I’m playing catch up with my podcasts these days, so I just now came across “Nerd Out: Leaving Church, Packing Heat, and Metaphysical Violence” in my Homebrewed Christianity Queue.
The discussion of peace and metaphysics was rich and challenging. Right around the 51 minute mark, you get this stream from Tripp:
Caesar’s editors got a hold of the Jesus story and they rendered unto God the things that were Caesar’s; namely, omnipotence, empire by coercion, cross building, totalitarian ideologies. You see what I’m saying? And when you find yourself needing to defend the patterns of empire’s power on behalf of the cross-dead homeless Jew, that’s when you’ve just got to say, “How did we get here?”
This is the sort of challenge to our celebrations of power that I keep returning to–challenges that the cross of Christ itself should be continually setting before our eyes.
In the course of the discussion, Tripp even riffs on Barth for a few minutes. *shhhhh!!!* Don’t tell!!
The question he asks is this: Is Jesus, as we meet Jesus in the Gospels, truly the revelation of who God actually is? Or is this Jesus a strange parenthesis between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the coming judgment?
That question, too, has the power to transform our understanding of what faithful embodiment of the Christian story looks like in our world.
But it does leave me with some lingering questions. Namely, what about those passages that make Jesus himself look more “violent” than selections in the Sermon might? E.g., what about the Jesus of the narrow way and crashing house from the end of the Sermon?
But then there is also the question of what comes before and what comes after. There is judgment. In the OT there is war and destruction. In Revelation there is a lake of fire.
So, my lingering question for the metaphysics of the non-violent, non-coercive God is this: what do we make of the other parts of the story that make Jesus, and Jesus’ God, look like those forces of coercive power we otherwise see Jesus repudiating?
- Are those simply bad readings of the passages in question?
- Or, do we exercise a revisionist hermeneutic in light of [parts of] the Gospels?
I’d love some more discussion on this, because I think that Tripp is absolutely correct. We cannot paint a cross on the sword of Caesar and think we are standing in the presence of the Crucified.
But what does this metaphysical reframing of God tell us about the God who will judge the earth (and who, apparently, has already on more than one occasion)?
thanks for linking to the Brew!
i will try to blog a response later but you should be intentionally inclusive in your second question…I would argue that those who are wound up over divine wrath can easily practice a ‘revisionist hermeneutic’ on the actual life and ministry of Jesus. the most important question may be what gets privileged in your hermeneutics? #IgoWithJC
Ive been struggling to reconcile the non violent God of Jesus and the God of the OT and Revelation recently as well. One of my thoughts has been that the Bible is a narrative that shows how the concept of “God” has evolved though the years. So, that means the Jewish historians wrote from their point of view that God justified and even they thought God told them to commit genocide and other acts of violence. Then during the time of the prophets there was this sense that God relented (or repented) from violence like in the Jonah story. Then Jesus us the culmination and ultimate revelation of God who comes in humility and shows humanity that God is not a violent God but instead a compassionate God. As ar as revelation, um, well I don’t interpret it literally and I think some of the events happened already around the time it was written (prophecy ex eventu) and the message of the book is to preserve in faith with the hope and assurance that God is on the side of the marginalized and Love will ultimately win (using a lot of apocalyptic style imagery that would have resonated back then and not so much now).
I’m open to thoughts and discussion about this but that’s how I’ve reconciled this topic thus far…
I’m gonna go listen to tripps podcast right now
The answer might differ on specific texts. An example is probably needed.
I like what Tripp said (minute 47 ff), if you’re going to kill somebody, you could just say, “I’m sinning”; like if somebody breaks into your house to hurt your kid. I think that’s right. Being sinners means that we really can’t avoid sinning; violence is wrong but being a hands-off pacifist in that situation isn’t right either. We have to do what we have to do and rely on God’s promised grace that it will somehow work out reasonably. (This morning Pastor mentioned Romans 5:20, “Where sin existed in abundance, grace was in superabundance and then some more.” (Wuest))
Circling up to the larger question, God/Jesus is clearly not a live-and-let-live kind of guy. John 15:2, even branches that bear good fruit get pruned; that’s dominion for you. The difference between coercion and persuasion is important, but either way you are imposing your will on the situation. (“Every narrative is a power trip.”) But maybe that’s a point for us, not for God, who seems to like to let us bash our heads until we understand that his way is the right way. (Tripp’s point at the end about the Prodigal Son etc is very nice.) Eg, God didn’t tell Joshua to murder everyone in Jericho; Joshua added that part, and sure enough it didn’t work out well, and it still isn’t.
I find it difficult to arrive at any other conclusion than Jesus is the full revelation of who God is.
John 1:1 – “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”
John 1:14 – “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
Colossians 1:15 – “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.”
Colossians 1:19 – “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him.”
Hebrews 1:3 – “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.”
In Jesus we have the true image and full character of God, not a parenthesis between the already and the yet to come.
Back to the lingering question…
What do we do with the OT? How do we explain the images of God given to us in the OT that look so different than Jesus? How do these images bear witness to Jesus?
I’m certainly not dogmatic about this but here is my way of processing such an important question.
(1) Jesus fully reveals what God is like.
(2) Jesus reveals what God is always like, i.e., God did not start becoming Christ-like when Jesus appeared.
(3) Jesus is God incarnate.
If Jesus is God incarnate and Jesus reveals what God is always like, then God is always incarnational. God is always stooping down into the humanity of his people in order to bear their sins. When Jesus dies on the cross to bear our sins, it looks ugly. On the cross he looks guilty. He looks cursed. He’s not, but he appears that way.
If this is what God is really like, then we who know what God is really like should read the OT through that lens and look for examples of where God may have stooped to enter into the humanity of people in a way that would bear their sins and appear ugly.
So when I see images of God that don’t look like the beautiful God that is revealed in Christ, I assume that it says more about the people God had to work with than it says about the true nature of God, because we have the true nature of God in Jesus.
Good questions at the end there. Dr. Kirk have you seen John C. Nugent’s recent book, The Politics of Yahweh, which lays out Yoder’s OT hermeneutic? It’s pretty relevant on these points, and satisfies my theological tastes (decidedly neo-Anabaptist) moreso than the approach that the HBC guys take. I’m with you: I agree with Tripp’s initial point (and I’ll have to remember that quote: “rendering unto God what is Caesar’s”!), but not necessarily where he goes with it…
I know just enough biblical scholarship to get myself into a lot of trouble around people more knowledgable, but my thinking on these questions really changed a bit when I learned that whole swaths of the Bible aren’t exactly historically true. Or true at all, really. I know there’s debate about this stuff, but, let’s assume the Flood is a myth, and the central point is about the futility of genocide and violent exclusion (thanks, McLaren), and that the events in Joshua probably didn’t happen, instead the Israelites were a local people group that grew to dominate Canaan, rather than an invading force with a divine mandate. If Joshua was written later, say, during the Babylonian exile, then I don’t think it’s a stretch to conclude that the author was justifying the Israelites claim to the land with a divine mandate, in contrast to the more universalistic visions of God found in some of the prophets of exile.
Jesus comes along and claims to be God’s son, and everyone expects him to be a conquering warrior king like Joshua or David, and he refutes them at every turn. Interestingly, despite all the “Who do people say I am?” that goes on in the Gospels, no one EVER confuses Jesus with his namesake Joshua, and the few times (at least in Mark) that he’s referred to as the son of David, he actually refutes that claim. He’s just too much of a different kind of messiah.
So if Jesus is truly who God is, then I think we’re justified in rethinking our approach to the violent texts of the OT (and the scholarship helps us here). Recognizing these violent stories as myths written by people with agendas, we can argue that Jesus was saying “You think God is like this [violent, dominating, exclusive…basically just like you] but he’s really like me.”
Now I know this doesn’t account for everything, but I think it’s a start. I wrote some thoughts on Revelation as parody of Caesar here: https://improvfaith.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/who-is-this-god-in-revelation/
So my answer is this: In light of Jesus’ teachings and incarnation, as well as biblical scholarship regarding OT texts, then I would say that attempts to reconcile the violent God of the OT with Jesus’ nonviolence are a bad reading of those texts. If that’s a revisionist hermeneutic, then I’d say it’s one that Jesus initiated.
What am I missing here? I know this is a lot of broad brushstrokes. Thanks for the conversation!
What do you think?