Bill.. Svelmoe is a college professor in South Bend. I've admired his take on the current issues of the day in the USA, having found him last year on line. We have not met, but his scholarship and having read his novel, Spirits Eat Raw Papaya, I admire his way of thinking. In the following essay, he's 'big wording' us a little bit but stretching the vocabulary is, to me, a good thing.
I've encouraged Bill to move his writing from skinny little Facebook blurbs to a more reader friendly format like this one. He's busy and will probably do that when he has time after the end of the school year. I just like reading in a friendly format.
The following essay may have one typo. I wonder if Bill composes on line or in a Word program and copies and pastes. His punditry is a primer for critical thinking and maybe he'll publish his essays in a book one day. Don't let the big words freak you out. Absorb the information and see where it leads you. Take a walk on the wild side.. (Lou Reed came to me for some reason.. )
I have not vetted the statistics. This is a copy and paste deal, with paragraph spaces on me.
Thank you, Professor Svelmoe for permission to share as I might. This essay is a bit long, but stick with it. Have your dictionary handy.
michael sheehan
2/13/2021
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Shortly after 2:00 p.m. on January 6, 2021, as rioters stormed the Capitol hunting for the enemies of Donald Trump, Trump called the newly elected senator from Alabama, Tommy Tuberville. Trump wanted to bend the senator’s ear with strategies to destroy American democracy. Tuberville informed Trump that he had to seek out a hiding place and that Vice President Pence had been hustled away by the Secret Service.
Translation: We’re in serious trouble.
More than ten minutes later, Trump tweeted: "Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving states a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify."
Translation: I don’t give a shit. Find Pence and do with him what you will. And if Tommy gets caught in the crossfire, so be it.
Yesterday, news of a Trump conversation with Kevin McCarthy surfaced. Similar conversation. Perhaps more f-bombs. Similar result. Kevin, you’re getting what’s coming to you.
One might expect such an embrace of violent political vengeance to be soundly rejected by the law and order party. It will not be.
One might expect such an embrace of violent political vengeance to be soundly rejected by the Jesus-followers who have transferred their allegiance to Trump. It will not be.
In fact no group in the country, a recent survey shows, embraces lies and violence like white evangelicals. Our friends who love Jesus.
Forty-one percent of white evangelicals said they completely or somewhat believed that violence may be required to keep the right side in power.
And here is where I’m really going with all this. The why question. Why is that? How have white evangelicals so lost their way?
The short answer is that the Bible consists of more than the Gospels. If all you read is the Gospels, Jesus, and God himself, can seem quite friendly. One can almost imagine following such a man. After all, water into wine is a pretty cool trick. Makes for a happy lot of disciples.
Unfortunately the Gospels are followed by the Book of Revelations. Jesus shows up with a sword coming out of his mouth. Lots of blood. Lots of butchered people. Apparently lots of folks who didn’t get the message.
Equally unfortunate is the fact that the Gospels are preceded by an older Testament. The picture of God therein lists to the brutal side. Sound thrashings of the human race fill chapter after chapter. Floods, pillars of salt, snakes, earthquakes, and the swords of his folk, all inflicted on those who somehow failed to get the message.
One of the most striking stories is of the Israeli general Joshua, filled with blood lust as he pursues his/God’s enemies, calling on God to make the sun “stand still” so that he’ll have more daylight to kill and capture. Well, actually, just kill. God was never too fond of capture. Presumably getting bogged down in trials taxed his patience.
At any rate, God obliged. The sun stood still. Daylight lingered over a scene that I suspect even Josh Hawley would find disturbing.
I have long thought that the next religion I take up will be one in which its devotees pray for time to stop on a 72-degree summer day, high blue sky, a light breeze blowing, and the entire desire of the worshipers is for the sun to linger a little longer on the face of such a world.
But I did say that was the short answer. Best get out now, if you don’t want the long answer.
The long answer is that evangelicals defend, even embrace, such Scripture, and such a God, and such violent action in the world, because they are constrained by the founding presuppositions of the movement, presuppositions which force evangelicals to deal with such texts as if they were entirely accurate history and present an entirely accurate picture of the nature of God. It’s called the doctrine of inerrancy, and, while it has a long history, which perhaps I’ll get into at some point, it forces evangelicals to defend every piece of Scripture as if it were literal truth.
Let me illustrate.
A prominent evangelical seminary recently received a $3 million donation to establish a Center for the Study and Ministry of the Holy Spirit today. The donation will fund ten years of things like academics getting a "two-course release" to study the Holy Spirit. I admit, perhaps to my shame, that as an academic I couldn't stop chuckling over the notion of professors getting course releases to study what is, virtually by definition, invisible and unknowable. I know academics. You ain't gettin’ anything useful on such a subject even from ten years of two course releases. But I digress.
The funds will also be used to bring to the center "influential Christian leaders who can educate the community about the Holy Spirit's current work around the world." Imagine with me for a moment an influential leader standing before our assembled academics and declaring that such and so that happened in some obscure African or Asian nation was a "work of the Holy Spirit." But someone else stands up and says, No, that actually wasn't the Holy Spirit. How does one adjudicate such a question?
The article announcing the grant contains the seeds of the answer to that question. The millions of dollars will be spent on a "biblical examination" of the Holy Spirit. A "sound biblical hermeneutic" will be used. And therein lies the problem. As anyone who knows evangelicalism knows, those are code words for a host of presuppositions like inerrancy, literalism, theologically accepted views of God which will not, I repeat not, be re-examined as part of this study. So, in other words, you will spend ten years and millions of dollars coming to the exact same conclusions to which a mountain of books on the Holy Spirit have already come. I guarantee you that after ten years not one new insight, an insight not already written in some text somewhere, will have been gleaned. You simply cannot go anywhere new in a discussion about God if the presuppositions are not open for re-examination. I don't care how many course releases you get.
How do I know this you might ask?
Well, let me illustrate some more. And this is closer to the topic at hand.
None of the following is fiction.
A professor who professes to "love inspiring students with the beauty of the Old Testament" takes up the topic of God and genocide. And there is beauty here. The beauty is in enjoying the tortured explanations required when you refuse to examine your presuppositions.
He begins by laying out four propositions which he admits cannot all be held at the same time.
1. God is good and compassionate.
2. The Old Testament is a faithful record of God's dealings with humanity.
3. The Old Testament describes events that are identified as genocide.
4. Genocide is always evil.
I leave it to you to guess which proposition he discards.
You're right of course. Number 4. Genocide, it turns out, is, by definition, good, if God is the one committing it.
The professor dismisses any attempt to re-examine how we think about God with one sentence. That's what the "New Atheists" do. So it's automatically out of bounds. In fact, if you question along those lines, you are likely a candidate for some good Old Testament genocide.
Hemmed in by his presuppositions, he refuses to see the text as anything but an accurate historical record; therefore, he is left to defend Yahweh's genocide.
How?
Three points.
1. The Canaanites were bad. They'd had plenty of time to repent. Time's up. Women, children, cats put to the sword. We should feel more sorry for the Israeli soldiers who had to carry out the deed than we should for the women and children. They undoubtedly required years of therapy to get over sinking their swords into screaming babies.
2. This wasn't “ethnic” genocide. For some reason our author appears squeamish about that. It was “theological” genocide. The Canaanites didn't think correctly about God. They could, after all, have thought correctly about God, likely after taking some classes from Israeli scholars with course releases, joined the Israelis, and saved themselves from annihilation. After all God set snakes on Jews who didn't think rightly. He's an equal opportunity thought-police genocidal deity. [O.k. Granted I'm paraphrasing a bit. But the ideas are all there.]
3. This genocide was part of God's plan for the world. After all, he'd done it before at the flood, at Sodom and Gomorrah, etc. The author helpfully points out that God used fire at Sodom and Gomorrah because he'd promised not to drown people again after the flood. I guess he felt as bad as some liberals do about water boarding. Couldn't go back to his favored technique. Kind of hemmed in by his own vows. Rainbows and all that.
Basically, our author explains that God has to kill lots and lots of people in order to get through to us that he doesn't like us being bad. We're slow that way. Probably something to do with sex. Usually is.
The author generously points out that we all deserve the same fate. In fact most of us will receive the same fate. Our personal Sodom and Gomorrah is simply postponed till the end of time. We'll eventually get our own bad-people genocide. The Canaanites simply received their end-times genocide early. God removed the "common grace" many of us get, i.e. we get four score and ten years on earth to agree to the correct ideas about God, and "brought their eschatological judgment to [the Canaanites] immediately."
But God also gives positive reinforcement. In the same way the Canaanite genocide was a prefiguring of hell, the Israelis getting to move into their now "unoccupied" land was a helpful prefiguring of heaven. The whole thing was a giant object lesson. Why the Israelis came equipped with swords and not flannelgraphs is never explained.
After all this tortured logic, our good author lets himself off the hook by saying he "feels ill at ease" with this "difficult topic." And the "destruction" of these civilizations was "limited to that time and place and is not to be repeated today." Whew! How he knows that, he does not say. When someone comes to butcher him and his family claiming God's command, I assume he'll explain it then. At the very least he'll feel "ill at ease."
Likely, after four years of Donald Trump, he has revised his notion that violence is limited to “that time and place.”
Here's my point. Evangelicalism is stuck. Forty-one percent of white evangelicals will continue to support political violence as long as they worship a God who never blinked before dispensing the harshest justice upon human beings. Listen to their rhetoric today. They celebrate their violent God.
To grow, both in influence and intellectually, evangelicalism simply must re-examine its founding presuppositions about the nature of Scripture and the nature of God. Otherwise millions of dollars and a decade will be spent, and the movement will arrive right back at the starting gate, publishing defenses of the indefensible.
P.S. A better use of that $3 million and ten years and professorial course releases would be to study how a centuries old and once respected religious movement winds up with over 80% of its constituents voting for Donald Trump. Believe me, those votes and my post are inextricably linked.
There's a beautiful irony in our good prof's piece defending God's genocides. He articulates clearly that what God is most passionately opposed to, the sins for which He butchered entire races, are "sins of injustice that enriched the oppressor."
Yet not one word in his article about the 80% of his religious tribe that pulled the lever for a man and a party whose every waking moment is given over to plotting how best to take from the oppressed to give to the oppressor. If God were still in the genocide business, he'd likely turn his attention first to evangelicals.
It turns out that blind commitment to presuppositions leads to an inability to see what the story of Jesus quite obviously intends to be the central message and commitment of evangelical faith. I think he said something about love. Somewhere in there.
As I heard a black comedian recently say, "Religions are always fighting about who has the right messenger. I don't give a damn about your messenger. My question is, did you get the message?!"
Bill Svelmoe / February 13, 2021
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