Who Needs the Old Testament?

Its Enduring Appeal and Why the New Atheists Don't Get It

Katharine Dell

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780281065042
• eBook ISBN: 9780281077236
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Atheism

Who needs the Old Testament?

It might be a literary classic, but what relevance does it have today?

How much of it can we believe anyway?

Katharine Dell invites you to rediscover the appeal of the Old Testament for the twenty-first century. In doing so she deftly refutes hard-line attacks by writers such as Richard Dawkins; she firmly critiques the atheistic agenda of those scholars who seek to undermine the Old Testament's historical grounding; and she helpfully reassures those within the church who express doubts about its usefulness as a resource for Christian life and thought.

Written by a world expert, this book will help many, both inside and outside the church, to gain a more informed appreciation of the different kinds of literature contained in the Old Testament, and a more nuanced understanding of the developing vision of God to which they witness.

CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction

PART ONE: Breaking the New Atheist Spell
Chapter 1: From Dawkins to Marcion: countering scepticism and atheism.
Chapter 2: The character and scope of the Old Testament: Countering a bad press.
Chapter 3: Meeting Dawkins head-on: texts in Genesis.
Chapter 4: Homing in on Hitchens: Exodus, Numbers and legal texts.
Chapter 5: Countering Dawkins: Texts in the ‘histories’.

PART TWO: Engaging with the Old Testament
Chapter 6: The Writings: a neglected corner of the Old Testament.
Chapter 7: The Prophets: a more convincing source of morality?
Chapter 8: Back to the Pentateuch and Historical books: the power of story.
Chapter 9: Questioning the history of Israel: scepticism within the Academy.
Chapter 10: A Christian Perspective on the Old Testament.

Part 1

BREAKING THE NEW ATHEIST SPELL

1

From Dawkins to Marcion: countering scepticism and atheism

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniac, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

(Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion)1

The God of the Old Testament has recently had a bad press from the New Atheists, as the above quotation from Richard Dawkins makes clear. Indeed it is more than just a bad press, it is a character assassination. First, Dawkins suggests that the Old Testament is a work of fiction rather than of holy writ, and second, he draws out all the bad characteristics of any person he can think of and applies them wholesale to God. It is interesting that, despite his atheism, Dawkins has more pleasant things to say about the God of the New Testament. He states that, compared to the ‘cruel ogre’ of the Old Testament, Jesus is a huge improvement. The New Testament ‘undoes the damage and makes it all right. Doesn’t it?’ he asks sarcastically.2

Let us be clear here that he is talking about ethics – the ethics of Jesus is more palatable to him than that of God in the Old Testament. Ethics is Dawkins’ starting point and his main criterion for judging the two ‘Gods’ to be so different. This raises first of all the question whether there is any continuity between the ‘Gods’ of the Old and New Testaments, and why that might matter; and second, the further question of how Christians can ‘read’ the Old Testament in a nurturing way if a very different kind of God lurks within its pages.

The questioning of the place of the Old Testament, both in Christian life and thought and in the canon, is an old chestnut. The characterization of very different ‘Gods’ as portrayed by the two Testaments is also an ancient concern. It takes us back to Marcion, that famous first critic of the value of the Old Testament for Christians.3 He took a radical stance in sweeping away the old Scriptures to make way for the new, and, even more radically, focusing on St Paul and the Gospel of Luke alone for the Christian message. This may be because Luke was the Gospel of which he had knowledge – we are speaking here of pre-canonical times, where individual Gospels seem to have been known and popular in certain areas. But the writings of St Paul were where the real newness of the Christian message lay for Marcion, in the gospel to the Gentiles and the consequent leaving behind of the Jewish heritage. This led him to reject the Old Testament and its God, whom he described as the Demiurge, a different God, creator and redeemer of the Jews, who had no place in the Christian proclamation. Indeed he excised from Luke passages citing the Old Testament in order to show that Jesus was indeed a fulfilment of the promises made by the Old Testament prophets. He disliked the God of the Old Testament almost as much as Dawkins does. Marcion has had a number of followers over the years, most famously Adolf Harnack,4 and in modern times Eric Seibert, who takes a very Marcionite line in his recent work.5

Clearly the Old Testament with the God it portrays is easily open to attack and, as with most accusations, however exaggerated, there is some justification; evidence abounds of God’s less savoury characteristics, as Dawkins makes us aware. It is interesting, however, that Dawkins can cite passages only from the narrative sections of the Old Testament to be found in the Pentateuch and in the historical books. Large swathes of the Old Testament, notably the Prophets and the Writings, are entirely left out of account, along with their portrayals of God. It is of course the books of the Prophets to which the early Christians turned for prophecies of the coming, life and significance of Jesus; and the New Testament, especially the Gospel of Matthew, is a witness to the way they viewed prophecy and fulfilment in the person of Jesus. But surely the Writings deserve a mention too? The Psalms, a key book within the Writings, have long been cherished in Christian liturgy and thought and are also part of the ‘fulfilment in Christ’ motif for the New Testament; and an alternative system of ethics resides in the wisdom literature, notably in Proverbs.

The present book seeks to counter these ‘Dawkinsite’ and Marcionite accusations about God and the Old Testament. It does not seek entirely to exonerate a God who does at times behave in an opposite manner to expectation, but it seeks to understand the context of God’s actions as far as possible. I try in the book to draw out the ‘other side of the coin’ when it comes to texts in the Old Testament, and to indicate the diversity and richness of their textual offering. While I will spend much of the book countering such critics as Dawkins on a passage-by-passage basis, I will also seek to indicate the broader context of the Old Testament as canon and as a rich historical, literary and theological document, essential for understanding its successor, the New Testament. In this chapter I want to explore further the New Atheist and Marcionite attacks and seek to understand where the critiques are coming from, before I turn in subsequent chapters to my own characterization of the Old Testament in response to these critiques.

The New Atheist movement: a brief outline

The so-called ‘New Atheists’ are a group of four writers and scholars – dubbed, in a reference to the book of Revelation, the ‘four horsemen of the non-Apocalypse’ – who have pioneered a fresh attack on religion for the twenty-first century. It was the events of September 11 2001 that inspired Sam Harris to write The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004), and this was swiftly followed by publications by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2007, following his 2006 television documentary The Root of All Evil?), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, 2006) and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, 2007).6 There is some question as to whether this is really a new movement – it builds on a secular humanism that has its roots in the humanism of the Renaissance and on ideas from utilitarianism, ethical naturalism and evolutionary biology. It is a particularly strong brand of atheism, even anti-theism, that springs also from a scientific perspective which does not simply ignore the ‘God hypothesis’ but sees it as false. According to the New Atheists, the answers to our questions about the world we inhabit and the wider universe are entirely answerable by naturalism rather than by any appeal to the supernatural.

The New Atheists as a group are not particularly concerned with the Bible, especially with the Old Testament. Two of them, however – Dawkins and Hitchens – do engage with it, so it is with these two that I will interact in this book as I seek to evaluate the Old Testament from both a scholarly and a Christian perspective.

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

Dawkins’ starting point in his chapter on ‘The “Good” Book and the changing moral Zeitgeist’ is, as I have said, the use of the Old Testament as a source of morality.7 There is some question as to whether this is the only reason people read it, but that is his line. He argues that there are two channels for morality: direct instruction from God, as exemplified in the Ten Commandments (Exod. 20; Deut. 5), and the idea of God as a role model to emulate. He goes on to identify stories in the Old Testament that he deems ‘morally appalling’ (as he says of the story of Noah) to show that the role-model argument quickly finds God seriously lacking. He jibes at the view of the Flood as bound up with human sin by saying, ‘We humans give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our poky little “sins” to the level of cosmic significance!’8 And if the retort of the theologian is that we don’t take the Flood story literally, then he questions how one can take some parts of the Bible literally and not other parts (see below, Chapter 2).

He then scours the first five books (the Pentateuch or Torah) of the Old Testament for the worst stories he can find. He goes on into the ‘historical books’ of Joshua and Judges to find more evidence. So we come across the stories of Abraham and Lot in Genesis 19, and of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19, which he paraphrases in a mocking tone. He picks on Abraham in particular – he retells the story of his passing off his wife as his sister and has a field day with Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac, which he views as child abuse. These examples demonstrate to him that ‘We do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture’, or, if we do, they are just derived from the ‘nice bits’.9

He then turns to Judges 11, the story of Jephthah’s daughter – another very difficult text, identified by biblical scholar Phyllis Trible as a ‘text of terror’.10 He repeatedly asks the question what kind of God expects loyalty to the point of sacrificing one’s own offspring, and what kind of morality that conveys. Because these stories are so raw and unpalatable to modern sensibilities, he is easily able to jibe and mock with no understanding of the context in which the stories arose. He accuses the God of the Old Testament of sexual jealousy of the worst kind, with the indictment of the people for their ‘going after other gods’. An example is found in Exodus 32 with the story of the golden calf and its often forgotten aftermath when 3,000 people are killed to ‘assuage God’s jealous sulk’,11 followed by God sending a plague.

Moses as well as Abraham comes in for a character assassination from Dawkins – the attack on the Midianites in Numbers 31 is cited as evidence. Rival gods and rival peoples that provoke God’s jealousy are at the centre of concern here: ‘The tragi-farce of God’s maniacal jealousy against alternative gods recurs continually throughout the Old Testament.’12 Joshua and his attack on Jericho (Josh. 6) comes under discussion as ‘xenophobic relish’,13 as does the ‘invasion’ of the promised land (Deut. 20). Dawkins asks, ‘Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?’14 Again, he is establishing his point that modern morality and the Old Testament are poles apart (a fact that no one is challenging) – the issue here is whether the Old Testament has anything to teach us, on the question of morality or otherwise, or whether it is simply to be ‘binned’ with the rest of the Christian faith, as Dawkins would have us do.

The laws of the Old Testament, which also were clearly designed for a very different context, are then held up for ridicule – why the death penalty for offences that seem to us to be minor? He points out that, when we turn to the New Testament, Jesus defined himself against such laws as this one about Sabbath-keeping: ‘Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them.’15 So Jesus himself is used in the argument against the ‘morality’ of the Old Testament.

A Christian too might use appeal to the morality of Jesus as an argument against following the morality of the Old Testament, but this is a choice that Christians are not actually being asked to make. What I am calling for here is at least an understanding of the cultural context of that morality and a fair evaluation of the nature of the stories and other texts that we find in the Old Testament, rather than a wholesale rejection on moral grounds.

Lest we think Dawkins is going soft on us when he gets to Jesus, though, he points out some more shadowy features of Jesus’ ministry. He critiques Jesus’ ‘family values’, and how he was ‘short, to the point of brusqueness, with his own mother’,16 for which viewpoint he cites no evidence. My immediate response would be that the Gospels simply do not relate much about their relationship and do not specifically give us any reflection on Jesus’ treatment of his mother. Furthermore, says Dawkins, Jesus demanded his disciples abandon their families to follow him, a request Dawkins regards as reminiscent of modern ‘brainwashing’ cults.

Dawkins can find little fault with Jesus’s ethical teaching,17 but he has a field day with the doctrine of original sin, which after all is a somewhat later interpretation (going back to the early Church Father Augustine)18 of the links between sin in the Garden of Eden and Jesus’ atonement for that sin. Adam and Eve come in for a good jibe here: ‘The symbolic nature of the fruit (knowledge of good and evil, which in practice turned out to be knowledge that they were naked) was enough to turn their scrumping escapade into the mother and father of all sins.’19 He then airs the point that if this story is symbolic – as many theologians maintain – rather than real, then what on earth was the view of Jesus’ atonement? Here is one of his most vicious sentences (comparable with the one cited at the beginning of this chapter): ‘So, in order to impress himself, Jesus had himself tortured and executed, in vicarious punishment for a symbolic sin committed by a non-existent individual? As I said, barking mad, as well as viciously unpleasant.’20 While I, and many Christians, might accuse Dawkins of being ‘viciously unpleasant’ here in his diatribe, he quite clearly misses the point of symbolism. Even if the story is symbolic, the truth that it represents about the human condition is not (see below).

I have probably paraphrased enough of Dawkins’ vitriolic chapter to give you a flavour of his argument and concerns, and I will come back to many of his points and to the texts that he lampoons. To sum up, Dawkins, in little more than half a chapter devoted to the Old Testament, grounds his discussion primarily in the context of how Scripture might be a source of morals or rules for living, either in terms of laws such as the Ten Commandments or of role models that devotees might follow. Either route he terms ‘obnoxious’ to any civilized modern person, particularly in the light of the fact that the Bible is ‘not systematically evil but just plain weird’,21 but ‘unfortunately it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living’.22

The word ‘zealots’ is very telling: Dawkins gives the impression that all religious people of any persuasion are extremists who take the Bible literally and reject all scientific explanations for natural disasters in the belief that they are payback for human misdemeanours. He comments on the human egocentricity that places human concerns at the centre, asking ‘Why should a divine being, with creation and eternity on his mind, care a fig for petty human malefactions?’23 Dawkins’ main point in his half-chapter is to say not that we shouldn’t get our morals from Scripture but that in fact, when we study Scripture closely, we find that we don’t. I agree with him that we do not get our modern morality from his selection of texts, but I would not go so far as to say that there is no morality in Scripture at all.

Dawkins continues to argue that neither is God a good role model, nor are the laws relevant to today, so we have no need of this ‘weird’ and outdated set of ‘textually unreliable’ and confused documents called the Old Testament. His claim is that the ‘good book’ gives us no nourishment, moral or otherwise. There is no doubt about what his convictions are. I will attempt to show that the Old Testament is of a diverse nature and that such sweepingly general comments cannot be fairly applied to its contents. It has enduring appeal for those who engage seriously with it and seek to understand its cultural context and for those who explore its variety and appreciate the development of its ideas over the many centuries before it reached its final form.

Alister McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion?

Before turning to another New Atheist, I...

Table of contents

• Who Needs the Old Testament
• Part 1 Breaking The New Atheist Spell
• Part 2 Engaging with the Old Testament