Abstract
This book is a collection of nine essays by Christopher Marshall, most published over the past 15 years and falling roughly into three parts: the interpretation of Scripture; criminal, and particularly restorative, justice; and violence.
Marshall is rightly concerned about the way in which Christians should, can and do interpret Scripture to support their social, political and other programmes. It is true that many parts of the Church have become increasingly wary of using Scripture, without realizing that without Scripture there is no Church. William Blake’s rhetorical question – ‘Why is the Bible more interesting than any other book?’ – has currently lost its force. If we look, as he does, to Scripture’s role in forming the character of a community, we also have to acknowledge that the nearly two millennia in which this largely happened also sanctioned horrific intra-church violence – the first heretic to be burned was in 1022 and this went on into the seventeenth century. The Enlightenment critique of all this was perfectly justified. Marshall looks to the contrast between the Hebrew Bible and the Messianic writings, but we also need to remember that the same author who gives us the Magna Carta of Christian non-violence – the Sermon on the Mount – also gives us Matthew 23, and, indeed, Matthew 25, salivating over the future torments of those with whom we disagree. In the second of his chapters on violence, Marshall offers what I believe is the real hermeneutic key to reading the whole of Scripture: namely, in understanding the cross as the refusal of retaliatory violence. Rather than read this in terms of progressive revelation, we can also think of it as the result of the ongoing ruminative process of interpretation, focused ‘once for all’, as Hebrews says, in Jesus’ own reading of the tradition he inherited, and a challenge to every succeeding generation. Great exegesis that understands this (Myers’ Binding the Strong Man, for example) begins to answer Blake’s question.
Marshall is perhaps best known for his book on restorative justice, Beyond Retribution, and the essays in the second two sections take up this theme. The essays extend the scope of restorative justice beyond the prison, for example into thinking about how we respond to terrorism. Stories of restorative justice are always profoundly moving and they remain, across the world, deeply countercultural. The instinct in most cultures seems to be to hit back, to pay back, often (to use the phrase counter to Isaiah’s sense) ‘double for all their sins’. This is particularly true of the ‘Christian’ West, which launched ‘Operation Shock and Awe’ in defence of ‘Western and Christian civilization’. In its military chaplains and its endorsement of the status quo, the Church largely supports retribution. Marshall is surely right that this is the polar opposite of anything we might designate ‘good news’. The Church is dying at the moment because it stands for nothing worth saying. If we begin to understand the cross as Marshall – and, increasingly, many others – wants us to understand it, then Scripture will come to life and we will have a gospel that is of use to both God and humankind.