The “Canaanite genocide” and the so-called “gospel of love”

There’s an important section in Kenton Sparks’ God’s Word in Human Words in which he discusses how we might discern positive “trajectories” that may enable us to reach moral or theological conclusions beyond—or perhaps even in contradiction to—explicit affirmations in the biblical text. Slavery provides an example. The Old Testament allowed for the harsh treatment of slaves (eg. Exod. 21:20-21). The New Testament tolerated the practice, but by introducing the potential for a quite radical egalitarianism (cf. Gal. 3:28) based on love established a trajectory that eventually—with some prodding from “the Enlightenment and its emphasis on human dignity and individual freedom” and despite well-meaning opposition from evangelicals such as George Whitefield and Charles Hodge—landed at the morally and theologically correct abolition of slavery in the West (289-93).

Was the “Canaanite genocide” sub-Christian?

Another example that Sparks considers is the so-called “Canaanite genocide”—the divinely ordained extirpation of the native peoples of Canaan during the conquest. He considers Kevin Vanhoozer’s critique of I. Howard Marshall’s argument that—as Sparks puts it—”the Canaanite genocide, or the biblical slave laws, or the imprecatory psalms, reflect sub-Christian ethical viewpoints” (297).1 I only have Sparks’ reconstruction of the discussion to go on, but he quotes Vanhoozer’s objection:

Marshall wants Christians to get “beyond genocide.” So do I. But I am not prepared to say that God’s judgment of the world, or of the nations, is “intrinsically wrong” if it involves killing people….

Sparks takes issue with this:

Is it only in Israel’s case that divine sanction legitimizes the extermination of pagans? Or is it more likely that the biblical text has simply assumed standard but erroneous Near Eastern ideas about the relationship between ethnicity, religion, and war? Theologically speaking, the latter possibility seems more likely to me than the former.

That would be a good, if somewhat extreme, example of the hermeneutical principle of divine accommodation to the limited perspective of his people in history, which he argues for in an earlier chapter. Sparks then states:

The Israelite massacre of Canaanites is no more compatible with a gospel of love than was European imperialism or the Crusades…. At any rate, it seems theologically reasonable to conclude that the systematic killing of pagan enemies simply because they are pagans—and this is certainly the basic logic of Deuteronomy—is not compatible with the gospel of love. (297-98)

Normally I would expect to side with Sparks against Vanhoozer when it comes to the interpretation of controversial texts—I think that Sparks has a less blinkered view of scripture, is less captive to the demands of doctrinal correctness. In this case, however, it seems to me that he has allowed an ethical correctness to distort the relationship between the conquest narrative and the gospel. It may be possible, in principle, to describe some sort of self-adjusting trajectory that launches with the Canaanite genocide and ends at a free-standing “gospel of love”, but the biblical narrative is more complex than that.

Violence and divine judgment

I have argued before that the conquest of Canaan was like the flood. The flood was the eradication of a wicked humanity from the face of the earth prior to the reinstatement of the original creation through the family of Noah (‘God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” ’: Gen. 9:1). In the same way but on a smaller scale, the destruction of the Canaanites was the eradication of an idolatrous and wicked humanity (cf. Deut. 9:4-5) from a land that would become for Israel a world in microcosm, in fulfilment of the promise made to the patriarchs that their descendants would be a new creation. In other words, whether we like it or not—and I’m sure most people won’t like it—the killing and driving out of the Canaanites from this new world was an event of considerable and central theological significance. It was not gratuitous violence.

The “Israelite massacre of Canaanites”, however, is not the only instance in the Bible where slaughter and destruction are attributed directly to the will of God. A major part of biblical theology is developed as a response to the fact that Israel was sometimes devastatingly on the receiving end of such divinely sanctioned violence. This is not confined to the Old Testament. The premise for the Gospels and for a good part of what is found outside the Gospels was the prophetic conviction that Israel faced destruction because of its sins. The New Testament is as much a coda to the Old Testament as it is the overture to something new.

So although there is the added complication in Deuteronomy that Israel is made an instrument of such bloody judgment, the basic theological problem runs right through scripture, from the flood to Jesus’ realistic and non-metaphysical warnings about a gehenna of fire and, for that matter, of another flood that would sweep away Israel’s house (Matt. 7:24-27). The wrath of God against sinful humanity, including against sinful Jewish humanity, when it came, invariably took the form of slaughter and destruction. Well, perhaps not quite invariably….

Rome put to a metaphorical sword

The boundary between such a “primitive” conception of wrath and a putative “gospel of love”, therefore, has to be drawn after Jesus, not before him. Paul speaks of wrath against the Jew to be followed by wrath against the Greek (Rom. 2:6-11). Whereas Jesus is quite unequivocal about the military nature of the judgment against Israel (cf. Lk. 21:20), the subsequent judgment of the pagan world, even at its most apocalyptically intense, appears to have been conceived non-militarily. Jesus will kill the man of lawlessness by the “breath of his mouth” and by the “appearance of his coming” (2 Thess. 2:8); it is the “Word of God” who appears, at the climax to the judgment of Rome in Revelation 19:13-15, to strike down the nations with a sword that issues from his mouth, who will “tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty”.

This may—I stress may—suggest that between these two horizons, between AD 70 and the collapse of pagan Rome, we shift from a divine wrath that entails killing to a divine wrath that is effected through the wielding of a metaphorical sword—the preaching of the gospel. The difference would lie in the fact that whereas the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple was a final judgment on a rebellious people, judgment on Rome was at the same the inheritance of the nations by YHWH’s king (cf. Ps. 2:7-9; Rom. 1:4: Phil. 2:10; Rev. 19:15). Second temple Judaism was destroyed; Rome was converted.

The so-called “gospel of love”

But is what was preached simply a “gospel of love”? The phrase is questionable for a couple of reasons. On the one hand, I don’t think that there is a “gospel of love” in the New Testament. Not in so many words. There is a “gospel”—or perhaps better there are “gospels”, contextualized announcements of good news. And there is a command to the persecuted people of God to love one another and to love their enemies. But there is no “gospel of love” as such, unless we include the “good news” which reached (euangelisamenou) Paul regarding the “faith and love” of the Thessalonian believers (1 Thess. 3:6). The “gospel” was an announcement about what the God of Israel was about to do on behalf of his people in the political-religious arena of the Roman empire. It may have been motivated in part by love (cf. John 3:16); but it was also motivated by a desire on God’s part to justify himself in the eyes of the nations. In other words, this was an eschatological announcement: it promised, even provoked, radical historical transformation.

The command to love was a response to the eschatological crisis of the wrath of God. On the one hand, the love that the disciples had for one another would be an essential factor in their effectiveness and survival as a credible prophetic community; on the other, Jesus had made it clear by his own example that the only legitimate response to aggression was love for their persecutors and a willingness to suffer. Or as Paul put it:

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (Rom. 12:19-21)

The point is that there is no simple self-correcting trajectory in scripture running from the Canaanite massacre to some imagined, ethically correct “gospel of love”. Both the violent conquest of Canaan and the proclamation of good news to Israel and to the pagan world presuppose a difficult storyline about an “elect” people struggling to establish and preserve its exceptional identity amongst the nations of the Ancient Near East and Europe as God’s “new creation”. Sparks’ metanarrative of the “progress of redemption” (302), it seems to me, is too simplistic—and, ironically, too evangelical—to accommodate the critical theme of YHWH’s conflict with the nations.

• 1Vanhoozer contributed an appendix to Marshall’s book Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology (Baker Academic, 2004).