Recently, Dr. David Tee, whose real name is Derrick Thomas Thiessen, responded to my post Should Christians ALWAYS Obey God? I suspected one of my Fundamentalist critics would respond, and Thiessen was the first one to respond. What follows is my response. All spelling, grammar, and punctuation in the original. Thiessen’s response is in bold font.
There are many factors that play into our not taking a break. Right now, we have had a rainstorm and are still waiting for a project to be sent our way. So we need something to do. The question in the title is not ours. It comes from BG’s website, and it reflects the attitude of MM and his question: would we kill him if God commanded us to?
Thiessen, as he is wont to do, drags my friend Ben Berwick into the debate. While Ben and I agree on this issue, I will leave it to him to defend himself. Is it fair to ask questions about whether an Evangelical Christian would kill someone if God commanded him to? Absolutely. It is, after all, in the Bible. God repeatedly commanded his chosen people, the Israelites, to commit violence and murder against individuals and people groups. If Thiessen has a problem with our observations and conclusions, his real problem is with God, not BG and MM (as he likes to call Ben and me).
Both are ridiculous questions because the answer to the title question is yes, and the answer to the annoying second question is that God does not give that command anymore.
Wait a minute, I thought the Bible says that Jesus (who is God) is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He is a deity that doesn’t change his mind, though other passages of Scripture say he does. On what basis do we conclude that God doesn’t expect his followers to obey everything he commands them to do? Is Thiessen saying God changed his mind; that he figured out bloodshed, violence, and murder are not effective ways to get your point across — especially when innocent people get caught up in the carnage — including women, children, babies, and fetuses?
I asked in my post:
If God commands a Christian to do something, should he obey? How does a Christian determine that it is God commanding him to do something? What if God’s command runs contrary to the Christian’s personal moral code? Should the Christian obey, anyway?
The answer to the first question is, yes, he should, as the Bible teaches us that to obey is better than sacrifice. The second question is a bit more difficult to answer, as confirming God’s command takes several steps.
Thiessen’s position is that Christians should, without exception, obey God’s commands. Never mind the fact that he doesn’t practice this himself, He’s more of a “do as I say, not as I do follower of Jesus.
The first step is to confirm that the command is in line with God’s word
Thiessen believes the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God. He believes every word of the Bible is straight from the mouth of God. Thus, in his mind, if God commands it, obey!
The second step would be to confirm that God is sending that command. The Bible tells us to test the spirits, and we should test that command to make sure God is giving it.
How could someone possibly know it is God commanding him to do something? How does a Christian determine whether it is God, Satan, or self telling him to do something? As far as I am aware, there’s no empirical test that can be used to confirm it is God giving a believer a command. As far as I know, all that Evangelicals have to go on are their feelings. How do Evangelicals know God is speaking to them? They allegedly feel it in their heart of hearts.
Third, the nature of the command must be analyzed to make sure the Christian is not being commanded to violate God’s other commands, laws, and instructions. Murder and rape etc., are certainly not commands coming from God.
And here is the crux of the issue. The Bible does indeed make moral claims. However, the Bible also records not only God, but his followers, ignoring and violating these moral claims. What’s up with that? Surely Thiessen is aware that God commanded the Israelites to murder and rape those he determined were his enemies. If Thiessen wants to debate me on this issue, I’m game.
Fourth, one must be careful not to confuse the commands given in the OT as commands to be followed today. For example, God commanded certain activities to be done as punishment for the other people’s sins. Those commands are very people and era specific and are not in force today.
Does Thiessen really believe that every act of violence God commanded Israel to do is moral? What did the innocents murdered and raped by the Israelites — as commanded by God — do that deserved such punishment?
Thiessen wants us to believe that God went to anger management classes, and now he behaves differently. However, the book of Revelation reveals a God who is still very much a vicious monster. Richard Dawkins was right when he said:
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.
As far as we know, God does not command anyone to kill others as punishment for their sins in the modern age. Those types of commands come from evil, and we know they come from evil because they violate God’s laws, instructions, and so on.
If these commands “come from evil,” logically God and the Israelites committed evil acts. I conclude, then, that the God portrayed in the Bible is evil.
Thiessen has no evidence for this claim. We humans cannot know God’s mind, the Bible says, yet Thiessen thinks he can discern and know the mind of God.
Then, we have NT instructions to guide us in how we obey God. Galatians 5 tells us:
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.
Thiessen might want to meditate on these verses and change his ways. My interactions with Thiessen suggest that he doesn’t think these verses apply to him.
We are also told in Romans to obey the laws of the land and murder, rape, pedophilia, etc., are against the law of the land and a Christian cannot disobey those laws. As you see by the quoted verse above, we are instructed to live according to the Spirit, which does not have any evil or evil doing in it.
Evil is evil, right? So if certain behaviors today are evil, those same actions were evil in the Old Testament too. Thiessen cannot have it both ways.
As for the question, if God commands something against a Christian’s personal moral code, would that person obey God? First, a Christian should not have a moral code that contradicts God’s or his instructions. etc.
But, every Christian does. No two Christians have the same moral code, and that incudes Evangelicals who claim that the Bible is their rulebook.
Second, it is better to obey than sacrifice, so the Christian must always obey God, as long as it is God giving the instructions. Disobedience is sin and wrong. Third, we do not go by the unbelieving world’s standards for commands or obedience . . .
Again, how can an Evangelical Christian infallibly know that it is God commanding them to do something? They can’t.
….
I wrote:
Does genocide, child sacrifice, and slavery promote the well-being of others and human flourishing? Of course not. Yet, when God commands such things, all of a sudden, Christians lose all sense of what’s best for themselves and others.
This is another ridiculous thing to say, as the unbeliever takes them out of context and misapplies them to whatever troubling thought they have on their minds. The unbeliever writing those words has no concept of what human flourishing means as he wants sin and corruption to abound at the expense of those doing what is right and moral.
Contrary to Thiessen’s assertion, I know exactly what human flourishing means and what we can do to make our world a better place to live. Again, I am more than happy to debate him on this issue.
I find it funny coming from a man with a sordid past that he says “sin and corruption to abound at the expense of those doing what is right and moral.”
I wrote:
The good news is that most Christians do not obey God. As cafeteria Christians, they pick and choose which commands to obey. That’s why they oppose genocide, child sacrifice, and slavery.
That is not good news but bad news. Christians are not free to pick and choose what they will obey. As Jesus said, ‘Why do you call me Lord yet do not do the things I say’. People need to look at what Jesus says honestly and implement his instructions correctly.
All Christians, including Thiessen, pick and choose the commands they want to obey. If someone obeyed every command, teaching, and precept in the Bible, you know what would happen? He would be arrested and thrown in prison.
At no time does Jesus teach to own slaves, commit genocide or do child sacrifice. Those activities are practiced by the unbelieving world as the sinful world aborts innocent children, keeps sex slaves, and kills people just because they do not like them.
Thiessen forgets the fact that Jesus is God. I have challenged him on this point before. I have concluded that he is heterodox on the nature of Jesus and the Trinity.
Everything that God commanded in the Old Testament, was also commanded by Jesus, the second person of the Trinity. Thus, Jesus commanded the Israelites to murder, rape, and commit genocide. To say otherwise is to deny the divinity and nature of Jesus.
We can point you to Hamas, Boko Haram, and other examples that show it is not the Christians that is doing this. Abortion is the biggest genocide taking place,e yet the unbelieving world practices it without guilt or shame.
The Christians are the ones trying to stop these things. But the unbelieving writer of those quoted words does not care if he writes the truth or not. He just wants to justify his departure from God. He also wants to misdirect people’s attention away from what the unbelieving world is doing.
Thiessen does what he always does: he attacks my motives and says I am a liar. I will leave it to readers to decide if I am a truth teller.
Anything that the writer accuses God of doing, his side of the world is doing with less than holy and pure motives, and on a far grander scale. He and other unbelievers are in no position to accuse God of anything.
It is best that he refrain from speaking, as his world is far worse than anything God has done.
Is this the best argument Thiessen can offer? God and his followers may have commited sinful, evil acts, but Bruce and his fellow atheists do worst things. Really? Whom have I murdered or raped? What immoral, evil acts have I committed. No, Thiessen objects to the fact that I speak my mind about Evangelical Christianity and people agree with me. His only response is to attack my character and lie — both of which, if the Bible is to be believed, means Thiessen is not a Christian.
What say ye readers? Please leave your thoughts in the comment section.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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The world in general is a better place than it was even just a hundred and a bit years ago. Then we had wars, as we do now, but we lacked ways of treating wounds that now we take for granted. Vaccination was in its infancy. Child bearing was dangerous for both mother and child. And so on and so forth. Dominating every part of western civilisation was Christian belief (and other cultures had their own faiths). Churches abounded and attendance was almost taken for granted. Preachers bible thumped their interpretation of morality and ethics and people were terrified to challenge them lest they were destined for hell.
Then along came science and reason, and a realisation that religion, if not actually false, was the problem and not the solution. Diseases and bodily infections could be successfully treated via medicine and vaccinations, and not by prayer. Women could look forward to childbirth without fear. Driving all of this was education. More and more people able to think for themselves meant that the horrible morality of the bible, and of people like Tee, could be left behind, consigned to the dustbin of ancient superstition where it belonged. Sadly, too many people have hung onto the old ways, thinking that they have a god commanding them to act in certain ways. This is the basis of pretty well every single conflict in the world today, from West Bank settlers in Israel claiming that god gave them the land (sadly he didn’t provide them with the title deeds), to India and Pakistan, and even the Russia Ukraine conflict contains many of the factors that underpin religious inspired conflicts.
Tee is a despicable individual. Whilst his opinions are extreme, they represent those of many people. His writing style and grammar is dreadful, but I daresay the few people who follow him are likely similarly challenged. He will no doubt continue to spout his nonsense, as long as modern medicine is able to keep him alive, but at least there are now many more voices of reason out there, holding him to account.