Upon re-reading the episode in Luke 22, I’m reminded of Jesus’ willingness to share a meal with a known enemy, one from his most intimate circle who had turned against him: ‘The one who betrays me is with me, and his hand is on the table’ (Luke 22:21).
The sword clearly holds symbolic power for the narrator. It’s a symbol of God’s assured victories and the complete destruction of Canaanites.
The concern to address violence in Scripture derives from at least four primary sources. First, within the church, there is an increasing move toward authenticity as an ideal, or even a virtue, for Christian community.
For a recent WTCLive event, I interviewed NT Wright on his recent books Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Fortress/SPCK, 2013), Paul and His Recent Interpreters (Fortress/SPCK, 2015), and The Paul Debate (Baylor University Press/SPCK, 2015). That was a lot to cover in one event, but it was fun. Enjoy the video, and for more information head on over to the WTCLive page, where you can find a whole range of past WTCLive interviews. Enjoy!
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!
This is a basic, but often missed, principle that applies to thinking through all sorts of knotty problems in theology. Answers that resolve problems too neatly and easily usually have hidden costs or trade-offs that don’t surface at first glance. Only by prodding and testing do they begin to emerge.
Two of the most common problems on which interpreters reach for the gas can are divinely sanctioned violence and divine wrath (I can see you reaching for it already!).
Easy resolutions to the problem of violence often look like one of the following two approaches:
The first looks at an issue like the Canaanite genocide and says, ‘Sin is sin, so of course God is justified in his command to destroy every man, woman, child, and infant in Canaan without mercy!’ The assumption here is that the one asking the question might not take seriously enough the problem of sin, or they do not have a sufficiently high view of God’s holiness and sovereignty. If they did, the problem would disappear. I’ve even heard one person ‘resolve’ the issue using eschatology, suggesting that Joshua is a case of ‘intrusion ethics.’ God’s eschatological judgment had broken into history and wiped out a few thousand as a foretaste of the billions he would destroy at the end of time. This displaced and augmented the problem.
The second easy resolution says, ‘Well of course the Canaanite genocide never happened,’ or, ‘The conquest story is the projected fantasy of a primitive tribalistic people.’
Both approaches pour gasoline on the problem … often with unintended consequences. The first approach ignores (or destroys) the rich tradition of protest against divine judgment that we see demonstrated in individuals like Abraham (Gen 18) and Moses (Exod 34; Num 12, 14, 16, 21). It also misses out on the rich complexity of Joshua’s message, which seems to question the fundamental division between ‘us/good’ and ‘them/bad’ that a surface reading of the book suggests (e.g., Josh 5:13-14). The second, which states the non-historicity of the Canaanite genocide, pretends to remove the problem but only shifts it. Now we’re saying that this is how God wants to be portrayed, even if it didn’t happen. And calling the ancient Israelites ‘primitive’ is just arrogant, and like the first approach, leads readers to miss much of Joshua’s theological depth.
Rather than rushing toward either resolution, perhaps we should explore the cost of doing business with them, avoid representing the biblical writers as our intellectual and moral inferiors, and adopt a posture of empathetic listening and faithful questioning. Perhaps we should read Joshua slowly. Let it disturb, surprise, and unsettle. As someone who has done this, I can only say that it repays such efforts abundantly.
Divine wrath is also a problem on which many want to pour gasoline … and they have for a long time, going back at least as far as the early 2nd century heretic Marcion (not a fan of Yahweh). Marcion wanted to do away with divine wrath, and with it, the Old Testament. He found it unbecoming of God’s goodness. In his critique of Marcion, Tertullian writes: ‘A better god has been discovered, who never takes offense, is never angry, never inflicts punishment, who has prepared no fire in hell, no gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness! He is purely and simply good’ (1.27).
But here’s Tertullian’s insight—there are always hidden costs to pictures of God that eliminate challenging tensions. In this instance, Tertullian claims that Marcion eliminates God’s ability to act as judge: ‘You allow indeed that God is a judge, but at the same time destroy those operations and dispositions by which He discharges His judicial functions’ (Adv. Mar. 2.16). For Tertullian (and many biblical texts), wrath is the emotion that animates God’s active concern for justice. Criticizing his wrath was like criticizing the instruments of a doctor. Wrath, in Tertullian’s formulation—and arguably in the Bible itself—is tied intimately to God’s exercise of justice.
Tertullian is highlighting the inseparability—or at least the complex interaction—of wrath and justice in God. In Exodus 22:21-24 for instance, God warns Israel that if his people cause the orphan or widow to cry out, ‘my anger will blaze.’ He would come in judgment upon those who cause such an outcry just as he came against Egypt. The point of these verses is not to be precise about the exact penalty for oppressing the weak, but to express the pathos of God in the face of injustice. For Israel, Mark Smith points out, God’s wrath was bound up in the idea that he was the protective father of the vulnerable—whether they be individuals or his people Israel. Wrath—like jealousy—was seen as a sign of concern for the weak against any who would put them at risk or threaten his legitimate claim to parentage. In this sense, God’s wrath toward the nations (e.g., for their mistreatment of Israel) was a deep expression of his love over and for his people.[1]
For many of us, associating wrath with love is strange. But love in the Old Testament is grounded in the idea of Israel as God’s covenant people (Deut 6:4-5). Love was the relational glue between covenant partners. And if we think of covenant in terms of ‘family substitute,’[2] love was the trusting loyalty required for healthy family cohesion, while God’s wrath was his protective rage aimed at threats to that family (internal or external).
But we can’t swing the pendulum away from mercy toward wrath, as if wrath could never become a problem. Abraham and Moses certainly recognized this on many occasions—and even challenged God to exercise mercy! Tertullian, who defended God’s wrath against Marcion, urges us to weigh God’s ‘severity’ against his gentleness and observe the imbalance (Adv. Mar. 2.17). As I tell my students at WTC, God’s character is wildly imbalanced. The coexistence of wrath and mercy is not that of equals. If we take the language of mercy vs. wrath in Exod. 34:6-7 in strictly mathematical terms (love to ‘thousands of generations’ : ‘3-4 generations’ of judgment) God’s mercy outweighs by at least 500:1!
But for important reasons, these verses—which are central to an Old Testament portrait of God—keep God’s mercy and judgment sit together, even if they are imbalanced. Perhaps we lose something when we lose judgment and wrath, and perhaps we lose something when we toss aside violent texts as purely human projections. Maybe there is an understanding of God’s character that only comes by exploring the revelatory value of the most troublesome texts and by teasing out the complex characterization of Israel’s God that Scripture offers.
The subjects of wrath and violence are uncomfortable. But I suggest that how we handle them, and not just the topics themselves, is what poses the greatest danger. We will not all land in the same place on these topics, but what if we at least stop and explore the cost of doing business with easy resolutions? Let’s keep the roof over our heads.
[1] Smith, How Human is God? Seven Questions About God and Humanity in the Bible (Liturgical Press, 2014), 46.
[2] Smith, How Human is God? 48.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks has a truly ambitious vision of interfaith respect, peace, and mutual blessing in his recent book Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence. I don’t wish here to give an overview or critical review of his book, but instead, I want to share an important and tantalizingly provocative theme he explores in Genesis.
Sacks’ book sits within the stream of several recent books that use Genesis as their point of departure for reflection on the major questions of God, ethics, and morality in our time. Alongside Sacks we could also mention Leon Kass’ recent The Beginning of Wisdom and Iain Provan’s Seriously Dangerous Religion, each of which asks the ‘big questions’ using essentially the same guiding questions: What happens when we let the book of Genesis form our moral vision? What kind of people do we become? What sort of values and societies does a book like Genesis engender?
Sacks’ main concern is with religiously motivated violence. Drawing from social anthropology, biology, religious theory and history, Sacks contends that violence basically exists because as social animals, we live and find identity in groups. Group identification brings out the best and worst in us. It can lead to incredible self-sacrifice and generosity, but toward outsiders, it can result in rejection and boundary maintenance. A stronger ‘mutant form’ of group identity can erupt when a group embraces a kind of ‘pathological dualism.’ Pathological dualism is a radical splitting of the world into good and evil, which sanctions and devolves into the most severe forms of hatred and violence. While he’s careful not to state that religion causes violence (thank goodness!), he does recognize that religions can become susceptible to sharply dualistic thinking of the sort that justifies demonization and murder. In this hyper-acute form of dualism, murder can become justified because you aren’t killing human beings; you are killing a virus or cancer that threatens one’s group.
Here is where the story of Genesis becomes especially important, and where Sacks’ thesis re-embraces religion as a challenge to violence. From its fourth chapter, Genesis thematises violence, and it does so by telling an enigmatic story of sibling rivalry. This story includes the very first religious act in the Bible (sacrifice), an act that ends in violence. Rather than side-stepping the issue of religiously motivated (or at least religiously occasioned) violence, Genesis lifts it up for reflection.
Sacks also attends to the sibling stories of Genesis because that is how he sees the three monotheistic faiths. Whether or not that is the most precise way of expressing the relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam (and I wish here he’d engaged Jon Levenson’s critique in Inheriting Abraham), there is a kinship between them that works by analogy. They each share a similar religious and Scriptural tradition.
Previously, I’d read Genesis’ sibling stories along the lines of primogeniture subversion. By this, I mean that the Genesis story sees the younger son subverting the inheritance rights and privileges of the older son. Primogeniture subversion is indeed an intriguing thread running through the book that cannot be ignored. The younger brother Isaac was the promised and blessed son of his father Abraham. The younger brother Jacob steals the birthright of the older Esau. The older brothers bow to the younger Joseph. Jacob blessed the younger brother Ephraim rather than Manasseh. If read in isolation, this thread reinforces the value of perpetual struggle and subversion. It’s the sort of story that radicals love. And while I don’t consider myself very radical, I do revel in the upside-down nature of the biblical story. As Sacks points out, God chooses ‘those who cannot do naturally what others take for granted’ (117). Natural strength disqualifies, while God-enabled strength qualifies the weaker disadvantaged brother. To continue this line of thought, God ‘chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise’ (1 Cor 1:27).
But perpetual subversion leads to tremendous animosity and antagonism. It leads to violence and rejection. Ishmael is cast out. Esau wants to kill his brother. Joseph’s brothers try to kill him and sell him into slavery, and so on. The story of perpetual struggle and subversion is cyclical and doomed to failure. It cannot sustain societies, nor is it a particularly helpful way of thinking through the problems facing ‘sibling’ faiths like Judaism, Christianity and Islam. When the weaker gains the upper hand by deceit and violence, the stage is set for another revolutionary.
So here is where the genius of Genesis’ sibling theme shines brightest and provides an alternative. To begin, Genesis fosters tremendous sympathy for the outsider. The obvious instance is the Patriarchs themselves, who never owned land (except a burial plot), and lived as strangers in a foreign land. This was a crucial part of their identity (e.g., Gen 23:4). But also, Genesis leads its readers to feel for the cast off sibling. Who cannot weep for the desperate Hagar, parched and helpless as she watches her son Ishmael dying of thirst in the wilderness? And what about Esau’s distress upon realizing his brother’s theft? ‘He cried out with an exceedingly great and bitter cry, and said to his father, “Bless me, me also, father!”’ (Gen 27:34) The Hebrew Bible, Sacks explains, leads us ‘to enter into the humanness of the Other: Ishmael, Hagar, Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Leah and her children’ (180). This is the outsider empathy that Genesis forms in its readers, and the character that finds resonance throughout Scripture:
You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exod 22:21)
You shall not oppress a stranger; you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exo 23:9)
But Genesis goes further than empathy. Genesis moves its readers from empathy toward peace and reconciliation with the estranged sibling. This begins with recognizing one’s basic kinship with the outsider. The Ishmaelites and Edomites are your brother, Genesis says. Then, Sacks directs our attention to the last scene in each of the sibling stories. A beautiful picture begins to emerge from the darkness.
Things are bleak at first. With Cain and Abel, the older kills the younger. While God pursues Cain, there’s no real restitution. Next, we read that after Sarah died, Isaac went to live near Beer Lahai Roi (25:11; cf. 24:62). Beer Lahai Roi is where Hagar and Ishmael had fled (16:13-14). We don’t know why Isaac was living there, but it is suggestive that when Sarah died Isaac and Abraham went to live near Hagar and Ishmael! The Rabbis even suggest that Keturah, Abraham’s second wife, was Hagar. This might explain a further detail in the story, that at Abraham’s death Isaac and Ishmael came together to bury their father (25:8-9). The point, as Sacks explains, is that ‘neither Abraham nor Isaac made their peace with the banishment of handmaid and child’ (121). Their futures part ways, but they do so with their own blessings.
Next, we discover that the estranged Esau and Jacob reunite for a brief time (Gen 33). The extraordinary feature of this meeting is not simply that the brothers make their peace. It is what happens when they make their peace. To see it, we have to go back 22 years in the story to when Jacob stole Esau’s blessing. Isaac had blessed Jacob with two things:
But then … and here’s the twist … these are the precise things that Jacob bestowed upon his brother. Jacob returned the blessing! He went to Esau and ‘bowed down to the ground seven times’ (33:3) and urged his brother to receive abundant wealth from him, saying ‘accept my blessing’ (33:10-11) (132-33). Having held it for 22 years, Jacob gives back the blessing.
He can do so, as Sacks observes, because he’d already received his own separate blessing from his mother Rebecca (28:3-4). This blessing was more suited to the promised family. It was a blessing of land and progeny, not of wealth and power. In sum, like Isaac and Ishmael, both brothers are blessed and arrive at least at an uneasy peace toward the end of their lives.
Climactically, however, the Joseph stories in Genesis 37-50 tell the story of brothers who reconcile and reunite. Joseph refuses to self-identify as a victim, and brings his brothers to self-identify with the victim, resulting ultimately in their reconciliation and blessing for the whole world.
We thus move from fratricide (Cain and Abel) toward brothers reunited (Isaac and Ishmael), and from brothers re-united into an uneasy peace (Jacob and Esau) toward brothers fully reconciled (Joseph and his brothers). Thus, Genesis leads its reader progressively through stories of sibling hostility and subversion into the realm of reconciliation and mutual blessing. ‘Sibling rivalry may be natural,’ Sacks writes, giving a nod toward cultural anthropology, ‘but it is not inevitable. It can be conquered’ (170). This is indeed an inspiring and challenging message, and well worth reflection in our fraught and highly charged contexts of inter- and intra-religious conflict.
The incarnation forms the climactic turning point of sacred history. The high point in the grand biblical drama of redemption involved the self-emptying descent of God in Jesus.
For many, the incarnation may seem like a 33-year anomaly in the life of God. The God who is otherwise transcendent or at least invisible became visible, imminent and incarnate for a short while. He completed the job and promptly re-ascended to the father. Phew! Otherwise, it was an unusual—though necessary—phase. We all have phases, and so did God. Now he’s over it.
But this way of conceptualising God is problematic for at least two reasons. First, the church has always maintained that once incarnate, Jesus remained forever 100% human and 100% God. He is eternally divine and human. His resurrection body was the first and only of its kind. It was a physical non-corruptible body and he’s still got it. The incarnation is a present and ongoing reality.
Second, if the incarnation is, at its heart, about God becoming human, then we can see strong lines of continuity between how God was always oriented and what God became in Christ. God had an incarnational ‘impulse’ from the beginning.
Look at the following few samples from early in the story:
Genesis 1:2 – The Spirit of God is already present in some form swooping down over the pre-creation waters.
Genesis 1:26-28 – God makes humankind in his image. Humans are manifestations of God in creation. They aren’t God, as such, but they are what God would be like if he were to enter creation. Put differently, humanity is positioned well for the incarnation to happen.
Genesis 2:1-3 – God takes part in the time continuum of history by engaging in a rhythm of work and rest.
Genesis 3:8 – God ‘walks about’ in the garden.
When we look back through these texts, we see that God always had a kind of ‘fascination’ with embodiment, with presence, and with creation. And continuing …
Genesis 18 – God appears in the form of a human, to promise a son to Sarah.
Genesis 32 – God wrestles with Jacob as a man and is overcome.
And not all precursors to the incarnation are about human embodiment. Some simply demonstrate God’s desire to be physically present in creation with humanity.
Exodus 13-14, 32-34 – God comes as a fiery pillar & glorious presence and takes up residence in Israel’s midst. He’s chosen to self-identify with a slave people.
Leviticus 26:12 – God ‘walks about’ his people in the Tabernacle, using the same phrase as God’s ‘walking about’ in the Garden in Genesis 3:8.
If we were to fill out the idea of an ‘incarnational impulse’ in God, we might say that God’s move toward creation—and even toward embodiment—is primary, and not secondary, to his creational purposes. God sought physical presence from the beginning, most significantly through the creation of humans in his image.
This is critical for capturing the full significance of the incarnation. God’s becoming human was not just salvific and redemptive—at least if we see those acts as purely fixing a problem. It was also the realisation of God’s preferred move toward creation.
While the incarnation in Christ was unique, it was also the culmination of a continual process of God drawing near to creation—and not just in response to sin! To put it more boldly, it is a logical (though not necessarily inevitable) extension of what God was doing in the Old Testament. It’s almost as if God so loved creation that he moved toward it, and not that God was so frustrated with creation that he came to fix it (and get out).
The Old Testament paves the way for the New. This paving is not simplistic, and often only seen in retrospect. While the texts communicating God’s incarnational impulse are in many cases only gestures toward THE Incarnation, they have a compounding effect as one reads the Old Testament through the lens of the incarnation. These texts build a picture that challenges any attempt to distance God from his deep and embodied involvement in creation. And they bring into clear confluence the yearning of advent (for God-with-us) and the yearning of God himself (to be God-with-us).
This is the second in a two-part interview with Matthew Bates on his recent book The Birth of the Trinity (find the first part HERE)
Matt Lynch [ML]: Three things stood out to me: (1) You’ve excavated a Trinitarian reading strategy that shows enormous continuity between the NT and early Patristic eras. (2) The idea that this reading strategy goes back to Jesus himself, and in texts that many scholars attribute to the historical Jesus! (3) I loved the reading of Heb 10:6-7, and your description of the Son ‘regifting’ his body back to the Father. As you state, ‘The Father initiates the gracious gift-giving with the presentation of the incarnational body to the Son, yet the Son consummates the gift-giving by offering this very same body back to the father …’ (p.87). This puts the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on a more relational (rather than transactional) footing.
Could you give an example of prosopological exegesis of an Old Testament text?
ML: That’s a very personal insight into Trinitarian conversations … as if we’re dealing with … well … persons! If we grant Jesus’ conception of his own pre-existence, as you suggest in the book, how do you move from Jesus’ pre-existence to ontological parity with the Father and Spirit? In other words, how can we say that these theodramatic conversations reveal the birth of the Trinity, and not just belief in the pre-existence of Jesus, a divine being?
ML: Again, you’ve turned the interview around. This is against protocol! OK, I’m just going to control my temper here and answer. … I think this is where the Trinitarian approaches help each other, and in particular, models 3 & 4 mentioned above. Where I find Hurtado & Co. helpful is in understanding how Yhwh devotion was received by Jesus, and with Bauckham & Co. how Jesus does Yhwh stuff. Both of these insights suggest that early followers saw ontological parity between Jesus and Yhwh. In my mind this complements your insights into the pre-existent Jesus and intra-Trinitarian dialogue.
Your book helps give depth to our understanding of the Trinity. The Father, Son, and Spirit were seen to be in rich dialogue with one another. Do you think we can read other Old Testament texts theodramatically?
ML: I’m not yet settled on this, at least on whether we have sufficient warrant to read any texts in such a way that they provide a previously unseen window into intra-Trinitarian dialogues. Nonetheless, your controls on reading theodramatically (ch. 7) are helpful.
What are the implications of your work for systematic theology?
MB: Well, I’ll be curious to see what the systematicians make of The Birth of the Trinity. I do believe that my results mesh well with the traditional Nicaean-Constantinopolitan conclusion that God is three persons subsisting in one divine essence, although my work emphasizes the “persons” category. I wonder if those favoring social models of the Trinity—that is, those who prioritize persons in relationship over one divine essence—will see my book as offering support? I also wonder if those who emphasize the economic Trinity or the Trinity-as-revealed-in-history will find my work useful for opening up some new scriptural vistas.
Thanks, Matt L., for your excellent questions. It’s always great to talk with you, whether in person or via the keyboard—and it has been a delight chatting with you about the book. A final remark: Research-writing is always arduous, but the time I spent penning The Birth of the Trinity was often an exciting and (dare I say) worshipful experience. What pleases me most is that a number of readers and reviewers have remarked that the book has enhanced their love for the triune God. May God be praised: Father, Son, and Spirit.
ML: Thanks Matt. Always a pleasure.
In this post, I interview Matthew W. Bates about his recent book, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretation of the Old Testament (Oxford University Press, 2015). Matt received his Ph.D. from Notre Dame, and has served for the past four years as Assistant Professor of Theology at Quincy University in Quincy, Illinois. In addition to his recent book on the Trinity, Matt has written a book on Paul’s method of interpreting Scripture: The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation (Baylor University Press, 2012). He has also written articles for Journal of Biblical Literature, Revue biblique, The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, and The Journal of Theological Studies. Matt has been a good friend since we met at graduate school at Regent College, in Vancouver, B.C.
ML: Matt, thanks for being willing to do this interview with the Theological Miscellany blog.
ML: Matt, I’m glad you pulled yourself together. It looked for a moment like this interview was headed for disaster! OK, what’s the big idea in your book?
ML: Has anyone argued this before?
ML: Prior to your work, what were the common historical data points for plotting the development of belief in the Trinity?
ML: What is the most surprising or significant find of your book?
MB: Personally, I was surprised that the study proved to be so exegetically and theologically generative. The NT is such heavily worked ground that it is unusual to be able to offer an interpretation of a passage that has never before been proposed by another scholar. But numerous novel interpretations of specific biblical passages emerged. I’ll be curious to see how other scholars assess these.
I would identify three things as especially significant: (1) a new historical model for how the doctrine of the Trinity first emerged; (2) the suggestion that “Divine Identity Christology” and other NT Christological models need to take into account NT data showing that Jesus Christ was understood to be a divine person who conversed with other divine persons—i.e., we find what I term a “Christology of Divine Persons” in the NT; (3) when Jesus Christ was regarded as speaking in the OT this wasn’t because our NT authors were reading “typologically” (contra Richard Hays) but rather prosopologically.
Part two is available here.
How can a just God keep extending mercy? At first blush, this may seem like an ideal problem to have. We all want more of God’s mercy, right?