I read Peter Enns’ post today on New Atheism and OT Morality with a certain sense of bafflement. I fully agree with the main thrust of his opening point.
One of these issues is the very real challenge to Christians of OT morality. In defending the faith, there has been a tendency to laud the moral supremacy of the Bible over other religions and especially over atheism. [New Atheism] NA is quick to point out that no reasonable, compassionate person would model his or her morality by much of Old Testament behavior.
Much of what we find in the OT is, to use an NA phrase, “Iron Age tribalism”: our god is better than your god, and he told us to take your land, kill all of you, and keep the booty. When Christians respond that the OT also carries the injunction to “love your neighbor,” NA responds that one’s ”neighbor” in the OT is fellow Israelites. God is not telling the Israelites to walk on over to the Canaanites and “love them.” Rather, he is telling them to wipe them out and take their land.
I don’t think this observation by NA is cynical or driven by a blind bias (as some of their observations are). Rather the observation is correct. Here the Christian reaction, motivated as it is to defend their understanding of the Bible against criticism, is unconvincing.
Okay, I have a minor quibble that I assume Enns would agree with if he were spelling things out in detail, which is that there are a range of OT moralities, and some of them, such as that reflected in the novelette (OK – that’s an anachronism) we call the Book of Jonah, are far from tribalism.
OT morality, singular, is in all sorts of ways a Christian construction in the same sense that “Old Testament” a singular entity to be contrasted with “New Testament” or “Gospel”, whether read as promise, type or in some other way. What I find baffling is that I can’t help avoid the suspicion that Enns himself is reading some of this into the New Testament.
I quote Enns in some detail on how to bring the NT into the question of understanding “neighbour”:
The issue of one’s neighbor is treated in the NT in the well-known story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). Jesus is speaking to a crowd, and an “expert in the law” sought to challenge Jesus by asking him what one must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asked him what the law said, and the man responded with the well-known confession: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Jesus commends him for his answer, but the man asks Jesus, “and who is my neighbor.” This is not an innocent question, but one that seems to be motivated by his desire to draw as small a circle of love around him as he could (hence the comment in the story that this expert in the law was seeking to “justify himself”).
Jesus responds with that wonderful story of the Samaritan who sees on the side of the road a Jewish victim of a mugging, and goes well out his way to help him, even to the point of incurring personal expense. Samaritans were hated by Jews, yet—if I may get to the point of the story—even this hated Samaritan had more a sense of God’s love than these “pious” Jews (a priest and a Levite) who did not hesitate to step over a countryman in need.
“I will tell you who your neighbor is,” Jesus says. “Let your hated enemy show you. Are you Jews humble enough to see that the love of God transcends these nationalistic and sociological boundaries?” Jesus blows these boundaries away. “Love your neighbor” is given a broader and rather unsettling meaning. Whatever such boundaries existed in the OT, no longer do.
NA misses this entirely. Christianity is a faith that is not bound to every OT expression of morality.
Now I have some problems with this. While the traditions that would later be enshrined in first Mishnah and then Talmud are obviously still in process of development, I don’t think one can simply describe the ethical reflection and practice of late Second Temple religion as “Old Testament morality”. Moral reflection is reached through exactly the sort of question and answer dialogues about the meaning of scripture as we see the trained Torah-expert and Jesus engage on here. In the modern academy it would not be too inappropriate to see the expert’s question as “Which verses do you think provide the hermeneutical key to a right reading of the Torah?” I suggest that the very serious engagement in halakic argument is proof in and of itself that there is no such thing as a simple OT morality.
It is not clear to me in the slightest that the expert wishes ” to draw as small a circle of love around him as he could”. I think it just as likely that he feels Jesus’ answer patronising, and wishes to justify himself in the sense of showing that there’s a deeper question here: knowing who counts as neighbour is a not unreasonable thing to explore if one is to fulfil a law that says “love your neighbour.” Indeed, asking the question suggests that there wasn’t a simple tribal answer ready made and to hand, but that this itself was a disputed question. (I am assuming the basic historicity of the Lukan narrative.)
Jesus’ answer is complex, not least because it doesn’t answer the question. Rather it implies that “Who is my neighbour?” is the wrong question, and that it needs to be replaced by “Who can I be a neighbour to?”. In that sense it returns a limitless answer: there is no end, no boundary to fulfilling the law. This is the kind of intensification of Torah we see elsewhere, noticeably in those teachings Matthew collects together in the Sermon on the Mount. It also chimes well with the attitude Luke’s Jesus commends elsewhere: “So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’” (Luke 17:10 NRSV).
I always go onto full alert when I hear people paraphrasing Jesus as saying “You Jews” as Enns does here. It is, of course, entirely possible that Jesus had some Galilean prejudices about Judeans – although that would not chime very well with this story! But I fear it is of a piece with the assumption that there is such a thing as OT morality,. That leads too quickly in turn to an assumption that OT morality is Jewish morality and from there there’s but a short jump to Christian moral superiority over Judaism and everything else. Theologically I think the relationship is more complex than that, and historically I think that contrast is simply inaccurate.
I think in this post as elsewhere Enns has some good things to say and his point about mistaken Christian attitudes to the Bible in the face of atheist criticism is well-taken. I have to say, however, that the sort of interpretation implied in that “you Jews” just has to go. It can lead nowhere good.
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Thanks Doug – it seems to me that PE’s expression ‘you Jews’ may have been careless – but your implications are well taken. I have just finished reading Harold Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh. Very well written – Bloom is always entertaining, but he raises some questions (some of which I will reduce to blog entries later) that highlight miscommunication between Christian and Jew. Your refining the question to “Who can I be a neighbour to?” and your phrase “intensification of Torah” really helps focus where the dialogue should begin again – in a pre-Chalcedon pre-Nicean context.
Doug,
A very thoughtful post and I’m glad I stumbled on it. I think the degree to which I actually agree with you is masked by the brevity and intention of my post.
By putting the phrase “you Jews” in Jesus’ mouth, i would be as startled as you, but “jews” is mean to stand in contrast to “Samaritan.” I think I could have put it more clearly than I do, so I don’t blame you for your response. I was aiming at something like “you jews should do as well as that Samaritan.” Of course, the great irony in putting “you Jews” in the mouth of Jesus in the way you understood it is that Jesus himself was Jewish and not Christian.
I also appreciate your other thoughts. I think I actually anticipated one of them, but I also think I was too subtle in my comments, wanting to get to the larger point of the post. You are correct that not all of the OT is “Iron Age tribalism,” and I acknowledge that when I say “MUCH of what we find in the OT is, to use an NA phrase, “Iron Age tribalism.”” You are also certainly correct that in Jesus’ day, there was much more afoot than a flat “OT morality” and I thought for quite a while whether to draw that out a bit, but in the end decided for less nuance rather than more.
You make some other nice points, too, that I think add depth to the discussion in general. For my post, I was simply trying to offer a general hermeneutical principle, which, I realize, raises some theological challenges of its own (none of which I get into).
Pete, thanks for the gracious and helpful response. It’s always a problem with blog posts to know how many qualifications to put in and how often to use broad brush strokes. I suspect we are indeed quite close here.
I must say that I’m glad I found your blog, even if my first interaction with it was to offer some critical questions.
I think asking critical questions is part of what blogs are all about, Doug. Keep ‘em coming. The issue is truth, after all, and that requires a lot of honest questioning.
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