Edgework

While we have noted that there is a nonviolent narrative woven into the Old Testament text, J. Denny Weaver says in, The Nonviolent God, that Jesus was faced with a biblical text that frequently would “…picture a God who uses violence as punishment and judgment. At times God exercises violence directly…Other times it is Israel’s leader or army that follows instructions from God to carry out the violence. The violence falls on those who disobey and oppose the will of God” (95).

Weaver also points out that, according to 2 Corinthians 5:19, the true character of God is reflected in Jesus: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” That being the case, we are not at liberty to attribute characteristics to God that don’t find resonance in Jesus. According to Weaver, “The God fully revealed in Jesus is a nonviolent God. And if the God revealed in the story of Jesus who refused the sword is also the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, then we need another look at the Old Testament” (104). Weaver basically argues that Jesus drew forward those strands of the Old Testament account that supported the image of God being nonviolent and left the violent strands behind.

Derek Flood picks up this argument quite forcefully in Disarming Scripture: “In broad strokes, Jesus is outlining a way that is rooted in forgiveness and enemy love, and is in direct opposition to the way of violent retaliation and payback justice characteristic of much of the Law of Moses” (25). Jesus keeps reaching for nonviolence. For example, in Genesis 4:15, the promise is made that anyone who murders Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over. Then, in Genesis 4:24, Lamech claims to be avenged seventy-seven times. The Law of Moses limited retaliation to an “eye for an eye.”  But Jesus “…now takes it to the next level, saying not to retaliate ‘at all,’ instead proposing a superior way which seeks to restore enemies, rather than to destroy them” (26).

From Jesus’ point of view he was fulfilling the law, “…yet in order to do so, utterly changes it. That is how Jesus understands faithfulness to Scripture. Fulfilling Scripture for Jesus means lovingly bringing it into its fully intended purpose” (27). In John 8: 1-11, Jesus forgives the woman caught in adultery instead of participating in her stoning. “This radical stance of prioritizing love over law could be said to be the baseline of Jesus’ exegetical method” (30).

So, for example, the Torah seems to blame the cause of all suffering on disobedience to God, while the Psalms and Prophets actually give a legitimate voice to the victims of unjust suffering. But Jesus embodies the idea found in some of the prophets of being willing to suffer for righteousness sake. So in this way “…we see Jesus embracing certain narratives that speak of restoration and mercy and rejecting other narratives found in those same Scriptures which instead uphold committing or justifying violence in God’s name” (42). Another way of saying this is to take note that “…Jesus made a habit of questioning and rejecting how Scripture was read and applied whenever he saw that this was hurting people” (44).

Understanding the process Jesus used of drawing Old Testament texts forward through a grid of nonviolence gives us a helpful perspective on how to interpret violent Old Testament texts. It is not that far removed from the rabbinical tradition of allowing dissenting views to stand side-by-side in the Talmud. Not taking everything one reads at face value, for example, “…the violence and harm perpetrated in God’s name” (73), is a deeply Jewish way of reading Scripture.

A second century Church leader, Marcion, dealt with violence in the Old Testament by stating that the God of the Old Testament was not the God and Father of Jesus Christ. So his view was that one should read the Old Testament record of violence literally but understand that it did not depict the God Jesus represented. While this teaching was not accepted by most Christians, it was an attempt to acknowledge and deal with violence as portrayed in the Old Testament.

In the third century, Origen responded to Marcion’s approach by claiming that the violent texts in the Old Testament should not be read literally, but allegorically. He wrote, “Unless those physical wars bore the figure of spiritual wars, I do not think the books of Jewish history would ever have been handed down by the apostles…who came to teach peace” (79). While this provided a way to overlook the apparent violence inherent in the text, it did minimize the text as it stands. Nevertheless, using the allegorical method to deal with violence in the biblical text was used right till the modern era.

Flood describes what happened next: “When scholars jettisoned allegorical readings for academic reasons, they lost with it the means to deal with ethical problems in Scripture and offered nothing in its place” (82). In this new context biblical scholars were once again forced to deal with the discrepancies between the apparent divine sanction of violence in the Old Testament and the teaching of Jesus who attempted to disarm such texts.

Some modern Bible readers have simply concluded then that, while God is a God of love, he is at the same time a God of wrath who doesn’t shrink from participating in violence; God is two-faced – like the ancient Roman god, Janus.

However an increasing number of scholars are relying on reading the Old Testament “ethically” through a nonviolent grid as Jesus did and leaving the violent images behind as inadequate representations of the God of Jesus Christ. This allows them to move forward from a starting point that acknowledges that “things like infanticide, genocide and cannibalism are simply and always categorically wrong” (87).

So in the interpretive scramble, Jesus always wins out in the end.