when the letters in question are inspired. They remain letters, just as the Psalms remain psalms, and we must read them as such. They may have something to say to all men in all ages, but they were not written for all men in all ages.
I presume “the Hebrews” were Christian Hebrews, but they did not stop being Hebrews when they became Christian. If I converted to Islam, I am sure I would remain a very Christian Muslim for many, many years. If an intelligent Muslim wrote me a letter to instruct me in my new faith, he would certainly build on the foundations of my abandoned Christian faith. He would recognize that a former Christin presents unique opportunities and difficulties as a student.
Another way to think about this would be to imagine the Pope write an encyclical “To the Americans.” The Japanese or Hottentots might read this with profit, but much of it would speak to problems and prejudices they do not have.
Ok, I don’t disagree with any of your latest.
In terms of the evolution of moral values, the rest of the Amalekite story in 1 Samuel 15 is very interesting too. “God,” or the character passing for him in this text, had ordered a genocidal attack that spared no one and nothing. Saul’s troops, though, while apparently killing all the people including infants, hadn’t fully complied, but had held back some of the livestock. This reduced that part of the crime from genocidal murder to mere looting. God, and therefore the prophet Samuel, were furious, and had harsh words for Saul, who tried excusing the lapse on the grounds that the animals were meant to be sacrifices to God. How could God object to a gesture aimed at his honor?
Samuel’s reply could have been, “Get real, your men were keeping those fatted animals for themselves.” That’s probably what Saul expected. But no, it was this:
“Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices
as much as in obeying the Lord?
To obey is better than sacrifice,
and to heed is better than the fat of rams.
23 For rebellion is like the sin of divination,
and arrogance like the evil of idolatry.
Because you have rejected the word of the Lord,
he has rejected you as king.”
Samuel is appealing to a higher morality — one that isn’t founded on ritual sacrifice, or on merely (but formulaically) avoiding idolatry and magical spells while worshiping Yahweh alone, but on sticking to a code of conduct, which starts with doing what God specifies. That the particular commands in this case were atrocious and, from our vantage, highly immoral would have completely escaped the story’s writers and original readers. What was being revealed to them, here as in many other OT texts, was the idea of religious faithfulness as a matter of morality at all rather than mere ritual. This was an evolutionary step toward our modern understanding, even if it so happens that we’ve since moved on — quite a long ways, in fact — in our views of which sorts of actions actually are moral and which aren’t. The further evolutionary step, after “obey God no matter what,” would be, “and now a forgiving God is commanding love, peace and kindness, so do that instead.”
So yes, the Old Testament is a very interesting archive and record of ancient thought and how it developed. As direct instructions for modern conduct…. Well, you’ve got to pick your passages carefully.