"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

So says Richard Dawkins. Obviously, he doesn't want readers to think he's on the fence about God as presented in the Old Testament—or at least, how God seems to Dawkins. But if we clean ourselves up after this blast of rhetorical wind, how strong is Dawkins' case against God?

Dawkins lists a number of objectionable Old Testament scenes, ending with God's command to massacre the Midianites (Num 31:17-18), Joshua's putting all of the inhabitants of Jericho to the sword (Josh 6:21), and God's "rules" for waging holy war in Canaan (Dt 20:10-18). In regard to the last two, he remarks, "the Bible story of Joshua's destruction of Jericho, and the invasion of the Promised Land in general, is morally indistinguishable from Hitler's invasion of Poland, or Saddam Hussein's massacres of Kurds and the Marsh Arabs," and "Do not think, by the way, that the God character in the story nursed any doubts or scruples about the massacres and genocides that accompanied the seizing of the Promised Land…. [T]he people who lived in the land…should be invited to surrender peacefully. If they refused, all the men were to be killed and the women carried off for breeding."

Let's try a little experiment, and assume Dawkins' skewed and unfair reading of the Bible. Suppose upon reading his devastating attack on the God of the Old Testament, we would reject the Bible and embrace Dawkins' atheism—exactly what Dawkins wishes to be the effect on readers. What then? Would we be any better off?

First of all, as he himself admits in his book River out of Eden, in coming over to Dawkins' side, we have thereby embraced a cosmos indifferent to good or evil. As a consequence, we immediately face a dilemma: we have no moral grounds for condemning the actions of God (He doesn't exist) or the characters in the Bible (good and evil don't exist). Since God doesn't exist, there is no reason to work up a froth of indignation against Him, anymore than against the lunkheaded Zeus in Homer's Iliad.

Yet now another, more amusing problem arises for Dawkins as the champion of Darwinism today. It would seem that a good many of the complaints made by Dawkins against the God of the Old Testament could with equal justice be made against natural selection itself. To say the least, that puts himself in a paradoxical position.

If we might put it in an arresting way, many sociologists of religion argue that primitive people tend to fashion their notions of the gods according to the way they experience nature, as nature deified (whether this is true or not, we won't decide here, but will take it on trust for the purposes of illustration). What would evolution look like if we tried to deify evolution's principles? Would the Evolution God (EG) be "unjust" in its callous indifference "to all suffering," and supremely so, for continually picking off the weak and sickly? Would EG be an "unforgiving control-freak," "megalomaniacal," and "petty" since (as Darwin stated), "It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relations to its organic and inorganic conditions of life"? Would EG be "sadomasochistic" in his use of suffering, destruction, and death as the means to create new forms of life? A "capriciously malevolent bully" in his "lacking all purpose" and being "callous"? A "bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser," "genocidal," and "racist" in his continually pitting one species population against another in severe struggle, the struggles among humans taking place between tribe and tribe, race and race? And what adjective would describe EG, who uses these deadly struggles as the very vehicle responsible for the upward climb of human evolution?

So we've rejected the God of the Old Testament for Dawkins' atheistic account of evolution, only to find out that many of the traits Dawkins marked as repugnant are ensconced in natural selection (except that now, as a new and even more unfortunate kind of Job, we have no one against whom to complain).

Perhaps Dawkins will fare better in his case against the people of the Old Testament? But now another paradox comes to the fore. On Dawkins' own grounds, it would be hard to imagine a people who more assiduously pursued a better set of evolutionary strategies for ensuring that its gene pool was carried forward, undiluted by rival tribes and races, than the ancient Jews. They were genetic geniuses!

Think over the above "reprehensible" examples Dawkins provided from the Bible, and then ruminate upon his account of how evolution, including human evolution, works. Dawkins maintains in his classic book The Selfish Gene that we may "treat the individual as a selfish machine, programmed to do whatever is best for its genes as a whole" (although, as he makes clear, the invisible level of the struggle between genes in a single individual is, for him, the real level of natural selection and the struggle to survive). The selfish machine works, literally, by gene-o-cide, the destruction and use of other selfish machines, treating them as fodder for its own survival.

What, then, is left of Dawkins' case against the God of the Old Testament? Nothing at all.
 
 
Originally posted at To the Source. Used with permission.
(Image credit: The Guardian)

“What great nation is there that has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is to us, whenever we call upon him?”  This passage from the Book of Deuteronomy was recently proclaimed in the Catholic Church’s Lenten liturgy, and it touched right at the heart of something I have been pondering for some time: evidence of polytheism in the Bible and the relationship between ancient Israelite and Canaanite religious traditions.

Popular critics of the Judeo-Christian God frequently focus on the apparent incompatibility of the biblical portrait of God with what we insist must be essential moral attributes of the divine nature should it even exist.  Both critics and believers, however, are often unaware of another crucial problem that would seem to contradict traditional Christian doctrine concerning the nature of God.  In a nutshell, the tension lies not only in the relation of the biblical God to violence and evil, but also on the arguably more fundamental level of whether the Bible reflects belief in only one divine being in the first place.

I have devoted a chapter to this very theme in my book Dark Passages of the Bible, and even there I barely scratch the surface of this issue.  Nevertheless, I have continued to ponder this issue over the past couple years and believe something meaningful can be said within the constraints of a blog post.

Biblical Henotheism and Canaanite Religion

 
First we have to acquaint ourselves with a sampling of concrete biblical texts which illustrate the particular problem.   Here I will focus on just a few examples from the Book of Psalms:
 

"God has taken his place in the divine council;
in the midst of the gods he holds judgment." (Ps 82:1)
 
 
"For who in the skies can be compared to the LORD?
Who among the heavenly beings is like the LORD,
a God feared in the council of the holy ones,
great and terrible above all that are round about him?
O LORD God of hosts,
who is mighty as thou art, O LORD,
with thy faithfulness round about thee?" (Ps 89:6-8)
 
 
"For the LORD is a great God,
and a great King above all gods." (Ps 95:3).

 
Christians typically do not read the above texts with the assumption that multiple divine beings exist.  We know that there is only one God—so the argument goes—therefore the “gods” of which the Psalmist speaks clearly must not refer to other divinities.  This view runs throughout the Church Fathers and is illustrated in St. Augustine’s exegesis of Ps 82:1 cited above: “[The psalm] begins,” he says, “God stood in the synagogue of gods.  Far be it from us, however, to understand by these gods the gods of the Gentiles, or idols, or any creature in heaven or earth except men.”  In line with a venerable Jewish tradition (one invoked by Jesus on a similar text and an issue I simply cannot take up within the constraints of this post), here “the gods” or “holy ones” refer to the saints, that is to say the human faithful who have been made like God through entry into covenant with him.

For thoughtful believers and unbelievers alike, however, the question remains: Does the above explanation truly do justice to what the human author(s) of the Book of Psalms intended to say? In other words, did these authors really have humans in mind when speaking of “heavenly beings” who dwell “in the skies”?  Philosophically speaking, it is impossible to prove that the psalmist couldn’t have meant humans here.  But the question is whether this is the most reasonable and likely reading of his words.  When one achieves an acquaintance with the whole array of biblical evidence to the contrary—evidence, again, of which even my book only touches the surface—it becomes increasingly difficult to side with Augustine on this particular point without a further word of explanation.  Now a staunch Christian might disagree, insisting he can offer a satisfactory explanation to individual problematic texts on a case by case basis.  However, after a certain amount of study and by what Newman calls a “cumulation of probabilities,” the evidence amasses and the scale tips. Conventional pre-critical explanations alone no longer suffice to account for the data.  As a colleague of mine once said, “You may be able to dodge snowflakes, but you can’t dodge a snowstorm that has come right upon you.”

So what is really going on in texts like the psalms sampled above?  A Catholic ecclesiastic and biblical scholar of no less stature than Pope Benedict XVI himself recognized that we are witnessing here traces of polytheism, or, more precisely, henotheism in the Bible.  Even the official religion of Israel, Benedict tells us, did not at first deny the existence of other gods than Yahweh.  Henotheism, also sometimes called monolatry, refers to religious worldviews in which the existence of more than one divinity is taken for granted, while worship is rendered only to the being considered highest among them.

If it is not apparent to the reader simply from a survey of the Scriptures themselves, I find the case for henotheism in certain parts of the Old Testament to be undeniable when reading it against its broader Ancient Near Eastern background.  A number of erudite studies explore the evidence for this claim, for example John Day’s Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan, William Dever’s Did God Have a Wife?, and Mark Smith’s works The Origins of Biblical Monotheism and The Early History of God.  Beginning with Frank Cross’s 1973 work Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic and continuing in more contemporary works such as those mentioned above, scholars have argued that the earliest literary strata of the Israelite tradition from the 1^st millennium B.C. reflect a dependence upon much older Canaanite religious traditions.  Remember, Canaan is the Promised Land conquered by the Israelites, and this land had its own robust culture which naturally exerted significant influence upon the people of Israel.

The religion of Canaan during the 2^nd millennium B.C. is well depicted in the hundreds of cuneiform tablets excavated at the ancient sea port of Ugarit (located in modern Syria) during the last century.  Thanks to these archaeological discoveries, we are now aware of some 150 Canaanite deities, including many who make an appearance in the Old Testament: El, Baal, Yam, Mot, and Asherah, to name a few.  It is noteworthy that Yahweh does not appear in the genealogies at Ugarit.  It seems that Yahweh came into Canaan from the outside.  Where precisely scholars do not agree upon, but the narrative of Moses at the burning bush offers us the Israelite view: Only with the revelation to Moses is the God of Israel revealed as Yahweh.  As God tells Moses, “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty, but by my name the LORD [Yahweh] I did not make myself known to them” (Exodus 6:3).

The high god of the ancient Canaanite pantheon was named El.  Fascinatingly, El also appears as one of the principal designations for God throughout the entire Old Testament.  The form can occur in the singular (El), in the plural (Elohim), or in what is known as construct form.  For instance, El-Bethel identifies him with a physical place, while the personal name “Elijah” means “My God (literally, my El) is Yahweh.”  Depending on the translation one is using, typically El is translated generically as “god,” a move that makes sense seeing as the Hebrew tradition eventually lost consciousness of El as a divine being distinct from Yahweh.  Elohim (literally, “the gods”) thus can be used to characterize a group of false gods, but it is also used for Israel’s one God despite the thought-provoking fact that the word is grammatically plural. Often one finds Elohim alongside Yahweh (itself often rendered “LORD”).  Thus in translating Yahweh Elohim in Psalm 89:8, the RSV gives us “LORD God.”  In the Psalmist’s view, these two words clearly refer to the same divine being.  An abundance of evidence, however, suggests that an earlier stage within the Israelite tradition saw the two as distinct gods.

Of all the biblical texts that could be cited to this effect, perhaps the most poignant is Deuteronomy 32:8-9, which casts Yahweh as one of the “sons of El”:
 

"When the Most High [Elyon] gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he separated the sons of men,
he fixed the bounds of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.
For the LORD's [Yahweh’s] portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage."

 
For me it is always illuminating to read various Bible translations against the ancient manuscript traditions they are trying to render in our modern languages.  In the case of Deuteronomy 32:8 above, the RSV does not reproduce the Hebrew Elyon (which, likely referring to a particular manifestation of El, has no equivalent in English).  Rather, it follows the Greek Septuagint’s hypsistos in giving us “the Most High.” According to its standard practice, the RSV likewise follows the Greek kyrios giving us “LORD” rather than reproducing the Hebrew Yahweh.  But for me the most interesting choice concerns the expression “of the sons of God.”  Here the standard Hebrew Masoretic Text reads bene Israel (the sons of Israel).  The Septuagint reads angelon tou theou (the angels of God), reflecting a later understanding that beings once identified as gods would better be characterized as angels.

Why, then, does the RSV say “sons of God”?  In reading the footnotes to the critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, one discovers that this is the suggested emendation which is “probably right” based on comparisons with other extant manuscript evidence (Qumran, Symmachus, Old Latin, etc.).  Essentially, the editors of the Bible are arguing that either bene el (“sons of God”) or bene elim (“sons of the gods”) represents the most ancient tradition of the text from Deuteronomy even though this is not the expression found in the manuscripts upon which we typically base our translations.

The reason why the editors consider this to be the original text lies precisely in the awareness of the Hebrew Bible’s dependence upon earlier Canaanite traditions.  A key concept in the Canaanite religion was that of the “divine council,” a royal court of divinities collectively known as “the sons of El.”  As we know from the archaeological evidence, El was the high god of this heavenly court, while the other gods ministered to him.  In its own turn, Deuteronomy 32:8-9 appears to reflect the Canaanite belief that El had assigned each nation its own guardian god.  Thus Deuteronomy may well be offering us a privileged glimpse of a stage in the Israelite tradition wherein El and Yahweh were still considered distinct deities.

If the above supposition is true, then one may ask why the Septuagint and Masoretic Text changed the original text to “angels of God” and “sons of Israel,” respectively.  As Benedict XVI always taught us in his biblical exegesis, one ought not to exaggerate claims to certainty on such questions, yet, in light of the preponderance of evidence, scholars can still offer the following reasonable explanation: The Bible is best thought of not as a monolithic monotheistic tome but a rich and complex body of “monotheizing” literature.  Later strata of the Israelite tradition built upon what came earlier, in the process developing this thought while at the same time polishing it.  In contrast with the more ancient version of the text which still harbored traces of Canaanite lore, later biblical versions were produced with an emphasis on showing that the “the sons of the gods” did not actually exist.  Eliminating any polytheistic or henotheistic overtones in the earlier tradition, these later editions intended to proclaim that there exists only one El, and his name is Yahweh.

Christians and Atheists: Looking at the Same Evidence, Drawing Different Conclusions

 
At least for some believers and non-believers, what I have said above may represent common ground in terms of evidence we can agree upon.  My summary might even square perfectly with other observations the non-believer has previously made concerning the Bible, seeing in it a frail work made by human hands and subject to countless alterations over the centuries.  Again, all of this might simply confirm the skeptic’s conviction that the Bible is nothing more than a human work replete with discrepancies, errors, and cover-ups.  What I wish to say in this post—and what I want you believers out there to take home—is that the Christian can look boldly and critically at the same evidence the atheist perceives to be deeply problematic, and in doing so actually grow deeper in your faith.

As Joseph Ratzinger famously taught in his 1988 Erasmus Lecture in New York, the real debate in exegesis is at bottom a philosophical one.  Every one of us begins our reading of the Bible already with a particular interpretative lens, with a conscious or unconscious set of presuppositions which in turn color the conclusions we draw from an examination of the biblical data.  In our case as Christians, we admittedly read the Bible with the eyes of faith.  As I hope you can tell from reading this post, this need not and should not mean that we neglect modern scholarship, but it does mean that we operate with the conviction that the Bible’s idiosyncrasies are reflective of a greater plan God has for mankind.

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, the Catholic Church looks at the developments we find in the Old Testament as expressions of the divine pedagogy, the teaching method by which God gradually revealed himself to his people over the centuries. As part of this process, he accommodated himself to our human weaknesses, working from within the context of the Ancient Near East and purifying its religion from within.  Naturally, the Old Testament faithful were not going to arrive at Trinitarian monotheism overnight.  Like any good teacher, God in his divine pedagogy had to work the Israelite and Canaanite pupils he had, not the 4.0-GPA honors students he wished he had.  As Ratzinger put it in a homily on Genesis’ creation narrative:
 

"The Bible is thus the story of God’s struggle with human beings to make himself understandable to them over the course of time; but it is also the story of their struggle to seize hold of God over the course of time…The whole Old Testament is a journeying with the Word of God.  Only in the process of this journeying was the Bible’s real way of declaring itself formed, step by step…For the Christian the Old Testament represents, in its totality, an advance toward Christ; only when it attains to him does its real meaning, which was gradually hinted at, become clear."

 
The traces of polytheism and henotheism we see in the Old Testament are therefore not a scar of which Christians should be ashamed, but rather evidence of the plan by which God patiently worked with a human people to lead them—in a gradual way befitting human nature—along a path which would eventually enable them to welcome the coming of Christ.

So, at the end of the day, can the believer admit that El and Yahweh were originally viewed as distinct deities in Israel?  If a person looks at the Bible as a catalog of divine propositions dropped down from Heaven, then probably no.  But for the Catholic who sees the Bible as God’s word in truly human words, then it only redounds to the beauty of God’s plan to glimpse in the above texts evidence of his ancient dealings with the people of Israel, our ancestors in faith.  Confronting the presence of multiple deities in the Bible only makes me more appreciative of just how far we have come thanks to God’s gracious plan for our salvation.  It makes me profoundly thankful to know that divine providence has led us from worshiping a pantheon of warring deities to worshiping the one true God who became incarnate for our salvation in the person of Jesus Christ.

Now I don’t expect the atheist to agree with anything I have said in these final few paragraphs, but I do hope it conveys in a charitable manner how thoughtful Christians might approach the problem of polytheistic overtones in the Bible.  And for you believers out there, I pray that your engagement with these difficulties will give you both a sense that the Bible’s difficulties really can be faced with confidence, as well as a sense of wonder at how much we Christians still stand to learn about our Israelite family history.
 
 
(Image credit: Conservapedia)

NOTE: Over the past several months, we've had lots of combox discussion about how Catholics read and interpret the Bible. To help us all make sense of this question, we began a multi-part series on the topic. Once a week, for the next several weeks, Mark Shea will unpack how Catholics authentically read the Bible. He began with a general introduction, then he outlined three specific guidelines. Last week he launched into the three main spiritual senses (or lenses) through which Catholics interpret the Bible by focusing on the allegorical sense. Today, he'll cover the moral and next week conclude with the anagogical.

Discussing the moral sense of Scripture should seem easy. After all, we’re talking "The Good Book" here. Even when many Americans abandoned Christianity as supernatural revelation from God, they for the past couple generations still tended to treat the Bible as a solid moral code with some lingering respectability. Martin Luther King, Jr. could still appeal to it and not get hooted off the stage as recently as 40 years ago.

But the cultural consensus about the goodness of the Good Book is rapidly decaying and, for many people, it is no longer taken for granted that “the moral sense of scripture” is even a good thing. But whether they approach the Bible as the Good Book or the Bad Book, there’s one thing most of our fellow post-moderns can agree on it: it is primarily a Rule Book.

That’s just one of the many ways in which contemporary culture demonstrates its misunderstanding of Scripture. For it is not too far off the mark to say that Christ came into the world specially to destroy the notion that salvation is predicated on following the Rules and Morality.

So if the Bible is not all about law and morality, why the Ten Commandments and all the rules and regs? The basic answer of the Tradition is that laws and morality are sort of like x-rays. They are part of the healing process, but they do not heal anything. The laws and morality side of the Bible are the x-ray equipment of the Divine Physician. The law says stuff like “Don’t covet. Be generous.” and then, when you act like the squeezing, wrenching, grasping, covetous old sinner you are, you find you are breaking the law. But that’s all the law can do: tell you what’s wrong with you. It’s can’t get you an inch nearer to healing the problem with your soul once you’ve looked at the x-rays. Only Christ can do that—which is why the Bible is actually all about him, not about rules and regulations.

This does not, of course, mean Catholics say “Whee! New Testament, New Covenant! No rules! Go nuts!” It means that for us Christ is the reality while the laws, rules, and regulations of the Old Testament were, so to speak, just the shadow pointing to him. The lesson of the Old Testament, in a hundred ways, is that purity matters. And the Old Testament gets this across by making no specially strong distinctions between the “ick” created by our revulsion to sin and the “ick” created by our revulsion at eating foods that gross us out. The moral is not “God hates bacon”. The moral is “God hates sin the way you, O Israel, hate the thought of eating pork.” Eventually, once the central lesson has been learned about the sin business, Christ will make clear that we are not defiled by anything that enters the belly, but only by the evil that comes out of the heart. His solution is not “Down with rules!” but rather to give us the power to obey God and keep the law. So faith in Christ does not “free” us from obeying God, just as love does not “free” us from binding ourselves to our spouse. Rather, faith “establishes” the law of God by making us both desire to do it and able to do it.

That’s why the New Testament still commands us to do various things (starting with keeping the Ten Commandments). The point is not that the Ten Commandments will save you, but rather that saved people live as God wants them to live so that they can experience the fulness of the life of the Trinity. Living out the commands to love God and love neighbor, they will find themselves keeping the whole of the law and the prophets.

Because of this, the Church has always looked to Scripture to convey a “moral sense”: that is to communicate ways in which an authentic follower of Jesus Christ should live. This includes not merely the standard didactic moral teaching of the Judeo-Christian tradition (“Love your enemies, pay your taxes, don’t gossip, avoid impurity” etc.), but also various ways in which Christ is again “hidden” in the Old Testament.

What this presumes is that Christ teaches by means of icon as well as word. The reason the Church believes this is because Christ does, in fact, give us an example of iconographic teaching when he strips, ties a towel around his waist, and proceeds to wash the feet of the disciples on Maundy Thursday. He offers us a picture rather than a preachment and tells us to do likewise. The Church, following this clue, does what we all do when reading a familiar tale and starts seeing moral lessons elsewhere. For instance, she (like every first grader on planet earth) sees a moral lesson about courage in the face of overwhelming odds in the tale of David and Goliath. Reading the story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den, we see a moral image of the faith required by a disciple of Christ when we too are surrounded by lions of fear, despair, doubt, and discouragement. When we look at the Temple, Paul tells us that we are looking at an image of our own body and that we must not defile it. He gets that connection from his Master, who likewise said of his body, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”

Scripture is more or less a bonanza of this sort of imagery and, again, we can ransack it at will just so long as the moral teachings we see illustrated there do not contradict what the Church teaches about, you know, morals.

Which, of course, raises a question since morals in both Scripture and in the history of the Church develop. Psalm 137 pronounces a blessing on anybody who would smash a Babylonian babies brains out on a rock. Christ? Not so much. Slavery used to be sort of reluctantly okay for Christians (cf. Philemon). Now? No.

Of course, a postmodern who is simply mining Scripture for “contradictions” will often dismiss the whole thing as rubbish. However, those in our culture who still retain something like an historical imagination will consider the possibility that precisely the problem facing the Christian description of revelation is that it involved eternity breaking into time and the Perfect revealing himself to the radically imperfect. Among other things, this means that our grasp of what God is saying to us could well take all of human history and beyond to fully see what is going on. So it would seem to me quite on the cards that when God reveals himself to a bunch of Bronze Age savages, he will likely be understood in Bronze Age savage terms involving such matters as herem—the ancient Semitic practice of slaying everybody and everything in a village as, ironically, a pious act (“See Lord! I’m keeping nothing for myself!”). One need not, I think, believe that God desires such things to see that he could use such cultural flotsam in a long-term effort (a successful one, by the way) to move Israel away from such barbarism and ultimately to the revelation of Christ, who offers Himself as a sort of burnt offering to save us from our sinful barbarism.

Because of all this, I don’t think we can embrace any of three simple solutions to the moral complexity of Scripture. That is, we cannot simply: 1) deny the inspired character of those texts of Scripture we happen to find distasteful or troubling; 2) explain away the literal sense of Scripture by allowing some symbolic reading of it to predominate; or 3) simply affirm wholesale all Old Testament morality from hamstringing horses to stoning rebellious adolescents to butchering Canaanite babies as “the will of God.” Rather, we must be very cautious in searching through Scripture for its moral sense because the morality taught by Scripture is not a static thing.

Consider a human embryo. At one point it has a tail. But the adult human doesn’t. Is it really accurate to say humans are creatures with tails? No, even though at one stage in the womb we were. The same principle applies here. Revelation progressed like a developing embryo from the Old Testament to the New. God permitted divorce under the Mosaic Covenant, for instance. Yet Jesus would later make clear that this was a permission, not “God’s will” (Mark 10:5). Similarly, God condescended to the practice of the culture to which He first revealed Himself when He “stooped down” and submitted Himself to the practice of “cutting a covenant” with Abraham by passing between the severed halves of the animal carcasses (Genesis 15). But though God blessed forms of sacrifice and covenant which were perfectly acceptable in Abraham’s day, His ultimate goal was always to lead us to the final and full sacrifice and covenant offered by Christ. In the same way, there were moral, ethical, and philosophical insights in Abraham’s day which were good as far as they went, but they have since been fulfilled and completed by the final and full revelation offered by Christ

Consider also the Jewish understanding of the afterlife. Ecclesiastes tells us that “life is vanity” and speaks in a despairing tone about the futility of earthly existence. That is because Ecclesiastes is unaware of the resurrection of the Body which was not fully revealed until later. The author is right as far as he goes. Earthly life is futile. He simply doesn’t (and can’t) go far enough without further revelation.

Bottom line: Much Old Testament morality and theology regarding war, marriage, the afterlife, justice, and so forth is true as far as it goes, but often the author has not yet gone far enough because the Holy Spirit has not yet revealed it. In the Old Testament, the Chosen People were not yet the recipients of full revelation. That full revelation was Jesus Christ, who definitively clarified all that went before and fulfilled what was not complete. This is the idea of the development of doctrine. We understand this idea completely when we contemplate our own children. There are things we permit of (and punishments we inflict on) three year olds that are appropriate for their stage of development which would be absurd to permit of (or inflict on) a 20-year-old.

In short, in revealing himself “in time and on earth” God is obliged to work through and with a people with faults, idiosyncrasies, blind spots, and errors resulting from their being as fallen as the rest of the human race. Yet he is obliged to do so, not in order to ratify the Fall, but in order to mend it. This meant, as all teachers know, making allowances for the weaknesses of the student till the student matured further. It meant facing the fact that the world into which Israel marched out of Egypt was a real world, not an ideal one, and that facing that world (a world where idolatry, wars of extermination, child sacrifice, polygamy, and other such complicating features were the norm for all participants) would mean a long, hard road to building a civilization and an even longer road to the day when the human race was ready to hear the (at the time) unimaginable truth of Christ.

Thus, to complain that God did not immediately introduce the full moral and ethical teaching of Christ into the diet of Israel is like complaining that a parent does not immediately force feed a baby sirloin steak and a bottle of wine. It is like finding fault with a kindergarten teacher for neglecting to introduce the kidlets to the inner mysteries of integral calculus, algebra, and quantum physics. As Christ taught of divorce, so it may be said of many of the moral imperfections permitted in the Old Testament: “For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment” (Mark 10:5). It was not that God changed from the Old Testament to the New. It was that we had to grow up enough to bear the full truth about him and his demands on us. Our eyes have to get used to the Light.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Exchange. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: St. George's)