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Responding to William Lane Craig on the Conquest of Canaan (Rev. Dr. Helen Paynter) || SLP507 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: Nothing could be more intuitively wrong to me than the killing of an innocent child.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_02: And what we're told to believe is that, okay, maybe most of the time that's wrong, but sometimes it is actually just okay, as long as God commands it, meaning that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with killing innocent children.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: I would say that it is wrong in the absence of a divine command.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: The instinct that says this just doesn't feel right, we need to be prepared to sit with that discomfort actually, wrestle with it and try and grapple with it.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: But for me, I feel very uncomfortable with the idea of trying to pretend there isn't a gap.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_03: The lump that we all have when we read through the book of Joshua, the lump in our throat, has been put there by Jesus, someone who is the Prince of Peace who said those who live by the sword will die by the sword, by the one who, instead of bringing violence to his enemies, actually suffered violence at their hands.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_03: Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_03: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus, including the issue of the Old Testament conquest of the land of Canaan.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_03: And that has been a topic of great conversation, especially since William Lane Craig went onto Alex O'Connor's podcast called Within Reason and defended his position about the justification for that conquest.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of people have been talking about that.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_03: And I thought to myself, the person I most want to speak to on this issue is the Reverend Dr.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_03: Helen Painter.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_03: She is on the other end of this line.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_03: She is the director of the Center for the Study of Bible and Violence.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_03: And she joins me from Bristol.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much, Helen, for joining me.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_03: Now, this is uh an area that you have spoken about and uh written about uh as well, uh, including your book from 2019.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_03: Can you can you just um introduce people to uh yourself, your work, and perhaps uh that work uh in which you speak on issues that are to do with the Bible and violence?
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: So um you've got my name already.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm a uh biblical scholar, um, I teach um Old Testament at the Bristol Baptist College.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh I'm particularly interested in the interpretation of biblical violence and also in the um in the appropriation of of scripture for contemporary violence, which is I hope not going to be.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: We've got one big thorny thing to discuss today, so perhaps we'll leave the other one for another time.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but those are the two areas that I do research in.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I absolutely don't have all the answers, but I do continue to wrestle and think about them hard because I think they really matter.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so the book you're referring to is um called uh God of Violence Yesterday, God of Love Today, Question Mark.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm never going to write another book with a question mark in the title because the question mark is really important, because I'm what I'm not saying is that um there was a different God in the old days and and and a new God today.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to trying to problematise that.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: But uh yes, that's that's that book.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it's aimed at people who are not specialists, it's aimed at people in the churches who are wrestling with these questions.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_03: So why do you think it's um such an issue?
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_03: I I guess um obviously the book of Joshua has been in the canon um for thousands of years, um, but it's it does seem to me like um we are in many ways rightly sensitive to this issue and perhaps more sensitive to this issue um today than ever before, and I guess you can add on to that uh a layer since October the 7th, um in in which the these issues are are spoken of with with such weight and such sensitivity.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_03: But um even besides the Israel uh Gaza issue, uh what why do you think in 2024 this particular question is asked with such seriousness?
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's been it's been growing, I think, for the last hundred years now.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think since we have started to see the see much more closely um the effects, the enormous effects of of mass war.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think we have rightly become more and more sensitised to it.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think perhaps the uh you know in the last uh few decades that the way that war is now brought into our living rooms and into our phone screens um on a on a daily, perhaps even on an hourly basis, um hopefully keeps us sensitive.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's always sometimes a danger we're brutalized by it, but it also we we we see these things and we have visuals now for for these things.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think so I think that's part of it.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think also there's um we see things differently now to the way that um that Joshua saw those things, and we see these things through whether we're Christians or not, actually, through the lens of the the way that the teaching of the church has has shaped the teaching of Jesus and then the teaching of the church has has shaped our thinking, um, especially in those countries and those cultures which have been um heavily influenced by the church.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: Now, don't hear me say that the church has got everything right, the church has done some dreadful things, but but overall, even when we don't attain peace or manage to live in peace, we still have this kind of deep gut conviction that that's how it ought to be, and and that's actually because our thinking has been shaped by um the developing Christian story, I think.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I I often say that the lump that we all have when we read through the book of Joshua, the lump in our throat that we all have, uh, has been put there by Jesus.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's been put there by someone who is the Prince of Peace who said those who live by the sword will die by the sword, by the one who, instead of bringing violence to his enemies, actually suffered violence at their hands.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I guess for 2,000 years we've been uh meditating upon a vision of divine glory um in which that picture of the one who is so glorious is not the perpetrator of violence, but the victim of violence.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_03: That cannot help but subvert all our natural inclinations towards power and oppression and dominance and violence.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um and so we have that tension, and it's a tension that's sort of brought out so well in your book, and even the cover to your book, is just that that sense of, you know, God of love today, surely, the God revealed in Jesus, right?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um, how do you bind together the Gospels and that Christ with the 39 books of the Hebrew Bible in which something like Joshua sort sort of happens?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_03: And I have to confess that as an evangelist, I I think it's probably the question I dread the most.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um people can ask all sorts of more generic questions about evil and suffering in the world, but the actual wielding of the sword um and the wielding of the sword as commanded by the Lord um just seems like the most difficult question um that I could possibly be asked.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_03: What as as we we're gonna have a look at William Lane Craig in a second, and and as a philosopher, he talks about ethics and meta-ethics, and he's got sort of certain um theories about that that he brings to bear on the question of Canaan.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_03: But um what are your sort of prior beliefs about just even the possibility for development within the Bible?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_03: Because you might you might think, oh, it's a it's a divine text, it's sort of come down to us from heaven.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um, there is this unchanging nature to divine commands, and um that might be one way certainly people outside Christianity, when they look in, they just see, well, it's it's a divine text.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_03: If it says it in Joshua, I'm sure it's the same as if it says it in the book of James.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um whereas I guess we've got this sense of a developing narrative within the Bible.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_03: How how do you um think of ethics, especially in terms of a developing narrative that goes from Genesis onwards?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a it's a a huge question and not one I can answer quickly.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um one of the things I teach um biblical theology here, biblical theology for those who who don't know the term, because it's a little bit technical, is looking at the deep themes of scripture that run through and how they how those themes develop.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: And when we come towards the end of the module, which we actually had last week, we talk about preaching uh scripture and I preaching the Old Testament in particular.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I have this little diagram um talking about how we take an Old Testament uh text and how we are going to interpret that for a contemporary uh listeners.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: And one model is to pick that text up, um, extract it from its context, drag it and drop it as it were into the 21st century, and then drop it down.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and what that does is that completely bypasses everything that Jesus did, everything that Jesus said, and it just extracts it and yeah, drags it and drops it into into the now.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that is, by and large, a really unhelpful way to handle scripture, and I don't think it's how scripture encourages us to handle it.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: A much better approach, in my view, is to try and see, uh, with any Old Testament text, but the one we're talking about today is is the conquest of Canaan, try and see what deep themes are at work here.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and how, where did they start?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: And how is how have they already now developed at that by this point?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: But how are those deep themes going to continue?
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: And and spoiler alert, all those deep themes always land on Jesus Christ, one way or another.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: So how do they track through?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: What do they look like when they land in Jesus Christ?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: What do they look like when they push on towards the new heavens and the new earth?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: Because they all kind of track into that as well.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and those themes continue, even the difficult problematic ones, or with the ones we feel are problematic, they they continue into the New Testament, they continue into the person and and and work of Jesus Christ.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: But but they get uh radically changed, um, or radically, they look radically different quite often.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the way some of the language I use to try and explain this, the way is learning to notice how later texts use earlier ones.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: And they kind of pick up on grammar, uh not don't mean necessarily literally grammar, but the ways of expressing things that, for example, the first couple of chapters of Genesis use, um, but in many other places as well.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: They pick up on these ways of expressing things and they you they employ those same ways again to develop a theme.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that's one of the things that I I would love us, the whole church, to become more attentive to, because I think it helps us to understand how this particular text fits into something that is much deeper.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_03: I was really reminded of that when I was preaching on Luke 19 last year, and uh in Luke 19, verse 1, it just says, Jesus entered Jericho.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_03: And I thought, that's interesting, because the name Jesus is literally the name Joshua.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_03: And so you've got a verse in the New Testament that says, Joshua, the true Joshua, the divine Joshua, entered Jericho.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_03: And what do you see him do?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_03: Well, actually, what you see him do is actually reconcile this good-for-nothing Zacchaeus.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I'm reminded of the the uh line that Abraham Lincoln said, you know, I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_03: And in a sense, you know, Jesus entered Jericho and he destroyed his enemy because he reconciled Zacchaeus and made him his friend.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_03: And it seems to me that the New Testament is is constantly picking up that that kind of language.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um I I almost want to race ahead and and do some New Testament work, but perhaps we should go perhaps we should um go back to Joshua first and figure out the ways in which the New Testament kind of picks up these um picks up these threads first.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um and the way I'd like to do that is let me let me just show um the way in which William Lane Craig on Alex O'Connor's show um sets out the problem of um the the conquest of Canaan and then some of the objections that Alex O'Connor has.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_03: And I'd I'd love to hear from you um even more than what William Lane Craig said, uh, more particularly, what would we say to Alex O'Connor?
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_03: But let's let's let's have a look at how the problem is set out by William Lane Craig.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: So God doesn't have the same sort of moral uh constraints uh that we do uh because he doesn't have moral obligations to fulfill.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: He has to act only in consistency with his own nature.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so when if you think of it in those terms, Alex, the problem posed by the conquest narrative is as follows.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's very similar to the problem of evil, that there is a sort of internal inconsistency between two propositions affirmed by the Judeo-Christian faith.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: The first would be that God is all just and all-loving, and the second in this case would be that God has issued a command to Israel to drive out the Canaanites on pain of death from the land.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so my argument is that um those two those two propositions are completely consistent with each other because God wrongs no one in issuing such a command.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if he wrongs no one, then there is no moral uh constraint on his issuing such a command.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I I see a few problems with this, and I think my listeners will too intuitively, but there's nothing I can say to prove that that's wrong.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: That maybe maybe God can just uh permit things like the killing of innocent children by an Israelite clan.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: Ma maybe that is just okay.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: But the the problems this raise uh that this raises include things uh like this is raised by by Randall Rousser.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_02: He points out that this seems to undermine our ability to trust moral intuition.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh in in other contexts, such as in the moral argument for the existence of God, uh you you might appeal to the fact that we all know that certain things are morally right and morally wrong, and we sort of use that feeling to say that there must be some objective element uh of morality in the universe, and we use that to construct an argument for the existence of God.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: It seems, as as Rauser points out, that nothing could be more intuitively wrong to me in this regard than the killing of an innocent child.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_02: And what we're told to believe is that, okay, maybe most of the time that's wrong.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe that's always wrong unless it's specifically commanded by God, but sometimes it is actually just okay, as long as God commands it, meaning that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with killing innocent children.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's it can't be intrinsically wrong if there are uh circumstances in which it's actually not just permitted, but in fact the the thing that you're ordered to do.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: I I would say that it is wrong in the absence of a divine command, but that God has the ability to override that by issuing a divine command, which then becomes our moral duty.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: And as long as this ethical theory is possible um and coherent, then there just is no inconsistency between his being all good and all loving and his issuing uh a command of this sort.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in the absence of a divine command, as I say, it could well have been immoral.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: But given the presence of divine command, it becomes the moral obligation of those persons to whom it was issued.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: So it doesn't undermine our moral intuitions about what's right and wrong, it it just introduces the qualification of a divine command.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: But it would mean that there's nothing there's nothing intrinsically wrong with taking the life of an innocent child.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing intrinsically wrong with within Well, again, this is gonna depend on your moral theory, Alex.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think that right and wrong, moral obligations, are determined by imperatives issued by qualified authority.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so, in the absence of such imperatives, there literally is no right and wrong.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: It it's a subjective illusion of human consciousness.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is one of the real problems of atheism is that lacking a moral lawgiver and moral authority, it has no basis for affirming objective right and wrong.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: These are just uh either um patterns of behavior that em have emerged from the sociobiological pressures of the evolutionary process, or else they're expressions of personal preference and and taste.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: In neither case then are they normative.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: So in the absence of a moral authority to issue these imperatives, there wouldn't be any objective right or wrong.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: But given such a divine moral lawgiver, there is objective right and wrong, but that moral lawgiver himself doesn't have the same moral obligations that we do.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_03: So I guess William Lane Craig there is answering as a philosopher and and answering as someone who's a consummate debater, and and someone who is used to sort of taking the argument back to his interlocutor and saying, Well, on what basis, Alex, are you going to condemn violence?
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um are you able to bring to bear an objective moral standing when you make pronouncements about the evils of of thousands of years ago or the evils of today?
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_03: And so he's he's sort of making that quite apologetic, philosophical, meta-ethical kind of move.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um but I I wanted to bring you on, Helen, because um you're a biblical theologian and you pay attention to like the text and the narrative, and you think like the the story is really important in answering these questions.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_03: So let's let's go back to Alex's first issue that he raises, and and that is we have a very strong moral intuition that killing innocent children is as wrong as wrong can be.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um what are you going to say as a biblical theologian to to Alex?
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna say yeah, I absolutely agree.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think that that that instinct is is right, and and I think there may be so that presents us with a problem because I can't just I can't dismiss what Joshua is telling me.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: But but but but the instinct that says this just doesn't feel right, I think we need to be prepared to sit with that discomfort actually and wrestle with it and and try and grapple with it, but but but acknowledge where there's a gap.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: And for for me, I feel very uncomfortable with the idea of trying to pretend there isn't a gap, as it were, in our understanding when when when there is.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to say yes, and the reason that and I guess we we touched on this a few minutes ago, but the reason I I so confidently believe this is because of how I see because the fullest expression of God is seen in Jesus Christ, and the fullest expression of of God's character is seen in Jesus Christ on the cross, as you said a few minutes ago, as as the victim of actually the those those those yeah, all of those themes and those those strands landing in Jesus as the victim on the cross, not as the perpetrator of violence.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so reading from from this side of the cross and the resurrection, look and looking back on it, yeah, my instincts, your instincts, our instincts that say, um, Alex O'Connor's instincts that says this is this just doesn't feel right, I say, I'm into that.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: And and and so now let's wrestle with the gap.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_03: So let's wrestle with the gap a little bit.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_03: And like one thing I often say about Joshua is that it's it's very subversive as a text, alongside a whole bunch of other things that are very shocking, and I I don't want to sort of um I don't want to dismiss what is shocking about it, but it's also when you think of a David and Goliath story, um, who is David and who is Goliath, uh, as as the way the Joshua narrative is is kind of set up, and you know, little Israel that's been enslaved for 400 years and that's been sojourning in the wilderness for another 40 years, um, they are very much David in the narrative.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_03: The way in which they enter Jericho, the first um of the outposts in in the land, is uh by this almost ridiculous kind of circling around Jericho, sort of, you know, every day for seven days and on the final day seven times, and then they blow trumpets.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_03: And I often sort of say it's it's a little bit like you know, Malawi going to war against the United States and they wage warfare by strumming acoustic guitars or something.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's it's there is something very subversive going on at the same time within Joshua.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_03: So could you sort of speak to some of those issues?
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_03: How how is how is the narrative of Joshua subverting our expectations about violence?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, thank you.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh if I could just insert one bit in the middle between them wandering in the in the desert and wand walking around the Jericho, um, they they get have to all that new generation have to be circumcised.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: And Joshua crosses them over the Jordan and circumcises all the fighting men within sight of Jericho.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's bonkers.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's absolutely bonkers.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: As a military strategy, that's Is beyond bonkers.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: So there is, yeah, there are these extraordinary traces.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: We see, as as we go on, we see the the kind of might of the uh of the Canaanites that they're fighting.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I can't remember the chapter right now.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: I want to say chapter nine, but I'd have to check.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um speaks about Joshua taking a particular victory and hamstringing horses.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: And people sometimes get quite distressed about that, it's sort of cruelty to animals, and I can understand where that's coming from.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: But what we need to under what we need to notice is that the Canaanites have horses, and Joshua and his men are on foot.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: And a horse is crack military technology, if you can call a horse technology.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this is a scary piece of of military equipment, if you like.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the hamstringing of horses is is it's like putting the spokes in the wheel caterpillar tracks of a of a tank.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's that sort of idea.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things, and there's lots of things that the text of Joshua itself wants to wants to show us and surprise us with, but one of the things is this massive imbalance of power, um, and it is it is the weak peasants who who actually are very ill-equipped.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: They haven't come out of Egypt with with weapons.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and interestingly, at the Battle of Jericho, they're not permitted to loot the city for weapons.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: So that would be it's another moment of bonkers, technical term you understand.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, another moment of of just craziness where you the the first thing you would do if you've somehow by extraordinary means managed to achieve this victory, you'd write, well let's get let's get kitted up then, chaps.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: But they don't do that.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: So that idea of of this being a a battle like no other, or a series of battles like no other, is one of the clues that the text is is showing us.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_03: And the issue about children as well, which sort of came up quite a lot in in Alex and William Lane Craig's conversation.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um am I right in saying there there is no record of non-combatants being killed in in the book of Joshua?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_03: Though soldiers are killed, we we we read of soldiers being killed, we read of kings being killed.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um I don't think we read of children being killed, for instance.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's ambiguous, I think.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: We certainly see uh language of him leaving alive nothing that breathes in certain places.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I think one of the questions we need to ask is what's the text w what's the presupposition of the text?
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um and for a whole load of reasons I think there's uh we would expect that this is a a battle between combatants.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um in um in the book of Samuel we see a moment where Saul sends word ahead to a city and says, Look, I've got a particular beef with this particular group, but you other ones, you can just disappear and and I've got no trouble with you.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: So so they do, they leave the city.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know why they don't all leave the city, I've never quite understood that.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: But but the point is we see this idea of a of an army coming up, and people see it happening, and they say, Right, let's get let's get other people away to safety.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: So it's every reason to think that as Joshua is approaching a city, who who's he's facing combatance, um, and it's unlikely he's facing much in the way of families and women and children.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_03: Nevertheless, some of the language um spoken is uh very confronting language of wiping out in some of the English translations.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_03: We can we can talk about the Hebrew, but um some of the language seems to be wipeout, some of the language seems to be drive out.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um what what are we to do um with with those issues?
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_03: They're not just translation issues, that also within the Hebrew that there's there seems to first of all be language of wipeout and then language of driveout, and does the drive out predominate over the wipeout?
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_03: And what what's going on with that language?
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you, and it's it's very interesting to kind of look at the verbs that are used, um, because it's about five or six, um, and also look at who's doing the verbs, because one of the things that it's not always uh human action that is foregrounded.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: So um, in quite a number of places in Deuteronomy, at which anticipates um the conquest, um, and in Joshua itself it speaks about um the Lord going ahead, particularly in Deuteronomy, the Lord going ahead and and or sending the hornet ahead.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, metaphorical language clearly.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but interestingly, when uh Joshua sends a couple of spies into Jericho and and they um are taken in by a woman called Rahab, and she says to them, Um The fear of you, the dread of you has has come upon us, and we are, you know, we're all terrified.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: And uh this isn't my own thinking, this is I'm trying to remember who who wrote this, but so I'm pinching somebody else's idea here and reproducing it for you.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: But um but this this might be the idea of what is meant by the Hornet, that sense of kind of of fear that goes ahead and does indeed clear the land.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: So, in other words, this conquest action is recounted in a number of ways.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's accounted as as clearing or dispossessing, it's account accounted described as as as the Lord clearing, and it is described with this particular word, um, if I can use a bit of Hebrew for a minute because I think it's important, this particular word.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: Now, charem in most English Bibles is translated as something like utterly destroy.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: And we kind of then in our minds kind of translate that to massacre.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think I think our translators let us down here, and it's tricky because it's a complex word, and and you've got to collapse it down into a a couple of you know into a few words in English, otherwise the text won't flow.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: But the core idea behind this word harem is not to kill, and it's not to massacre, and it's not even to destroy.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: And we know that because you can do you can do harem to a thing as well as to a person, and so it can't mean kill.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: And when you do it to a thing, sometimes that thing is destroyed, but sometimes that thing is preserved and taken into the sanctuary.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: So what you have in common between those two fates, if you like, is that that thing is put out of normal circulation, it's put out of normal use.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: If it's a a pot, you can't cook in it anymore.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: You've smashed it or you've sanctified it and taken it out of normal use.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now that's the core idea behind Hawen.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: So when we then think about what that means when that's applied to people or when that's applied to whole people groups, it doesn't mean kill.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: I wish it I wish I could say it didn't entail killing, and clearly killing comes into it, but it's not at core meaning just go and massacre.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: And um I think John Walton's very helpful on this on this matter, in a little book called The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: And and and that core idea of putting something out of normal use, devoting it, putting it aside for the purposes of the deity, if you like, but not using it as normal.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now the normal thing to do when you've just taken new territory is you make a covenant with the people around you and um and you establish a boundary and you probably um you know ratify that covenant by intermarriage, just to kind of you know make everything nice and stable and and and and so on.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's the normal use, as it were, of a conquered peoples.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: And but if they are if they are not to be used in that way, if they're not to be treated in that way, then then it means you don't make covenant with them, it means you don't intermarry with them, and that is the fundamental idea behind this.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: That yes, I can't deny that there is clearly evidence in the text that this sometimes involves killing, but that's not the core focus of what is going on here.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_03: Now there are also examples within Joshua of mercy being shown to those who want to kind of submit to Israel.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_03: Tell us about some of those stories.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and these are just some some glorious moments in my view.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um Rahab is the classic one that a lot of people know.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: Rahab was a Jerichoite, so she was a woman who lived in Jericho, worshipped the gods of Jericho.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, when these spies that I mentioned a minute ago come and visit her, she makes the most extraordinary statement of faith.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it's a statement of faith that is only used, only used by one other person in scripture.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's Solomon, but I'd have to check the details.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: But it is certainly a remarkable uh thing for a non-worshipper of Yahweh to say.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: And she says, Your God is God in the heavens above and the earth below.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then she appeals to them on the basis of um, sorry, another Hebrew word, but on the basis of Chesed, which is God's, it's kind of the almost the most important word to describe God in the Old Testament, his his loving, steadfast, faithful love.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: And she she makes an appeal to them on the basis of this, so she understands something about the character of God.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: And as a consequence of her casting herself on the mercy of God and making that appeal, she is is rescued, and rescued in the most remarkable way, if we just kind of think about the visual for a moment, so um listeners may know that the sign that she is to be rescued is that she hangs a red cord out of her window, and the window is in the wall of the city.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: So if you think of yourself as one of Joshua's soldiers for a minute, and you're coming into the city now that the walls have come down, and and how are you going to enter her her house to to kill her?
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna come in through the window, that's the natural point of ingress.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: And what stops you is a red cord that prevents you, the destroyer, from going in and killing her.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that that is a reenactment of the Passover event from 40 years before.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: And the Passover event itself, in my view, um, is is is made available to anybody, so it's not just the Hebrews who get to use that, and we get a clue about that because a mixed multitude comes out of Egypt.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: But here we see a Passover event that is explicitly for a woman who has has no connection with the Israelites up to this point and this extraordinary moment.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's a another story a little bit later on, um, with this group called the Gibeonites.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the Gibeonites have another name, it's the Hivates.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: And uh that that word Harem I was talking about a minute ago, that that language is applied, is referred to of seven nations, um, and they're the seven nations that are closest to uh to land within and closest to the land of Canaan.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so the Gibeonites, aka the Hivites, are subject to the Harem order.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um but they play a trick on Joshua, and and I love the trick, because they come and they basically pretend that they've travelled a long way, they come with cracked wine bottles and worn-out clothes and moldy bread, and they say, Oh, we've come such a long way, we've heard about you, and we've come to make covenant with you.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting language.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, people did make covenants with each other, it's not a unique thing, but it's very interesting.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: That language, we've come to make covenant with you.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um and Joshua says, Okay, yeah, great, I'll make a covenant with you.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then discovers, you know, ta da, he's been tricked, and really they're the Hivites, and really they were just round the corner.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um But a number of interesting things happen.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: So the Gibeonites, actually a bit like Rahab, they are absorbed into the nation.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: Rahab is so absorbed into the nation, should have said this a minute ago, that she becomes she becomes David, King David's great great is it, grandmother, something like that.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, a key, a key person in that unfolding story of salvation history.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: The Gibeonites are absorbed into the nation as well, so much so that in the next chapter, when they're attacked by a hostile power, Joshua goes to war in their defence because he's made a covenant with them.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: And they later on become servants, um with servants of the tabernacle itself.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: You can't get much closer to the heart of things than that.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: So you see these extraordinary counter moves uh where on the basis of throwing oneself um at the mercy of God, um, these people are not just grudgingly spared, but embraced into the heart of the nation, into the heart of the people of God.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_03: And perhaps the greatest miracle in the Bible, when you think about the physics that's involved in it, the sun stopping in the middle of the sky, is effected on behalf of these foreigners who've sought to make peace with Israel.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_03: Because Israel themselves are fighting on their behalf.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_03: So the incorporation into the plans of God is is is quite extraordinary, really.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then there is a moment just towards the end of the book of Joshua, uh, where God through the prophets says, um, uh those other nations, they didn't sue for peace as the Gibeonites or the Hivites did.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: Implication being, actually, they also could have benefited from oh God's mercy is always is always bigger than his people understand.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: This is something I just keep bumping into right now.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um going back to Genesis 18, where Abraham bargains God down at looking over Sodom and Gomorrah from fifty righteous men to ten righteous men.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then he stops.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: Why does he stop?
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: He's pushing at an open door.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: God's not having his arm twisted, he's going, Oh yeah, go on then.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: And Abraham stops and he's like, Oh, Abraham, you just didn't quite understand how merciful God is.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this this is another example of that.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_03: And also by the end of Joshua, Joshua says, I have done everything that was commanded through Moses, um, despite the fact that certainly um not everyone in in Canaan had been exterminated, let alone even driven out, actually.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_03: Um Jebusites and and and that sort of thing.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_03: What what does that make us think about those those earlier comments said through Moses?
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I I think we have we have a tension within um we have a tension within the book of Joshua itself.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we have moments, sometimes, you know, the first half of a verse which makes some kind of grand claim about complete annihilation or complete conquest, and then we have another voice, as it were, even in this perhaps the second half of the same verse or later in the chapter that says, Oh, but there were survivors, and but the conquest was patchy and so on.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: So we need to notice that the text itself has attention, but as we look back then on Moses' words, I think we see this as being paradigmatic or you know, um perhaps metaphorical isn't quite the word, but it's there is a sense in which Israel is is given this land by God, but actually it it's never properly given the land.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's first of all, they're always tenants, God is God who owns the land.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's this language of if you don't keep my covenant, the land will vomit you out.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: Quite graphic language.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and sure enough that is what happens.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and they continually share the land.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, we get these slightly grandiose claims, which are kind of a theological claim, but we also see that that is kind of mitigated almost attenuated by other accounts that say, yeah, but it wasn't actually in actual fact it wasn't quite as complete as as we might imagine.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_03: It's also interesting to me to read how the story develops even within the Hebrew Bible, because there is even within Jewish theology, am I right, that that's there's something unrepeatable about the conquest of the land, even within Jewish theology, let alone thinking about how Christ fulfills the the old covenant and and all that kind of stuff.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_03: That's there are there are clues within the Old Testament text itself that this is an unrepeatable event.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_03: Is that right?
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, um, for all sorts of reasons.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um one of them I think is is in the book of Joshua itself.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um so we haven't spoken about this a little bit um uh today, but there's a moment just before the Battle of Jericho where Joshua meets a man with a drawn sword, um, right outside the city, and and he he doesn't know, we d we're going to discover very quickly as we read that this is an angel, but he doesn't know that when he asks uh when when he meets the man, and so he says, friend or foe, basically, um, whose side are you on?
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if he'd known that this this was an angel, he wouldn't have asked that question, because up to now he's had no reason for one moment to doubt that God is absolutely on their side.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so he would have seen the angel, he'd have high-fived him and he'd say, Great that you've come, you're just in time because the battle starts tomorrow.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: But he doesn't know it's an angel, and so he asks the question, and so the the reply that he gets sh presumably makes his jaw drop to the ground and should do the same to us.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because the reply is I'm not on your side, I'm not on their side, you know.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um be on my side by implication.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_01: And and that's in my view, that is a lens from which we should read the whole of the rest of the book.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um because although Joshua goes on to win the Battle of Jericho, as the old song says, um, the next chapter, they lose the next battle.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: And this is really the very beginning of this kind of unravelling of the idea that God is exclusively on Israel's side.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Tremper Longman has very helpfully said there are, I think, five kind of phases in this theme of warfare as we read through scripture.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: So to begin with, we read, uh we see God as being on Israel's side, but quite quickly God starts fighting, at least sometimes, against Israel, because he's on his own side, and when his people don't, you know, aren't obedient to him, he he's absolutely not a tame God, and he's not just gonna line up behind them.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then we see further on in the Old Testament, we see the kind of um the vision of of God as the heavenly warrior, but but it's a heavenly battle, it's a it's a cosmic battle rather than a it may have implications on earth in the Old Testament, but it's primarily a cosmic battle.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then of course that tracks into the New Testament, and and and then we see Jesus as the one who subverts that, the one who experiences violence, the one who who is on the receiving end of it.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: And the final stage, um, maybe we don't want to go into Revelation today, but the final stage is a cosmic battle, but it is exclusively fought in the heavenly realms.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: Humans are not involved in it, um, and it is the final defeat of evil.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the kind of that's this great theme that develops.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so yeah, so the idea that God is unequivocally on anybody's side is really is is problematized very, very quickly.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I mean there's a wonderful moment in the book of Amos.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I love it, because it's just such a kind of rhetorical thing.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we imagine Amos as standing in the marketplace of Samaria, somewhere public like that.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: And he begins by he's got this oracle against the kind of the wickedness of some of the other nations, and he kind of he names one of them, and you can imagine his listeners going, Yeah, yeah, down with the bad guys, you know, and then he names another, and and he builds this up, and he gets to the seventh, and the seventh one is Judah.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: Well, by now this the people of God have split in two halves, and this is the other half, so everybody's like, yeah, yeah.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's like standing outside um, you know, this Scottish Parliament saying, Down with London, you know, everybody's going, Yeah, great, that's fine.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: But then he but then there's this eighth moment, there's this eighth move where he says, and and this is God's word against you, against you, Israel.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like the stings in the tail, he's kind of drawn them in and made them, you know, made them say, Yes, we're on God's side, yes, we stand against evil, and then suddenly it's like, but you know, this lands with you.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: So it's this extraordinary moment where we we just see that, yeah, God's on his own side.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_01: God is on the side of good and right goodness and righteousness and peace and justice, and we just better get in line, or we find ourselves on the wrong side of him.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_03: Which Israel does, uh f finds themselves on on the wrong side of pretty much everybody, from the Assyrians to the Babylonians, to the Persians, to the Greeks, to the Romans, and and then we know what the Romans did to the king of the Jews, and then what they did to uh Jerusalem itself in 70 AD.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um and so absolutely um Israel itself does not come out looking like a a hero in any way, shape, or form.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_03: Even in Deuteronomy, you know, even even before Joshua, Moses is teaching the Israelites a song that they're going to sing when they're in exile.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_03: You think, well, we'll they haven't even gotten into the land.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, when you've messed it all up, like remember that it was your fault.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_03: Even before they get into the land, and you know, there are very few national anthems in the world that you know have verses about how terrible the the country is, but but often, you know, the the Israelites are singing those kinds of songs, so they they are never they are never the hero.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um and that's just even within the old testament.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_03: Come through into the New Testament, um how should we think as New Testament people about things like a nation state, uh a div a divine theocracy with its own army and soldiers and conquests?
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_03: How should we think about, you know, such things as as land and those temple themes that are there in the old covenants?
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_03: Ha how do those things get transformed as we come through into the New Testament?
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Keyword is transformed because things that the Old Testament views in very concrete terms.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, the blessings and the curses of the covenant in Deuteronomy that we referred to a minute ago, they're very tangible, they're very physical.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: They are, you know, having many children and crops, crops being very fruitful and winning over your enemies.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: Things like land, things like the people of God as a kind of as a almost, almost, not quite, but almost a kind of ethnic identity.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: Kingship, temple, all of these themes track, as I kind of hinted earlier, all of these themes track into the New Testament.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: They all, it's like some great road system, they all condense and and find their fulfilment in Jesus Christ.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: So the promises do not fail, but the promises are fulfilled in unexpected ways.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, um God promises David that he will always have a son on the throne of Israel.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: And what it feels like, reading the Old Testament and reading their expectation is well, we've got to get a Davidic king back and he's gonna re-establish a physical territory.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_01: And what actually looks like is the son of David, who of course is Jesus, ascending to heaven and being eternally on the throne.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's a much that's a much bigger, better fulfillment, but it's not a it's not a failure with that promise, but it's a fulfillment in a way that isn't physical and tangible and geographically located in the same way.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: You can track all these themes.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: The theme of the temple is fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um it doesn't need to be built again because Jesus has has fulfilled that, and now the church has the responsibility to to conduct those functions on behalf of the world.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so on, all of these themes, and warfare is one of these themes.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: So ever since ever since the serpent wormed its way into the garden, um there is conflict between God and and the destroyer and the evil one.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um and bring on the day I say when the dragon is cast into the abyss, because that's the serpent again, that's the same same image.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh bring it on, and every time we pray the Lord's Prayer, sorry, I'm preaching now, aren't I?
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_01: Every time we pray the Lord's prayer, we're praying for that.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_03: Preach, Helen.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: We're praying, Your kingdom come, your will be done.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, particularly your kingdom come, it's Lord, cast the dragon into the fire.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: So between those moments, there is always going to be tension between good and evil.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: We mustn't imagine that we are naturally on the side of good, and when we pray, um, you know, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, we can be praying against the evil, we are praying against the evil in our own hearts, as much as we're praying against other evil.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: But this theme, this theme of warfare, of conflict between good and evil, makes its way through, is is ultimately found at the cross, and you know, what happens at the cross is a such a deep mystery that uh, you know, a single image, a single metaphor, a single explanation just can't capture it.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um but one of the things we see, one of the ways of understanding what's going on at the cross is is the the the ultimate defeat of of of evil, the ultimate victory, Christ as as conquering evil through the most unexpected way conceivable.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um here here's here's your conquest.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: In here's the same theme has landed here.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: Here, Jesus is both the conquering one and the one who experiences the the extreme penalty, the extreme um, you know, that the the sharp end of that conquest.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um here we see it, that here we see victory finally achieved.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, I could talk for ages about this, but that might be long enough.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_03: No, I love that.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_03: I love that.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_03: And we didn't bring you on to interact with William Lane Craig directly.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_03: You're you're both kind of world-class theologians in your own areas.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and he's coming from a more philosophical point of view, you're you're more a uh a biblical scholar.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_03: Um but you did mention something earlier in in our conversation that sometimes we need to be willing to live with tension and not tie everything up in a in a bow and not have answers for everything, which which for William Lane Craig, I'm I'm sure, as as an apologist and as a great debater and as a philosopher, um, that's sort of less on the table for him.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_03: If if a point is made and he's a debater, he needs to sort of answer the point.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um but I think in terms of our own faith, um, we're not going to sort of tie everything up in a neat bow.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_03: And in our conversation, we you know we haven't, you know, stared full in the face at at some of the um the very shocking kind of violence that is there in the text.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um but I I guess you're you're saying to us, Helen, that um we can look at that, we can feel the weight of that, and we can trust in God, and we can not know how to close the gap at the same time.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_03: How how do we put that together?
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, it's something about something about God being God and us having very puny minds.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um and if actually if I could completely cash God out and explain him and and put a bow around him, then he probably wouldn't be worth worshipping, because he'd just be me.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, uh another version of me or something.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_01: So something about that I think.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: There's also something about wrestling, which um I think we we undervalue as church sometimes.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: So it's very striking to me that the name of the Old Testament people of God um is Israel.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it could have been Abraham, I've often wondered why it wasn't Abraham, because he was kind of the very beginning of it all.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um but it's not, it's Abraham's grandson, um, and it and that chap was born Jacob.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not the name that is usually given to the people of God.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: The name that is given to the people of God is Israel, and he gets that name when he wrestles with God.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_01: He meets God at a dried up um riverbed and he wrestles with him all night.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_01: And God doesn't say, How dare you wrestle with me and kind of smite him down.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: He wrestles with him and he engages with him on his own terms, and then he blesses him.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: And and Jacob in fact seizes onto him at the end and says, 'I'm not going to let go until you bless me.' And God blesses him and he gives him the name, the one who wrestles with God, as a as a reward, I think.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_01: And that is the name that then the people of God have all the way through the story.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that is remarkable, um, because that shows us that it shows us God is not offended by our tough questions.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it shows us that God invites us to engage our minds, to bring our questions, our concerns, our doubts, our fears, our anxieties, bring them, wrestle them out.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: We we might end up like Jacob, and Jacob walked away with a limp from that encounter.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: So we can't expect that we won't be changed, that we won't be um affected by that encounter, but we are invited to do that, and and God doesn't squash us, He He He engages with us, He He welcomes that.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: And and we see that, we see that in in scripture, we see that in the psalmists who say things like, Wake up, God, why are you asleep?
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's quite impertinent, really.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um we see it with Job, Job who says, You know, God, I want my day in court, but if I summoned you to court, you'd you'd just flatten me because you're more powerful than me.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't mean you're right, though.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, what a thing to say to the living God.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: But he's not struck down for it.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_01: He's God God is he's okay with that.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I want us to be honest, I want us not to try and and pretend things are okay when they're not.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: I want us to to to be frank about times when we don't have it all sewn up.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um continue to live with hope, continue to look at the look at Jesus and view everything through the lens of Jesus.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: Understand that even though we sometimes can't square that circle, we do know that God is good and he looks like Jesus on the cross.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um this is God at His most glorious.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um but yeah, sometimes living with living with that gap.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's what I'd say to Alex O'Connor as well, like you you have some very good questions to ask, some very sharp questions to ask.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_03: Is there any possibility you could ask them from the inside of Christian faith rather than from the outside of Christian faith?
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_03: I I don't even want you to leave your question at the door and come on in.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_03: I actually want you to strengthen your question, and your question becomes so much stronger when you stand on the basis of Christ and him crucified, the one who was, you know, the victim of violence rather than the perpetrator of violence.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_03: In a sense, the Christian has um a an even more urgent question to ask about about the the book of Joshua than the atheist does.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um and so the the invitation is not so much to to drop the question or flatten the question or simply you know answer the question even.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's could you could you keep on asking the question, but from the inside of the faith, and from the inside of a faith that actually makes more sense of the question than being on the outside of the faith makes.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_03: Let me bring this to a little conclusion because on the William Lane Craig, Alex O'Connor conversation, um, Alex quite understandably has a very serious concern.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_03: Could God command today such violence?
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I think William Lane Craig, coming from a philosophical, meta-ethical point of view, is um getting his divine command theory kind of to do the job of how we understand Joshua.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_03: But because I don't think he's letting the scriptural narrative do the job, um his difference is between our moral intuitions and divine commands.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um whereas I I think the story we've been telling is the difference between sort of old covenant and new covenants kind of fulfillment in Christ.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_03: And so I I think we can probably say a much firmer no to any sense in which, you know, if I if I think that God is commanding me to kill children, um I I think we can say far more firmly than the there's sort of a crack open in in the door for William Lane Craig to he doesn't he doesn't quite close that door in the conversation with with Alex O'Connor.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_03: But I think because we've we've done a kind of a narratival telling of the story and the the coming of Christ is utterly decisive for us, we can sort of shut the door on that question.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um so let me just you know end by by sort of asking you um where does that leave us today and this question of violence?
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um obviously you are the director of the the Center for the Study of the Bible and violence.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um this is uh an area really close to your heart, so I'm I'm kind of asking you to tell tell us everything that's on your heart in this final question.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um but how how does the Christian nowadays feel about violence in the light of Christ?
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um, well, my word, I've written a big fat book trying to answer that question, so I'm not going to do it in two minutes.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean what we see in in scripture is a clear um narrative towards reconciliation and peace and justice and holiness, and all of these are things which will be perfectly fulfilled in the in the new heavens and the new earth, and there won't be any tension between them there.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and I long for that day actually, when there is no tension between justice and peace, for example, which we see all the time in our world at the moment.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um but so there is there is a strong and um a strong imperative towards peace, towards non-violence, um, certainly in terms of our own.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_01: I I I don't believe I may take up arms to defend myself.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think Jesus has um I think it's Tertullian says, Jesus has disarmed us.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um whether I may take up arms to defend the weak is a question that Christians grapple with.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's a slightly different question.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think it's it we're living here within this, in this time that hasn't yet reached that the the moment when justice and peace coincide perfectly.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we have to balance those.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um But Jesus has taught us to turn the other cheek.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus has said those who live by the sword will die by the sword.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um Paul has told us that our enemies are not flesh and blood, um, but they are the spiritual forces at work in the world.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um Paul also tells us that the last enemy to be destroyed is death.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and so when we pray some of those psalms actually that feel violent, we can pray those against the great enemies of humankind, against genocide and rape and cancer and dementia and death.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and we are straining, we are straining towards the new heavens and the new earth.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: And and and as Christians, every time we take communion, we're drawing a little bit of that forwards into the now.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: We are we are tasting something of of that future, we are we are meeting with people who are unlike us, people we perhaps don't get on with, and we are eating and drinking the same food.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_01: So there are just glorious moments of of promise and expectation and hope.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but we still live in this muddly middle time where we haven't yet managed fully to attain the peaceableness that we are called to, I think.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there's lots for people to uh dig into, as you say.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_03: You've written you've written the book on the subject, God of Violence Yesterday, God of Love Today.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_03: Question mark, the all-important question mark.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mentioned the my most recent one actually, which expands that a bit more.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um so this is the one that came out last year.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's attempting a biblical theology of human violence.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_01: So um yeah, because it's called Blessed of the Peacemakers, a biblical theology of human violence, where some of the ideas I just very briefly touched on kind of might expand on those more there.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_03: Fantastic.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_03: And you've got a YouTube channel as well, which all our YouTube watchers will want to go on and uh subscribe to with uh a great series on hope that you're uh running at the moment.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_03: How many videos on hope have you done so far?
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um however many weeks we are into the year, uh minus one, actually.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: I missed one because I broke my arm a few weeks ago.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_01: But basically, I'm releasing a short video every week this year, just looking at the deep, um, the deep biblical theme, the reasons for hope.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I just feel like there is so much despair and hopelessness right now as we look at the world events, as we look at sort of existential crisis of the climate and so on.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but we don't we don't need to lose hope because God holds out very good reasons for us to hope, and I'm trying to explore those in that series.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_03: Brilliant.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_03: And uh people can check out the website as well in the links that we'll uh share with this episode on the podcast and on the YouTube channel.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_03: But uh Reverend Dr.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_03: Helen Painter, thank you so much for joining us.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.