In the predawn hours of May 26, 1637, an army of English settlers under the leadership of Captain John Mason breached the palisade walls of a Pequot village near the Mystic River, and with the help of native allies, set fire to the community. Hundreds of Pequot burned alive, and those who managed to escape were shot or slain by Mason’s men. Recounting his role in the massacre, Puritan John Underhill wrote, “Down fell men, women, and children. . . . Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? . . . Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. . . . We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”1
For Underhill and other European colonialists, that “sufficient light” came from the Bible’s war stories, particularly those of Israel’s battles in Canaan.
As the story of Scripture moves from Israel’s most ancient origins to its distant history, the theme shifts from deliverance to conquest. After the death of Moses, God commissioned a warrior named Joshua to assume leadership over the people of Israel and take possession of the land they had been promised, land stretching “from the desert to Lebanon, and from the great river, the Euphrates . . . to the Mediterranean Sea” (Joshua 1:4). The only problem? This land was already occupied. Various indigenous tribes, known collectively as the Canaanites, had dominated the landscape for years, some boasting mighty armies and fortified cities. It was even rumored that giants walked among them. But God told Joshua, “I will give you every place where you set your foot. . . . I will never leave you nor forsake you. Be strong and courageous, because you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their ancestors to give them” (Joshua 1:3, 5–6).
So Joshua led the people onward, crossing the River Jordan, then attacking the city of Jericho—not by charging its gates, but by marching around its walls seven times, blowing rams’ horns, and shouting as God had instructed. Sure enough, just as the famous song declares, the walls of Jericho came a-tumblin’ down. The text reports that Joshua’s army “destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys” (Joshua 6:21). Only Rahab, a prostitute, and her family were spared because they had sheltered Israelite spies ahead of the siege. (A children’s book in my home provides a G-rated version of the story, explaining that Rahab was able to help because she “often had visitors coming and going at odd hours.”)
From Jericho, Joshua’s armies moved on to Ai, which they conquered in their second attempt, the first having been compromised by a soldier who broke God’s commands regarding plunder. After luring the men of Ai out of the city for ambush, a battalion of Israelite soldiers set fire to the city where the women and children had been left behind, reducing it to “a permanent heap of ruins” (Joshua 8:28). According to the story, the Israelites killed all twelve thousand of the city’s inhabitants. The Israelites then offered thanks at Mount Ebal before heading south, where they defeated an alliance of Amorite kingdoms and hung the decapitated bodies of enemy kings from trees. The text reports God sent a hailstorm to pummel the Amorite army and froze the sun in the sky for a full twenty-four hours so Israel would be victorious (Joshua 10).
All told, the Israelites took control of more than thirty Canaanite cities. The last major challenge lay in Hazor, where a coalition of Canaanites had united against the Israelite invaders and rallied an army “as numerous as the sand on the seashore” (11:4). But even with the odds against them, the armies of Israel prevailed, totally destroying the city, killing in it “all who breathed” (10:40). Of Israel’s conquest of Canaan, the text notes, “Except for the Hivites living in Gibeon, not one city made a treaty of peace with the Israelites, who took them all in battle. For it was the LORD himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as the LORD had commanded Moses” (11:19–20).
It’s an astounding statement, and if we encountered it anywhere other than the Bible, we would immediately condemn it as a defense of genocide.
When it comes to processing these troubling stories, there are generally three types of people: (1) those who accept without question that God ordered the military campaigns in Canaan and has likely supported others throughout history, (2) those who are so troubled by the notion of God condoning ethnic cleansing that it strains their faith or compels them to abandon it, (3) those who can name all of the Kardashian sisters and are probably happier for it. I fit rather decidedly into the second category, the Bible’s tales of violence and holy war adding some of the first wrinkles to my pristinely starched faith.
Growing up, I noticed the ugly details in the Sunday school stories; children always do. I remember I was deeply troubled by the fact that God drowned all but two of each kind of animal in the Great Flood (to say nothing of all the people), and wondered aloud at the dinner table how God could be all-knowing and all-powerful, but also filled with regret. A friend’s seven-year-old captured the angst well when she recently asked, “Mom, is God the good guy or the bad guy in this story?”
This question of God’s character haunted every scene and every act and every drama of the Bible. It wasn’t just the story of Noah’s flood or Joshua’s conquests that unsettled me. The book of Judges recounts several horrific war stories in which women’s bodies are used as weapons, barter, or plunder, without so much as a peep of objection from the God in whose name these atrocities are committed. One woman, a concubine of a Levite man, is thrown to a mob, gang-raped, and dismembered as part of an intertribal dispute (Judges 19). Another young girl is ceremonially sacrificed to God after God grants a military victory to her father, Jephthah, who promised to offer as a burnt offering “whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites” (Judges 11:31). Earlier, in the book of Numbers, God assists the Israelites in an attack against the Midianites, and tells the Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child from the community. They kill all except the young virgin girls whom the soldiers divide up as spoils of war. Feminist scholar Phyllis Trible aptly named these narratives “texts of terror.”
“If art imitates life,” she wrote, “scripture likewise reflects it in both holiness and horror.”2
Rereading the texts of terror as a young woman, I kept anticipating some sort of postscript or epilogue chastising the major players for their sins, a sort of Arrested Development–style “lesson” to wrap it all up—“And that’s why you should always challenge the patriarchy!” But no such epilogue exists. While women are raped, killed, and divided as plunder, God stands by, mute as clay.
I waited for a word from God, but no word came.
It was as though I lived suspended in the tension of two apparently competing convictions: that every human being is of infinite worth and value, and that the Bible is the infallible Word of God. These beliefs pulled at me with the gravitational forces of large planets. I couldn’t get rid of them, and yet I couldn’t seem to resolve them either. The tension was compounded by a growing confluence of misgivings I had about the absence of women in leadership in my church, the shaming of young women perceived to be immodest or “impure,” and the insistence that God is most pleased when women are submissive and quiet. My home had always been a place of refuge, where the voices of women were valued and honored, but as I graduated from high school and entered college, I began to wonder if the same was true for the broader Christian community to which I belonged.
When I turned to pastors and professors for help, they urged me to set aside my objections, to simply trust that God is good and that the Bible’s war stories happened as told, for reasons beyond my comprehension.
“God’s ways are higher than our ways,” they insisted. “Stop trying to know the mind of God.”
It’s an understandable approach. Human beings are finite and fallible, prone to self-delusion and sentimentality. If we rely exclusively on our feelings to guide us to truth, we are bound to get lost.
When asked in 2010 about Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, Reformed pastor and theologian John Piper declared, without hesitation, “It’s right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die.”3
Piper’s dispassionate acceptance represented pure, committed faith, I was told, while mine had been infected by humanism and emotion—“a good example of why women should be kept from church leadership,” one acquaintance said.
And for a moment, I believed it. For a moment, I felt silly for responding so emotionally to a bunch of old war stories that left the rest of the faithful seemingly unfazed. But this is the deleterious snare of fundamentalism: It claims that the heart is so corrupted by sin, it simply cannot be trusted to sort right from wrong, good from evil, divine from depraved. Instinct, intuition, conscience, critical thinking—these impulses must be set aside whenever they appear to contradict the biblical text, because the good Christian never questions the “clear teachings of Scripture”; the good Christian listens to God, not her gut.
I’ve watched people get so entangled in this snare they contort into shapes unrecognizable. When you can’t trust your own God-given conscience to tell you what’s right, or your own God-given mind to tell you what’s true, you lose the capacity to engage the world in any meaningful, authentic way, and you become an easy target for authoritarian movements eager to exploit that vacuity for their gain. I tried reading Scripture with my conscience and curiosity suspended, and I felt, quite literally, disintegrated. I felt fractured and fake.
Brené Brown warned us we can’t selectively numb our emotions, and no doubt this applies to the emotions we have about our faith.4 If the slaughter of Canaanite children elicits only a shrug, then why not the slaughter of Pequots? Of Syrians? Of Jews? If we train ourselves not to ask hard questions about the Bible, and to emotionally distance ourselves from any potential conflicts or doubts, then where will we find the courage to challenge interpretations that justify injustice? How will we know when we’ve got it wrong?
“Belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man,” Thomas Paine said.5 If the Bible teaches that God is love, and love can look like genocide and violence and rape, then love can look like . . . anything. It’s as much an invitation to moral relativism as you’ll find anywhere.
I figured if God was real, then God didn’t want the empty devotion of some shadow version of Rachel, but rather my whole, integrated self. So I decided to face the Bible’s war stories head-on, mind and heart fully engaged, willing to risk the loss of faith if that’s where the search led.
I listened to sermons. I read commentaries and theology books. I became a real downer at dinner parties:
“If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?”
“Have you seen any of the Oscar-nominated films this year?”
“What’s your Enneagram number?”
“Do you think God condones genocide?”
The explanations came hurried and certain. Oh, God told Israel to wipe out the Canaanites because the Canaanites were super-duper evil, like the worst people ever. They worshipped idols and had orgies and sacrificed their children to their gods.
So God condemned the practice of child sacrifice . . . by slaughtering children?
Well, that’s just how things were back then. It was kill or be killed, tribal warfare and all that. Israel did what it had to do to survive.
Yes, but Israel was the aggressor in these stories. Joshua’s armies weren’t defending their land and their homes from foreign invaders; they were the foreign invaders.
What’s the big deal? God sends millions of people to hell forever and is still a good God. The Canaanites were simply “vessels of wrath, prepared for destruction,” as Saint Paul puts it. You should just be grateful you’ve been chosen for heaven. Stop worrying about everyone else.
That doesn’t help. At all.
I began to feel a bit like the disheveled Berenger, a character from Eugène Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, who grows increasingly bewildered as the people of his provincial French town acclimate to the sudden presence of rhinoceroses in their community. In one scene, a rhinoceros thunders through the town square, trampling a housecat. After their initial shock, the villagers get sidetracked debating whether the rhino had one horn or two, and whether its origins are Asiatic or African. And on it goes throughout the play, as the townspeople themselves transform into rhinos, one by one, arguing all the while over pointless trivialities, until only Berenger remains human.
The play is about fascism, I think, but it reminds me a bit of Christians and their Bibles. Sometimes it seems as if there are all these rhinoceroses barreling through the pages of Scripture, pooping on sidewalks and flattening housecats, but we’ve grown so accustomed to defending their presence we end up debating the length of their tails.
A lot of people think the hardest part about religious doubt is feeling isolated from God. It’s not. At least in my experience, the hardest part about doubt is feeling isolated from your community. There’s nothing quite like going through the motions of Christian life—attending church, leading Bible study, singing hymns, bringing your famous lemon bars to potlucks—while internally questioning the very beliefs that hold the entire culture together. It’s like you’ve got this ticker scrolling across every scene of your life, feeding you questions and commentary and doubts, and yet you carry on as though you can’t see it, as if everything’s fine. Say something and you risk losing friendships and becoming the subject of gossip. Keep your doubts to yourself and you risk faking it for the rest of your life. I know a lot of people, including some pastors, who are faking it.
At the crux of the dilemma hangs a single, haunting question: If I belong to this community because I share its beliefs, what happens if I stop believing? The threat of exile has a way of making those justifications for biblical genocide a lot easier to swallow.
My questions came with consequences. We left the church in which I was raised, and rumors of my “rebellious spirit” circulated around town, prompting more than a few well-meaning interventions. (Warning: Do not be lured by the promise of homemade chocolate chip cookies at a meeting to discuss “recent turns in your faith journey.” It’s a trap.) Friends stopped calling—both because of their own fears and because I pushed too hard to try and make them understand. And the doubts stuck around; they remain with me to this day.
But accepting the Bible’s war stories without objection threatened to erase my humanity. “We don’t become more spiritual by becoming less human,” Eugene Peterson said.6 How could I love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength while disengaging those very faculties every time I read the Bible?
So I brought my whole self into the wilderness with God—no faking, no halfway. And there we wrestled.
I’ve never liked war stories. The Red Badge of Courage was the first school reading assignment to bore me to tears, and I’m the only person I know over the age of twenty who hasn’t seen Saving Private Ryan or Apocalypse Now. Civil War reenactments, common in this part of the South, give me the creeps, and most of what I’ve seen of Game of Thrones I’ve watched through my fingers while pleading, “Is it over yet?” In my sole attempt at playing one of those single-shooter video games we progressives like to blame everything on, my character ran in a circle for five minutes before blowing itself up with a grenade.
But you don’t have to like war stories to be profoundly influenced by them, and living in a country that spends more on its military than any other means I too am immersed in the imagery and rhetoric of war, no matter how sanitized I prefer it. From poems that immortalize revolutions in couplets, to viral videos of soldiers arriving home to their families, few narratives have as much influence over a culture’s identity than the legends of its most famous military battles and heroes. Our war stories tell us where we come from, what we value, who we fear, and what we hate. They haunt our literature, our art, our monument-dotted landscapes. Generals historic and mythic have rallied their troops with the promise of being immortalized in the war stories of future generations. The famous Saint Crispin’s Day Speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V—“This story shall the good man teach his son / And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by / From this day to the ending of the world / But we in it shall be remembered”—finds echoes in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton lyrics, “The Story of Tonight.”7 Churchill made a similar appeal in a speech to the House of Commons at the start of World War II: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”8
People take extraordinary risks to be part of a story that will outlive them.
Sometimes our stories glorify war. Sometimes they lament it. Traditionally they employ exaggerated rhetoric, ranging from a little hyperbole and creative license to shameless propaganda, with all sorts of iterations in between. Sometimes the details of a battle are well preserved by journalists or historians, but more often than not, they get distorted—by the shame of loss, by the pride of victory, by the new politics of a new age, or by the warped lens of time. If you really want to understand what makes a community or a culture tick, ask the people in it what they believe is worth dying for, or perhaps more significantly, worth killing for. Ask the people for their war stories.
Ancient Israel was no different. By the time many of the Bible’s war stories were written down, several generations had passed, and Israel had evolved from a scrappy band of nomads living in the shadows of Babylon, Egypt, and Assyria to a nation that could hold its own, complete with a monarchy. Scripture embraces that underdog status in order to credit God with Israel’s success and to remind a new generation that “some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God” (Psalm 20:7). The story of David and Goliath, in which a shepherd boy takes down one of those legendary Canaanite giants with just a slingshot and two stones, epitomizes Israel’s self-understanding as a humble people improbably beloved, victorious only by the grace and favor of a God who rescued them from Egypt, walked with them through the desert, brought the walls of Jericho down, and made that shepherd boy a king.
To reinforce the miraculous nature of Israel’s victories, the writers of Joshua and Judges describe forces of hundreds defeating armies of thousands with epic totality. These numbers are likely exaggerated and, in keeping literary conventions of the day, rely more on drama and bravado than the straightforward recitation of fact. Those of us troubled by language about the “extermination” of Canaanite populations may find some comfort in the fact that scholars and archaeologists doubt the early skirmishes of Israel’s history actually resulted in genocide. It was common for warring tribes in ancient Mesopotamia to refer to decisive victories as “complete annihilation” or “total destruction,” even when their enemies lived to fight another day. (The Moabites, for example, claimed in an extrabiblical text that after their victory in a battle against an Israelite army, the nation of Israel “utterly perished for always,” which obviously isn’t the case. And even in Scripture itself, stories of conflicts with Canaanite tribes persist through the book of Judges and into Israel’s monarchy, which would suggest Joshua’s armies did not in fact wipe them from the face of the earth, at least not in a literal sense.)9
Theologian Paul Copan called it “the language of conventional warfare rhetoric,” which “the knowing ancient Near Eastern reader recognized as hyperbole.”10
Pastor and author of The Skeletons in God’s Closet, Joshua Ryan Butler, dubbed it “ancient trash talk.”11
Even Jericho, which twenty-first-century readers like to imagine as a colorful, bustling city with walls that reached the sky, was in actuality a small, six-acre military outpost, unlikely to support many civilians but, as was common, included a prostitute and her family. Most of the “cities” described in the book of Joshua were likely the same. So, like every culture before and after, Israel told its war stories with flourish, using the language and literary conventions that best advanced the agendas of storytellers.
As Peter Enns explained, for the biblical writers, “Writing about the past was never simply about understanding the past for its own sake, but about shaping, molding and creating the past to speak to the present.”
“The Bible looks the way it does,” he concluded, “because God lets his children tell the story.”12
You see the children’s fingerprints all over the pages of Scripture, from its origin stories to its deliverance narratives to its tales of land, war, and monarchy.
For example, as the Bible moves from conquest to settlement, we encounter two markedly different accounts of the lives of Kings Saul, David, and Solomon and the friends and enemies who shaped their reigns. The first appears in 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. These books include all the unflattering details of kingdom politics, including the account of how King David had a man killed so he could take the man’s wife, Bathsheba, for himself. On the other hand, 1 and 2 Chronicles omit the story of David and Bathsheba altogether, along with much of the unseemly violence and drama around the transition of power between David and Solomon. This is because Samuel and Kings were likely written during the Babylonian exile, when the people of Israel were struggling to understand what they had done wrong for God to allow their enemies to overtake them, and 1 and 2 Chronicles were composed much later, after the Jews had returned to the land, eager to pick up the pieces. While the authors of Samuel and Kings viewed the monarchy as a morality tale to help them understand their present circumstances, the authors of the Chronicles recalled the monarchy with nostalgia, a reminder of their connection to God’s anointed as they sought healing and unity. As a result, you get two noticeably different takes on the very same historic events.
In other words, the authors of Scripture, like the authors of any other work (including this one!), wrote with agendas. They wrote for a specific audience from a specific religious, social, and political context, and thus made creative decisions based on that audience and context.
Of course, this raises some important questions, like: Can war stories be inspired? Can political propaganda be God-breathed? To what degree did the Spirit guide the preservation of these narratives, and is there something sacred to be uncovered beneath all these human fingerprints?
I don’t know the answers to all these questions, but I do know a few things.
The first is that not every character in these violent stories stuck with the script. After Jephthah sacrificed his daughter as a burnt offering in exchange for God’s aid in battle, the young women of Israel engaged in a public act of grief marking the injustice. The text reports, “From this comes the Israelite tradition that each year the young women of Israel go out for four days to commemorate the daughter of Jephthah” (Judges 11:39–40). While the men moved on to fight another battle, the women stopped to acknowledge that something terrible had happened here, and with what little social and political power they had, they protested—every year for four days. They refused to let the nation forget what it had done in God’s name. In another story, a woman named Rizpah, one of King Saul’s concubines, suffered the full force of the monarchy’s cruelty when King David agreed to hand over two of her sons to be hanged by the Gibeonites in an effort to settle a long, bloody dispute between the factions believed to be the cause of widespread famine across the land. A sort of biblical Antigone, Rizpah guarded her sons’ bodies from birds and wild beasts for weeks, until at last the rain came and they could be buried. Word of her tragic stand spread across the kingdom and inspired David to pause to grieve the violence his house had wrought (2 Samuel 21). Even the prophetess Deborah, herself a legendary warrior, included in her victory song an acknowledgment of the defeated general’s mother, whom Deborah imagined peering from the lattice of her window as she awaited her son’s return, wondering, “Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why is the clatter of his chariots delayed?” (Judges 5:28). Deborah’s portrait of the enemy is far from sympathetic—it reads more like a taunt, really—but it nevertheless broadens the narrative scope of the typical biblical war story to include the experiences of women.
The point is, if you pay attention to the women, a more complex history of Israel’s conquests emerges. Their stories invite the reader to consider the human cost of violence and patriarchy, and in that sense prove instructive to all who wish to work for a better world. Of the Bible’s texts of terror, theology professor and poet Nicola Slee wrote, “We will listen, however painful the hearing . . . until there is not one last woman remaining who is a victim of violence.”13 It’s not always clear what we are meant to learn from the Bible’s most troubling stories, but if we simply look away, we learn nothing.
In one of the most moving spiritual exercises of my adult faith, an artist friend and I created a liturgy of lament honoring the victims of the texts of terror. On a chilly December evening, we sat around the coffee table in my living room and lit candles in memory of Hagar, Jephthah’s daughter, the concubine from Judges 19, and Tamar, the daughter of King David who was raped by her half brother. We read their stories, along with poetry and reflections composed by modern-day women who have survived gender-based violence. My friend built a diorama out of a pinewood box that featured five faceless wooden figures, huddled together beneath a ring of barbed wire, their silhouettes reflected on the backboard by pages cut from a book. Across the top of the box were printed the words of Christ—“As you have done unto the least of these, so you have done to me.”
I recount the experience in my book A Year of Biblical Womanhood, and have since connected with pastors and worship leaders who have incorporated similar liturgies into their services, often during the season of Lent, when, among other things, Christians remember and repent of all evil done in God’s name. Once, when I was speaking as a guest at a church in the Midwest, someone had arranged and lit five candles on the altar, four in honor of the biblical women we commemorated in our ceremony, and one in honor of all the women, past and present, who share in the sad solidarity of their suffering. The gesture moved me to tears.
If the Bible’s texts of terror compel us to face with fresh horror and resolve the ongoing oppression and exploitation of women, then perhaps these stories do not trouble us in vain. Perhaps we can use them for some good.
The second thing I know is that we are not as different from the ancient Israelites as we would like to believe. “It was a violent and tribal culture,” people like to say of ancient Israel to explain away its actions in Canaan. But, as Joshua Ryan Butler astutely observed, when it comes to civilian casualties, “we tend to hold the ancients to a much higher standard than we hold ourselves.”14 In the time it took me to write this chapter, nearly one thousand civilians were killed in airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, many of them women and children. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki took hundreds of thousands of lives in World War II, and far more civilians died in the Korean War and Vietnam War than American soldiers. Even though America is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, it takes in less than half of 1 percent of the world’s refugees, and drone warfare has left many thousands of families across the Middle East terrorized.15 This is not to excuse Israel’s violence, because modern-day violence is also bad, nor is it to trivialize debates over just war theory and US involvement in various historical conflicts, which are complex issues far beyond the scope of this book. Rather, it ought to challenge us to engage the Bible’s war stories with a bit more humility and introspection, willing to channel some of our horror over atrocities past into questioning elements of the war machines that still roll on today.
Finally, the last thing I know is this: If the God of the Bible is true, and if God became flesh and blood in the person of Jesus Christ, and if Jesus Christ is—as theologian Greg Boyd put it—“the revelation that culminates and supersedes all others,”16 then God would rather die by violence than commit it. The cross makes this plain. On the cross, Christ not only bore the brunt of human cruelty and bloodlust and fear, he remained faithful to the nonviolence he taught and modeled throughout his ministry. Boyd called it “the Crucifixion of the Warrior God,” and in a two-volume work by that name asserted that “on the cross, the diabolic violent warrior god we have all-too-frequently pledged allegiance to has been forever repudiated.”17 On the cross, Jesus chose to align himself with victims of suffering rather than the inflictors of it.
At the heart of the doctrine of the incarnation is the stunning claim that Jesus is what God is like. “No one has ever seen God,” declared John in his gospel, “but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known” (John 1:18, emphasis added). The New American Standard Bible says, “The only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him” (emphasis added). So to whatever extent God owes us an explanation for the Bible’s war stories, Jesus is that explanation. And Christ the King won his kingdom without war.
The oldest hymn of the church puts a new spin on the traditional war ballad. In it the Christian sings of Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used
to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
(PHILIPPIANS 2:6–11)
Citing this hymn, the apostle Paul instructed Christians to “have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus” (2:5 NASB).
Jesus turned the war story on its head. Instead of being born to nobility, he was born in a manger, to an oppressed people in occupied territory. Instead of charging into Jerusalem on a warhorse, he arrived on a lumbering donkey. Instead of rallying troops for battle, he washed his disciples’ feet. According to the apostle Paul, these are the tales followers of Jesus should be telling—with our words, with our art, and with our lives.
Of course, this still leaves us to grapple with the competing biblical portraits of God as the instigator of violence and God as the repudiator of violence. Boyd argued that God serves as a sort of “heavenly missionary” who temporarily accommodates the brutal practices and beliefs of various cultures without condoning them in order to gradually influence God’s people toward justice. Insofar as any divine portrait reflects a character at odds with the cross, he said, it must be considered accommodation.18 It’s an interesting theory, though I confess I’m only halfway through Boyd’s 1,492 pages, so I’ve yet to fully consider it. (I know I can’t read my way out of this dilemma, but that won’t keep me from trying.)
The truth is, I’ve yet to find an explanation for the Bible’s war stories that I find completely satisfying. If we view this through Occam’s razor and choose the simplest solution to the problem, we might conclude that the ancient Israelites invented a deity to justify their conquests and keep their people in line. As such, then, the Bible isn’t a holy book with human fingerprints; it’s an entirely human construction, responsible for more vice than virtue.
There are days when that’s what I believe, days when I mumble through the hymns and creeds at church because I’m not convinced they say anything true. And then there are days when the Bible pulls me back with a numinous force I can only regard as divine, days when Hagar and Deborah and Rahab reach out from the page, grab me by the face, and say, “Pay attention. This is for you.”
I’m in no rush to patch up these questions. God save me from the day when stories of violence, rape, and ethnic cleansing inspire within me anything other than revulsion. I don’t want to become a person who is unbothered by these texts, and if Jesus is who he says he is, then I don’t think he wants me to be either. There are parts of the Bible that inspire, parts that perplex, and parts that leave you with an open wound. I’m still wrestling, and like Jacob, I will wrestle until I am blessed. God hasn’t let go of me yet.
War is a dreadful and storied part of the human experience, and Scripture captures many shades of it—from the chest-thumping of the victors to the anguished cries of victims. There is ammunition there for those seeking religious justification for violence, and solidarity for all the mothers like Rizpah who just want an end to it. For those of us who prefer to keep the realities of war at a safe, sanitized distance, and who enjoy the luxury of that choice, the Bible’s war stories force a confrontation with the darkness.
Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.