My reply to J. Warner Wallace on the gospels as hearsay

This is my reply to an email I received from J. Warner Wallace on October 28, 2023, on the issue of the gospel and "hearsay"?

Are the Gospels Unreliable Hearsay?

Objection:  Confused question.  Hearsay is not "unreliable" by definition.  It is rather a claim to knowledge that is based on another person's assertions of fact.  Lots of hearsay is no doubt true.  But the reason the Courts generally forbid hearsay and require testimony to be based on personal first-hand knowledge is because hearsay increases the probability of jury-misleading far more than Courts feel comfortable allowing.  There are also many exceptions to the hear-say exclusion rule, which again shows that hearsay is not definitionally false stuff.  Unfortunately for apologists, they never justify why they pretend that the rules governing evidence in a modern American court case are the rules bible readers "should" apply to the bible's historical claims. 

Some critics attempt to undermine the reliability of the gospel writers as eyewitnesses,

Most Christian scholars think Mark is the earliest gospel.  They also agree that Mark's long ending is forgery.  Therefore today's unbeliever is manifestly reasonable to infer that the earliest gospel did not contain a resurrection appearance narrative.  Most Christian scholars say Matthew and Luke depended extensively on Mark's text.  So we can be reasonable again to infer that their two resurrection appearance narratives constitute "embellishment".  All attempts to get Mark to somehow admit the risen Christ was seen by others, are not so powerful as to render the skeptical position unreasonable.  Mark's refusal to even mention the virgin birth despite his agenda to prove Jesus was the Son of God, likewise makes us justifiably suspicious that the VB story likely didn't exist until after Mark wrote, since if it existed before Mark wrote, Mark likely would have known about it, and he would hardly have "chosen to exclude" this apparently convincing proof, when in fact all patristic sources agree that his purpose was to exactly repeat previously established Christian truth.  If then Peter was Mark's source, then we raise the spectre of either a) Peter not knowing Jesus was virgin born, or b) Peter of it but thought it false, or c) Peter knew of it but never communicated it to Mark.

The Matthew-author's resurrection narrative refers to the 11 apostles in the third person.  It doesn't matter if one of those apostles could possibly have later reasonably chosen to refer to his own group in the third person, what zealous apologists intentionally forget is that referring to one's own group in the third person is not typical or usual.  If YOU were part of the group you describe as experiencing something, and YOU intend for the reader to take your claims as "eyewitness testimony", we have the perfect right to a) expect that you'll refer to your group in the first person plural ("us", and "we"), and b) not expect you to refer to your own group solely in the third person plural ("they" and "them").  And yet, Matthew was supposed to be a tax-collector, committing apologists to the propositioin that this apostle knew exactly who to word an account so that it properly claims personal knowledge.  He would also have known that some sort of identifying mark was necessary to tie the testifying party to their staements, yet nothing in the history of Matthew's gospel or its manuscripts expresses or implied he ever signed his own alleged testimony, even though the need for a signature or personal touch was paramount in the opinion of other Holy Spirit filled people who were addressing people they previously conversed with (2nd Thess. 3:17).

while others seek to have this testimony “tossed out” as unreliable “hearsay” before it can even be evaluated.

But since the mere existence of the gospels today does not obligate anybody to give a shit about them, smarter skeptics, like me, take the third position that there is nothing to "toss out" in the first place.  The writings of Homer exist...does this obligate us to either deal with them or toss them out?  No.  But regardless, my arguments allow you all the authentic apostolic gospel authorship you want, and allow you to date them to less than 6 months after Jesus died...and I would still prove that those who reject Jesus' resurrection are reasonable to do so.  So don't think the justification for skepticism forces us to resort to hearsay objections.  Far from it.

They argue the gospel accounts fail to meet the judicial standard we require of eyewitnesses in criminal cases.

They would be correct, but again, you've never justified applying modern American criminal law principles to the gospels in the first place.  What exactly do you recommend an atheist do with a Mormon who has failed to make their case?  Keep asking?  Or walk away? 

Witnesses must be present in court for their testimony to be considered in a criminal trial.

Which is one reason why your marketing gimmick of applying modern American criminal court rules to the gospels is absurd.

And it wouldn't matter if you could resurrect Matthew and put him on the witness stand today, most Christians who specialize in actual scholarship as opposed to "apologetics" refuse to credit Matthew with any specific narrative or Christ-saying in the gospel attributed to Matthew, thus we are reasonable to say Matthew is not responsible for the text we call canonical Matthew.  If you read a Christian commentary and notice a statement to the effect of "Matthew authored everything in this gospel", you KNOW you are reading the work of a fundamentalist who is more concerned about apologetics than about scholarship...which is perfectly sufficient to justify tossing the commentary in the garbage.  If you don't trifle to the person who recently received Jesus that just because a skeptical book gets something wrong doesn't justify tossing the entire book, then you cannot trifle to a skeptic that just because a fundamentalist book got something wrong doesn't justify tossing the entire book. 

But regardless, my attack on Jesus' resurrection is so powerful, I don't need to waste time trying to distance Matthew from that gospel.  I could allow his authorship solely for the sake of argument and I'd still be perfectly reasonable and academically rigorous to call the author a liar about Jesus' resurrection.  Yes, I'm well aware of how incapable you are of providing any compelling biblical or patristic evidence that any apostle continued to preach despite seriously believing doing so would likely result in their death.  Goodbye to that piece of dogshit called "martyrdom apologetic".  What screws the patristic evidence is the biblical proofs that the post-resurrection apostles were unwilling to die.

This often presents a problem for me as cold-case detective.

And the problem would disappear just as soon as you stop anachronistically applying a modern American evidentiary standard to a 2000 year old religious book, fool. 

I have a few unsolved cases because key witnesses died and are unavailable to testify in court. Though these witnesses may have described their observations to a friend or family member, I can’t summon these “second level” witnesses into court, as their testimony would be considered “hearsay.”

Then it is your problem that this American criminal evidentiary standard you wish to apply to the gospels (i.e., "Cold Case Christianity") has a standard that would render the gospels inadmissible.  But since marketing gimmicks and word-wrangling are your specialty, I'm sure this wouldn't bother you in the least. 

The statements of friends or family members would be inadmissible because the original witness would not be available for cross-examination or evaluation.

Oh, so did you suddenly discover that certain traits of the modern American criminal evidentiary standard are not good to apply to 2000 year old religious documents?

This exclusion of hearsay testimony from secondary witnesses is reasonable in criminal trials; as a society, we believe “it is better that ten guilty persons escape … than that one innocent suffer.” For this reason, we’ve created a rigorous (and sometimes difficult) legal standard for eyewitnesses.

So did you suddenly discover that certain traits of the modern American criminal evidentiary standard are not good to apply to 2000 year old religious documents?  Or did God tell you that only certain parts of such standard would "apply to" ancient religious documents?

If our spiritual destiny is more important that our earthly circumstances, then the evidentiary standard we apply to spiritual stuff should be even MORE rigorous, since in spiritual matters, getting something wrong can possibly result in eternal conscious torment in the afterworld, which is far worse than merely spending a lifetime in an earthly jail.  And yet Wallace doesn't have the first clue how to draw up evidentiary criteria for spiritual matters where the criteria are more rigorous than those applicable to earthly legal criminal cases.  I guess we have some sort of obligation to bow our heads and acquiesce to the desperate fools who insist that we, who are taking the entire risk of hell, "should" be satisfied with less than perfectly authenticated evidence, even though getting some spiritual bullshit wrong carries far graver consequences that if we were to get some earthly bit of criminal evidence wrong. 

But this standard is simply too much to require of historical eyewitness testimony.

So did you suddenly discover that certain traits of the modern American criminal evidentiary standard shouldn't be applied to 2000 year old religious documents?  Or did God tell you that only certain parts of such standard would "apply to" ancient religious documents?  If you can't justify that standard from the bible, wouldn't that mean your standard has less authority than a biblically necessitated answer?  How obligated are we to believe Jesus was a man?  How obligated are we to believe apostle Thomas was martyred?

If historical testimony is dictating what one must do to avoid spiritual prison, it isn't up to Wallace to decide what should be considered a sufficiently rigorous standard...it's up to the individual person how rigorous the standard must be.  When its MY ass on the line, you don't decide what "should" suffice for me, I do.  If my standard seems too high in your opinion, I don't exactly experience nightmares merely because another imperfect person disagreed with me.

The vast majority of historical events must be evaluated despite the fact the eyewitnesses are now dead and cannot come into court to testify.

Where are you getting that from?  What rule of historiography even gets near telling anybody that they "must" evaluate historical events?  Your apologetics desperation is starting to show.

The eyewitnesses who observed the crafting and signing of the constitution of the United States are lost to us.

A loss that inflicts great damage, since the Courts, like Christianity, have subsequently interpreted the Constitution in a progressive way that departs from the original intention of the fathers, just like modern Christianity departs from the intent of the original biblical authors, or so seems to be the battle cry we hear when equally authentically born again Trinitarians point the finger of heresy at each other. 

Those who witnessed the life of Abraham Lincoln are also lost to us.

And nothing "requires" any adult to care, except for those adults who wish to teach U.S. History.  The modern American who is completely apathetic toward Abe Lincoln is doing nothing unreasonable.

It’s one thing to require eyewitness cross-examination on a case that may condemn a defendant to the gas chamber; it’s another thing to hold history up to such an unreasonable necessity.

And it's another thing to tell an unbeliever that they "should" be satisfied with a less-than-perfect authentication standard for testimony that allegedly has the power to cause them irreversible eternal conscious torment...something much worse than merely a false criminal conviction on earth.  That higher standard for spiritual matters might make your apologetics case impossible to make, but that higher standard remains reasonable nontheless.  Reasonableness isn't limited to whatever supports Cristian apologists.  Reasonableness might possibly be found in something that makes Christian apologists hate their jobs.

If we require this standard for historical accounts, be prepared to jettison everything you think you know about the past.

I'm not seeing the downside.  Ignoring ancient history is about as dangerous as ignoring a jelly stain in a landfill.  When you can prove that any biblical bullshit "applies to us today" (mission impossible), you can talk to me further about the risks of ignoring ancient history.

Nothing can be known about history if live eyewitnesses are the only reliable witnesses we can consult.

And why should anybody outside of historians and Christian apologists give a fuck what might have happened 2000 years ago?  You can't show that anything in the bible "applies to us today". 

If this were the case, we could know nothing with certainty beyond two or three living generations, including two or three living generations of your own family.

That's not a problem for anybody except those who do ancient history as a hobby or job, and and problem for Christians who realize there is no Holy Spirit in the first place, and so their case for Christ really does evaporate once the historical evidence is justifiably marginalized.

Learn more about the nature of eyewitness testimony in the new, updated and expanded version of Cold-Case Christianity.

Shame on you for trying to draw away Christians from their Sola Scriptura security blankets.  If they are serious that the bible "alone" is "sufficient" for faith and practice, that means they don't need J. Warner Wallace's marketing gimmicks anymore than the 4th century church fathers did.

My response to Bellator Christi on bible inerrancy

 See 

https://bellatorchristi.com/2023/10/26/s7e8-inerrancy-does-it-matter/

In case my post gets deleted, here's a screenshot proving the post was made, followed by the actual text:

Text:

What I offer here is not proof that you are unreasonable, but that Christians who reject bible inerrancy are reasonable.

First, I have't studied your own views enough to detect what you think about this, but I will assume that you think inerrancy arises either naturally or logically, or both, from divine inspiration, on the grounds that "god cannot lie" (i.e., Geisler-flavored inerrantism, i,e., "The bible is God's word, God cannot err, therefore the bible cannot err".). So your problem is in explaining why you think the mere fact that the author is "divinely inspired" somehow necessitates that whatever he wrote during such inspiration, was inerrant. You cannot deny that the author of Revelation was divinely inspired, and yet it was WHILE he was divinely inspired that he committed the capital offense of idolatry twice, with the angel rebuking it as a sin that is to be avoided (19:10, 22:8). So if somebody wanted to stay open to the possibility that other NT authors engaged in acts of sin/imperfection while they were in the process of writing the text of their NT books, you could not rationally insist that this is completely out of the question.

Second, if you deny Geisler's version of inerrancy, then you have a version of inerrancy that is far less clearly "biblical", which might require that you stop characterizing as unreasonable those Christians who think inerrancy is modern day Phariseeism.

Third, you cannot theologically separate inerrancy from divine inspiration. You would never say that maybe Romans could be inerrant while also lacking divine inspiration. Since your position views divine inspiration as necessary to biblical inerrancy:

1 - What bible verse or verses most strongly support(s) the divine inspiration of the NT? To make things easy, feel free to provide your proofs in the same order as the order of the NT canon: Proof that Matthew is divinely inspired, proof that Mark is divinely inspired, etc. The less clear the divine inspiration of NT books is, the less unreasonable will be those who reject NT inerrancy. And yet something tells me that when you meet another Trinitarian Christian who denies biblical inerrancy, you think they are not presently experiencing all of the spiritual growth potential that god has made possible for them to presently experience.

2 - Is your inerrancy-favoring interpretation of those NT verses so clear and compelling that those who disagree with you on the point must be unreasonable to so disagree? Or could disagreement with you on the point possibly be reasonable?

3 - Most conservative and fundamentalist churches have a statement of doctrines they consider "essential to salvation", very few of them express or imply that belief in the inerrancy of the NT is essential to salvation. That is an awful lot of spiritually alive people who are failing to notice how crucial the inerrancy of the NT is, reasonably suggesting their view does not arise from ignorance, but from the non-existence of the doctrine in the first place. This renders the outsider reasonable to conclude that rejection of NT inerrancy iis not anymore unreasonable than is rejection of Preterism.

4 - Could a Christian do absolutely everything which Jesus in the 4 canonical gospels required of them, while sincerely believing the whole time that the doctrine of NT inerrancy is false? I say yes, their trust that the 4 gospels correctly convey Jesus' commands, does not demand they assent to gospel-inerrancy, only that they assent to the historical reliability of the gospels. As as I'm sure you are aware, most Christian apologists insist that belief in bible inerrancy is by no means necessary before a person can be reasonable to say Jesus' resurrection is the one theory that best explains the NT evidence..

I'm not saying inerrantists are unreasonable. I'm merely saying those who reject NT inerrancy can be reasonable to do so. Contrary to popular belief, reasonableness for one group does not dictate the limits of reasonableness for another group. And yet the humble attitude that says your opponent could possibly be equally as reasonable as you, is not only nowhere allowed in NT theology, but is explicitly condemned by Paul who seems to think that disagreement with him automatically justifies anathematizing the opponent (Gal. 1:6-9), or insisting that they "know nothing", and worse (1st Tim. 6:3, Titus 3:9-11). That is, if you refuse to become an intolerant bigot in your theological views, you are willfully disobeying apostle Paul's demand that you imitate him (1st Cor. 11:1).

If spiritually alive people cannot even agree on such spiritual things, you can hardly expect spiritually dead people, like me, to manifest more accurate discernment of such spiritual things.

Hope that helps.

==================end

J. Warner Wallace warns against Christians being "teachers" likely because he knows it will create controversy and interest

 This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Stop Teaching Young Christians About Their Faith

By J. Warner Wallace, Published3 days ago

In a prior post, I summarized the studies and publications that describe the flight of young people from the Church. A compelling cumulative circumstantial case can be made to support the fact that young college aged Christians are walking away from Christianity in record numbers. What can we do about it? What can be done?

Blame it on God.  God could have given them a road-to-Damascus experience like he did with Saul who wasn't even a Christian at the time, but very anti-Christian (Acts 9, 22, 26).  If such a spectacle succeeded with such a violent anti-Christian, such experience has even more likelihood of persuading when the people to be convinced are already Christians.  When God doesn't do his best, it demonstrates real limitations of his love.  Just like if you could have saved a drowning child by putting more effort into it, but you solely by choice refrained from exercising all of your ability to save the child, this necessarily implies there was a limit to the amount of love you had for that child.

When you trifle that maybe God knew better than us, then you are admitting that the reason God doesn't do anything about young people leaving the church is because he knows what's best.  If God isn't doing his best to prevent young people from leaving the church, you cannot be more godly than to follow God's lead.  NO, you are not following God's lead with your apologetics bullshit.  In the bible, God's "leading" of somebody caused them to speak infallibly...that's how you got your inerrant bible, remember?  Having fun trying to show anything in the bible saying God in the last days will only inspire his followers to a less intensive extent than he did the original followers.  it doesn't exist.  Therefore, if in fact you carry on Christianity without possessing infallible teaching authority, we have to seriously consider that this is because God wants unbelievers to classify you as a heretic.

Whenever people ask me this question, I always say the same thing. STOP TEACHING YOUNG CHRISTIANS. Just stop it. Whatever Christendom is doing in its effort to teach it’s young, the effort appears to largely be a failure.

Is this the part where the atheist reminds you that god's ways are mysterious, and if you can survive a debate with a "well maybe god....", so can the anthesit?  Like, maybe God is working great wonders through the youth in the church of today, but for his own sovereign mysterious reasons, he doesn't want you to detect it?  How is that any less persuasive than "well maybe god has a sovereign mysterious purpose for allowing evil and we just can't see it yet"? 

In fact, Ken Ham (in his book, Already Gone:Why Your Kids Will Quit Church and What You Can Do To Stop It) found that young Christians who faithfully attended Bible classes were actually more likely to question the authority of Scripture, more likely to defend the legality of abortion, same-sex marriage, and premarital sex, and more likely to leave the church! What’s going on here? I think I know. It’s time to stop teaching our young people; it’s time to start training them. There’s a difference between teaching and training. Training is teaching in preparation for a battle. Boxers train for upcoming fights. In fact, boxers are sometimes known to get fat and lazy until the next fight is scheduled. Once the date has been signed, fighters begin to train in earnest. Why? Because they know that they are going to eventually get in the ring and face an aggressive opponent. We train when we know we are about to encounter a battle. Imagine for a moment that you are enrolled in an algebra class. If the teacher assured you that you would never, ever be required to take a test, and that you would pass the class regardless of your level of understanding, how hard do you think you would study? How deeply do you think you would come to understand the material? How committed do you think you would be to the material? The problem we have in the Church today is not that we lack good teachers. There are many excellent teachers in the Church. The problem is that none of these teachers are scheduling battles.

Then none of those teachers are filled with the Holy Spirit, a perfect reason for atheists to generalize that such teachers are too suspect to justify listening to them on any biblical subject, including evangelism.

Make no mistake about it, there are battles looming for each and every young Christian in the Church today, but church leaders are not involved in the scheduling of these battles.

Because they are not filled with the Holy Spirit, a perfect reason for unbelievers to steer entirely clear of them.  If they cannot even know what God wants them to do with young Christians, we are reasonable to avoid trifling about what they do know, and to view them with enough suspicion to justify absolute apathy toward every other bit of biblical bullshit they spout.  Did Paul ever tell anybody to avoid the parts of a heretic's theology that are wrong, and to pay attention to those parts that are correct?  no.  if they are heretics, they are to be ENTIRELY disregarded, regardless of whether some of their teachings are "correct".  A lot of things Mormons teach about the bible are correct...would you suggest that people disregard the Mormons entirely?  Or would you recommend they put forward effort to disregard Mormon errors and only pay attention to Mormon truth? 

The battles are waiting for our sons and daughters when they get to University (or enter the secular workplace). The Church needs to be in the business of scheduling battles and training our young people for these battles.

Wow, J. Warner Wallace wants young spiritually immature Christians to train for "battle"?  Doesn't your religion teach that spiritually immature people are not supposed to directly battle the devil?  You've shown multiple times that you have no more of the Holy Spirit than any Roman Catholic, and yet you are going to train spiritually immature people for spiritual battle?  LOL. 

Teaching without a planned battle is little more than “blah, blah blah.”

Then Paul's epistle to the Corinthians was "blah blah blah" because not only did he refuse to train them for battle, he was determined to know nothing among them except Christ and him crucified.  1st Cor. 2:1-2.  Knowing nothing but Jesus and him crucified does not constitute "battle teacher".  And yet the fucking fool also told them how to more properly present themselves when manifesting spiritual gifts (ch. 14), never dreaming for a single second that the fact that they were presenting themselves improperly during this Voodoo was a good argument that the Holy Spirit had nothing to do with their manifestations in the first place.

This is the problem with traditional Sunday School programs.

Then unbelievers have been reasonable every single time they denied an invitation to attend a traditional Sunday School.  What fool would trifle that merely because they err about battle doesn't necessarily mean they err about salvation?  It is not  your prerogative to decide what an unbeliever should be satisfied with.  If the unbeliever is unwilling to take any chances on a Christian who manifests no in-filling of the Spirit, that does not represent unreasonableness on her part, that is YOUR problem.  You can refute this argument when you take a razor and slice out of your bible all of those bigoted paranoid statements about how perilously risky it is to become a Christian (viz. you might get a nasty surprise on judgment day, Matt. 7:22-23; just because you start out converting to Paul's gospel is not the slightest guarantee against God cursing you in the future for denying the true gospel (Gal. 1:6-9).  No infallibility? No obligation to give a fuck.

They are often well-intended, informative and powerfully delivered. But they are impotent, because our young people have no sense of urgency or necessity.

Did Jesus exhibit a sense of urgency or necessity when he reclined in that chair as the center of attention at the party Levi threw for him (Matt. 9:10)?  Probably not.   Your hype that Christians need to push evangelism and apologetics as urgent is every bit as much of the marketing gimmick today as it was for any fool preaching the same in the NT.

There is no planned battle looming on the horizon and the battle of University life is simply too far away to be palpable. It’s time to address the problem not with our classes but with our calendar. It’s time to start scheduling battles so our teaching becomes training. Years ago, as a youth pastor, I started taking annual trips to Salt Lake City and Berkeley. Why? I was scheduling theological and philosophical battles to help prepare my young Christians for the larger looming battle they would someday face on their own.

Then why have you put so much effort into avoiding the challenges that skeptics like myself have been confronting you with for years?  Let me know when you are ready to engage with me in a debate just as live as those debates you now claim to have attended in Salt Lake City.  You've deleted my responses for so many years, you know perfectly well who I am and how to get a hold of me.   So accept this battle-challenge, or shut the fuck up, you duplicitous pussy.

If you want to teach your young people theology, there is no better method than to put them in direct contact with people who believe in a very sophisticated heresy.

And if you want to test the skills and knowledge of your chosen apologetics teacher, there is no better method than to put them in direct contact with skeptics who have been challenging such apologists for years. 

Mormons use the same terminology as Christians but deny the basic tenants of our faith.

And Arminians use the same terminology as Calvinists (freewill, divine sovereignty, atonement, preservation, etc) but deny the basic tenants of Calvinism.  You will never explain how it is that somebody could be filled with the Holy Spirit sufficiently to be "saved" but at the same also lack the Spirit sufficiently to remain deceived about such important doctrines as Jesus' atonement and God's sovereignty. 

And you couldn't justify "essential doctrine" from the bible anyway.  Neither Jesus, nor Paul, nor any NT author, expressed or implied that belief in several doctrines were "essential to salvation".  That is merely the by-product of the canonization of the NT, therefore, your "essential doctrine" doctrine is no less an exercise in elevating human tradition to the level of scripture, than Roman Catholicism is. 

In order to dialogue with Mormons effectively, we first have to understand what we believe.

If you were filled with the Holy Spirit, you wouldn't have to understand:

 19 "But when they hand you over, do not worry about how or what you are to say; for it will be given you in that hour what you are to say.

 20 "For it is not you who speak, but it is the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you. (Matt. 10:19-20 NAU)

Was that intended only for first century Christians?  Gee, I wonder how many other teaching of Jesus he did not intend to be mirrored by modern Christians?  How crooked of a road will we encounter if we start trying to answer that question?  Or did I forget that doctrinal division in the body of Christ on what Jesus meant with his sayings, is no more significant to you than division in the church on how to make pancakes?

 Or maybe you suddenly discovered that 1st Cor. 14:25 is false?  Gee, how will Wallace ever correctly balance the magical fantasyland of the 1st century with the undeniably naturalistic reality of the 21st century?  Jesus not only told his original followers to perform miracles as part of their evangelism efforts (Matthew 10:8), he also said future believers were to obey everything he had commanded of the original disciples (28:20).  So because you have never raised the dead nor done a single miracle in your entire life, I have solid biblical basis to say it's probably because God is refusing to bless your efforts (which implies you are a false teacher), or this whole bible-fronting lifestyle is total bullshit.  

No, there is nothing in the NT clearly and unequivocally asserting that in the last days, God will pour out his Spirit upon true believers to a lesser extent than he did the original believers.  You merely speculate otherwise because such speculation is the only basis you have to 'explain' why it is that nobody today can do what the bible says the original disciples did.  And Paul's speculations about "when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part will be done away" do not bother me in the least:  the fact that he was far less clear than he could have been tells me he intended this solely for the originally intended recipients, and you will NEVER make a convincing case that anything in the NT "applies to us today".  FUCK YOU. 

When we train young people in preparation for an evangelism trip to Salt Lake City, we give meaning and purpose to the content of our teaching. In a similar way, our evangelistic trips to Berkeley (where we contact notable atheist speakers and atheist groups on campus) require us to prepare ourselves to answer the myriad of atheistic objections we will inevitably encounter.

Except that you've never even bothered to try answering ME.  I have more powerful arguments against your religion than you'd normally get from college atheists.  Put up or shut up. 

Once again, the content of our teaching in preparation for this trip takes on purpose and meaning when we know the level of our understanding will eventually be tested. If we want to do our young people a service, we need to stop teaching them. It’s time to start scheduling battles so we can turn teaching into training.

What would you say to the Christian couple who want their 6 year old daughter to perform exorcisms?  Wouldn't that qualify as "training"?   or did you suddenly discover that your absolutist language is errant, and there are plenty of exceptions where teaching without training would be preferable?

CLICK TO TWEET These trips are not easy, but they are essential.

No, nothing in the bible requires Christians to take their children to battles with unbelievers.  Fool. 

They require us, as leaders, to become good apologists.

Then you need to step down, because your "apologetics" are laughably weak, as I've demonstrated countless times at this blog. 

They require us, as pastors, to prioritize our calendars to make room for the trip and for the important training that will take place for months prior to the trips.

Can you produce a New Testament verse that tells pastors to take their followers to secular learning centers to train them for battle?  No.  YOU are the heretic.  You cannot manifest miracles, yet you still want 1st century Christianity to be true and applicable in this modern age, when the bible has absolutely nothing to say about whether Christianity would remain binding upon people 1900 years after the first century.   

One last thing; I’ve learned the importance of this approach first-hand.

It doesn't matter, your approach contravenes the biblical model.  What you found in your own experience does not have biblical authority. 

My first year as a youth pastor was perhaps my toughest. As a former designer with a strong interest in the arts, I spent my first year focusing on the artistic nature of the Sunday gathering. I incorporated music, video, art and drama to create compelling Sunday experiences that were more entertainment than content.

Then your level of spiritual immaturity was so great, we'd be reasonable to say its probably because you had never gotten "saved" in the first place. 

The kids who graduated from my ministry that first year were not prepared for what they encountered in college and all but one walked away from their faith. This impacted the way I did ministry from that time on. I began to schedule battles and train young people for these important tests. I don’t think I’ve lost a student since.

You don't have the first clue how many of those who read your Cold Case Christianity crap subsequently fell away from the faith.  But my exposure of the weakness of your apologetics suggests there were probably thousands.  Your repackaging of the "historical reliability of the NT" stuff is nothing but marketing scam run amok, just like your "crime scene" stuff that never answers the question of what makes you think Jesus or Paul wanted their religions to continue applying to people after the 1st century, a question you cannot answer with the bible.  And if you tried to answer it with some NT "prophecy" you think is coming true today, I'd sic the Christian "preterists" on you, and presto, whether any biblical "prophecy" predicted anything happening today, is yet another division in the body of Christ. 

If we want to do our young people a service, we need to stop teaching them.

You are a false teacher.  The bible could not be clearer that the job of the Christian pastor is to "teach":

1 Tim. 3:2  An overseer, then, must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, prudent, respectable, hospitable, able to teach,

1 Tim. 4:11  Prescribe and teach these things.

1 Tim. 6:2  Those who have believers as their masters must not be disrespectful to them because they are brethren, but must serve them all the more, because those who partake of the benefit are believers and beloved. Teach and preach these principles.

2 Tim. 2:2  The things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.

2 Tim. 2:24  The Lord's bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged,

Heb. 5:12  For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food.

-------------

Your insistence on ceasing to teach and starting to train overlooks and denies the reality spoken of in Hebrews 5:12, that some Christians have fallen behind in their knowledge and must be taught again.  Since they fell behind, they are not spiritually prepared for "battle", so that this verse is forbidding the readers from "training" such immature believers.

It’s time to start scheduling battles so we can turn teaching into training.

And you couldn't produce a NT verse to justify that methodology, to save your life, you scheming mass-marketing heretic.  Why don't we find Paul scheduling battles for his churches to participate in? Are you a liberal who thinks Paul should have scheduled the Galatians to do battle with the Judaizers rather than merely "teach" the Galatians through an epistle?  FOOL.

The NT authors whom you believe wrote infallibly, have never done anything for the church after the first century except "teach", and yet you, despite denying you yourself possess infallible teaching authority, demand that your followers do better than the NT authors did?  FUCK YOU. 

For more information about strategies to help you teach Christian worldview to the next generation, please read So the Next Generation Will Know: Training Young Christians in a Challenging World.

Yeah, because the Holy Spirit's work in the mind of the sincere authentically born again person who is reading the bible,  is not enough.  But try to remember that although my books are not the bible, still, you "need" them.  And remember, your "needing" my books doesn't conflict with your sola scriptura belief that the bible is ALONE sufficient for faith and practice. 

This book teaches parents, youth pastors and Christian educators practical, accessible strategies and principles they can employ to teach the youngest Christians the truth of Christianity.

Because as we all know, not only is the bible the word of a God who always honors his promise to enlighten his true followers, but the bible is also "perspicuous" or clear, meaning, if we are true followers, we can determine what a bible verse means without purchasing the bells and whistles of fools who explicitly disclaim infallible teaching authority...like J. Warner Wallace.

The book is accompanied by an eight-session So the Next Generation Will Know DVD Set (and Participant’s Guide) to help individuals or small groups examine the evidence and make the case.

Because as we all know, not only is the bible the word of a God who always honors his promise to enlighten his true followers, but the bible is also "perspicuous" or clear, meaning, if we are true followers, we can determine what a bible verse means without purchasing the bells and whistles of fools who explicitly disclaim infallible teaching authority...like J. Warner Wallace. 

WRITTEN BYJ. Warner Wallace J. Warner Wallace is a Dateline featured cold-case homicide detective, popular national speaker and best-selling author.

Which can only be a testament that most of today's Christians are abysmally ignorant.  Just like the more popular Benny Hinn is, the more embarrassment to Christianity.

 He continues to consult on cold-case investigations while serving as a Senior Fellow at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He is also an Adj. Professor of Christian Apologetics at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, and a faculty member at Summit Ministries. He holds a BA in Design (from CSULB), an MA in Architecture (from UCLA), and an MA in Theological Studies (from Gateway Seminary).

And despite all of that fancy knowledge, he cannot produce a single bible verse to support the premise that God thinks it legitimate for one of his true followers to try to beef up their teaching authority with references to how they graduated from formal Christian institutions. In the first century, the best learning institution was the original apostles who walked and talked with Jesus...but Paul explicitly disclaimed he had obtained a single thing from them, and in the same verse discounted the significance of their authority. Gal. 2:6.  While fundagelical commentators insist Paul likely obtain plenty of gospel info from the earlier apostles, it remains a problem for them that Paul never actually comes right out and admits that he depended on them for any gospel knowledge.

The basic dishonesty of Jeff Durbin and Apologia Church

Jeff Durbin is a 5-point Calvinist apologist who co-pastors a church with Dr. James White.  Durbin also has a YouTube channel, Apologia Studios, and operates the https://apologiastudios.com website.

For years I've been posting comments on the videos Jeff Durbin uploads to YouTube.  Since I'm usually signed in, I always see my previous comments.  No issue.

Then one day I signed out, then went back to the comments, and suddenly, all of my comments from the past few years were gone.  Apparently, YouTube stupidly wants people who are signed in, to have the impression their comments are still present even if in fact the channel-operator has deleted them.  You have to sign out of your email and YouTube accounts, then go back and look, before you notice that the prior comments were deleted in the past.

My posted criticisms of Durbin have never alleged any falsehood about Durbin, they merely point out how Durbin is both incorrect and hypocritical in so many ways despite his natural propensity toward dogmatism.

I am therefore reasonable to conclude that if anybody thinks Durbin is a great apologist, its because he does a consistent job of destroying the evidence indicating how very deceived he is.

Gee, how easy would it be to look smart if you were always  destroying proof that other people were criticizing you?

What if I had a YouTube channel, posted many videos critical of Christianity, and none of the thousands of comments was significantly critical because I constantly delete the criticisms I cannot answer?

Would you continue to rave about how smart of a counter-apologist I am?  I'm guessing "no".

My objections to Lisa Cooper and Christian Research Institute about Sandy Hook and theodicy

This is my reply to an article in the CRI Journal entitled

School Shootings and the Problem of Evil

(Was God at Sandy Hook that day?)

Lisa Cooper, Article ID: JAF1422, Apr 3, 2023

To give a Christian apologetic response to school shootings, it is important to address the problem of evil. How is it possible that a perfectly good God who is in control over all things would allow such heinous acts of violence carried out against innocent children?

Easy: you redefine "good" so that it no longer precludes acts that it normally precludes when used in typical everyday speech.  Making us wonder what criteria you use to decide when typical everyday speech is and isn't sufficient to meaningfully discuss "god".

Of first importance is the philosophical answer to this question. By focusing on the well-received argument put forth by Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga concerning mankind’s free will to do both good and evil, it becomes evident that God can be good even though evil exists.

So apparently Lisa wants us to side with her against Calvinism....when we know that Calvinism v. Arminianism is one of Christianity's more pernicious in-house debates. 

This response, however, does not always reach people who are hurting.

If quoting a bible verse to a grieving person doesn't help them, blame it on God, who often boasts that his word is powerful and sufficient.  Really now, what is the Holy Spirit doing when you quote Romans 9:20 to a grieving mother who responds to her son's murder by questioning god's goodness?  Is the Holy Spirit NOT using that word of God for his own glory?  If he is, then the failure of a bible quote to calm the grieving parents of murdered children probably has less to do with 'wisdom' and more to do with "bible quotes are nothing but hot air in the first place". 

Christian philosopher Angus Menuge offers an existential response to the problem of evil. He uses Jesus’ death on the Cross as a starting point, showing that God knows what it means to have a child die,

He should, God is the one who killed his own son by his own "hand":

 27 "For truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel,

 28 to do whatever Your hand and Your purpose predestined to occur. (Acts 4:27-28 NAU)

Lisa continues: 

and Jesus, having died for us,

except that Christian Calvinists deny that Jesus died for absolutely all sinners...a point which causes non-Calvinist Christians to deny the Calvinist god's goodness...something us unbelievers can exploit.

has suffered every pain we as humans could suffer in this life.

False, there is no evidence that Jesus ever suffered the pain of losing a biological child or being divorced by a spouse that suddenly became unloving, or became paralyzed from the neck down in an accident and then had to endure the next 50 years of his life experiencing severe depression at his inability to move,  and experiencing the guilt of becoming a significant burden on those who took care of him. 

Further, a biblical approach to suffering

What about unbelievers who don't accept the doctrine of full biblical inerrancy?  Can they correctly interpret a bible verse about God's morality without worrying about whether that interpretation harmonizes with everything else in the bible? 

reveals that, in the midst of all of this pain, God works all things together for the good of those who love Him (Rom. 8:28), even when we receive no direct answer about how this happens.

You know it's true because "the bible says".  My heart is already skipping from the great sense of guilt I have about my sin. 

It is true that our suffering conforms us to the image of Christ.

The hope of the hopeless.  One wonders what orientalisms about morality in the NT would have been different if life in the 1st century hadn't been as rough on Christians as it was.

While we live this side of heaven, we identify with Jesus in His suffering. When He comes again, we will identify with His resurrected and glorified self — perfect and sinless, without sadness or suffering, and forevermore participating in the Son’s holy and loving relationship with the Father.

What about preterism, you know, the eschatological doctrine that says Jesus completed his second coming before the close of the 1st century?  How long does God want me to compare your futurist eschatology with Christian historicist eschatology, before He will start expecting me to discover which one is the truth?  Would John the Revelator agree with most conservative Trinitarian inerrantists of today that his words about the eschaton constitute non-essential theology?  Wow, he sure seemed all fired up about the whole business.

Therefore, in ministering to those affected by gun violence, we are called to a ministry of patient listening and faithful presence.

Would you be exercising patience by informing them that God in Deuteronomy 32:39 and Job 14:5 takes personal responsibility for all human murder?  How would the Holy Spirit use your references to these texts to further His intentions toward the grieving survivors? 

We simply should not try to present fully formed analytical answers to those who are lamenting the loss of a child. What we can do is be present in the day-to-day wrestling, listening to them in their distress, and pointing them to how Jesus has already-but-not-yet accomplished the end of suffering.

"already-but-not-yet"?  I don't think hitting the grieving parents of murdered children with theological contradiction is the best way to "minister" to them.  Perhaps that's because I'm an unbeliever and I don't recognize any force in the "god's ways are mysterious" excuse?

When the news of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, was posted on my Facebook account, I was eight months pregnant with my first son. Having grown up in the town next to Newtown, I knew those streets; I knew that parking lot; I knew some of the people in that community. I sat at my laptop, aghast at the live feed.

Aghast at God performing his will (Job 14:5)?  How could something you are supposed to pray for ("thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven") be something you were 'aghast' at?  Maybe I didn't notice that CRI is so anti-Calvinist that they take the Arminian approach absolutely for granted? 

Aerial views of the school, panicked parents searching the crowds for their kids, kids’ faces flushed red from crying; it was all too much to take in.

Perhaps you are spiritually immature to pray that God perform his will, then find it too much to take when you God starts answering that prayer? 

I kept reminding myself to breathe. All the while, a phrase repeated in my mind: “How can I bring a child into this world?”
People can be so utterly evil. How can I allow this child to exist in a world where sin has so infected people that a twenty-year-old man could think it was a good idea to murder first his own mother and then as many children as he could before turning the gun on himself?

You can't, because you are a good person.  So the only way "god" could allow it is if you redefine "good" so that it doesn't preclude acts that it normally would preclude in typical daily conversation.  Remember:  God must always be a special exception to the rules...that's the only hope you have of salvaging any theodicy.

In the news since that horrific day, December 14, 2012, we see murder after murder, school shooting after school shooting. Educators are heard relaying hiding tactics to news reporters, while others have died protecting students, having used their bodies as human shields.1 According to the K–12 School Shooting Database, since January of 2013, the month following the Sandy Hook shootings, there have been 328 incidents of gun violence on school premises. Not all of these incidents involved an active shooter, but in the active shooter incidents, there have been 132 injuries and fatalities including the shooter, with a whopping 92 of those taking place from 2018 to now.

Then why don't you praise God for acting like God and deciding for himself when it is time to terminate a person's earthly life?  Could it be that there will always be a contradiction between your mammalian desire to preserve life, and your more philosophy that says some higher being is always good whenever he kills anybody?

And yet I, along with the historic Christian church, have the audacity to believe in a sovereign God who rules over all of this? Even more outrageous, I call this sovereign God good!

"Outrageous" is correct.   But in reality the issue is not that you are foolish to call such a bloody god "good", but rather whether unbelievers can be reasonable to say such a god is evil.

First, the philosophical question must be addressed: how can God be good if evil like this exists?

I prefer to first ensure we are talking about a real god before we start wading into the muddy waters of what he is like.  That's how I fuck up most Christian apologists.  If I refuse to discuss the traits of the toothfairy until I am sure she exists, I'm reasonable.  Nothing about the bible's existence imposes the slightest obligation to either refute it or agree with it. 

Next, the practical issue: how can Christians bring the gospel to those who have been affected by school shootings?

In other words, how can we manipulate the grieving surviving family members of murdered children so that these tragedies become opportunities to promote our religion? 

The problem of evil consistently has been an issue for apologetics and evangelism. In America, however, due to the rise in school shootings in recent years, it has become a politically charged national conversation. As time goes on, with each incident, more people have connections to these shootings, and so these attacks have started reaching us on a personal level.

Just tell yourself that the god who takes personal responsibility for causing all murder (Job 14:5) is "trying" to reach those people on a personal level.  Problem solved.  Spiritually mature people always happily praise god when he works his will in the world, since to become upset at what god is doing would contradict the witness of the Holy Spirit, correct? 

In the years since the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, I have known two people directly who have been the targets of random gun violence, and four more indirectly (relatives or friends of friends). For me, as for many, unjustified evil has become a serious philosophical prohibition to the spreading of the gospel in our culture.

Then you aren't remembering who you are or what you believe.  Your biblical world view does not allow you to believe in "unjustified" evil.  See Deut. 32:39 and Job 14:5.  If some crazy person walks into an elementary school and shoots dead several kids, your theology does not call this unjustified evil.  Your theology says "God is calling them home". 

Nonbelievers, rather than merely considering whether or not God exists, are now asking whether or not God is simply absent, woefully neglectful, or even overtly evil.

But because the bible says God is "good", there is potential to reasonably conclude that no "good" god would allow such evils, therefore, god may exist, but the biblical description of him is wrong therefore he cannot possibly exist as described. 

And now, due to the prevalence of these shootings, even people who have not been tied personally to an injury or death caused by a school shooting are asking these questions. Christians must be prepared to engage both abstract questions about the nature of God and to practice practical evangelism with tact, proper listening, and continued care.

"Christians must be prepared"?  Where are you getting that from?  I see nothing in the NT indicating anything therein "applies to us today".  Shall I wade through in-house Christian debates on which parts of the NT do and don't apply in 2023 (eschatology, dispensationalism, theonomy)?  If so, what source imposes any moral, spiritual or intellectual obligation on me to so wade?  And how do you know that source is talking about anybody living in the year 2023?

THE PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM OF EVIL
If God were truly all-knowing (omniscient), truly everywhere (omnipresent), truly powerful (omnipotent), and truly good (omnibenevolent), why would He not intervene and stop these shootings from happening?

Just tell yourself that "goodness" for god isn't always the same as "goodness" for human beings, and presto, behold the magic that can be achieved by simply defining a problem out of existence. 

He could part the clouds and strike the gunman dead. He could have caused the gunman never to have been born. He could have created a universe in which this shooting did not occur. But He didn’t.

The toothfairy also didn't do anything to stop those murders.  Maybe the toothfairy's ways are higher than our ways? 

He gave us these children, and then He let these precious children die.

Because he wanted them to die (Deut. 32:39, Job 14:5), and you are forced to concede that every act of God is "good".  Sounds like your problem, not mine, it's not even near a problem for unbelievers.  Your only possible explanation would be that God has the right to take life as he chooses, but the fact that such answer is comforting to you doesn't dictate that it be reasonable for unbelievers.

The Logical Problem of Evil
In response to the question of evil and suffering in this world, the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga demonstrates in his book God, Freedom, and Evil that there is no logical contradiction in saying that God is good while evil persists. The set of three propositions, “(1) God is omnipotent; (2) God is wholly good; and (3) Evil exists,” is neither explicitly nor implicitly contradictory. 

Sure, if you define "goodness" for God different from how you define "goodness" for human beings.  But all that would prove is that if you give a lawyer long enough, he can turn night into day by clever use of words.  We do not presuppose that "god" exists, nor that he is "good", nor that his alleged power suddenly renders his maximally wise in everything he does.  We interpret Genesis 6:5-6 literally as opposed to your non-literal and knee-jerk reactionary "anthropomorphic" interpretation, which is necessitated by absolutely nothing but a need to make that passage harmonize with everything else in the bible in the name of inerrancy.  We have atheist philosophers who insist your three propositions do result in contradiction.  See J. L. Mackie, "Evil and Omnipotence," Mind, New Series, Vol. 64, No. 254. (Apr., 1955), pp. 200-212.

What’s more, Plantinga sets forth a Free Will Defense, which negates any supposed inconsistency between the aforementioned set of propositions, and shows that any world with significantly free creatures necessarily has potential for those creatures to choose evil. He contends, “A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all.”

Except that there are two biblical paradigms that show that your god could have actually achieved a sinless world full of sinners, i.e., the world is not full of sin because we are sinners, its full of sin because God merely wants it to be that way when he doesn't "need" it to be that way:

a) Numbers 23:26, God causes the pagan prophet Balaam to refrain from cursing Israel, and since it is biblical, however that happened must surely be harmoninous with God's ideas about the need for human freedom.  Therefore if your god is all-powerful, he could similarly prevent similarly unbelieving people today from sinning.

b) Did God take away somebody's freewill in Daniel 4:33?  If I did to you all that was necessary to cause you to start doing what that king did after being cursed by god, would most Christians say I took away your freewill?

c)  In Ezekiel 38:4 and other passages before chap. 40, God's level of sovereignty over the wills of unbelievers is taught with the metaphor that says God puts hooks in their jaws and turns them around.  The mental image of a fisherman forcing a fish into the boat against its will after hooking it, is perfectly consistent with the apparent intention of the metaphor.  

Should you start balking that ancient Semitic people typically exaggerated for rhetorical effect, you throw into question most conservative Evangelical, Reformed and Catholic beliefs about God, each of which rest upon a decidedly literal interpretation of a theological statement in the bible.  If the book of Revelation says God is "omnipotent", is that literally true, or is that just an ancient Semitic exaggerated way of saying God has massive power? 

Other philosophers attack Plantinga's Freewill Defense.  See Justin Ykema, A Critique of the Free Will Defense A Comprehensive Look at Alvin Plantinga’s Solution To the Problem of Evil.

Through his Free Will Defense, Plantinga does not seek to give an explanation of God’s motives behind allowing the suffering or evil that He allows.

Then Plantinga leaves open the logical possibility that "god" has morally bad motives. 

Rather, Plantinga works to find a logical ground for why God does not necessitate only morally upright actions from the people He created.

Good luck finding anything in the bible to support the view that "God does not necessitate only morally upright actions from the people He created."  When you find a bible verse that says God asked anybody to do morally evil things, let me know how you felt about converting to Calvinism. 

In addition to this, he shows that it is logically consistent that those evil actions chosen by significantly free creatures do not reflect the will of God who created them, for, “He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.”

Then how does Plantinga explain God forestalling moral evil, such as Numbers 23, the case of pagan prophet Balaam, whom God restrained from cursing Israel?  Maybe all Christian commentators are wrong, and Balaam's willingness to say whatever YHWH wanted is because he was a true follower of YHWH?  Then what could possibly have made Balak think Balaam was a good candidate for cursing God?  Did Balak go to the wrong tent?

Surely in some Christian circles, Plantinga’s emphasis on significantly free moral action would be considered problematic.

What is the Holy Spirit doing as he flutters above the head of the sincerely praying Calvinist?  Is the Holy Spirit "trying" to make the Calvinist see the light, but the divine intent is held back by Calvinist stupidity?

Or maybe you'd say the divine is held back by the Calvinist's unwillingness to see truth?

Gee, what fool Christian couldn't hurl that accusation at another to account for heresy? 

Luther, for example would say that in matters of faith, no moral action that merits salvation can be done outside of faith in Christ; however, he would affirm that moral action can be done spontaneously in terms of civil action. Plantinga makes no such distinction. The theological concerns here do not undermine the significance of the logical argument that Plantinga puts forth. In showing that God, being good, can exist and rule over a creation in which evil exists, he is not making a systematic theological argument but rather a logical one.

Sure, but if God has mysterious higher good reasons for allowing evil, then it becomes problematic to continue characterizing the evil in question as "evil".  Do we ignore the good that an "evil" brought about, and insist it is still fully evil, merely because of philosophical necessity?  Or only because modern democracy demands that we refrain from reclassifying certain "evils" as good?  Is the murder of a child evil because it breaks a biblical commandment?  Or good because it is God who caused it (Deut. 32:39)?  What would Dr. Frank Turek think of the fool who said the murder of a child is both good and bad depending on whether the perspective is divine or human?  Wouldn't he jump out of his moral absolutist skin and insist that god thinks the murder is evil too? 

Indeed, even atheist philosophers concede that Plantinga solved the logical problem of evil, showing that there just is no logical inconsistency between orthodox theism and the facts of evil and suffering we experience in the world.

But the problem of moral subjectivity and relativism comes to stay permanently just as soon as you say "An act can be evil for us to do, but can be good for God to do".  When we say child-rape is "evil", we usually don't mean "from our perspective", we mean it is absolutely evil period.

 

However, Plantinga acknowledges that his Free Will Defense is not the appropriate response to offer people in the midst of suffering. In the case of real-life evil, misery, and hardship, he calls one to seek pastoral care, not philosophical explanations.

And pastoral care cannot be more spiritual than to quote the bible in an effort to justify god at all costs. 

GOD’S SON WAS MURDERED

Then because it was God's "hand" that caused people to kill Jesus (Acts 4:27), that makes God guilty of murder no less than the truthful statement that it was your "hand" that caused somebody else to murder.  What fool would say "My hand caused that person to commit murder, but I am not responsible for that murder"?

The existential approach put forth by Christian philosopher Angus Menuge in his article “Gratuitous Evil and a God of Love” is centered on the coming of Jesus Christ in history to suffer for us.

Then it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion, and is worthy only for the flames. 

Menuge argues that discussion of the problem of suffering begins and ends with the person and work of Jesus Christ on the Cross, for “Christ is God’s answer to the problem of evil” (emphasis added).

Except that smart people don't care about a person's attributes, until they become convinced that the person is actually real.  Except in the case of parents who explain tooth-fairies to toddlers.  And the case of Christians who jump at any chance to "show" that their concept of God is free from internal conflict.  And the case of atheists who might be in the mood to toy with apologists.

 

He explains that the problem of evil affects all of our hearts and minds, and “since evil is an immersive, existential condition, God answers by actions of love” (emphasis in original). The answer is therefore not abstract but utterly real, historical, and is revealed in the bloody God-man, Jesus Christ, suffering and dying for us on the Cross.

Hot air.  Dismissed.

God knows what it is like to have His Son die unjustly.

So?  How could it matter that it is possible for God to sympathize with us, when he is the one inflicting all the misery (Deut. 28:15-63?  How could it matter that a man sympathizes with a kidnapped child...if that man is the kidnapper? 

Jesus suffered the pain of a brutal death on the Cross. This is the difference between the Christian God and other gods: God came down from heaven and endured the pain of this world in order to save His creatures from eternal death — the very creatures at whose hands He would die.

Hot air.  Dismissed.

 

This can offer profound comfort for those who have suffered the loss of a child to gun violence, or for those of us who suffer from the anguish of seeing another suffer. The kind of anguish we face in this life is not foreign to God, and suffering is precisely the means by which God accomplished salvation for us.

Mormonism has an excellent track record of providing comfort to those who are grieving. So apparently, the ability of the sophistry to provide "comfort" does precisely nothing to justify pretending the comforting words are "true".

THE NOW AND THE NOT YET

Scripture speaks to the problems of suffering, pain, and premature death, but it even more robustly offers eschatological hope.

So do the Jehovah's Witnesses. 

When discussing the nature of our lives here on Earth, this side of heaven, the distinction between the now and the not yet is imperative. It is true that Jesus died on the Cross to reconcile us, to rescue us, to forgive us, and bring us into union with God; and it is true that those who believe enjoy some of these benefits now, but not to their full extent. The faithful must wait for Jesus’ return to receive them in full.

You just alienated all Christian preterists from the body of Christ.

Life in the now is characterized by suffering. We have been united to Christ in His suffering, not only in that He has suffered on our behalf but that we also, like Christ, cannot escape suffering in this world. Through suffering, furthermore, we are being molded and shaped to be more like Jesus.

Hot air, dismissed. 

However, we must be careful not to assure people of some assumed moral improvement as a result of suffering. In speaking to a parent of a child who had been murdered, we cannot approach them with, “Take heart! God is making you better,” or some such platitude.

Then you disagree with most Christian apologists who rely on God's mysterious good higher purposes to explain evil.   

Menuge condemns this, saying, “When God allows his creatures to suffer, it is not primarily because he has calculated some moral improvement that he can achieve for this life (although that may happen), but because he ‘desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth’ (1 Tim. 2:4).”

Then according to the reasoning of Menuge and apparently yourself, when God allows a little girl to be raped to death, it is because God ‘desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth’ (1 Tim. 2:4).”  Nice going.

Jesus says, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matt. 16:24). The Christian cannot choose his or her cross. “He must leave that to God (1 Pet. 3:17; 1:6), for God alone knows which cross is beneficial and only God gives the strength needed to bear the cross (1 Cor. 10:13).”15 Our understanding is limited (Isa. 55:8–9).

Does God give the strength the little girl needs to endure a rape that ends with her hemorrhaging to death?  If so, what would such a rape situation look like if God had not given her such strength?  Would she have died the second the man threw her on the bed?

We cannot fathom why God has allowed us to endure the specific suffering that we must face.

Sure we can:  God is equally as pleased to inflict rape, kidnapping and parental cannibalism on disobedient people, as he is pleased to inflict prosperity on obedient people.  Deuteronomy 28:15-63, see esp. v. 63, the "delight" is the same in both cases.

 

We are not called to know the intricacies of what God is doing, but we are called to trust Him.

But if the guy in charge is killing people, his followers will either demand to know the intricacies, or they will quit following him.  Is this the part where you tell me that God is always the special exception?

 

And, in that vein, we can trust that God is working all things together for the good of those who love Him (Rom. 8:28).  However, Scripture shows us that the sufferings we endure are for us a promise of the eternal glory awaiting us, and assurance of our union with Christ (Rom. 8:17). Jesus, in His Revelation to John, explains that God Himself will dwell with His people in glory, and that “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:3–4). In glory, we too will be glorified. In glory, there will be no more fear of premature death, no more concern to protect our children from violence, and no more mourning.

If you are going to quote the bible to make a point, why waste space with an article?  The bible says God is good, righteous and holy, so shouldn't that be the sufficient answer to anybody's problem with evil? 

EVANGELISM IN A TIME OF DESPAIR

Various philosophical approaches to the problem of evil can and will be entertained by our minds as we consider the impact of school shootings and whether or not God, being infinite in love and knowledge and power, could allow them to happen.

You forgot about another option.  Truth doesn't limit us to giving an answer that will help somebody reconcile reality with their religion.  It doesn't matter if God exists, the only way the "good" god of the bible and real evil could exists is if you redefine "good" so as to allow for crimes that we normally don't allow to be possible with any "good" (i.e., you will redefine "good" solely for the sake of ensuring there's no contradiction between your god and the reality of evil). 

But, there is a point where these approaches wax silent, and ministry begins. There is a moment you find yourself in a conversation about how gun violence in schools has affected a person’s own mind, soul, and spirit.

Sure, it was God, causing the gunman to kill the kids, so it was God who wanted to affect the minds, souls and spirits of the survivors.  Deut. 32:39.

I skip the rest of the article because it is nothing but preaching to the choir.  Lisa's article does nothing to render unreasonable the unbelievers who explain evil by God's non-existence, his apathy, or his evil desire to hurt people.

Update on "Does your God approve of sex within adult-child marriages?"

I've been publicly attacking the biblical inerrancy doctrine since 2003.  The vast majority of inerrantists presume that the bible-god views pedophilia as a sin.  So to attack that view, I've been arguing for the last 20 years that this understandably popular doctrine has no support in the Mosaic Law.  The inference, that Christians seek to avoid like the plague, is that God doesn't condemn sex within adult-child marriages as sin, because he doesn't think such activity is sinful in the first place.  The whole notion that god thinks an act to be sin, but has nowhere plainly declared so, is theologically problematic.

The attack comes mostly in the form of arguing that Numbers 31:18 is not merely authorizing Hebrew soldiers to use underage girls as "house servants", it is also authorizing Hebrew soldiers to both marry and sexually consummate such marriage to such underage girls (i.e., sex within adult-child marriages, i.e, pedophilia).

17 "Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately.

 18 "But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves.  (Num. 31:17-18 NAU)

As you can imagine, Christian apologists have for more than 20 years been hitting me with everything they can possibly think of to justify their tendency to create god in their own modern western democratic image, in their effort to show that by some strange coincidence, the Old Testament YHWH just happens to hate pedophilia equally as much as today's Americans do.

The link-fixes that appear below are some of my reasons why such attempts to avoid biblical moral disaster fail, and therefore, my view (that YHWH had, in the days of Moses, approved of sex within adult-child marriages), remains reasonable.

These arguments do not prove that Christians are wrong in how they interpret the bible.  The arguments only show that us atheists/skeptics can be reasonable to interpret the bible the way we do. That is, these arguments refute the Christians who characterize my view as "unreasonable".  They may hate that view, but they are absolutely paralyzed from proving it to be unreasonable.  None of my views arise from improper exegesis.  Thus they are forced to say the view is reasonable no matter how distasteful or religiously incorrect they think it is.

If you disagree, then your job is not to show that I'm "wrong" (because I don't claim I'm right), your job is rather to show that my arguments fail to establish the reasonableness of the interpretation I advocate.  That's a much more difficult goal to reach, for daily reality tells us we can possibly be reasonable even if wrong.  Only a stupid fool insists that everytime somebody gets something wrong, it is because their method of truth-seeking, if any, was unreasonable.  No, sometimes we make innocent mistakes.  

Reasonableness can arise from accuracy, but it by no means demands accuracy.  Therefore, "you are wrong" is not sufficient to show my views to be unreasonable.  You must show that my exegesis is so poor that no person concerned for truth could possibly condone it.

If you can't do that job, then you must live with the knowledge that yes, at least some atheist bible critics, even if not all of them, can possibly be reasonable to view the biblical YHWH has having approved of sexual relations within adult-child marriages back in the days of Moses.

Does your god approve of pedophilia? Part 1: sin is transgression of God's law

-------In this entry, I argue that Romans 7:7 forbids the notion that we can know sin without the Mosaic law, therefore, if in fact the Mosaic law doesn't clearly condemn pedophilia, then you have no biblical justification for saying God thinks sexual acts within adult-child marriages are sinful.  The truth is that Romans 7:7 is itself false, but as a Christian, you don't have the option of winning the debate that way, you are forever stuck with what Paul meant with his words.

Does your god approve of pedophilia? Part 2: We can know what sin is by our conscience?

------In this entry, I argue that because the bible founds the human conscience upon the Mosaic law, it is reasonable to deny that the OT YHWH thinks "conscience" is a way, independent of Mosaic law, to establish any act as sinful.  Thus if your conscience bothers you when thinking of pedophilia in 2023, we are reasonable to conclude this "pang", even if it came from the NT God, did not come from the OT YHWH.

Does your god approve of pedophilia? Part 3: We can know what sin is by intuition?

----forthcoming

Does your god approve of pedophilia? Part 4: "In non-essentials, liberty"

----In this entry, I argue that if my opponent is the type of Christian who believes in the popular conservative maxim "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, charity", then because the Mosaic Law fails to clearly condemn pedophilia, what a Christian in your congregation thinks God's opinion is concerning sexual relations within adult-child marriages, constitutes nothing more important than a "non-essential".  Thus if a Christian in your church in 2023 thinks God doesn't condemn sexual relations in adult-child marriages, we are reasonable to view you as under an obligation to give that Christian liberty of conscience on the subject, meaning, we are reasonable to condemn you if, because of his viewpoint on the subject, you ever disfellowship or excommunicate him.

Does your god approve of pedophilia? Part 5: God establishes all the secular laws

----forthcoming

Does your God approve of pedophilia? Part 6: God expects Hebrews to use their "common sense"

----In this entry I argue that nothing in the bible indicates God ever expected anybody to use their "common sense" to fill in moral gaps created by omissions in the Mosaic Law.  Thus we are reasonable to presume that silence in the Mosaic Law means silence from YHWH...a god that seems to have a need to condemn nearly everything he sees.

Does your God approve of pedophilia? Part 7: Ezekiel 16 establishes nothing except more apologetics embarrassment

------In this entry I argue that, contrary to the hopes of many apologists, nothing in Ezekiel 16 renders unreasonable my view that the in the days of Moses, YHWH approved of sexual relations within adult-child marriages.

My reply to Jonathon McLatchie on Numbers 31:18 and rape

This is my reply to an article by Dr. Jonathan McLatchie entitled

Does the Bible Support Sexual Slavery? 

An Analysis of Numbers 31:15-18

December 24, 2021

More than two years ago, I participated in a debate in Oxford, England, with atheist YouTuber Alex O’Connor (who goes by the online alias Cosmic Skeptic). The subject was “Why I Am / Am Not a Christian,” which was quite broad. Given the short time constraints of the debate and the breadth of the topic, we were regrettably unable to pursue an explication of our differences with the depth that I would prefer. 

And when I challenged you with a list of possible topics worded in a polite respectful manner, being the very first communication I ever sent to you, you absolutely refused to debate me for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with my ability or inability to significantly challenge you on the merits of your beliefs.  See here.

Nonetheless, I very much appreciated my interaction that evening with O’Connor, including the dinner we enjoyed together before the event.

You enjoyed having dinner with an atheist?  What fellowship hath light with darkness?  And you call yourself a bible-believing Christian?  Then so is John Dominic Crossan.

I have long viewed O’Connor as one of the more philosophically nuanced atheist thinkers, and I have valued our ongoing private discussions subsequent to our initial public dialogue. 

And what about the opinion of those other people in your Calvinist group, like Sye Bruggencate and Jeff Durbin, or their teachers Van Til, Greg Bahnsen and John Frame, who think anything an atheist has to say in defense of any non-Christian tenet is pure blasphemy?  Wow, I didn't know you valued blasphemy.  Or did I forget that Calvinism and presuppositionalism are houses divided no less than Protestantism is?  

My positive argument in the debate concerned the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, while O’Connor focused on moral critiques of the Bible. 

Then such a lopsided debate likely had the convenient effect of allowing one side to avoid having to answer the more difficult questions, while had you both been debating a single solitary proposition, the cross-examination would have been more comprehensive.

In his portion of the cross-examination, O’Connor chose to focus on the issue of slavery in the Old Testament. The last of the texts we discussed was Numbers 31:15-18, which was interpreted by O’Connor to endorse sexual slavery. At the time, this was not an issue that I had researched with great depth, though I recognized it as a difficult text. My preparation for the debate had largely been on the evidences for New Testament reliability, and its epistemic relevance to developing a robust case for the resurrection. I therefore acknowledged it as a difficult text without offering any detailed response. 

If you weren't such a cessationist, you would not have needed time to prepare for the subject matter anymore than would the people Jesus described as puppets in Matthew 10:20.  You worry too much.  Just let go and let God. 

If you are not a cessationist, then why didn't the Holy Spirit do for the unprepared you, what He allegedly did for the apostles when they needed to give answers?  Maybe you didn't pray enough?  Maybe you had secret or unconfessed sin in your life?  Or must I assume, contrary to the NT, that the spiritual world had nothing to do with you being less prepared than you wished to be?

Earlier this week, Alex O’Connor uploaded the clip from our debate, in which this text was discussed, to his Cosmic Clips spin-off channel. I therefore thought it an appropriate time to publish an article offering my current perspective on this difficult text. Here is the passage under discussion (Num 31:15-18):

15 “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he [Moses] asked them. 16 “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.

The first thing to note about this text is that it is not technically God who gives the instructions. Thus, on the worst case scenario, one may interpret this text as being descriptive of Moses’ command, rather than it being an act endorsed by God. Nonetheless, even supposing (as I think is more likely) that Moses’ instruction carries with it God’s approval, I do not believe it to be as problematic as it might appear on first impression.

Good save:  God told Moses to take "full" vengeance on the Midianites (Numbers 31:2), so it was intended to be a genocide.

O’Connor believes that this text gives permission to the Hebrew soldiers to rape Midianite war captives.

He's not going far enough, Numbers 31:18 constitutes Moses' advocating marital pedophilia.  O'Connor didn't hit you as hard as he possibly could have.  You should thank him for having mercy on you.

However, such an interpretation would fly in the face of every piece of clear moral legislation on sexual relations that we have in the Hebrew Bible. 

How do you expect your "scripture interprets scripture" rule to be the least bit impressive or obligatory on an unbeliever who clearly denies biblical inerrancy and biblical consistency?

Do you the juror demand that the prosecutor reconcile all of his theories of the case with everything the suspect said on the witness stand?  No.

There is no universally recognized rule of historiography, hermeneutics or common sense that obligates anybody to presume moral consistency in a text of theocratic rules that allegedly began in somewhere between 1400 b.c. and 650 b.c., the original text of which most scholars think has been altered numerous times over the centuries, with definite anachronisms?  

There is nothing the least bit unreasonable in the unbeliever-hermeneutic that says that on account of the Hebrew texts admitting they fell into idolatry nearly every day, charging them with inconsistent legislation is about as worrisome as charging the Canaanites with inconsistent legislation.

For example, in Deuteronomy 22:23-27:

23 “If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, 24 then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. 25 “But if in the open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. 26 But you shall do nothing to the young woman; she has committed no offense punishable by death. For this case is like that of a man attacking and murdering his neighbor, 27 because he met her in the open country, and though the betrothed young woman cried for help there was no one to rescue her. [emphasis added]

According to this text, the crime of rape is so serious that it is punishable by death.

Your excluding vv. 28-29 was apparently intentional, because it restores the moral depravity you so desperately try to remove:

 28 "If a man finds a girl who is a virgin, who is not engaged, and seizes her and lies with her and they are discovered,

 29 then the man who lay with her shall give to the girl's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall become his wife because he has violated her; he cannot divorce her all his days. (Deut. 22:28-29 NAU)

The moral depravity here is in forcing the rapist to marry the victim, when in fact this particular legislation does not express or imply that the victim is allowed to deny the marriage.  Trinitarian inerrantist scholars explain that v. 28 is also describing the man taking the woman by force, so that the victim in v. 28 was forced to marry the rapist even though she was forced into the sex act:

22:28–29 At first glance the next example, the rape of an unbetrothed girl, might appear to have been a lesser offense than those already described, but this was not the case at all. First, he seized (Heb. tāpaś, “lay hold of”) her and then lay down (šākab) with her, a clear case of violent, coercive behavior.

Merrill, E. H. (2001, c1994). Vol. 4: Deuteronomy (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 305). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

What fool would trifle that the victim of a "clear case of violent, coercive" rape was also somehow "willing"?  I do not argue that Merrill's view is necessarily correct, only that its existence prevents YOU from justifiably accusing my more negative appraisal as unreasonable.

If the woman failed to scream for help when she was in the city and could be heard, the Jewish law viewed the situation as consensual sex rather than rape, since the woman could have cried out for someone to rescue her but didn’t.

A bit of unforgivable stupidity since common sense dictates that the man could either prevent her screaming by muffling her, or threatening her life.

Thus, both parties were guilty. However, if the sexual assault took place in a rural area where the woman had no chance of being heard, the Jewish law gave the woman the benefit of the doubt and she was not to be considered culpable.

Which is also stupid since nothing about the place the sex act occurred would say anything authoritative about whether she was willing.

One might object here that women captured in war were not afforded the same rights as women belonging to the people of Israel, and thus this consideration offers little help with regards to the text of our study. However, the previous chapter in Deuteronomy concerns the rights of women who are captured in war (Deut 21:10-14):

A text that neither expresses nor implies that the woman had any right to refuse the marriage.  You quote as follows:

10 “When you go out to war against your enemies, and the LORD your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, 11 and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, 12 and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. 13 And she shall take off the clothes in which she was captured and shall remain in your house and lament her father and her mother a full month. After that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. 14 But if you no longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she wants. But you shall not sell her for money, nor shall you treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her. [emphasis added]

McLatchie continues:

Therefore, while the Hebrew soldiers were permitted to marry female war captives, they were not permitted to rape them or treat them as slaves.

The "Good News" Translation of v. 14 makes plain that this rite involved rape:

14 Later, if you no longer want her, you are to let her go free. Since you forced her to have intercourse with you, you cannot treat her as a slave and sell her.

See here.  McLatchie continues:

 The woman was also to have a month to mourn the loss of her kin prior to getting married. 

Oh, ok, so if I kidnap your 18 year old daughter and deal with her exactly as Deuteronomy 21:10-14 allowed a Hebrew man to deal with a female war-captive, then you'd conclude I was treating her "right"?

Daniel Block notes, “This monthlong quarantine expresses respect for the woman’s ties to her family of origin and her own psychological and emotional health, providing a cushion from the shock of being torn from her own family.” 

Then that is respect for pagan theology and idolatry, since the woman's family ties would have been formed in idolatrous contexts.  Gee, is tolerance for her family ties what was meant by a Mosaic author whose purpose in killing her family was his intolerance of idolatry?

[1] Indeed, as John Wenham comments, “In a world where there are wars, and therefore prisoners of war, such regulations in fact set a high standard of conduct.” 

Some would say that making her shave her head and remove her clothes merely adds unnecessarily to the humiliation.  Your idea that this is supposed to be a "nice" thing is absurd, and you'd never conclude any such foolishness if somebody kidnapped your 18 year old daughter today and followed out all the permissions and requirements in that passage.  You only make excuses and hem and haw because nobody has subjected YOU to such degredation.

[2] Furthermore, by becoming part of the people of Israel (and possessing full status as a wife), the women would be delivered from pagan idolatry and exposed instead to Israelite religion concerning the true God, thereby having opportunity to attain salvation.

Meaning: we should be amazed at how the Hebrews who killed her family, acted nice to her after kidnapping her and forcing her into a marriage with one of the people who killed her family.  Sorry, I'm not feeling that.  Try again.

The historical context of the war against the Midianites is also important to bear in mind as we evaluate our text. Numbers 31:16 indicates that the Midianite women “were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people.” 

Then we wonder why Moses didn't also kill off the children of the Hebrew soldiers who sinned there, no less than he ordered the killing of the children of the Midianites in Numbers 31:17.  But sometimes, demanding consistency from a dictator is out of step with the barbarisms of the ANE.  My bad.

This is an allusion to Numbers 25:1-9, in which we read of an occasion where the Midianites devised a plot to entice Israel into pagan worship involving making sacrifices to Baal and ritual sex. According to Moses, the Midianite women were among those who “enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord” (Num 31:16). Thus, the women who were permitted to live and marry into Israel (that is, those who had not known man by lying with him) were presumably those who had not been involved in enticing the men of Israel into sexual impurity.

Moses is a hypocrite:  he kills the Midianite babies apparently because he ascribed to some type of corporate-responsibility ethic, but he does NOT kill the babies of the Hebrew men who participated in that sin.  How convenient.

Another consideration, often overlooked in discussions of our text, is that we are not informed what happened to young woman who were brought into the Israelite camp but who did not wish to marry the men who had just slaughtered their kin. 

No, the text that allows the Hebrew soldier to marry the daughter of parents he recently killed, neither expresses nor implies the girl had the least bit of choice in the matter.  If the Hebrews were stupid enough to kill her family, we can hypothesize they were also stupid enough to give her as much say in whether to marry, as they gave to her parents on whether to die.

We can hypothesize that they were forced into it anyway, but we can equally hypothesize that they were allowed to make themselves useful as virgins until such a time as someone more suitable presented himself. 

What fool would seriously tell himself that where women of a cult tempt other men to sin sexually, surely the virgins in that cult couldn't possibly be culpable?  Did the Hebrews think only vaginal intercourse counted as sexual sin?  When Moses spared the women who were still virgins, wasn't he taking a chance that in the spared group were a few virgins who had engaged in forms of sex that leave virginity intact, such as fellatio, cunnilingus, anal sex, i.e.,  participating in the Midianite sin but preserving their virginal status?

If he really was taking a such a chance, how can we be unreasonable to say he was just a stupid gullible dictator without any god to make actual truth known to him?

You also have the option of saying they were not dolts, and the reason they deny culpability to the still virgin girls is because the Hebrews honestly didn't see anal sex, fellatio or cunnilingus as adultery or fornication...but you aren't in the business of making concessions that open the door for today's Christians to fornicate without fornicating, right?

This is simply not stated or even intimated in the text. Thus, if there were women who were averse to being married to an interested Israelite soldier, we just do not know what happened.

If you don't know what happened, you cannot render improbable the possibility that they were forced into the marriage.

Moreover, even if on occasion something bad happened — and there is no reason to deny that sometimes it may have — it is not something we are told was done by command of God.

But if there was any forcing, it would have been justified by appeal to Deuteronomy 21:10-14.  So, Jonathan....do you believe that passage is the inspired inerrant word of God, yes or no?

When Moses gave the requirements as recited in that passage, was God speaking through him, yes or no?

In conclusion, though Numbers 31:13-18 is undoubtedly a difficult text, especially from the vantage point of our twenty-first century western culture, the text becomes, upon closer inspection, significantly less problematic than it appears at first impression. 

You can save your campaign speech until after you have shown the Good News "rape" Translation of Deut. 21:14 to be unreasonable or incorrect.  You highly doubt you'll ever do that, right?

The Pentateuch outlined the rights of female war captives, and they were not allowed to be treated as a slave or sex object.

Those who killed a girl's parents forced her to marry one of the guilty Hebrew soldiers, in a way that wasn't quite as barbaric as would have been allowed in pagan cultures.  Congratulations.  I'm experiencing a heart attack right now because of how guilty I feel about my sin.  Nice job.  Do you have any dust and ashes I could borrow?

The Pentateuch also takes a very negative view of rape.

According to the Good News Translation of Deuteronomy 21:14, God must have intended this rite to result in rape.

Most likely, the women who were spared were not involved in enticing Israel into sexual impurity during the incident at Peor. Finally, we are not informed by the text what the arrangements were for women who did not wish to marry an interested Israelite soldier, and so any suggestion of what may have happened is mere conjecture.

But my conjectures cannot be shown to be unreasonable.  Your assumption that the multiple authors of the Pentateuch were honestly trying to give future readers exactly what Moses wrote, is also mere conjecture.  If the Hebrews were as prone to corruption as every page of the Pentateuch says, we have no reason to pretend their scribes were any exception. 

Footnotes
8 thoughts on “Does the Bible Support Sexual Slavery? An Analysis of Numbers 31:15-18”


JOHN RICHARDS
DECEMBER 24, 2021 AT 12:49 PM

Labelling the Numbers text as ‘difficult’ reveals your point of view – that of a presuppositionist.

I don’t find it at all difficult!

It also reveals your assumption that the Bible is a reliable source of information…
Reply


KEVIN ROSS
DECEMBER 24, 2021 AT 9:57 PM

Of course you don’t find it problematic. Your presuppositions ensure that any misunderstanding of the text remains a live option.
Reply



JMCLATCHIE
DECEMBER 25, 2021 AT 4:18 PM

John Richards: Anyone with a cursory familiarity with my work knows of my staunch opposition to presuppositionalism. Contrary to the insinuation of your comment, it is not an entailment of evidentialism that, for one to be rational in holding a belief, that belief can admit no difficulties.
Reply

-----------------turchisrong replies, April 19, 2023

Then you, McLatchie, must confess that it is possible for an atheist to be rational in holding to atheism, even if atheism presents "difficulties".

============================continuing:

PETER
DECEMBER 24, 2021 AT 2:53 PM

Definitely appreciate addressing this. It really is an uncharitable reading that doesn’t even make sense (e.g. Kill the Canaanite non virgin women and Isrealite men for inappropriate sexual acts, and keep the Virgin women so you can… Do more inappropriate sexual acts!??!?), so it’s nice to see a complete response to it.
Reply


JESSE
JULY 22, 2022 AT 2:00 AM

Remember the sexual idolatry of Balaam’s sin led Israel to experience a plague, for which Moses killed many Israelites, both to punish the sin and to stop the spread of disease. Notice the emphasis on the cleansing rituals to ensure they did not carry back to the camp any plagues; ie STD’s. Sexual idolotry. Orgies. Even with children. Remember these tribes which surrounded Israel were accused of cannibalism and human sacrifice of children as well as incest and bestiality, and archaeological findings do support those claims.
Reply



DAVID MADISON
DECEMBER 26, 2021 AT 10:02 PM

The world in which God revealed Himself was very different from today’s world. It was a world in which warfare was common and the consequences for defeated peoples were often terrible. Marrying the men who had conquered you is not a particularly attractive option but it is better than the alternative. What we often find in the Old Testament is a way of doing things that limits harm.

Atheists are dismissive of this. Their usual response is to ask why God didn’t just come along and impose modern values on the people who lived 3000 years ago. This is remarkably shallow. Life was brutal 3000 years ago. The reason why it was brutal is that this is what human nature is capable of. And it still is. Christianity offers us the hope of deliverance from our corrupt nature but this hope is not something we have any right to expect.
Reply

----------------------------------------turchisrong replies, April 19, 2023

Their usual response is to ask why God didn’t just come along and impose modern values on the people who lived 3000 years ago. This is remarkably shallow. Life was brutal 3000 years ago. The reason why it was brutal is that this is what human nature is capable of. And it still is. 

Then how do you explain God preventing the pagan prophet Balaam from cursing Israel in Numbers 22:38, 23:8, 12?  Wasn't life during Numbers 22 equally as brutal as it was in Numbers 31?

What we find here is that your God has no excuse:  Not only can God prevent pagans from sinning, the fact that he did so at least once proves that he is far more willing to violate human freewill than today's freewiller Christians wish to admit.  

And God can cause pagans to both know his will and obey it even if they are idolaters.  See Ezra 1:1.

So the skeptic is reasonable to say that your god is sadistic:  he clearly does have a viable way of preventing humans from sinning, but no, he prefers to take the route that causes unnecessary misery and bloodshed.  Sort of like the fool who has a choice between drawing money out of his account to pay the rent, or robbing the bank to pay the rent, and he chooses the latter despite the former being entirely sufficient to the purpose.