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

by John Dominic Crossan

one fundamental conviction I have had for a long time: that reason and revelation or history and theology or research and faith—by whatever names—cannot contradict one another unless we have one or both wrong.

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.

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. In other words, the meaning of that Bible’s story is in its middle, in the story of Jesus in the Gospels and the early writings of Paul; the climax of its narrative is in the center; and the sense of its nonviolent center judges the (non)sense of its violent ending.

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.

Notice that human consequences are not misinterpreted as divine punishments.

the normalcy of human civilization is not the inevitability of human nature.

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.

In summary, therefore, the problem with Earth for the biblical God is not too much human “noise,” but too much human “violence.”

There is no divine repentance for the flood’s violence, but at least there is a divine promise of “never again.”

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.

The purpose, reason, and intention of the Sabbath day was to give all alike—householders, children, slaves, animals, and immigrants—the same rest every week. It was not rest for worship of God, but rest as worship of God.

We have seen already that our divine image consists precisely in earthly rule as stewards, and managers of a world not our own. We are divine agents for, with, and under a God of distributive justice and restorative righteousness.

God declines to establish divine punishment for human murder. Instead, God simply allows human consequence rather than asserting divine sanction.

But notice as well that in this case, “covenant” means a unilateral promise given unconditionally by God to the whole world and all creation. There is not a hint of any sanction for human default or penalty for human rejection. God says “never again” rather than “never again unless . . . ”

The delusion of divine punishments still prevails inside and outside religion over the clear evidence of human consequences, random accidents, and natural disasters. This does not simply distort theology; it defames the very character of God.

As that rhythm becomes ever clearer as the very heartbeat of the biblical tradition, we will see the basic solution for How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian. Read it all carefully and thoughtfully, recognize radicality’s assertion, expect normalcy’s subversion, and respect the honesty of a story that tells the truth.

It makes a profound difference whether from that central core of covenantal Law in the present, one moves mostly to past History in gratitude to God or mostly to future Sanction in fear of God. What is ultimately at stake across that Covenantal Divide is the character of the biblical God as one of distributive justice or of retributive justice, as graciously nonviolent or punitively violent.

The basic message—clear, consistent, and courageous across three hundred years—demanded just distribution on earth or else stern retribution from heaven.

First, that negative/positive dyad against the presence of worship amid the absence of justice is not simply a problem unique to Isaiah’s time and place.

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.

Then comes this searing result: “all the foundations of the earth are shaken” (82:5b). There is nothing about external curses or punishments as Sanction from God. Instead there is the terrible consequence that injustice shakes the foundations of the earth.

Wisdom as God’s divine medium for creation.

Notice that as in Genesis 2–3, knowledge of good and evil is a positive gift.

Does the Wisdom tradition have the same passion for distributive justice as does the Prophetic tradition, or is it a passion for distributive charity? It is clearly against oppressing, ignoring, or refusing society’s vulnerable ones. But is its focus on personal and individual justice rather than on systemic and structural economic justice on earth? Is the Wisdom tradition a radical vision of justice or a liberal vision of charity, and if it is the latter, what if the biblical God is a radical rather than a liberal?

To reject Wisdom is not to break an external law and bring about divine punishments, but to destroy our internal character and bring about human consequences.

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.

another great biblical tradition—that of God’s final transformation and ultimate transfiguration of an old earth ruled by imperial injustice to a renewed earth

None of these visionary synonyms for the Kingdom of God is about the earth’s destruction or abandonment; they are about its transformation and transfiguration. They are not about the end of the world’s existence and our emigration elsewhere, but about the end of the world’s evil, injustice, oppression, violence, and war.

do not locate, say, the Peace of God elsewhere than on this earth. Also please, do not subvert its religio-political, ethico-moral, and socio-economic vision as other than a radical challenge to the normalcy of civilization.

Saying that the Kingdom is “among you” indicates that it is an external, communal process, rather than simply “inside you” as an internal, private, and spiritual reality.

Maybe, thought Jesus, there was no divine intervention, not now, not soon, not ever. There was, is, and will be only a divine and human covenant, collaboration, and participation.

also wonder whether discussing the Kingdom’s end was, and still is, a refuge from facing the Kingdom’s start; whether debating the Christian future was, and still is, a strategy for avoiding the Christian present. If we can postpone the entire eschatological challenge of God’s Kingdom to a future, unilateral, divine intervention in heaven, we can avoid the challenge of a present, bilateral, divine and human collaboration on Earth.

The ultimate difference between Jesus and Pilate or between God’s Kingdom and Rome’s Empire is that between nonviolent resistance and violent oppression.

Revelation’s promise of a bloodthirsty God and a blood-drenched Christ represents for me the creation of a second “coming” to negate the first and only “coming” of Christ; the fabrication of violent apocalypse to deny nonviolent incarnation; and the invention of Christ on a warhorse to erase the historical Jesus on a peace donkey. Jesus’s nonviolent resistance to evil is replaced by Christ’s violent slaughter of evildoers. The challenge was never the Jesus of history versus the Christ of faith but the Jesus Christ of nonviolence versus the Christ Jesus of violence.

THE RHYTHM OF ASSERTION-AND-SUBVERSION that patterns the Christian Bible is also applied to the historical Jesus’s here-and-now-present Kingdom of God as nonviolent resistance to the normalcy of civilization in its contemporary Roman incarnation.

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.