Reflections on the Morality of God
What is morality? According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, morality is defined as
- descriptively to refer to certain codes of conduct endorsed by a society or a group (such as a religion), or accepted by an individual for her own behavior, or
- normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be endorsed by all rational people.
For Christians, morality is determined by the commands of God as revealed in the Bible.
But it’s actually not quite as simple as that.
What do we do when the Bible describes God commanding something that we would normally consider to be immoral? There are more of these then we would like to admit.
What do we do when we read about God commanding the Israelites to not just drive out the Canaanites, but in certain cases to make sure they kill every man, woman, and child. This is considered genocide and most people consider it immoral.
I have read the responses by Christian apologists and theologians. Some make more sense than others but none fully make sense to me. For some Christians, it seems that the way it works is this: Genocide is normally wrong, but if God commands it, it is okay.
I will say that I understand that God is not just another human being that we can debate things as equals. If God wants to do something, God can do it and there is not much we can do about it.
But this should push us to ask the question: Is there anything that God could command that would be considered immoral?
Some will say that God would never command anything immoral because of God’s perfectly moral nature. But we have already seen that the Bible presents God as commanding genocide, which we normally consider immoral.
Here is another example.
Thus says the Lord: I will raise up trouble against you from within your own house; and I will take your wives before your eyes, and give them to your neighbour, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this very sun. (2 Samuel 12:11)
On the surface, this looks like God is punishing David by allowing his neighbours to have sex with his wives. This is probably the original meaning and it would have been considered a just punishment for his sins.
The problem is that today we recognize that David is not the only victim. David’s wives would be the victims of nonconsensual sex, that is rape. In that day, women often did not get a say in which man had sex with them. This would not be shocking to the original readers.
However, today we would say that handing women over to men to have sex with them against their will would be immoral. And yet this is exactly what God seems to do with David’s wives.
I can thing of apologetic responses to both the Canaanite slaughter and the situation with David’s wives. But these defences usually come from a place that assumes that the Bible always provides an accurate and clear description of the nature of God.
My understanding is that the Bible was written with the questions of their time in mind. The writers had their contemporary view points and cultural assumptions. What we see as immoral today may have seemed to be standard practice for them.
I find people wanting me to give answers for why the Bible says certain things and seems to describe God commanding immoral things. I have long given up on trying to explain those things away. Did the original writers misunderstand God’s role in these events? Did they interpret the events through their own cultural lens rather than through who God really is?
I don’t know.
My faith is not based on how well I can describe difficult passages in the Bible. My faith is based on who I understand Jesus to be and what Jesus has done. I am much better able to comprehend those things (although imperfectly) than some of these other events, especially in the Old Testament.
That is not the answer that many Christians want. People want answers that reconcile what we know now to be moral with the biblical texts as they currently are. I’m not sure that can be done.
Most likely we have to choose between stating that God is moral even when God commands what is normally something immoral or the Bible’s literal interpretation is not giving us the full story. I tend toward the latter.
