The “New Atheists” speak as though portions of the Bible were smoking guns, as obviously evil as revelations of abuse from priests. They assume that Christians will blush and either apologise for these passages, or explain them away. In fact, the gospel calls the New Atheists not only to repent of sins in general, but to repent specifically of their claim to be moral judges standing over the Bible. We will look at the command to destroy the Canaanites in the Old Testament within its biblical context and show that it is integral to God’s nature as life-giving and life-protecting. In fact, we will further show that it is only when we listen to what the OT teaches (including these commands) that we can call genocide evil. By contrast, atheists (new or otherwise) have no solid grounds for critiquing the violence which filled the 20th century.

Steffen Jenkins is half German, half Welsh, was born in Spain but again in England. He has served on the faculty of the Eastern Baptist Seminary in Cuba and with the “Cuba para Cristo” mission agency for fifteen years. He has recently completed a project at Tyndale House, Cambridge, to equip Cuban seminary lecturers to raise up new lecturers of Greek and Hebrew throughout Cuba, while serving as associate minister of an evangelical Presbyterian church in Chelmsford. His doctoral research under Prof Gordon Wenham focused on prayers for vengeance in the Psalms. His twin passions of equipping pastors with languages to a high enough standard that they can use them, and of helping pastors to love the Old Testament shamelessly, are happily combined by his idiosyncratic position as lecturer of Greek and OT at Union School of Theology.

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