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March 21 - June 19, 2023
Only good, honest, and accurate history might save Christian faith from a theological anti-Judaism as the continuing seedbed for racial anti-Semitism.
Second, the Roman Empire was not destroyed by Christ but was, for better or for worse, converted to Christ under and after Constantine in the 300s. There is not a glimpse of that actuality anywhere in the prophetic vision of Revelation. Destruction, yes; conversion, no.
Was not the biblical God every bit as bipolar regarding violence and nonviolence as was that biblical Jesus?
An Old Testament bad-cop God and a New Testament good-cop God were persuasive only to those who had never actually read the entire Christian Bible.
The heart of God’s justice is to make sure that the “weak and the orphan” have received their share of God’s resources for them to live and thrive. Retributive justice comes in only when that ideal is violated.
scholars have often wondered, if the Jubilee Year was actually observed regularly every fiftieth year, why do we have so little mention of it across our later texts? If, as is likely, it was not observed, then the core of the Priestly tradition—to which Leviticus belongs—is reduced from divine decree to mere suggestion.
Watch carefully what happens along that “Pauline” trajectory on the subject of slavery. First,
they have died to the core Roman values of victory and hierarchy and their derivative values of patriarchy and slavery.
What has happened is that a post-Pauline, pseudo-Pauline, and even or especially an anti-Pauline vision has quietly contradicted the vision of the historical Paul.
Paul’s vision of the radicality of God has been co-opted by the Roman normalcy of civilization.
A vision of the radicality of God is put forth, and then later, we see that vision domesticated and integrated into the normalcy of civilization so that the established order of life is maintained.
That proposal might also answer how, as noted in Chapter 1, Jesus the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount preferred loving enemies and praying for persecutors while Jesus the Christ of the book of Revelation preferred killing enemies and slaughtering persecutors. It is not that Jesus the Christ changed his mind, but that in standard biblical assertion-and-subversion strategy, Christianity changed its Jesus.
Put simply, the nonviolent Jesus is the Christian Bible’s assertion, acceptance, and affirmation of the radicality of God while the violent Jesus is its corresponding subversion, rejection, and negation in favor of the normalcy of civilization.
The tension is not between the Good Book and the bad world that is outside the book. It is between the Good Book and the bad world that are both within the book.
This ambiguity in the term “world” is between the world as creation (what I call the radicality of God) and the world as civilization (what I call the normalcy of civilization).
we should say more accurately that the Bible contains the word of God.
The norm and criterion of the Christian Bible is the biblical Christ. Christ is the standard by which we measure everything else in the Bible. Since Christianity claims Christ as the image and revelation of God, then God is violent if Christ is violent, and God is nonviolent if Christ is nonviolent.
Christianity’s godsend is not a book but a person, and that person is the historical Jesus. It is precisely that historical
Succinctly put, for Christians, Incarnation trumps Apocalypse.
Surely we must at least claim to side with God’s radicality over civilization’s normalcy.
The Epic of Gilgamesh and Enkidu has the honesty and integrity to face the truth: What does immortal reputation matter to a mortal human being? What Gilgamesh wants is eternal life, not just eternal fame.
When the Gods created mankind they appointed death for mankind, kept eternal life in their own hands.”
“So, Gilgamesh, let your stomach be full. Day and night enjoy yourself in every way, every day arrange for pleasures. Day and night dance and play. Wear fresh clothes. Keep your head washed, bathe in water. Appreciate the child who holds your hand. Let your wife enjoy herself in your lap.”
The first is the tree of eternal life, and, as seen already, that meant eternal rejuvenation. The second is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Both trees together are the domain of divinity; either tree alone is that of humanity.
Both these stories were metaphorical warnings against transcendental delusions of human immortality. They were parables proclaiming that death is our common human destiny.
To touch it was to die. The serpent denies that will be their fate, they eat, and they are sent from the garden into the normalcy of human life. That would have been a minimal Israelite adaptation of Mesopotamian options. But instead, Genesis introduces that second tree: Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Our humanity, Genesis concludes, is not distinguished by being immortal, for that is an impossibility, but by being moral—and that is a responsibility. Alone among all the animals, we do not just have instinct to control us but also conscience to guide us. That is all we know on Earth, and all we need to know.
Humankind had chosen to live within the challenge of conscience rather than within the delusion of immortality. In other words, realities are not penalties, and human consequences are not divine punishments.
For whatever reasons, Mesopotamia—and then Israel—never succumbed to Egypt’s grand delusion of eternal life for humanity after death. Think of Genesis 2–3 as a divine challenge or an evolutionary wager. There exists one single species protected from destroying itself and/or its world only by deliberate conscience rather than by automatic instinct.
Gilgamesh’s cool swim and lost plant or Adam’s first bite and lost tree were not tragedy, but inevitability. We
Sumer’s divine brothers, Shepherd Dumuzid and Farmer Enkimdu, become the Bible’s human brothers, Shepherd Abel and Farmer Cain: Eve “conceived and bore Cain. . . . Next she bore his brother Abel . . . a keeper of sheep, and Cain [was] a tiller of the ground” (Gen.
God’s socio-subversive decision is that “the elder shall serve the younger” (25:23). We have, in Genesis 4:4b–5a, preliminary warning of that cultural challenge as God prefers Abel over Cain. That divine preference sets up the movement of the drama. What will Cain do to Abel in revenge for God’s snub? What
Genesis 4:6–7 contains the earliest mention of sin in the Bible, and the word is in the singular—not “sins” as of many but “sin” as of one. Next,
Notice that human consequences are not misinterpreted as divine punishments.
“You will rule over it.” In other words, the normalcy of human civilization is not the inevitability of human nature. (That, by the way, is my mantra for this book.)
The mark of Cain is on human civilization, not on human nature. Escalatory violence is our nemesis, not our nature; our avoidable decision, not our unavoidable destiny. It is our “original sin” but could then—and can still—be overcome.
We humans are not getting more evil or sinful but are simply getting more competent and efficient at whatever we want to do—including sin as willed violence.
“sin” occurred originally not in the divine garden of Genesis 2–3 but in the human field of Genesis 4.
“sin” in Genesis 4 is not a flaw in creation but in civilization, a fault not in nature but in culture.
original sin is not about individuals and sex but about commu...
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As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” (8:21–22)
The message of Genesis 2–3 is not about God’s retributive justice and universal punishment for the whole human race but about humanity abandoning the delusion of immortality and accepting instead the responsibility of conscience.
How are we, as Christians, to read the Christian Bible?—a story that almost immediately presents us with a God who is far worse than our worst evil rather than far better than our best goodness.
Humanity is not the crown of creation. We are the work of a late Friday afternoon, and best work is seldom done on a late Friday afternoon.)
the biblical tradition nonviolent distributive justice is not a command by God but is the character of God.
I propose that the Deuteronomic tradition accepted, for better or for worse, the contemporary Assyrian-style sacred treaty as its ongoing understanding of God’s covenant with Israel.
Here are two striking examples that contradict Deuteronomy’s serene assurance. Watch how history is then corrected to conform with theology.
despite Deuteronomic theology, Josiah was killed in battle in 609 BCE. How is that possible? He must have done something wrong, and once again, the Chronicler invents a reason:
You cannot, without acute hypocrisy, worship a God of justice in a state of injustice.
Second, notice the parallelism in the climactic conclusion where “doing good” is equated with “justice” and “justice” is equated with rescuing those politically, socially, and economically weaker. In other words, justice is not simply personal and individual, but more especially systemic and structural—especially for a society’s vulnerable ones.
