Mark Ward comments on the (otherwise excellent) conference speaker who, referring to Titus 2:4, said that because phileo is ‘friendship love’, it’s important for husbands and wives, and parents and children, to be friends. Although there may well be some truth in this (Ward remarks), as far as the text in Titus is concerned, it is reading too much into the word; it is ‘overspecifying’ the text. Husbands and wives are to be lovers, and not just friends. …
Christian writers of a certain stripe seem to be queueing up to say pretty much the same thing: the Old Testament contains texts that have repeatedly been used to legitimate violence in the form of colonialism, abuse of women, and genocide. We should not ignore these texts, nor yet try to justify them. We should see, rather, how they have been thoroughly subverted by the teaching and example of Jesus Christ.
One such writer is Eric Seibert, in The Violence of Scripture: Overcoming the Old Testament’s Troubling Legacy.…
With regard to the parts of the Old Testament that record, encourage, or even command violence, a frequent response is that we should interpret them with a ‘Jesus hermeneutic’. Trouble is, Jesus didn’t seem to find these accounts nearly so problematic as we do.
Distinguished Old Testament scholar John Goldingay (not exactly a dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist) puts it like this:-
…‘Many modern people don’t like the way the book portrays Joshua’s leading Israel in killing many Canaanites, but there is no indication that the New Testament shares this modern unease.
In his book Disarming Scripture: Cherry-Picking Liberals, Violence-Loving Conservatives, and Why We All Need to Learn to Read the Bible Like Jesus Did, Derek Flood claims that OT texts which represent God as encouraging, or even commanding, genocide ‘have been used repeatedly by Christians to justify genocides, beginning with the crusades and continuing up to present times.’
Flood mentions the Crusades, the killing by Oliver Cromwell of large numbers of Irish Catholics, the slaughter of many native Americans, and the killing of nearly a million Tutsies in the Rwandan genocide. …
In his book The Miracles of Exodus (Continuum, 2003), physicist Sir Colin Humphreys argues that a plausible scientific basis can be found for the plagues of Egypt, as recorded in Exodus 7-11.
This is not to suggest that they can be ‘explained away’ as merely natural phenomena. Rather, accordingly to Humphreys’, the miraculous element lies in their timing and intensity, along with the fact that they were predicted.
Instone-Brewer (Science and the Bible: Insights For An Ancient Text) takes a similar line:
…‘These plagues are not portrayed in the language of miracles, except with regard to their timing and their ferocity.
Allan Moseley poses seven questions that can help us to see how the Old Testament points to Jesus.
Why, and how, did God strike down all the firstborn in Egypt? Why, and how, did he spare the Israelites? Do you think that today we should still regard God as both a Judge and a Liberator?
In what ways do you think that the Passover gives us a picture of how God saves us through Jesus?
According to Exodus 12:14, ‘remembering’ is very important. In what ways do we, and could we, commemorate what God has done in the past?…
I’m been giving some thought to the subject of ‘undesigned coincidences’ in the Bible. One of the pioneers of this field of exploration was J.J. Blunt, in his book Undesigned Coincidences in the Writings both of the Old and New Testaments. (published 1847; enlarged edition 1869)
Blunt presented evidence that suggested to him the possibility of a gathered people of God before the time of Moses.
Calum Miller summarises:-
Suggestion that there was an early proto-church [Blunt calls it a ‘Patriarchal church’] despite this never being mentioned:
a.…
(a) Many of us tend to view our own conversion to Christ in contrast to Paul’s: ‘Of course,’ we say, ‘I never had a Damascus Road experience.’ What aspects of Paul’s experience as recorded here are unusual, and what aspects would be true of any genuine conversion to Christ?
(b) In the light of what you know about Paul generally from the New Testament, what would you say he was converted from, and converted to? And what would you say about yourself in this regard?…
Summarising this post by Jason De Rouchie:-
