Is the Old Testament Ethical?

This is the title of a recent interview with Dr Peter Williams, Warden of Tyndale House.  With the criticisms of Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, ch. 7) particularly in mind, Williams gives a cogent series of responses to some of the more difficult and pressing worries that we (whether we are believers or not) may have about the morality of some of the things we find in the Old Testament.

Of course, Williams cannot offer, in the limited time afforded by an interview, a comprehensive set of answers.  And, in any case, if would be foolish of anyone to suppose that it is even possible to provide a neat set of knock-down arguments.  But I have to say that the lines of explanation offered in this interview are most helpful.  Williams constantly emphasises the contexts of the passages in question, and invites us to ask what the passages really say, not what we think they say either at a cursory glance or (worse still) at second- or third-hand.

To take one example:-

Christ and the Spirits in Prison

1 Peter 3:18-20 says, For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit, through whom also he went and preached to the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water.

What does it mean when it says that ’through the Spirit Christ went and preached to the spirits in prison’?

Who were the ’spirits in prison’?

What did Christ preach to them?

What does it mean when it says that he went and preached to them ‘through the Spirit’?

When did this take place?