Violence in Scripture

For those of us that consider all Scripture to be God-breathed (which, really, all Christians should), passages like the one above serve as a huge headache and heartache. Headache because now we have to look up all the scriptural and historical context, find what our favorite Christian writers and thinkers have said about them, and finally try our best to think of a way to comfortably fit it in with the rest of our worldview. Heartache because, really? Would you really say something like this, God? Would you really threatenyour people with cannibalizing their own children?

There are many difficult passages in the bible. For example, I can think of nothing harder than Jesus’ command to love my enemies, to turn the other cheek, and to pray for those who persecute me. My feeling is that, “I’m having a hard enough time as it is with the gospels and the epistles, why throw the Old Testament in there as well?” Personally, I feel like I’d rather keep some of the Old Testament depictions of a violent God out of sight and out of mind, because realistically they do nothing to help me be a more faithful follower of Christ, here and now.

But for one reason or another we are forced to contend with the bloodthirsty, vengeful God of old. Sometimes it’s the in-your-face atheism of people like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, whose words we see in media or from our acquaintances that have read their work. In The God Delusion, Dawkins famously says that “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction” calling him, among other things, vindictive, homophobic, genocidal, and a bully. Such attacks on the God we worship puts us on the defensive, and so we feel the need to defend God from those that seek to slander his name.

Other times the hard-hitting questions come from a more well-meaning place. Maybe this scenario is familiar to you: a newer Christian approaches someone she considers an experienced Christian and asks why God is okay with destroying entire peoples in the Old Testament. If God is love, why does he seem so unloving in those parts of the Bible? Whether you’re the newer or the experienced Christian in that situation, the impulse is to reach for some kind of favorable “spin”, or a way to justify according to our standards what it was that God said and did whenever he engaged in violence.

So far I’ve introduced three ways Christians respond to the problem of God’s violence in the Old Testament: push it out of sight and out of mind, defend God from those outside the faith, and put the best possible “spin” on it. But if you’re like me you are still unsatisfied. In the coming weeks I’ll be working through some alternatives that Christians have found, different ways of trying to make sense of these violent portraits of God. And, despite the headaches and the heartaches, hopefully come to a fuller understanding of the coherent story of God in Scripture.