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Q.
Does God justify violence in scripture?
Brandon Gilvin
Who is...
?
Brandon Gilvin
I want someday to write an article on 1980s graphic novels,
apocalyptic literature, and the end of the Cold War.A.
The world has always been a violent place. Some of the earliest
stories in the Bible acknowledge this. Whether it’s the mythic sto-
ries from Genesis, such as Cain’s murder of Abel, or the later epic
stories that recall violence against women, such as the rape of Tamar, violent
acts are part of the stories that make up the Bible. The death of Jesus, which
serves as the climax of the gospels, is itself an act of state-sponsored violence
(seriously... how else would you describe capital punishment?).
Different violent acts are treated differently throughout the Bible. Some
acts are punished, others are accepted as collateral damage, and some seem
sanctioned.
From my perspective, however, those differences have little to do with
how God sees violence. Human beings wrote the stories in the Bible and an
invisible, divine hand did not direct them. The people of faith that wrote these
stories should be understood as fallible human beings who were struggling
to make sense of how God was present in their histories. Sometimes they saw
God’s presence in the violence waged in their history.
Does this mean that we must see violence in biblical stories as divinely
inspired? Does it give us permission to excuse our violence as divinely
sanctioned?
Modern readings of the stories in Joshua of the violent conquest of
Canaan have been used to justify the slaughter of indigenous people in North
America, the apartheid-era violence in South Africa, and the ongoing Israeli-
Palestinian confl ict. Readings of Paul have been used to justify slavery. Pro-
phetic calls for God’s punishment of ancient Israel have been used to excuse
the Holocaust.
These are abusive readings. It is inexcusable to justify violence with reli-
gion. I suggest an alternative way of approaching the Bible—reading it with
the knowledge that those who came before us struggled with the way to fi nd
God in every detail of their lives and histories and sometimes got it wrong,
and remembering that for every act of violence in the Bible, there is a call to
justice and peacemaking, and a story about an individual who suffers an act of
violence and cries out.