I think I will treat the next two chapters together. Chapter Seven of Hitchens’ book is on the nightmare we call the Old Testament, and Chapter Eight informs us why the evil of the New Testament surpasses that of the Old.
That which is good in the Old Testament is, according to Hitchens, not unique to it.
“But however little one thinks of the Jewish tradition, it is surely insulting to the people of Moses to imagine that they had come this far under the impression that murder, adultery, theft, and perjury were permissible” (p. 99).
But he forgets the heart of man, both ancient and modern. And I do not mean the heart of man in some hyper-spiritualized sense, but rather the heart of man as indicated by what he actually does. In the world into which these commandments came, human sacrifice was not uncommon. Herodotus records how each Babylonian woman was required to do a “tour of duty” as a temple prostitute. As for theft, the distinctions between meum and tuum were particularly blurry, especially when dealing with the members of another tribe. The codification of these standards represented a true advance in civilized liberty.
But what about now? To take just one example, does Hitchens seriously want to maintain that the evil of adultery is self-evident in our day? In the circles he travels in, is adultery such an evil that everyone recoils in horror from the news of yet another straying husband or wife? When a marriage cracks up because one of the partners was seeing someone on the side, what sort of comment might you hear from Hitchens at a Washinton D.C. cocktail party? “What Smith did is reprehensible. Why this is something that Moses didn’t even need to tell his unwashed barbarian followers. Even they would know this was an evil and an outrage.” As one of our prophets has put it, don’t hold your breath.
Hitchens makes fun of the “insanely detailed regulations governing oxes that gore and are gored,” along with “micromanagement of agricultural disputes” (p. 100). This is not the heart of his argument at all — he is just setting the stage by showing how irreverent he can be — but it is kind of funny. Think about it. He is laughing at these rubes for micromanaging agriculture. He pokes fun at the ancient Hebrew predeliction for “insanely detailed regulations.” And where does Christopher Hitchens live? I believe I read somewhere that it is in the Washington D.C. area, that vast and inexhaustible supply of micromanaging and insanely detailed regulations. The ancient Hebrews had ten commandments, and one slim volume of commentary on those commandments. Go to the nearly law library and ask to see the regulatations that you, enlightened modern man, live under. They will show you shelf after shelf of big fat books, and the incoming regulatations will, on a daily basis, far surpass the Mosaic code in volume, and want they overdo in quanity they will make up for in pettiness, hubris, and incoherence.
But then we get to his real objection to the Old Testament, which is moral.
“The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals” (p. 102).
Now, let me allow for the sake of argument that Hitchens has correctly read these passages. This is a big suppose, for he has done nothing of the kind, but let us grant it. Let us pretend that the Old Testament allows for all this stuff in just the way Hitchens supposes. And let us pretend further that it gives warrant for such practices today, provided you believe it. Now here is my question, directed against Hitchens’ central objection. Given his atheism, what is wrong with any of this? This is what people do sometimes.
We are not bound to obey the Old Testament, he says, because it was put together by mammals. In the same way, we are not bound to Hitchens’ book either, manufactured by mammals also. Ah, he might say. I said crude, uncultured mammals. And I would reply, exactly. Have you seen the size of the Department of Agriculture, and all their micromanaging regulations? They wrote a book, you wrote a book, there is no God over us, and so who cares?
We are not bound to the Old Testament, he says. But why, on his principles, are we bound to reject it? Why are we bound to anything?
“Intelligent schoolchildren have been upsetting their teachers with innocent but unanswerable questions ever since Bible study was instituted” (p. 104).
Yes, but this happens in Bible classes (routinely, I might add) because the kids asking the questions have a standard. Usually, the standard consists of principles they have learned elsewhere in the Bible, and their question is one of harmonization. How can God require this here when He required that there? These are good questions, and they ought to be encouraged. But when someone rejects the whole business, one of the first things that should have occurred to him is that all right to ask all questions has evaporated. In order to bring a charge, you must have a standard. If there is no God, when what is that standard, and why is it obligatory? To this question, Hitchens has absolutely no answer. And so, if the Old Testament is what he claims (it isn’t) then I am the one who has a problem with it, and he is the one who does not have a problem with it.
But why is the New Testament worse? Why does the New Testament contain more evil? In the next chapter, he doesn’t really address this question directly at all. He goes in for a goodish bit of various textual criticisms, not to mention giving an ear to gnostic counter-accounts, but this would simply make the New Testament unreliable, or contradictory.
“The contradictions and illiteracies of the New Testament have filled up many books by eminent scholars, and have never been explained by any Christian authority except in the feeblest terms of ‘metaphor’ and ‘a Christ of faith'” (p. 115).
This kind of confident pronouncement shows that Hitchens really doesn’t get out much, and, when he does, he rubs shoulders with the kind of Christians who lost their bearings seventy-five years ago. The contradictions “have never been explained” except in terms of metaphor, or the Christ of faith? That’s the kind of answer you might get from an alcoholic Bible-as-lit professor who used to be a Methodist minister once. But for Christians who care about the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture, there is a minor industry producing apologetic materials addressing every Bible difficulty you may think of. Some of them are strained, some are hokey, some are wooden, and many are shrewd, scholarly, learned, and wise. But none of them, contra Hitchens, are non-existent.
“The case of biblical consistency or authenticity or ‘inspiration’ has been in tatters for some time, and the rents and tears only become more obvious with better research, and thus no ‘revelation’ can be derived from that quarter. So, then, let the advocates and partisans of religion rely on faith alone, and let them be brave enough to admit that this is what they are doing” (p. 122).
Hitchens needs to come to the realization that, with this book, he is challenging Christian who believe the Bible, and who will defend it. They will not defend it with vaporous appeals to fideism, but rather to the truth which can be objectively and genuinely known.
But I must say one thing about why Hitchens thinks the New Testament more evil than the Old. Remember, he has no basis for saying anything is evil, but he thinks he does. Apart from the chapter title, he does not make an explicit argument for the claim. But the implicit argument appears to be the fact that the New Testament defends the Old Testament, claiming to find in the death of Christ the complete fulfillment of all the sacrifices of the Old. This would include “almost” sacrifices, like that of Isaac by Abraham (p. 109). And in this identification, Hitchens is quite correct. The Old Testament and the New stand or fall together.
But Hitchens has no basis for indignation about anything. And this is why he is required to sit quietly when I tell him that the Christian faith is a faith based on human sacrifice. We do not reject human sacrifice, but rather rejoice that the ultimate human sacrifice has been offered to God, and accepted by God, and that we have therefore been liberated from our sins. Apart from human sacrifice, there is no remission of sins.
Hitchens rejects human sacrifice out of sheer personal prejudice. There are no standards, there is no God, people do things and that’s one of them, and why should anybody obey a standard based on what creeps Hitchens out? I reject any further human sacrifice because the perfect sacrifice was offered on the cross two thousand years ago. We are all invited to submit to that sacrifice, accepting it, and, when we do, God accepts us. If we reject God, as Hitchens has done, we reject the ability to reject anything.
If this reality-therapy is pressed on the atheist (as it needs to be), it will perhaps quiet the room for a moment. And in that silence, the only thing that needs to be said is that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself. We declare the human sacrifice — Christ and Him crucified.