Ramblin' Man: Quivering Scriptures

I'm gonna be all over the place in a short amount of time. QF (as an example in a larger point being made), presupposition, the Old Testament God, the pitfalls of making the OT prescriptive, fungelical rationalizations, maybe more. We'll see when we get there.


We all know that Quiverfull, an entire theology, has been built upon this Old Testament passage from Psalm 127...

³ Children are a gift from the Lord;
      they are a reward from him.
 ⁴ Children born to a young man
      are like arrows in a warrior’s hands.
 ⁵ How joyful is the man whose quiver is full of them!
      He will not be put to shame when he confronts his accusers at the city gates.

There's no new ground there. We've been over it before.


QF adherents and proponents are extremely reliant on OT texts - particularly the Christian homeschooling movement and PeripheralVision Forum types. It's been a while since I've read it, but most of VF's mission statement and biblical tenets of patriarchy are supported from OT text, if I'm recalling correctly.


The passage above has to be taken waaaaay out of context to support the idea that "God controls the womb" and you should have faith for as many children as God sends even if your ovaries and uterus have to go nuclear. But they'd suggest that the instruction is clearly there. This is one of the biggest downfalls of presupposition (and "biblical worldviews" in general) - reaching a conclusion before you examine the evidence, rejecting any evidence that opposes your conclusion (such as science, and even worse, common sense), and twisting neutral evidence to "support" your conclusion. Some even use Psalm 127 to support pro-life views. Nothing wrong with being pro-life. I'm pro-life. But the Psalms aren't a great place to support either Quiverfull OR pro-life views.


Just a few chapters over, in Psalm 137, we find this...

⁸ O Babylon, you will be destroyed.
      Happy is the one who pays you back
      for what you have done to us.
 ⁹ Happy is the one who takes your babies
      and smashes them against the rocks!

Kinda hard to gloss over that one. If I were to take that verse and approach a group of fundamentalists with it, I'd probably get everything from the Rationalization Olympics to "They deserved God's wrath!" Really? Even the little ones? The babies?


Maybe, just maybe, our Christianity shouldn't be based on OT passages, written to Holy Spirit-less people by sometimes obviously quite vengeful people, and which often convey an image of a God that's pretty dark and complicated, sometimes jealous, and to a casual (or not so casual) observer perhaps even petty.


Elsewhere in the OT, we find similar passages, like this one from Ezekial 9...

⁵ Then I heard the Lord say to the other men, “Follow him through the city and kill everyone whose forehead is not marked. Show no mercy; have no pity! ⁶ Kill them all—old and young, girls and women and little children. But do not touch anyone with the mark. Begin right here at the Temple.” So they began by killing the seventy leaders.

 ⁷ “Defile the Temple!” the Lord commanded. “Fill its courtyards with corpses. Go!” So they went and began killing throughout the city.

Kinda flips the modern evangelical idea of the "age of accountability" entirely over, doesn't it? No mercy. No pity. Kill the children.


My hope is that even as much of the OT writings were inspired, they've got ample human fingerprints all over them - humanity misunderstanding and misrepresenting God, much as I believe movements like Gothardism, IFB, Christian homeschooling, and PeripheralVision Forum do today. People have always been, and ever will be, people. Although I believe it is, I don't know that my hope is accurate. I arrive at my hope through faith that Christ is the personification of the genuine nature of God - speaking words of condemnation only to the religious addicts and snakes. I'm not a "New Testament Christian", as the title itself is stupid. There were no Christians of ANY flavor prior to the events of the New Testament, and frankly, most people who claim to be New Testament Christians are more Paultians than anything - and I'm not always comfortable with the picture Paul painted of God, realizing that he wrote with the same kind of cultural bias that we would if we were composing the bible today, and he had no idea he was writing part of "the bible". I guess all of this is one reason I've always been partial to the Book of the Secrets of Enoch. It portrays an image of an awesome, majestic, powerful God whose main concern is His creation being decent to each other, taking care of each other, and loving each other.


Here's another example from Jeremiah 48...

¹⁰ Cursed are those who refuse to do the Lord’s work,
      who hold back their swords from shedding blood!

Seriously? Cursed for not wanting to kill people mercilessly? Lord knows that if anyone on this earth has a case for revenge, I do, and there are moments where it still probably wouldn't be good for me to meet certain people in a back alley, but as much as I loathe everything about the type of people my former future in-laws are, the way they live their sociopathic faith, all the needless turmoil and pain they introduced into my life, I don't have a thirst for their blood. Yes, I want them to have a reckoning before God (I'd buy a ticket to that one), but not so I can see them punished. I just want to hear them say "I was wrong and I'm sorry" and genuinely mean it. I want to see the realization of the gravity of what they did in their faces. But, I don't want their blood, and I don't want God to want their blood, either.


The OT God doesn't really give me the warm fuzzies. Or at least the God portrayed by the men who wrote the books in the OT.


I see two main problems in all of this... 


1) I was once told by a relative of some well-known P/QFers that (paraphrased) "they envision a utopia where everything is governed by biblical law". Yikes. I say "yikes" because being governed by "biblical law" negates Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit (the most wholesome parts of the canon), and because the ugly scriptures above are the consequence of the infringement of biblical law. If those nuts ever did actually take over, it'd suck to be you or me. We might be on the business end of one of their swords, or have our babies' heads dashed against rocks. I mean, really, if you're gonna make the OT literal and prescriptive, and follow "biblical law", why not?


2) The remarkable propensity for mainstream Christians to totally gloss over this kind of scripture, to rationalize it away, or to go to the other extreme, embrace it, and promote what is essentially one angry-assed version of God. It's especially bad coming from those who refuse to see the biblical canon as anything other than "God's Word", complete and thorough, every syllable of every word breathed directly from His lips.


My advice to group 2: Reasonable people respect "I don't know" a heck of a lot more than they respect rationalization. There's a great deal of the "Worship me or die!" vibe in the OT. It might be in the best interest of our faith to consider that maybe the OT writers didn't always "get" God...


...and neither do we.