The other day I attempted to respond on Twitter to some provocative comments from a Rabbi about God and suffering. The Rabbi in question, Mike Harvey, claims to have written a best seller book about conversing with Christians and to be a leading expert on interfaith relations. He didn’t seem too interested in conversations with anyone and definitely not fostering good interfaith links with Christians.
He had started out be stating that people believe three propositions about God, that he is on omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing) and benevolent (good and love). He argued that it is not possible for God to be all three and that if you thought he was then you had never done any critical thinking. So, we aren’t off to a good start, anyone who disagrees with Mike clearly either hasn’t or isn’t capable of thinking. That’s not really inviting us into a conversation.
He then set out a thread of tweets arguing his case. It’s based on a conversation that he had long ago about the bit in Deuteronomy when Moses prepares the people to go into the land and defeat their enemies there. He says that the person he was talking with asked “Why do they have t do all of that, given that God we’ve seen God do great things, win battles, split the sea, etc.” Now, that’s a fantastic question to be asking and should encourage any student of Scripture to dig deeper into the text.
Instead, Mike argues that monotheist belief in a sovereign God came later and that all the evidence of suffering in history, particularly focused on the suffering of the Jewish people is evidence that if God truly is good then he cannot also be sovereign. He then rules out the argument that God’s eternal purposes may be greater than we can understand. Notice that he doesn’t argue for why he disagrees with it, doesn’t offer logic or scripture. He just says that you can’t say that. Again, he has just declared that if you disagree with him, you are stupid.
Well, I challenged him on two things. First, I suggested that his approach of telling everyone that they were stupid if they disagreed with him wasn’t really going to engage them in conversation. It’s not exactly the most winsome of approaches. Then I pointed out that there were a number of things that he hadn’t brought into consideration in his argument. He’d cited one Scripture, suggested it created a problem but then failed to consider how Scripture itself might seek to resolve the issue. I highlighted a couple of passages from the Torah and Prophets that might be pertinent to the discussion.
The response I got was fascinating, if a little disturbing. Mike himself retweeted my comments with a quote to the affect of how dare some Gentile Christian tell him, a Jew and a Rabbi how to read Torah. Then his friends began to join in. Did I not realise who I was talking to? I should be listening to the Rabbi. Of course, he had read all of these texts, he’d read them in Hebrew. Could I say that? As it happens, the answer is that yes I could say that. I have read the relevant texts in Hebrew as have many Jews and Christians before both of us who would take issue with his claims. Mike is essentially promoting one form of liberal Judaism. Apparently though I was arrogant for daring to disagree with him.
Let me pause just there. As I said in a previous post, as a white, middle class male, I don’t tend to experience this kind of online behaviour too often and in person even more rarely. However, for many people, this is what they have to put up with in life on a day to day basis. There was a reliance on race and power to silence me. Perhaps it was good for me to get a taste of that kind of experience because it made me think about what that is like for people who don’t hold power and don’t belong to the right groups.
So, lesson number one is about how we engage with others. As it happens, for a lot of people, listening and learning involves them challenging, offering counter points, debating and arguing. Ironically that is normally part and parcel of the rabbinic approach which is often driven by genuine curiosity and in my experience of discussions with other Jews can be an enjoyable experience. How do we, especially those of us who hold positions of power invite interaction and challenge?
Secondly, in so far as I did have a conversation with him, he was very reluctant to engage with the Scripture passages I mentioned. His arguments were as follows, first that for every Bible passage I offered, he could find one to contradict it. Second, that all of those Scripture passages were written by different authors with different beliefs. Third that they were written over 2000 years ago and were the writings of superstitious iron age people who thought that it rained on the crops if God was pleased with them. So, he claimed that he was interested in logic, not in the views of people living many years ago.
So, in the rest of this article I want to set out the responses back for why we should have engaged with those Bible passages. In a future article, I hope to do what he wouldn’t agree to and have a look at them, plus a couple more suggested by others.
Now, I write and speak as someone who believes in the divine inspiration of Scripture and because of that I believe it is infallible, it is true and without error, it is reliable. Mike very clearly does not. He sees it as a merely human collection of fallible writings. Elsewhere I’ve written about why I believe Scripture to be God’s inspired word so I don’t intend to retrace those points now. Rather, what I suggested to him was that for the sake of argument, we accepted his view of Scripture. Even then we would want to pay attention to it. Why?
Well, first of all, we both agree that different human authors wrote down Scriptures. However, whilst he would not accept that those authors were inspired by God, there has still been a process involving editors or redactors and the interpretative community of God’s people that has led to those writings being brought together into the one book. Those editors and the people who have accepted those writings as their Scriptures down through history were able to see a unity and a togetherness to the text. We might want to think about why.
Secondly, even should the texts disagree with and contradict each other, this does not mean that we have nothing to learn from them. In fact, engaging one passage with another may encourage us to reflect more deeply on what it is saying. As it happens, I’ve found that they don’t contradict.
Thirdly, he kept suggesting that I was arrogant to challenge him but surely there is something of a chronological arrogance to the belief that the views of a couple of men on the internet in the 21st century trump the thoughtful reflections of others on their experience just because they lived 2-3k years ago.
Fourthly, I suggested that if a Rabbi and a Pastor were going to have a conversation then you would expect that conversation to be exactly about the question of what Scripture says. That’s where our qualifications are. I could offer a legal view or a manufacturing engineer’s view on the matter based on past qualifications and employment and perhaps legal training enables me to think through aspects of logical, philosophical and ethical conundrums but I’m not a philosopher, that’s not my discipline and so what I have to offer and what a rabbi have to offer too is our expertise in our religious texts.
Fifth because he had actually started with Scripture. He’d set up the problem based on his interpretation of Deuteronomy. It kind of seems reasonable to me that we should at least give Scripture the chance to respond to the charges laid against it.
Sixthly, if his issue was that ancient people believed faulty things about the world around them, if they saw the weather as a direct consequence of God’s emotions then the big question was whether or not this prevented them from having anything useful to say about God. If in effect he did think that, then why stop at where he had got to. He seemed to be pushing us towards a deist position where the answer was that for whatever reason, God wasn’t directly and intimately involved in our lives. Why stop there though? If God is not good or not great and possibly both then why bother with God at all. That’s the atheist’s reaction and to be honest I’ve got to say that I get where they are coming from.
So, some further general points. First, we need to be careful about chronological superiority. There is a tendency among some in religious debates to look down on people from the past. Such views of superiority are often out of tune with the views of historians who have dedicated significant time to studying such people. Second, if we are attempting to answer questions, it is right that we do so based on the qualifications we have in that area. That’s what others are looking for from us. For pastors, that means that our responsibility is always to take people to what God’s Word says.
Faithroots 