Violence in the Bible: Some Useful Sources

I think I’m done writing out my questions and thoughts-in-process on this subject for awhile. (I’m actually taking a reading detour into an Elizabeth Goudge novel right now and leaving this pot to simmer in the back of my mind and heart.) But I want to record here a few of the relevant ideas and resources that I’ve come across in recent weeks. In the comments, some others have indicated similar questions, so I’m sharing these for anyone interested in checking them out.

1.) This past Sunday, my pastor preached a sermon called “Holy Violence.” The podcast is here. He packs a lot in, including the relationship between Genesis 15:16 and the later wars against the Canaanites, as well as a consideration of the whole idea of God’s wrath. I’m grateful for his perspective on all of this, and I believe you will be too if you listen.

2.) Greg Boyd has a series of blog posts about the Bible’s violence at his blog. He is kneading some of the issues and ideas that will be developed in his forthcoming book Crucifixion of the Warrior God. The book won’t be out for another 18 months or so, but you can get a taste of some of the thinking behind what he calls “The Cruciform Thesis.”

3.) Boyd touched on the subject of violence in his book Letters from a Skeptic, which represents his thinking as of several years ago. The upcoming book will not necessarily reflect these same ideas in this form, but they have still fed into my own recent engagement with this subject. Here is an excerpt from the book:

Jesus Christ is the person in whom God is fully revealed. This, for me, must be my central definition of God. Whatever else God is like, He can’t be different from the God I encounter here. “If you see Me,” Jesus says, “you see the Father” (John 14). If something in Scripture appears to contradict this, I must confess ignorance and suspend judgment. I don’t always know why God did what He did in the Old Testament. But since I know on other grounds that God is all-loving and all-wise, I must simply trust that He had wise and loving reasons for doing what He did.

He moves on there to talk about

• …how “intensely violent” and “power-driven” the ancient world was; he discusses some aspects of Canaanite culture and concludes, “perhaps one of the reasons God had to use violence in the Old Testament was because violence was the only way of accomplishing what He wanted to accomplish…”
• “Perhaps the death of certain people was, in certain circumstances, the lesser of two evils. Do we not also believe that death is sometimes preferable to life? If, with this, one considers God’s universal perspective, one must ask not only what is the lesser of two evils for the individuals involved, but what is the lesser of two evils for the entire world throughout history?…”
• “If one believes in an afterlife, as I do, then the death of the Canaanites is not really the end of their life at all. It may be just the beginning of an eternal life with God. What God does for historical purposes is not necessarily an indication of how God judges people eternally. And in this light, the death of certain Canaanite people, especially the children, could be seen as an act of mercy. Perhaps they were spared the hellish life (and afterlife) they would have had if they had grown to maturity…”

Now, all of this is excerpted from his book, and if it piques your interest I urge you to get ahold of a copy and read it so you can see the full development and context of these ideas. I am giving only brief quotations here and that never does full justice to someone’s thoughts.

4.) If you’d like to get a sense of Eric Seibert’s overarching themes in The Violence of Scripture, he wrote some guest blog posts over at Peter Enns’ blog: here, here, and here. Dr. Seibert’s book was helpful to me as a survey of both the troubling texts in Scripture, and the ways they have been used to justify violence throughout history (including in America). But though I agree that the Bible’s historical context is important, I don’t have quite so limited a view of its authority, so I didn’t find his recommendations for how to deal with the Bible’s violence that helpful. (I think the way certain elements in evangelicalism are attacking him is inexcusable.)

There are aspects of all these sources that I agree with, disagree with, and am up-in-the-air about, but here they are for anyone who’s interested.