So Wright has been attempting to address the issue of the Israelite takeover of the Promised land as described in the Old Testament - particularly in the book of Joshua.  At issue is the wholesale slaughter of entire towns or even people groups, as dictated by God.  Wright is going through various ways of looking at these events that help to put them in perspective.  Ultimately, Wright wants to defend God against the allegation of genocide.

And whenever we try to defend God, we fail.  God doesn't need defending, so we're already on shaky ground.  But Wright uses some pretty poor arguments to try and place the conquest of the Promised Land into the proper perspective.  

One of his arguments is that the slaughter didn't take up the whole Old Testament, and in most part was limited to a single generation of conquest.  As though the fact that it was just one generation of people killing others makes the situation any better.  The Nazis were a single generation of killing.  The killings in Rwanda in the 90's was just a single generation of killing.  It doesn't make the killing any easier to deal with.  If God ordered the killing of even one person, this is a mighty issue that we need to grapple with.  At a very basic level, the scope or scale or duration of a God-ordered killing spree is far secondary to the fact that God ordered any sort of killing in the first place.  Wright is not going to be very compelling to anyone in terms of reducing the timeframe of the killing to a single generation. This isn't getting God off the hook.  

Wright then argues that the destruction of the Caananites was God's judgment against the wickedness of those peoples.  This is, I believe, very true.  The problem is, that in the previous section on dealing with the concept of evil, Wright goes to great pains to show Jesus indicating that personal tragedy or suffering is not necessarily direct divine retribution for a wrong committed.  This is also very true, I believe.  However Wright doesn't take time to address what is going to appear like a rather gaping contradiction.  God punishes in real-time, and God does not punish in real-time.  God operates differently with individuals than with collections of individuals.  Sorry, not very compelling.

Wright's two points are valid, but he needs to grapple and deal with and explain that what appears to be a contradiction may not be.  That God is free to act in human history however He decides to, and that we can't draw wholesale generalizations based on these interventions.  God may indeed allow or bring about the suffering of someone who has done wrong, but that is not something we can judge very well without God explaining this fact to us.  The same thing happens on national levels as well.  All things are under God's ultimate control - but we aren't privy to what that means in any specific situation outside of what is revealed to us in Scripture.

The difficulty of the Old Testament stories of conquest is that they remind us that we are all guilty.  None of us are innocent.  All of us rightly deserve God's wrath.  The fact that His wrath was poured out on specific peoples at specific times for His specific purposes is a reminder that none of deserve any different.  In fact, we all deserve the exact same treatment.  It is only the saving grace of Jesus Christ that removes that terminal guilt from our shoulders, and eliminates our status as 'rebels' against God, and changes it to 'heirs' of God.  

There is no way to soften this truth, I believe.  The fact that we wish it were softened is an indictment of our own guilt - even those of us who know our guilt and have been forgiven.  The OT is a reminder that the stakes are high, and that there is no middle ground between good and evil.  We are either saved, or we are lost.  We are either with God or against Him.  And we can be saved, and can be with God, because God has acted, and has sent us salvation through the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.