How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation

by John Dominic Crossan

distributive justice is the primary meaning of the word “justice” and that retributive justice is secondary and derivative.

In summary, therefore, the disjunction between God as violent and nonviolent can be rephrased for the rest of this book like this: the biblical God is, on one hand, a God of nonviolent distributive justice and, on the other hand, a God of violent retributive justice. How do we make sense of this dual focus? How do we reconcile these two visions? This is what we will explore in the rest of the book.

that a deeper and more thoughtful study of the Christian Bible demands a different metaphor. There is, on that deeper level, a fascinating and interactive pattern between those parallel train tracks. There is a recurrent rhythm between the biblical vision of God’s nonviolent distributive justice and God’s violent retributive justice. The more accurate metaphor is not the Biblical Express Train but the Biblical Heartbeat.

The interest and value, the honesty and integrity, of the Christian Bible resides triumphantly in the dialectic of yes and no, assertion and subversion. This dialectic means that both Judaism and Christianity took the radical challenges of God seriously. (If, for example, we Americans took our vision of liberty and justice for all under God seriously, imagine the qualifications and reservations that would surround our Pledge of Allegiance.)

The struggle is not between divine good and human evil but between, on one hand, God’s radical dream for an Earth distributed fairly and nonviolently among all its peoples and, on the other hand, civilization’s normal dream for me keeping mine, getting yours, and having more and more, forever.

That Neolithic R/Evolution entailed the domestication, control, and command of grains, animals, and even people. Think of the organized labor necessary to prepare, conserve, and maintain the dikes, canals, and levees needed for irrigated farming on alluvial floodplains. Think of silt as both initial gift and final curse. The control of people’s labor began as a matter of willing cooperation for the greater good of the many but eventually evolved into unwilling coercion for the greatest good of the few. Do not, therefore, ever, ever confuse the normalcy of civilization with the inevitability of human nature, for human nature had already got on without human civilization for millions of years.

My proposal in this book is that the same individual studied as the Jesus of history by academic research and accepted as the Christ of faith by confessional belief is the norm and criterion of the Christian Bible.

Israel knew, as did the entire Fertile Crescent, that the Epic of Gilgamesh and Enkidu was not a tragic tale of “if only” Gilgamesh had not taken that cool swim, he would have been immortal. They also knew that Genesis 2–3 was not a tragic tale of “if only” Adam had not taken that first bite, humanity would have been immortal. Both these stories were metaphorical warnings against transcendental delusions of human immortality. They were parables proclaiming that death is our common human destiny.

On questions of eternal life, Israel espoused that stern and honest realism. It was geographically close to Egyptian territory but intellectually much closer to Mesopotamian theology. And so, for most of its history (up to the last two centuries BCE), Israel could create the majesty of Torah, the glory of prophecy, the beauty of psalmody, and the challenge of wisdom without affirming an eternal afterlife for itself. Israel may have left Egypt, but it never left Mesopotamia.

These are the only places in the entire Bible where the knowledge of good and evil or knowing about good and evil is mentioned. These are not simple opposites intended to mean all knowledge or knowledge about everything. If that were intended, it would have been very easy to balance the tree of life with the tree of knowledge. In other words, I take very seriously that it is not just the tree of knowledge but precisely and explicitly the tree of the knowledge of good and evil from which Adam and Eve have eaten—that is, the tree of ethical awareness, or the tree of moral integrity, or most simply, the tree of conscience. 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.

Humanity chose—yes, that word is quite deliberate—to eat from and live by that second tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—that is, the tree of conscience. That was Israel’s magnificent adaptation and creative expansion of its Mesopotamian heritage in composing Genesis 2–3.

GENESIS 4 IS NOT simply about an original fratricide. It is about escalatory violence almost as a seductive inevitability. But, of course, it is also about a God who asserted that it was not inevitable and proclaimed that it could be overcome: “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.)

We humans are not natural-born killers (if we were, would we suffer posttraumatic stress after battle?). 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.

Genesis 4 depicts the escalatory violence not of warfare, but of blood feud, of honor and shame relationships when small groups confront one another without overarching legal and juridical precedent or competent and adequate communal governance. (Are nation-states without a world government any different?)

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.

From all of this, I take these four conclusions about “original sin” in the Bible. First, according to the explicit text of the Bible, “sin” occurred originally not in the divine garden of Genesis 2–3 but in the human field of Genesis 4. Second, “sin” in Genesis 4 is not a flaw in creation but in civilization, a fault not in nature but in culture. Third, original sin is not about individuals and sex but about communities and violence. It is about humanity’s penchant for escalatory violence as its drug of choice. Fourth, sin is not inescapable or irresistible: “you will rule over it,” says God in Genesis 4:7, as a divine wager on the human conscience. My next step is to link Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 to Noah and the flood in Genesis 6–9 along that escalating trajectory of human, and now divine, violence. Notice, however, that the violence of divine retributive justice has not been present up to this point in the first half dozen chapters of our Bible. But, as you brace yourself now for the flood story, always remember that Israel adopted and adapted that story from Mesopotamian tradition. It did not imagine it or create it from its own soul.

agree completely with the last half century’s consensus of scholarship that the Hittite-style suzerain-vassal treaty was the metaphor, model, and matrix for the divine covenant in the biblical tradition. (I repeat that those treaties were never secular treaties but always sacred contracts.) Covenant in the biblical tradition is, therefore, a religio-political, religio-social, and religio-economic commitment between God and the world as macrocosm or God and Israel as an experimental microcosm.

Here, however, is the intractable challenge. The event of an ecstatic trance derives from the chemistry in the brain, but the content of an ecstatic trance derives from the theology in the mind. What entranced prophets saw in heaven validated and empowered what they brought with them from earth. The result combined both the very best understanding of the covenantal God of nonviolent distributive justice and the very worst understanding of the covenantal God of violent retributive justice. The basic message—clear, consistent, and courageous across three hundred years—demanded just distribution on earth or else stern retribution from heaven.

Gods of power die when their supporting power dies. (What have you heard recently from Zeus or Jupiter?) But how could a God of distributive justice ever die unless the thirst for distributive justice were already dead in every human heart?

THE PRICE OF THE Deuteronomic tradition’s influence on the Prophetic and Psalmic traditions is that the character of the biblical God becomes more about covenant than creation in terms of the human-divine relationship, more about Sanction than History in terms of covenant, and more about curses than blessings in terms of Sanction. For my titular problem, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, both the Prophetic and Psalmic traditions are extremely ambiguous on the character of God. Indeed, there is almost a rhythm of assertion-and-subversion within and across each tradition. On the one hand, both traditions presume a God of nonviolent distributive justice and a world that should be managed in the image and likeness of that God. On the other hand, both traditions hold that vision in acute dialectic with a God of violent retributive justice. You will have heaven on earth, says their God, or I will give you hell here instead. In other words, I can now extend that diagram for the Covenantal Divide I have already proposed:

Israel. It was the hinge of the three then-known continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. It was the corridor, cockpit, and cauldron of imperial competition. With warring superpowers first to the north and south, then to the west and east, invasion for Israel was inescapable and defeat inevitable—despite Deuteronomy 28. If Israel had spent all of its life on its knees praying, the only change in its history would have been to have died—on its knees praying. It is a crime against both humanity and divinity to tell a people so located that a military defeat is a punishment from God. This holds also, but for different reasons, on disease and drought, famine and even earthquake. No wonder, therefore, that Israel’s Psalter is filled with cries for forgiveness and pleas for mercy. External invasions, internal famines, and any other disasters were not divine punishments for how the people of Israel lived its covenantal life with God, but human consequences of where the nation of Israel lived it.

MICHAEL HARDT

It is surely long overdue for us to rethink both the theory of divine punishment and the resultant practice of pleading for forgiveness and crying out for mercy throughout the Christian tradition. Instead, we could begin, aside from natural disasters and random accidents, to accept fully the human consequences for what we do, and especially to acknowledge the internal effects of denying our human identity and rejecting our human destiny—as proposed in, say, Genesis 1 and Psalm 8. I

The book of Proverbs warns that “where there is no vision, the people perish” (29:18 KJV). But with the wrong vision, they perish even faster. Eutopia or eschatology may even be necessary if our species, protected by moral conscience rather than by animal instinct, is not ultimately to destroy itself—because escalatory human violence has never invented a weapon we did not use, never invented one less powerful than what it replaced, and never ceased to confuse lull with peace. Are those eschatological visions of distributive justice and universal peace nothing more than empty fantasies?

At this point, I can almost rest the case I lay out in How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: accept and follow the assertion of the nonviolent historical Jesus as the image and revelation of a nonviolent God; understand and reject the subversion that changes him across two stages, first into rhetorical and then into physical violence. In other words, I already have the solution to the challenge of How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian—for those who have eyes to see—within the Christian Bible itself: if the biblical Christ is the norm, criterion, and discriminant of the Christian Bible, then the historical Jesus is the norm, criterion, and discriminant of the biblical Christ.

(1 Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Romans) represent the radical Paul. The three “probably not” letters (2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians) represent an initial de-radicalization into a conservative “Paul.” And the three “certainly not” letters (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus)

My foundational presupposition, a very general but very basic one, concerns how to read anything, ancient or modern, biblical or nonbiblical. That process demands awareness of matrix; that is, anything spoken or written must first be understood within its own time and place. Matrix is the background you cannot skip, the context you cannot avoid. (For example, as mentioned at the beginning of this book, the matrix for Gandhi is British imperialism, and that for Martin Luther King Jr. is American racism.) The cross-haired coordinates of matrix are communal tradition and individual vision as well as specific time and particular place. And, whether we like it or not, matrix is destiny, for speaker and writer as for hearer and reader.

I repeat and thereby emphasize strongly that I am not invoking that antiquated distinction of the Jesus of history versus the Christ of faith. Whether the historical Jesus was or was not Christ, the Messianic Son of God is not the present debate—that is a matter of faith.

What is at stake here for us Christians is theologically quite evident. Whether Jesus accepted, advocated, or used nonviolent or violent resistance against the violence of oppression and injustice determines how we Christians are to imagine the very character of our God. That also determines our religious, theological, and ecclesiastical processes as well as our economic, social, and political lives.

Take, for example, our human self. We are body and soul, flesh and spirit. But when they are separated from one another, we do not get both—we get neither; we get a physical corpse. So it is with justice and love.

Justice is the body of love, and love is the soul of justice. Separate them and you do not get both—you get neither; you get a moral corpse. Justice is the flesh of love, and love is the spirit of justice. Think about this for a moment.

Why, on one hand, do individuals or groups who set out with the highest ideals of distributive justice so often end up in bloody slaughter—especially of “the unjust”? Why, on the other hand, is “love” a word so empty of content that it can be used at the same time for our favorite candy bar and the soulmate of our life, for our favorite sports team and God Almighty? It is because we have separated what cannot be separated if each term is to retain its full ...

and justice embodies love. Keep both, o...