Cold Case Christianity: Wouldn’t A Loving God Reform Rather Than Punish?

This is my reply to a podcast by J. Warner Wallace entitled

 Wouldn’t A Loving God Reform Rather Than Punish? (Podcast)  

Posted: 27 Jul 2017 01:47 AM PDT

In this blast from the past, J. Warner responds to a common objection to the nature of God: If God is all-loving, why doesn’t he “reform” people rather than simply “punish” them in Hell? How would you answer a skeptic who argues a God who simply punishes his children in Hell is sadistic and vengeful, unworthy of our worship? J. Warner responds to this objection and answers listener email related to the nature of “election”, and the evidence for “annihilationism.”

Wallace begins the podcast with intro music and intro speech that indicate he wants to the the center of attention.  And I've been accusing him of being the Arnie's Used Car Salesman of Christianity for years.

The intro also says one purpose of the podcast is to "engage" skeptics with the Christian world view, so my Christian readers should note the day i posted this rebuttal, and start counting the days, weeks, months and years that Wallace will let my rebuttal go by before he decides to live up to his promise to "engage" this skeptic.

At 4:30, Wallace invites the listener to come to his "blog", and says he would "love" to have the listener come over and join that conversation, but when one presses the "comment" button to comment on one his articles, one is taken to his Facebook page...and despite my never having violated any of Wallace's Facebook rules or Facebook's own rules, Wallace banned me several months ago from his Facebook page.

So I continue standing by my accusation that Wallace is a liar:  he says he wants to "engage" skeptics, and yet despite my never having violated any rules of conduct from Wallace or such rules required by Facebook itself, he still banned me, rather quietly, from his Facebook "blog", several months ago.  Wallace is thus a liar; when he says he would love to have the listener join his blog conversations, the unstated caveat is that you not know enough to substantially refute his beliefs.  Nothing spells "fake Christian employing typical materialistic political marketing strategy" quite like "let's ban our more informed critics, that will prevent potential customers from being dissauded from buying our product.".

And indeed, when one goes to Wallace's websites, one would think he is some ridiculous liberal who thinks God wasn't able to get His act together until Wallace began teaching Christians how to have a forensic faith.  It is not an exaggeration to say Wallace promotes his materials so relentlessly, he is making his apologetics fantasy more the center of attention than Jesus precisely because of his marketing pitch that you cannot really live up to what Jesus wants you to do without having the forensic faith that comes from purchasing Wallace's materials.

If Wallace is correct that the bible is the inerrant word of God, "sufficient" for faith and practice, then why does he so relentlessly promote, market and advertise his own opinions about what the bible means?  Why market so obstinately that today's Christians "need" his books?  If the Holy Spirit doesn't need his help, why does Wallace make it seem that he and the Holy Spirit entered a mutually beneficial marketing contract?

If we are correct to ask 1990's televangelists whether they think God cannot be activated until the evangelist recieves donations, aren't we correct to ask the same type of question of other Christians who use similar marketing gimmicks?  Sure, Wallace doesn't tell others to send in their last grocery money, but that hardly means he must be employing any more honest of a marketing ploy.  He still drowns himself in relentless ceaseless promotion of himself, and his books, and this degree of "look at me!!!" is not consistent with Wallace's alleged trust that the Holy Spirit doesn't need his help and that the bible is ALONE "sufficient' for faith and practice. 
 
Basically, the first 10 minutes of this podcast justifies more the interpretation that Wallace's first priority is Wallace, than the interpretation that Wallace's first priority is Jesus.

Wallace is never going to make God look good, no matter what excuses he puts forth to "explain" how a literal hell can be consistent with divine "love", because of one bible passage that I've been using to beat fundamentalists senseless for years, and they haven't moved even one single inch toward making this sadistic lunatic look "good", probably because common sense prevails over their theological delusions:

NAU  Deuteronomy 28:
 1 "Now it shall be, if you diligently obey the LORD your God, being careful to do all His commandments which I command you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth.
 2 "All these blessings will come upon you and overtake you if you obey the LORD your God:
 15 "But it shall come about, if you do not obey the LORD your God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes with which I charge you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:
 16 "Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the country.
  30 "You shall betroth a wife, but another man will violate her; you shall build a house, but you will not live in it; you shall plant a vineyard, but you will not use its fruit.
 41 "You shall have sons and daughters but they will not be yours, for they will go into captivity.
 53 "Then you shall eat the offspring of your own body, the flesh of your sons and of your daughters whom the LORD your God has given you, during the siege and the distress by which your enemy will oppress you.
 63 "It shall come about that as the LORD delighted over you to prosper you, and multiply you, so the LORD will delight over you to make you perish and destroy you; and you will be torn from the land where you are entering to possess it.

Notice, the bible teaches not only that God's curses will cause men to rape women (v. 30) children to be kidnapped by sick-minded pagans (v. 41), parents to cannibalize their own children (v. 53), but that God would be just as "delighted" to cause these curses to happen, as he is "delighted" to give prosperity to those who obey him (v. 63).

One fundamentalist breathed an ill-advised sigh of relieft by pointing out that nothing in the context indicates that God said this, it was only Moses doing the speaking.

I asked him which other statements Moses made about God, that this fundamentalist thinks are wrong.  He disappeared.

I can at least buy the notion that God hurts his kids in an effort to punish them or teach them, even if we today are enlightened and know that kids don't need to be abused to be disciplined.

What I cannot buy is that a god can be "good" while "delighting" to cause women who disobey the 10 commandments, to be raped.  Worse, v. 63 intentionally defines God's delight in inflicting such curses, as being the same type of "delight" he has to prosper those who obey him.  So if you think God is gleeful, happy and cheerful to grant you prosperity, you cannot subtract those emotions from him when you speak about him causing rape, kidnapping and parental cannibalism.

When you think of an ancient Hebrew woman being raped, you didn't envision God standing next to her and "delighting" to watch it, until just now, did you!

God's "delight" to cause rape rationally warrants the atheist to say "fuck you" to your bible religion and do more productive things like smashing beer cans on his forehead.

Who would you rather have babysit your kids?  Some spiritually dead dork who smashes beer cans on his head?

Or some bible-believing inerrantist who seriously thinks there are times when it can be good and moral to be happy cheerful and "delighted" to cause women to be raped, children to be kidnapped and parents to eat their kids?

Tough question, eh?  You need to weigh your pride against the obvious stupidity of allowing sadistic lunatics to babysit your kids, you cannot just suddenly give up your faith of 30 years, can you?

Go ahead, check all the Christian commentaries you please.  Let me know when you find exegetical and contextual argument that God's "delight" in v. 63 in inflicting such curses is something other than the happy gleeful cheerful "delight" this verse says he takes in prospering other people.

And if you are really stupid and insist that this is just Moses speaking with typical semitic exaggeration, let me know the critiera you use to figure out which extremist statements in the bible are mere exaggeration and rhetoric.

The Psalms magnify God and extoll his goodness like no other book in the world.  Are this book's extremist statements about God's eternal goodness also a case of mere Semitic exaggeration?  If not, why not?  Where is your sociological evidence that the only time ANE peoples exaggerated about their god, was when they were describing his wrath?

This is my reply to J. Warner Wallace's article:

 Why Would a Good God Behave So Badly?  

Posted: 16 Jun 2017 04:00 AM PDT

I have many unbelieving friends who laugh when I claim the God of the Bible is both all-powerful and all-loving. As they read through the Old Testament, they point to a variety of passages and episodes where God seems to be anything but loving. They cite passages, for example, where God seems to command the pillaging and killing of Israel’s enemies with great brutality.

they should have pointed out the passages where God specifies that he will take "joy" in causing men to rape women, and causing parents to eat their own children, such as:

 15 "But it shall come about, if you do not obey the LORD your God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes with which I charge you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:

 16 "Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the country.

 30 "You shall betroth a wife, but another man will violate her; you shall build a house, but you will not live in it; you shall plant a vineyard, but you will not use its fruit.

 53 "Then you shall eat the offspring of your own body, the flesh of your sons and of your daughters whom the LORD your God has given you, during the siege and the distress by which your enemy will oppress you.

63 "It shall come about that as the LORD delighted over you to prosper you, and multiply you, so the LORD will delight over you to make you perish and destroy you; and you will be torn from the land where you are entering to possess it. (Deut. 28:15-63 NAU)

 "Delight" in both cases is the same word, whether in Hebrew or Lxx, so you won't be escaping this one on linguistic grounds.  And good luck finding a Christian commentary that provides any argument that might favor your position.  Indeed, if God really meant his threats to inflict horrific torments, to be taken seriously, then he does indeed delight to inflict such things no less than he delights to prosper those who obey.

 How can a God who would command the brutal destruction of Israel’s enemies be called moral or loving?

Easy, he isn't moral or loving in the modern American sense, he's only moral and loving in the ancient Semitic sense.

It’s easy for us to judge the words and actions of God as if He were just another human, subject to an objective standard transcending Him. But when we judge God’s actions in this way, we are ignoring His unique authority and power.

Not really, god admits in Genesis 6:6-7 he sometimes regrets his own decisions, so with precedent like that, you cannot dismiss the possibility that god is such an asshole in the OT because that was back when he had less moral maturity.  I don't believe in biblical inerrancy, so I couldn't care less that you can find another bible verse that says God is infinitely wise.  Inerrancy is so disputed even among spiritually alive people, that spiritually dead people are smart to dismiss it as speculative, and refuse to use it as tool of interpretation, and therefore, to insist we can know what Genesis 6 means without reconciling it with everything else in the bible.

While great work has been done by Paul Copan (Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God), describing the proper context of these passages in the Old Testament,

I've already refuted them; their exegesis of 1st Samuel 15 (where King Saul is dispossessed by God precisely because Saul did not completely destroy the kids as the ban had required) is foolish, and completely ignores the reason why those kids were ordered killed:  their great-great-great-great grandfather Amalek had attacked the last of the Israelites as they exodused from Egypt, an event that took place more than 400 years before Saul's time.  That is, the reason that current generation of Amalekite kids was ordered slaughtered is not because they were obstinately holding on to parts of the promised land God wished to give to Israel, but because they were corporately guilty of an ancestor's sin.  In which case they wouldn't stop deserving death merely because they fled the land. 

and by Clay Jones (Killing the Canaanites: A Response to the New Atheism’s “Divine Genocide” Claims), describing the view God held toward the sin of Israel’s neighbors,

"Genocide" merely muddies the waters.  The problem is that this god gives every appearance of thinking his plan for Israel to go around killing off pagans is his "best" plan, when in fact he could have achieved his goal without causing children to suffer, by waving his magic wand. And his employment of an imperfect plan argues there is no god to discuss, this is just godless ancient Hebrews who are mischaracterizing their military strategies as if they were commands of God.  NOthing more significant than the modern fundie who justifies his bombing of an abortion clinic by saying "God told me to do it".

I would like to add the following observations about the nature of God as we consider His actions in the Old Testament:  God is the Greatest Artist If you and I were in an art class together and I suddenly grew frustrated with my sketch and decided to destroy it, you wouldn’t complain in the least.

That's because destroying inanimate objects doesn't create suffering of live creatures. 

If I stepped over to your easel and destroyed your sketch, however, you would certainly complain that I was doing something unjust. You see, the artist has the authority and right to destroy his or her own work.

You also have the right to burn all of your house and possession to the ground as long as you don't do it for a criminal or illegal reason.  But if you did that once per year, people would still conclude, with rational justification, that you were crazy, despite the fact that you had the "right" to do it. 

The art belongs to the artist.

And according to Genesis 6:6, the artist often screws up.  It could very well be that God today, if he exists, thinks similarly to Genesis 6:6, that is, that he regrets having been such an asshole in the OT.  Once again, that bible verse and its likely meaning will not go away just because you presuppose bible inerrancy as a hermeneutic, and you think we need to reconcile Genesis 6:6 with the rest of the bible.  Bible inerrancy, for reasons already staed, does not deserve to be exalted in our mind to the status of governing hermeneutic.  Therefore, you cannot get rid of the imperfect God that verse tells about, by smothering it with something else in the bible.  And even if bible inerrancy were true, you don't know whether Genesis 6:6 should be interpreted in the light of other bible verses, or if the other bible verses declaring God infinitely wise, need to be interpreted and delimited in the light of Genesis 6:6.

If there is a God, all of creation is His handiwork. He has the right to create and destroy what is His, even when this destruction may seem unfair to the artwork itself.

Exactly why there is no rational reasoning with Islamic extremists.  YOU might not think it fair to be injured in a suicide bombing, but Allah does.  So there's no rational reasoning with you, your religious belief becomes more important to you that common sense once you get to thinking God wanted something done a certain way.

  God is the Greatest Physician If you or I suffered a snake bite on our elbow and were miles from the nearest hospital, a doctor might advise us (over the phone) to tourniquet the arm to save our life. In doing so, we would surely sacrifice an otherwise healthy hand to prevent the venom from spreading to our heart. But the doctor understands that this drastic action is required to prevent our death.

That's because the doctor is not an all-powerful genie who can cure us with a wave of his magic wand.  Your God is.  Now back to your "his-ways-are-mysterious" excuses.

You and I might not agree with the plan, or like the outcome, but the doctor knows best.

 But the doctor of Genesis 6:6-7 admits to regretting his own decisions, so it's far from rock solid that because God is God, his choices are beyond criticism.

The treatment plan belongs to the doctor. If there is a God, all of us are His patients. He has the wisdom and authority to treat us as He sees fit, even when we might not be able to understand the overarching danger we face if drastic action isn’t taken.

Such as when a little girl dies from an STD she got due to an adult man raping her.  The truth is that your god has far more in common with fairy tales than reality, the arguments for God's existence are less than convincing and suffer the fatal religious language objection, and for these reasons, we are rationally justified to limit how often we entertain your trifling excuses, as often as we are justified to limit the extent to which we entertain Mormon apologetics. But clearly, you aren't arguing to convince skeptics, you are building your argument on presuppositions you share with other Christians.

  God is the Greatest Savior If you and I live as though our mortal lives are all we have, we’ll often become frustrated that our lives seem to be filled with pain and injustice.

Too many Christians have complained that their lives seems to be filled with pain and injustice, for you to pretend that becoming a Christian will fix that attitude.

But the Christian Worldview describes human existence as eternal.

Unfortunately, the OT contains statements that cannot be reconciled with that idea, according to other spiritually alive orthodox people such as 7th Day Adventists, which means you are a fool to expect spiritually dead atheists to figure out who is right in this in-house Christian debate.

We have a life beyond the grave.

Not if the best that can be argued toward that end is J.P. Moreland's ridiculous The Soul: How We Know It's Real and Why It Matters.

We live for more than 80 or 90 years; we live forever, either with God in Heaven, or separated from God for all eternity. If there is a God, He is certainly more concerned about our eternal existence than He is about our mortal comfort.

If he was as concerned about our eternal well-being as you say, he'd likely be doing ALL that he could to save us, not just the minimal bit he says is sufficient to compel faith.  When our kids are drowning, we don't do what we think is minimally sufficient to save them, we do all that we can until we either save them, or find that our best efforts weren't good enough.  I don't ask you whether God thinks He's done what is "sufficient" to make the gospel believable.  I ask you whether God is doing his "best" to make the gospel believable.  Could God have provided more convincing evidence than what 2,000 years of church history gave us?  He apparently doesn't mind violating freewill, how blown away do you suppose the Israelites were when they saw the wall of water on either side as they passed through the parted Red Sea?  God is NOT doing his "best" to convince unbelievers, hence, he is less concerned with saving unbelievers than you say.   And quit pretending that your view is "the" Christian view.  5-Point Calvinists quickly insist that God never wished to save those who end up in hell.

His plans are grander than our plans. His eternal desires are greater than our mortal desires.

They are also occassionally errant, Genesis 6:6-7, and the "anthropomorphism" interpretation cannot be sustained by anything in the grammar, immediate context, or larger context, hence such interpretation is likely false.

 If there is a God, He is more concerned about saving us for eternity than He is about making our mortal lives safe.

Spiritually alive Christians known as Calvinists refuse to classify all unbelievers as loved by God, the way you do.  Don't expect spiritually dead atheists to correctly figure out which of you got it right.

  Christians understand that there have been times in the history of humanity when God’s chosen people (those who placed their trust in Him) were in great eternal spiritual jeopardy from those who surrounded them. God understood the risk as the Great Physician and often prescribed drastic action to cut off the threat.

He could have used his telepathic tractor beam powers and stirred the hearts of whoever he wished away from whatever sinful goal they were trying to achieve.  God has that kind of power according to Ezekiel 38:4.

God had the authority as the Great Artist to destroy what was His in the first place,

And as noted before, if you employ your "right" to destroy your stuff too many times, most people will conclude, with rational justification, that you have mental problems.  So god's having the "right" to destroy his people, doesn't insulate him from a justified charge of being the sadistic lunatic he is.  Deut. 28:63 

and He also had the wisdom and compassion as the Great Savior to do what was necessary to protect the eternal spiritual life of His creation.

Then he failed, since he could very easily have made the gospel far more believable in past centuries, to those who rejected it and apparently went to hell, and he could have achieved that goal without violating their freewill...unless you think a jury's freewill is violated when the prosecutor's evidence is absolutely unassailable?

If God failed to act in these situations, we would hardly call him all-powerful and all-loving.

There's plenty of biblical passages that cannot be reconciled with the others that teach God is all-powerful and all-loving.  God can defeat wooden chariots but not iron chariots in Judges 1:19 (inerrantists are forced to read their speculations into the text in order to "reconcile" this with other bible passages nabout God's omnipotence, and yet you shall not add to his word, Proverbs 30:6.  And I don't care what you say, burning your daughter alive because she had premarital sex (Lev. 21:9), or putting children to death by burning because they helped their father steal a wedge of gold (Joshua 7:15) has about as much chance of being reconciled with any rational understanding of love, as beating them to death does.