Marginal Christianity

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...

1.     God’s purpose and design for creation is divine-human communication/communion/community with humanity on this earth (pictured in Gen.3 by God walking with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden). In other words, God always intended to come among us and be with us as one of us. It was always his plan to send the incarnate Jesus Christ into the world to effect his purpose. 2.     God’s strategy was incarnational: to identify and enter into solidarity with his creatures in ever more intimate ways as his purpose unfolds through history. Development, change, and deepening were always to be features of this history. The principle: God meets the people where they (takes history seriously) and takes them on in the direction he wants them to go. 3.        After the Fall, this strategy is complexified. God now has to deal with the problem of sin and its distorting effects in his world to achieve his purpose. Violenc...