God, the Bible and Violence, a new look

I begin this posting with a confession-a confession of embarrassment. I have long thought that I knew the bible very well but Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer’s work has shown me that I failed to take seriously the extent of the violence that runs throughout the bible. I had read books like Sam Harris’ “End of Faith” but was able to dismiss his arguments about the dark side of religious traditions without examining his evidence seriously.
Undoubtedly we have all participated in discussions about whether or not Islam is at base a violent faith but seldom have I confronted with the question in regard to our own faith tradition.
When I was preparing for these discussions at Holden Village I had intended to do a little on the holy war tradition in the first testament and then look at some of the passages in the book of Revelation. I am now convinced that such an approach only confirms my failure to even to begin to address the pervasiveness of violence in the bible. It now seems strange to me that I could have thought so little about this subject when the topic was “God, War and the Law”!
Our discussions during this second week will explore what it might mean to look more seriously at this issue. We will be reading a number of texts in both testaments where violence, much of it directly ascribed to God, is presented. Then we will test out an observation from James Sanders in “From Sacred Story to Sacred Text”: “Enlightened reading of the layers can thus be corrected by enlightened reading of the whole, and vice versa. … “…no theological construct built on it (God/Realty) can escape-sooner or later-the Bible’s own prophetic challenge.” (Page 6). We will be reading alternative voices from within the scriptures themselves with a particular emphasis on the place of Jesus in this conversation. We will test how this interpretative principal could assist in moving us as people of faith who claim to be disciples of Jesus toward being a non-violent presence and witness in a very violent world.
Our informing perspective will be a theology of the Cross. “But a modest church that is still under the spell of an immodest theology has not yet begun to deal with the fact that “Religion Kills” For what “kills” in religion is not only, or primarily, the exclusionary deed, the aggressive and proselytizing stance, the crusading attitude and act, but the underlying doctrine that functions both as inspiration and justification for all such actions. A religious community that believes itself to be in possession of “the Truth” is a community equipped with the most lethal weapon of any warfare: the sense of its own superiority and mandate to mastery. Douglas John Hall, “The Cross in Our Context” (Page 5). In other words, it is our understanding of God and of God’s very nature that informs, shapes, and inspires our way of being in the world.
A theology of the Cross can help keep us modest and thus perhaps make us less violent. To quote Hall again: “The theology of the Cross …is … first of all a statement about God, and what it is says about God is not that God thinks humankind so wretched that it deserves death and hell, but that God thinks humankind and the whole creation so good, so beautiful, so precious in its intention and its potentiality, that its actualization, its fulfillment, its redemption is worth dying for.” (Page 24).
If I were to do these presentations again, I would begin with the violence that is an overwhelming aspect of the biblical and Christian tradition and then see how the arguments I made in our reading of Genesis address this violence. I would look more diligently listen for other voices that challenge the cry of violence.