Marginal Christianity

Ch.4: Reading the Bible Redemptively READING THE BIBLE REDEMPTIVELY: ENGAGING TWO HORIZONS Reading the Bible redemptively works from the premise that “movement is meaning.” Even as we read a text as it is on the page to determine its meaning within its lterary context, we must pay attention to its social, historical, and canonical contexts to get a the movement of its meaning that represents the underlying spirit” (103) of the biblical material as a whole. CONCLUSION We must read the Bible both looking backwards and looking forward. If we only read it looking backward from our vantage point in the present we will see only much that seems foreign, primitive, retrograde, and even repulsive to us. And it is! But we also look forward from the text toward its eventual fulfilment in Christ, we may see “ a redemptive side, which often contains partial or incremental movement toward the betterment of human beings.” (103). That these redemptive movements, ...

Part 1 Ch.1: Slaughtering Children, Grabbing Virgins W/O posit that we have four stacks of pictures in our minds when it comes to war: Stack one: Modern-day war pictures   Stack two: ANE war pictures   Stack three: Biblical war pictures, group one —what Israel actually practiced in war  Stack four: Biblical war pictures, group two— what Yahweh wanted Israel to do in war We must take pains to separate Stack one images (which we all have plenty of) from the three stacks of ancient war pictures with which they have little in common. A distinction not observed by some prominent defenders of traditional answers to the questions of the Bible, genocide, and rape. Part 2 Traditional Answers: Good for Big-Picture, Story-Line Questions Ch.2: Where Traditional Answers Don’t Work Traditional answers to our questions (first two positions on the chart given earlier) include: (1) God as source of the holy war commands, (2) the loft...

We're troubled by God's commands for Israel to wipe out entire peoples. Why we should be encouraged. Phillip Cary / July 23, 2013 Gentiles in the Hands of a Genocidal God We're troubled by God's commands for Israel to wipe out entire peoples. Why we should be encouraged. Phillip Cary / July 23, 2013 T here is genocide in the Bible. Scripture both describes the Israelites exterminating the Canaanites in cities like Jericho (Josh. 6:21), and also presents this as the command of God. This is what the Israelites are supposed to do when they enter the Promised Land and encounter its inhabitants: "devote them to complete destruction . . . and show no mercy to them" (Deut. 7:2, esv). The Hebrew word for "devoting to destruction" is herem . It is not an ordinary kind of massacre but something sacred, a way of giving things totally to the Lord. It includes property and livestock as well as men, women, and children. And it has the effe...

  19th January 2016 By Matt Lynch   When preparing to teach on violence in the Old Testament recently I was reminded of a book review I once read. The reviewer recounted his neighbour’s efforts to remove a grease stain from his garage floor. The neighbour dumped a few gallons of gasoline on the floor and scrubbed. It worked beautifully . The stain disappeared completely. Job done! However, there was a slight problem. The gasoline fumes filled the garage and were eventually ignited by his boiler’s pilot light. The great conflagration that ensued ended up burning his entire house to its foundations. This story offered a warning that stuck with me: Turn off your mobile phone at the pump, you ask? Yes, but also, beware of solutions that too easily resolve. They might be highly combustible! Read more at: http://theologicalmisc.net/2016/01/how-to-burn-down-your-house/