The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 82 – Paul Copan

Episode 82: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

This episode of the Dr. Jeff Show features Dr. Paul Copan, a philosopher and professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Paul has written several important books addressing difficult questions about Christianity and the Bible, including Is God a Moral Monster?, Did God Command Genocide?, and a forthcoming book titled Is God a Vindictive Bully? set to release in Fall 2022. During their conversation, they discuss the primary challenge Paul encounters: people today are less likely to question God’s existence and more likely to question His goodness, viewing Him as evil, violent, misogynistic, or pro-slavery.

Paul addresses these concerns by examining Old Testament warfare accounts, arguing that much of the language is hyperbolic rather than literal genocide, and explaining the historical and cultural context of practices like servitude in ancient Israel. He emphasizes that God’s judgment comes from His love rather than opposing it, maintaining both God’s kindness and severity as complementary aspects of His character.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast. This show’s available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Liftable, Edifi, or wherever you get your podcasts. Would you please take a moment today to go review the show in the place where you prefer to download it? That would be really helpful. Other people find out about the show that way and people trust other people’s opinions for people who are dedicated podcast listeners as you are. So thank you for doing that.

This is the show where I interview major thought leaders to show that our worldview changes everything. And my guest today is Dr. Paul Copan. Paul is a philosopher. He studies the philosophy of religion and he’s written some books that are profoundly important for us to begin considering books such as, Is God a Moral Monster?, Did God Command Genocide?, and a new one that’s coming out this coming fall. We’re recording this in the summer of 2022. Is God a Vindictive Bully? Have you heard all those criticisms before? Well, that’s what I’m going to ask Paul about in our conversation. Welcome to the show. Dr. Paul Copan, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Dr. Paul Copan (01:14):
Great to be with you. Thanks, Jeff.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:16):
I have been looking forward to this conversation because you’re one of my favorite Christian apologists. You take the most difficult questions about Christianity and about the Bible and you process through them, and I know that you do it with a heart, a pastoral heart, as well as with the philosopher’s mind. So I’ve been excited. And of course people will know about you from the introduction and the program that you are operating, which is teaching other Christian apologists at Palm Beach Atlantic University. How’s that going?

Dr. Paul Copan (01:54):
Yeah, going great. We just started a master of arts in philosophy of religion at Palm Beach Atlantic University last year, and we have 30 students in our program. We are also starting up an undergrad in Apologetics, so that’s going to be ramping up in August. So we’re glad for an undergrad major, which will be a nice feed into our master of Arts and Philosophy of religion program.

So we’re very excited about it. It has a unique emphasis of being a more public facing master’s degree, not just simply preparing people for PhDs in philosophy, but also helping them to address the issues and culture, to think through the wide array of issues regarding technology and ethics, dealing with issues in corporations dealing with artificial intelligence and so forth. So a lot of exciting things that we’re doing.

Dr. Jeff Myers (02:42):
I love it. Well, I have to say, every time I’ve been to Palm Beach, I run, I go for a little run and I go run by the campus. And I don’t think a lot about what’s going on inside the classrooms of the campus. I just think about the cool yachts that are right there in the intercoastal and getting to run by them. But it’s a beautiful location for a school, and the program that you’re doing there is really exciting. I’ve gotten to know some of the students who are involved in that, and I’m just really encouraged.

(03:14):
And when people come to Summit Ministries, there’s a Dr. Paul Copan bookshelf in the Summit Bookstore with the different things that you’ve written. So there’s no way we could cover everything that you’ve talked about. We can’t even cover a tiny fraction of it. But there’s one issue that I’d love to really dig into with you, and it’s just my sense as I talk to people, work with students that the questions they’re asking today are not about God’s godness, they’re about his goodness.

In other words, I’m more likely these days to have a conversation with someone who says, I grant to you that God exists, but he’s evil. He’s violent, he’s misogynistic, pro-slavery, anti-woman, so forth, and he willingly withholds his power from doing good in the world. All of those kinds of things that people say, they’ve experienced the world through this lens of disappointment. God’s really there and he’s not for me, he’s against me, kind of thing. Do you sense that?

Dr. Paul Copan (04:29):
Oh, sure. One of the common issues, like you said, I do work in the moral argument for God’s existence. And so when you talk about goodness making sense, if God exists, then people say, well, what about the Canaanite warfare? What about some of these Old Testament issues? So you can lay out your case, as you said, but the critic just jumps right into some of those difficult issues that we see cropping up in the Old Testament and often feeling like God can be readily dismissed because look, this is a problem. That’s a problem.

And so what I try to do is tackle those issues and walk through them, provide a context for them so that people don’t so readily dismiss them, but actually are, stop short and think about them. What does it mean to think about God’s wrath? What does it mean to think about God’s judgment?

(05:19):
What does it mean to think about God’s patience and goodness in holding off to allow for repentance? So those are things that often get ignored and something that looks harsh that even may be hyperbole or exaggeration, which I talk about regarding warfare, that it’s taken literally and not taking other texts into account. And so people just say, that’s done. So that’s really the top question that I get, the warfare question, but also attendant questions like servitude in the Old Testament, women in the Old Testament. How do we navigate those things?

I think people, I think thanks to the new atheists have raised the issue and it’s important for us to think them through, but there are also some good responses that we can offer to those critics and say, hold on a minute. If you want to talk about it, there’s a broader context to consider and we can put those things on the table and then start to see the goodness of God after all.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:18):
I’d love to dig into as many of those as we can in the amount of time that we have. But I recognize if you’ve developed an entire master’s degree program around some of this, what we can cover in 30 or 40 minutes, it’s really limited. But I’m just curious about the, so Christopher Hitchens, who’s passed away now, but he wrote this book, God Is Not Great, calling into question whether God is something more than just a vindictive bully. And of course his answer was no.

I mean, you can’t pay any attention to scripture because of this, but what you are doing is, and this is the other part for Christians, is sometimes I’ve heard Christians say, well, that’s the Old Testament, so God’s different now. Those questions are no longer relevant. They actually take three-fourths of the Bible and just cut it out because they’re so afraid of trying to address some of these questions. Right.

Okay, well, let’s dig in. Let’s take the violent God. God commands genocide. He’s violent, he’s angry, he’s mean, and you’d better watch out when somebody says that to you. How do you approach that? Because you’ve written about this in books, and I guess the main book on that one is?

Dr. Paul Copan (07:44):
Well, Is God a Moral Monster? Did God Command Genocide? And then I’m building on that in my third book called Is God of Vindictive Bully? coming out in October.

Dr. Jeff Myers (07:51):
Perfect. Perfect. Okay, so we caught the wave just right here at the right time there. That’s it. Great. Okay, so give us a sense of how you approach this, because I know this is what you’re doing with some ministry students, but for those who aren’t able to attend or maybe just they’re out for a walk right now listening to the podcast, help us.

Dr. Paul Copan (08:12):
Yeah, no, I appreciate it. A few things to keep in mind are the bigger picture that when we look at the vision of the Israelites that God has for them, that God wants Israel to be a blessing to the nations to bring salvation through the Messiah, but God has to start somewhere.

So he begins with, Israel promises them a land where they can begin this process, but also there are people in that land who are not quite fully wicked, but God says, I’m going to wait until the sin of the Amorites is filled up until the sin reaches full measure, and only then will you be able to enter the land.

And so it’ll be a simultaneous reception of the gift of the land that I promised to Abraham, but also judgment on people who are acting in ways that would be considered criminal in any civilized society. Incest, bestiality, ritual, prostitution, infant sacrifice. These are the sorts of things that have a corrupting influence. And of course, Israel from the very beginning is highly corruptible.

(09:19):
Highly influenced. And so God is very strong in his stance against the Canaanites who stand in the way of the fulfillment of God’s purposes. So if you don’t have Israel committed to God, if you don’t have this nation, you don’t have a Messiah, you don’t have salvation that goes to the ends of the earth. So something has to be done, but God waits patiently. It’s not anything that is ethnically oriented. God is not picking on the Canaanites because of their tribal or genetic identity. It is simply because of their wicked behavior that God is going to, he commands the Israelites to drive them out.

So in a lot of these battles that are waged, I don’t take the view that this is genocide. I simply see that there’s a lot of hyperbolic language that is being utilized, sweeping terminology that is being appropriated. That was common in the ancient near east. It was like ancient near Eastern trash talk in our sports teams. We say, oh, we totally annihilated those guys. We totally destroyed them.

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:25):
We talk that way all the time. We annihilated them. I thought we were just playing a game. But yeah, we talked that way with hyperbole. And so you’re saying that when they wrote out battle reports, that was a common way of?

Dr. Paul Copan (10:38):
Right. Joshua is a paradigm case of this battle report that uses hyperbolic language. We know, and again, depending upon, it’s hard to understand, how do we interpret the term “utterly destroy”? It can be translated different ways. Sometimes it just means you won the victory, you defeated them. And we’re not told anything about, well, how many survivors there were.

But what’s interesting about the Israelite accounts in contrast to other ancient near Eastern war accounts which say, oh, there are no survivors, there were non-existent, there were no opponents left to stand up against Pharaoh or this other ruler, at least in Joshua and other accounts, you have a more balanced understanding where not only does it say there are no survivors, we left alive, nothing that breathed and so forth. You’ll see mentions of survivors who are there in maybe even the same chapter later on a couple of chapters later.

(11:34):
And certainly when you get to Judges when it says, the Israelites could not dry them out, they could not dry them out. So even though it says that the land had rest under Joshua, and you get to the end of Joshua and it says, there’s still many nations that need to be driven out. But the main thing is that God is focusing on the identity of the Israelites and that if they need to remove the objects that hone in on Canaanite identity.

And one couple of New Testament scholars, John and Harvey Walton talk about how in Nazi Germany you have after the war, there was a nation largely intact, soldiers died and so forth, but the people were pretty much intact. But when the allies came in, they destroyed the symbols. They killed those who were higher up, they vilified the ideology, they removed all of those identity markers that were the problem.

(12:32):
And in the same way, when God says destroy their idols, he meant it because those are the identity markers. And so you could have a lot of Canaanites still around, but the key point is to remove those identity markers so that Israel’s religious theological identity would not be compromised. Lemme just hone in on something that may be helpful here. When you see man, woman, young and old and so forth, there’s an account, a principled on the ground account that you’d see in a more journalistic manner in Numbers 21, where these two kings, Sihon and Og are defeated.

The Israelites want to pass through peacefully. They don’t allow it. They take up arms. We’re told in that account that Sihon, or Og, the king, his sons and his army fought against the Israelites and were defeated. Fast forward to the more intensified language of Deuteronomy, which uses the sweeping language, and it recounts that battle, but it says, man, woman, young and old, even though it was just the king, his sons and the army.

(13:36):
So what’s going on? Well, Deuteronomy uses that hyperbolic, intensified language that later on, say 1 Kings 15, the Amalekites that picks up on it. But you see that sort of intensification, and I’ll give a final example here. In 1 Samuel 15 we’re told that there’s this pitch battle that Saul has with the Amalekites. He says, I have. He says, and the narrator says that Saul utterly destroyed, however that’s to be translated utterly destroyed the Amalekites.

Fast forward, David, at the end of the book, first Samuel is fighting against an army of the Amalekites and the same vast terrain that Saul is fighting against as part of the exaggeration of war accounts is fighting them from Arabia to Egypt. David has this pitch battle, this localized battle, and then it says that David fought them from Arabia to Egypt. You have the same sort of things going on, so as you look more closely, you start to see that there’s more beneath the surface than merely oh, genocide. So those are the sorts of things that I take up and try to make clear in my books.

Dr. Jeff Myers (14:42):
Yeah, I can imagine somebody who’s listening right now thinking, well, if those were exaggerated, maybe other things in the Bible are exaggerated as well, maybe that actually means I can’t really trust it. How do you distinguish between understanding that the Bible is literally true and that idea of, it’s literalistically true? In other words, we kind of measure it by our current standards. How do you fine tune that? Because I’m sure you get this question in class.

Dr. Paul Copan (15:17):
Absolutely. I’ve been hearing it while I’ve been here at Summit. But the thing to keep in mind here is that we’re talking about a distinct genre that these warfare accounts are part of an ancient near Eastern genre that just uses that kind of trash talk. And so when you see that, you realize that what is a genre? I mean, it is in essence, when you hear once upon a time, what do you immediately think? Oh, here’s we’re about to go into a fairytale fair.

When you see these warfare accounts, you understand that the author is writing with, it’s sort of like a contract between the author and the reader that the author understands that you’re going to read this in a certain way, that you’re not going to say, oh, utter destruction means literal annihilation. You’re going to understand that there’s a lot of hyperbole here, and that is common, and many interpreters recognize that.

So when it comes to different genres, revelation is highly symbolic, and basically you invert principles of interpretation. When you read historical narrative, you take it, you assume it’s generally literal and straightforward unless you have reasons to take it as figurative in revelation, you assume apocalyptic literature that this is figurative or symbolic unless you have reasons for taking it literally. So I like to tell people, not so much to read the Bible literally, but to read it literarily.

(16:43):
Read it according to the literary genres or types of literature within the text, and there’s a great book. It’s by Douglas Stewart and Gordon Fee called How to Read the Bible for All It’s Worth, which goes through all the different types of genre within the basic genres within scripture, the gospels historical narrative, epistles, apocalyptic poetry, prophetic and so forth.

So it gives you basic principles of interpretation for those particular types of literature. I think that’s a nice gateway into understanding how genre works. So certainly when the Bible says the trees of the field will clap their hands and so forth, we don’t think that that is really what is going to be happening as that’s going on. Exactly.

So we understand that that’s part of poetic language. And so I think if we can allow for a little more leeway here and say, well, this also applies to the war accounts that you see in the ancient Near East and in Israel, but the Israelites are more realistic in their accounts than what you see in the more braggart accounts as it were in other ancient Eastern accounts that don’t allow for any nuance whatsoever. In fact, you could even eke out a victory, a narrow victory, and it’ll say, we totally annihilated them. There are none left and so forth. That’s how it works.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:07):
One thing I’ve always been impressed with a lot of the battle accounts is though they fit into that genre, they are remarkably specific in geographical details and the names of the people who were involved.

Dr. Paul Copan (18:21):
They are.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:21):
Which are very interesting historical aspects to this. I remember visiting Israel and our guide took us to a place and said, this is where David and Goliath fought. Of course, I’m a little skeptical. I know there are probably a lot of people out there who say things just, it’s our field. We could charge admissions, so therefore we say, this is where this happened. I asked, how do you know? He said, here’s the description from the Bible. This is literally the only place in the entire country that fits that geographical description exactly.

Dr. Paul Copan (18:58):
Wow.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:58):
Which I thought was, I thought, oh, okay, I need to go back and look at all these other accounts as well. We’re provided a lot of historical detail.

Dr. Paul Copan (19:06):
Right, exactly. And you’re right to bring in the historical dimension, obviously, and I’m not denying that at all. You do have a fundamental historical base that is taking place here, and there are some scholars who, because they want to avoid the implications of God commanding warfare, Israel actually engaging in battle, they just say, oh, that’s non historical. That didn’t really happen. That’s just kind of a later rhetorical sort of a thing that happens after Josiah in the seventh century BC or even into the exile.

And so what I’m doing is I’m saying, no, this is actually historical stuff. This happened. These are actual places, these battles took place and so forth. But it does have that flourish of the hyperbole, the exaggeration, and other literary devices.

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:52):
Yeah, well, we need people. We need you to get some new books for your library. Is that going to come as a complete shock to anybody who’s watching or listening practically? We need a new book every week, but Is God a Moral Monster? Is God a Vindictive Bully? you said comes out in October.

Dr. Paul Copan (20:13):
And then the book, Did God Really Command Genocide?, is in the middle.

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:16):
Did God Command Genocide?

Dr. Paul Copan (20:16):
Of the trilogy as it were.

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:17):
Okay. Alright. So you’ve got to read those and then look through them and recognize that you’ve got people like Paul who believes in the authority of scripture looking at these things as opposed to people who try to come at it purely as historians or theologians or maybe archeologists who have no pre-commitments to the truth of any of this. It’s a very different, interesting approach.

Dr. Paul Copan (20:47):
Yeah, and one of the things that I’m pushing back on in my forthcoming book is on people like Greg Boyd and others who are saying, when it says thus says the Lord in the Old Testament, it’s not necessarily that God was saying it. It could have been just Moses or Joshua with their fallen violence prone ancient near Eastern viewpoint.

And so if there’s something that goes against the kindness and love of God, then that must be what they say is the textual God, this fallen perspective of the ancient author or narrator, but as opposed to the actual God who is kind and loving and nonviolent, et cetera, that this is the Jesus when he says, father, forgive them loving your enemies. That’s the true, the actual God. And what I try to do in my book is show that even at places where they say, no, that’s not the actual God, that’s just a textual God.

(21:43):
As you look a little deeper and you look at other scriptures, no, the actual God and the textual God are identical, and that they’re actually creating this vast chasm between within the God. It sounds a lot like Marcian who rejected the Old Testament and embrace certain portions of the new because he didn’t like the violence prone God of the Old Testament going to say, and the God who the heavenly Father turned the other cheek of the New Testament, but Jesus himself dries up money changes from the temple Jesus. In Jude five it says, Jesus, after he had delivered the Israelites from Egypt, destroyed those who did not believe.

(22:25):
In Revelation 2, in red letters, we have Jesus saying about Jezebel, that he’s going to cast her on a bed of sickness and that cast, he’s going to strike dead her followers. This is Jesus speaking. So as Paul says, he says, behold, then the kindness and severity of God, Romans 11:22, and those critics from outside, I talk about the forthcoming book, the critics from without, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and so forth, they emphasize the severity of God, but they ignore the kindness of God. On the other hand, the critics, as I say, critics from within Greg Boyd and so forth, they highlight the kindness of God, but they ignore the severity of God.

And I’m trying to walk that tension and keep it together because God’s severity actually comes out of his love. It’s not opposed to his love. God is passionate when there’s dehumanization, when there’s evil, when there’s criminal activity. And so God steps in, he acts precisely because those things are wrong and they need to be judged. So as one theologian said, God is not wrathful in spite of love, but he is wrathful because of love. And so that’s how we need to understand it. And I think that puts a lot of what you see going on in the Old Testament in proper perspective.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:45):
Yeah. Yeah. So that’s really helpful that you don’t have different grades of godness, that God is always completely loving and completely just and merciful at the same time, loving and judging at the same time. And so I really appreciate that because sometimes what I see is people just sort of throwing the whole world or the reality of human sinfulness under the bus. Oh, that wasn’t the God that was like the demigod. It sounds sort of gnosticism in a way that is where a lot of people end up.

Dr. Paul Copan (24:25):
Yeah. I think that there is a sense, and again, gnosticism of course was something that detached itself from the world. And I think what the scripture is actually doing it, it’s a no spin zone, which tells us that these things are really bad and that God ought to act. In fact, God promises that he will bring justice. In fact, you look at the martyrs in Revelation, the heavenly martyrs, redeemed martyrs in Revelation 6 who are saying, how long a Lord until you avenge our blood, that has been shed by the nations of the earth. And so this is that God promises that he’ll render to everyone according to his deeds.

Of course, we trust in the grace of God, and that is obviously our refuge, that we are declared righteous based on what Christ has done. So we can stand with confidence before God, but for those who continue in their ways and refuse to submit themselves to the mercy and love of God and also the justice of God and His holiness, then God will have to render to them according to what they have done.

(25:32):
There’s a certain asymmetry here too, I would add. So the Bible is one realistic about these things. It doesn’t detach itself and somehow look the other way at these evil things. No, God is going to act. He’s going to judge. These things are wrong, and it’s just a broken world with a lot of messiness in it. And God thankfully steps into that messiness. And Jesus Christ, he gets his feet dirty and hands bloody and moves us in a redemptive direction through Jesus Christ. So anyway, maybe that’s all I’ll say on that, but more topics to cover perhaps.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:04):
Yeah, that’s so good. There are more that I’d love to talk about. One of the things that people are very concerned with these days is this sense that masculinity has in the church kind of become hyper-masculinity and it’s patriarchal, and we meet people who’ve experienced sort of, you might even say abusive relationships with men.

And then I think a lot of people, if they’re trying to pinpoint what actually happened, say, well, those men were that way because they believed God was that way, that God is anti-woman and therefore they can be anti-woman and it’s righteous and spiritual. And then I think a lot of people in that vein, once they starred into that line of thinking, look back at the Old Testament and say, see, women had no place there. This is not the sort of society that we want. Therefore, we need to displace all of the Old Testament teaching. You can see where it goes.

(27:18):
But I have these conversations quite a lot, and I want to be sensitive to people’s experience of having not had good experiences with men, men who say that they’re harsh because God is also harsh. I would love for you to just tackle that for a moment. I mean, when you study God in the Old Testament is God.

Dr. Paul Copan (27:50):
Yeah, certainly not. We see at the very beginning that God creates male and female in his image, that there is a fundamental equality from the very start, and that this is the ideal that the scriptures continue to come back to that fundamental equality that is there. We go to the New Testament, we see, of course, Paul says, in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, male and female harking back to Genesis one, no male and female. He made them in his image.

And Paul is saying that fundamentally even these distinctions before the cross are irrelevant, that it’s not one statuses more superior than the other. No, fundamentally there is this equality before God because of what Jesus Christ has done for us. And so we see that this is the broader biblical vision that is taking place here. And when you look at even somebody like the Proverbs 31 woman, she’s an entrepreneur.

(28:51):
She is, she’s doing real estate. She assesses a field and buys it. She’s doing stuff on her own apart from her husband. He blesses her, he trusts her. But she is doing all sorts of stuff. I mean, she is really a go-getter. And these top business women, she’s going places, she’s doing stuff, and there’s nothing unfeminine about that sort of a thing. She’s doing these sorts of things and her husband praises her in the gates.

And you see, in ancient Israel, some scholars are now realizing that the term patriarchy is actually not a good word. I mean, I use it in my book, Is God a Moral Monster? But I’ve adapted things a little bit because one noted scholar, Carol Myers from Duke University, she had been the president of the Society of Biblical Literature, and she said that a better term about the Old Testament is hierarchy rather than patriarchy.

(29:50):
You see women, you see they’re differing skills and professionalisms within ancient Israel. And sometimes the women are, they’re the ones who are leading the charge on whether it be in certain crafts or certain things that they do with grain, certain things that they do in serving the temple or counseling or midwifery or the like that there were guilds that women had in which they were the experts, they were consulted.

And you also have women who are prophetesses. You have Deborah, who’s a judge and so forth. You see these women who are rising up. Miriam is part of this triad, this leadership with Moses and Aaron. So you see men who have their areas of expertise, women who do, but it’s not as though there is this kind of uniform patriarchy where you have the men are always on top, the women are on the bottom, and that there is absolutely no interchange.

(30:45):
You have women rising up in leadership, you have men doing certain things and taking orders from women and so on. So to call it a kind of a straight patriarchy, she says it’s actually a later term, kind of a Marxist even term that’s being utilized. And she says, we actually shouldn’t kind of slap on the term patriarchy to this ancient culture when those categories didn’t even fit. So anyway, in my forthcoming book, I talk about a number of these things looking at this concept of hierarchy, where women, they have their own guilds, they have their own skills, and those are highly respected and regarded within ancient Israel.

So that’s a little bit in a nutshell there about what’s going on. But you see again, over and over again, honor your father and mother, that that’s not honor your father and a piece of property, that there is this fundamental quality that is there in the book of Proverbs, pay attention to your father, listen to your mother. Although the father in those cultures tended to be the point person between the household and the law or the rest of society.

And so that was kind of like a buffer there, a protective zone. But there is an assumed authority that women had within the home, that they had their own area of expertise and function, and men pretty much stayed out of that domain. I could go on, but there’s a lot more to be discussed.

Dr. Jeff Myers (32:06):
Well, on this show we’re learning so many things that are causing us to sort of rethink the way we’ve been taught that things are. So for example, the difference between that you’ve made the distinction between something that’s patriarchal and something that’s hierarchical.

Dr. Paul Copan (32:27):
Hierarchical.

Dr. Jeff Myers (32:29):
Hierarchical, easy for you to say. The other one that we’ve learned about on the show with one of the guests, Os Guinness, was that, oh, no, it was not a theocracy in ancient Israel. It was a republic, and it was mind blowing. And then a bunch of us read his book, oh yeah, I can see the point that he’s making here.

(32:53):
And it really helped inform the founding father. Okay. So yeah, we’re having to rethink a lot of things. What would you say is when you think of a challenge that you often hear people ask? Because I’m guessing that just like at Summit Ministries, students are like, I think that guy might have the answer to my question, and he seems like a guy who’s okay to talk to, and then they start sharing things that there are real doubts that they’ve had. What are some of the ones that you’ve encountered the most and how do you respond to them?

Dr. Paul Copan (33:27):
Yeah. Well, I’d say the top question has to do with warfare. The second one has to do with servitude or slavery. In Israel, of course, there’s this black mark on our culture, this negativity that’s associated with slavery. In the pre-Civil War South, there is this, again, the horrible mistreatment of blacks. And so a lot of people, when they hear the term slavery or slave or they read it in the Bible, they think automatically, oh, modern day slavery, this brutality, this inhumanity, and so forth. And what I point out is that you’re seeing something that is radically different from what is going on in the antebellum south.

And so what I try to focus on is that well fundamentally keep in mind the broader vision of the Old Testament, that there is a fundamental equality that with the fall comes this, these distinctions with the fall, we see classism, we see racism, we see certain institutions that oppress and so forth.

(34:36):
Well, from the very beginning it was not so, and what we see in the Pentateuch and the law of Moses is pointing back to the ideals of creation and acknowledging that also there are some laws that are less than ideal because of these fallen cultures. Jesus said in Matthew 19:8 that Moses permitted certain things because of the hardness of human hearts. So they weren’t ideal laws. There’s some obviously very good laws, but there’s some that accommodate human weakness, human failure, and they assume that human beings will sin.

But when it comes to servitude, keep in mind that for the Israelite, there was a limit to how long a person could serve six years. But there are also ways to try to keep people out of poverty because slavery or servitude was basically a way to help people deal with poverty because they ran out of resources, and so they needed to do something to sustain themselves.

(35:35):
So there were gleaning laws. You could pick grain or pluck trees and so forth from your neighbor’s yard. There were also, you had no interest charge to Israelites so that they wouldn’t have loan sharks to further oppress them. So there were ways to lighten the load so that people could remain economically self-sufficient. But if they couldn’t, they would become indentured servants and they would have a six year limit. But if they wanted to continue on, Exodus 21 says, then they could say, I love my employer master, but employer. And so they align themselves with this person to live lifelong under that person’s roof.

What is interesting is that even within surrounding nations in the ancient Near East, you had, if there were any runaway slaves from other nations, the Bible says the law of Moses says they are to settle in any of Israel’s cities. That is, they had the freedom rather than unlike the extradition treaties that other nations had in the ancient Near East to send back slaves to their masters.

(36:43):
Israel was to allow, Israel is to take in those fugitives and to take care of them because there is, the Israelites themselves had been foreigners in the land of Egypt. So that really informs the ethos of Israel’s law. You also have to keep in mind that the term slave or servant better translated itself is a neutral term. It simply means a dynamic dependency relationship that you were dependent upon. Another person, it could be positive, could be negative. Think of the negative side.

When you look at Pharaoh, the Israelites are slaves or servants under Pharaoh, and it’s very oppressive. But God tells Pharaoh through Moses, he says, let my people go that they may serve me. That may become my servants in the wilderness. So there’s a negative servitude and there’s a positive servitude, one that is liberating, one that is freeing.

So that term is a neutral term in and of itself, but it depends upon the context. And so a lot of people superimpose this language upon the scriptures superimposing the negativity of modern day slavery when it actually looks far different than what a lot of people associated with.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:55):
I think there are some people who would hear that and say, okay, yeah, I get it. You’ve got to be more nuanced in the way you understand this term in the Old Testament. But there were a lot of people who said that American slavery was Christian. So you have this hypocrisy, these people who were in church on Sunday and beating their slaves on Monday. I think it makes people cynical. Sure. Say, well, can’t you pretty much use the Bible to justify anything you want?

Dr. Paul Copan (38:28):
Yeah. Well, what I point out is that if the law of Moses were kept, there wouldn’t have been such a thing as modern slavery. For one thing, kidnapping was prohibited, and it’s not just in Israel, but throughout the ancient near East. And that’s how modern slavery got going through kidnapping, people taking them away, of course had a lot of African slave traders who were tribal chieftains and so forth who were cooperating with this process too. So you have no kidnapping. It’s an act punishable potentially by capital offense.

You also have, as I said, the runaway, the fugitive slave laws that the United States had. You had to return the slave to his harsh master. Well, no, if a slave runs away or a servant, a slave runs away from a foreign nation, he can settle wherever in Israel. And the picture is that of refuge of relief of protection. And so that certainly wasn’t taking place in the pre-Civil War South. You also have a term limit on how long a person can serve. It’s six years.

(39:38):
And if a person wants to stay on longer, then that person certainly may. But with servitude in slavery in the antebellum South, it was a lifelong generational sort of a thing. So you have a lot of differences here. And some people say, oh yeah, well, what about Leviticus 25? Leviticus 25 talks about, you can have an alien or a stranger or alien or a sojourner who you can take them from foreign nations and they can become your slaves, servants, whatever, and you can bequeath them to your children and so forth. So you’ve got, isn’t that generational? Aren’t you passing that on?

Well, a couple of things to keep in mind here. The term acquiring, to acquire these foreign servants is simply a legal transaction job. Sorry. Boaz acquired Ruth as a wife in a legal transaction that involved property. God acquires or purchases the Israelites. Exodus 15 tells us he bought them out of slavery in Egypt. We also see that as you keep reading though, it says that if a foreigner or sojourner becomes a person of means in Israel, such that he can actually hire an Israelite to work for him as a servant, it wasn’t optimal. And so hopefully a relative would be able to buy him out to ransom him.

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:07):
Oh, got it. Right.

Dr. Paul Copan (41:08):
And it says, so that person, that Israelite can be acquired the same term that’s used. And I think fundamentally what we see going on here is with the law that says the runaway slave from a foreign nation can settle in any of Israel cities and servitude in which there is an employer loving master, if you will, but an employer who is told, I love you, I want to be under your household. What we have in those two texts fundamentally are the deconstruction of the institution of slavery or servitude within Israel.

Because if you’re oppressed, you can run away even within Israel to a master or an employer who is not going to be harsh with you, and the foreigner can run to Israel from a foreign master and find protection and refuge within Israel. So that’s what the law provides. So you see some really dynamic things happening that relate to servitude in the Old Testament. So I think as you take another look, you realize, oh, there’s a lot more going on here.

Dr. Jeff Myers (42:14):
Wow. So we’ve got to be more thoughtful. I mean, we really need to be more thoughtful when we look at scripture. If we trust it, we’ve got to be able to dig in and ask, what do these things mean? Looking at the cultural context and all of those sorts of things. I know we’ve got to draw our show to a close.

But Paul, I’m curious because you’ve written a lot of books now and you’ve covered not only these Old Testament issues, you’ve also covered the issue of moral relativism as an example. As you do this writing and teaching, what have you seen happen in your own relationship with God?

Dr. Paul Copan (42:56):
Yeah, I mean, there are some, I recently was writing to someone who’s an Old Testament scholar, and it asked this Old Testament scholar about contributing to a book that dealt with some of these issues, some of these challenges. And this Old Testament scholar who takes a view similar to mine, wrote back and said, I’ve seen what people have done to you in terms of trashing you, in terms of being really hostile to you on the internet and so forth, and said, I don’t have the temperament to actually step into that like you do. Or Matt Flanagan, who wrote with me, Did God Really Command Genocide?

And I understand sometimes when you write about these things, there are attacks on you. There are challenges, slander people. One guy saying that I’m an apologist of genocide, which, so he’s using this sort of rhetoric. I’m saying he’s actually doing what I’m saying these ancient writers are doing about warfare.

(44:06):
He’s calling me an apologist genocide, which I don’t believe it happened. It wasn’t genocide. But he’s using that as a rhetorical device to get people to say, look, he’s supporting immorality. He’s really, and so sometimes you get those sorts of things. And so just kind of one basic lesson is you entrust your reputation to the Lord. You say, I can’t answer all of my critics, and I don’t have the time to do that, and I don’t want to just have the emotionally draining experience of having to go and put out fires as it were to try to set things straight, et cetera.

And so you realize as you wrestle with these things, there are some tough issues. And even David Lamb, who’s an Old Testament scholar, takes a similar view on these things as I do. He himself wrote a book called God Behaving Badly, and as he’s written the second edition, he said that it’s kind of taken a toll on him emotionally.

(45:04):
Just dealing with some of these harsh issues can really, it can be very emotionally consuming. And I’ve certainly found that that’s the case where you’re dealing with issues. I mean, sometimes you’re going to university campus. I speak in Singapore, and they wanted me to speak on this topic, and I said, how about the problem of evil? That’s a nicer entry point. People don’t have a context for the Old Testament issues. And so then I prepared for the problem of evil. They said, okay. And then the day before I presented, they said, no, we really think you should do the Moral Monster theme.

So I revised it and everything, and I presented it to a largely non-Christian audience, and I think it went well. But again, it does add a lot of emotional weight to what you’re doing. You realize that you’re dealing with a lot of stuff that hasn’t been processed yet, and people are, you’re seeing these verses or hearing these concepts for the first time as an atheist or non-Christian at least. And they’re saying, yeah, what about that? What about that?

And so you just feel like you got this heavy weight to carry with you as you’re presenting this to your audience. So it really calls for a lot of dependence on God. And just like I said, entrusting these things to the Lord and recognizing as Keith Green, the late singer, a Christian singer, put it, just keep doing your best and pray that it’s blessed and he’ll take care of the rest. And that’s how I operate.

Dr. Jeff Myers (46:22):
Yeah, that’s so good. That’s so good, Paul. I sometimes think of people who are writing these books as pure logic, just utterly rational and so forth. But the truth is there’s a lot at stake in the discussing of all of these issues, and that’s, just to circle back to where we were at the beginning, at stake is how we understand the goodness of God.

Dr. Paul Copan (46:46):
Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (46:47):
That’s right. And to see that in a very personal way from your story as well as in the discoveries that you’ve made is fascinating. Paul, thanks so much for being on the show today.

Dr. Paul Copan (46:57):
Pleasure. Thank you, Jeff.

Dr. Jeff Myers (46:58):
Thank you to my guest today, Dr. Paul Copan, for joining on the Dr. Jeff Show podcast. You can follow Paul and find out more about his work, read his articles, find out about his books at paulcopan.com. Just spell Copan, C-O-P-A-N, and your home free, paulcopan.com.

Even when scripture is hard to understand, this is a really important point. We can understand God by looking to Jesus, the author and finisher of our, and the exact representation of God’s being. That’s what scripture says. Thanks for joining this week. We’ll see you soon.

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