Dawkins acknowledges that on the surface Darwinism seems to be inadequate to explain goodness and morality. After all, what is the survival value of such sentiments? He nonetheless attempts to explain morality through his “selfish gene” theory by which genes ensure their own survival by encouraging altruistic behavior, such as through reciprocal altruism or aiding one’s genetic kin.²

Dawkins also argues that if our morality is grounded in our “Darwinian past” then we can expect to find universal morals that transcend cultural and religious boundaries. He cites studies that allegedly demonstrate that religious people do not differ from atheists in their morals.³ He concludes that “we do not need God in order to be good—or evil.”⁴

Considering his atheistic assumptions, it makes sense that Dawkins would attempt to base morality on evolution. However, his argument does not do justice to the true nature of morality: (1) he does not adequately explain how natural selection can produce moral obligation; (2) he confuses the relationship between morality and either God or religion; and (3) he does not adequately explain why being moral is important.

PROBLEM ONE: BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN WHAT IS AND WHAT SHOULD BE

Dawkins’s theory addresses whether actions either promote or hinder the survival of genes. This is merely a pragmatic criterion, but morality deals with concepts of right and wrong, not useful and not useful. No one consistently lives as if morals are merely based on survival value. People do regard some actions as genuinely right or wrong. Dawkins does not explain how the survival value of an action translates into the moral status of that action. As Dawkins admits elsewhere, “science has no methods for deciding what is ethical. That is a matter for individuals and for society.”⁵

Dawkins theorizes in terms of pragmatic survival value, but he misses this problem when he criticizes religion in terms of actual right and wrong:

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.6

These considerations fill me with despair. They seem to show the immense power of religion, and especially the religious upbringing of children, to divide people and foster historic enmities and hereditary vendettas.7

Joshua’s action was a deed of barbaric genocide.8

A More Pessimistic Perspective

Dawkins demonstrates a very different attitude in River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (published eleven years before The God Delusion). He explains how a female digger wasp lays eggs inside a caterpillar so that her larvae can eat it. She paralyzes the caterpillar but does not kill it so that the body remains fresh. Dawkins speculates that if the wasp’s venom included an anesthetic, then the caterpillar would not suffer while being eaten, but “nature is not cruel, only piteously indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.”⁹

In The God Delusion, Dawkins advocates seeking the greatest good for the greatest number of people,¹⁰ but in River out of Eden he explains that natural selection does not promote such behavior. He draws from the economic concept of utility functions (in other words, whatever a given system maximizes) and explains that natural selection maximizes the survival of DNA. He then proposes the concept of “God’s Utility Function.” He says that we can imagine that creatures were created by a Divine Engineer and then we can reverse engineer what he was trying to maximize.¹¹ He applies this to what he considers to be the instability of cooperative effort:

Humans have a rather endearing tendency to assume that welfare means group welfare, that “good” means the good of society, the future well-being of the species or even of the ecosystem. God’s Utility Function, as derived from a contemplation of the nuts and bolts of natural selection, turns out to be sadly at odds with such a utopian vision. To be sure, there are occasions when genes may maximize their selfish welfare at their level, by programming unselfish cooperation, or even self-sacrifice, by the organism at its level. But group welfare is always a fortuitous consequence, not a primary drive. This is the meaning of the “selfish gene.”¹²

Dawkins returns to his example of the wasp and caterpillar and says that “Nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering nor for it. Nature is not interested one way or the other in suffering, unless it affects the survival of DNA.”¹³ He describes the crash of a school bus and quotes a writer who argues that the horror of such tragedies confirms that we live in a world of values, because if the world were just electrons, then there would be no problem of evil. Dawkins responds:

On the contrary, if the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies like the crashing of this bus are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention. It would manifest no intentions of any kind. In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A. E. Housman put it:

For Nature, heartless, witless Nature Will neither know nor care.

DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.¹⁴

How can natural selection be the basis of morality (The God Delusion) if it is completely unconcerned with kindness and suffering (River out of Eden)? Dawkins shows some intellectual honesty (considering his atheistic assumptions) regarding morality in River out of Eden, but he appears to abandon it in The God Delusion. The reason for this change is unclear.

Morals Need a Solid Foundation

Paul Copan argues that evolutionary naturalism can describe how people behave, but it cannot prescribe how people should behave.¹⁵ In order to say that an action is good or evil, one needs an objective and universal moral standard that transcends individual people and individual societies. It must also be personal in nature. Moral standards deal with right and wrong, what should and should not be done. That implies a choice that requires personality and consciousness. A transcendent moral standard would therefore need to be grounded in a conscious, personal, and transcendent reality. Christians find this in God—the only place where such a standard can be found.¹⁶

If God does not exist, then as Francis Schaeffer explains, ethics merely explain what is rather than what should be. There is then no objective difference between kindness and cruelty because there is no standard.¹⁷ The very terms “kind” and “cruel” would be meaningless. As Norman Geisler and Frank Turek argue, atheists rule out a transcendent Lawgiver in advance:18 This creates a problem: “While they may believe in an objective right and wrong, they have no way to justify such a belief (unless they admit a Moral Law Giver, at which point they cease to be atheists)” (emphasis in original).¹⁹

PROBLEM TWO: CONFUSING GOD AND RELIGION

In some places in The God Delusion Dawkins argues that God does not need to exist in order for people to be moral, and in other places he argues that people do not need religion or belief in God in order to be moral. He appears to use these two conditions interchangeably:

As we shall see, the way people respond to these moral tests, and their inability to articulate their reasons, seems largely independent of their religious beliefs or lack of them.²⁰

The main conclusion of Hauser and Singer’s study was that there is no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious believers in making these judgments. This seems compatible with the view, which I and many others hold, that we do not need God in order to be good—or evil.²¹

You have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good. I suspect quite a lot of religious people do think religion is what motivates them to be good.²²

Whatever its cause, the manifest phenomenon of Zeitgeist progression is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good, or to decide what is good.²³

The distinction between these two conditions is significant. As explained above, objective morality requires a transcendent foundation in God. This is true regardless of a person’s specific religious beliefs, or lack thereof, and despite differing cultural standards. In the Christian worldview (to which Dawkins responds more than to any other religious worldview), God created mankind, and He has revealed Himself not only through the written revelation in the Bible and the incarnation of Jesus, but also through nature and mankind’s moral conscience. For example, the apostle Paul explains in Romans 2:13–16 that the Gentiles who do not have the written law are nonetheless inwardly aware of God’s moral law.

If God exists and has given mankind a moral conscience, then people will be aware of His moral law, despite differing cultural and religious standards. Human morality has a divine foundation, not only for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, but also for atheists. As Paul Copan explains, atheists can discern an objective difference between right and wrong without reference to special revelation (such as written scripture), but they lack “a proper metaphysical context” for such an affirmation, a context that is provided in the biblical affirmation that God exists and has created mankind in His image.²⁴ Someone may be aware of morals without religion but not without God.²⁵

PROBLEM THREE: WHY EVEN BOTHER BEING MORAL?

Most atheists are not guilty of the immoral deeds perpetrated by atheistic regimes, but beyond evolutionary pragmatism and public pressure, what prevents a person from being immoral if atheism is true? Dawkins admits that evolution does not produce such virtues as generosity and universal love,²⁶ but he argues that we have evolved to the point where we can rebel against our DNA and teach such values.²⁷ However, he does not indicate why we should rebel and move beyond our evolutionary heritage.

If nature does not care about suffering, then why not be cruel if it is beneficial for the individual person or society? History provides numerous examples of cruelty and oppression by perpetrators who saw personal or societal benefit in their actions (such as Hitler’s “Final Solution”). Alister McGrath notes that “one of the greatest ironies of the twentieth century is that many of the most deplorable acts of murder, intolerance, and repression of that century were carried out by those who thought that religion was murderous, intolerant, and repressive—and thus sought to remove it from the face of the planet as a humanitarian act.”28 Dawkins argues that humans have progressed morally since the times of Genghis Khan and Hitler and will continue to progress,²⁹ but he needs a standard by which to judge between moral systems. C. S. Lewis explains:

The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.³⁰

Dawkins does not provide a clear standard. He supports a utilitarian ethic by which one should seek the greatest good for the greatest number of people, but he does not explain how to judge which consequences are good and which are bad.³¹ Lewis argues that a moral standard exists beyond human convention: “It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men’s behavior, and yet quite definitely real—a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us.”³²

Dawkins also does not have a rational basis for moral values if people are the products of impersonal, random, evolutionary processes. He attempts to argue that natural selection is the very opposite of a chance process.³³ Granted, if natural selection determines which genes survive based on their survival value, then it does not operate according to pure chance, but there are two problems. First, chance mutations will determine whether or not a gene arises as a candidate at all, even if natural selection itself is not a chance process. Second, Dawkins appeals to chance to explain how the first hereditary molecule arose and why one universe is favorable to life while another is not. He argues that chance (he also calls it “luck”) in the origin of life is not a significant problem because it only needs to happen once, while natural selection is a continuing process.³⁴ This may reduce the role of chance, but it does not escape the reality of chance and the problem that it creates for objective morality. Life is still the product of chance.

In Dawkins’s model, morals are byproducts of evolution, which means that they are mere conventions. Nothing is genuinely right or wrong. An action is merely pragmatic or not pragmatic, desirable or not desirable (but pragmatic or desirable for whom? Who decides?). People are merely accidents of evolution, and there is nothing wrong with a stronger (more “fit”) accident oppressing a weaker (less “fit”) accident in order to move ahead. In fact, that would be natural selection at work.³⁵

THE REALITY OF MORALS

Every person is aware that there is a genuine difference between right and wrong. As Paul Copan explains, “an ethic rooted in nature appears to leave us with arbitrary morality. Theism, on the other hand, begins with value; so bridging the is-ought gulf is a nonissue” (emphasis in original).³⁶ God did not arbitrarily declare a standard of right and wrong, and He did not discover that standard. Instead, the standard that He has revealed is an expression of His eternally holy, just, and loving nature. Greg Bahnsen states that “as Christians we have an absolute, unchanging, holy God who has revealed an absolute, unchanging, holy law to provide an absolute, unchanging, holy foundation for our ethical outlook and our moral conduct.”³⁷

Christians have an absolute, unshakable, and unchanging standard of morality. The atheist does not have such a basis. Gary Habermas argues:

One may have a strong, personal disgust for eating eggplant, but such an act is far from being immoral. Similarly, what we commonly view as evil in the world on an atheistic ethical system amounts to personal distaste, not to an objective problem for theism. Atheists have lost their favorite argument against theism.

To summarize briefly, we cannot have it both ways: we can accept absolute morality and face the strong possibility of the theistic universe, or we can deny it and acknowledge that we cannot lay evil at God’s feet, for there would be no such thing as objectively recognized wickedness. Either way, atheism receives a serious blow.³⁸

It is true that some people have committed atrocities in the name of Christ, but they acted contrary to the teachings of Christ. This illustrates the depravity inherent in the heart of every person and the need for Christians to continually strive to serve Christ more fully. Atheism does not account for mankind’s fallen nature,³⁹ and it does not provide an adequate basis for morality or for the concepts of good and evil. As Joel McDurmon notes, “The atheist has no Golden Rule because he has no Golden Ruler.”⁴⁰ When morality is divorced from its foundation in God, mankind ultimately has no stable foundation on which to judge the good and the bad. The Christian does have such a standard.

Henry W. Middleton, Ph.D., is a researcher and advisor for TrueLife.org. He also writes a Christian apologetics blog at http://thoughtsonapologetics.blogspot.com.

notes

1 See C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: MacMillan Books, 1952), 17–39.

2 See Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 214–20. Dawkins says in a radio interview that altruism towards individuals who cannot reciprocate is a “mistaken byproduct” but a mistake of which he approves. Terry Gross, Fresh Air (March 28, 2007), 50 min, MPEG-4, http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/ viewAudiobook?id=251744842&s=143441.

3 See Dawkins, The God Delusion, 222, 225.

4 Ibid., 226.

5 Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science and Love (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 34. See also Gregory Koukl, “Monkey Morality: Can Evolution Explain Ethics?” Christian Research Journal, April–June 1998, http://www.equip.org/articles/evolution-and-ethics.

6 Dawkins, The God Delusion, 31. For a response to such charges, see Paul Copan, “Is Yahweh a Moral Monster? The New Atheists and Old Testament Ethics,” Philosophia Christi 10, 1 (2008): 7–37; also available from the Evangelical Philosophical Society, http://www.epsociety.org/library/articles.asp?pid=45.

7 Dawkins, The God Delusion, 257.

8 Ibid. Dawkins is referring to the attack on Jericho in Joshua 6.

9 Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, The Science Masters Series (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 95–96.

10 See Dawkins, The God Delusion, 232–33.

11 See Dawkins, River out of Eden, 103–5.

12 Ibid., 121–22. Also Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th anniversary ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 2–4.

13 Dawkins, River out of Eden, 131.

14 Ibid., 132–33.

15 See Paul Copan, “A Summary Critique: Why Science Can’t Explain Morality,” Christian Research Journal 29, 6 (2006): 44.

16 Paul Copan makes a similar argument in “God, Naturalism, and the Foundations of Morality,” in The Future of Atheism: Alister McGrath and Daniel Dennett in Dialogue, ed. Robert B. Stewart (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 147–48. Also available at PaulCopan.com, http://paulcopan.com/articles/pdf/God-naturalism-morality.pdf. See also J. M. Njoroge, “The New Atheism and Morality,” Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, at http://www.rzim.org/USA/USFV/tabid/436/ArticleID/10020/CBModuleId/881/Default.aspx.

17 See Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, in The Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy: Three Essential Books in One Volume (Wheaton, IL.: Crossway Books, 1990), 291–301.

18 See Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Wheaton, IL.: Crossway Books, 2004), 191.

19 Ibid., 193.

20 Dawkins, The God Delusion, 223.

21 Ibid., 226.

22 Ibid., 227.

23 Ibid., 272.

24 See Copan, “Is Yahweh a Moral Monster?” 35–36. Also Copan, “God, Naturalism, and the Foundations of Morality,” 145–57.

25 Dawkins’s appeal to studies regarding behavior among religious and nonreligious people does not prove that God is unnecessary in order for a person to be moral. At most such studies demonstrate that a moral distinction between right and wrong is universal among mankind, which is part of Paul’s argument in Romans 2:13–16.

26 See Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, ix, 2–3.

27 See ibid., xiv, 3, 139, 200–201, 267–68.

28 Alister McGrath, “Has Science Eliminated God? Richard Dawkins and the Meaning of Life,” Science and Christian Belief 17, 2 (October 2005): 132. For examples of actions committed under atheistic communism, consult Stéphane Courtois, Nicholas Werth, Jean-Luc Panné, et. al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

29 See Dawkins, The God Delusion, 265–72.

30 Lewis, Mere Christianity, 25.

31 See Dawkins, The God Delusion, 232–33. See also Dawkins, River out of Eden, 104.

32 Lewis, Mere Christianity, 30.

33 See Dawkins, The God Delusion, 113–14.

34 See ibid., 137–40, 158.

35 Dawkins describes slavery among ants (The Selfish Gene, 177–79), but he opposes slavery among humans (The God Delusion, 169, 265, 271).

36 Copan, “God, Naturalism, and the Foundations of Morality,” 152.

37 Greg L. Bahnsen, Pushing the Antithesis: The Apologetic Methodology of Greg L. Bahnsen, ed. Gary Demar (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 2007), 182.

38 Gary Habermas, “The Plight of the New Atheism: A Critique,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 51, no. 4 (Dec. 2008): 823.

39 See Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live without God? (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1994), 189.

40 Joel McDurmon, The Return of the Village Atheist (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 2007), 28.

Western Christians have little connection with history. Events of thirty years ago are easily forgotten and generally considered irrelevant to “today.” So it is not surprising that most evangelicals are blissfully ignorant of a vitally important document on the topic of inerrancy produced by leading evangelical scholars. The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy, first published in 1978, remains one of the most important documents of the past century, and its importance has only increased with the slide of Western culture into ever more virulent forms of secular humanism. In a cultural context where nothing in the religious realm can ever be said to be “true,” a fully authoritative scriptural revelation will be attacked incessantly. The foundations on which the historic Christian proclamation has rested are once more under attack, and more often than not those swinging the pickaxes are wearing religious garb.

The contemporary attacks on the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture are often couched in an attitude of twenty-first century hubris. Those people did not have computers. They did not have cell phones and modern medical knowledge. They did not send men to the moon or put satellites in orbit. So how could they have possibly had any meaningful knowledge of transcendent truths? The Bible was not written using modern language and categories; therefore, how can it be at all relevant to us today? Couple this with carefully selected texts demonstrating apparent “contradiction,” and it is easy to see why many Christians are embarrassed by the historical confession of the perfection and inspiration of the Bible. “We just can’t speak like that anymore. We need a new way of looking at the Bible,” we are told.

Have we grown so much wiser than our predecessors? Were the great men and women of God of the past naïve when it came to the Bible? Should we abandon inerrancy and speak of the Bible in postmodern terms? Or is there a reason to continue to believe that God has spoken with truthful clarity in Scripture?

CAREFULLY DEFINING THE ISSUES

There is no question that Christians have attributed things to the Bible that it never attributes to itself. Ignorance of the Bible’s authors, its historical context, languages, canon, and overall purpose has led to all sorts of odd claims about the Bible down through church history. Claims that the Bible is a handbook to nuclear physics or that it contains startling scientific secrets are easily (and truthfully) refuted.

The acts of the ignorant over the centuries do not determine the nature of Scripture, however. We must think carefully and clearly about what Scripture is so that when we speak of its authority, nature, and accuracy, we are standing on solid ground. It is just this kind of clear, careful thinking that marks the work of the scholars who crafted the Chicago Statement in 1978.1 Though the entire statement is lengthy, the summary statement is brief enough to be of assistance to us here:

1. God, who is Himself Truth and speaks truth only, has inspired Holy Scripture in order thereby to reveal Himself to lost mankind through Jesus Christ as Creator and Lord, Redeemer and Judge. Holy Scripture is God’s witness to Himself.

2. Holy Scripture, being God’s own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: It is to be believed, as God’s

instruction, in all that it affirms; obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises.

3. The Holy Spirit, Scripture’s divine Author, both authenticates it to us by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning.

4. Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.

5. The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible’s own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the Church.

One of the clearest expressions of the Bible’s view of itself is found in 2 Peter 1:21: “No prophecy ever came from the human will, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”² The origin of Scripture is God; the means of expression is human language. Yet, even in the act of speaking that which comes from God, the authors are guided, guarded, by the Spirit, who bears them along in their speaking. This text, along with Paul’s assertion that all Scripture is God-breathed (2 Tim. 3:16), provides the foundation of a proper, sound, reflective doctrine of inspiration and inerrancy:

1. All of Scripture is God-breathed. Its ultimate origin and source is God, who determines its form, the date and structure of its revelation, and the author through whom the revelation will come.

2. God uses different individuals at different times to bring His Word to His people. He uses their circumstances, their individual personalities, and their particular experiences as the means through which His Word is revealed. This means the Bible speaks in human language, replete with differing styles and emphases.

3. Since Scripture is intended to communicate in its first appearance as well as down through the ages, it must be understandable to its initial audience. Therefore it will use language directly relevant to its human authors and audience. Later generations, seeing the progressive outworking of God’s revelation over time, should interpret older portions in light of the original context and overall intention of Scripture.

Apart from these major considerations, there is another element often overlooked. Scripture can be read by anyone, but it speaks of those who are the enemies of God, and those who are submitted to Him. There is a spiritual element to Scripture that is embarrassing to many in our technological society. While the words themselves communicate to any person capable of understanding, a desire to understand and obey is beyond the capacity of the natural man. Divine grace is needed to truly understand divine truth, as the Lord Jesus illustrated on His first meeting with the gathered disciples after His resurrection. “Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures” (Luke 24:45 NASB). Just as the Lord had to open Lydia’s heart to respond (Acts 16:14), so too the mind must be opened to understand the divine revelation of God in Scripture. In other words, sound interpretation of divine revelation is not an amoral activity. Hence, those who remain in rebellion against God are predisposed by nature to unbelief and a twisting of the text before them (2 Pet. 3:16).

A MODERN CONTROVERSY OVER INERRANCY

In 2005 Baker Academic published Dr. Peter Enns’s book, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. Enns was at the time an associate professor at the venerable Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Westminster Seminary was founded by J. Gresham Machen and others in response to the decline of Princeton Seminary in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Machen impressed on the school his own deep reverence for Scripture and his strong views on theological liberalism. Machen’s book Christianity and Liberalism plainly distinguished between the two, identifying theological liberalism as its own separate religion, standing in opposition to Christianity.

In reviewing Enns’s book, Dr. John Frame noted in passing, “Enns, like many evangelicals, wants to be invited to the table with the mainstream scholars.”³ This impetus is behind the gradual movement of almost every theological institution away from the foundation on which it was established. There can be little doubt that Machen himself would have found Enns’s work troubling. Though we can only speculate about that, the governing board of Westminster Seminary likewise found his views inconsistent with the historical stance of the seminary. Though the faculty voted in support of Enns, the board did not, and as of August 1, 2008, Peter Enns “discontinued his service to Westminster Theological Seminary after fourteen years.”⁴

Why did Enns’s book result in his leaving Westminster only a few years later? Why has he now been sought out by a local NPR affiliate and given the opportunity of presenting his views in that venue?⁵ The answers to these questions shed a great deal of light on whether inerrancy matters any longer.

ENNS’S ARGUMENTS

There have been a number of published responses to Enns’s work,⁶ including a full-length book, so there is no need to go in-depth in re-presenting his material. Some elements of his argumentation, especially concerning parallel historical accounts in the Old Testament, require extensive and lengthy analysis, and hence are beyond our scope here. A brief summary of his major assertions will be sufficient for our purposes.

Enns presents three areas of argumentation, all designed to support his central thesis that we need to change our traditional ways of viewing Scripture and embrace what he calls the “incarnational” model. First, he presents a number of examples of parallels and relationships between literature and stories from the ancient world and the Scriptures, raising the basic question of the Bible’s uniqueness. Next, he raises questions concerning the Bible’s internal consistency and integrity by addressing what he sees as theological diversity in the text of the Old Testament, primarily. Then he deals with the always difficult and challenging area of the New Testament’s use of and interpretation of the Old.

It is important to grasp the position Enns is promoting in this work, as it has become a common theme among those who find the old categories of speaking about inerrancy inadequate in our day. With his paradigm of seeing the Bible incarnationally, Enns wishes to avoid the error of Docetism. Historically, Docetism was a heresy that denied the human nature of Christ. Following the Bible’s own teaching on the incarnation of Christ, the early church struggled with those who would deny elements of that divine revelation. Some, mainly influenced by early Gnostic movements, came to teach that Jesus only seemed to have a physical body, for no truly good teacher could have a physical body (all matter being evil, all spirit being good). They would tell stories of Jesus and a disciple walking along a seashore, and the disciple, on looking back, would see only one set of footprints. Why? Because Jesus does not leave footprints in the sand, for He only seemed to have a physical body. The Greek word for “seems” is dokein, hence the term “Docetist” for a person who believes Jesus’ physical body only seemed to be real. Docetism, as it was later called, was strongly condemned by John in his first epistle, and later generations of Christians likewise added their rejection of this false teaching.

Biblical Docetism, then, would ignore, or at least downplay, the “human” side of the Bible. A biblical Docetist would be one who refuses to see how the Bible came to be in history, its intimate and undeniable connection to its original contexts, authors, and situations. Evidently for Enns, it also means accepting that the limitations, even ignorances, of the original authors are fully on display in the text of the Bible. It is just here that Enns’s incarnational model raises very serious questions.

First, it should be noted that the only way we know the truth of the Incarnation is, in fact, due to the reliability of the revelation God has given us in Scripture. If we are left with a hobbled revelation (due to the “human” aspect of things diminishing the trustworthiness of the text to communicate divine revelation), the entire incarnational model is left hanging in mid air unless, of course, someone wishes to argue for some form of divine revelation outside of Scripture.⁷ Indeed, any form of argumentation that seeks to transcend divine revelation and objective truths found in propositional Scripture founders on this very question, for unless we have a trustworthy revelation to start with, how do we derive these higher paradigms such as the Incarnation?

Second, a sound doctrine of the Incarnation includes within it a careful affirmation that the human nature of Christ was sinlessly perfect. There is nothing in confessing that Christ was one person with two distinct natures that necessitates imperfection or error in the man Jesus. In the same way, a sound “incarnational model” of Scripture would not therefore force us to bring in error, ignorance, contradiction, or falsehood as a constituent part of the human side of Scripture. If we wish to use Enns’s model, we would be perfectly within our rights to recognize all the human aspects laid out so clearly in the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy, such as the differing styles of the authors, their life situations, and so on, as well as the original contexts to which they spoke. We will see how this applies to major portions of Enns’s examples below. But we would not be following that model properly at all if we laid at the feet of Christ’s humanity our concepts of errors, contradictions, and falsehoods.

IS THE BIBLE UNIQUE?

Many of the examples Enns provides come from ancient documentary sources that are generally not a part of the normal reading of most evangelicals. While I am not suggesting that every believer should be pouring over Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, it is just as true that some reading in the contexts of the sources cited in such discussions is often very helpful. Enns lists “similarities” between, for example, the Enuma Elish story (also known as the “Babylonian Genesis” account) and the biblical account in Genesis. Specifically, (1) The sequence of the days of creation is similar, including the creation of the firmament, dry land, luminaries, and humanity, followed by rest. (2) Darkness precedes the creative acts. (3) There is a division of the waters (waters above and below the firmament). (4) Light exists before the creation of the sun, moon, and stars.⁸

On the basis of such similarities, Enns asks how we can speak of the biblical revelation as “unique,” since it shares commonalities with other ancient works of literature, and even with mythology. As he writes, “both Genesis and the Enuma Elish ‘breathe the same air.’”⁹

But do they? Not if you read beyond surface-level similarities. First, any discussion of origins or creation will, of necessity, speak of the earth, the sky, luminaries, planets, and so forth. Any such discussion will have to have some order of creation to it, some discussion of light and darkness, and so on. Such similarities are necessary, given the subject being addressed.

But it is the dissimilarities that are most important in answering Enns’s question as to the uniqueness of the biblical narrative. For it is the foundational proclamation of the uniqueness of the Creator in Genesis that separates Genesis from Enuma Elish or any other such ancient narrative. The God of the Bible is not a part of a pantheon of divine beings and hence dependent on preceding generations of gods. He is not taking preexisting matter and re-forming it into our current creation. God speaks, and light and life come into existence. The creation is “good,” in proper relationship with the Creator, and the distinction between creator and creation is marked out clearly from the start.

A brief review of Enuma Elish¹⁰ reveals that it is firmly rooted in the bedrock of mythological polytheism. It is not the story of creation by a self-sufficient, eternal Creator who speaks and brings the physical creation into existence. Instead, it is the story of one god among many, Marduk, and his battle against his great-great grandmother Tiamat. There is no answer offered as to the origin of these many gods. The physical creation itself comes out of Marduk’s defeat of Tiamat and the division of her body into various portions of the natural world.

One of Enns’s parallels, that of light existing before the sun, moon, and stars, is not a parallel at all, since, obviously, all sorts of things in the realm of the “gods” exist prior to the division of Tiamat’s body into the various parts of the physical creation. Marduk has weapons to use in his fight with Tiamat, and, obviously, they were not fighting in darkness. So clearly, there is little relevant in observing this “parallel” given the fundamental difference between the accounts. Outside of their common topic (creation), the worldviews and answers given to the central question are as different as night and day.

The other issues raised by Enns likewise help us to gain perspective on these commonly promulgated objections to biblical inspiration and uniqueness. Enns makes reference to the Gilgamesh epic, an ancient story that makes reference to a great flood, similar to that in the Bible. He refers to the Nuzi documents from northern Iraq and to the Hittite Suzerainty treaties, both of which indicate that similar legal and cultural norms existed outside of the context of the biblical stories. Likewise, he makes reference to the Code of Hammurabi, which contains many legal parallels to what we find in the Mosaic Law.

All of these issues are perfectly valid areas of study for the student of the Bible. In fact, they should be seen for the exciting confirmation of the Bible that they are. Although many skeptics wish to remove the Pentateuch from its ancient context (preferring a much later date for its composition and thus removing Moses as its primary author), these documents demonstrate that those earliest portions of the Bible reflect very accurately the cultural and legal contexts of the days in which they were written.

This is not a problem, as Enns seems to see it, but is instead a positive affirmation unknown to earlier generations. Consider the legal and cultural aspects of the Nuzi documents and the Hittite Suzerainty treaties. What are we assuming about the biblical revelation if we find it “difficult” that similar laws and concepts existed in the legal systems of other nations? If we believe man is made in God’s image, and if we believe what the Bible itself teaches about man’s conscience, common grace, and natural revelation, would we not expect to find echoes of divine truth in the laws common to man? The errant assumption underlying the view of these things as objections to the Bible is that the inspired text must somehow transcend the context in which it was first revealed and must be unique in style and substance. That is, the false assumption is that the Bible should speak in some heavenly language at all times, even when narrating God’s acts in history, and that any evidence that God did, in fact, act in a particular historical period in a way that would have made sense to those with whom He had communication is somehow antithetical to “divine revelation.” But this is just to miss the nature of Scripture itself.

Likewise, the Gilgamesh epic is a tremendous problem for the unbeliever, not the believer. We have clear evidence of an ancient memory of a great, catastrophic event, written in this case in another language from another culture. Given the uniqueness of the event itself, to encounter such evidence is truly startling.

Yet, if such a thing as the flood took place, would it not leave a mark in the memories and stories of mankind? That is just what we find here. It is therefore unwarranted to assume that if the Bible contains a similar story, this means it is shot-through with “myth” that must be challenged.

Of course, Enns discusses the term “myth” and presents his own definition of the term, but in general usage today, the term is being used to refer to ancient stories that have no connection to history. Now obviously, it is absurd to hold ancient writers to modern standards of historiography. Everyone should recognize that. It does not follow, however, that accounts written to illustrate a particular moral, ethical, or theological point are, by definition, “untrue” or “unreliable” in the historical facts they relate. One writer may choose to emphasize certain aspects of a historical situation to make a point, but that is not a meaningful objection to the accuracy of the facts that he chooses to include in his account.

This leads us finally to Enns’s recounting of the common issues that arise in dealing with the so-called “Synoptic problem.”¹¹ We can summarize the objection in this fashion: the differences in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) force us to abandon modern ideas of “history” and “accuracy” and embrace a less-defined idea of what is “true” about the Gospel accounts. Hence, Enns notes the issue of the cleansing of the Temple recorded at the end of Jesus’ ministry, pointing to the fact that John records this as happening at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Plainly, then, John is not recording history, but is providing a different kind of literature that we need to recognize in the“incarnational” model. Enns says that it is “distortion of the highest order to argue that Jesus must have cleansed the temple twice.”¹² Yet, he does not note, as Beale has rightly explained, the list of those Enns must say are guilty of such “distortion of the highest order,” such as A. Plummer, B. F. Westcott, R. V. G. Tasker, R. G. Gruenler, Leon Morris, and D. A. Carson. Likewise, Craig Blomberg and A. Köstenberger lean toward two cleansings as well.¹³

So often in the rhetoric of the current controversies, any treatment of the ancient documents that gives them the benefit of the doubt and seeks harmony between them is dismissed out of hand as “contrived.” Yet, is it not far more probable that, when it comes to apparent conflicts regarding statements of fact we, positioned thousands of years later, may well be missing basic pieces of the contextual puzzle that were quite apparent to the original authors? Do we not extend this very courtesy to other ancient works? It is ironic that many of those who seek to exhort us to “epistemological humility” are actually a good bit less humble when it comes to the standards they apply to the writers of Scripture. We should have the humility to admit we do not have sufficient information on which to judge the intentions and motivations of ancient writers.

DOES IT MATTER?

What is the foundation of a sound, lasting Christian faith? The Lord prayed on the night He was betrayed, “Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth” (John 17:17 NASB). As central and important as all the means of grace God has given His people are, it is clearly His intention that the Spirit use Scripture as the bedrock of His communication with His people. No one can read the words of the Lord Jesus and come to the conclusion that He found Scripture dispensable or peripheral. “The Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35 NASB). For Jesus, “It stands written” ended the argument. So one is forced into an untenable incoherence to hold on the one hand to Jesus as Lord, as the God-Man, Savior, and King, while on the other hand believing the very Scriptures He honored (and, in His triune unity with the Father and the Spirit, authored!) are significantly less reliable than Jesus Himself believed.

Surely, if the Lord has not spoken, we are left with little more than the opinions of men. Such has never been the faith of the Christian Church. As Irenaeus said long ago, “We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation, than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and, at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith.”¹⁴

It has never been more important for the church of Jesus Christ to speak with confident authority to its own members in defense of the full inspiration, integrity, and inerrancy of divine Scripture. But it is likewise vitally important that we do so not from a position of dogmatic ignorance, but one of informed faithfulness and knowledge of the issues that surround the topic. We cannot afford to be ignorant of the developments in scholarship, but, at the same time, we must not slavishly follow secular humanism into an idolatrous exaltation of it either. Scholars are human beings with presuppositions and biases, and many today willingly dedicate their scholarship to the service of secularism. In the process their prejudices twist the conclusions they draw from the facts of their research. The wise believer in the twenty-first century will be the one who can sift through the writings of the scholars, happily accepting the nuggets of truth while recognizing the overriding control of naturalistic and humanistic presuppositions.

Let us not fear in the face of the mockery and angry denunciations of men. Divine truth does not change with the blowing winds of cultural trends. Though we may have to await patiently the Lord’s own timing, His truth will be vindicated, His people confirmed in their faith. Belief in God’s ability to communicate His will to His people through His Word is rational, historic, and defensible. We must resist the siren call of the slippery slope of cultural accommodation and stand firm in our faith that God’s Spirit will use God’s Word to edify God’s people.

James White is an elder of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, and the author of more than twenty books. He has taught in a wide variety of theological fields and engaged in more than seventy-five moderated public debates in defense of the Christian faith.

notes

1 http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/creeds/chicago.htm.

2 Author’s translation.

3 http://www.frame-poythress.org/frame_articles/2008Enns.htm.

4 http://www.wts.edu/stayinformed/view.html?id=187.

5 Dr. Enns appeared with Marty Moss-Coane on WHYY in Philadelphia on August 13, 2008.

6 D. A. Carson wrote a very useful and insightful review of Enns’s book (http://www.reformation21.org/shelf-life/three-books-on-the-bible-a-criticalreview.php). The full-length book is by G. K. Beale, The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008).

7 This is exactly the direction many have gone over the past few decades, seeking in various (and often contradictory) forms of “tradition” what they have concluded can no longer be found in divine writ.

8 Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 26.

9 Ibid., 27.

10 See James B. Pritchard, The Ancient Near East: Volume 1: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 31ff.

11 A huge array of resources exists on this topic. See Robert L. Thomas and David Farnell, The Jesus Crisis (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 1998); Robert L. Thomas, ed., Three Views on the Origins of the Synoptic Gospels (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2002); Mark Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem: A Way through the Maze (London: T and T Clark International, 2001); David Allen Black and David R. Beck, eds., Rethinking the Synoptic Problem (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001).

12 Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 65.

13 Beale, The Erosion of Inerrancy, 50. [Editor’s note: for a different approach to resolving this problem see Ask Hank on p. 62 of this issue.]

14 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book III, 1:1.

SYNOPSIS

The “new atheists” call God’s commands to kill the Canaanites “genocide,” but a closer look at the horror of the Canaanites’ sinfulness, exhibited in rampant idolatry, incest, adultery, child sacrifice, homosexuality, and bestiality, reveals that God’s reason for commanding their death was not genocide but capital punishment. After all, the Old Testament unequivocally commands that those who do any one of these things deserves to die. Also, God made it clear in His conversation with Abraham regarding the Canaanite cities of Sodom and Gomorrah that He knows who would or would not repent, and in the case of those cities, not one person would heed the warning and even Lot’s family had to be forcibly pulled away from the coming destruction. In Leviticus 18 God then warns Israel that if they commit similar sins that the land would similarly “vomit” them out. Later when Israel disobeys God and allows the Canaanites to continue to live among them, the corruptive and seductive power of Canaanite sin results in the Canaanization of Israel. Subsequently, God sent prophets to warn Israel of their coming destruction, but they didn’t repent and God said that they became “like Sodom to me” and He visited destruction on Israel for committing the same sins. This again reveals that God’s motive isn’t genocide, but capital punishment. That we commit similar sins today renders us incapable of appropriate moral outrage against these sins and thus we accuse God of “genocide” to justify our own sinfulness.

Richard Dawkins and other new atheists herald God’s ordering of the destruction of Canaanite cities to be divine “ethnic cleansing” and “genocides.”¹ With righteous indignation, Dawkins opines that the God of the Old Testament is “the most unpleasant character in all of fiction.”² But was the killing of the Canaanites an example of divine genocide? If you think the Canaanites deserved to die because of their own wickedness, Dawkins will zealously compare you to acting like the Taliban.³ A closer look at several key facts will help explain God’s reason for the destruction of the Canaanites and reveal how our own sinfulness demonstrates our incapacity to judge rightly.

That atheists are incapable of judging spiritual matters leads some Christians to wonder why we even need to answer them at all, especially if they lack any objective, moral, or epistemological foundation for their claims. Moreover, most atheists do not customarily condemn the very practices that God condemns, for example, idolatry, adultery, and homosexuality. Predictably so, their values conflict with what God hates.

Concerning the destruction of the Canaanites, atheists especially like to exploit the Christian condemnation of genocide. They reason something along these lines: (1) Christians condemn genocide. (2) Yahweh’s command to kill the Canaanites was an act of divine genocide. (3) Therefore, Christians should condemn Yahweh for commanding genocide.

The second premise is false, however. Part of the goal of this essay is to offer evidence to show that God had good reason to command Israel to kill the Canaanites. In Leviticus 18 and elsewhere, for example, the Bible reveals that God punished the Canaanites for specific grievous evils. Also, this wasn’t the entire destruction of a race as God didn’t order that every Canaanite be killed but only those who lived within specific geographical boundaries (Josh. 1:4). Canaanite tribes (especially the Hittites) greatly exceeded the boundaries that Israel was told to conquer. And since, as we will see, He punished Israel when they committed the same sins, what happened to the Canaanites was not genocide, but capital punishment.

This wasn’t merely punishment, however. God sought to reveal His standards of righteousness to a thoroughly corrupted humankind, and He chose Israel out of the nations to exhibit the requirements for relationship with Him (Deut. 4:5–8). Before He redeemed humankind, He needed to unambiguously demonstrate what exactly He was redeeming them from: a blatant and unrestrained evil that resulted in a worthless, nasty, and cruel existence. God knows what is best for humankind, but He allowed free creatures to rebel and find out on their own that He is right. If Jesus had died to redeem humankind prior to humankind’s comprehending the depth of their sin, then people would question the need for Jesus’ death. Why would Jesus die for basically good folk? God waited to redeem humankind until they had the chance to be, as 2 Live Crew once put it, “as nasty as they wanna be.”

THE CANAANITES WERE WICKED

The Bible is explicit concerning the sins of the Canaanites: idolatry, incest, adultery, child sacrifice, homosexuality, and bestiality. Much of what follows is horrific, but if we refuse to look, will we really understand the reasons for God’s judgment?

Idolatry. The Canaanites worshiped other gods, which the Old Testament frequently denounced as no more than sticks or pottery made by human hands that could not “see or hear or eat or smell” (Deut. 4:28 NIV). Yahweh derided these handmade gods that cannot speak and must be carried because they cannot walk (Jer. 1:16; 8:2–5).

The Canaanites took seriously the testimony of the Old Testament witness of Yahweh and His revelation, if for no other reason than intentionally to transform the scriptural depiction of Yahweh into a castrated weakling who likes to play with His own excrement and urine.⁴

Of course Dawkins complains that “God’s monumental rage whenever his chosen people flirted with a rival god resembles nothing so much as sexual jealousy of the worst kind.”⁵ But does anyone think that if Dawkins’s wife left him for a gingerbread man of her own baking, and then she began to tell everyone that he liked to play with his excrement, that Dawkins would tolerate the characterization of his feelings as no more than “sexual jealously of the worst kind”?

Idolatry perverts our ability to love what Yahweh loves. Consequently, we love what He hates, and we hate what He loves. The story of Canaanite incest, adultery, child sacrifice, homosexuality, and bestiality flow out of the plot line of idolatry. The tragedy of this story is that not only is idolatry an offense to Yahweh, but it fails to supply a happy ending for human communities as well.

Incest. Like all Ancient Near East (ANE) pantheons, the Canaanite pantheon was incestuous. Baal has sex with his mother Asherah,⁶ his sister Anat, and his daughter Pidray,⁷ and none of this is presented pejoratively.

Although early Canaanite laws proscribed either death or banishment for most forms of incest, after the fourteenth century BC, the penalties were reduced to no more than the payment of a fine.8 In the larger ANE context, it is helpful to consider that in an Egyptian dream book dreams of having sex with your mother or your sister were considered good omens.⁹

Adultery. Canaanite religion, like that of all of the ANE, was a fertility religion that involved temple sex. Inanna/Ishtar, also known as the Queen of Heaven, “became the woman among the gods, patron of eroticism and sensuality, of conjugal love as well as adultery, of brides and prostitutes, transvestites and pederasts.”¹⁰ As University of Helsinki professor Martti Nissinen writes, “Sexual contact with a person whose whole life was devoted to the goddess was tantamount to union with the goddess herself.”¹¹

The Canaanites even remake the God of the Bible, El, after their own image and portray Him ceremonially as having sex with two women (or goddesses). The ceremony ends with directions: “To be repeated five times by the company and the singers of the assembly.”¹² About this John Gray comments, “We may well suppose that this activity of El was sacramentally experienced by the community in the sexual orgies of the fertility cult which the Hebrew prophets so vehemently denounced.”¹³

Child sacrifice. Molech was a Canaanite underworld deity¹⁴ represented as an upright, bullheaded idol with a human body in whose belly a fire was stoked and in whose outstretched arms a child was placed that would be burned to death. The victims were not only infants; children as old as four were sacrificed.¹⁵ Kleitarchos reported that “as the flame burning the child surrounded the body, the limbs would shrivel up and the mouth would appear to grin as if laughing, until it was shrunk enough to slip into the cauldron.”¹⁶

Homosexuality. No ANE text condemns homosexuality. Additionally, some ANE manuscripts talk about “party-boys and festival people who changed their masculinity into femininity to make the people of Ishtar revere her.”¹⁷

Let us also remember that the problem with the Canaanite city of Sodom wasn’t just sex among consenting adults: the men of Sodom, both young and old, tried to rape the visitors (Gen. 19:5).

Bestiality. Probably the ultimate sexual depravity is intercourse with animals. Hittite Laws: 199 states, “If anyone has intercourse with a pig or a dog, he shall die. If a man has intercourse with a horse or a mule, there is no punishment.”¹⁸ As with incest, the penalty for having sex with animals decreased about the fourteenth century BC.¹⁹

There should be no surprise that bestiality would occur among the Canaanites, since their gods practiced it. From the Canaanite epic poem “The Baal Cycle” we learn: “Mightiest Baal hears / He makes love with a heifer in the outback / A cow in the field of Death’s Realm. / He lies with her seventy times seven / Mounts eighty times eight / [She conceiv]es and bears a boy.”²⁰

There were absolutely no prohibitions against bestiality in the rest of the ANE.²¹ In fact, in an Egyptian dream book it was a bad omen for a woman to dream about embracing her husband, but good things would happen if she dreamed of intercourse with a baboon, wolf, or he-goat.²² In short, their sexual fantasies involved everything that breathes.

This explains why, in certain cities, Yahweh sentenced to death everything that breathes. If they had sex with just about every living thing they could get their hands on, and they did, then all had to die. Dawkins objects that it adds “injury to insult” that “the unfortunate beast is to be killed too.”²³ But Dawkins doesn’t seem to grasp that no one would want to have animals around who were used to having sex with humans.²⁴ Moreover, this might also explain why God used a flood to destroy what Dawkins called the “presumably blameless” animals in the days of Noah.²⁵ If pre-flood humankind frequently had sex with every imaginable animal, then even though it wasn’t the animals’ fault, it would be harmful to allow these animals to be a part of God’s start-over society.

ISRAEL SEDUCED AND CORRUPTED

Israel’s response to Canaanite sin is a parable of how their own sinfulness empowered them to ape the sin of the Canaanites and thereby procure God’s judgment on them. For God does not show favoritism. Israel was warned not to let the Canaanites live in their land, but to completely destroy them (Exod. 23:33; Deut. 20:16–18), lest the Israelites learn the Canaanite ways (Exod. 34:15–16). If they did not destroy them, the land would “vomit” them out just as it had vomited out the Canaanites (Num. 33:56; Lev. 18:28; Deut 4:23–29, 8:19–20).

Instead, the Israelites worshiped the Canaanites’ gods and “did evil” (Judg. 10:6; 1 Kings 14:22; 2 Kings 17:10). They had “male shrine prostitutes” (1 Kings 14:22), committed acts of “lewdness,” adultery, and incest (Jer. 5:7; 29:23; Hos. 4:13–14; Ezek. 22:10–11; Amos 2:7), and even Solomon set up an altar to Molech (1 Kings 11:5, 7–8). But instead of repenting when things went badly, they concluded that their misfortune was because they stopped burning incense to “the Queen of Heaven,” Inanna/Ishtar (Jer. 44:18). So the Lord said that Israel became “like Sodom to me” (Jer. 23:14). In short, Israel was Canaanized.

Although prophets warned the northern kingdom (usually referred to as Israel or Samaria) of impending doom, they didn’t repent, and in 722 BC the king of Assyria killed or deported most of them, and filled the land with conquered peoples from other nations. Similarly, the southern tribes (usually referred to as Judah) were deported when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem beginning in 586 BC. Just as God had demonstrated his knowledge of who would repent in the Canaanite cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, before he destroyed Jerusalem He told Jeremiah that if He could find even one righteous person He would spare the entire city (Jer. 5:1).

It doesn’t stop there. In Luke 20 Jesus told the Jews the parable of the tenants and the vineyard. Servants were sent to the tenants of the vineyard, but had been mistreated, and so the owner of the vineyard sent his son, but the tenants killed the son. Jesus then warned, “What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.” Then, in AD 70, forty years after Jesus was crucified, the Roman emperor Titus destroyed Jerusalem. Josephus records that the Jews in Jerusalem “were first whipped, and then tormented with all sorts of tortures, before they died, and were then crucified before the wall of the city….So the soldiers, out of the wrath and hatred they bore the Jews, nailed those they caught, one after one way, and another after another, to the crosses, by way of jest, when their multitude was so great, that room was wanting for the crosses, and crosses wanting for the bodies.”²⁶ Titus then renamed the region Palestine and for almost 1,900 years one couldn’t find “Israel” on the map.

What God commanded Israel to do to the Canaanites wasn’t genocide—it was capital punishment. In both Testaments we see that God hates sin and will punish it.

GOD KNOWS WHO WILL REPENT

Could there have been any righteous Canaanites, especially in view of the pervasive, seductive, and corrosive nature of Canaanite sin? Abraham asked the Lord this exact question in Genesis 18 regarding the coming destruction of two Canaanite cities—Sodom and Gomorrah: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city?…Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”²⁷ Ultimately the Lord then agrees to spare both cities if only ten righteous people were found.

When angels arrive, however, the men of the city try to rape them and not only does Lot not find anyone who will repent, Lot himself tarries so long that the angels take Lot and his family by the arms and all but drag them out of the city. Later Lot’s own daughters get him drunk to have sex with him and so even Dawkins, in a surprising moment of moral clarity, writes, “If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.”²⁸

Skeptics often complain that children were killed in Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction. Such a complaint usually masks an unspoken premise: God shouldn’t have killed the children because that wouldn’t give them the chance to reject Canaanite sin. Curiously, this simply relates back to the entire dialogue of God with Abraham. God knows who will or will not repent of his or her sin and if He concludes that all the children would have been similarly corrupted, then He is perfectly right to institute capital punishment.

Moreover, given the evidence of Canaanite sin, it is no stretch to realize that even many young children would have already learned Canaanite ways. Thus, if God wanted to rid the world of their wickedness, then He couldn’t have them grow up wanting to imitate their birth parents with whom they bonded. Imagine the teenage rebellion in those households! Wouldn’t even infants, as they grew, begin to ask, “What practices did my parents do which resulted in your killing them?” As sad as this is, it also points to the horror of sin. Parents can corrupt their children.²⁹

But why should we take seriously the skeptic’s advocacy for Canaanite children? Doesn’t the new atheist’s complaint ring hollow, since they are often at the forefront of defending a woman’s right to suction, dismember, or scald to death her unborn baby at any time and for any reason?

Perhaps what the skeptic is really concerned about is whether the just destruction of the Canaanites is license for Christians to resort to killing the wicked. The answer is: absolutely not! We don’t live in a theocracy anymore and, as Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 10:4–5, we don’t fight with “the weapons of the world,” but “we demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God” (NIV). In other words, we now wage war in prayer and in the realm of ideas.

OUR SIN AND THE NEW ATHEIST CLAIMS

The new atheists immaculately exemplify what the Bible has proclaimed all along: sin corrupts our authority to judge rightly; what we think is justified prosecution against God Almighty turns out to be, on further illumination, a raucous rant full of the noxious fumes of the sinful heart.

Consider one basic example of how new atheist rationalizations echo the propensities of “Canaanite sin,” and indeed, echo the rationalizations of the human heart. Concerning sexual desire, Dawkins questions why evangelical Christians are so “obsessed” with “private sexual inclinations.”³⁰ The apparently not obsessed Christopher Hitchens considers “dangerous sexual repression” so serious that he calls it one of the “four irreducible objections to religious faith.”³¹ Dawkins and Hitchens are not just encouraging a sort of sexual libertarianism per se. They are insisting that God and Christianity are in fact poisonous and must diligently be resisted and defeated. In a recent debate with William Lane Craig, Hitchens exhorted the Christians in the audience, “Emancipate yourself from the idea of a celestial dictatorship and you’ve taken the first step toward becoming free.”³²

Although Dawkins nowhere endorses sex with animals, he does endorse Princeton atheist and ethicist Peter Singer as an “eloquent advocate” for our need to become “postspeciesist.”³³ According to Singer, to claim that one species is better than another is to invoke grave implications because, after all, “We are animals….This does not make sex across the species barrier normal, or natural, whatever those much-misused words may mean, but it does imply that it ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.”³⁴

The problem with new atheist divine genocide claims is rather simple: God hates sin, but the new atheists do not.³⁵ Consequently, they complain of divine genocide in the face of Canaanite sin! So let’s not kid ourselves: at the end of the day no amount of explanation will cause today’s illuminati (or “brights,” as some new atheists like to be called) to consider God’s commands justified.³⁶ But our job as Christians is to proclaim unambiguously, especially to strongholds set up against knowledge of God, that humankind is sinful, that the wages of sin is death, and that by trusting Christ’s sacrifice we can be saved from the wrath of God and enjoy resurrection life in and with Him forever.

Clay Jones is assistant professor in the Master of Arts in Christian Apologetics program at Biola University and specializes in issues related to why God allows evil.

notes

1 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 247.

2 Ibid., 31.

3 Ibid., 246.

4 See Ulf Oldenburg, The Conflict between El and Ba‘al in Canaanite Religion (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1969), 172.

5 Dawkins, 243.

6 For the story of Baal having sex with Asherah, see: “El, Ashertu and the Storm-god,” trans. Albrecht Goetze, ed. James B. Pritchard, The Ancient Near East: Supplementary Texts and Pictures Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1969), 519.

7 W. F. Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan: A Historical Analysis of Two Contrasting Faiths (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1968), 145.

8 Harry A. Hoffner, Jr., “Incest, Sodomy and Bestiality in the Ancient Near East,” in Orient and Occident: Essays Presented to Cyrus H. Gordon on the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. Harry A. Hoffner, Jr. (Neukirchen Vluyn, Germany: Neukirchener Verlag, 1973), 82.

9 See the Papyrus Chester Beatty III recto (BM10683) from about 1175 BC as referenced in Lise Manniche, Sexual Life in Ancient Egypt (London: Routledge, 1987), 100.

10 Gwendolyn Leick, Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature (New York: Routledge, 1994), 57.

11Martti Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective, trans. Kirsi Stjerna (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 33.

12 John Gray, The Legacy of Canaan (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1965), 101–2.

13Ibid., 101.

14 John Day, Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1989), 62.

15 Shelby Brown, Late Carthaginian Child Sacrifice and Sacrificial Monuments in Their Mediterranean Context (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic, 1991), 14.

16 Kleitarchos, Scholia on Plato’s Republic 337A as quoted in Day, 87.

17 Stephanie Dalley, “Erra and Ishum IV,” Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford: Oxford University, 1989), 305.

18 Hoffner, 82. HL §§ 187–88, 199.

19 Ibid., 85.

20 Mark S. Smith, trans. Ugaritic Narrative Poetry, ed. Simon B. Parker (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1997), 148.

21 Hoffner, 82.

22 Manniche, 102.

23 Dawkins, 248.

24 For an example of how embarrassing and dangerous this could be, see Robert M. Yerkes, “The Mind of the Gorilla: Part III. Memory,” Comparative Psychology Monographs 5, 2 (1928): 68–69.

25 Dawkins, 237–38.

26 Flavius Josephus, The Works of Flavius Josephus, trans. William Whiston (Hartford, CN: S. S. Scranton, 1905), WORDsearch CROSS e-book, 822.

27 Genesis 18:23–25 NIV.

28 Dawkins, 240.

29 Although no Scripture is definitive that all children will be saved, many Christians point out that it is possible (based on verses like Matthew 19:14). And if all children are saved, then a Canaanite child would benefit by being alive in a better place.

30 Dawkins, 238.

31 Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Boston: Twelve Books, 2007), 4.

32The debate between Craig and Hitchens occurred on April 4, 2009 at Biola University. The quote is from Gail Patches, “The Great Debate: Craig, Hitchens ask ‘Does God Exist?’” Whittier Daily News, April 5, 2009, A1, A4.

33 Dawkins, 271.

34 Peter Singer “Heavy Petting: Review of Midas Dekkers, ‘Dearest Pet: On Bestiality’ (London, 2000),” Nerve.com, 2001, http://www.nerve.com/opinions/singer/heavypetting/main.asp. Accessed 5 November 2008.

35 Sadly, all too often, neither do we.

36 Dawkins, 338. A special thanks to Joseph Gorra for his many helpful suggestions and to my wife, Jean E. Jones, for her extensive reading of ANE primary and secondary sources and for years ago explaining to me much of the Old Testament.

O daughter of Babylon, you devastated one,

How blessed will be the one who repays you

With the recompense with which you have repaid us.

How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones

Against the rock! (Ps. 137:8–9)²

What nasty person would say such things? Well—a pretty angry psalmist! This portion of Psalm 137 is one of various “imprecatory psalms” (Pss. 7, 12, 35, 55, 58, 59, 69, 79, 83, 109, 137, 139). “Imprecation” is the calling down of curses or divine judgments on someone. Imprecatory passages have shocked some modern editors into performing “psalmectomies” on psalter hymnals, excising these verses altogether!³ Biblical poetry contains prayers that God break the arm of the wicked (10:15), scatter their bones (53:5), or slay His enemies (139:19). C. S. Lewis calls them “terrible,” “contemptible,” “devilish,” “profoundly wrong,” and “sinful” prayers.⁴ Shouldn’t we love and pray for our enemies (Matt. 5:43–48)? How can we make sense of these harsh-sounding passages? Perhaps the following acrostic (I-M-P-R-E-C-A-T-I-O-N) can offer guidance.

Irate reactions to terrible injustices are understandable. Psalm 137’s setting is Israel’s distressing sixth-century BC exile in Babylon following “unshakable” Jerusalem’s destruction (Ps. 46:5)—a very tough pill to swallow! Their captors taunted them to sing “songs of Zion,” which added insult to injury. Of further insult was the fact that Israel’s brothers, the Edomites (descendants of Esau) also joined in the destructive rampage and pillaging. They even blocked fleeing Israelites from escaping, treacherously handing them over to the Babylonians (Obed. 11–14).⁵ This psalm expresses legitimate moral outrage. Consider how you would react if a neighbor tried to seduce your daughter or give your children drugs. Outrage indicates that we care and take injustice seriously.⁶ These psalmists cry out to God with understandable, honest, hot-off-the-emotional-press responses.

Modern Western standards should not be imposed on an ancient Near East context. C. S. Lewis wrongly assumed that the Hebrews “cursed more bitterly than the Pagans.”⁷ We read of standard curses in other ancient Near East “prayer books.”⁸ In response to devastating injustices of an earlier war, “The (Babylonian) Curse of Akkad” (2400 BC) expresses the wish: “May the cattle slaughterer slaughter his wife” and “May your sheep butcher butcher his child.” An Assyrian text (from 672 BC) wishes leprosy and death followed by the feasting of vultures and jackals on enemies’ corpses.⁹ Harsh-sounding prayers were common back then.

Passionate responses are upset exaggerations, not calm contemplations. The prophet Jeremiah, after being beaten and placed in stocks, curses the day he was born, wishing he had remained in his mother’s womb until he died (Jer. 20:14–18). Jeremiah does not literally mean this; he simply hasn’t yet “cooled off.” He thus gives a white-hot immediate response to the deep humiliation and injustice he suffered; Jeremiah wants us to feel his pain.¹⁰ Old Testament (OT) scholar John Sailhamer observes that Psalm 137’s imagery “is no more intended to be taken literally” than that in psalms that speak of “rivers clapping their hands and mountains singing for joy.”¹¹

Repression of righteous outrage obstructs justice and healing. Naming evils and calling perpetrators to account is the first step toward correcting injustice. Victims of sexual abuse or of a spouse’s adultery often experience healing after they articulate their pain. Consider how Rwanda’s genocide and South Africa’s apartheid have led to commissions in which perpetrators must face surviving victims who name evils, hold their persecutors accountable, and (begin to) heal festering wounds. To love our enemies, we must know who they are and what they’ve done. Hate should be prayed, not stifled. Apathy, not hate, is the opposite of love.¹²

Enemies are not hated personally by the psalmists. Despite the psalmists’ harsh words, they often exhibit graciousness and personal concern toward their enemies (Pss. 35:1, 12–13; 109:4–5). The psalmist David treated Saul, Absalom, and others with kindness despite their mistreating him (2Sam. 1:1–16; 2:5; 16:11–12; 19:12–23).

Concern for God’s purposes is the psalmists’ passion. The indignation of the psalmists was not primarily personal, but God-oriented. Defying God’s redemptive workings through Abraham/Israel to bless the nations meant opposing God’s purposes. Commitment to God’s plan and reputation prompts David’s use of uncomfortable, harsh terms (“hate,” “loathe”) toward God’s opponents (Ps. 139:21–22). He nonetheless immediately asks God to search his heart, saying, “see if there be any hurtful way in me” (vv.23–24). When the psalmists call on God to do to the wicked what He has promised (Ps. 58:9–10), then, personal vengeance isn’t the point. Our relativistic society could learn from the psalmists’ moral outrage and their passion for God’s will.

Anger takes a back seat to mercy. God desires repentance, not judgment (Ezek. 18:23). Needing conversion himself, Jonah evaded Israel’s enemy Nineveh, knowing that God likely would show mercy in response to repentance: “I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God” (Jonah 4:2; cf. Exod. 34:6). The wicked indeed can avert promised calamity by their repentance (Jer. 18:7–8). Evil king Manasseh’s penitence shows that no matter how morally depraved one becomes, God may be moved by humble repentance (2Chron. 33:9, 12–13). This theme of compassion over judgment is well known to the psalmists (see, e.g., Ps. 106).

Triumphalism does not characterize the psalmists. Hardly self-righteous, the psalmists know that Israel, when rebelling, isn’t above God’s righteous judgment. They exhibit no double standard—they know that unfaithful Israel can expect God’s promised wrath: “As I plan to do to [the corrupt Canaanites], so I will do to you” (Num. 33:56; cf. Josh. 23:15; Lamentations). In Psalm 89, God is “full of wrath,” having “cast off and rejected” His “anointed” (v.38). He isn’t playing favorites.

Inspiration for the New Testament’s emphasis on loving and forgiving enemies is rooted in the Old Testament. Reinforcing Jesus’ message to love one’s enemy and pray for one’s persecutors (Matt. 5:43–48), Paul exhorts: “Never pay back evil for evil to anyone.… ‘if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink….’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:17–20), citing Proverbs 25:21–22 (“if your enemy is hungry…”) as the ideal. Other OT Scriptures emphasize the same theme (Exod. 23:4–5; Lev. 19:17–18; Prov. 24:17). Believers must move beyond imprecation to the higher ideal of desiring the salvation of their enemies, blessing rather than cursing (Matt. 5:43–48; 1Pet. 2:23; 3:9; Rom. 12:14–21). This is God’s own attitude, whose love is “complete” or “perfect” (Matt. 5:48): He doesn’t just love those who love Him, but also loves His enemies, and sends rain and sunshine on both groups of people (Matt. 5:44–45). This point, here and elsewhere in Scripture, does not negate the New Testament emphasis on God’s judgment against those resisting His rule; it does, however, stress the primacy of God’s love, who reluctantly allow people to go their own way and separate themselves from Him permanently.

Old Testament moral perspectives, however, are sometimes tolerated as less-than-ideal. We can reject the psalmists’ cries for brutal vindication in its most literal sense, and look toward Jesus’ example of blessing instead of cursing—prayer instead of imprecation—in response to personal enemies. We have seen that bashing-babies-against-rocks imprecations are not literal, but remember also that certain ancient Near East practices Israel adopted—slavery, polygamy, tribalism, patriarchalism—are permitted in the Scriptures because they are expressions of humanity’s hardness of heart (cf. Matt. 19:8)—rather than reflections of God’s ideal (Gen. 1:26–28; 2:24), which Christ’s redemption seeks to restore (cf. Gal. 3:28). So, as Christians reflecting on the imprecatory psalms, we should desire God’s ideals—our enemies’ good and their salvation—but we also should desire that God’s justice prevail, like the martyrs did in Revelation 6:9–11. This, however, will mean judgment on the unrepentant. John Stott reminds us that we can’t desire sinners’ salvation “in defiance of their own unwillingness to receive it,” and we should desire their—and our—judgment if we repudiate or ignore God’s grace.¹³

New battle lines have been drawn for God’s people, the church. OT (national) Israel’s enemies were often other nations—with their idolatries and immoralities. The psalmists’ curses on Babylon or Edom flow from this profoundly religious framework.¹⁴ Unlike the church—the new, true interethnic Israel (Rom. 2:28–29), national Israel fought physical battles against enemy nations that opposed God’s purposes. Christians, using imprecatory prayers, fight spiritual battles against the forces Christ came to defeat (Matt. 12:22–29; John 12:31; 16:11; Col. 2:14–15); we must pray that the gospel and its influence may spread (2 Cor. 10:4; Eph. 6:19; 1 Pet. 5:8–9).

With certain qualifications, then, we can learn from the imprecatory psalmists by identifying with their outrage and dismay when humans and spiritual powers oppose God’s just and good purposes. Anger is often understandable, but grace-receiving Christians should pray for grace on their enemies—and also for God’s just reign to be established: “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10).

—Paul Copan

Paul Copan (Ph.D., Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is Professor and Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University (West Palm Beach, Florida). He is the author and editor of many books on philosophy of religion and apologetics, including When God Goes to Starbucks (Baker, 2008) and Loving Wisdom (Chalice Press, 2007), and a contributor to the Apologetics Study Bible (Holman, 2007).

notes

1 Shortened from a chapter in Paul Copan, When God Goes to Starbucks: A Guide to Everyday Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker 2008).

2 All Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible.

3 Eugene H. Peterson, Answering God (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1989), 98.

4 C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958), 20–33.

5 Elizabeth Achtemeier, Preaching Hard Texts of the Old Testament (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1998), 105–10.

6 Peterson, 100; Lewis, 30.

7 Lewis, 30–31.

8 I draw from William Webb, “Bashing Babies against the Rocks” (paper presented to the Evangelical Theological Society, Atlanta, November 2003).

9 D. J. Wiseman, The Vassal-Treaties of Esarhaddon (London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1958), 60–78.

10 D. A. Carson, How Long, O Lord? (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991), 97–98.

11 John H. Sailhamer, The NIV Compact Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 346.

12 Peterson, 98.

13 John Stott, Favorite Psalms (Chicago: Moody, 1988), 121.

14 Leslie C. Allen, Psalms 101–150, Word Biblical Commentary 21 (Waco, TX: Word, 1983), 242–43.

The biggest problem with The Blue Parakeet, however, is that it has a hidden agenda. It uses the widely relevant “hook” of how we are to read Scripture as a cover for its ardent promotion of egalitarianism (“mutualism,” as McKnight puts it) over the course of a number of chapters. Though McKnight refers to his discussion of women in ministry as a “test case,” the reality is that it takes over as the central thesis of the book, leaving the reader more than a bit confused, and surely not helped, by the time one reaches the end of the book.

The odd title comes from McKnight’s observation of an escaped pet, a blue parakeet, finding its way into his yard among the many sparrows that are his regular guests. The idea is that the blue parakeet interrupted their normal experience and provided a startling, jarring invasion. So this phrase becomes a symbol of jarring, unexpected, challenging verses, at least as McKnight interprets them, which expose our less-than-robust ways of reading the Bible. He uses the imagery in other ways, as well, later referring to women gifted for ministry as “blue parakeets” that are locked in a cage by “traditionalists” and forbidden to sing.

McKnight, a professor at North Park University in Chicago and author of The Jesus Creed, uses a plethora of “Bible difficulties” to raise one basic issue and to illustrate one basic point: we do not do everything the Bible says. He insists no one can, since, in reality, the Bible requires us to adopt a pattern of “discernment” that is based on reading the Bible “with the Great Tradition” but not in a traditionalistic way. He brings us to this conclusion slowly, and rather circuitously, raising all sorts of issues about the Sabbath, various Old Testament laws, and New Testament historical situations.

From here he promotes part of his thesis: “that was then, this is now.” The theme becomes tiring in its repetitiveness. Almost every element of redemptive history, law and gospel, shadow and fulfillment, is put into the category of “that was then, this is now,” as if this simplistic phrase can actually account for the rich development of God’s revelation over the course of the Scriptures. McKnight knows well the in-depth treatments of these issues that have been part of Christian literature and history, but he prefers to simplify the situation so that he can get to his main point, his “case study” of women in ministry.

McKnight creates an overarching paradigm of unity restored in Jesus that becomes the foundation of his real purpose in writing The Blue Parakeet. In the process he presents a truncated rendition of the “story” that is Scripture that does injustice to the richness of the biblical narrative. As Thomas Schreiner has noted in this regard, “At the same time, his own hermeneutical method is not very helpful. To say ‘that was then and this is now,’ and that we need a pattern of discernment as we are led by the Spirit in community is insufficient. How McKnight’s program works out is remarkably vague and amorphous.”²

No Authority, No Submission. McKnight’s vague and amorphous answers to his own difficult questions are among most troubling aspects of this book. Those looking for answers to the many attacks on the Christian faith prevalent in Western society today will find little help from The Blue Parakeet. Their confidence in the Bible’s ability to provide guidance will not likely be increased but rather decreased by McKnight’s perspectives.

McKnight often gives vent to the sentiments that power the writings of many Emergent authors, reacting to a childhood defined by a stilted, narrow, often hypocritical fundamentalism. But the existence of shallow, unreflective fundamentalism does not logically justify a paradigm shift that allows him to write that those who “have a proper relationship to the Bible never need to speak of the Bible as their authority nor do they speak of their submission to the Bible. They are so in tune with God, so in love with him, that the word ‘authority’ is swallowed up in loving God” (emphasis in original).³

Though the Bible contains just this kind of language of submission and authority, McKnight’s view of the Bible as “story” and “narrative,” and his imbalanced view of what a true “relationship” with God entails, forces this odd viewpoint into his theology. The nature of Scripture as breathed out by God and man’s recognition of his created state cannot but produce categories of authority and submission, but McKnight, in forcing his paradigm of “unity” on Scripture, squeezes this vital aspect of biblical revelation right out of the “story.”

Egalitarian Agenda. I began by asserting that The Blue Parakeet was in essence guilty of false advertising, for while it presents itself as a dialogue on how we should read the Bible today, it is far more an apologetic for egalitarianism and an attack on comple ment arianism. Though McKnight raises all sorts of issues (often under cutting biblical authority in the process), it is just here that he reveals his true motivation. The chapters on this “case study” are filled with strong language; stronger, I think, than McKnight even recognizes. His prose conveys emotion and the reserve that often expresses itself elsewhere in the book is pretty much lost here. This results in some pretty glaring inaccuracies and imbalances, some of which might not be readily apparent to the untrained eye.

Just one example must suffice to substantiate this charge. In discussing the issue of whether Junia is a woman’s name in Romans 16:7 (a very common point of discussion in the complement arian/egalitarian debate), McKnight not only dismisses with prejudice one of the key complementarian arguments (that, as Dan Wallace⁴ has pointed out, the phrase “of note among the apostles” is best understood as “well known among,” removing this text from a central position in the debate to begin with) but he makes this kind of blanket statement: “Junia is a woman’s name. But because women aren’t supposed to be ‘apostles,’ someone copying the letter to the Romans changed the spelling so that Junia (female) became Junias (male)….Recent exhaustive study has uncovered this mistake, and we now are virtually certain ‘Junia’ was a female.”⁵

How does McKnight know the intentions and beliefs of ancient scribes? While it is common enough for modern textual scholars to engage in time-traveling mind-reading today, neither McKnight, nor anyone else, can tell us with any certainty what any particular unknown and unnamed scribe believed in the ancient world. In fact, both sources cited in McKnight’s notes indicate that the situation is significantly more complex and nuanced than his discussion indicates.⁶ The reality is that nobody changed any spelling at all. The difference between Junia and Junias is a matter of accenting, and the earliest manuscripts do not have accent marks. Hence, McKnight’s assertion that this text was changed “because women aren’t supposed to be ‘apostles’” evaporates on examination, as does much of his larger argument.

McKnight confesses to not having tried to end the “abuse” of the “caged blue parakeets” (i.e., women he insists were called to ministry) when he was teaching at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. This entire book seems, to this reviewer, to be some kind of cathartic exercise for having failed to engage the battle.

Paradigm vs. Primary Example. Even more telling than this is a rather glaring observation, shared by other reviewers of this work. All through The Blue Parakeet we are told that the paradigmatic phrase we need to understand is “that was then, this is now.” This is what all Christians are left with, “discerning,” with the Great Tradition of the Church, how we are to read the Bible in our own cultural setting. One would therefore expect that in McKnight’s main test case, that of women in ministry, we would see his thesis proven; yet, just the opposite happens. Instead of “that was then, this is now,” we have a completely different argument, for McKnight asserts that women have always had these positions of leadership. So, McKnight’s argument should rather be: “it was like this back then, and it should be again now.”

We see then that McKnight’s own paradigm does not fit his primary example. This again leads us to conclude that the preceding discussion about reading the Bible was just a vehicle to allow him to present a case for what he calls “mutualism,” but which is really nothing more than standard egalitarianism in more emergent language.

Scot McKnight raises all sorts of valid and important questions in The Blue Parakeet, but like Peter Enns in his Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament,⁷ the reader is left with more questions than answers at the end of the “discussion.” This is the mark of many of today’s writers. The “dialogue” is far more important than actually coming to any conclusions. Yet, given that we are talking about God’s revelation to man and a faith that proclaims Jesus Christ to be “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), who provides His followers with everything they need “for life and godliness” (2 Pet. 1:3), shouldn’t that conversation end with something like “Thus sayeth the Lord”?

—James White

James White is an elder of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, the Director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, and the author of more than twenty books. He has taught in a wide variety of theological fields and has engaged in more than seventy-five moderated public debates in defense of the Christian faith.

1 R. C. Sproul’s Knowing Scripture (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009) comes to mind as a sober alternative.

2 http://www.cbmw.org/Blog/Posts/A-Review-of-Scot-McKnight-s-The-Blue-Parakeet-Part-V.

3 Scot McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible, Kindle ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), locations 1402–5.

4 Dan Wallace, “Innovations in the Text and Translation of the NET Bible, New Testament,” in The Bible Translator 52.3:343–44.

5 Locations 2800–2805.

6 McKnight references Douglas Moo’s commentary on Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) and Eldon Jay Epp’s Junia: The First Woman Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005).

7 Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005.

Word-Faith leaders take a different—though even more heretical—spin on the verse. Kenneth Copeland, for example, asserts that Jesus “had to give up His righteousness”³ and “accepted the sin nature of Satan.”⁴ Benny Hinn likewise declares that Jesus “did not take my sin; He became my sin….He became one with the nature of Satan.”⁵

In what follows, I will demonstrate in brief fashion that there are five key hermeneutic principles that disallow such distorted understandings of Christ and His salvific mission. These principles, which guide our understanding of the apostle Paul’s intended meaning (the only correct meaning), are: (1) interpret Bible verses in context; (2) correctly understand, assess, and draw insights from Old Testament typology; (3) interpret verses in accordance with lexical insights gained from the original languages of the Bible; (4) interpret Scripture by Scripture, recognizing that Scripture is its own best interpreter; and (5) interpret difficult verses in light of the clear verses.

1. Interpret Bible Verses in Context. The immediate context of 2 Corinthians 5:21 centers on reconciliation to God (see vv. 18–20). The Greek word for reconciliation in these verses, katallages, refers to “the exchange of hostility for a friendly relationship.”⁶ The state of hostility exists because of human sin against a holy God, which, according to the apostle Paul, was dealt with at the cross of Christ (2 Cor. 5:14–15). In view of this, the friendly relationship that Adam and Eve lost can now be restored through faith in Christ. The basis of Paul’s reconciliatory message is then stated in verse 21: God “made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

2. Correctly Understand, Assess, and Draw Insights from Old Testament Typology. A type is an Old Testament institution, event, person, object, or ceremony that has reality and purpose in biblical history, but that also—by divine design—foreshadows something yet to be revealed. The Passover lamb in the Old Testament (Exod. 12:21) was a “type” of Christ, who is Himself the Lamb of God (John 1:29, 36).

An understanding of the Passover Lamb in the Old Testament provides significant insight on the concept of substitu tion. For example, the sacrificial lamb had to be “unblemished” (Exod. 12:5; Lev. 4:3, 23, 32). At the time of the sacrifice, a hand would be laid on the unblemished sacrificial animal to symbolize a transfer of guilt (Lev. 4:4, 24, 33). Notice that the sacrificial lamb did not thereby actually become sinful by nature; rather, sin was imputed to the animal and the animal acted as a sacrificial substitute. In like manner, Christ the Lamb of God was utterly unblemished (1 Pet. 1:19), but our sin was imputed to Him and He was our sacrificial substitute on the cross of Calvary. Simply because our sin was imputed to Him does not mean He changed in nature or actually became sinful.

3. Interpret Verses in Accordance with Lexical Insights Gained from the Original Languages of the Bible. In 2 Corinthians 5:21, the phrase “on our behalf” (“He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf ”) derives from the Greek term huper. This word can bear a number of nuances, not all of them substitutionary in nature. As professor Daniel Wallace has noted in his Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, however, there are a number of factors that argue in favor of a substitutionary use of the word in New Testament times. For example, the substitutionary sense of huper is found in extra-New Testament Greek literature (see, e.g., Plato, Republic 590a; Xenophon, Anabasis 7.4.9–10), the Septuagint (e.g., Deut. 24:16; Isa. 43:3–4), and in the papyri (e.g., Oxyrhyn chus Papyrus 1281.11–12; Tebtunis Papyrus 380.43–44).⁷ One papyri example relates to a scribe who wrote a document on behalf of a person who did not know how to write. In all, Wallace counts 87 examples from the papyri in which huper is used in a substitutionary sense, and this by no means exhausts the extantpapyri data. Wallace thus concludes that “this evidence is over whelming in favor of treating huper as bearing a substitutionary force in the NT era.”⁸ The Friberg Greek Lexicon likewise affirms that the word is used “with a component of representation or substitution in the place of, for, in the name of, instead of.”⁹

Christ’s death, as the Lamb of God, was “for” (huper) us in the sense that it was on our behalf (2 Cor. 5:21). The word is used in this same on-behalf-of sense elsewhere in Scripture. Jesus at the Last Supper said: “This is My body which is given for you” (Luke 22:19, emphasis added here and in the verses that follow). Likewise, in John 10:15 Jesus affirmed, “I lay down My life for the sheep.” Paul thus exults that “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8; see also Gal. 3:13; 1 Tim. 2:6; Heb. 2:9). Jesus “gave Himself for us to redeem us” (Titus 2:14), “the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God” (1 Pet. 3:18; see also 2:21). The idea of substitution richly permeates these verses.

4. Interpret Scripture by Scripture. Since Scripture is its own best interpreter, we must approach 2 Corinthians 5:21 in light of the clear teaching of other verses. While there are quite a number of pertinent theological facts we could derive from other verses that may have relevance for a proper under stand ing of this verse, for illustration’s sake I cite one alone: the immutability of Christ. Scripture reveals that Christ, as God, is unchanging and unchangeable (cf. Mal. 3:6; James 1:17). In Hebrews 1:12 the Father—drawing a contrast between the universe that ages and is passing away, and Jesus who is untouched by the passing of time—says of Jesus, “You are the same, and your years will not come to an end” (emphasis added). We are assured of the divine Savior: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8, emphasis added). Whatever else we might conclude from such verses, they certainly prohibit any suggestion that Jesus changed in His essential nature as God, or, more specifically, took on the nature of Satan.

5. Interpret Difficult Verses in Light of the Clear Verses. Among the more obvious teachings in the clear verses of Scripture is the perpetual sinlessness of Jesus Christ (emphasis is added in the following verses). The writer of Hebrews affirmed that “we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15). Jesus was “holy, innocent, [and] undefiled” (Heb. 7:26). He was One “who committed no sin, nor was any deceit found in his mouth” (1 Pet. 2:22). Jesus’ betrayer was remorseful, saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood” (Matt. 27:4). A hardened Roman soldier cried out, “Certainly this man was innocent” (Luke 23:47). The apostle Peter affirmed that we are redeemed not “with perishable things like silver or gold…but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ” (1 Pet. 1:18–19). John said, “You know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin” (1 John 3:5). In view of such verses, it is impossible to argue that Jesus’ essential nature actually became tainted or corrupted by sin.

The Apostle Paul’s Intended Meaning. Based on the preceding hermeneutic considerations, we conclude that the apostle Paul’s intended meaning in 2 Corinthians 5:21 is that Jesus was always without sin actually, but at the cross He was made to be sin for us judicially. While Jesus never committed a sin personally, He was made to be sin for us substitutionally.¹⁰ Just as the righteousness that is imputed to Christians in justification is extrinsic to them, so the sin that was imputed to Christ on the cross was extrinsic to Him and never in any sense contaminated His essential nature. As one Bible expositor put it, “The innocent was punished voluntarily as if guilty, that the guilty might be gratuitously rewarded as if innocent.”¹¹

In a nutshell, then, the whole redemptive plan is one of substitution—and without such substitution there can be no salvation. It was by His utterly selfless sacrificial death on the cross that our sinless Savior—the unblemished Lamb of God—paid the penalty for our sins and thereby canceled the debt of sin against us, thus wondrously making possible our reconciliation with God. The redeemed of God can only respond in exultation and praise: “To Him who loves us and released us from our sins by His blood…to Him be the glory and the dominion forever and ever” (Rev. 1:5–6).

—Ron Rhodes

Ron Rhodes, Th.D., is president of Reasoning from the Scriptures Ministries and adjunct professor of theology at Biola University (La Mirada, California), Southern Evangelical Seminary (Charlotte, North Carolina), and at Golden Gate Seminary (Southern California campus). He is an award-winning author of numerous books and articles.

notes

1 Frank Jannaway, ed., Christadelphian Answers (Houston: Herald Press, 1920), 24.

2 Ibid., 24.

3 Kenneth Copeland, “The Incarnation,” Audiotape #01-0402 (Fort Worth: Kenneth Copeland Ministries, 1985), side 2.

4 Kenneth Copeland, “What Happened from the Cross to the Throne,” Audiotape #02-0017 (Fort Worth: Kenneth Copeland Ministries, 1990), side 2.

5 Benny Hinn, quoted in Hank Hanegraaff, Christianity in Crisis (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1993), 155–56.

6 Walter Bauer, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed., ed. and rev. Frederick William Danker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 521.

7 Daniel Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 383–88.

8 Ibid., 386.

9 Timothy Friberg, Analytical Lexicon of the Greek New Testament, in BibleWorks software, BibleWorks, LLC.

10 See Norman Geisler and Ron Rhodes, Correcting the Cults (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1997), 244.

11 Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown’s Commentary, in PC Study Bible software, BibleSoft.

So I opened it to the center spread and here is an article by a leading voice in dispensational thought—Dr. Benny Hinn, and he writes an article titled, “The Fig Tree is in Bloom: What God has Through the Modern Creation of Israel is Nothing Short of a Miracle of Bible Prophecy.” So through his special insight, usual unbridled speculation, and subjective flights of fancy, Hinn looks at the Bible and interprets it for us in the article. He notes that there are three specific prophecies with respect to 1948. He says, “I have been told that for centuries Jewish rabbis have been waiting for the fulfillment of three Old Testament passes they believe point to the Messiah’s coming. The first two have already occurred, and the third is taking place right before our eyes.”[2] So you have Jewish Rabbis looking at three passages and—in agreement with Benny Hinn—they think that the passages say what Benny Hinn thinks they say.

Benny then lays out these prophecies for us. Number one, according to Hinn

Traffic in the streets of Jerusalem. Nahum wrote of a time after Israel would be scattered and persecuted, when “the emptiers have emptied them out and ruined their vine branches.” (Nah. 2:2). He saw a day when “the chariots come with flaming torches in the day of His preparation…they jostle one another in the broad roads; they seem like torches, the run like lightening” (vv. 3-4).

The prophet saw cars in Jerusalem and did not know how to properly describe them––vehicles speeding in the streets of the city he called “broad roads.” These wide roads didn’t exist in the prophet’s day, but they certainly do now![3]

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this. Now, obviously, all Nahum is taking about is broad places, and I suppose broad places existed in Old Testament times just as they today.

When you read something like this in a Christian magazine or by a Christian teacher, I think the first thing you better do is put on your bologna detector. What can you know for sure? That Benny Hinn does not know how to interpret the Word of God and there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who are following him into a ditch, so we have to learn discernment skills and test what these people are saying with scripture really says.

The second thing to do is look at the context. This passage in context is a prophecy concerning the destruction of Nineveh. It has nothing to do with cars in the streets of Jerusalem in the twenty-first century. Nahum didn’t see cars in Jerusalem as Hinn claims. He saw chariots in Nineveh.

We need to look through the subterfuge and deceptive reasoning of men like Benny Hinn, go back to the passage, and realize that Old Testament prophets were not using poor analogies, like saying chariots with flaming torches because they didn’t know how to say cars were fast and had headlights. This is nonsense. This is dealing with prophetic language and hyperbole with what is going to happen to Nineveh.

All one needs to do is pick up the book of Nahum and see that’s what Nahum is writing about. However, people don’t do that. They read this and say, “Oh my goodness, the most significant of the prophecies that Jewish rabbis believe. We should believe this as well.”

After all the anointed man of God, Benny Hinn, has spoken. Of course this is the same guy who is telling us that faith is a force and words the containers of the force. He’s the same guy who is distorting the nature of God and talking about thousands and thousands of miracles in his venues, but yet cannot produce a single authentic miracle.

The point is simply this, test all things in light of Scripture, hold fast to that which is good. (1 Thess. 5:21). Don’t fall for last days fever and don’t read Charisma magazine to get your end times fix. It’s sensationalism, sophistry, sloppy journalism, and it’s seducing people. Quite frankly, it’s like a freak show and it drags Christ’s name through the mud.

For further information on how to interpret the Bible regarding the end times and the Word of Faith Movement check out my books, The Apocalypse Code and Christianity in Crisis 21^st Century at our website www.equip.org