I recently saw (via a Facebook friend of mine) a Christianity Today piece by Mark Buchanan titled "Can we trust the God of genocide?" (7/19/2013). In it, the author relates trying to teach the topic 'Can the Bible be trusted?' to students at a Christian school, and being "dumbfounded" at the negative answer by one student: "Hosea 13:16." (The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.) What makes this verse so disturbing is that this barbarity and cruelty is clearly by the will of God. In his piece, Buchanan argues that the God of the Old Testament is exactly the same God of the New Testament. His argument largely rests on the how "thin" the gap is between the two Testaments in their description of God; the God of the New Testament is no less "stern" than the God of the Hebrew Bible.
Unfortunately, this line of argument is of no help to me. The unfortunate fact is that the Bible does contain verses showing a barbaric, vindictive and cruel God. One extremely disturbing verse is found in Ezekiel, chapter 20: So I [God] gave them other statutes that were not good and laws through which they could not live; I defiled them through their gift—the sacrifice of every firstborn—that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am the Lord. The observation that the God of the New Testament is as cruel only compounds the difficulty. I simply cannot believe in such a God; if this is required to be a Christian, I cannot consider myself to be Christian.
But I think the solution to this problem is not to abandon belief in God. It is to understand that the Hebrew Bible (and the New Testament) are not the Word of God as is taught by conservative evangelicals, who hold to doctrines of inerrancy. The scriptures are instead a record of a slowly developing understanding of God by humans; the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are both the words of people who at all times have a limited understanding of God and God's mercy, love and justice. This is best seen by comparing with the verse in Hosea the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke chapter 10), where Jesus explains to his followers that even the hated Samaritans are their neighbors and are to be treated with love and caring.
So in that sense, I think I can remain a Christian. I still believe in God; I still believe in changed lives and repentance; I still believe in charity, love, compassion and peace-making. But there is no need to defend the atavistic and cruel passages in the Bible; I can understand them as obsolete relics in human writings that show a developing awareness of God and God's compassion.
Our understanding of God progresses in much the same way our understanding of science progresses. The mechanics of Newton replaced the mechanics of Aristotle. But while Newton added immeasurably to our understanding of the universe, his science was still very rough by modern standards, and he spent tremendous energy on pursuits we now regard as unproductive or even superstitious—alchemy and obscure Biblical analyses. But science continued to advance; Newton's alchemy was soon replaced by the modern chemistry of Lavoisier. Today, science has an extraordinary range and grasp on our world; we live in an age when the blurry, telescopic pictures of the planets in my childhood science book have now been replaced by the high resolution imagery of robotic space probes. But as Neil Tyson affirmed on the second episode of Cosmos, scientists aren't afraid or ashamed to admit what they don't know. This should perhaps be how we approach God: we know far more than the writer of Hosea 13:16 about God and what God wants of us, but there is much we still do not know. Our understanding will continue to grow, and we shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge what we don't yet know. In any event, we don't need to hold to or defend obsolete images of God from the Bible, from an era of less understanding.