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by
Brian Zahnd
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October 10, 2017 - January 23, 2018
Foreword
In Jesus everything is brought together, all the disparate extensions of our mindful grasping after the transcendent God, and the scattered but viscerally real pursuit of an integrated and relational love with an immanent God. Both our understanding and experience of God must be grounded in our Christology. Apart from Jesus, we can do, know, be nothing.
If transformation is by the renewal of the mind and I have never changed my mind, then be assured I am actively resisting the work of the Holy Spirit in my life. Everyone who grows, changes.
The image of the angry God haunted my adolescence. Did the specter of the angry God help me toe the line? Maybe. Maybe not. But that’s not the question. The real question isn’t “Does it scare kids straight?” but “Is it true?”
People have never seen God until they see Jesus. Every other portrait of God, from whatever source, is subordinate to the revelation of God given to us in Jesus Christ.
Sometimes the Bible is like a Rorschach test: our interpretation of the text reveals more about ourselves than about God.
What the Bible does infallibly is point us to Jesus. The Bible itself is not a perfect picture of God, but it does point us to the One who is. This is what orthodox Christianity has always said.
The wrath of God is a biblical metaphor we use to describe the very real consequences we suffer from trying to go through life against the grain of love.
Important distinction.
Literalizing a divine metaphor always leads to error. We easily acknowledge that God is not literally a rock and not literally a hen, but we have tended to literalize the metaphor of divine anger.
Yet even in the Old Testament there are hints of how we can better understand the wrath of God. One of those hints is found in Psalm 7.
Important verses to consider.
that God’s wrath is a biblical metaphor does not make the consequences of sin any less real or painful. The revelation that God’s single disposition toward sinners remains one of unconditional love does not mean we are exempt from the consequences of going against the grain of love.
The fear of God is the wisdom of not acting against love. We fear God in the same way that as a child I feared my father. I had the good fortune to have a wise and loving father, and I had deep respect, reverence, admiration, and, perhaps, a kind of fear for my father, but I never for one moment thought that my dad hated me or would harm me. God does not hate you, and God will never harm you. But your own sin, if you do not turn away from it, will bring you great harm. The wisdom that acknowledges this fact is what we call the fear of God. Sin is deadly, but God is love.
When we fall into the hands of the living God, we are sinners in the hands of a loving God.
The hands of God have been stretched out in love where they were nailed to a tree. The nail-pierced hands of God now reach out to every doubter and every sufferer, revealing the wounds of love. The hands of God are not hands of wrath but hands of mercy. To be a sinner in these hands is where the healing begins.
We already agreed that God doesn’t change, God doesn’t mutate. So if God used to sanction genocide, and God doesn’t change…well, you see the problem. You’ve been painted into a corner.
1. We can question the morality of God. Perhaps God is, at times, monstrous. 2. We can question the immutability of God. Maybe God does change over time. 3. We can question how we read Scripture. Could it be that we need to learn to read the Bible in a different way?
The murder of children is immoral. I know this. And you know it too! Who doesn’t know that killing children is wrong?! Only those who want to defend at all cost a certain flat reading of Scripture can pretend that the wanton murder of children is not always immoral.
The Bible is sent by God and inspired by God, but the Bible is not God. The Holy Trinity is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—not Father, Son, and Holy Bible. John the Baptist and the Bible play similar roles in relation to the eternal Logos who is Christ.
c.f. John 1
So if we don’t want a monstrous God who occasionally commands genocide, and if we don’t want a malleable God who is slowly mutating away from a violent past, how do we view the Old Testament? Something like this: The Old Testament is the inspired telling of the story of Israel coming to know their God. It’s a process. God doesn’t evolve, but Israel’s understanding of God obviously does. If the revelation of God is perfectly depicted in the Pentateuch, why follow the story line of Scripture into the Prophets, Gospels, and Epistles?
It seems obvious that we should accept that as Israel was in the process of receiving the revelation of Yahweh, some unavoidable assumptions were made. One of the assumptions was that Yahweh shared the violent attributes of other deities worshiped in the ancient Near East. These assumptions were inevitable, but they were wrong.
The Bible is not the perfect revelation of God; Jesus is. Jesus is the only perfect theology. Perfect theology is not a system of theology; perfect theology is a person. Perfect theology is not found in abstract thought; perfect theology is found in the Incarnation. Perfect theology is not a book; perfect theology is the life that Jesus lived. What the Bible does infallibly and inerrantly is point us to Jesus, just like John the Baptist did.
There’s a reason Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. are probably the two best examples of American prophets. Their prophetic edges were sharpened on the cruel flints of slavery and segregation. The Hebrew prophetic tradition developed in the crucible of enduring threat, invasion, and oppression from Gentile empires. In this crucible of suffering a theology of justice was forged, but it also produced the slag of vengeance theology.
Instead of thinking Gentiles deserve to be punished by divinely orchestrated famine, the reader rejoices that the widow of Zarephath receives mercy from God. Instead of seeing Naaman as a two-dimensional villain deserving divine retribution, the reader sees Naaman as a real human being in need of God’s kindness.
In telling these two stories, the Hebrew Bible subverts a Jewish lust for vengeance. Because we hear their stories, these two “enemies of God” are no longer viewed as enemies. What is an enemy? An enemy is someone whose story you haven’t heard. So the Bible supplies us with subtext stories to subvert our assumptions about enemies.
As long as Jesus announced that it was the time of God’s favor, the crowd spoke well of him. But as soon as he made it clear that God’s favor is for everyone, as soon as Jubilee was made inclusive and not exclusive, they tried to throw him off a cliff.
Until we are captivated by the radical mercy of God extended to all, we will cling to the texts of vengeance as cherished texts. We do this not for the noble sake of justice but for the spiteful sake of revenge.
Does this mean there’s no divine judgment? Of course not. Certainly there is divine judgment, but it is a judgment based on God’s love and commitment to restoration. The restorative judgment of God gives no warrant to a schadenfreude yearning to see harm inflicted on others. Jesus has closed the book on that kind of lust for vengeance.
When we speak of the Word of God, Christians should think of Jesus first and the Bible second.
What Moses and Elijah—the Law and the Prophets—had begun, Jesus would fulfill. The goal of the Law and the Prophets was to produce a society of fidelity and justice. Jesus and the kingdom he announces and enacts is where that project finds its fulfillment.
When Peter, James, and John looked around on Tabor after the voice from heaven had spoken, they saw only Jesus. This is significant. To say it as plainly as I know how, the Old Testament is not on par with Jesus. The Bible is not a flat text where every passage carries the same weight.
When we try to embrace Biblicism by placing all authority in a flat reading of Scripture and giving the Old Testament equal authority with Christ, God thunders from heaven, “No! This is my beloved Son! Listen to him!”
It’s not biblical justice that we pursue but Christlike justice. Biblical justice may call for the punitive measures of stoning sinners and executing idolaters, but Christ clearly calls us to a higher ethic of mercy.
Idols are gods we can manage according to our own interests. If we want to make the Bible our final authority, which is an act of idolatry, we are conveniently ignoring the problem that we can make the Bible say just about whatever we want.
The Bible recognizes the tragedy that civilization is founded upon human violence. The Bible is wrestling with the miserable reality. But the Bible is not univocal about violence.
it’s a fool’s errand to try to reconcile all the disparate things the Bible says about violence. But there is a trajectory in the Bible, a movement away from violence as normative and toward God’s peaceable society where swords become plowshares and spears become pruning hooks.
Across one thousand years, the human conscience began to reject what human life had always apparently required, and the record of that rejection is the Bible.*35
4 The Crucified God
We Christians are a peculiar people. We worship—as incredible as it sounds!—a crucified God. All religions more or less worship some version of a powerful, glorious, triumphant God, but Christians are unique in worshiping a betrayed, tortured, crucified God. This is the original scandal of the Christian faith: the worship of a God who was nailed to a tree!
Above all things, the cross, as the definitive moment in Jesus’s life, is the supreme revelation of the very nature of God. At the cross Jesus does not save us from God; at the cross Jesus reveals God as savior! When we look at the cross we don’t see what God does; we see who God is!
We need to resist the temptation to be too quick to explain the cross in the utilitarian terms of juridical formulas and economic equations. Before we attempt any explanation we should first be struck mute at the sight of the crucifix. Who is this tortured man, nailed to a tree, suffering a violent death? Incredibly Christians say this is God! The crucified God. If we don’t find this scandalously shocking, we have grown far too familiar with the crucifixion of Jesus. The crucifixion of Good Friday isn’t an economic transaction; it is the torture and murder of an innocent man. This isn’t a
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On Good Friday we find God in Christ absorbing the sin of the world and responding with forgiveness. The cross is where God receives the most vicious blow of human sin, turns the other cheek, and forgives.
It wasn’t God who was alienated toward the world; it was the world that was alienated toward God. Jesus didn’t die on the cross to change God’s mind about us; Jesus died on the cross to change our minds about God! It wasn’t God who required the death of Jesus; it was humanity that cried, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” When the world says, “Crucify him,” God says, “Forgive them.”
The cross is not where God finds a whipping boy to vent his rage upon; the cross is where God saves the world through self-sacrificing love. The only thing God will call justice is setting the world right, not punishing an innocent substitute for the petty sake of appeasement.
The sacrifice of Jesus was necessary to convince us to quit producing sacrificial victims, but it was not necessary to convince God to forgive.
At Golgotha humanity violently sinned its sins into Jesus. Jesus bore these sins all the way down into death and left them there. On the third day Jesus arose without a word of vengeance, speaking only “Peace be with you” on that first Easter.”*10 When we look at the cross we see the lengths to which God will go to forgive sin. The cross is both ugly and beautiful. The cross is as ugly as human sin and as beautiful as divine love—but in the end love and beauty win.
When the cross is viewed through the theological lens of punishment, God is seen as an inherently violent being who can be appeased only by a violent ritual sacrifice. Those who are formed by this kind of theology will harbor a deep-seated fear that God is a menacing deity from whom they need to be saved.
The crucifixion is not what God inflicts upon Jesus in order to forgive; the crucifixion is what God endures in Christ as he forgives.
If we persist in looking at the cross through the distorted lens of fear, anger, and shame, we will imagine that the cross is what God does in order to forgive, instead of perceiving the cross as what God endures as he forgives.
5 Who Killed Jesus?
Jesus was put to death by the structures of political, economic, and religious power represented by Pontius Pilate, Herod Antipas, and Joseph Caiaphas. In the Gospel narratives we see the Roman governor, the king of Judea, and the high priest acting in demonic concert to execute Jesus. God did not kill Jesus; human culture and civilization did. God did not demand the death of Jesus; we did.
