Bloody, Brutal, Barbaric: Ch.1: Violence is (Nearly) Ubiquitous
One can certainly be excused for
assuming that violence is an intrinsic part of all life in our world. Nothing and
nobody is free of its taint and corruption. Well, almost nobody. Jesus of
Nazareth, a 1st century a.d. Galilean peasant and prophet, acclaimed
the Messiah of Jewish expectation and Lord and world ruler by Christian faith,
seems to have lived free of its taint and even its allure. And therein lies the
nub of the problem investigated in this study. How do we understand this Jesus,
and the God he worshiped and served, and the books of the Bible that witness to
him? Especially since the latter, and the God they present as the “Father” of
this Jesus, his “Son,” seem as “bloody, brutal, and barbaric” as the world in
which it arose and to which it claims to witness to a redemptive nonviolent alternative
reality and possibility for human life on this planet.
The Bible itself testifies to the
near ubiquity of violence in the life of our planet. Most of its content is
preoccupied with violence and the intractable and knotty problems and
conundrums it peppers human life with at every level of existence. Yet at the
beginning, in its first two chapters, and the end, its last two chapters, it
speaks of a time before violence and a forever after free of its corrupting
presence. In between, however, violence is a central reality and driver of its
story.
After the event pictured in Genesis
3 when Adam and Eve (humanity) sin, breaking relation with God, and try to
begin controlling and directing their own (and other’s) lives chaos ensues.
Genesis 3-11 unfolds a litany of de-creation in which humanity no longer lives
in peace with God and consequently with itself, with each other, or with the
creation. The chief mark of this chaos is violence. So pervasive is this
violence that God in sorrow, regret, and anger nearly brings an end to his
creation project with the flood (Gen.6:5-12).
God perseveres with Noah, however,
and launches a reclamation and restoration movement for his creatures and
creation with Abraham and Sarah and the family which comes from them (Gen.12)
promising to bless all peoples through them. Thus ensues the long and painful
struggle for blessing to triumph over sin and peace (Shalom) over
violence.
The duration and vagaries of this
journey create in large measure the problems we will concern ourselves with
here.
-Who does God reveal himself to be
on this journey?
-How does God manage this
reclamation and restoration project?
-What are Israel’s roles and responsibilities
on this journey?
Other issues will emerge in
considering these questions and we will look at at least some of them here. I
make no claim to be comprehensive or exhaustive. I aim to introduce these
matters and offer my take on them as a way for others to engage these issues
for themselves. In the nature of the case, sin is an irrational distortion and
inexplicable terror afflicting creation’s life and history. We should not
expect, then, a full rational resolution of the problems of violence either in
the Bible or in our experience. Loose ends and unanswered/unanswerable
questions will remain and, more importantly, our lives afflicted by violence
until the day Christ returns to finally and fully set all things right. The
most we can hope for is to gain as full a perspective as we can on scripture’s
understanding of this journey and through it on our experience of it as part of
the journey.
Walter Brueggemann once described
Israel’s faith as holding together utter realism and extravagant faith at the
same time. That’s a good description of this project. Utter realism demands we
take violence and its chief manifestation in war-making and the problems caused
by God’s engagement with his rebellious and violent world with utmost
seriousness. There are real, faith-challenging problems here. Yet, at the same
time, we must operate with the hope that God’s promise to overcome sin with
blessing and violence with peace will hold and at the end prove true and that
God and his ways of engaging and prosecuting this journey will be justified. In
the meantime we muddle through as best we can beset by the doubts and
frustrations endemic to God’s way of dealing with humanity’s choice of other
ways than his of living and ordering life by clinging to Christ, the one in
whom all God’s promises are “Yes” (2 Cor.1:20).
A
Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric World
A part of reality we face in this
study is the presumption that we, at least in the West, have evolved beyond
that bloody, brutal, and barbaric world we see reflected in the Bible and other
Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) literature. This presumption fuels a sense of
superiority we bring to evaluating and judging the biblical story. This sense
of superiority alienates from them and their experience in way that hinder
understanding.
In the first place, this
assumption is false. It was understandable that 19th century Western
people believed the myth of progress and that Western civilization was the
vanguard of the future constantly and qualitatively surpassing the primitive,
savage, and backwards past. That such a view persisted into the 20th
century was perhaps inevitable but many saw World War I as the death blow to
this myth and World War 2 its burial, especially after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For those who somehow persevered in believing the myth, the failure and
cooptation of science by political ideologies by the end of that century did
even most of them in. In the early 21st century the savage primitive-ness
we attributed to the superseded past is seen to be alive and well under the
guises of our civilization, another iteration in a more technologically
advanced form of what the world used to be and now, we are rudely reminded,
still is. When asked what he thought about Western civilization, a response
often attributed to Ghandi is “I think it would be a good idea.” Whether Ghandi
said this or not, and whether Western civilization would be a good idea of not,
it gives a dissenting outsider perspective on what we normally take for
granted. We too in our time and place, under the shiny veneer of steel, crystal,
and fiber optics live in a bloody, brutal, and barbaric world. The world is
smaller. We know far more about each other than ever before. Yet fear, despite,
and savagery seem the most tangible result on all sides. And as usual, the
poor, the different, and the children bear the brunt of it all.
We must not read the violent
biblical stories as if from a perch of superiority and moral achievement that
sets us apart from them. They are us and we are them. In a Ziggy cartoon years
ago Ziggy was staring put his window wistfully at the moon. All the while he
thinks to himself, “But wherever I go, I’m still there.” We too, however far we
advance beyond those ancient times, are still there.
Secondly, we are indeed far
from those times and peoples. We cannot understand or assess them or their
actions and dynamics of their history from that distant place where we are. We
are different, historically, culturally, and religiously. They are not
understandable or accountable to us on our terms. Historical sympathy rather
than historical arrogance is necessary. As deep a grasp of the mores,
protocols, and worldviews of those ancient peoples and times is non-negotiable.
We may well be repelled, and should be, by some of what we read in the Old
Testament in particular. But we may not judge them failures, perverts, or
savages because their failure to meet our norms repels us. We must work through
that repulsion through learning what the best of historical research can teach
us about the perspectives and practices of those times. Then we have a chance
to at least walk a mile in their sandals and develop some sympathy with why
things happened as they did and people do what they did. Then we can better
evaluate what was done and happened in a more appropriate frame and resist the
urge to blame prematurely.
Yes, historical sympathy is the
name of the game. And the means we must love our distant neighbors by patiently
probing their times and attitudes in a genuine effort to gain some solidarity
with them before we look at all and judge all that is different between us.
In the third place, we live in a time
when God as a living reality who created us and to whom we are accountable is
KIA (Nietzsche). One side inflicted mortal wounds of triviality and
predictability in the interests of a bourgeois
morality. The other killed the deity by reducing God to a cipher for its best,
liberating, revolutionary nostrums to recreate society, world, and history in
its image. All the while a reductive capitalism busily and effectively
transformed both sides and all others it touched in its image of homo
economicus (economic man) for whom the summum bonum was no longer the
beatific vision but a healthy bottom line in a humanly constructed paradise.
In any
case, this dead God serves admirably as a prop (as in Moralistic Therapeutic
Deism) or whipping boy (as in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials
trilogy) for our satisfactions or discontents. In relation to the violence we
find in the Bible and its God we feel free to affirm both or reject both
depending on the assumptions and commitments we bring to these texts. Some
struggle to reject the violence and still hold on to a real and living God.
Others, I suspect, do not want to reject God along with the violence they
rightly abhor but find no option to not doing so.
Such judgments of a primitive God
(whether affirming or rejecting), from our position as modern or postmodern
people, treat God as a paper Lion to be retained or disposed of as we see fit,
but not like the Lion of Judah come to his rebellious world to turn everything
upside down and shake it all out in his own design again. According to
Walter Brueggemann,
“The God who is disclosed in the Bible does not conform to
our generic notions of
God, either the stern disciplinarian of righteous indignation or the generous
Santa Claus of availability. Nor does this God conform to our more reasonable
“orthodoxies” of “perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.” Our
conventional notions of God derive primarily from the logic of Greek philosophy
that yields a God who is a fixed point of reference “uncontaminated” by the
vagaries of lived reality.
“But the
God of the Bible does not arise from the syllogisms of such logic that hold
promise of certitude. Rather this God, so definingly Jewish, inhabits
open-ended narrative . . . And in open-ended narrative, unlike logical
syllogism, all sorts of things can happen that are surprising, unexpected,
inexplicable, and sometimes disconcerting. Thus this narrative-dwelling God is
part of a plot and emerges as a full character who acts amid the
plot. Both the plot and the character violate ordinary, generic religious
categories. The outcome of this way of disclosure is a God who is free and
elusive and ofttimes irascible. It is this God who warns David not to try to
box God into his temple, or this is a God who “moves about” (to and fro) with
freedom, who refuses our settled categories (II Samuel 7:6).”[1]
In particular, I find his
characteristic term “irascible” to describe God quite congenial. This quality
of irritability is precisely the mark of the living God we must rediscover,
having worked so hard over the centuries to rid ourselves of it. I would argue,
in fact, that unless our description of God as “love” (1 Jn.4:8,16) entails
this mark of irascibility it fails as a description of the biblical God.
Irascibility is, of course, not a
problem for those who have no problem simply affirming the violence and God
associated with it in the Old Testament. Their problem is just this
unproblematic affirmation which fails the Christological “smell test.” For
those who take seriously Christ’s categorical rejection of violence in the name
and based on the character of God his Father (Mt.5:43-48) the violence
associated with God in the Old Testament is deeply problematic. As it should
be!
Yet Brueggemann is right, I think,
to characterize the biblical deity as irascible. Nothing ticks God off more, if
the biblical accounts are to be trusted, than his human creatures’ willful
distortion and destruction of his creation and dehumanization and death of their
fellow divine image-bearers (Gen.1:26,28). So angry, in fact, that he executes
wrath and judgment on them for it, often in the most lurid and destructive
imagery available to the writers who describe it.
Surely this deity, some claim, has
nothing to do with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! This “God” is
at best a sub-Christian deity, perhaps understandable in its primitive setting,
but completely unacceptable for followers of Christ. The Christian God must be
pacific, even a pacifist committed to non-violence, to merit our loyalty and
approval. This is the God of whom Jesus is the fullest and clearest “exegesis” (Jn.1:18:
ἐξηγέομαι from which we get our “exegesis,” explanation). Is it any wonder many
of us cannot find our way clear to identify this Jesus with that God?
Thus, taking our cue from God’s
self-identification as the nonviolent Jesus of Nazareth, and driven by our
presumption we are in a position to (and have even a moral duty to) “judge” God
with the consistency and certitude of the logic we have been brought up with,
we reject the Old Testament’s deity with relish and even delight that we have
“killed” such a monstrous figure.
Others mourn parting ways with this
deity. Still others cannot quite part with him and attribute the offending
descriptions of him to his scribes in the Old Testament who wrongly described
him and his actions in the only way they knew how. That is, with images of a
Divine Warrior who with a quick trigger finger eagerly metes out judgment on
humanity to satisfy his offended honor.
I must say, I understand and to a
degree sympathize with these sentiments. However, I also see problems with such
proposals which we will look at more fully later on. And Brueggemann’s
irascible deity of the Old Testament seems to me one key to a more faithful
response to this real problem. In fact, the rest of this study is, in effect, a
long footnote to the description of the biblical God as “irascible” in both
reality and rhetoric.
So, to sum up, we cannot distance
ourselves as different from these folks in the ANE so long ago. As different as
our times, cultures, possibilities, dreams, and hopes may be from theirs, like
Ziggy “we” are still there. And our world is as bloody, brutal, and barbaric as
theirs, albeit in different, more “civilized,” ways.
We must, therefore, exercise our
historical imaginations to develop as much sympathy as we can with their world,
the ways it worked, and how they thought in order to better discern the work of
God in their midst and how that divine work gets translated (not negated) in
and through Jesus Christ for our world.
We cannot, then, stand in the presumed
moral superiority of our modern world which has executed judgment upon God and
reduced him to either a parody or whipping boy for our current moralities or
done away with him altogether, and dismiss or damn him. The world, and God, are
more complicated than we can imagine. The “irascible” God of the Old Testament
gives us a way into rethinking all this.
And to that rethinking we now turn.
Our
Agenda
The first part of this study will
work through the substantive and detailed presentation of William Webb and Gordon
Oeste in their brand-new book Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric? Wrestling with
Troubling War Texts (hereafter BBB). I will use this text as a
baseline and in Part 2 develop my own reflections on this work. That will take
us into some systematic and biblical theological matters beyond the scope of BBB.
I will lay my cards on the table
here at the beginning of our journey. I largely agree with the approach and conclusions
of BBB. I do think the hermeneutic (way of interpretation) they propose,
while on the right track, can be improved somewhat and I will offer suggestions
to that end in Part 2.
BBB follows the three general
principles I laid out above. I think this is the wise and prudent way to proceed
and I intend my comments and discussion of additional matters to support that
contention. I think it helps us practice the kind of faith Bruggemann notes
above: holding utter realism about our world and ourselves together at the same
time with the extravagant hope promised by God in the Bible. Living between
those two realities, and sometimes stretched to the breaking point by their
tensions, is the hermeneutical and existential cross we must bear in our time.
A prayer for illumination as we
venture on in this journey:
God of Courage,
be in our speaking. Be
also in our listening, and speak to our souls’
deep understanding. In
Christ’s name we pray. Amen.
©Lee Wyatt 2019
[1] “The Biblical God Who Goes ‘To and Fro’ in the Earth,”
http://thecenterforbiblicalstudies.org/the-biblical-god-who-goes-‘to-and-fro’-in-the-earth-by-walter-brueggemann/.
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