Making Sense (sort of) of Biblical Violence

A highlight of my four years living in Minnesota was a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters that I organized with my brothers. The endless landscape of lakes would be heaven on earth if it weren't for two things: misquitos and black flies. As awful as the misquotos could be, they didn't bite like the black flies. Ouch. Even a strong breeze in the middle of a lake wouldn't offer respite. A couple black flies would still follow and attack. We could never get ride of them.

Given the season of life I was in, black flies in the boundary waters became a metaphor for doubt and skepticism in my faith journey. Faith would be a lot more pleasant if nagging doubts would just go away. And often, at least for me, the same reoccurring doubt would reappear. It might leave me alone for a while, but around the next bend it would be back.

Perhaps the most consistent "fly" of doubt in my spiritual journey is violence in the Bible, especially the Old Testament. This was my primary theolgical conundrum in high school. And it still looms large twenty years later.

I’m not alone. Processing Biblical violence is one of the most difficult theological tasks for the Christian. As ironic as it sounds, many people question thier faith, or lose it all together, when they begin reading the Bible! There are many violent - even disturbing - passages. Endless blog posts reveal this is a well trodden theological path littered with casualties.

I have tremendous compassion for these folks. We're in the midst of preaching through the meta-narrative of scripture at my church. As we wrap up the pentateuch, there are already several distressing stories of violence. The flood wiped out a vast majority of humanity. The tenth plague that ultimately helped liberate Israel from slavery left every Egyptian family mourning the death of their first born child. Are we supposed to celebrate this? What if we were born as an Egyptian?

There's one passage that deeply troubles and confused me every time I read it. In Exodus 32. Moses descends Mount Sinai and discovers God's people have built a Golden Calf. He gathers men from the tribe of Levi and this is what happens next:

27 Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.’”28 The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. 29 Then Moses said, “You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day.”

I still don't get it. To make this scene even more confusing, just a couple chapters later God declares himself to be compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abonding in love and faithfulness (Exodus 34:6). I get the need for some consequences here. But this? It's hard to make sense of it.

I haven't even mentioned the ultimate example of troubling BIblical violence: the Canaanite conquests. Joshua and Judges are some of the most violent and bloody literature I have ever read in my life. That's a true statement.

Common Pathways

How do we even begin to make sense of this? Annecdotally, there seem to be four primary paths people tend to go down:

Don't Question It

I should just stop worrying about it! Stop struggling. Stop doubting. Just trust. God is good. It's just time to move on. It;s unchristian to questions the Bible. Sometimes church leaders or well meaning Christian friends send this harmful message. This approach is simply not viable for most of us. Being asked to turn our brians off when we approach scripture is going to make it very difficult to believe in the truth and sturdiness of the Christian faith. If we can't engage with intellectual honesty, then maybe this whole thing is a hoax?

Question God's Morality

Maybe God is a moral monster afer all? Maybe. Christians always overplay how gracious and merciful God is. Perhaps the God of the Bible is just another angry, judgemental diety.

This path usually, if not alayways, leads to a faith that slowly dissolves overtime. To experince a robust Christian faith that desires to worship God, we need more than just a hunch God exists. We also need to believe God is good. As Hebrews 11:6 puts it,

And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him

I have loads of compassion for people who find themselves down this path. I've found myself heading in this direction before. But, our desire to worship God is going to dissipate. And with it our faith.

Question God's Immutability

The book of Hebrews declares that God is the same yesterday, today and forever. Or maybe not? Some violent texts feel so impossible to reconcile with the life and teaching of Jesus that we end up creating a Yahweh vs. Jesus dichotomy. Jesus ends up saving us from God. The God of the OT is in direct tension with the person of Jesus.

A second century theologian named Marcion thought along these lines. He constructed a different biblical canon that eliminated the Old Testament altogether. The early church fathers gathered together and deemed "marcionism" a heresy because, among other things, the Hebrew scriptures were discarded.

The problem with this path is that, ironically, it doesn't take Jesus seriosuly enough. Jesus was deeply shaped by the Hebrew scriptures. He read, memorized and recited them. As one Old Testament scholar puts it, it was his "formative curriculum". It's a dificult thing to declare allegiance to Jesus as teacher, savior and Lord while distancing ourselves from His scripture.

In adddition, the New Testament makes it clear that the life, death and ressurection of Jesus cannot be understood without being situated in the story of God that begins in Genesis. For example, in 1 Corinthians 15 Paul summarizes the gospel by saying:

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.

In other words, we must place Jesus in context. We won't understand Him otherwise. Jesus only makes sense within the story of Israel. He was Israel's Messiah for the sake of the world.

Question our reading of scripture

But there's another option. One that won't resolve the tension but can offer a way to trust and love of the Bible again. If God doesn't seem good to us, is that an accurate reflection of the character of God or are we struggling to find the proper resources to guide us towards a healthy hermeneutic? If we emerge from the Biblical story with a primrily wrathful, vengeful and violent God, are we reading and interpreting the Bible correctly? I personally don't think so.

As we consider a more mature approach to Bible reading, it's important to recognize a few scholarly insights related to violent texts:

• Ancient Near East Smack Talk - Most scholars agree that the war texts of the Bible mirror common cultural language of the time. In other words, what we get in Joshua is hyperbolic war rhetortic. It's like saying the Chicago Bulls totally destroyed the Washington WIzards last night. Did they? "Total destruction" language meant that the victory was total, not that every single person was killed. In fact, the narratives themselves often make this clear. All we have to do is turn the page. Often in the next verse, the next chapter or the next book, we learn of survivors or of land not conquered. This consideration has left me feeling very, very unsatisfied when considering the scope of the problem. But it's worth mentioning

• Accommodation - The Bible starts in Genesis 1-2. Not with the flood, the plagues or the conquests. God is dealing with fallen humans in a broken world within their cultural context and is developmentally moving them along towards His ideal, which is actually a return to the shalom state of the garden. To put it another way, God is in triage mode. With Genesis 1-2 laying our theological foundation we realize that violence is a malicious intruder into God’s good world. Therefore, God's occasional use of violence is an accommodation within an incredibly violent and tribal ancient world in order to oversee damage control and restore what's been broken by sin.

• Cultural projection - The Bible is a divinely inspired text, and yet God chose humans to tell the story. We can feel confident the Bible is God's word to us and still recognize a human fingerprint on the text. Could it be that some of the violence in the Old Testament was not as God-ordained as Israelites thought? After all, they swam in violent and tribal waters. Maybe they assumed God was more violent than he was and projected their assumptions onto God. And maybe God is so loving that he is willing to be misunderstood in order to move closer to the humans God loves.

This list only scratches the surface in reagrds to scholarly insights. The tension is still there, but it's important to process violent texts with a historical-cultural lens and with a sharp theological eye.

But our real path forward is going to be found by putting the Bible under the correct microscope.

Jesus Is Our Interpretive Lens

We need to put the gospels on as a pair of glasses through which we read the rest of the Bible. Scripture makes this emphatically clear because Jesus is the purest and clearest revelation of God. The list could be longer, but here are four foundational texts to emphasis this point:

Jesus, in John 14:9 declares:

If you've seen me you have seen the father

John 1:18 states,

No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.

In the opening line of Hebrews we read:

In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. 3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being

And Colossians 1:15-16 says,

15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.

We cannot have a flat reading of the Bible. A flat reading - where we need to balance out every part of the Bible equally, can lead to very problematic interpretations. The whole canon of scripture provides the landscape for understand God and God's mission in the world. But Jesus is the peak that stands taller than the rest of the terrian. All eyes should be drawn to him. We don't have to - nor should we - take Moses' command to pick up the sword in Exodus 32 and try to balance that our with Jesus asking Peter to put down the sword in the garden of gathsemene. We shouldn't hold with equal weight the "total destruction" passages in Joshua with Jesus' emphatic teaching and modeling of enemy love. The life and teachings are Jesus are ALWAYS theologically load bearing. Not every part of the Bible should be.

Let's look at one more passage to hammer home the importance of Jesus being our interpretive lens. In Mark 9 we encounter a bizzare story about the transfiguration of Jesus. Many of us don't know exactly what to do with this passage. Jesus has just predicted his cricifixion and then we read that six days later Jesus takes three of his disciples - Peter, James and John - up a mountain. By this point in the Biblicl narrative it's obvious what an ascent up the mountain leads to: a unique encounter with God. Sure enough, Jesus turns blazing white and is transfigured in front of them. Importantly, Moses and Elijah then appear and God's voice comes from a cloud saying,

This is my dearly loved son, listen to him - Mark 9:7

Catching the theological signficance of what's going on here is critical to learning how to read the Bible. It's no coincidence that Moses and Elijah enter the scene. Moses represents the law and Elijah represents the prophets. The law and the prophets...the shorthand phrase for referencing the Old Testament. And their faces and clothes are not being transfigiured, only Jesus'. God the father, in the company of Moses and Elijah, tells the disciples to listen to Jesus. It's not that Moses and Elijah's ministry's are unimportant. They are key Biblical characters who are crucial to the story of God. Yet, they'r role pales in comparison to Jesus. Jesus is the main character now. He is who we listen to first and foremost. If something Jesus says feels in direct tension with sometihng Moses says, it's Jesus' life and teachings we hang our hat on. I found it fascinating the Kevin Vanhoozer, a reknown scholar on hermeneutics, views the transfiguration story as a hermeneutical key to unlocking how to read the Bible. What a significant claim.

We are told to listen to Jesus. A Jesus whose talked a walked a path of bearing the violence and offering love and forgiveness in return. The rabbi that walked up on a hil along the sea of Galileee and proclaimed "blessed are the peacemakers".

This insight, that Jesus must be our interpretive center, is the pathway that can lead us back to a love and trust in the Bible (and therefore God) again. Tensions won't be eliminated. There's a handful of Bible stories I don't think I'll ever understand and that will always leave me disturbed and confused. Yet, with Jesus as our interpretive foundation, the Bible can bloom again with beauty. We can leave the story believing in God's existance and goodness.

In closing, here are four summary statements - signposts if you will - that I beleive can help guide us when we're stumbling around trying to make sense of Biblical violence:

1. The Bible contains difficult - even troubling - passages. The bible encourages us to wrestle with faith honestly, not holding back our confusion, doubts or anger. Therefore, we should feel safe to bring hard questions to God and to church.

2. Jesus doesn’t save us from God. We know God is good because Jesus is good. But Jesus does protect us from problematic interpretations of the Bible.

3. Jesus loved the Hebrew Scriptures. Since it was His formative curriculum it should be part of ours and can shape us into people who more deeply understand Jesus and live like Him.

4. Where the scriptures feel in tension, we must look to Jesus for clarity. Jesus Christ is the ultimate revelation of God and therefore the foundation for building our belief and behavior.