Some time ago I wrote this on Catholic Answers Forums, and thought it would make a nice post here. [CAF is now defunct]
My view on the Old Testament atrocities is that human history, and especially the activities and rules in the Old Testament, are a play laid out by God to teach us something at the end. The Old Testament in particular is a play that is fulfilled and understood in the New Testament. E.g. unclean animals not suitable for eating existed to symbolise the difference between God’s chosen people and the Gentiles (Leviticus 20:23-26), and is no longer relevant now that there is no longer such a distinction and the Church is open to all.
Likewise with the killing of entire cities, women and babies included. It fits into the play, and has a purpose in the bigger picture (I don’t always know what).
Is it immoral for God to decree such annihilation? I’d say no – God decides when everyone will live and die; some die peacefully, some die in natural accidents, some die in war.
Was it immoral for the Israelites to perform such killings? I would say yes. Killing innocents is always wrong, now as well as then. God’s action is legitimate, his use of Israel as a tool to perform the action is legitimate, but the hearts of those killing babies were black with sin, perhaps with mitigating factors (see later).
Abraham agreeing to sacrifice Isaac – same thing. He lived in a different culture, and that culture made it easier for him to think human sacrifice might please God, so when told to sacrifice Isaac, he could do so with greater ease than we could today. If someone today got a message from God saying they should sacrifice their children on an altar, we’d rightly lock them away. For them, and for Abraham, killing their child would be a terrible act. Abraham was rescued at the last minute, but I think agreeing to it was a huge moral error on his part in terms of absolute morality. But I think there were mitigating factors.
Mitigating factors:
The Sacrificial Lamb – Josefa de Ayala, ca 1670
Abraham was told to do this by God, and believed it was God telling him to do this. As misguided he may have been regarding the appropriateness of human sacrifice, he still trusted God fully. Perhaps he expected God to raise Isaac to life again, perhaps immediately or in the future. But that faith and trust of God, in his context and warped environment, outweighed, morally, the evil of human sacrifice, and so he is credited with having faith. Had he killed Isaac, it would have been an evil act on his part, and a sin, but the culpability for his sin would have been diminished by his circumstances. As would the culpability of someone today trying the same thing.
Imagine three people amongst the Israelites who went and killed babies in 1 Samuel 13.
Person 1 – they believe God has instructed them to do this, and they get great joy from the killing. I don’t believe that someone who experiences joy in a situation like that has a good heart. Whether or not their specific act of killing is a mortal sin (see below) or, due to their belief, only a venial sin, I would think their state is mortally sinful.
Side note: CCC 1857: For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: “Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent.“
Person 2 – they believe God has instructed them to do this, but they experience it as terrible, spend months recovering from the emotional trauma, and saying to God, “You asked me to do this, but why???” Their state is one of confused repentance, despising what they did, mingled with faith in God’s will. Their hearts are much purer than Person 1’s.
Person 3 – they reject the instruction as abominable. God zaps them dead for refusing to obey (similar to the guy who, in apparent good faith, touched the Ark of the Covenant when he tried to prevent it from falling over). They arrive in the afterlife, and God says to them, “1. I zapped you for not obeying, because that will show people a bigger part of my plan. 2. Welcome to heaven, your heart is pure and your love and compassion great.”
This is one of the ways I think one can approach this without moral relativism (there may well be better ways to do that).
Further reading:
Catholic Answers Forums – Are you a moral relativist? [CAF is now defunct]
