Chronological Ignorance, Old Books, and the Bible

When reading old books, it is easy to display a chronological snobbery, as C.S. Lewis called it. The chronological snob is to time what the ethnocentric person is to ethnicity. His chronocentrism assumes that everyone in the past should know everything he knows or agree with all his assumptions. When visiting the past in his imagination, he views it as Cameron viewed the people of 1912 on Titanic: moderns with funny clothes and less stuff.

Sadly, it is even more common in students to be chronologically ignorant. Such people forget the progression of ideas and they assume every concept and word available to them was available in the past. They forget that language and ideas also develop (the Platonist of today is not the Platonist of yesterday) and imagine that the ancients thought like moderns without the technology.

But Abraham was not an American with sheep and no Ipod.

The Lord God of Sacred Scriptures is not a revolutionary, thank God. Rapid change in human culture has rarely been for the best and God does not make the mistake of the French or Russian revolutionaries. Each revolution was led by men who believed that they could rapidly bring heaven to earth, but ended up making France and Russia look more like hell. God knows that even a great good must be brought on slowly to avoid doing greater harm.

He is outside of time and no chronological snob nor does the Divine Being suffer from chronocentrism.

God also has to communicate with people in language and concepts available to them, if He is to allow them to mature. Even attempting to describe the inner workings of the atom to a tribal people would be useless, since they lack the mental vocabulary to make sense of the message. Of course, God could directly reveal all this to humanity, but this would not allow for a natural cultural development.

Why is such a development so important? If a culture does not learn for itself what is good, true, and beautiful then it will not be an adult culture. It will depend forever on priestcraft and develop a magical, instead of rational, understanding of reality. If God is trying to raise up sons and daughters, part of a divine educational program, then He must slowly help us grasp the ideas behind what He wishes and we need.

We would be lost without divine revelation, but He is intent on giving us the time to truly understand what He is saying. He does not just force it on our imaginations.

Ideas that seem easy to humanity now are the result of thousands of years of human thought in conjunction with the work of God’s Spirit. Great genius is often required to understand the big ideas on which later, more incremental progress, is based. The very words to describe these ideas and to refine them must be invented. A Moses or a Socrates, sensitive and ready to learn rapidly from God and experience, is a rarity. Most humans can only progress at a much slower pace.

As a result, any reader would anticipate that the story of human history in the Bible would be the story of the education of mankind. God would have to tolerate enormous crudities and barbarisms. Nor is this way of looking at Scripture the result of modern excuse making for the morality of the earlier parts of the Old Testament. Jesus Christ when commenting on Old Testament divorce laws in Matthew 19:8 notes that Moses allowed divorce only because the men of that time had “hard hearts.”

We should know better and so divorce should be unthinkable for most Christians in most situations.

It is easy for the critic, at the far end of centuries of mostly Christian cultural development to be critical of the Patriarchs and of the Mosaic Law. They forget how stunning and difficult the very idea of a universal law was when God revealed it to Moses. It took hundreds of years for even one people group, the Jews, to grasp the ramifications of a law that applied equally to king and commoner. The morality of “might makes right” was slowly supplanted by “right makes might,” but it took thousands of years to do it.

The remarkable thing is not how harsh the Mosaic Law was, but how progressive. Any parent understands this moral pilgrim’s progress. Things are tolerated, and even laughed at, in the behavior of a child that would never be accepted in an adult. God made men as good as He could, as quickly as He could, without imposing on them a moral burden so great that they would have become worse for it.

All of this can help the modern reader have tolerance for the different world of Old Testament ethics.

A favorite place of secularists to attack the ethics of the Bible is the narrative of the conquest of Canaan by Joshua. The commands of God related to the “genocide” of the Canaanites much exercise skeptics, including Richard Dawkins. The skeptical argument boils down to charging God with immorality in ordering the total (or near total) destruction of the people of the land the Israelites were called to conquer. Interestingly, this criticism of the Bible has become more prominent with the rise of secular warfare that has butchered millions of people.

Still the problem is that a holy, and alleged good God, ordered warfare that any modern Englishman or American would know is wrong. Stalin with his atheist henchmen may have killed millions to the Israelite thousands, but few modern atheists would defend Stalin and nobody sane believes he was ethically perfect.

The difficulty for the skeptic is that he is applying modern categories of morality, often based on centuries of Jewish and Christian thought, to ancient men. They had no language of justice and no concept of “non-combatants.” Primitive man was . . . primitive. He thought in terms of tribe and battled with tribal ferocity.

Humankind after the rebellion against God knew only nature red in tooth and claw. Anyone outside the clan or the kin structure was scarcely human. Warfare had no distinction between combatant and non-combatant and language had no way of thinking about a just war. The god whose people won a war was the “good god.” Losing gods were losers.

The Mosaic revelation began to plant the ideas that would change all of this thinking. All men and women were created in God’s image, not just people in the nation of Israel. All wars in the ancient world were fought brutally and God commanded that one war be fought that way. His very command that this exceptional war should be fought as most wars were fought implied that other wars should not be fought that way.

In any case, God was dealing with a people who live in a world where they would either be masters or slaves. He had not yet worked with them to create the cultural space that we have for better options. In ancient times, the alternative to “total war” was to enslave and intermarry with a small portion of the conquered one let survive. There was no precedent, no vocabulary, for a just war.

Modern commanders can scarcely control their troops after thousands of years of moral development. Joshua could not ask his Bronze Age troops to do what the Americans in Iraq have sometimes failed to do.

In a sense, God was faced with an educational problem. He had a group, the Jews, which He was trying to teach the hard lesson of the supremacy of law over passion and of monotheism over polytheism. Old Testament history shows how difficult and arduous this process was to be. They lived in a time when every surrounding people group would have no qualms about destroying them utterly or making them slaves. Absorbing even a trace of the culture of the surrounding nations would simply put off the time when the hard lessons could be properly learned.

God, uniquely in Scripture, ordered “total war,” because it was the best of the bad options available in the time and with the people He had. The total war against the Canaanites minimized their pain by ending it quickly. Ancient warriors would have saved only slaves and slavery is not a life much to be preferred to sudden death. Slavery and intermarriage with Canaanites also certainly would have infected the nation of Israel with bad ideas that would have made their progress even harder.

Slower progress morally meant more suffering on the whole. Human beings are not allowed to do this sort “ends justifies the means” moral calculation, because we do not know all ends or whether the certainly of bad means really will be outweighed by hoped for benefits. God, on the other hand, knew.

He knew total war, like radical surgery, was necessary.

God did what He could with the instruments at hand. It is not what God would command today or what He did command later in the Bible, because we have learned more. The minute the proper lessons were learned, God could begin to bring a more pacific outlook to the Jewish people. He never ordered them to be an imperial power, none of their great kings were particularly great conquerors, and the lack of emphasis on war in their annals is remarkable.

God, in his Revelation to the Jews, was as interested in what they could learn from losing battles as from winning. Almost alone in ancient religious literature, the Bible focuses on the failures of the great national rulers more than their victories. Most of the kings who ruled the people of Israel and Judah were wicked and the Bible calls them such.

We take for granted the long story the Bible tells of the slow decline in Israel’s national power, but this is only because the Bible story so permeates our culture. Because the people of Israel had been slaves and sojourners in Egypt, they were to treat sojourners well. Slavery itself was economic and heavily modified by restrictions. If followed carefully the Mosaic law was bound to undercut the viability of slavery.

Immediate emancipation would have made no sense at all at the time of the Patriarchs. It would have harmed more than it would have helped. Instead, God presented a set of laws and a picture of common humanity that doomed the institution in the long term wherever the Bible was read. It is not accident that the entirety of Scriptures could not be given to slaves in the Antebellum South. They would have gotten the moral progression of Scriptures easily.

Understanding this will help us read the Bible, and all ancient books, more charitably. They are a core part of the moral development of the West.