I’m reading Is God a Vindictive Bully? by Paul Copan, which purports to square the “genocide, racism, ethnic cleansing, and violence” in the Old Testament with the seemingly different deity presented in the New Testament in the form of Jesus. I’ve tried to go into this with an open mind; I’ve tried to avoid presumptions and judgments before I read. But by page six, he’s already making moves that put the argument exactly where I anticipated:

Consider a “golden rule” of interpretation: treat another’s writing as you yourself would want your own writing to be treated. This doesn’t mean being naive or uncritical; it does mean being charitable and fair as we honestly examine challenges in the text.

Is God a Vindictive Bully, 6.

Why would I treat the Bible the same as other documents? Christians claim it is the word of God: they claim that it’s not like other ancient documents, and if it’s written by a deity, it isn’t like other documents. Why treat a supposed god’s words with kid gloves? Why do I need to be “charitable and fair”? Wouldn’t a god do a better job writing a document?

This hints at a problem I know will appear in this book: how does the tension between “God composed this book” and “humans physically wrote it down” resolve? No Christian would deny that humans wrote the actual physical Bible: it didn’t just float down from heaven. However, they also claim that it is of divine origin. Humans, they insist, were just the instrument. The actual composition is God’s. However, when apologists start using historical context to explain something, they have immediately removed the composition from God’s purview and made the Bible a strictly-human document. It’s coming–I know it is.

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