Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

Violence is so prominent in the Bible because violence is the problem the Bible must address. The Bible looks honestly and unflinchingly upon the world as it is, and thus the pages of Scripture often drip with blood. But using the violent passages of the Bible to justify or normalize violence is like using the Bible to endorse slavery. Of course both have been done. Colonial interpreters and imperial theologians can and have forced the Bible to serve a violent lie. But on Good Friday the truth is told, for at Golgotha we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies. A billion crucifixes have revealed God as nonviolent. To paraphrase Hans Urs von Balthasar, being disguised under the disfigurement of an ugly crucifixion and death, Christ upon the cross is paradoxically the clearest revelation of who God is. The violence of the cross is not what God does, the violence of the cross is what God endures. The cross is not what God inflicts upon Christ in order to forgive. This is what N.T. Wright has called a “paganized soteriology.”[7] The cross is not the violent appeasement of a pagan deity, but what God in Christ suffers as God pardons the world. God does not employ and inflict violence; God absorbs and forgives violence. The cross is where God in Christ transforms the hideous violence of Good Friday into the healing peace of Easter Sunday.