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A podcast focusing on issues related to nonviolence, and a member of the Kingdom Outpost.
Welcome back to the Fourth Wave Podcast. In this episode, I had the privilege of interviewing Randall Rauser, author of Jesus Loves Canaanites. Now much of what this interview touches on would extend very well into some of our previous seasons, notably our season on nonviolence and our season on just war. But in this season, I want to highlight our struggle with power and control. One of the areas that we have focused on in this season where many Christians seek control is in the interpreting of the biblical text.
Derek:But the word interpret is an uncomfortable one for a lot of us, implying subjectivity. So oftentimes we slap more stable terms onto it, particularly the term of inerrancy. And inerrancy is touted as meaning that God determines truth through His text, when in reality, what it often means is that we use the name of God to sanctify our particular reading of a text. With God's name invoked, we have certainty and therefore we have control. All theological dissonance and dialogue can be waved away by simply decrying one's opponent as being against inerrancy, and therefore opposed to God.
Derek:Beth Allison Barr has mentioned this before in regard to the discussion on egalitarianism, and many other Christians have found the same to be true when they confront the issues and idols of those who cling to inerrancy. Now inerrancy is powerful. It tends to be a weapon and a shibboleth. In this interview, Randall Rauser unpacks his book as we discuss the importance of submission to the text rather than a wielding of it, and how our intuitions about the nature of God and the good and our consciences, convictions can lead us to read the Biblical text in submission to it rather than in ways which bolster my personal certainty or my group's power and control in the world. And that really is how I would characterize much of inerrancy's invocation.
Derek:It seeks certainty and or control. And really, it often resembles impatience. Just think about it. If I can open my Bible and look at the words on the page and know that what it says to me is exactly what God is telling me, that's really comforting. I can know now all the truths that God wanted me to know.
Derek:But if I have to wrestle with the immediate text, as well as all of the texts of the Bible and the traditions of the cloud of witnesses handed down to me, there is a lot of responsibility that falls on me to wrestle with the Holy Spirit through it, falls on me to work through and wade into the Scriptures, and calls me to wrestle with God like Abraham at Sodom or Job in Uz, rather than stand in silent submission to those things which accost my conscience and intuition as to the nature of God and the good. Demands like sacrificing my child or becoming complicit in genocide. The way of wrestling with God and submitting to the whole text requires much more patience. Wading through the murky mire and mist, than something like an inerrantist reading, which views the text as a moral and historical handbook of dictates from God. It reminds me of Tertullian's words in his work on patience where he says, Nothing undertaken through impatience can be transacted without violence, and everything done with violence has either met with no success or has collapsed or has plunged to its own destruction.
Derek:Tertullian argues that where you see impatience, you see violence. And where you see violence, you see failure and destruction. These do not seem becoming of God. And as the author of the Epistle to Diognetus declares, quote, violence has no place in the character of God, end quote. By their fruit, you shall know them.
Derek:Now the fruit of some brands of impatient inerrantis is the support of God commanded genocides as moral. Some even leaving open for today the justice of modern genocides against those they deem to be enemies of God. For them, there is a place, a very large place for violence and the character of God. This acceptance of violence comes, in my opinion, because of their own impatience. Impatience as Kierkegaard uncovered in his work Purity of Heart, which manifests in a variety of ways.
Derek:The way which presents itself most pronounced today, I think, is a desire to have the victory now and to have that victory come through us. Impatience for God's ends comes at the circumvention of His means. Therefore, we must find ways to christen the means that we feel the need to implement as the very means of God. And we often invoke inerrancy to do this very thing. We are impatient and therefore we are violent.
Derek:We are violent and therefore we must make violence a part of the very nature of God Himself. As you listen to this interview, I hope you have the rest of our season running through the back of your mind because there is so much to pick up on in regard to what I've discussed so far. Randall Rouser nuances everything so well and so succinctly, and he does a great job at uncovering underlying presuppositions. I think this is an episode that you'll probably want to pause, rewind, and listen to several times. As usual, I will put links and timestamps in the show notes for your convenience.
Derek:Without further ado, here is the interview with Randall Rauser. I have to admit when I first saw your book, I anticipated that it was gonna largely be an emotional case. And I use that in a pejorative sense because to me, and I think to a lot of people in our culture, emotional seems like a weaker sort of case to make. And it's my culture that I grew up in, conservative evangelical church, we are relatively rationalistic and positivistic. And so we look down on emotionalism.
Derek:So in my mind, it's really hard to imagine that an emotional case could be compelling when when evangelicals tend to look at the straightforward reading of the text. So, and that's because words seem more objective than feelings. But I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised when I read your book that I thought you made a great case. And what was fascinating to me, I could tell you did a good job because I would have rebuttals in my mind and be like, well, about this? And you anticipated those and knocked those out.
Derek:So before we get into maybe specific questions, I would love for you to just give a background of who you are and what caused you to write this book and the focus of your book.
Randal Rauser:Thank you, Derek. So I am Randall Rauser, and I am a former seminary professor. I was a professor for twenty years. And back in 2019, I started doing workplace investigations part time, and I've been doing that full time for two, three years now. And so that focus I focus on abuse allegations in such context.
Randal Rauser:So it's a very different kind of area from what I used to do. But I'm also an author and I've published 17 books. So Jesus Loves Canaanites is one of the 17. And where I came into this, I mean, I think like a lot of people growing up, I read the Bible with a lot of, I would say, cognitive dissonance. In the book, I talk about different ways that we deal with that cognitive dissonance, different reading strategies that people are raised with in the evangelical church or the Christian church more broadly to deal with some of the more shocking moral content in the Bible.
Randal Rauser:And those strategies worked for a time, But beginning in the mid 1990s, it really began to bother me and there was one particular incident, where I read in the newspaper of a father who had decapitated his son on the side of a highway because he believed God was commanding him to do so. And I was filled with anger. It just triggered me when I read that anger directed at God. But the bigger question with the anger for God allowing that, but the bigger question was, well, the Bible has moral atrocities equivalent to that of God ostensibly having commanded and commended things like that. How do I deal with those?
Randal Rauser:And so that seed was planted really there for me to deal with that. And then coming into the early two thousands, you had the the new atheists, and they really highlighted the link. Whatever their limitations were, they highlighted the link between religion and violence. And, like, nine eleven and, the link between dogma or doctrine and violence in nine eleven also really helped force a lot of Christians and begin to talk about these issues. And so there's a burgeoning of literature in the 2000s on these topics.
Randal Rauser:In 02/2009, I published a journal article in Philosophia Christi criticizing Paul Colpan on some of these topics, his book has got a moral monster. And since then, I've sort of been a fixture in these dialogues. So then, fast forward to 2020, December, I had a debate with the atheist Dan Barker on the unbelievable program on biblical violence. And for that debate, I mapped out my arguments and response. Following that debate, I said to myself, I've written, the outline for a book.
Randal Rauser:And so I just devoted the next three months to writing the book and came out. And so I've continued to participate in the dialogue since then. Awesome.
Derek:Yeah. So I I wanna start maybe with the first question at what I I view as probably the most foundational aspect to your argument. And it was a concept that I was familiar with because my wife got her apologetics degree at Biola. So we, you know, we were in circles with Clay Jones and William Craig and stuff. And so one of the arguments that William Lane Craig uses in his debate is he talks about the idea of properly basic beliefs and how he has a properly basic belief because the Holy Spirit is within him and, shows him what is what is real in regard to his faith.
Derek:And that's something that you invoke here, this idea of a properly basic belief. And you give you give some examples, because honestly, it sounds kinda weird when you when you first hear it. But the example of being accused of a crime where all the evidence points to you, but you know you didn't do it, you have this belief, justified belief, that you didn't do it. So I'd love for you to expound on the idea of the grounding for intuition being a legitimate source of knowledge.
Randal Rauser:Yeah. So this is the area that we call epistemology or theory of knowledge. And the basic idea here is that you can't have reasons for every belief. Like, you can't believe every single thing you believe based upon some evidential reasoning process because that would quickly lead to an infinite regress. You'd always have to Well, if I believe one, premise one based on premise two, I need to have believe premise two based on premise three and going on back ad infinitum.
Randal Rauser:And that would just undercut your ability to reason about anything. So that would be a big problem. Well, then we say, well, actually, how do we function in the world? And how we do function is that for the most part, we don't reason to, but we reason from. So what that means is that for the most part, we take things as they are presented to us at face value.
Randal Rauser:And then unless we have some reason to doubt those things that have been presented to us at face value, we accept them and we reason from them. And that's colloquially speaking, just the gist of this idea of proper basicality. So for example, the one that you cited is memory. I just have my memory of things that I've done in the past. And unless there is some very strong counter evidence for me to question my memory, like let's say surveillance footage showing I did something that I clearly do not recall having done, or a whole bunch of people saying I was there and I did it, unless there's some really strong overwhelming evidence, all things being equal, I'm justified in trusting my memory.
Randal Rauser:It's the same thing when it comes to sense perception. So I don't have to have reason to the reliability of my sense perception in order to be justified in believing I'm seeing a sunny day out the window. Rather, I look out the window and it just seems to me to be sunny. And so I formed the belief immediately on the occasion of that experience that it is in fact sunny. It would only be if somebody came up and provided some evidence that it was not sunny that I would then have to question whether my sense perceptual faculties were working properly.
Randal Rauser:And so we have memory, we have sense perception, we have all sorts of other ways that we form beliefs in this immediate, properly basic way, and then we reason from them. So there's starting points for our reasoning. And another area for that is moral beliefs or moral We could call it moral perceptual beliefs or moral intuitive beliefs. So I intuit or perceive certain basic moral facts about the world. And unless you can give me some overwhelming compelling evidence against those facts, again, I'm reasonable in reasoning from them.
Randal Rauser:So some of the facts are, well, it is good to love people and you ought to treat people the way you want to be treated. Those are sort of intuitive first principles of moral reasoning. If you met somebody who questioned the golden rule and said, Well, why would I treat somebody the way I want to be treated? It'd be kind of hard to reason with them because for the most part, we aren't with that as an assumption. We just consider it's intuitive force to us.
Randal Rauser:Now, one place where find the power of moral intuition is when you experience perceived things in the world happening, and there's an immediate visceral categorization of that as either being morally good or morally evil. So for example, you're walking along the street and you see some man come up to an old lady and just cold cock her in the side of the head and take her purse. Now, immediately there is an intuitive revulsion to what that man did. And you say that is evil, what he did to her. You don't have to reason to that conclusion.
Randal Rauser:Now, you may be able to hopefully provide supplemental reasons as to why you should think it is wrong for him to have done that, but your belief itself is generated simply on the occasion of witnessing what happened to that woman and saying that is wrong. Conversely, if you see a little old woman stumble in the middle of a crosswalk and traffic stops and a man runs from the side of the curb and picks her up and helps her across, you have an immediate positive moral appraisal of that action. Again, you don't have to reason to that conclusion. Your belief is immediately occasioned by the perceptual experience of what is happening, and you categorize it as morally good or morally evil, morally right or morally wrong. The same thing when we read about biblical content, that we can have that same kind of visceral emotional, moral reaction.
Randal Rauser:Note that I say emotional because emotion is part of moral reasoning. It's an intuitive attraction or revulsion, which is part of the whole process by which moral reasoning works. And so that is an important part of our moral knowledge. Recognizing it's part of our moral knowledge, just like memory or perception is part of our basic knowledge of the world is key then to beginning to read and interact with the Bible in an ethically responsible way.
Derek:Yeah. You know, it was interesting as I was going through your book and I was kind of I was trying to reflect on myself and the community that I've grown up in. It became pretty apparent to me that emotion and intuition are very strong aspects, even of my community, even though I think our natural tendency is to dismiss it, especially when it's inconvenient. You brought up the example of the use of fetal imagery with, you know, pro life individuals, how they want to show fetal imagery and evoke emotion in mothers to help them see what they're destroying. Or you mentioned or, you know, one of the other things that popped up is Romans one was always a big text in my church growing up where people are without excuse because God has given us a conscience.
Derek:And so we know what is right and wrong intuitively in us unless we sear that. And so that is an intuitive form of knowledge. Another example, you know, October, when it was reported that there were children beheaded when Gaza, when Palestine had invaded Israel, in our community, was a very strong reaction. They didn't ask the question, well, did those kids deserve it? Was it it was, no, this is wrong.
Derek:It's a a war crime. And of course, that ended up not being, true, but nevertheless, it exposed that we just know certain things are wrong. Yet at the same time, you're talking about the Canaanite genocide, and somehow, my group has a tendency to not trust their intuition in that. Could you help to explain where that seeming double standard comes in and how that's, justified on their part?
Randal Rauser:Well, first of all, we should recognize that while we can form our beliefs in a basic way, as I said, I also kept qualifying and saying, so I would trust my memory unless you gave me some good reason not to, right, unless you have the surveillance footage or a list of direct eyewitnesses who said, no, I was there even though I said I wasn't. So our memory can sometimes mislead us. It's it's fallible. Same thing with our sense perception. Right?
Randal Rauser:I could possibly misperceive the sun being out the window. Maybe I have some sort of delusion. I'm I'm experiencing, some disconnect with reality. And it's the same thing with our moral reasoning. It is not infallible, so it can mislead us.
Randal Rauser:And some of the ways it can mislead us is through our cultural formation. You know, it seems to most people today, I think, thankfully, that slavery is obviously wrong. It's obviously wrong to own people. Another thing is it's obviously wrong to torture people. So I remember back in the mid 1980s, visited Madame Tussaud's wax museum in London, And the most memorable part of the museum there was torture chamber, medieval torture chamber, where these elaborate wax sculptures recreated elaborate tortures of the medieval period.
Randal Rauser:This was in the Christendom, Christian society, where civil magistrates were engaging in elaborate tortures of human beings. Today, most people just think that's obviously wrong. Back when the Bush administration was waterboarding suspected terrorists, the debate wasn't whether it was morally permissible to torture. I should say yeah. The debate wasn't whether it's morally permissible to torture.
Randal Rauser:Everybody assumed it wasn't. The debate was whether waterboarding should qualify as torture. And it just showed how the way that the debate is framed. What that tells me is that our cultural formation does impact how we think about morality. And so various things that one people group, whether it's torture or slavery or something else, they may think it's obviously morally right.
Randal Rauser:Another group may think that's obviously morally wrong. Now some people then might wanna say, well, then let's just be skeptics about that. I I like CS Lewis's response at the end of his book, The Abolition of Man. He has this famous table of morality, where he goes around to different cultures and points out that, Do not lie, honor your parents and elders, do not kill, and so on. But those are actually pretty universal across cultures.
Randal Rauser:What happens is that there are various rationalizing frameworks that are used to kind of reconcile us to some deviation from what is otherwise a generally universally recognized moral norm. So for example, we'll say, It is wrong to murder, but killing that person isn't murder because they're a pathogen or their ancestor took our land, whatever, and you develop some rationalizing structure for it. So we have to be cautious then that just because there is divergence and disagreement doesn't mean there is no moral fact about the matter. The reality is that both the culture can illuminate moral precepts, true moral knowledge, but it can also obscure it. So then here we come to the biblical passages, and you have some people thinking, well, if you have a problem with killing Canaanites, it's because you don't recognize some of the moral unique factors of that time, such as that they were illegally occupying the land and they presented a unique threat to the Israelites and God wanted to bless the world through the Israelites.
Randal Rauser:And if He allowed these people to corrupt the Israelites, then that would undermine that whole plan. God also had to accommodate the ancient Near Eastern standards of warfare. And there's all sorts of and just the fact that we are repulsed by this is because we're actually not repulsed enough by the sin of the Canaanites. And if we were, then we would recognize that. So you have all of those as rationalizing frameworks.
Randal Rauser:Inversely, I think, well, from my mind, what really is more compelling here is that it's always wrong to kill women and children and infants. So for example, the post World War II consensus that it's wrong to kill noncombatants, to target noncombatants, and it's definitely wrong to commit what we today call genocide. That, for me, takes precedence when I'm reading those passages. I do think one other thing is very significant for people in that debate who disagree with me is that they were taught that reading the Deuteronomic history, that reading the history of Israel entering the land of Canaan is a historical narrative as surely as the Gospels. And that if you question whether Jericho was raised to the ground, that will lead you likewise to question whether Jesus was raised from the dead.
Randal Rauser:And I think personally that that's just a misunderstanding of the relative weight of these texts and how they're functioning. That the ergonomic history does not function the same way as the Gospels, and that they don't have the same doctrinal significance as the resurrection of Jesus. But I do think that that's at play there as well. And so as a result, you have people end up defending positions like genocide and child killing in the ancient areas that today, as you brightly point out, in any other context, would consider to be more occurring.
Derek:Yeah. So I I think a lot of this debate, always seems to be people who either adhere to genocide or, you you give the just war framework for it, for those who don't want to call it genocide. A lot of that is them putting the burden of proof on your position, on intuition. And your argument is that intuition and emotion are actually a lot stronger than most people give them credit for in our rationalistic age. At the same time, I think it's important to recognize that there is a lot of subjectivity in the text as well.
Derek:So you believe that there's a stronger case for intuition. Would you also say then that the the position of the text at face value being objective is weaker than a lot of people in the the pro genocide circles give it credit for?
Randal Rauser:Say that again. The text at face value.
Derek:The text at face value, do you believe that that is a weaker position than genocide adherents think it is? Like, they would say that it's very objective, and it's very clear, and so we just need to accept it. Do you think it's as clear and objective as they say, or do you think there's a lot of subjectivity infused into that?
Randal Rauser:You used a phrase at the beginning when we started talking. You talked about straightforward reading of the text, and then just now you talked about text at face value. And what I think we have to always be careful of is assuming that the way the text seems to us is just a transcultural way it should obviously seem to anybody. So that anybody who disagrees with our perception of what the straightforward meaning is or what the text at face value is, is mean that other person is just somehow engaging in bad faith or bad reading. The fact is that there are always so many factors at play that inform the way any person encounters a text and reads a text.
Randal Rauser:Basic hermeneutical principle or basic principle of interpretation is that there's no uninterpreted text. Even a stop sign is interpreted. The second you begin to read, you are interpreting it. So we have to be careful about that. Now, another thing that I would just say is that, I mean, among people who disagree with me, they have a great deal of difference on various matters.
Randal Rauser:For example, someone like William Lane Craig is much more likely to be unapologetic about talking about the targeting and killing of noncombatants. Whereas someone like Paul Kopan, who might seem very close to Craig in some respects, is much more nuanced in wanting to talk about the people who he believes were primarily targeted were combatants. So the way Paul Coppin, for example, we read about Jericho as a city. Well, people like Kopan have pointed out, in fact, the Hebrew there for city. Really, we should think of that in some respects more as a military target, like a citadel, a military fort.
Randal Rauser:Though here, I live in the city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. 2 Hundred Years ago, this was a trading post called Fort Edmonton. Now, were some people, some families living here, but it was primarily sort of a military outpost of the Canadian government trading with the local population. It wasn't a city as we think of it today. Jericho was more like that.
Randal Rauser:And so people like Kopan say, It's a lot more nuanced in that respect than we recognize. And so right there, we're beginning to erode the very concept of a straightforward reading of the text or text at face value. So that would just be my caution, that there's a whole spectrum there.
Derek:But for me Yeah,
Randal Rauser:go ahead.
Derek:Before you go on, I used to use the word literal, and I got corrected on that and said, No, we take more face value. But I, you know, as you expound on that, it seems I mean, you seem very correct on it. So should we just avoid that language altogether? Because it seems to give credence to that position being the stronger position.
Randal Rauser:Well, I would just push back on it. Like, would say there is, in my mind, there's no default setting. I mean, an even clearer way to see it is when you come to Genesis chapter one, and you have the young earth creationist saying at face value or a straightforward reading is God created in six twenty four hour days. And another person could say hold on a minute. I mean just because it says day doesn't mean within and just because day, not like it's being used as the word day, but it's being used within a poetic framework.
Randal Rauser:So we have to be careful about extrapolating that that literally maps onto twenty four hour periods in past histories. And there's a lot of assumption that are brought into that Young Earth Creationist reading. I think we run into some similar tensions here that we have to be cautious about. But another thing that I would really caution us about is an underlying assumption of particular type of inerrancy. So I think many people, probably most conservatives when they talk about inerrancy, because conservatives are the only ones really talking about inerrancy.
Randal Rauser:But when they do talk about it, typically what they're meaning is that the biblical text as written by the human author is without error. And that is not an assumption just to be accepted without question. In fact, I think there's a lot of grounds to question that on biblical grounds. So the example I always give is that you can read one third of the Psalms are Psalms of purses against one's enemies or imprecatory Psalms. And the imprecatory psalmist in those psalms makes a long list of claims.
Randal Rauser:The psalmist claims that God hates His enemies, that laughs at His enemies and relishes their coming destruction, and that the psalmist likewise relishes the coming destruction of God's enemies. He longs for the names to be wiped out of the book of life. He desires for their children to be childless. He says, Blessed is he who takes the infants of their enemies and dashes them against the rocks. Now he's made a series of claims there about the nature of God and the nature of the good.
Randal Rauser:And is the psalmist without error in those statements? And I think he's clearly in error at various statements. He's not correctly describing who God is or how we ought to act. And I I know that in part because of the life and teaching of Jesus. That brings an internal critique in the Bible itself to the Psalms of Perse.
Randal Rauser:It doesn't mean they shouldn't be there, but it says that we shouldn't think of them simply in a flat footed way that whatever the psalmist says is without error. Now if you use that same framework and say, okay, what do I do then when Deuteronomy seven is talking about utterly destroying another culture, and Deuteronomy 20 is talking about massacring their entire families, including women and children? Can I bring in the same kind of critique to Deuteronomy that I brought to Psalms? And that's an open theological question. But I think, given several factors, including our moral knowledge and our theological knowledge of who we believe we're allowed to be in Jesus, that is a very good question to be asking.
Derek:Yeah, certainly is. And I think one of the difficulties, even if someone would agree with you up to this point, it brings one who comes out of conservative circles to a very challenging place. And you brought this up just a couple minutes ago. But the idea that if dismiss the historicity of one thing, then you have to dismiss the historicity of central things like the resurrection. So in your book, one of the most powerful parts I thought was just going through this, you know, pseudo dialogue of this guy who is proof texting why he should sacrifice his son, like why that is not against the nature of God.
Derek:God's calling him to do it. And, I mean, the texts that you use, right, they're indefensible. Like, if just as when he puts them forward, you're like, okay, I understand your rationale. I just think you're wrong because I don't think that's who God is. But if God didn't tell Abraham to sacrifice his son, if God didn't, you know, fill in the blank with all these historical events that that we seem to get from the Old Testament, it's very uncomfortable because at that point it seems like, oh, well, you know, you want to keep Jesus.
Derek:That's convenient for you because you like Him. You're getting rid of the parts that you don't like, rather than trying to, you know, make them cohere as a make them cohesive. How do you how do you have confidence in the Bible and in in keeping the parts that are are you would say are central and important?
Randal Rauser:So we're all doing this. There are all parts that quote unquote we don't like and other parts that quote unquote we do like. But to put that another way and maybe a little less sort of crudely or tenvantiously, there are things that seem to us to be true and other things at face value that don't seem to be true. And the task of every thinking Christian, we're all theologians, we're all putting on a theological hat whether we acknowledge it or not, is that we have to try to reconcile the various things that seem to be true and also those that do not seem to be true. And you try to reconcile those into a theoretical framework.
Randal Rauser:And that's just what systematic theology is. It's attempting to develop a systematic account of what one believes, which includes bringing some kind of coherence and cohesion and systematic organization to a lot of the chaos in the Bible and in other things like our experience, maybe in our traditions, in our own reasoning, to bring some kind of coherence and systematic organization to that so that we have a clearer sense of what it is in fact we're committed to or what we believe. I like to describe systematic theology as like a closet organizer that a lot of people, they have their jumbled closet. Right? You open up the closet doors and there's all this clothing messed up on the floor.
Randal Rauser:Some of it is like love your neighbor. Others of it is like kill all the Canaanites that live in the land, leave alive nothing that breathes, and you're like, how am I gonna organize this into a systematic theological ethical framework that is coherent. And that's the task for everybody. So we're all engaged in that. I mean, you mentioned Abraham.
Randal Rauser:Like a good example of this, Richard Middleton wrote a book back in 2021 called Abraham's Silence. He is an excellent biblical scholar. He does a close theological reading of the text of the offering of Isaac and argues, read correctly, the offering of Isaac, the narrative story is actually critiquing Abraham for not having pushed back on this command. Earlier, Abraham pushed back on God's decision to eradicate Sodom and Gomorrah, and he bargains with God about farming just righteous people. And so he keeps reasoning, but what if there are 50 people and so on?
Randal Rauser:He doesn't do that, defend his own son. And Middleton argues that the text is actually critiquing Abraham. And I think this is something we always have to keep open to, that we are inculcated, formed into particular ways of reading texts that come to us to seem second nature or just natural, And often stepping outside of those and exploring other reading traditions can seem like, again, the abandonment of what is just the plain meaning of the text. But maybe this is actually a completely wrong way that we've been taught to read it and we need to explore new ways. And to do that, you have to have the freedom to question.
Randal Rauser:Now, the last thing I would just say is I always like to point out that the very name Israel means that they who strive with God. So to be Israel is to wrestle with God as Jacob wrestled through the night with the angel. And that includes the role that Abraham maybe should have had in the Akkadah or the offering of Isaac to push back at this command. And maybe for us, it's to be more willing to question and to doubt and to challenge things that to us seem to be fundamental violations and breaches of our ethics and character.
Derek:I really like that analogy of organizing your closet because I could just picture my closet right now and it needs to be organized. It carries very well. So as as we think about those sorts of lenses, like, think just this last week, I think about the sermon that our pastor had. And one one of his points in there, he he had said he had talked about the importance of experience, but also tempering our experiences. And so he said something to the extent of like, you know, cocaine will give you a powerful experience, bungee jumping, those sorts of things.
Derek:And the demons can give you a powerful experience as well. But we need to temper our experiences of God, which I would extrapolate to like our emotions, our feelings about God, those sorts of things. We need to temper that with what has been revealed of God. And by revealed, he meant, you know, the text. And so as I was I was thinking about your book and about talking with you this week, I was thinking, man, I wonder what would have happened.
Derek:Like, if Joshua had the text of Jesus in front of him, and this seeming command from God in front of him, assuming that Joshua was historical and and those events, could Joshua have said, hey, you know what? I think this command to slaughter the infants is is from God. Or might he have tempered that and said, know what? That that just doesn't fit. And so people like Marcion in church history, they've struggled with that same sort of thinking because they had the text of Jesus in front of them too.
Derek:And we would label Marcion as a heretic because he essentially created two gods. That was his resolution. And that is not that is not your resolution. You talk about something that you call, I believe, reframing, and you give, you know, examples from film. I would I would love for you to explain how what what you are arguing is not Marcionite and how, this reframing is something that that is valid and important for us to do.
Randal Rauser:So so we wanna talk here about, like, understanding how the bug is in fact a feature, how the error is in fact panelist or something else.
Derek:So
Randal Rauser:the example I give, but probably the main example is the film The Shining. Let me begin. First of all, James Joyce's book, Ulysses, I was a lit kid, like I did a degree in English literature thirty years ago. So James Joyce's Ulysses came out a century ago, and there were several expelling mistakes, hypo's typographical errors in the book. And somebody published a critical edition that removed the errors, thinking they were doing it a favor.
Randal Rauser:And then others pointed out various ways to read the text to believe, in fact, that Ulysses had these error quote unquote errors in there as part of the text intended by James Joyce, who was a meticulous author. Now and I think they're right about that. Now now there's something similar when you had a film like a a director, Stanley Kubrick, one of the most famous film directors, and probably there's no been no filmmaker in history who was more obsessive with the details of his films than Stanley Kubrick. In 1980, he made one of his most, highly regarded films, The Shining, based upon Stephen King's nineteen seventy seven horror novel. And the interesting thing about The Shining is that there are several and I should just say full disclosure, I'm a big fan of The Shining.
Randal Rauser:It's my favorite movie of all time. And back in 1999, I surprised my wife by taking her to the Timberline Lodge where the external shots were filmed after we were married. It's in in, Mountain Hood, Oregon. So that's that's neither here nor there. But The point is that if you watch The Shining, there are several errors quote unquote in that film and they are including what we would call continuity errors So for example, in one scene like Jack, he's trying to get at Wendy, his wife, since he's locked in the bathroom, he had an axe, and he hacks open a panel and there's like one panel he's knocked out of the door, and he looks at the door and famously says, here's Johnny, which was an ad libbed line.
Randal Rauser:The next scene, there are two panels missing in the door, which doesn't make sense because he never knocked out the second panel. That would be considered, in a standard filmmaker, a continuity error. That editing, they just ended up with something that lacked verisimilitude, that was just inconsistent in the story. But whenever something like that occurred within a Knutriq film, the wiser response is to say there's some reason that error was placed there, just like Zamkiewicz plays in grammatical errata within Ulysses. And so the key is to figure out thematically why that continuity error is in the film.
Randal Rauser:We could talk for another hour or two about The Shining, but let's segue now back to the Bible. So then when we have putative historical errors, theological errors, ethical errors within the Bible, we want to ask a similar question. If we think about God as analogous to Kubrick making a film and that God only includes inherent errors if God has some sufficient reason to do so within the life and function of the text, then we want to ask what those quote unquote errors are there for. So, to go back to all the impregatory psalms, what can we be learning from those? If they are an error about God's nature and ethical demands and so on, how we treat our enemies?
Randal Rauser:And the example I like to give here is that the Psalms are a record of human existence and human experience, raw and unfiltered. They include everything. So they include frustration, anger, hopelessness, disappointment, rage, revenge. It doesn't mean we should baptize all of those responses. It does mean that when we read those passages, we should find ourselves in the world and experience of the psalmist because we've had those same responses to people that have aggrieved us.
Randal Rauser:So even like dashing their babies against the rocks, well, we should read that and try to understand what was it like for the psalmist talking here in the context of a Babylonian exile about themselves experiencing a type of genocide of their people. How angry would they have been at the people who were perpetuating that against them? Likewise, and when we have parent errors of moral content, historical theological content, we wanna read them with an understanding of the same commitment to the intent of the original creator, whether it's the film director Kubrick or God as the superintending divine author of this collection of written human texts, and ask the question, well, what is God doing in those texts? So that understanding, yes, there may be things that are in error in some sense, but to understand them as functioning intentionally within the whole as a feature rather than a bug. So when I read within imprecatory Psalms about content that seems to me to be an error ethically or theologically, I say, well, there's a reason God included that in there.
Randal Rauser:How can I learn from that? What can I learn from that? For example, the, Psalms are a record of human existence. They present frustration, anger, disappointment, disillusion, even rage. And I can find all of those things in my own human experience, so I understand the world of the psalmist and even desiring to dash their babies against the rocks.
Randal Rauser:I mean, can I identify with that? Well, maybe not. Not immediately. But look, let's start off with the fact that the psalmist is talking about having been exiled into the land of Babylon and having rage at those who are perpetuating a genocide on his people. It's pretty common in human history to want to respond in kind to people who have harried out great evil against you.
Randal Rauser:And so I can begin to understand that. And I give an example often on this very point. So some years ago, there was a man driving his car Well, let me set it up. So he was at the sentencing of his trial, and Marco DiMuzzo was his name. And a woman stood up and talked about a victim impact statement, and she said, You deserve to know what it is like to lose every child you've ever loved.
Randal Rauser:But what she was just doing there is saying she hopes every child he will ever have dies, which is about the most horrible thing you could imagine, right? Except you understand she would benefit Neville Lake, and this man was a drunk driver who had killed her three children and her father in an accident. And so she is speaking out of the heart cry of a bereaved mother. And we should think of the psalmist in his rage at his enemies, wanting to talk about the blessedness of dashing their babies against rocks. We should we should want to understand that them in that same light and with that same charity that they're speaking out of the emotional anguish of people.
Randal Rauser:It doesn't mean we baptize their comments, however. We can still understand them as theologically and ethically in error, even though we understand and find ourselves in their humanity. And that can open up the way that we begin to engage with the whole text, treating it as authoritative from the divine purpose while recognizing that the divine intent may diverge at points from the human author's immediate intent. The same thing that you can do with the impregnatory Psalms, you can do with Deuteronomy or with Joshua as you begin to explore what does it mean for me to be a Christian and how should I think in light of that, of how God is presented in the Deuteronomic narrative.
Derek:Yeah. You know, one of the other aspects that you talk about in your book, besides just trying to understand where people are coming from and humanizing the authors, which I think is important because sometimes we just get the dictation model and we think that they were essentially just God extended out in time. One of the other things that you mentioned, I think highlights a way that we intuitively know that something needs to be done with the text, that there's a lot of dissonance. And I believe you call it obscuring. And it was funny because, you know, I start to notice all these things after going through your book, but, my daughter said, Oh, there's this song I really want you to listen to.
Derek:It was this song called Praise. And so I listened to it, and you know, in the song, it's got a couple lines like praise is the water that my enemies drown in, or praise is the shout that brings Jericho down. And I was like, okay, well, what happens when the walls of Jericho come down? Or what happens to the orphans of the Egyptians who are drowned in the sea? Like, there's a reality that How does a kid's book talk about Noah and all these other things?
Derek:How do you teach that to five year olds? Because there are a whole lot of ramifications that go along with it. And I especially appreciated when you talk about cities being destroyed, you frequently will bring up you're talking not just about infants, but you're talking about the mentally disabled, you're talking about the aged. We don't wanna think of that type of stuff going on when it comes to something like genocide or the things that we believe God commanded Joshua to carry out. So could you talk just a little bit about some of these strategies that we use that really keep us from from having to address, the real world implications of of, you know, our theology?
Randal Rauser:So I I have an acronym in the book, Over My Dead Body, and there I captured there four reading strategies that Christians are often formed in, often unawares, that help them to maintain cognitive dissonance with the text. The first one over is omission. So we simply omit details. So we will talk about the fall of Jericho, but we will not talk about, you know, the killing of men and women young and old as narrated in Joshua six. I I remember my daughter when she was young twenty years ago, we had this videos, which does Joshua fought the battle of Jericho that there would be this video and it would all be like kids playing, tearing out the soldiers and then knocking down a foam wall of bricks, and that's where the video ends.
Randal Rauser:There's nothing else shown. It's omitted. And so if you tell the story and omit all the cruel details, the violent details, you can maintain cognitive dissonance for a while. Over my, the second is myth representation. So this is where you present something differently.
Randal Rauser:I mean, a simple example of this is that King David sexually assaulted or raped Bathsheba. It's what we call a power rape. And yet, how often has that been presented as a consensual affair, adultery, or even Bathsheba somehow seducing King David by bathing on the roof? And so you've misrepresented it and often we misrepresent things. So think about Jericho again, you misrepresent it by describing it as the battle of Jericho.
Randal Rauser:There's nothing there about a battle. What it describes is a military siege. Israel surrounds Jericho and then knock down the walls and they go on and kill everybody in it and set fire to the city. There's no battle. It's like if one kid runs up to another kid and starts pounding on him and the other kid's just holding up his arms and trying to shield himself from the blows and you call that a fight.
Randal Rauser:It's not a fight. It's an assault. So we misrepresent. So omission, misrepresentation, over my be distraction. So we distract.
Randal Rauser:And often the way that you distract is by giving some moral principle. So think Ken Jericho. So we we say, for example, I I have the children's study bible with children's reading notes. And when it comes to the battle of Jericho, the reading notes say something like, God often asks us to have faith and trust in him. Do you trust in God?
Randal Rauser:And so, okay, fair enough. A great moral principle to talk about, but it's distracting from the moral content of the killing of men, women, young and old. So over my dead, omission, misrepresentation, distraction. The last one, body, is blunted affect. And blunted affect refers to the idea that we describe things that properly would produce a moral shock or revulsion in a very flat effectual manner, which really distorts or misrepresents the horrifying moral content by treating it as if it's just normal or not really worthy of shock.
Randal Rauser:So we just talk in a very casual way, matter of fact way, about God commanding the battle of Jericho or God commanding the killing of people. Then the Assyrians, like the angel of death killing a 85,000 Assyrians, and we just throw out this numbers, don't really think about it. Right? It's this blunted affect, not killing the firstborn of the Egyptians. We talk about it with a blunted affect, and it doesn't really invoke the kind of moral revulsion that in other contexts it properly would.
Randal Rauser:So omission, misrepresentation, distraction, and blunted affect can be very powerful tools to maintain cognitive dissonance for a very long time.
Derek:Yeah. Speaking of blunted affect, and I mean, really your whole acronym, I've got two more questions for you. And I think they're a little bit shorter because I know you have to go soon. You know, when I think of the Canaanite genocide, another thing that I appreciate about your book is that you bring modernity into it and you use the Rwandan genocide to put flesh on it, you know, because I don't know any Canaanites from four thousand years ago, and I don't know that I know any Rwandans, but I can envision a Rwandan more than I can envision a Canaanite. And so, like, I think of right now what's going on in Gaza in particular.
Derek:There are a lot of people in the Christian group who would be pro genocide in the biblical text or just word here and saying that it was justified are a lot of the very same people who are not having problems with and actually encouraging lot of what is going on in Gaza in terms of what I would say is the genocide or ethnic cleansing that's going on there right now. I follow a bunch of different sources on Instagram. I mean, see videos. Like, even if nobody has comments on these things, I see what's happening there. And very clearly, it's atrocious, and it's being done to women, the old, men, noncombatants.
Derek:I'd love for you to it's easy to think that this is a theological issue that maybe doesn't have real world ramifications. It's just, you know, maybe ivory tower sort of stuff. But how do you see our view of who God is and what the Bible tells us about him impacting the world today?
Randal Rauser:First thing I would say is you said, well, we don't know what a canonite looks like. We actually kinda do because for the most part, the modern Lebanese people are considered to be the descendants of ancient Canaanites. So I sometimes I talk about these issues, I will put up a picture of a group of modern Lebanese people and say, these are the faces that we are rationalizing in a text having massacred in a genocide in February. So this puts in a context what we're talking about. It isn't just an abstraction, and it does have these real world implications today.
Randal Rauser:Because when you rationalize that God has done this in the past, you automatically open up the possibility that God could do it again in the present or in the future. The book Philip Jenkins' book, Lay Down the Sword, he takes a historical approach. And in that book, he points out how often Christians have invoked, the language of Canaan and the Canaanites otherizing dehumanize people and to justify genocide. Now it is interesting. This was uncommon as as another scholar, Douglas Earl, has shown during the Crusades.
Randal Rauser:And the interesting reason why is because the Crusades, there was a tradition back to origin in the third century of spiritualizing the Crusades, leading them as the Canaanites being like a metaphor for the soul or or sorry, sin and impulses of sin in the soul and the killing of the Canaanites as a metaphor eradicating impulses to sin within one's life. And that was a reading strategy, in my mind, not a great one, but still much better than accepting genocide. That was a reading strategy that was deeply formed in the Christian tradition for centuries that they spiritualized the horror of Canaan so that when it came to looking for an explanation, a defense of the killing of Muslims in the Middle East during the Crusades, the go to texts weren't automatically Joshua and Deuteronomy. But that began to change significantly after the Reformation when the spiritual approaches of the text became increasingly marginalized. And then you had people like, for example, Oliver Cromwell in the seventeenth century using this rhetoric to justify a genocide against the Irish, or the Puritans in the eighteenth century to use these texts to justify a genocide against the First Nations people of The Americas.
Randal Rauser:So you see it has real world implications, and so it does today. And again, I mean, you mentioned Gaza. A Year And A Half ago, Benjamin Netanyahu used the rhetoric of Amalek. So going back to the Amalekites, like in one Samuel 15, eradicating the Amalekites as part of God's judgment. So these are go to texts of othering and dehumanizing throughout history.
Randal Rauser:And I've had very chilling conversations with Christians who accepted these approaches to reading the text. When I pointed out, you have similar rhetoric in the book of Revelation. There are different ways I wanna say right now to read the book of Revelation that are nonviolent. And I would say read Richard Bauckham's commentary on Revelation for an introduction to nonviolent ways to read Revelation, that revolutionize it by understanding the lion is, in fact, the lamb crucified from the foundation slain from the foundation of the world. But there are Christians who read Revelation violently, who read passages like, Revelation 17 and a coming cataclysmic apocalyptic battle, violently, and they are open.
Randal Rauser:I've talked to them. They're open to the possibility of God's army in the future carrying out the plotter of God's enemies just as God's people did in the past. So the second you have this framework to rationalize this kind of violent behavior, we're in dangerous territory. So I think we need to take the implications of violent reading to the Bible very seriously because they can rationalize all sorts of things, including what you've described in Gaza.
Derek:Yeah. Last question for you then, which I think segues perfectly, talking about your chilling conversations. When I think of going back to the time of slavery, know, shadow slavery in The US, or when I think of Nazi Germany, I don't know that I could have justified fraternizing with slaveholders or with Nazis because of the atrocity of what they supported and what they did. It's You're very gracious towards people who take the genocide approach. And seemed like you encouraged dialogue with them and stuff.
Derek:And you know, talking about Philosophia Christi, and I know you've been at some of the, I forget what you call it, but where you guys all come together, Evangelical Philosophical Society. And not to be not to be well, maybe to be harsh, but it seems like if you support genocide, that's akin to Nazism, that's akin to slavery. Like, that is on the same level as those evils. How do you promote such a gracious approach to them in that light? Because that resonates with me.
Derek:I'm still in that group. The majority of my church would probably be genocide adherents, like saying, yes, God commanded it, it was good. But I struggle thinking I would disassociate from Nazis, but I associate with people who are okay with genocide. How do you handle that dissonance?
Randal Rauser:Well, think So first of all, there is a spectrum. So you mentioned Clay Jones earlier. I mean, I think I've done these critiques of him because his view is absolutely one of the most noxious. Like he wrote an essay in Philadelphia Christie where he compares ancient Canaan to modern America. And the whole point is that modern American society is not worse than ancient Canaan.
Randal Rauser:So the implication being that just as God was warranted in slaughtering Canaanites on mass, so God could be justified in having a particular people slaughter Americans today. I mean, it's mind numbing that this is published in a sense in an academic journal and from a professing evangelical Christian. He's presented an argument claiming to be pro life along the way. Mean, that is the depth of this cognitive dissonance, claiming to be pro life about the fetus in utero and yet offering an argument that clearly implies or implicates the possibility of slaughtering American men, women, children, and infants if it's just beyond the pale. So how do you interact with people like that?
Randal Rauser:I I'll say just generally, first of all, I think we have to appreciate that there is a degree of cognitive dissonance deep in the community. And so I would say, first of all, there are some people that I think the vast majority of people I'll put it this way. The vast majority of people are nominally supporters of this kind of genocide rhetoric, theoretically, as God, they believe, commanded it in the ancient Near East, but they're not deeply committed to it. I don't think that most of them have really reflected on what it is they're committed to. They're nominally committed to it.
Randal Rauser:They haven't reflected deep on the ethical moral implications of what that would look like and what that commits them to. So that leads me to have a lot of sympathy with them. And just practically to say, what is the best way I'm going to reach those people? Is it by embalming them, judging them, or is it by trying to reason sympathetically with them? I mean, it's the same way if I was gonna talk to an anti vaxxer who, you know, believe that the COVID vaccine is a George Soros attempt to control people or some conspiratorial stuff.
Randal Rauser:The way I'm going to reach them is not through contempt and anger. People just put their guard up. It's through sympathetic reasoning and dialogue. The other thing, though, I'll just say is I'm also for plain description. So again, we have to push back against blunted affect and these other strategies.
Randal Rauser:So if I believe a person is functionally a genocide apologist, that's how I call them. I say, Look, I believe you are a genocide apologist. Hear me out. This is the definition of genocide from the United Nations accepted in international law, and this is what you've argued. What you've argued meets that legal definition.
Randal Rauser:So it's not emotional. It's simply description. It's neutral description. And if we can keep it out of the emotional like it seems a pejorative insult and say, No, this is the neutral description. You are a genocide apologist.
Randal Rauser:Hopefully, can force people to address their own cognitive dissonance and come to terms with what it is they're defending.
Derek:Yeah. All right. Well, I think that's all I had for you. I really appreciate your time. If there's anything that you'd like to plug or say or any questions you think I missed, then go ahead and have the last word.
Randal Rauser:Nothing in particular, Derek. I really appreciated your time and your interest in the topic. I just wanna say, like, again, to come back to your concern about Gaza and that I do think in some ways this is a five alarm fire. I don't wanna be dramatic about it. But the fact that we have millions of Christians who have been formed into thinking that genocide is is part of an ethical way of of viewing Christian discipleship is deeply concerning.
Randal Rauser:Because if you can think that's okay in the past, could think in principle it's okay in the future or the present. And so I think this should remain on the top of our agenda. In the same way that one hundred and fifty years ago, Christians still widely accepted moral propriety in North America, or at least, sorry, I should say the American South, they accepted the institution of slavery as compatible with Christian discipleship. And for the last one hundred and fifty years, we've made that unthinkable. I think we have to have that same long term project on this kind of way of reading the Bible.
Randal Rauser:We have to make it unthinkable, and we have to remain committed to that goal.
Derek:Well, thank you again. I appreciate it.
Randal Rauser:You bet. Thanks a lot, Derek.
Derek:That's all for now. So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to non violence and kingdom living.