The Problem
In the beginning . . . let him go up! Genesis 1:1a – 2 Chronicles 36:23c NASB
In the beginning/ go up – These are the first and the last words of the Tanakh: be-rēʾ šît; yāâl. In the beginning God assents to descend, voluntarily creating a universe with agents who are capable of resisting His will. At the end, those who love and follow YHVH are finally given permission to build for Him a sanctuary on earth. In between is the rest of the story of love, betrayal, woe, remorse, return, deliverance, hope and trust. In between is our history.
And that’s a problem.
The problem for Christian doctrine is the existence of evil. The problem for faith is history.
Christianity wrestles with a philosophical/theological problem. “How can a good God be responsible for evil?” Or: “What is the source of evil if God is absolutely sovereign?”
Judaism, under the influence of Hellenism, struggles with a similar problem. “Why do bad things happen to good people?”
But Hebraic religion never experienced mental contortions about these issues. Whatever God did was God’s business. Isaiah makes it abundantly clear that evil is also under God’s complete control, and, in fact, comes into existence only through God’s purposes. If that doesn’t make rational sense to the Western philosophical mind, too bad. Live with it!
Hebraic religion struggles with a completely different problem, one that is buried under mountains of myopic reconstruction of the text. The problem is that actual historical events do not line up with the religious reports in Scripture. For all intents and purposes, the Bible isn’t history. It’s propaganda.
Ouch! That doesn’t sit well. We think of propaganda negatively, as if it is essentially untruthful and deliberately misleading. But biblical propaganda isn’t intended to misdirect. It is intended to support belief in YHVH. It is religious political narrative. It’s purpose is to provide “evidence” for trusting God, even if in order to do that it must rewrite some of the actual occurrences in human history. Maybe “rewrite” is a bit too strong. Maybe what happens is governed by a religious commitment to the one God. Since there are no rivals to the God of Israel, everything is ultimately His doing, and that means that all human history needs to have a kind of “divine” perspective. So if there are two different stories about Saul becoming king, or there are two accounts of David’s victories, or there are different versions of Israel’s flirtations with idolatry, all of these must be reconciled under the banner of the one and only one God. Some reshaping becomes necessary. Not so differently than the way American history books depict the American vantage point of WWII. Not lies, just bias.
We might be reasonably comfortable acknowledging the bias of American history books on WWII, but this is the Bible, for God’s sake! It’s not supposed to have bias (or anything even close to “propaganda”) because it’s from God and God never lies. As you read this last sentence, does it resonate? If it does, then you should notice that your view of history is doctrinally dependent. History is what happened (from any given perspective), not what religious belief wishes would have happened. And when historical investigation finds no evidence that there was a Canaanite king in Ai when Joshua attacked the city, what are we going to do? Are we going to dismiss the archeologists and historians, the scientists and investigators because what they find doesn’t square with the report in the “sacred” text, or are we going to admit that the “sacred” text has an agenda, and that agenda governs the recounting of events.
Do you feel the foundation shaking?
It’s a problem, isn’t it?
Evil? Yes, it’s a philosophical conundrum, but we can live with that one. Who knows what the real answer is? It doesn’t affect us too much. We still have to survive in a bad world.
But what if our view of “historical” is colored by our beliefs in the integrity of the text. Can we live with that? Maybe, maybe not. More later.
Topical Index: history, propaganda, Genesis 1:1, 2 Chronicles 36:23
