Did church fathers ever deal with "Bible requires brutality" critics? A recent question here caused some confusion, and increases my curiosity about this topic. Someone asked why people say Christians have disdain for the handicapped. (Apparent) practicing Christians responded with incredulity: who says that? The point is that such an idea doesn't appear to be taught anywhere today within circles of practicing Christians. Interestingly enough, the internet is full of claims made by non-Christians that Christianity necessarily requires disdain for the handicapped, or various cruelties or brutality. That's because activists have picked up a handful of verses that by themselves could point to some kind of "ethic" for cruelty.

My question is whether the church fathers (or any more recent prominent theologians) have specifically dealt with such criticism. For example, could I find an apologetic for this question, in say, a chapter of St. Augustine's City of God? A sermon by someone like Martin Luther that advocates feeding the poor is not what I'm looking for. I want to see rebuttals of the practice of objecting to Christianity on the basis of picking a handful of tough passages.
My recollection of the section in Confessions where Augustine discusses the Bible with Ambrose was that they took most of the Old Testament far more figuratively than we do today (it should be noted that one of Augustine's primary objections to Christianity, when he was Manichean, was that the OT is inconsistent and often poorly written). Approaching the desert monastics, I see a very similar approach to the texts &mdash; they took things as relating to spiritual warfare and far less as a literal account of history (and it can be argued that they couldn't care less about the literal account anyhow).

I guess that my impression is that if you complained to one of the Fathers, "the Old Testament is so barbaric" the response would be:


You're not reading it right
It is tame compared to what other philosophies and religions have taught.