[Book Review] Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution / John Yoder

Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution
John Howard Yoder; Theodore J. Koontz and Andy Alexis-Baker, editors.  Brazos Press, 2009.

Reviewed by Nathan Hobby.

Like Preface to Theology (2003), this book is the material for a unit Yoder taught, edited posthumously. It was published in rough form as a textbook for students taking his unit. The students who had access to this original publication for decades before the rest of us were very fortunate. This book is longer than anything else ever published by Yoder and is a significant work. It is a historical survey, tracing in Yoder’s refreshing and provoking way the attitudes of Christians toward war, peace and revolution through the centuries.

For me, the book is a lesson in the importance of history, a testament to the importance of knowing the history of a subject before you can claim to understand the subject at all.  In their preface, the editors’ sum up the book’s power:

In stating other perspectives in their strongest form, a surprising history unfolds. For Yoder, the history of Christian attitudes toward war and peace is clearly not a mainstream account that sees the church faithfully responding to the gospel by outgrowing its early pacifism, maturing and coming to accept responsibility, including the need to wage war. But neither is it a story of simple decline from the New Testament to the Anabaptists, as some within Yoder’s Mennonite tradition have told it. The most striking aspects of this story are the resilience through the centuries of the gospel of peace, and the abiding power of Jesus’s hold on people that invites them to imitate him in seeking peace and shunning violence. Again, and again, Yoder demonstrates, people throughout history have seen Jesus, and been drawn into the power of the cross. (p.8)

One striking example, which I’ll summarise at length as an example of Yoder’s method, is his re-reading of the Middle Ages in chapter 9, “The Peace Dimension of Medieval Moral Concern”. Yoder describes various ways in which violence and war were restrained in the Middle Ages (476-1453), and the church embodied a partial peace witness. These include:

• Holy times and places – fighting was forbidden in certain places (cemeteries) and at certain times (Good Friday, after sunset)
• Penitents – when a person confessed to a major offence, they might commit several months of their life around being a penitent, perhaps going on a pilgrimage as a penitent. A penitent was to be nonviolent and unarmed. ‘In the life of medieval Europe, therefore, people renouncing violence because they were Christian were a visible minority.’ (p.119)
• Priests admonished princes when they went too far. There was an element of accountability.

Yoder argues that the shifts involved in the Reformation actually increased the church’s support of war:

Protestants have been taught to think of the Reformation of the sixteenth century as undoing the mistakes of the Middle Ages – papacy, sacraments, justification by works, and other things. But on the morality of war, our model for interpreting the Reformation has to be turned around. The Protestant Reformation goes further in the direction of making war acceptable. (115)

Yoder identifies a number of ways in which this happened:

• The Reformation dismantled confession and penance, both of which had restrained bloodshed.
• The Reformation desacralized the world – everything was equally holy, or equally unholy; there were no holy places or holy times to avoid bloodshed.
• Instead of the priest admonishing the prince, the chaplain emerges: ‘In the Reformation, the Protestant chaplain increasingly gives a religious mandate to what people do, whether it is celebrating marriages or justifying causes and crusades… The preachers are the people to make the case for the next war.’ (p.119)
• The Reformation created nationalism – wars in the Middle Ages occurred within the Roman Catholic Church. Both parties ‘were at home in the same world, had the same moral heritage, and used the same yardsticks. They had a sense of being part of a wider civilization… The Reformation broke up the unity of the church and of the empire. It set aside the notion that enemy nations and adversary institutions have a claim on us. The beginning of nationalism in the modern sense – the notion that a nation constitutes a moral unit with no accountability to a wider community or culture – is a product of the Protestant Reformation.’ (p. 120-121)

The obvious objection is the Crusades of the Middle Ages. Yoder spends a couple of pages dealing with them, but not with the same questions we have in mind, and so his explanation is not satisfactory. He looks at how the Crusades were justified by priests (and the limits – not always followed – which they placed on them) and the sense in which the Crusades were a synthesis of the holy war and the just war. He seems unaware of the damage the existence of the Crusades do to his case.

Another chapter of particular interest to me was “Pacifism in the Nineteenth Century”. The nineteenth century seems to have been so formative for the current state of the evangelical church, seeing the rise of Churches of Christ, the Brethren, Wesleyanism and just afterwards, the Pentecostal movement. Within each of these restoration and renewal movements was a seed of pacifism –  now lost. Yoder makes this astute comment about Pentecostalism:

The Pacifism and racial integration of the movement as a whole were not deeply rooted, because Pentecostals did not believe in being deeply rooted. They thought history, theology and church structures did not matter, so they had no historical consciousness from which to sense a radical ethical position in the world. (262)

Interestingly, in Yoder’s account, Pentecostalism abandoned its original pacifism firstly in order to evangelise troops in World War One. He writes, ‘By the time of World War II, they created seminaries, because military chaplaincy required a seminary degree. They did not believe in seminary for their churches, but they gave chaplains a seminary degree in order to get them into the army.’ (263)

At the end of this chapter, Yoder asks a question deeply relevant to the AAANZ today:

Should we concentrate on trying to talk with institutional churches with long-established theological positions? If we are interested in propagating a witness against violence, should we instead look to the non-traditional renewal frontier, where people do not have as many good reasons for not listening, but also will be not as profound in their support or as thorough in their appropriation if they do hear? (270)

The ‘non-traditional renewal frontier’ which comes to mind for me is the house church and emerging church movements, and it seems to me that he has anticipated their response well.

There is just so much history I didn’t know in this book. The next chapter, “Liberal Protestant Pacifism”, paints a fascinating picture of the brief flourishing of pacifism amongst the liberal Protestant mainstream in the 1920s, which came fully unstuck with World War Two. He mentions in passing (p.277) the pacifism of three evangelical/ fundamentalist heroes – Jonathan Blanchard (founder of Wheaton College), Dwight L. Moody and William Jennings Bryan (creationist villain of the Scopes Monkey trial). He says that their successors have ‘falsified’ the record because of ‘their tactical alliance with the heirs of creedal orthodoxy and social conservatism’.

The book has its origins in the 1960s and was last revised by Yoder in the 1980s. The change in context since then is apparent; it is a pity we don’t have Yoder’s thoughts on the ‘War on Terror’, the acceleration of post-Christendom and the effect of church growth and the megachurch on Christian attitudes to war and peace.  He devotes a lot of space to responding to his great sparring partner, Reinhold Niebuhr, only to write in an obviously late addition, ‘By the early 1980s, Reinhold Niebuhr is less known or read, while the analysis of which he was the classical spokesman is more and more taken for granted.’ (p.308) His comment is more true now, which makes it feel tiresome at times to read so much material in response to Niebuhr.

Yoder is never easy to read, and at 472 pages this book is mountainous. (We owe our thanks to the editors, who judiciously trimmed it from a much greater length, as well as tidying up the manuscript extensively so that it is less repetitious and makes more sense.) It helps to remember that it is the substance of a semester-long unit. But who, then, is going to read this book? How many of us are willing to commit ourselves to the equivalent of a semester-long unit (albeit without the exam or essays or extra readings) on our own? Probably not many of us. If it seems too daunting, perhaps you should buy it and read four or five chapters. Save the rest for another time.

Yoder on Peace and War in the Middle Ages

John Howard Yoder’s Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution (Brazos, 2009) is a posthumously published, edited version of the notes Yoder distributed for his course in the subject.

In chapter 8 ‘The Career of the Just War’ and chapter 9 ‘The Peace Dimension of Medieval Moral Concern’, I am startled by his analysis of peace and war in the middle ages – but then, being startled is one of the joys of reading Yoder, and something I should have expected by now. He is always re-reading and reframing things we take for granted.

The early church was pacifist; the Constantinian church compromised this position, but Yoder describes various ways in which violence and war were restrained in the Middle Ages (476-1453), and parts of the church embodied a peace witness. These include:

• Holy times and places – fighting was forbidden in certain places (cemeteries) and at certain times (Good Friday, after sunset)
• Penitents – when a person confessed to a major offence, they might commit several months of their life around being a penitent, perhaps going on a pilgrimage as a penitent. A penitent was to be nonviolent and unarmed. ‘In the life of medieval Europe, therefore, people renouncing violence because they were Christian were a visible minority.’ (p.119)
• Priests admonished princes when they went too far. There was an element of accountability.

Yoder argues that the shifts involved in the Reformation actually increased the church’s support of war:

Protestants have been taught to think of the Reformation of the sixteenth century as undoing the mistakes of the Middle Ages – papacy, sacraments, justification by works, and other things. But on the morality of war, our model for interpreting the Reformation has to be turned around. The Protestant Reformation goes further in the direction of making war acceptable. (115)

• The Reformation dismantled the confession and penance, both of which restrained bloodshed.
• The Reformation desacralized the world – everything was equally holy, or equally unholy; there were no holy places or holy times to avoid bloodshed.
• Instead of the priest admonishing the prince, the chaplain emerges: ‘In the Reformation, the Protestant chaplain increasingly gives a religious mandate to what people do, whether it is celebrating marriages or justifying causes and crusades… The preachers are the people to make the case for the next war.’ (p.119)
• The Reformation created nationalism as we know it today. Wars in the Middle Ages occurred within the Roman Catholic Church. Both parties ‘were at home in the same world, had the same moral heritage, and used the same yardsticks. They had a sense of being part of a wider civilization… The Reformation broke up the unity of the church and of the empire. It set aside the notion that enemy nations and adversary institutions have a claim on us. The beginning of nationalism in the modern sense – the notion that a nation constitutes a moral unit with no accountability to a wider community or culture – is a product of the Protestant Reformation.’ (p. 120-121)

The obvious objection is the Crusades of the Middle Ages. Yoder spends a couple of pages dealing with them, but not with the same questions we have in mind, and so his explanation is not satisfactory. He looks at how the Crusades were justified by priests (and the limits – not always followed – which they placed on them) and the sense in which the Crusades were a synthesis of the holy war and the just war. He seems unaware of the damage the existence of the Crusades do to his case for the Middle Ages being a period where the church’s understanding of just war and its practices restrained war.

However, the value of these chapters is as a corrective to the generalisations we tend to make about period of histories, including the assumption amongst evangelicals that the Reformation was purely and simply a turn for the better. It is also an instructive study of the ways in which, in the midst of a church which is not pacifist, we might hope for restraints on war and violence and practices which promote peace.

 

Are Not Soldiers In Need of the Gospel?

A quote from the appendix to Guy Hershberger’s 1969 3rd edn of War, Peace and NonResistance, where he answers various practical objections.

13. Are Not Soliders in Need of the Gospel? Therefore Does Not Army Service, Especially Service as an Army Chaplain, Provide a Fine Opportunity to Testify for Christ?

It is true that the soldier needs the Gospel as much as any other man, and that the nonresistant Christian should not hesitate to bring it to him if he can do so without being part of the military organization. But to be a member of an organization whose task it is to kill would certainly disqualify one to preach the gospel of love and nonresistance. (p. 314)

I wish he had expanded on his answer at much greater length. But a nice start.

Listening to a military chaplain

Yesterday at church a military chaplain spoke about his work and I’m still feeling upset.

The slideshow had photos of all the chaplains in army fatigues, and of soldiers they were ministering to posing with large guns. Then a photo of a group in army fatigues praying, presumably before going out to do their duty.

I tried to keep my mouth shut, but I spoke up during the talk when he brought Jesus into it, relating how he was giving a sermon to military chaplains during the Iraq War about how they needed to follow the way of Jesus – including, he said, loving your enemy! I don’t understand how you can be giving solace and support to an invading army and talking about loving your enemy.

I think from his perspective he sees chaplains as a restraining hand on soldiers, keeping them comforted and in good mental and spiritual health so they don’t commit war crimes or atrocities, so that in the heat of the moment they don’t shoot civilians.

But I think war crimes and civilian deaths are not an aberration but an inevitable consequence of giving people guns and trying to take over a country or even trying to ‘keep the peace’ by eliminating insurgency. (Try separating insurgents and civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan anyway.)
The chaplain was gracious, and let me ask a question at the end. I asked how, even standing in the just war tradition as he must, he can embed himself with a military force which is fighting wars which do not meet the just war criteria. (And, I wish I’d added, have killed one million people, between the Iraq and Afghanistan War, according to some estimates.)

He said that under the Geneva Convention he is a non-combatant.

I find this unconvincing; you’re in military uniform and you’re supporting troops, meeting their spiritual needs, and thus lending legitimacy to what they’re doing.

I think all disciples of Christ should refuse to co-operate with the military, in every country.

I hate making a show of myself these days  – but I couldn’t let this pass without comment.

I thought that I’d found a church which would be broadly pacifist in outlook. Someone told me that it is important to the church to hear different viewpoints, and hence have a military chaplain speaking. But support for the military gets heard at every church in Perth. I don’t know of pacifist churches in Perth, except the Quakers and perhaps Wembley Downs Church of Christ. And the Peace Tree Community, who are sort of a church. There should be at least a few churches in Perth where non-violence is a non-negotiable, where it’s seen as integral to discipleship. Where we don’t just politely say helping troops is a good ministry to have, but where we say that’s not what Jesus wants.

The early church and war

Back on my ANZAC Day post, there was some discussion in the comments about the early church and war. I haven’t done much reading on this, but The Mennonite has a good introductory article by David Brattston, putting forward the case for a strong witness against participation in the army by Christians in the first three centuries.

ANZAC Day

The regenerated do not go to war, nor engage in strife. They are children of peace who have ‘beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning forks, and know no war’ (Isaiah 2:4, Micah 4:3). … Our weapons are not weapons with which cities and countries may be destroyed, walls and gates broken down, and human blood shed in torrents like water. But they are weapons with which the spiritual kingdom of the devil is destroyed. … Christ is our fortress; patience our weapon of defense; the Word of God our sword.
- Menno Simons

It’s strange that war raises so few problems for most evangelicals. Or actually it’s not so strange. It’s where the Constantinian mindset is shown most strongly today. Your average evangelical can’t see how being a disciple and being an Australian might come into conflict. For them, discipleship is about private, spiritual freedom; war is about political freedoms. (They can’t imagine a political dimension to the kingdom, they can’t imagine the kingdom as a new way of ordering life in the midst of a broken world – but why would they? They don’t see it in their churches!)

For most evangelicals, their primary political allegiance is to Australia, rather than to the kingdom. It’s this primary allegiance which allows them to fight wars against our country’s enemies, despite Christ’s injunction to love our enemies and do good to those who persecute us. But the church should be ‘a holy nation’ which transcends national borders and refuses to fight. If our first loyalty is to Christ, we can’t go fighting wars; we would be killing our brothers and sisters (Christians in the other countries) as well as our enemies. We would be failing in our duty to imitate Christ; we would be imitating the world.

ANZAC Day seems a kind of syncretism to me. Too many evangelicals like the way the average Australian sounds a bit religious on ANZAC day. They are happy for the world to quote ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends’ in connection to the ANZAC legend, because at least they’re quoting the Bible. I’m fairly sure that there will be a number of preachers across Perth appropriating the ANZAC legend tomorrow in their sermon and drawing a parallel to Jesus laying down his life for us.

But war is a tragedy. In our concern for honouring the horrible deaths and suffering of so many soldiers, we tend to avoid critiquing the political agendas of empire that caused those deaths. We forget that Jesus died in an act of reconciliation, while our fathers and forefathers died in an act of war. They were brave and they were probably selfless; but, alas, they were not fighting for the kingom of God.

So what should a pacifist do if he or she is in church in Perth tomorrow and hears the preacher draw a connection between the ANZAC legend and Jesus’ death? Don’t speak out during the sermon; it’s rude and it will never achieve anything. Don’t turn your back, that’s rude too. Should you keep your mouth shut? If you do, you might die inside as I’ve been dying inside for several years keeping my mouth shut about so many things. Should you start some respectful conversations? Yes, probably. It won’t lead anywhere quickly, though. But if you’re a pacifist, you already know that.

Disturbing Divine Behaviour : a review part 2

Seibert’s solution to disturbing divine behaviour is a christocentric hermeneutic. He acknowledges that the New Testament itself has some trouble images of divine behaviour. But he insists that we can trust the depiction of Jesus in the New Testament and use him, as the fullest revelation of God, as a guide to interpreting disturbing divine behaviour. He defines the God revealed by Jesus:

• Jesus reveals a God who is kind to the wicked – such as when he calls on us to love our enemies. This aspect of God’s character is only sometimes revealed in the OT.

• Jesus reveals a God who is nonviolent – again the command to love our enemies; throughout the gospels, Jesus never endorses or promotes the idea of God as a divine warrior. He lived nonviolently himself and rejected violence as a way to achieve justice. Ultimately, Jesus’ nonviolence is revealed in his death on the cross.

• Jesus reveals a God who does not judge people by causing historical (or natural) disasters or serious physical infirmities – recall Luke 13:1-5, where people ask Jesus what sin the Galileans committed that God let them be killed by Pilate

• Jesus reveals a God of love

Seibert goes on to show his dual hermeneutic in practice – critiquing disturbing texts with a christocentric hermeneutic, but also affirming them by seeking to find what ‘salvageable’ from such passages.

His final chapter offers some practical suggestions for ‘talking about troubling texts’:

• Stop trying to justify God’s behaviour in the Old Testament – a suggestion that is immensely liberating for me, if indeed I can follow him to here.

• Acknowledge how these texts have fostered oppression and violence

• Help people use problematic images responsibly and constructively

• Keep disturbing divine behaviour in perspective – that is, remember how much of the Old Testament is not troubling.

Seibert has an appendix dealing with Jesus’ eschatological sayings and whether they can be said to reveal a nonviolent God. Strangely, his treatment of hell doesn’t even consider universalism as an option – that is, the idea that ultimately God will reconcile all people to himself. It is at least as supportable of many of the things

I need some time to discern whether I can follow Seibert to where he goes. But his book gripped me. For once I found myself unable to put down a theology book,when usually they are something of a chore to read.

Disturbing Divine Behaviour : a review, part 1

Disturbing Divine Behavior: Troubling Old Testament Images of God / Eric Seibert (Fortress Press, 2009)

In this book, Eric Seibert tackles head-on a question which has long been in my mind: what are we to do with the troubling Old Testament images of God? The ones where, for example, he orders the Israelites to commit genocide and kill men, women and children?

Many evangelicals would disown Seibert and his answers, but he comes from an evangelical perspective, with evangelical questions. But instead of the standard evangelical approach of justifying why God did these things in the Old Testament, Seibert claims God did not do them.

Seibert doesn’t actually present anything startlingly new to me. Studying theology at Murdoch University, I was made well aware of mainstream (“liberal”) Old Testament scholarship, with archaeology and textual criticism leading scholars to the conclusion that there was no widespread genocide of the Caananites or a flood which decimated the world. What is so compelling for me reading the book is that Seibert uses this evidence to answer questions I have coming from an evangelical background. Most “liberal” scholars don’t bother to address the concerns of evangelicals.

Seibert starts out by outlining the problematic portrayals of God that he is talking about. He confines his scope to the Old Testament historical books and divides the problematic portrayals into a number of categories – ‘God as deadly lawgiver’ – laws where the penalty for disobedience is death; ‘God as instant executioner’ – passages where God instantly strikes people dead for evil; ‘God as mass murderer’; ‘God as Divine Warrior’; ‘God as genocidal general’; ‘God as dangerous abuser’; ‘God as unfair afflictor’ – such as in the case of Job or Pharaoh’s divinely hardened heart; and ‘God as divine deceiver’ – the example being 1 Kings 22. It’s a disturbing catalogue of divine behaviour.

In an important chapter, he examines ancient approaches to disturbing divine behaviour. It is easy to think that it is only more sensitive modern readers like us who are disturbed by parts of the Old Testament, but the reality is that Jewish readers were disturbed by some parts before the Old Testament was even finished. Thus, Seibert gives us the example of the writer of Chronicles who in 1 Chronicles 21:1 changes 2 Samuel 24:1 to say that Satan was responsible for prompting David to take a sinful census, rather than God. For me, it begs the question that if the writer of Chronicles felt he had permission to question – and “correct” – disturbing divine behaviour like this, perhaps we, with the full revelation of Jesus Christ, have similar permission?

Seibert goes on to discuss an early Christian interpreter of disturbing divine behaviour – Marcion. Marcion was so disturbed by the Old Testament that he rejected its authority altogether and produced an abbreviated New Testament, with Old Testament references cut out. It’s a good idea for Seibert to tackle Marcion directly, as he knows he is going to be accused of being a Marcionite. He insists many times that he’s not a Marcionite, that the Old Testament still holds authority for him, but that we must discern each text. Interestingly, Marcion pursued a very literal reading of the Old Testament, more like we would make today, and this is what made it so disturbing for him. Seibert traces other ancient interpreters who managed to be less disturbed by making allegorical or typological readings. Marcion anticipated our contemporary dilemmas better than these others; branding him as a heretic might have been necessary, but the problems he had with the Old Testament came out of valid questions.

The next chapter is “Defending God’s Behaviour in the Old Testament”, surveying approaches evangelicals take to explain disturbing divine behaviour, all assuming that God did and said exactly as the Old Testament records.

• ‘Divine immunity’ approaches basically claim that by definition anything God does is good and right and thus morally defensible. It usually appeals to how little as humans we understand of God’s ways. Seibert sees this approach as inadequate because it restricts honest inquiry about the character of God. It actually dishonours God by claiming he acted in ways that are inconsistent with our basic beliefs about what is right – we have to redefine evil behaviour as ‘good’. But ‘is genocide ever good?’ (p.74)
• Another approach is ‘the just cause approach’, supplying a rationale for God’s behaviour – human sin was so bad they needed to be slaughtered. But what about babies? And surely the responses to some particular offenses are out of proportion – like Uzziah in 2 Samuel 6:1-11 who steadied the ark and was struck dead.
• ‘The greater good approach’ argues that in these cases God was preventing a greater evil. Of course, what could be more evil than everyone perishing in a flood is difficult to fathom.
• ‘The “God acted differently in the Old Testament” approach’ argues for a discontinuity between God’s past and present behaviour. But if God instructed the Israelites to commit genocide just because that was all they could understand at their stage in development, our questions about God’s character aren’t answered at all.
• ‘The permissive will approach’ claims that God’s instructions to violence were a compromise because of Israel’s disobedience. The disturbing divine behaviour is contrary to God’s perfect will, but necessary because of the situation. This approach doesn’t actually rescue the text (it’s still inaccurately reports what God wants) or God’s behaviour (He still does these disturbing things).

Coming as he does from an Anabaptist tradition, it seems strange to me that he doesn’t spend longer addressing the approach of the most important Anabaptist thinker – John Howard Yoder. Yoder offers a way of reading the Bible that is different to any of the approaches Seibert discusses. Yoder approaches biblical texts from the ground up, finding their inspiration or theological truth in the way the writer has taken the prevailing cultural standards and worldview and transformed it. Yoder finds a trajectory in each case. In The Original Revolution, he deals explicitly with one of Seibert’s test cases – that of Yahweh ordering Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Yoder doesn’t even permit us to ask the question of whether Yahweh actually asked Abraham to do this. Instead, he points out that human sacrifice was not a moral issue for the ancient reader. It is not the point of the story at all. Instead, the point is that Yahweh calls Abraham to give up the very means through which Yahweh was going to fulfill his promise to make Abraham the father of many nations – a son. The ethicity of sacrificing Isaac is not a permissible question for the ancient Israelite. Yoder doesn’t expect the text to conform to his own ethical expectations of God. Debating its historicity is a sidetrack for him. His viewpoint has the potential to undo a lot of Seibert’s assumptions, and I would like to see some engagement with it. Of course, Yoder’s point is opaque and he doesn’t flesh it out; people aren’t going to respond to his solution in the same way many will resonate with Seibert’s.

[Part two coming tomorrow]

Beat your plowshares into swords

Yesterday the pastor asked if anyone had heard God speaking in worship, and someone said they had a verse from God. It was Joel 3:10. Read it carefully, it doesn’t say what you think it says at first:

‘Proclaim this among the nations:
Prepare for war!
Rouse the warriors!
Let all the fighting men draw near and attack
Beat your plowshares into swords
and your pruning hooks into spears
Let the weakling say, “I am strong!”
Come quickly, all you nations from every side
and assemble there.
Bring down your warriors, O’Lord.’

Yes, it’s the precise opposite of the more familiar verses from Isaiah and Micah which speak of beating swords into plowshares.

So what does it mean for a Christian to invoke these verses and say they apply to us now? What are our plowshares and pruning hooks that we use for making a living which we are going to convert to weapons of war? ‘Turn your computers into bombs, your cars into tanks, we’re going to go kill our enemies’ – is that the intention?

And isn’t the Lord telling the nations that he is going to declare war on them, and they should get ready to fight? He doesn’t seem to be addressing the people of God at all.

‘God’s Genocide’: some not-so-sensitive campus evangelism

I am very disturbed by this poster that was seen around my university a few weeks ago. I’m a part time student, and I only saw the poster after the event, otherwise I would have gone to listen, mainly in the hope that they weren’t saying what I suspect they were saying.

My suspicion was that this talk from the Bible on ‘God’s Genocide’ might be an exegesis of Joshua or Judges. When a poster the next week advertised a talk from the Book of Joshua, my suspicions seemed to be true.

The poster seems to suggest, without any hesitation or moral concern, that God was responsible for genocide. The photo looks like it might be taken from Pol Pot’s regime, which is about the most unfortunate, evil thing you could impute to God.

I imagine that the impulse here is a proud refusal to be ‘ashamed of the gospel’. But the book of Joshua isn’t the gospel. It is Scripture, it is part of our canon, part of our story, but it isn’t the gospel.

I actually think God would like us to be morally outraged and confused by stories like the one in Joshua in which Joshua commands the Israelites in the name of the Lord to destroy every living thing. Maybe this is what the talk said and the poster was just being provocative. I think it was completely insensitively and appallingly provocative.

I don’t know what to do with the terrible stories of genocide in the early part of the history of Israel. Here are some approaches I’ve noticed people taking:

1. The conservative evanglical: God said it, I believe it, end of story. Believing the Bible is the inspired Word of God means taking the stories on surface value. The Caananites were obviously very wicked and deserved to be slaughtered. (The fundamentalist might find some contemporary peoples who need slaughtering; the evangelical will emphasise the extremity of Canaanite wickedness.)

2. The mainstream evangelical: It’s true, but let’s not dwell on it.

3. Historical-critical: some of the readings I was assigned at uni indicated that the archaeological evidence does not exist for the stories in Joshua. Instead of a slaughter and conquer, the archaeological evidence suggests a gradual settlement by ex-slaves from Egypt. This would mean that the biblical record is worse than the reality. Interesting consequences for our understanding of the OT.

4. Texts of Terror : having stories like these in the canon is actually meant to incite us as followers of Jesus to respond with outrage and repentance at our own history and our blindspots. Their canonical function is as a kind of warning.

5. God will fight for us: In Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder briefly outlines an approach which reads stories like these from the perspective of the Israelites. They are being moved from where they are (a culture of bloodthirstiness and military prowess) toward the pacifism of Jesus. The significant thing they hear is not that God is sanctioning violence, but that their victory is not linked to military prowess. Their victory comes from God, not from their own fighting. They are still a long way from Jesus, but the culture is already being transformed.

6. Choose your strand: the Old Testament has a diversity of outlooks, some of them in line with the ultimate revelation of God in Jesus, and some of them not. Where the Old Testament fails to live up to the revelation of Jesus’ nonviolence, it is corrected and superseded by Jesus.