Re: [asa] On Job

In the case of Lot's wife, it's not that we're necessarily morally shocked. Not me--although Richard Dawkins would be. It's a question of proportion. So, given she had an evil heart, the effort needed for her punishment is all out of proportion to the sin. Given she deserved to die, what was the need to transmute her elements? That's the gratuitous part. After death, what could she have cared about her elements?

We don't have the capacity to question God's judgments, but we do have the capacity to read critically and decide whether it's likely that some supposedly historical events were embellished or not.

Don

----- Original Message -----
  From: David Opderbeck<mailto:dopderbeck@gmail.com>
  To: Don Winterstein<mailto:dfwinterstein@msn.com>
  Cc: Don Nield<mailto:d.nield@auckland.ac.nz> ; asa<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2006 7:44 AM
  Subject: Re: [asa] On Job

  Do we believe God would go to the trouble of transmuting all the elements of her body just because of an inappropriate glance? Not I. What would be the point, other than generating a memorable Sunday school story forever after?

  But this seems even more troubling to me than invoking "Alice" just because the story seems factually implausible. It's one thing to say the "pillar of salt" is a way of describing poetically something that happened to Lot's wife -- e.g., she was killed in a dust storm or some such thing when she refused to leave Sodom willingly -- and that the salt formations you refer to later came to symbolize that event and the Biblical account accomodates that popularization of the story. But to suggest the story belongs in Wonderland because we are morally or culturally shocked by it raises deeper problems.

  Who are we to question God's judgments? Surely there's more to the conduct of Lot's wife than an innocent backward glance at her home. I think that glance has long been understood as representing a deeper rebelliousness, a rejection of God's deliverance from that corrupt city, a siding with the sinfullnes of Sodom rather than choosing a covenant relationship with God. But an important point of the story -- and of the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal, and of many other such violent OT stories -- is that God is not a big teddy bear. God really does judge sin, and His judgments really are terrible. If we start sanitizing the Bible based on our discomfort with God's "dangerous" nature, that's a trip down the slippery slope.
   
  On 10/5/06, Don Winterstein <dfwinterstein@msn.com<mailto:dfwinterstein@msn.com>> wrote:
    My emphasis (admittedly hidden from view) was on what I took to be the "Alice" aspect: That is, do you look with skepticism on historicity if the events described seem far-fetched?

    Job is clearly written more like a play than a history. Jonah is not written like a play, but the usual historical details, such as the name of the king of Nineveh, are missing; so it's a good candidate for allegory. But there's nothing in the text that can really make the case. Elijah appears in a book that's clearly history. But the "Alice" aspect is strong in all three cases.

    Whether or not the book is history, what should we take literally? That's the question. The later chapters of Genesis clearly seem to be history, but who among us can take the reported fate of Lot's wife as fact? Do we believe God would go to the trouble of transmuting all the elements of her body just because of an inappropriate glance? Not I. What would be the point, other than generating a memorable Sunday school story forever after? This story is readily explained by elaborations on subsequent observations of a salt feature in the Dead Sea area. And when Elijah had 100 innocent soldiers killed by fire from heaven, doesn't this seem like gratuitous violence that may have been embellished considerably in the retelling? What would we have observed if we'd been on the scene at the time?

    But if we are skeptical because of the "Alice" aspect, how much do we wind up believing in the end? That's the slippery slope. Obviously many theologians and clergy have slipped a long way down that slope.

    Don

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Received on Thu Oct 5 11:04:34 2006