The Holiness Of God As An Infallible Guide: Since I'm Challenged To Name Something I Disagree With William Lane Craig About

WHILE IT IS impressive as an intellectual contortion in regard to the legends of the Book of Joshua as to God commanding the genocide of Canaanite tribes, including babies,  the erudite William Lane Craig's excuses for it strike me as a consequence of a conservative Protestant idolatry of the written text of the Bible at the expense of reason and the meaning of words and the Holiness of God.  And over the real scripture of which the words on paper and parchment are a mere shadow.  Considering the contemporary archeological evidence (admittedly hardly complete in its amount or meaning) that gives little to no evidence to support such a supersession,  it's far easier to explain things that the story is largely legendary, probably made up or a gross exaggeration AND THE VICTORS AFTER THE FACT CLAIMING GOD COMMANDED THEM TO COMMIT AN ATROCITY than to twist meaning and morality into knots to show the literal claim is moral. 

I am impressed with WLC when he's talking about many things but when he comes to things like this, the self-imposed manacles of Biblical inerrancy or its like becomes very obvious.  I far prefer the results when things like a more than literalist  ideology is in control of the commentary, what more contemporary Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, practice.   If there is something important in the Jewish tradition it is the Holiness of God, of God, not of a book, not even one in THE BOOK.  I find I go back to the observation of the great Abraham Joshua Heschel that even the Torah is a midrash on the real Torah which is not a book but which God communicates even beyond words.  Craig and, really, John Lennox have too much of a devotion to the literal meaning of the words, someone like Walter Brueggemann, who knows more than both of them combined about the Books and their background is far closer and makes far better use of them.   

Maybe, since you ask what I am, I could say I'm a Heschel-Brueggemann Catholic Plus who wishes there was a renegade Woman Priest led Roman Catholic congregation near me.  One who loves Good Pope Francis and wishes his trip to Canada is a great, humiliating and crushingly painful confrontation of a genocide that may well have been excused by citing those texts from Joshua.  I don't know that's the case but I'd not be surprised.   As Brueggmann once pointed out,  Cotton Mather did, in fact, cite that to justify the genocide of Native Americans under Puritan rule.  John Wayne didn't cite Joshua but justified it in the economic racist terms that are inevitably behind such claims.  God is all Holy and there is no possibility of anyone comprehending God as such in line with the claims of the written words of Joshua.  

In his important work opposing pop-atheism, it was exactly that which gave Richard Dawkins his ass-covering excuse for why, when he challenged apologists to effectively refute him, he was a no-show when WLC challenged him to a debate.  It was a bogus excuse but Craig handed it to him.