“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.” So says Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion.

This is one of the most compelling arguments against Christianity that the New Atheists use: that the God of the Bible is immoral. It’s an inversion of the argument for the existence of God from morality. Objective morality exists, but when you look at the Old Testament, God is certainly is not moral: quite the contrary. Therefore, the God of the Bible could not exist, because he is not good.

Surprisingly, there are a couple of positives in this take on the Old Testament.

Firstly, it concedes that the Bible is a unified book. The Old and New Testaments, for all their differences, are talking about the same God. The New Atheists haven’t taken the road of the second century heretic Marcion, whose verdict on the God of the Old Testament was the same as Dawkins, except he concluded that the God of love revealed by Christ must be a different God. So he scratched the Old Testament from his Bible.

Secondly, the arguments of both Marcion and the New Atheists are compelling because they raise a thoroughly Christian question. If God is love, how does that square with those confronting bits of the Old Testament? Doesn’t God command slavery, the oppression of women, and genocide to name just three?

Apologist Paul Copan takes up his pen to this challenge in his book Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God. In chapter 6, he argues that the Old Testament law doesn’t represent God’s ‘ideal’ but is rather a step in the ‘redemptive movement’ of Scripture. Most of the book, though, is spent systematically answering every question you might have about morality in the Old Testament, be it the almost-sacrifice of Isaac, polygamy, the command for a woman to marry her rapist (Deuteronomy 22), the beating of slaves (Exodus 21), so-called ethnic cleansing, right down to kosher food and kooky laws. This is a real strength of the book. Copan writes for a sympathetic Christian audience and that means he assumes a few things that the well-read atheist might take issue with. There were a couple of points where his argument seemed to be a case of special pleading, but on the whole his treatment of each issue is thorough, accessible and convincing. Plus, each chapter finishes with a helpful reading list if you want to follow up on a question.

Maybe it’s because I’m a big picture kind of guy, but I think Copan’s argument would have been strengthened by a bit more work on the ‘redemptive movement’ of Scripture. You see, the problem of the ‘immorality’ of God in the Old Testament is one form of the question: what are we to do with the Old Testament Law this side of Christ? It’s a question we see the New Testament writers wrestling with. They treat the Old Testament as a story that finds its climax in Christ. Read in this context, both the legal code of Exodus through Deuteronomy, and the occasional commands like those relating to the conquest of Canaan, are primarily elements of story rather than eternally binding commands. God is both the author and the main character of the story, and like any good storyteller he doesn’t lay all his cards on the table on the first page. We, as readers, have to sit with the tension till the final resolution. As much as we might like to join Marcion in scrapping the Old Testament, we can’t, because it’s essential to the plot. Jesus was, after all, the Messiah, who came in the fullness of time, to the Jewish people with this particular history.

Sitting with that tension may show us that the morality on display in the Old Testament is not ‘the ideal’, to use Copan’s phrase. Indeed, at times it’s all too human. And perhaps that is what is most unsettling. It upsets our conception of what God should be like that God would lower himself to use this means to reveal himself. But then, maybe it’s no more confronting than a broken and bloodied figure hanging on a cross: God in the flesh dying for the sins of the world.

If you haven’t thought about those morally difficult bits in the Old Testament, Copan’s book is a good place to start. But if you’re wondering what God is like and whether he is good, the place to start and finish is Jesus.

Victor Shaw grew up in the highlands of PNG. Having studied Roman history and then theology, he now works as an Anglican minister at Battery Point, in Hobart.