IS GOD A MORAL MONSTER?
Making sense of the Old Testament
By Paul Copan. Baker Books. 252 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978-0-8010-7275-8
‘The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.’
This is perhaps the best-known passage from Richard Dawkin’s God Delusion, and it represents one strand of the New Atheism’s attack on the God of the Bible. If we wonder how to answer such challenges, we would do well to read this thorough and well-argued book from Paul Copan. Each chapter takes a charge levelled by the new atheists, considers it, and answers it from Scripture.
Jesus wept
John 11v35 is not only the shortest verse of the New Testament, but also one of the most remarkable. There …