god morality and massacres a listmember d andrew killie i think wrote in response to the suggestion that genocide may sometimes be the will of god any god who works that way is indescribably evil and unworthy of my worship or faith nobuya higgy higashiyama replied as in substance did others where is your source of moral standards by which you judge god s behavior it is often argued that we have no standing by which to judge god s actions who is the clay to talk back to the potter but we find a contrary view in scripture when god proposes to destroy the city of sodom genesis abraham says suppose that there are some good men in the city will you destroy the righteous along with the wicked far be it from you lord to do such a thing shall not the judge of all the earth do right i am told that the hebrew is actually a bit stronger than this and can perhaps be better rendered dynamic equivalence as shame on you lord if you do such a thing there are those who say that the definition of good is whatever god happens to want but if that is so then the statement that god is good has no meaning it simply says that god does what he wants that being the case no one can either love or obey god because he is good the only motive left for obeying him is that he is powerful just as it makes sense to obey a dictator even when he tells you to round up all jews and exterminate them because if you defy him you might end up in the gas chamber yourself so it makes sense to obey god because he has the power to punish you if you don t this ethical theory i take to be in radical contradiction to genesis and to christianity in general any theory that makes our moral judgements worthless makes any further discussion of morality or of the goodness of god meaningless however it does not follow that our moral judgements are always infallible in particular cases still less our judgements in particular cases about the course of action most likely to achieve a good result when i read the scriptural accounts of the actions of god in history those actions often seem to me very different from what i might expect of a god who loves us and desires what is best for us moreover leaving the scriptures aside and considering the natural world i find that nature is often very different from what i might expect if it were the work of a benevolent deity origen said those who believe that the author of nature is also the author of the scriptures must expect to find in the scriptures the same sort of difficulties that they find in nature now that some such difficulties should exist is not in itself an argument against the existence power wisdom and goodness of god on the contrary their absence would be such an argument suppose that i am watching bobby fisher play chess and suppose that every time he makes a move i find myself nodding and saying good move just what i was expecting him to do same move i would have made if i were playing that would be a sign that fisher is no better a chess player than myself given that he is better i expect that at least some of his moves will have me thinking now what do suppose induced him to do that or even boy that was a real slip he s just thrown the game away similarly if god understands the workings of the universe better than i do it is to be expected that sometimes it will look to me as if he has made a mistake one difference between fisher at the chessboard and god at the controls of the universe is that i can see the end of the chess game if fisher wins i revise my earlier inference that it was carelessness that made him lose his queen moves earlier however if he loses and particularly if i can see that there was a time when he had an opportunity for a checkmate in two moves and did not take it then i know that he is not as good a player as i had thought with god on the other hand i shall not in this life see the total result of some of his actions therefore my grounds for judging that i have seen a bad move on his part must always be far shakier than my grounds for making a similar judgement about fisher in the book of genesis we read that joseph s ten older brothers who with good reason found him insufferable conspired to sell him into slavery in egypt there he eventually became viceroy and when there was a famine in canaan he was able to provide for his family when his brothers nervously apologized he told them do not worry you meant to do me evil but god turned it into good i once heard a rabbi speak on this text he said the history of the jews is largely a history of events that look like catastrophes that threaten the continued survival of the religion or the people or both but amazingly those events turn out to be the saving of the jews and of judaism the sale of joseph by his brothers looked like the breakup of the family but in fact it ended with a reconciliation of the quarrel between them the famine that drove the family out of canaan looked like a misfortune for them but in fact if they had stayed in canaan they would almost certainly have intermarried with the canaanites and been assimilated into their culture their oppression by the egyptians a few generations after their arrival in egypt again looked like a disaster but god used it to bring them out of egypt and into the promised land here the people built a temple and regularly offered sacrifices but the babylonians captured jerusalem and judea destroyed temple and city and countryside and deported most of the people to babylon you might have thought that that would be the end of the people and the religion but it was not living in canaan the people had been under constant danger of assimilation again and again they had turned from the worship of the lord to the worship of the canaanite fertility cults with their ritual prostitution and ritual human sacrifice the babylonian captivity put a stop to that never again did the jews show any interest in polytheism or idolatry neither the worship of the canaanites mor that of the babylonians ever again had a foothold among them nor is that all judaism had been in danger of becoming simply a system of sacrifices and temple observances the only prescribed acts of worship consisted of coming to jerusalem every so often and offering a sacrifice during the captivity with the temple gone the jews invented the synagogue a place of meeting for reading and study and discussion of the scriptures they came to realize clearly what they were in danger of forgetting while they continued to live in judea that god is not simply a local or tribal deity not just the controller of the land of canaan or the patron of the jewish people but the creator of the world and the ruler and judge of all humans everywhere time passed and the babylonian empire was replaced by that of the persians and then that of the greeks or rather the macedonians the ruler antiochus epiphanes was determined to stamp out judaism and to this end he made the reading and the study of the torah punishable by death again one might think that this would be the end of judaism but it was not the people met for worship and instead of reading the torah portion appointed for the day they would read some passage from the prophets that had a similar theme and then discuss that before this time the torah the so called five books of moses genesis exodus leviticus numbers and deuteronomy were the only books read and studied in the synagogue if it had not been for antiochus the books of the prophets would probably have been forgotten altogether his hatred for judaism saved them other examples here omitted for brevity s sake some of you may remember that julie andrews first became famous as eliza doolittle in the stage production of my fair lady when warner brothers undertook to make a movie of it everyone expected that julie who had been so magnificent on stage would play the same role in the movie instead the studio decided to go with an established screen star and cast audrey hepburn julie andrews was naturally crushed but she later realized that if she had played the screen role she would have been type cast for life as an elize doolittle type it would have been a disaster for her as it was walt disney offered her the role of mary poppins and she won an oscar for it at the presentation she stood there smiling and looking at walt disney she said and now my special thanks to the man who made all this possible jack warner it was the most memorable line of the evening in a similar spirit we jews might thank the men who in the providence of god have preserved judaism and kept it alive to this day beginning with joseph s brothers and continuing with two pharaohs with nebuchadnezzar with antiochus epiphanes after the formal meeting had broken up one woman came up to him privately and said you were talking about the holocaust weren t you he answered if that is an example that came to your mind then you are right i was talking about it to you but i would not talk about it to everyone for not everyone can bear it i assume that he meant that without the holocaust there would have been no state of israel someone hearing the rabbi s lecture might leap to the conclusion that god is dependent on the wickedness of men to accomplish his purposes or at least that the rabbi thought so he might then go on to suppose that the wickedness is in fact god s doing that he stirred up joseph s brothers to a murderous hate against him and that when the israelites were in egypt god hardened pharaoh s heart so that he oppressed the people and would not let them go and this raises questions about how an action can be considered wicked and at the same time be considered something that god has brought about i suggest another way of looking at it consider a sculptor who has a log of wood from which he proposes to carve a statue but the log instead of having a smooth even grain throughout has a large knot that spoils the appearance of the surface the sculptor considers the wood for a while and then carves a statue that features the knot that makes that particular interruption in the grain and color of the wood correspond to some feature of the statue so that observers will say how fortunate the sculptor was in finding a piece of wood with a knot like that in just the right place its presence is the crowning touch the thing that makes the statue a great work of art in reality the knot far from being what the sculptor was looking for was a challenge to his skill if the wood had not contained that flaw he would still have made a great work of art but a different one so if joseph s brothers had not sold him god would still have brought about his purposes for the jewish people but he would have done so in another manner if judas had not betrayed jesus if caiaphas and his fellow leaders had not rejected jesus but had rather acknowledged him as the annointed of god if pilate had followed his conscience rather than his fears and had set jesus free it might appear that there would have been no crucifixion and therefore no redemption and therefore no salvation not so god did not need judas sin to redeem us if judas had done right then god in christ would still have reconciled the world to himself we do not know how just as we do not know how michelangelo would have painted the sistine chapel if its interior had instead been shaped like grand central station and just as we do not know how bobby fisher would have won his fourth game agianst spassky if spassky had refused the exchange of bishops and had attacked fisher s knight instead don t bother to look up the game in question i am making up this example but the point is none the less valid thus we may say both that god used say the cowardice of pilate to accomplish his purposes and that the said cowardice was not god s doing and that pilate would not have thwarted god s plans by behaving justly and courageously what then are we to make of the place where god says to moses i will harden pharaoh s heart so that he will not let the people go some christians have taken this to mean that pharaoh was a puppet with god pulling the strings and that his stubbornness and cruelty were not his own work but the work of god in him i suppose rather that what god was telling moses was something like this if you see that pharaoh is not willing to let the people go do not be discouraged or suppose that the situation is out of my control my purposes will not be thwarted if pharaoh chooses to hear you and let the people go well and good if he does not i will fit his resistance into my plans and fit it so perfectly that future historians and theologians will suppose that i would have been thrown for a loss if pharaoh had obeyed me to return to the question that started this all off is it possible that the serbs in slaughtering the moslems of bosnia are instruments of god s will first point what they are doing is wrong just as what joseph s brothers did was wrong just as what judas did was wrong they intend it for evil if god somehow brings good out of it that does not make them any less subject to just condemnation and punishment second point of course god will bring good out of it but not the same good that he would have brought if the serbians had refrained from the sins of robbery and rape and murder nor does the good he purposes excuse us from the duty of doing what is right yours james kiefer
