[Bishop Robert Barron] [Comments on]
[Violence in the Bible]
If you look at the writings of the New Atheists, Hitchens and Dawkins, Dennet, Sam Harris,
one of the classical arguments you'll find is: The God of the Bible is a dreadful God
who's ordering all sorts of murder and mayhem and chaos.
To be fair, a lot of Christians wrestle with these passages as well
and call them the "hard passages," especially in the Old Testament.
Think of the Psalmist exulting in dashing babies' heads against the rock...
the children of his enemies.
Think of God telling Saul to put the ban on the Amalekites.
That means killing every man, woman, child and animal.
Think of Joshua, when he comes into the Promised Land,
he basically unleashes a blitzkrieg
and then wipes out, puts to death, entire populations.
How about this passage,
which came across recently in the liturgy from book of Exodus,
in the story of Israel battling the Amalekites again
and Moses putting his arms up
as long as he's praying the battle goes well
and finally Yahweh carries the day.
We hear this now: "And Joshua mowed down Amalek
and all his people with the edge of the sword."
It's followed immediately here in the lectionary by
"The Word of the Lord."
I realized that even devout Christians can find this kind of passage difficult.
And why? It's because it seems so out of step with the God of the New Testament.
Jesus reveals of the God of infinite mercy and compassion.
Jesus says: love your enemies, bless those who curse you,
pray for those who maltreat you, resist not evil. Jesus of the cross.
How is that God reconcilable with this God of the Old Testament?
Well, I'd say to both the New Atheists and to Christians who wrestle with this
that this is not a new problem
as though we've discovered this in the 21st century.
This is an old issue in the life of the Church.
It goes back to some of the earliest days.
There were people, think of the Gnostics and especially of the Marcionites
back in the 2nd century, who said:
let's solve the problem simply by jettisoning the Old Testament.
The Old Testament is a Testament to a fallen or wicked God, not the true God.
Get rid of that and then it's the New Testament
that reveals the true God.
Our best people, our best scripture scholars and theologians, resisted this move,
they stood against Marcion and they proposed the reading together
of Old and New Testament as the common witness to the true God.
One of the great figures now, around this time, was Origen of Alexandria.
I've spoken of him many times before; he's kind of a theological hero of mine.
Origen knew this problem and wrestled with it.
Here is his first observation:
We must read the entire Bible from the standpoint
of the last book of the Bible.
What does he mean?
He means in the fifth chapter of the Book of Revelation
we have that great scene, the visionary is up in the heavenly space
and a scroll comes out
-- in those days there weren't books like we have, like this, but a scroll,
so this great scroll- and it's sealed by seven seals.
The scroll stands for, if you want, the whole of the Bible.
It's the whole of God's revelation.
The sealing means it's hard to read, it's hard to interpret.
Who will unlock it? So we hear that voice:
Who will unlock...who will unseal the scroll?
Out comes a little lamb, and more to it, a little lamb who has been slain.
It says, "A lamb standing as though slain."
In other words, a figure of utter weakness and mildness, meekness,
is the one who alone can open the seals.
The point now is very clear, but it's very important:
the only standpoint from which we should read the whole of the Bible is
the standpoint of Christ crucified.
The lamb standing as though slain, of course,
is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,
precisely through His suffering on the cross.
Now here is the point, Origen's point, very important.
If, therefore, we read the Bible in such a way,
that we see God as capricious and cruel
or that He encourages us to be violent, we are ipso facto misreading it.
I want to say it again.
I think it's a very important point in the second century and today.
If you read the Bible in such a way, that it leads you to say,
"Hey, violence is a good thing. I should be more violent"
or that "God is hateful and violent," you have ipso facto misread it,
because you've not read it
from the standpoint of the Lamb, standing as though slain.
Once that move is in place --it is a very important one-
we still have the problem, in some ways,
well how do you read these famously difficult passages
where God does seem to be pretty violent and cruel?
Well, Origen said: Read these passages in a metaphorical, allegorical,
and symbolic way, as about the spiritual struggle.
Israel stands for all that's in accord with God's purposes
for love and for forgiveness and compassion
and therefore the enemies of Israel up and down the centuries
from the Amalekites, to the Philistines, to the Assyrians, the Babylonians,
to the Greeks, to the Romans are not just about those ancient people.
It stands for all the things that stand athwart God's purposes.
How should we fight them?
The point is, we should fight them all the way down.
Fight them all the way and not by half measures.
With that in mind, go back to one of most notoriously difficult passages
and that is God's command to Saul to put the ban on the Amalekites.
So the same people, by the way, that Moses was fighting.
Put the ban on them: kill every man, woman, child, animal.
And Saul doesn't do that.
He kills most of them, he defeats them,
but then he keeps a lot of the livestock for himself
and he keeps King Agag, the King of the Amalekites, for himself.
Maybe to hold them for ransom, who knows what, but he didn't kill him.
Samuel the Prophet comes in, he upbraids Saul
and he takes out his sword and it says he hacked Agag to pieces.
Now again, do you see?
How in the world is this in the Bible?
How in the world is this describing the true God?
Think for a second. What the most of we sinners do with evil?
We play around with it, we toy with it, we battle it to some degree,
but then we typically keep a little bit for ourselves, right?
We don't battle it all the way down. We play with it, we toy with it.
That's the sin of Saul.
Here's a couple of metaphors.
Suppose I went to Cardinal George and I said,
"Your Eminence, I'm so happy being a celibate priest.
I'm celibate 90% of the time."
How happy would he be?
Or if a husband went to his wife and said, "You know, honey, I love you, my marriage,
you mean so much to me, that's why I'm faithful to you 75% of the time."
I doubt she would be real thrilled about that.
Or if you said, "Yeah, child sex abuse is a real serious problem in this diocese,
which is why we've got it about 65% under control."
Some forms of evil are so profound.
They have to be hacked to pieces. We have to put the ban on them.
Read this text not as a cruel, capricious, tyrannical God.
But rather as allegories of the spiritual struggle
and the way that we should fight evil all the way down.
Here's another perspective, also from Origen,
but picked up by a lot of people over the centuries.
We're obsessed with historicity in a way that the ancient peoples weren't,
that's to say, with a very literalistic reading of text.
These ancient people were very comfortable with more symbolic ways of reading text.
You are an ancient Israelite, so you are a warlike people.
As many know, they were always fighting against their enemies.
And you are writing in a poetic way.
You are trying to express the truth of God through a poetic allusion.
What you are going to reach for? You're a warlike people.
Well, you might reach for this militaristic metaphor.
Yahweh fights for His people. Yahweh fights the enemies of Israel.
Well how is He going to fight them?
If you are trying to describe God - God is all-powerful, all-sovereign -
what you are going to say?
Are you going to say: "He killed half of Israel's enemies."
That's the God we believe in.
Yeah, He's great. God killed a third of the Philistines.
No. If you are a poet and you are trying to express
in this militaristic metaphor what God's power is like.
What you are going to say?
You are going to say: He wiped out the enemies of Israel.
He eliminated. He put the ban on them.
Again, don´t be obsessed with,
"Oh, that's a historical journalistic description of what exactly happened."
Rather, as a poetic evocation of the power and sovereignty of God,
but using precisely a militaristic metaphor.
We find that metaphor distasteful today.
So what? We've got a different cultural setting.
That was the metaphor that a lot of ancient peoples would reach for,
as the ancient Israelites did.
I'll just close with this.
It bugs me, the New Atheists, and I see it on the Internet, of course,
all the time, that people bring this up as though it is some new discovery that
Christen Hitchens figured it out. The Bible is showing us a cruel God.
Sam Harris uncovered the great mystery that the Bible... Come on!
Our great people have known about this problem from the beginning
and they've given us very rich interpretative strategies,
most especially, Revelation Chapter V.
We read the whole Bible in the light of the crucified non-violent,
compassionate, and forgiving Lamb of God.
Read the Bible through that lens and you'll read it right.