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Randal Rauser’s Interview: “Matthew Flannagan on God and Genocide”

April 15th, 2015 by Madeleine

Randal Rauser interviewing Matthew FlannaganWhen Matt was in San Diego for the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) and Evangelical Philosophical Society (EPS) meetings in November 2014, Randal Rauser interviewed him for his Podcast, The Tentative Apologist.

The interview was for episode 58 and is entitled “Matthew Flannagan on God and Genocide“; you can listen to it by following the link. (It is basically an interview about Matt and Paul Copan’s book, Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with the Justice of God.)

Rauser later reviewed Did God Really Command Genonide? here.

Tags: 6 Comments

6 responses so far ↓

  • Hi Matt,

    Jesus said his burden is easy and I’m wondering why we have to bear such a heavy yoke. Didn’t come to give us relief from such a burden, by teaching us a way better than Moses and Joshua?

    Suppose Jesus did come to teach against not only genocide, but also war (‘just’ or otherwise), the use of violence for self-defence, the use of judicial force or violence to redress wrongs ‘legally’ (e.g. capital punishment, debtor’s prison, attachment of a debtor’s assets, debt-slavery etc.). Would this not provide some relief for you?

    From what I can understand of your argument, the point is not that God does actually presently command genocide or ethnic cleansing, but that he does have the option of doing so and we have to work through the consequences of this option. I wonder if there is an alternative approach: God does not change, and his character is pure good. However, our understanding of God and his character is what has changed as God reveals himself to us over time. So, an initial revelation of God and his will may be an imperfect and incomplete revelation, that has subsequently been clarified.

    For example consider the command to impose capital punishment on murderers, after due process of law. That such a command was given is beyond dispute, it is mentioned and confirmed many times in unambiguous language. Suppose, for the same of argument, Jesus comes to tell us that God is pure good, and that to throw stones at someone to kill, even on the guilty after due process of law, is a sin. He therefore cancels the former command. Now suppose that he also taught that the reason why we must not kill the guilty after due process of law is because God is kind and merciful to the guilty and forgives them, and requires us to be like him. He teaches that God’s way of dealing with murderers and other wrongdoers is to let the nature of his universe causing them to suffer corruption and to die from the poison of their own sins. He teaches that this new command is the perfect command. If all this is the case, what can we make of the former command? And of those who in good faith killed the guilty after due process of law in obedience to the command?

  • How does Flannagan reconcile his “hyperbole” interpretation of the divine extermination orders in the OT, with 1st Samuel 15:10-35, which says God removed Saul as King precisely because he did not carry out the absolute extermination order (vv. 2-3) in an absolute way?

  • Barry, seeing you have posted reviews of my book on several online cites where you raise this objection and claim I have offered no answer to it. I’ll respond this time

    You can see how I do this in pages p 109-117 of my book where I address and make a response to the very objection you cite.

    You of course should be aware of this because you have written several reviews of my book, I assume you read it before you reviewed it. Did you?

  • Matt,

    I don’t know how, but I had missed your response in the book to the issue of 1st Samuel 15. I apologize. I guess I’m like many other writers who freely admit they too overlooked things that wouldn’t have been dealt with unless a second pair of eyes caught it. I work alone, and did not recognize you had answered the 1st Samuel 15 objection already.

    First, I believe that my treatment of 1st Samuel 15 in my original amazon.com review of your book was accurate and not disturbed by what you actually said.

    Second, either way, over at amazon yesterday I posted my rebuttal to your treatment of the 1st Samuel 15 issue. For whatever reason, amazon will not allow me to post a normal review, so I had to post my review as a ‘comment’ to somebody else’s review. Look for the comment attached to

    4.0 out of 5 stars Strong, Thorugh Apologetic
    By Carl Vogton July 3, 2016
    Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase
    Am about half way through the book….
    https://www.amazon.com/Did-God-Really-Command-Genocide/product-reviews/0801016223/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_ttl?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews&sortBy=recent#RV2PJWDTYRLRH
    ————-

    Third, although I believe that latest comment from me reasonably justifies atheists to find your treatment of 1st Samuel 15 unpersuasive, I have more, and I would be willing to discuss these matters with you one at a time, though I give all of them here so you can recognize that my missing something in the book doesn’t mean I’m an utterly worthless debate opponent with no more hope of getting things right than a rock (the explosively negative way I’m routinely treated by fundamentalist Christians whenever I make a mistake or miss something).

    Your accepting bible inerrancy as true throughout your book leaves your Christian readers no way to handle atheist opponents who can justify rejecting bible inerrancy as a hermeneutic. What is the point of refuting the atheist views about OT genocide, if you refuse get over this presuppositional communication barrier? Yet if bible inerrancy as a hermeneutic can be reasonably disputed, then this puts back on the table of legitimate options, the possibility that we should take literally those bible texts that show God being disappointed with himself (Genesis 6:6, 1st Samuel 15:11, 33). At that point, a Christian would be justified to conclude that God’s solution to the corruptions in the promised land, was not perfect, and at that point, such divine solution is wholly undeserving of the mammoth effort of inerrantists to make it sound persuasive to modern ears. God acting hastily before sufficiently thinking things through is graphically demonstrated in the Exodus yarn where God tells Moses to leave Him alone so He can destroy the people, but He changes his mind after Moses talks some sense into the divine head. Exodus 32:9-14, and no, “anthropomorphism” is an interpretation, yet cannot be sustained from the grammar or immediate context, or genre, and as such, you have no more objective basis to interpret it that way except your rather subjective presupposition that the right interpretation must necessarily harmonize with the rest of the bible. In other words, unless you can achieve mission impossible and justify using inerrancy as a hermeneutic, this Exodus story stands on its own feet and portrays, under Christian assumptions, the way God really was. That’s another reason for those bible-believing Christians who are not inerrantists to suppose that God’s reasons for having Israel decimate the pagans in the promised land were hasty, and like in Genesis 6:6, God, after a few more years of civilizing, thought back on his herem orders and felt sorry he ever issued them.

    Fourth, there are other Christian scholars who similarly minimize the horror of these OT wars, but who refuse to automatically conclude that because the Hebrew war propaganda sounds so much like pagan war rhetoric in the ANE, surely the biblical authors only intended their Israelite audiences to recognize that such wording contained exaggerations. Dr. Richard Hess would be one. Although arguing that no children were actually slaughtered, he admits he “pulls back” from the hyperbole-thesis, and argues that the places where the OT actor confronted the pagans was usually a military fort and not an actual city. Willam Lane Craig understands Hess that way too: “Old Testament scholar Richard Hess took a different line in his paper: he construes the commands literally but thinks that no women and children were actually killed.” http://www.reasonablefaith.org/the-slaughter-of-the-canaanites-re-visited.

    In one of his videos, Hess, in a question and answer period, points out that some pagans exaggerated their war speeches less than the Egyptians, and therefore, one should not lump all ANE pagans together and assume that pagan war propaganda was equally infected with hyperbole. Therefore, you cannot, as some fundamentalists do, insist that the only reason an atheist disagrees with your views is because she is spiritually dead. Plenty of Christians who are allegedly spiritually alive, do not find your arguments very convincing.

    Another such scholar who denies that “hyperbole” can help the apologist in this context, is Clay Jones, D.Min. Associate Professor of Christian Apologetics at Biola University.
    http://www.clayjones.net/2015/12/hyperbole-interpretation/

    Fifth, this says nothing of the countless Christian commentators in the history of the church, and currently, who took these OT commands literally and thus made extensive use of the already well-worn “god’s ways are mysterious” excuse. Will God refuse for centuries to answer prayers of Christians wishing to understand the bible correctly? Can we coherently talk about what this God “would” do if he toys with people to that extreme degree?

    Sixth, your comparison of the OT passages to pagan ANE war rhetoric opens Pandora’s Box. Were you also aware that the way biblical authors speak of their god, is very close to how the pagans exalt their own gods in the Mesha Stele, the Ugartic texts, and so on? Many scholars think Psalm 82 was simply a Hebrew adaptation of an originally Canaanite hymn, and in my opinion, James White lost his extensive debate with Mormon scholar Hamblin in his effort to avoid the polytheistic implications in that Psalm. If the Hebrews were simply imitating clichéd war rhetoric of their ANE contemporaries, what is to stop them from imitating the language pagans use of worship of their own god? How many times must the Hebrews imitate the pagan ways before we can reasonably become suspicious that the Hebrew religion appears to be nothing more than a purely naturalistic evolution from its Canaanite mother?

    Seventh, can you really assert any moral difference between the alleged “pass-children-through-the-fire” sacrifices of the Canaanites, and god’s own requirement to roast certain people to death in fire? Genesis 38:24, Leviticus 10:1-2, 20:14, 21:9, Numbers 11:1, 16:35, Joshua 7:15 (since Achan’s kids were killed too, the kids must have also been burnt alive, and there you go, your god ordering others to burn children to death), 2nd Kings 1:10, 12, 23:34, Psalm 140:10.

    Eighth, maybe I missed it, but I cannot find in your book any admission of the debate between scholars on whether the child-sacrifice allegations the bible authors make against the Canaanites are actually true. There is more than one way to reasonably interpret the infant bones at Carthage, the early classical texts that describe the horror of the sacrifice in fire could just as easily be post-war propaganda as they could be valid information (their various descriptions are sufficiently dissimilar to justify thinking their sources for such knowledge were less than reliable), and the admission of many Christian scholars that the Mosaic writings containing these condemnations only come to us after substantial reworking by priests with ideological theological axes to grind, makes it difficult to believe that every bible-description of pagan horrors was historically true, or true to the degree implied in the bible. If the Hebrew descriptions of pagan immorality were also tinged with hyperbole, then one of god’s reasons for having the Hebrews take their land (Deut. 18:9-12) goes right out the window. In light of the inconclusive nature of the archaeological and extra-biblical evidence for horrific pagan corruptions, why don’t you view the biblical descriptions of such horrors as containing a certain degree of hyperbole? Is it because the less terrible the pagans are, the less reason God would have to dispossess them?

    Ninth, you explain the survival of Amalekites seen in later chapters of Samuel as proof that the earlier war language requiring their ‘total’ annihilation had a degree of hyperbole, but why can’t the survival of Amalekites after such wars be explained by the simple fact that, as a fierce nation, with more to do than sit around waiting to attack Israel, some of their people/ armies were away on other political business/turf-wars when Samuel showed up in their city?

    Tenth, your treatment of bible inerrancy (27, the ‘appropriation model’), whereby you obtain the conclusion that God can “inspire” the wording of a human author while not endorsing what the human author means with his words, is truly bizarre. It seems to go against both the “men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke FROM God (2 Pet. 1:21 NAU) and the “god-BREATHED (2 Tim 3:16)” criteria of inspiration given in the NT, and I have to wonder how many inerrantist Christian readers actually believed it. The fact that so many conservative scholars have admitted in academic journals and commentaries that there is a real tension between Psalm 137:9 and Jesus’ do-good-to-your-enemies ethic, justifies one to be suspicious that you didn’t happen upon something other equally capable scholars missed, but are instead arguing the appropriation model solely as an emergency exit, should you discover in the future that the hyperbole-interpretation is incorrect.

    Eleventh, surely you are aware of the scholars who smirk, just a bit, when they read in 2nd Kings 22:8 about a priest, whose people had previously lived long without the law of Moses, conveniently “found” the book of Mosaic law (probably Deuteronomy) in the wall of an abandoned temple, and how this “find” inspired the deadly reforms of Josiah (2nd Kings 23:24) ? A. D. H. Mayes, in Deuteronomy, NCB (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1981) at 102 characterizes the finding of the book of the law as nothing but the Kings author’s employment of literary device. In other words, there is room in the OT text and history to argue that the words of God to slay pagans and paganism, might end up being nothing more than fictions, and you hardly need to publish an apologetic to defend the goodness of fictional divine commands.

    Twelfth, if your model of biblical inspiration be true, all it does is raise the problematic question of why Christians through the centuries have obstinately insisted the atrocity texts of the OT were fully literal. Should god be blamed for this consistent pattern of Christians missing the truth? If your model is correct, the classic conservative Christian position is one big proof of how easily one can stray from theological truth, despite sincere attempts from within the conservative tradition to get it right…and at that point, the hypothesis that there is no god to give guidance, is no less plausible than the excuse that god’s ways are mysterious.

    Thirteenth, most Christian scholars realize that the rules Moses prescribed for bans (kill all pagans who lived nearby, Deut. 7) were not always consistently followed out by Hebrew military leaders, and this might rationally justify the view that, assuming a historical kernel of truth is present in such stories, these leaders did not think their source for the “word of the Lord” was infallible, which of course would nuke your thesis. Moses himself apparently understood the word of the Lord in Numbers 31:1 (“full” vengeance) to require death to all virgin Midianite women (v. 14-15, pagans living nearby), but nevertheless relaxes that part of the ban, as some type of concession, after his soldiers return with them as prisoners of war (v. 18). Most conservative scholars argue that these women being virgins proves they had nothing to do with the sin at Peor which is being avenged. What they often overlook is that a) virgins can still sin sexually with Israelite soldiers without causing rupture of the hymen (i.e., Moses appears to lack critical thinking skills that would otherwise have helped him conform more closely to what God allegedly wanted, a defect we must also read into “his” authoring of the Pentateuch); b) the baby boy Midianites would likely have had even less to do with the sexual sin at Peor being avenged (it is completely absurd to argue they would have carried on pagan corruptions after growing up in Israelite households and having become assimilated to the Israelite religion like any natural Israelite child), and c) the fact that Moses relaxed apparently absolute herem law hurts his credibility and justifies atheists to wonder whether, assuming he is the original author of the extermination texts in the Pentateuch, his imperfection wasn’t also at work when he wrote such things. And your own acceptance of the “appropriation model” would open the door wide to the possibility that much of what Moses asserted, that we find so abhorrent, was identical to what you think is going on in Psalm 137:9 (i.e., the horrible atrocity mentioned by the biblical author is not something God approved of).

    Fourteenth, shouldn’t the inconsistency of such military leaders in obeying the ban, inform the question of whether their source for “the word of the Lord” was believed by them to always be trustworthy? Was Moses making exceptions to the ban because he was rebelling against god, or because his way of knowing God’s will was something less than absolute?

    Fifteenth, Rahab, Caleb and the Shecemites (your book at 70-74), with their ability to recognize and align with “truth” despite living in the midst of pagan corruption, would seem to justify the conclusion that that extensive pagan corruption that God allegedly cited as the reason for Israel to kill the pagans, was NOT so extreme that it would have had the guaranteed corrupting influence risk on Israel that you speak about in Id at 68. A further illustration of this would be the Kenites whom Saul in 1st Samuel 15:6 warned to go away from the Amalekites, a thing Samuel does not condemn him for. Saul likely would not have spared the Kenites had he believed they were steeped in corrupt pagan practices, so there is room to argue that Saul viewed these Kenites as actually living around the Amalekites without actually becoming assimilated into corrupt Amalekite paganism. If this theory be true, then the risk of Israel becoming corrupt was far less than what God said, consequently, this rational for dispossessing the Canaanites is weakened. In other words, there is room to argue that the bible authors portrayed the pagans as extensively corrupt, not because this was true, but to deceive the reader into thinking that something more than just a greedy land-grab was at issue. Most people recoil at the thought of slaughtering nations simply because the conqueror wants the land, so painting the original occupants of the land as notoriously corrupt helps justify said slaughter in the minds of most civilized readers.

    Sixteenth, your attempt to insulate Rahab from Morriston’s charge of her duplicity is hard to believe: a) there is scholarly disagreement on whether she was ever even a prostitute; b) her house was on the wall and yet the walls came tumbling down despite her having gathered her family into this house; c) the Israelite spies allowing Rahab to include family/friends in her being spared is problematic: even if Rahab had a sincere change of heart, that doesn’t mean her pagan acquaintances would have, and yet their survivial is something God said in Deut. 7 would guarantee that Israel would fall into idolatry; d) the Jericho King’s messengers suspiciously blindly accept the word of this Rahab concerning what happened to the enemy spies she admits having talked with, when her talking with them, in a context of impending war, would cause the reader to reasonably expect those messengers would have put forth the extra effort of searching her house; e) her hiding the spies in the flax bundles on her roof is suspicious, since the roof is where ANE people’s often went alone or with guests, and surely Rahab would have known that if the King’s messengers wish to do even a quick search, that roof is the first place they’d look, and finally f) if you lived in a small village and had reason to believe previously very successful terrorists sent their spies ahead to speak with you, and your village would surely perish with everybody in it, you cannot deny that the temptation to suddenly announce your belief in the truth of their religion, as a last ditch effort to stay alive, would be irresistible. In other words, the Rahab story is full of historical implausibilities, justifying the view that the authors of Joshua are more concerned with theological idealism than with historical fact, which, again, justifies skepticism of the idea that the “ban” in Joshua was something God “really” ordered.

    Seventeenth, many Christian commentators hold the view that Mosaic writings did not come to us until after they were substantially reworked by priests with theological axes to grind. (i.e., documentary hypothesis, among others). These commentators admit that the stories are idealized legends that depart to one degree or other from what likely actually happened. Concerning Numbers 31, “The story has little “realism,” and is best understood as a midrashic construction, celebrating the power of Yahweh to defeat enemies… Budd, P. J. (2002). Vol. 5: Word Biblical Commentary : Numbers. Word Biblical Commentary (Page 333). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.”—-How much of a dent does such a scholarly Christian admission put in your presupposition that the commands of God in these OT stories are what God “really did” order? We find similar admissions from the Catholic Jerome bible commentary

    Eighteenth, Samuel’s basis in 1st Samuel 15 for attacking Amalak is, conspicuously, not expressed or implied to be related to any evil the present generation had done. Rather, the basis was the solitary fact that this nation had attacked the exodusing Israelites more than 400 years before Samuel was born (15:2-3). This exclusivist emphasis on corporate responsibility (here, holding the present generation responsible for crimes they didn’t commit) supports saying Saul’s Semitic view would have motivated him to believe even the fleeing Amalekites were no less deserving of death than military personnel guarding the city.

    So the historical implausibilities justify rejecting bible inerrancy as a hermeneutic, and you clearly lose big if you cannot demonstrate the unreasonableness of the atheist in rejecting that tool of interpretation and requiring the OT texts to stand on their own merits. God requiring children to be burned to death (Joshua 7:15) makes God guilty of the very pagan practice the bible elsewhere condemns.

    Personally, God’s forcing a woman falsely accused of adultery to drink deliberately poisoned water, so the priest can then decide her guilt based on whether her vagina gets all yucky (Numbers 5) convinces me beyond a shadow of a doubt that nothing remotely close to an infinite intelligence was guiding ancient Israel. Most scholars think the final form of the Pentateuch/Historical sections originated with priests during the Babylonian captivity, and therefore we are reading ancient barbaric texts that have been reworked by those with an agenda to prioritize theological belief over historical accuracy.

    Your choice to try and answer the atheist criticisms, with answers premised on the assumptions of biblical inerrancy and God’s undeniable goodness, was your greatest flaw. If you seriously believed God’s goodness was *that* obvious, you’d have found no reason to make the divine atrocities in the bible less barbaric than they appear. God orders the killing of pagan babies, he has the right to take life, his goodness cannot be questioned, end of discussion.

  • Matt,

    Yes, I read the book about Genocide by you and Copan before I reviewed it.

    However, I had accidentally missed the section where you responded to 1st Samuel 15. Missing something is admitted by countless Ph.d’s in the preface to their academic books, and they praise third persons among family and friends for having pointed out something wrong or something overlooked. So you lay readers should not blindly assume that because one of your critics missed something relevant, this critic could not possibly have anything significant to say. That kind of logic would require throwing out most academic books on biblical subjects, whose authors thank third-parties for correcting manuscripts and pointing out other flaws before publication.

    I work by myself, so when I fail to see one of my mistakes, I take the chance that it will remain in the post or published comments. People like you and I know perfectly well the tendency of the average lay-audience to draw hasty inferences and side with what feels good, long before they’ve seen all the evidence. Trump and American media would not be what they are, if most people in America had critical thinking skills.

    I also have a problem with the fact that I made a very comprehensive rebuttal to your thesis and posted it here, and despite the posting being successful, that post disappeared.

    For what reason did that post disappear, and what changes can I make that will make it more likely that an extensive critique of your book will stay posted at a site where you are active?

    Why are you and Copan so unwilling to engage in an academic debate online about the merits of your book? Isn’t the prospect of your possibly misleading Christians with historical/theological misrepresentations and faulty argument, a higher spiritual priority in your eyes, than say, the current speaking engagements or the need to fulfill present book deals? Truth is more important than goals, is it not?

    If nothing else, you engaged in hasty generalization when you pointed out that ANE peoples contemporary with Moses/Joshua exaggerated their war-victories.

    First, most of the scholars in the history of Christianity who speak on the issue of OT genocide took the “leave alive nothing that breathes” language literally and predictably appealed to God’s mysterious ways.

    Second, not all pagan exaggerations are equal. For example, Dr. Richard Hess, Christian and OT scholar, says the Hittites exaggerated far less than the Egyptians, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdKlQAiyhPo at time-code 45:00 ff) thus raising the question of whether the “kill them all” language in the bible was as exaggerated as you say it was.

    Third, you open pandora’s box when you attribute language of exaggeration to God himself (as you are doing since in 1st Samuel 15:1-3, the command to even slaughter “children and infants” is presented as something God himself is commanding)…How many other statements from God in the bible are exaggerations equal to pagan literature, despite appearing grave and ominous on the surface? Is god truly infinite? Perfect? Does god love all unbelievers equally? Would the followers of Moses have known that the most horrible list of unspeakable atrocities God threatens against Israel in Deuteronomy 28:15-63 was mere exaggeration?

    Fourth, your theory that God’ s purpose for Saul was to simply wipe out any Amalekites who might be obstinately refusing to flee, cannot be harmonized with the divine purpose expressly stated in 15:3 (i.e., the current generation of Amalekites are to be attacked because of what their ancestors did to the exodusing Israelites more than 400 years previous. ). It is noteworthy that despite biblical mentions of Amalekite attacks after the Exodus, about which we can presume God and Samuel knew, the word from God to Samuel is careful to avoid using those allegedly more recent attacks as the motive for Saul’s retaliation. If the current generation of kids can be attacked for sins they didn’t commit, then this view of corporate responsibility makes it more difficult for the apologist to argue that individual present-generation Amalekites would have been spared as long as they fled. Saul therefore would have found the fleeing Amalekite mother and her kids no less deserving of death than the Amalekite military personnel standing guard and willing to oppose Saul directly.

    Fifth, W.L. Craig’s defense of inerrancy, which you use, blindly presupposes it’s truth. That is, Craig explicitly admits that because one view of the OT statements of God as harsh and genocidal cannot be harmonized with Jesus and the NT concept of love, then surely, some other understanding that allows such statements to harmonize must be the correct one. In other words, the view of inerrancy that you adopt is premised on the common fallacy of begging the question.

    Sixth, and perhaps worst of all, Wolterstorff’s model of bible inspiration, which you endorse, conflicts with the first half of 2nd Peter 1:21, which says “for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will…” (2 Pet. 1:21 NAU). Wolterstorff’s speech/act, delegation and appropriation models infuse the human will into the act of writing scripture. The first part of that verse condemns most modern theologians and apologists who seem to agree, for no good reason, that the mechanical dictation theory must surely be wrong. Since many conservative commentaries, such as Keil and Delitzsch understand verses like Ezekiel 38:4 to be describing God as forcing people to sin against their wills, there is plenty of biblical and scholarly justification for the proposition that God’s inspiration of the biblical writers overrode the human will, and if this is true, then there is no human element in 1st Samuel 15:3, so the command there to slay also “children and babies” is solely God’s own view. Will you argue that God himself, whom the bible says IS truth, talks in exaggerated ways no less than the pagans whom this God apparently despised so much?

    A study of “moved” (i.e., men of God were moved (Greek: phero) by the Holy Spirit, 2nd Peter 1:21b) indicates, according to Friberg, Thayer and other lexicons, that in all cases, the “moving” was describing the mover as being the SOLE cause of the described action (bring in the sick, Mark 1:31/Acts 5:6; Peter is led to martyrdom where he doesn’t want to go, John 21:18, a ship is driven by a wind, Acts 27:16, Simon “bearing” Jesus’ cross, Luke 23:26, etc, etc. If this type of tyrranical control, derived as it is from study of cognate usage, be combined with the first half of 2nd Peter 1:21 (i.e., no prophecy of God came from human will), then this verse is refuting the model of biblical inspiration that you had rested your book’s entire thesis on.

    There are many more critiques that can be made, but these are sufficient to reasonably expect a Christian author, wishing to make sure he has’t misled his Christian audience, to respond in some fashion.

    Once again, I offer to discuss these issues with you in any online forum of your choosing, whether email, chat board or otherwise.

  • Matt,

    Coming straight to this site from Google, there was no evidence of my lengthy Feb. 2 comment.

    This webpage did not tell me that my prior Feb. 2 comment was “awaiting moderation” until after I had posted my most recent comment today.

    So that is why I interpreted the absence of my lengthy prior comment as evidence that somebody had deleted it. I have never had to wait more than 4 days for a website forum operator to approve a comment. February 2 was more than 4 days ago, so pardon me for interpreting the silence through the filter of my previous experience.