Abstract
As with life in the twenty-first century, the Bible is much too full of violence. Beginning with Cain’s assault upon unsuspecting Abel, much of it—far too much—is concocted by humans. The creatures fashioned to carry the imago Dei, the very image of God, have proven remarkably creative in imagining and implementing all manner of violence against one another, and against other created beings. The Bible attests to this painful truth.
However, the Bible also pictures much violence—far too much—as a sort of sacred violence: sometimes a summons, sometimes a command, sometimes even a direct action of God. Within the pages of Scripture we meet violence sanctioned by the divine judge-warrior. So, for example, retributive justice falls destructively upon the rebellious, or simply the outsiders. Just ask Noah’s contemporaries. Or the Egyptian armies of exodus renown. Or Achan. Or the inhabitants of Jericho in Joshua’s moment of glory. And on and on.
And when, as is true for most of the biblical story, God’s covenant and covenanting people are caught in the oppressive web of occupation by a dominant power, violence sanctioned by imperial force wreaks its havoc on the social fabric.
How, then, to resist: with still more violence, or with an active yet nonviolent resistance? Our present reality in 2017 is a world in which violence is pandemic. How do readers of the Bible engage this aspect of the Bible responsibly and constructively? The Bible can be and has been used to justify violence, for example in the “just war” tradition, capital punishment, and (in too-recent memory) defense of the institution of slavery. But can the Bible instead support moves toward justice-seeking and risky peace-building that eschew violence?
In this issue, several authors tackle the disturbing subject of violence within Scripture. The first essay, by Stephen Wilson, probes the imago Dei in Genesis. Wilson argues that according to Genesis, humans emulate God not through a commitment to nonviolence that might counter the violence that is so prominent in the Hebrew Bible, but through sanctioned, retributive violence against persons who have violated the divine directive that life be protected. Ironic indeed.
For Sonia Waters, widely shared attitudes toward sexual violence against women have exerted strong influence on the interpretation of the troubling story of Sodom in Genesis 19. The tendency of many readers has been to discount rape as violence against women in biblical texts of terror. So a story that features catastrophic failure in hospitality and the threat of sexual violence against women (Lot’s daughters) has too often been distorted into an attack on gay sexual desire. Rather than minimize the threat of violence against Lot’s daughters in this story, Waters asks “how we might read Lot’s daughters back into the text, reconstituting a Christian imagination that combats the normalization of rape.”
Focusing on the Gospel of Matthew, Warren Carter critically analyzes the presence of structured, sanctioned violence in this narrative: e.g., military domination, taxation, judicial punishment, and slavery. Carter works with a definition of violence as “the sanctioned or unsanctioned destructive assertion of power against the will and interests of others,” an assertion of power that “violates the personhood of individuals and/or groups to their physical and/or psychological/emotional detriment and harm.” We encounter many passages in Matthew that assume or endorse sanctioned violence. Carter commends a resistant reading of the narrative at these points, an interpretive approach “that takes reading the Scriptures very seriously” but also remains alert to their potential to harm human lives. What is central to the biblical tradition at its best “foregrounds that which is life-giving, loving, and liberating.” So readers are aided in exposing and resisting the “scriptural constructions of sanctioned violence.”
With 2 Corinthians 2:14–7:4 as her textual focus, Laurie Brink explores the way in which God’s “gratuitous forgiveness and reconciliation” might provide a model of creative, nonviolent response to oppressive violence, a response that generates not more violence but, instead, reconciliation: indeed, “new creation.” With his own legacy of participation in violent persecution, Paul’s “participation in the process of reconciliation and his new vocation as ambassador show that it is not simply Paul’s writings but his own personal experience that forms the foundation on which modern Christian reconciliation may continue to build.” As a more fruitful alternative than the path of violence-begetting-violence, Brink offers the costly, risky work of reconciliation as a model for justice-seeking in settings both ancient and contemporary.