The trouble with violence and the Bible isn’t just in the way we read it or even that it’s baked into our theology. We can’t even see Jesus at the center when our convictions are founded on violence.
I was pretty young when I first asked “what’s so good about Good Friday?” Probably 10 or 11. The pattern of our tradition, like keeping a Holy Week, was natural to us. And the names of the days were just names to me. Until they weren’t. I wanted a real answer.
Because the death of Jesus alone doesn’t seem good. And the late night arrest, the show trial, the abuse and mockery didn’t seem good. Then that march to his own execution — this literal torture — before he’s even put up on a cross!
My little 10 year-old self started referring to it inside my head as “good” Friday.
I know I’m not alone. And I would hazard a guess that 9 out of 10 people who read this have had similar thoughts at one time or another. This is an enduring and universal question. And it connects to an even older, more enduring question about God.
It’s asked in many forms, all trying to find the relationship between God and violence. But we really could just put them under this one umbrella: WTF? Seriously.
God is good. And God seems to do some really terrible things.* Or if God doesn’t do them, God allows them. It’s the kind of junk we really can’t get around.
Many of us have spent a lot of time trying to understand. And failing.
And some of us justify or overlook or come up with alternative explanations which satisfy us.
I’m one who has never been all that happy with any of it.
*you know that’s not the word I want to use here
Toward a Nonviolent Bible
As a teenage poet, I didn’t struggle with the Bible and literalism. That wasn’t a deal for me. For instance, the story of Noah was never about history — it was always about God’s relationship to humanity. And when I heard that people actually look for a location for the ark, it just seems comical.
But I’ve always been bedeviled by theology and the connections we make about the nature of God. This is where I’ve struggled to hold onto what we claim to believe and what it actually means about God.
Here, the split between the two parts of the Christian Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures we call the Old Testament and the Greek Scriptures we call the New Testament seems tempting. Even for those who aren’t fundamentalists.
A few years ago, when our Bible study was reading straight through and we got to Joshua and the histories, we had to confront this vision of God as encouraging genocide. God sounded violent and elitist. And even my poetic approach to scripture was stretched to its limits. Many in the group longed for us to get to the gospels.
But sitting alongside all these conversations was another stream. A bigger, deeper stream, full of cold flowing water and vibrant living things.
This was a vision of God which wasn’t stuck on a violent/nonviolent paradigm of old and new. It wasn’t only Jesus-focused or Hebrew-exclusive. I knew the stream was there and I could lose the anthropological justifications in it. If I just stripped naked, removing the ridiculous Greek dualistic philosophy which clothes our faith with irrational reason I could dive right in.
I just needed an invitation to do it.
An Invitation for You
I received this invitation to dive into this other stream in Anthony W. Bartlett’s book, Seven Stories: How to Study and Teach the Nonviolent Bible.
Bartlett has written a textbook for seeing God, the Bible, and our faith as consistently provoking a nonviolent response to a world absorbed with violence. It’s a brisk dip which awakens us from the fog of mixed traditions and unreflected theology.
It was everything I longed to read and experience.
But it wasn’t easy. This isn’t a traditional page-turner. It’s an unabashed textbook, written to be a personal devotion for the patient or a classroom text for the rest of us.
Those unfamiliar with many of the concepts will have to go slow.
Bartlett relies heavily on Rene Girard
If you aren’t familiar with the work of Rene Girard, don’t worry. Bartlett gives a strong introduction to Girardian anthropology. This is the primary substance of his work.
For many, this is a signal to it’s flaws—they already know the holes in the way Girard’s theory deals with the weight of atonement. To those people, I suggest they read it anyway. Bartlett doesn’t excuse these gaps or pretend they aren’t there.
He does something different.
He honors the flaws and says essentially that’s not good enough. Because those critiques are nearly all built on a vision of God that Bartlett doesn’t have. A vision that says that God endorses violence in one place and not in another.
But rather than accept that or ignore it, he takes issue with its fundamental assumption:
That God could be so capricious.
Or, in the words of Tripp Fuller: [If Jesus reflects the nature of God, then]
“God has to be at least as nice as Jesus.”
God Abhors Violence
The consistent image in the Greek Scripture of a Jesus who abhors violence, reflecting a Jewish prophetic tradition of abhorring violence, means the Christian reflection on the nature of God must take on this nonviolent character.
This means we have to re-examine those places in which God seems to encourage violence or those places in which acts of violence are perpetrated in the name of God. Most of these end up being contextual, complicated, or poetic.
Ultimately, there is virtually no place in scripture which directly encourages the reader to act violently. And overwhelming evidence to the opposite.
More problematic are the places in which God does the heavy lifting (eg. the Exodus), or in the case of Joshua, seems to encourage this particular people to commit genocide and steal land.
The problem for the reader is that we somehow take these passages as being more fundamentally descriptive of God than the people or that previously named mountain of evidence to the contrary. Here, the Girardian view argues that these passages say a lot less about God and a lot more about the violent character of humanity.
In this way, the stories reveal the human preference for violence more than they speak to a God who wills violence. Again, the much more consistent character of the Hebrew Scripture is a people who disobey the God who loves them more than it reflects a God who uses violence or demands violence at random moments.
In fact, most of the violence in Hebrew Scripture comes with shame, such as the shame that befalls the blessed King David, whose personal act of violence prevents him from building the Temple.
Human Responsibility
What appeals to me most about Girardian anthropology is that it centers on human responsibility for its own behavior. This should be seen as a deep contrast to our usual attempts to pin all of the responsibility for human behavior on the creator.
Whether we admit it or not, most of the traditional questions of providence and the nature of God are built as a paradox: if God did it, then God is responsible for doing it; if God didn’t do it, then God is responsible for not preventing it.
How Bartlett uses Girardian anthropology centers our focus on the human responsibility for its own behavior, disallowing the scapegoating of God while also focusing on the way God has always focused on influencing human behavior toward a just and peaceful (Shalom) community.
This is far more consistent with the scope of the Bible than its detractors would admit: to be both the thing all of Scripture celebrates and condemns.
Even the idea of the scapegoat is both a responsible and irresponsible development in human history.
Much like the Torah, which set about making an order for civilization, it had the side effect of limiting it.
Take the case of the command from Torah we know as “an eye for an eye”. This was always taken as an attempt to limit the response to violence and mediate the will to retaliate. In other words, you can’t take more than an eye for the eye taken from you.
But much like this command to restrict vengeance to “an eye for an eye,” it became the vehicle to endorse revenge: so that one might have the opportunity or obligation to take an eye for an eye.
This is behind Jesus’s clever move—when he seeks to bring clarity to the teaching. Jesus reveals God’s real intent: God doesn’t want any eyes taken. Before, we needed to limit the revenge; now we need to end it.
This isn’t a dramatic turn of direction for God, but a consistent arc for a people who need to keep moving toward fulfillment of the Kin-dom promise.
Theology Is Imperfect
Tony Jones includes Girardian anthropology in his book on the atonement, Did God Kill Jesus?. He covers the many atonement theories Christians have developed over the years, revealing their strengths and weaknesses and when they have come into and out of favor.
Really, if you’re looking for something all Christians agree on, don’t go near the atonement.
With Jones’s critique of Girard as an atonement theory in mind, I was looking for the issues he raises in his book. And what I found throughout Seven Stories is that Bartlett renders most of them irrelevant. Not because Jones hasn’t raised important questions. More like they aren’t part of what the breadth of Scripture seems to be doing.
It’s like the critique relies on a decontextualized theology based in a hermeneutic of a dividedly violent God. Or, in other words, it was all theory and a narrow view of scripture.
No matter what we wish it to be, the focus of Scripture isn’t the building of a consistent Trinitarian theology in 21st Century North America. The purpose isn’t to defend penal substitutionary atonement or late evangelical theology. It wasn’t written to defend capitalism or nationalism or sincerely held individual beliefs.
Scripture tells the story of a love relationship between God and humanity.
And whether or not God is a consistent or perfect source is hardly the most dominant point. Far greater, more frequent, and more diversely told is the story of human screw-ups and God’s love for reconciliation.
Scripture isn’t consistent, and neither is Christian theology.
Far closer to that truth than all the descriptions about God or those excuses for the “fall” of humanity is the truth toward which these arguments all seek to point: that our relationship with God is imperfect, our preference for violence is imperfect, and our justifications for all of it are imperfect.
And over and over again, God calls us to choose the path of nonviolence instead. Bartlett’s relentless mining for this truth pays off, not because his arguments are perfect, but because they reveal that our focus must be on the truth in the midst of our imperfect world.
And that truth is that God invites humanity (and has always invited humanity) to reject violence and make peace. And perhaps, more importantly for the people today (like yesterday), this requires us to acknowledge the ways we reject God’s call and choose violence: in our actions, in our beliefs, and in our theology.
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Disclosure
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255.