The 10th Plague and the Problem of Evil

Tim, in his podcast on the passover, finds God's cold blooded killing of all the firstborn in Egypt (Ex11:4-8, 12:29-32) too much to stomach and too hard to believe.  As a compassionate human being, I find myself agreeing with Tim.  I said as much to the group that I am going through the E-100 readings with and got pretty short shrift from them.

image from here

One friend, who had his back broken in a car accident while working as a missionary in Egypt pointed out that this was God's judgment upon the Egyptians for their mistreatement of the Israelites (Ex 1).  That is a fair point, if indeed we do believe in justice, in the punishment fitting the crime.  The Egyptians had tried to kill every son of the Israelites, and were presumably only keeping the girls alive in order to take advantage of them, so this punishment seems proportionate, even a little lenient.

But I wonder if this kind of casuistry is a little beside the point. Part of the punishment was for the firstborn of all the animals to die, the first born of all the animals that had already been killed in the 5th plague (Ex 9:1-7).  Which suggests in at least one account, if not both, a little exageration is taking place.  This is not deception, because it is there in the text, as plain as the nose on your face.  If you read it you will see it, and its author/s must have seen it too.  My friend's second point, having lived in the Middle East, was that he could testify that that culture contains a lot more ambiguity than our modernist Western one.  So the rather absolute language of Ex11:4-8 and 12:29-32 could legitimately be taken with a grain of salt.

But I'm not sure how much that helps me either.  The real question is not, how can I get this text to fit in with what I think is acceptable or not for God to do?  The real question, or at least what I think they try and teach us at Bible college, is to ask what is this text trying to say to us?  It blatantly does not give a tinkers fart as to whether or not we think God's actions are proportionate or even historical.  The story's concern is with God's distinction between the oppressed (in this instance Israel) and the oppressors (in this instance Egypt) (Ex 11:7).  The story's concern is to show how God is keeping his promises to Abraham (Gen 12:1-3), i.e. the survival of the people of Israel, ultimately how God is going to redeem all creation.  The story's concern is to tell us about . . . God.

This was my friend's most helpful insight today: A year ago, after his back had been broken, he had been praying and hoping for healing.  And yet in the last year, from being wheelchair bound and suffering in a number of other respects, he can see all the things he has learnt about God through his infirmity.  Now he isn't really that interested in praying for healing. 

Such an idea is disgusting.  How can he possibly justify God for his crippled state when he should be enjoying health and wealth and prosperity like any deserving child of the western world.  How can he possibly understand his suffering as something positive?  Is knowing God really better than walking and using a toilet?  Is it really worth the death of all those Egyptian first born humans and animals for God to accomplish his promise to Abraham?

Well I don't know the answer to that question, I've never lost my legs or a child, I hope I never do.  But I do wonder if maybe I have the problem of evil all wrong, maybe evil looks so bad to me because I think the point of it all is for me to have a nice life.  What if the point of it all is to know God?  A god who prefers the poor and oppressed, a god who is redeeming creation, a god who doesn't appreciate my need for no one to get hurt, or at least for me not to get hurt, but is willing to hurt anyone and everyone if that is what it takes?  I don't know if that is a god I can believe in, I don't know if I have the guts for that, but I think that might be the sort of god that the Bible believes in. . . 

Let me know what you think,

What's the drama and who's the snake?

Thanks to James McGrath for lovely quote which inspires me to make two observations about Gen 2-3.

1. The suspense of Gen 2:18-20 relies on the reader not having read Gen 1:26-28.  The way the story is being told the audience are expected not to know what partner might be found for the man.  But Gen 1:26-28 has already given it away, man goes with woman and the two of them are supposed to "go forth and multiply."  Thus the suspense and resolution of Gen 2:18-25, which arrives at essentially the same answers by a different route makes no sense if treated as part of a continuous narrative with Gen 1.  The two creation accounts should not be harmonized but read as alternative accounts.  This is not because I feel the need to do this to satisfy some modernist need to justify my enjoyment of and adherence to these ancient myths, but because the text (which I believe is God's word) actually demands it. 


2. The serpent is introduced in 3:1 as being "more crafty than any other wild animal that God had made."  Because of this, and the resultant loss of limb for said serpent in 2:14, I have never understood the ease with which this chatty little reptile is conflated with Satan and the Devil.  To do so takes the story out of the category of myth and into allegory.  If it is allegorical then why do we need to get so excited about whether or not it is historical?  This also makes it hard for me to accept that in Gen 3:15 we find the proto-euangelion.  To me 3:15 is simply a folksy explanation of why snakes are nasty.  The true proto-euangelion is, IMHO at least, Gen 12:1-3 and it would seem that here the Apostle Paul agrees with me (cf. Gal 3:8, which might count for something with some people).


Let me know what you think :-)

Why the Jews survived as a people when no one else did

Further to the last post, I was watching a lecture by Yale Professor Christine Hayes, and she makes the point that the reason the Jews have such an extraordinary long history when so many larger and more advanced civilisations dissapeared off the map, is their robust monotheism. Which meant that when the ultimate national disaster happened (being wholesale exile and enslavement) rather than accepting that their god had been defeated by the enemy's god they interpreted the event as an act of their soveriegn God. This interpretive act effectively stopped them from being assimilated by the conquering culture and allowed them to maintain a unique identity. Now this is an entirely secular argument, not one that needs God to be real for it to work. (Although if God is real then obviously God might have a hand in the survival of God's chosen people as well.) But I think this same point applies to the contemporary Christian's ability to maintain a Christian identity even through the most traumatic and harrowing circumstances. If you are able to interpret the event as being within the will of a soveriegn God then you will be able to survive it with your commitment to God intact. But if the event is interpreted as having happened in spite of the best efforts of a limited god your willingness to identify with that god will be compromised. After all, it makes no sense to give all your loyalty to a deity than isn't always in control.

If God is good, what is God good for?

I recently heard a Christian defend God from the 'problem of evil' by suggesting that God has voluntarily self limited Godself in God's knowledge of the future (and possibly power) and so when bad things happen to good people it is just because God has chosen to be weak. This is not helpful. Believing that God didn't stop the bad thing because God either didn't see it coming or couldn't help even if God did, may stop you blaming God for the bad thing, but it also suggests that if God is so blind and feeble he is no God at all, but just a fellow sufferer who might occasionally provide some comfort but really isn't good for much else. There really is no way around the Bible's affirmation that God is both in control and fully aware of what is going on in the world (whether or not God has the future mapped out in minutia - but that is another discussion) so the fact that bad things happen (and yes I am talking about really bad things) must be understood in a way that does not diminish God's power or knowledge.

The biggest misunderstanding in Christendom is this: that God's power and knowledge are entirely bent on not letting bad things happen to those who believe in him, so that when bad things do happen some sort of explanation must be sought. This misunderstanding is based only on our belief that God is interested in the same things we are: our security, comfort and pride. That is, that God is like us. Of course only a quick skim through the Bible is guaranteed to show you a God rather contemptuous of our security, comfort and pride. In fact if you value those things the very last thing you should ever do is get to know Jesus. Jesus, the author and perfecter of Christian faith, showed us what true living was when his naked and damaged flesh was hung up for ridicule and slow death one Friday. In fact the better question is: how come so many people who claim to be good don't have more bad things happen to them? How come so many of these good people have so much security, comfort and pride and God does nothing to relieve them of it? Does God really love them at all?

Is mission about telling truth or fighting evil?

The problem of evil: the mathematics of humanity

One of the things I didn't think that Rowan Williams did particularly well in his interview with John Humphreys was deal with the 'problem of evil' in a very satisfactory way. The 'problem of evil' (POE) is an old chestnut which goes something like this:

1. God is both all powerful and totally good/loving
2. An all powerful and totally good/loving creator God would not make a world with evil in it
3. Evil exists in the world
4. Therefore there is no God

Now it is no.2 which contains the assumption where the argument falls down on a philisophical level because, of course, we humans have absolutely no way of knowing what an all powerful totally good being might or might not do. However, RW rightly recognised that in Humphreys' case, as with many people, the argument is not really a logical one so much as an emotional one. That is, at some point someone witnesses enough evil, or something so evil, that they find belief in a good God unconvincing. (Of course there are many other reasons for not believing in God but the POE is often reason enough for many people.)

What RW didn't do was to challenge Humphreys' on his acceptance of the emotional argument against God. For Humphreys' the terrible things he witnessed as a journalist led him to conclude that God could not exist, in particular the death of innocent children. The reason this needs challenging is that it betrays a rather wrong headed approach to the value of human life.

The emotional POE argument goes something like this,

1. God is good, and God made the world which is good
2. But something terrible happens
3. If God made the world knowing that something terrible might happen then God cannot be good
4. Therefore God is either evil, incompetent, or non-existant

What this argument basically says is that the genocide and the rape, the exploitation and the poverty, the war and the violence, in the world negate the goodness in the world, and so if God made the world he did it wrong, and so God is probably no god at all and just a figment of our imagination.

But I dont think that is right. Because the world that contain all that evil also contains much that is good. What we cannot do is try to calculate whether or not the evil outweighs the good. We cannot do this because it is absurd to say that because a child's life ends in violence that they should never have been born at all. That their short life, however full of tradgedy and pain it was, was somehow not worth it. But this is what the POE argument (in both its forms) says. It says that on balance there is so much evil as to render the world, if it has been created, a big mistake. That the world is not worth it.

It would be just as foolish to suggest the equation could be better done the other way, i.e. that there is enough good in the world to negate the evil. What we can say is that this world with all it evil is the only world in which you, me, the murdered child, and the rape victim could have existed in. In any other world, but especially one devoid of evil, we could never have existed. This is the world we live in, and if there is a God, God has decided it was worth it. For the love of you, me, the murdered child and every victim of every crime, God decided it was worth all the evil to bring us into existence.

To say that there is too much evil in the world for there to be a God is to say that our existence and the existence of all humanity is negated completely by the presence of evil in the world. Is that a judgement you are willing to make? Can you make that judgement on behalf of the victims of the world? Would they rather have never existed? Maybe some of them would rather that, but I dont think I would make that decision for them. I cannot calculate the worth of a life, no matter how short or tragic against whatever evil that might befall that life.

At the end of the day, if there is a God, only God can decide if it is worth it or not, because only God know the beginning from the end. And if there is a God then God has decided, and we (humanity) are worth it. But of course, if there is a God then God has an advantage over us, the big picture, where one day (if there is a God and if the Bible is God's word) God 'will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.' (Revelation 21:4) The Christian claim has never been that the good in the world outweighs the evil, or that things will somehow balance out in the end, but that God will one day comprehensively and decisively deal with evil and it (and its effects) will become a thing of the past. The answer to the POE, if there is a God, is that all evil however evil is only temporary, but all good will endure for ever in the eternity of God.