The only thing Roger Hutchinson proved in the foregoing article is that he can't recognize false analogy. In trying to make the death of David's infant son a consequence of, rather than a punishment for, his father's actions, Hutchinson tried to equate it with such incidents as a father who smokes in bed and causes a fire that kills members of his family, or drag racers who crash and kill third parties. In such cases, the innocent do indeed suffer consequences caused by the irresponsibility of others, but these are not even remotely parallel to the death of David's and Bathsheba's son.
In the case of the father who smoked in bed, the cause-effect relationship is obvious. The act of smoking caused a fire that killed other family members. The irresponsible act of the father clearly triggered the circumstances that caused the innocent to die, but that was certainly not the case in the matter of David's and Bathsheba's act of adultery. Hutchinson cannot claim a cause-effect factor in their sexual act that linked it directly to the death of their son. There may be cases where adultery results in the transmission of a fatal venereal disease from one or both parents to the offspring, and these would be proper examples of children who suffer the consequences of their parents acts. In the story of David and Bathsheba, however, there is nothing to indicate that the death of their son resulted from a cause-effect factor. To the contrary, the biblical text clearly states that "Yahweh struck the child that Uriah's wife bore to David" (2 Sam. 12:15). If Yahweh had not "struck" the child, he would not have died, so the child's death was not a consequence of David's and Bathsheba's "sin" but rather the result of Yahweh's intervention for the express purpose of killing the child. This is radically different from a child's dying from a fire caused by a parent who was smoking in bed or a passing motorist's being killed as a result of a chain of circumstances triggered by a bank robbery, and only someone desperate to shore up an illogical belief in the total inerrancy of books written in ancient, superstitious times would be driven to such analogical extremes as this. To have a case, Hutchinson would have to establish a cause-effect relationship between adultery and infant mortality. In other words, he would have to show that just as syphilitic parents can transmit their disease to their offspring, there is something inherent in the act of adultery that would very likely cause the death of children born from adulterous relationships, but Hutchinson knows as well as I that such is not the case. Untold millions of children have been born of adulterous relationships without experiencing any health problems, much less death. If we are to believe the biblical account, the cause of death in the case of David's son was the result of divine intervention: "However, because by this deed you have given great occasion to the enemies of Yahweh to blaspheme, the child that is born to you shall surely die.... And Yahweh struck the child that Uriah's wife born to David, and it became very sick" (2 Sam. 12:14-15). The text states very clearly that the sickness, which eventually caused the child to die, resulted from Yahweh's striking the child. The way that this story is told, if Yahweh had not "struck" the child, he would not have died, and so there was nothing inherent in David's and Bathsheba's adulterous act that caused the child to die.
Mr. Hutchinson seems to like analogies, so let's look at one that would be more parallel to this biblical story than the deaths of innocent people who died from someone else smoking in bed or drag racing. Let's imagine someone who was not the king of Israel but just an ordinary man of the times living in Moab, who met a married woman and had a relationship that resulted in the birth of a son. Now let's suppose that this act of adultery had angered the king of Moab, who reprimanded the man and then ordered the execution of the child. If that were the case, would Hutchinson be able to see that the child was punished for the sin of his father? What we have here is a simple case of a diehard biblical inerrantist who refuses to attribute unfairness or injustice to the Hebrew god Yahweh no matter how obvious biblical accounts are in describing Yahwistic actions that are unfair and unjust by any reasonable standard of conduct.
Besides his false analogies, Hutchinson appealed to other scriptures to try to prove that David's son was not punished for his father's sin, but all that he accomplished was to strengthen the errantist position by showing that other scriptures teach that children should not be punished for the sins of their fathers. If this is clearly what the Bible teaches, then Yahweh's striking an infant with a fatal illness would have been a violation of his own moral code, and this is exactly the point that Sol Abrams made in his article: the Bible contradicts itself by saying in some places that children will not be punished for the sins of their fathers but showing in other places that Yahweh did sometimes punish children for their fathers' sins.
Hutchinson's ploy in this part of his article is an old inerrantist tactic, which says that "scripture must interpret scripture," but this is fallacious hermeneutics. If a clear statement in one biblical passage plainly says X, then it doesn't matter how many other biblical passages may plainly say not X. Two biblical passages that plainly contradict themselves constitute contradiction and not a reason to resort to verbal gyrations about "letting scripture interpret scripture" to try to weasel out of acknowledging that the Bible is inconsistent. In the first place, this claim that scripture should be allowed to interpret scripture flagrantly begs the question of biblical inerrancy by assuming that there are no errors in the Bible, and so when two passages appear to contradict one another, it must be true that one of them does not mean what it clearly says. Inerrantists themselves would never accord this same consideration to any other written documents. In other words, they would never agree that if two clear statements in the Qur'an appear to contradict themselves, one of them must not mean what it plainly says. No, they reserve this privileged status only for the Bible, and that alone is enough to show the unsoundness of their hermeneutics.
Hutchinson cited the example of King Amaziah, who secured his hold on the throne of Judah and then killed those who had assassinated his father but did not kill their children because of the commandment in the law of Moses that said that children should not be put to death for the sins of the fathers, and from this example, Hutchinson concluded that David's son could not have been put to death for David's sin. His line of reasoning seems to be that because there was consistency between Amaziah's actions and the law that prohibited killing children because of their fathers' sins, Yahweh's actions in the matter of David's son must have also been consistent with that law. He doesn't seem to understand that no one is arguing that the Bible is completely inconsistent. The errantist position contends only that the Bible is inconsistent and contradictory in some places. The example of David's son, then, must be evaluated only on the bases of what the Bible says about this specific case and what it says about the punishment of children for the sins of their fathers. If the case of Amaziah's sparing the children of his father's assassins conformed to the law of Moses, then there is consistency between this story and the law. If the case of David's son does not conform to the law, then there is inconsistency between this story and the law. The matter is that simple, and no demand to let scriptures interpret scriptures can change the inconsistency one whit.
Hutchinson tried to explain away the death of David's son by arguing that David said to the prophet Nathan, "I have sinned against Yahweh," to which Nathan replied, "Yahweh has put away your sin; you shall not die" (2 Sam. 12:13). How convenient! It's too bad, isn't it, that David's infant son couldn't talk? Perhaps he could have said a word or two that would have moved the omnimerciful Yahweh to spare his life too. At any rate, Hutchinson has reached into his bag of inerrantist tricks and pulled out the same old discredited assumption that the Bible can't contradict itself, because the Bible is inerrant. Just because the Bible teaches that one will not be punished for sins that have been forgiven does not automatically make this story consistent with the doctrine. The fact is that Hutchinson has only identified another problem in the story. Nathan proclaimed that David's sin had been forgiven but then immediately proceeded to pronounce upon David a punishment for that pardoned sin. I would assume that Hutchinson will agree that killing a man's son for something that he did would constitute a type of punishment on the man himself, but whether he agrees or not doesn't matter. The biblical account clearly indicates that David suffered extreme grief for the affliction that Yahweh brought upon his son. David "fasted, and went in, and lay all night upon the earth" (v:16). That hardly sounds as if David thought that Yahweh had rewarded him for having repented.
At any rate, the matter is not punishment that David may have experienced because of the death of his son. It is a question of whether Yahweh took the life of an infant for something that the parents had done, and the story plainly indicates that he did. If Hutchinson still disagrees, perhaps he would like to answer a question: Is there anything in the story to indicate that this child would have died if he had not been born of an adulterous act? If not, then what else can we call this but a clear example of a child being killed for the sins of his parents?
In a final act of desperation, Hutchinson wagged in the doctrine of original sin to draw an analogy between the consequences of Adam's sin that all humans suffer and, presumably, the consequences of David's sin that his son suffered. Many Christians doubt that the New Testament even teaches the doctrine of original sin, but for the sake of argument, I will assume that it does. All that this doctrine does is put before biblical inerrantists another contradiction to explain, because it poses the same problem for Hutchinson as the case of David's infant son. It teaches that the children of Adam must all die for something that Adam did, and that is inconsistent with Deuteronomy 24:16 and Ezekiel 18:20, which both say that the sons shall not bear the iniquity of their fathers. The doctrine of original sin teaches that Adam sinned, and so all of Adam's descendants had to die. If that isn't a case of children being punished for something their father did, what is it?
Hutchinson has wandered here and there all through the Bible
and wound up explaining nothing. In other words, Hutchinson is a
typical Bible inerrantist.
