The Last Plague: Thinking about God and Justice in the Old Testament | Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P.

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Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 9 January 2021

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

This talk was given to the Texas A&M Chapter on October 7, 2020.

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About the Speaker:

Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P. is the Director of the Thomistic Institute at the Angelicum. He did his doctoral studies at Oxford University, and has research interests in metaphysics, Christology, Trinitarian theology, and the theology of grace. His books include The Incarnate Lord, A Thomistic Study in Christology (2015) and The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism (2017). He is co-editor of the academic journal Nova et Vetera and in 2011 was appointed an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. In 2019 Fr. White was named a McDonald Agape Foundation Distinguished Scholar.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:10.6	The subject we're talking about really is specific.
0:14.6	It's the question of the death of the firstborn and God's use of plagues as depicted, as God is depicted in Exodus in the plague cycle
0:24.3	in the early chapters, God's use of plagues and punishments with regards to the Egyptians
0:31.9	and the government that holds the Hebrew slaves captive as a way of chastising, rebuking, and educating them.
0:40.8	But the more general question is also about the morality of God in the Old Testament and
0:46.2	ways that one can question or wonder about the deeper dimensions of theological morality of God or whether God is depicted
0:56.6	justly in the Old Testament. And there are other passages one could choose, I think arguably
1:00.9	harder passages. One could choose to challenge, as it were, the justice of God in the Old
1:05.5	Testament. But I won't belabor the point. I'm just identifying the topic.
1:12.6	Now it's a huge topic and historically there's been a lot of reflection on it in the oldest Christian theology.
1:18.6	Just it takes some very important examples.
1:22.6	In the 4th and 5th century AD, the Manichaean heresy, which taught that this physical world is evil,
1:31.4	claimed that, and the body is evil, principle of suffering, and the spirit is good, the body's
1:37.2	evil, claimed that the Old Testament and the way that God was depicted in the Old Testament
1:41.7	is filled with immorality.
1:45.8	And Augustine, who had been, St. Augustine, before his conversion, had been a manatee,
1:50.2	and after his conversion wrote a famous treatise against Faustus the Manichy,
1:55.3	which lays down a number of principles for reading the Old Testament and engages with
1:58.9	controversies around the question of whether God is depicted as a moral agent in the Old Testament and engage us with controversies around the question where
2:01.0	the God is depicted as a moral agent in the Old Testament. You have a whole bunch of questions
	...

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