An atheist stumbles over a poetic [non]hurdle

Occasionally some of us get momentarily sidetracked from our specific objective of exposing the stench of heresy within the Sydney Anglican Diocese that emanates from its leaders, priests (oh, btw, our cure of souls, Hosea has something to say: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being priest for me, because you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children [and Connect 09]”) and its putative intellectual heart, Moore College. It is not that we are unconsciously diverted from this aim; we do welcome setting any worthwhile issue aright.

Peter, a perennial atheist visitor to our blog, has recently attempted to undermine the monotheism of Christianity by isolating two verses in the Old Testament that, on his and a few theological hacks’ reckoning, most of whom are unapologetically Mormon, evince at first blush a polytheism with YHWH standing as some sort of celestial council overlord. Just 2 verses are supposed to undo 4000 years of Jewish-Christian history. That is, 10 seconds – the time taken to read these few lines – checkmates 4000 years.

Peter, our atheist fellow traveller, suffers from the opposite condition infecting, sorry, affecting, our SAD brothers and sisters. Whereas SADs are wont to draw malleable non-literal theological “truths” from the literal, Peter reverses this epistemology by deducing from the poetic, theological absolutes. Of course, there is nothing wrong per se with Peter’s practice – there’s much to learn from biblical poetry - unless of course there are a myriad of history passages which categorically rule out Peter’s polytheistic conclusion.

The two poetic passages of any consequence that Peter mentions are Psalm 82 and Deuteronomy 32. The latter, as Peter alluded, gains its far from perspicuous polytheistic purpose from the DSS and some versions of the LXX. I won’t be expressing any thoughts on this. On the other hand, Psalm 82 is considerably less ambiguous and is thus the more interesting.

Asaph, the author of this psalm, states that God judges “among the gods” and asks them why they haven’t pursued justice and protected the powerless in Israelite society. No where in Jewish writing is there, as far as I am aware, any prose that records that there are literally gods who serve on the Jewish judiciary. It is thus clear that this is a metaphor indicating the extreme high office that judges partake of in order to carry out the judicial responsibilities that any society, let alone a theocracy, demands. In any case, these “gods” are determined to die like men: only men die like men, certainly not gods, notwithstanding their non-existence, a fact the Bible makes clear in more than one place, something Peter conveniently ignores.

Jesus uses this psalm to prove that a certain group of Jews had yet another misunderstanding – though subtly different from the error in John 8 - about who he was. In John 10 this group took up stones because they thought he was identifying himself, a mere man in their eyes, with the Father. He then distinguishes himself from the Father by stating his Sonship with the Father and further that, though his office was eternal, they too had once shared in the transcendent by being “gods” in ancient Israel’s courts of justice.

That this is a metaphor, though serving in the judiciary was not, can be seen from Moses interaction with God. In Exodus 4:16 God calls Moses to speak to the children of Israel. God tells Moses he will be like God to Aaron and Aaron will be [God’s] mouthpiece. The other verse is Exodus 7:1 in which again Moses is God, but this time over Pharaoh. In both places Moses serves in God’s role of judge, the very role that Psalm 82 is discussing. Moses literally can’t be God and the judges of the Israelite kingdoms can’t be literally gods but both stand in for God in his role as judge because they were supposed to be acting as God would, impartially, wisely and morally.

Peter’s attempt to strip Israel of her monotheism fails principally because he is unable to distinguish between the poetic and the actual.