Reading Joshua

Both Wolterstorff and Anthony accept that if taken literally the story of Joshua is morally unacceptable. I will need to argue otherwise if I am going to defend the idea that the flood narrative we find in Genesis 6-8 is accurate and an act of God. For the sake of argument I will see if I can achieve this whilst being reasonably faithful to Stump’s Thomist vision of the primacy of the love of God . I shall do this whilst being aware that

there is an alternative Anselmian vision of God as Judge that seems to imply that ‘divine justice and goodness are non-identical foundational features of God’s will and, as foundational, cannot be reduced to any other feature of God’s will or to each other’ I am also aware that the

theistic scepticism of Plantinga, as Stump points out, means there is no necessity for a theodicy, ‘because the actual reason for God’s allowing evil is and will remain mysterious’ (Stump 2010:19).

The question is whether there is a version of Stump’s Thomist vision of God, which incorporates the primacy of ‘God is Love’, that can also give us an eternal outcome that is recognizably consistent with an infallible Bible. This would mean showing how a God of love can allow the killing of so many people in actions clearly sanctioned by himself, including the worldwide flood, especially as the context appears to involve the people concerned being under judgement. Stump may wish to argue that God allowed the Amalekites to die because they would have become even worse over time (p185), however there are too many scriptures that suggest judgement is being viewed as the object of the exercise to believe that this approach alone is going to work if one wants to defend the infallibility of the Bible.

1In her book Wandering in Darkness Stump outlines her understanding of Aquinas’s position that the primary ‘obstacle to any person’s flourishing in union with God comes from dispositions in that person’s will that incline him to prefer his own short-term pleasure and power over greater goods’ (Stump 2010:395). It is this ‘cancer of the will’ which leads to the internal fragmentation which prevents union with God. Stump describes how through ‘justification’ and ‘sanctification’ a person can overcome shame because ‘to be loved by God is to be desired by God, and so to be desirable by the greatest standard of all. To be in a relationship of mutual love with God is also to be able to give to God, as well as to receive from God: and there is ultimate honour in giving to the Deity’ (Stump 2010:397) and this honour is the antidote to shame.

2 A quote from Turretin by Stephan (2017:13)

The following account does not represent my settled view on this matter - I have yet to come to such a position - but it does represent an attempt to dialogue with what I perceive to be the Stump/Thomist constraints with regard to the ‘God of Love’ . To do this I will make some starting assumptions, which are potentially problematic, however they may prove useful in exploring the possible outcomes we may arrive if we start with these assumptions:

1. It is a characteristic of God and those made in his own image that they have the capacity for hearts desires.

2. Heart’s desires either have their source in ‘agape love’ (which involves self-emptying for the sake of the other) or they have their

source in ‘selfish love’ (which involves making demands on others to satisfy your own needs).

3. Heart’s desires sourced in ‘agape love’ are able to flourish eternally because they constantly seek delight in blessing the other whether it is God, or other humans, or other parts of God’s creation.

4. Hearts desires sourced in ‘selfish love’ are eternally destructive as they inevitably consume the other to satisfy their needs. 5. An omniscient omnipotent God would understand that pursuing for eternity hearts desires based on ‘selfish love’ would involve an eternal sense of horror/torment because God would clearly understand the full consequences of such motives and this is why God consistently warns people about the judgement to come. I have introduced the concept of horror/torment as opposed to guilt and shame because I believe alongside guilt and shame there exists this sense of horror/torment that people (and to some extent demons) feel in the presence of holiness. There are many places in scripture where humans when they are aware that they are in the presence of God or of an angel representing God fall down in terror (Exodus 19:6, 20:18-19, 33:20, 34:29-35, Numbers 22:31,

3 This self-emptying does not mean the abandoning of pleasure - if received as a gift such pleasures are to be richly enjoyed, such as a good meal or a beautiful landscape. The very act of appreciation is the blessing you give to the giver. As Paul says ‘I know how to be abased and I know how to abound’ (Philppians 4:12a).

Judges 6:22, 13:20, Job 42:5-6, Isaiah 6:5-7, Ezekiel 1:28, Daniel 8:17, 10:7-9, Matthew 17:6, Luke 2:8-10, Revelation 1:13-17 ) likewise demons when they are in the presence of Jesus feel torment. There is no indication that these feelings were generated by God or the angel, instead they came from within as a form of self judgement. I am proposing that these feelings are different to shame and guilt because they are not dependent on what others might think about you instead they are a self judgement. (For example Stump describes guilt and shame as follows ‘A person who feels guilt has a conviction that his actions warrant others in desiring that he have what he takes to be opposed to his good. A person who feels shame has a conviction that something about himself … warrants others in repudiating a desire for him’ (Stump 2010:145) The reason we have the capacity for such self judgements lies in our being made in the image of God and therefore we are capable of self judgement.

6. The Beatific Vision allows creatures, made in the image of God, and who have hearts desires willing to be correctly ordered, to enter into a second person relationship with God. Once you have experienced the Beatific Vision you can’t change the source of your hearts desires.

7. The Beatific Vision gives us full access to the consequences of eternity. So those who have, through grace, gained access to hearts desires sourced in ‘agape love’ will enter into the blessing of the Beatific Vision - the level of that blessing will vary according to the degree they have cultivated ‘agape hearts’ desires. However those who have never cultivated ‘agape hearts’ desires will be unable to access these positive aspects of eternity. Instead by their knowledge gained through the Beatific Vision and in virtue of their being created in the image of God, they will experience the horror/torment of an eternity living in the knowledge of how awful their hearts desires were. It is our status of being creatures made in the image of God that places us in this dilemma for eternity. It is God’s knowledge of what our own judgement of ourselves will be that in part motivates his actions towards us (he is also motivated

by a desire for union with us with all the attendant joy that will bring).

8. Access to the means of grace that gives us the heart’s desires of ‘agape love’ are most powerfully seen in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit experienced by New Testament saints. However, throughout the Old Testament people of faith could also be counted righteous, that is they entered into the benefits of agape hearts desires by desiring what God wants more than what they wanted. Likewise those not familiar with the Gospel or Old Testament literature can, as Paul explains in Romans Chapter 2, access this means of grace through their untutored faith. Some Old Testament examples of this untutored grace are Job, Melchizadek and to some extent Rehab and Ruth - they show how even those outside the commonwealth of Israel could access the blessings of the children of God.

9. Conversely, those who reject the goodness of God which is found in the bounty of creation; and/or who reject their personal conscience, which points to the golden rule of doing unto others what you would want to have done to you; and/or who, if they have access to the Old Testament and New Testament, reject its teachings on the need for a new heart - a heart directed by agape love, will inevitably live with selfish love as the source of their heart’s desires. Therefore, at the Beatific Vision, they will view with horror/torment what they are and what they have done. They will do this with the same measure of judgment that God would use against himself if he entertained similar hearts desires and as a consequence acted in the same self centred way they have behaved. This they will do because they are made in the image of God and therefore have the capacity to judge themselves in the same way as God would judge himself, once they are in possession of the knowledge God has - something they receive at the Beatific Vision .4

4 An example of the effectiveness of self-judgement can be seen in restorative justice which involves the victims of crime meeting those who carried out the crime to bring home the full effect of the crime. This process has been very effective in cutting reoffending rates because those committing crimes, for the first time, begin to appreciate something of the significance of what they have done. (The Beatific Vision will entail much greater revelation of the significance of what we have and have not done.)

10. The level of horror/torment people experience at the Beatific Vision will be proportionate in its effect. Therefore, those who have little access to the truth will feel less horror/torment, likewise those who experience hard lives or short lives will feel proportionally less horror/torment. The level of horror/torment we experience for eternity will also match the level of destruction our heart’s desires have created. Because of the completeness of our knowledge gained through the Beatific Vision we will torment ourselves, not God. God refers to himself as Judge because all those made in the image of God, when they experience the Beatific Vision, will be judges of themselves. Therefore God will not torment us, instead we will.

How do these assumptions play out with regard to the hard stories we find in the Bible. God has as part of his ‘agape love’ a real desire in all his actions to alert us of our eternal danger and by whatever means get us to consider our plight. Jesus said there is more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than 99 who are already righteous. This joy stems from God’s genuine desire that not one person should perish because he knows the truly awful reality involved in eternity for such a person and because he knows what joy an eternal union with God will bring. That is why God blesses evangelism because he knows the eternal fruit of such activity. With regard to the flood there was an open invitation for all to enter the ark. Those within range of Noah’s preaching have no excuse - those outside that range do have an excuse. As a consequence they will either experience a significantly reduced sense of horror/torment as explained under assumption 10, or, if an unusual scripture found in Peter is taken to mean that Jesus preached to those who died as a result of the flood, then they will have an opportunity to respond to the Gospel prior to the final Beatific Vision (1 Peter 3:18-20). Does that apply to all those in the world up to the second coming who have never heard the truth. I don’t know - nor do I expect if such a preaching of the gospel were to take place it would necessarily have a positive results. However I assume God will be fair in all he does and at the Beatific Vision his fairness will be publically vindicated so that every mouth is stopped.

With regard to the conquest of Canaan it is clear from other scriptures that the approach of Israel and its army did not come as a surprise and the Canaanites were more than capable of understanding that they were facing God - therefore they did not have to sit back and accept their fate. For example the Gibeonites made a treaty (Joshua 9), Rehab made an arrangement (Joshua 2) and as the book of Judges testifies some of the cities taken by Joshua were subsequently repopulated by Caananites .5 The account of the mixed multitude who left Egypt during the exodus suggest that in reality a lot of non-Israelite individuals sided with God in these crisis situations (Exodus 12:38). As the people of Nineveh learned (Jonah 3:10), as Manesseh learned (2 Chronicles 33:12-13), and as Ahab learned (1 Kings 21:29), no matter how bad you have been with repentance all the blessings of God can begin to come your way including the ultimate blessing, being on the right side of the Beatific Vision . With regards to all those who suffer and die for actions they are

not responsible for, then according to assumption 10 they will suffer no loss, because that suffering will automatically reduce their sense of horror/torment in the life to come by a proportionate amount. As long as God’s actions are designed to facilitate his heart’s desire to bless people then he cannot be accused of bad heart’s desires because people reject his warnings. It must be remembered that if these assumptions are correct then God will act fairly because he knows his actions must be fair otherwise he will face horror/torment at the great and terrible day of the Lord.

Through this process I have advanced a method whereby the bad things people experience do not necessarily mean God is morally at fault, nor does the horror/torment to come necessarily come from God, rather it comes from ourselves because we are made in the image of God.

5In all probability many of the Caananites probably left their cities before they were destroyed and either became refugees or melted into the countryside - which would explain why in Judges the Israelites were often having to fight to retake their old conquests.

6 An interesting modern example of God’s extraordinary willingness to forgive can be found in Fredrick Grossmith’s account of how many of the senior Nazi officials during the Nuremburg Trials came to faith whilst he performed somewhat reluctantly his role as prison chaplain to the prisoners - an account of his work can be found in his book The Cross and the Swastika.

Therefore the judgement that appears retributive, does so because God is aware that as image bearers of God that is how we shall judge ourselves. Therefore, as God already knows these things, because he is God, he is warning us of our potential fate.

This assessment is essentially a thought experiment and not necessarily what I agree is actually going on. Rather it is an attempt to explore a Thomistic position as I believe Stump would interpret it, whilst retaining what appears to be retributive judgement, but is in fact a warning about the coming self judgement people could experience at the Beatific Vision. (The effect of this thought experiment on other biblical doctrines such as the atonement has not been considered and would warrant a separate consideration but only if this thought experiment was considered profitable ). I consider this exercise is worthwhile, even

though I am convinced that the material I have accumulated with regard to the worldwide flood is sufficient to prove that the flood described in Genesis 6-8 is a valid super miracle , (using the methodology developed

by Swinburne in his book The Resurrection of God Incarnate p204-215) and therefore I can reasonably claim to have the type of ‘warranted belief’ which Plantinga believes remains undefeated by the evidential challenge of suffering (Plantinga 2000:479). The reason I believe this process is worthwhile is that the very process of wrestling with these

7 The following is a cursory examination of this issue based on Stump’s account of the role of satisfaction in the atonement in her book Aquinas p430-433. Stump contrasts two accounts of satisfaction by stating that ‘For (P), the main obstacle to human salvation lies, in effect, in God himself, whose justice constrains him to damn human beings unless atonement is made. For Aquinas, the main obstacle lies in sinful human nature, which damns human beings unless it is repaired or restored by the atonement. ‘ (Stump 2003:432). Using this analysis then the approach I have proposed of self judgement would result in some form of the atonement that corresponds to the one put forward by Aquinas rather than the alternative represented by (P).

8‘Typical of this material is the work of Andrew Snelling in his book Earth’s Catastrophic Past. Another example is the work the mass spectrometry research group at Liverpool University www.liverpool.ac.uk/mass-spec ) who have recently published work describing the evidence for carbon isotopes including radiocarbon in dinosaur fossils (see B.D. Thomas, ‘Collagen remnants in ancient bone’, PhD Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2019). A survey of 80 papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years shows widespread evidence of soft tissue (original biochemistry) in fossils throughout the world. Original biochemistry has been reported in 5 of the 7 world continents and samples are reported throughout the geological column. The data reveal a predominance of biochemistry in Cretaceous System rocks, and a persistent trickle of biochemistry elsewhere including the entire pre-Cambrian system. This work provides corroborating evidence that these fossils and the sedimentary rocks containing them are consistent with deposition during the worldwide biblical flood some thousands of years ago.’

issues allows a person to enter into what Andrew Pinsent describes as a ‘shared stance’ with God. Interestingly Pinsent describes this process as taking place in the following sequence: ‘dispositions to be united with the other person; dispositions to be moved by the other person, and

dispositions to share in the stance of the other person as a consequence of that movement’ (Pinsent 2012:67-68). This implies that those who attempt to enter into a ‘shared stance’ with God over these difficult issues need to do so from the perspective of first entering into a deep relationship with God - which is why in scripture these wrestling matches with God usually take place with people who have had a long fruitful walk with God eg Abraham, Jacob, Job, David, Jeremiah etc .9

Postscript

In her reply Anthony makes a suggestion that God’s choice of Israel and to some extent his choice of Christians involves racism (p262). This is a serious accusation which I want to address. Firstly the choice was for a task. In the case of Israel they were to be the custodians of the oracles of God (Romans 3:2). For the Christians they were to be ambassadors for God to spread the good news of salvation (2 Corinthians 5:20). Neither groups were chosen because they were special and both groups have suffered greatly in carrying out their tasks (1 Corinthians 1:26-30) .10 The latest government report on religious persecution illustrates the plight of modern Christians. In summary these findings stated that 80% of religious persecution was targeted at Christians, which involved the severe persecution of 245 million Christians in over 130 countries of the world. The report goes on to state that this is the greatest story not being told in our world today (https://christianpersecutionreview.org.uk/report/).

9 Another reason for pursuing this approach is that even if this line of argument proved to be philosophically valid, but ultimately irreconcilable with a belief in an infallible Bible, the fact that it is possible to construct a philosophically robust defence of a God of Love coexisting with a harsh eternity for some people strengthens the theistic sceptics cause when they claim that there can exist theodicies capable of doing this, it is just our limited and fallen condition that prevents us from accessing such theodicies (Plantinga 2000:487).

10 Paul in his letter to the church in Rome clearly states ‘there is no partiality with God’ (Romans 2:11) and Jesus was almost killed when he made this point in front of the people of Nazereth when he described how often God helped Gentiles (Luke 4:23-30)

These findings show that the claim that Christianity may involve racism is unfortunate and I wonder if this is a widespread attitude because if it is then this attitude may have contributed to the significant under reporting of the plight of Christians around the world.

Bibliography

Bergmann, Murray, Rae, Divine Evil (Oxford University Press, 2011) Grossmith, Frederick, The Cross and the Swastika (Pacific Press, 1984) Pinsent, Andrew The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics (Routledge, 2012)

Plantinga, Alvin, Warranted Belief (Oxford University Press, 2000) Snelling, Andrew, Earth’s Catastrophic Past (Master Books, 2014) Stump, Eleonore, Aquinas (Routledge, 2003)

Stump, Eleonore, Wandering in Darkness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

Swinburne, Richard, The Resurrection of God Incarnate (Oxford University Press, 2010)