In our Scriptures, God sometimes is seemingly shown to be arbitrary, heartless, violent, demanding violence from believers, and completely calloused about the lives of anyone not among his chosen favorites.
 
As biblical scholarship makes clear, many of these texts are not to be taken literally. They are anthropomorphic and archetypal. What does that mean?
 
First, these texts are anthropomorphic, meaning that in them we attribute our own emotions and intentions to God. Hence these texts reflect our feelings, not God’s.  For example, when Paul tells us that when we sin, we experience the “wrath of God”, we are not to believe that God gets angry with us when we sin and sends positive punishment upon us. Rather, when we sin, we punish ourselves, begin to hate ourselves, and we feel as if God has gotten angry with us. Biblical writers frequently write in this genre. God never hates us, but, when we sin, we end up hating ourselves.
 
These texts are also archetypal, meaning that they are powerful, primordial images that explain how life works. I remember a man coming up to me one Sunday after a liturgy, when the reading had proclaimed God’s order to Joshua to kill all the Canaanites upon entering the Promised Land.  The man said to me: “You should have let me preach today. I know what that text means: I’m an alcoholic in recovery – and that text means ‘cold turkey”.  As an alcoholic, you have to clean out your liquor cabinet completely, every bottle, you can’t be having even a single drink. Every Canaanite has to be killed! Jesus said the same thing, except he used a softer metaphor: New wine, new wineskins.”  In essence, that’s the meaning of this text.
 
All individual texts in scripture must be seen within the larger, overall framework of scripture and our overall theology of God. As such, they demand an interpretation that is consistent with the nature of God as revealed overall in scripture.
 
In scripture, we see that God is non-negotiably all-loving, all-merciful, and all-good and that it is impossible to attribute bias, callousness, brutality, favoritism, and violence to God.  Moreover, scripture is binding and inerrant in the intentionality of its message, not in the literalness of its expression.
 
Context and interpretation are not rationalizations, they are sacred duty. We may not make scripture unworthy of God.

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