New Testament Violence Quotes

We think ourselves possessed, or at least we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact. There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny, or to doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself, it is punished by boring through the tongue with a red-hot poker. In America it is not much better; even in our Massachusetts, which, I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemies upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any arguments for investigation into the divine authority of those books? Who would run the risk of translating Volney's Recherches Nouvelles? Who would run the risk of translating Dupuis? But I cannot enlarge upon this subject, though I have it much at heart. I think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human mind. Books that cannot bear examination, certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws... but as long as they continue in force as laws, the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its investigations. I wish they were repealed. {Letter to Thomas Jefferson, January 23, 1825}

We can of course argue over what the Bible says about homosexuality, but one thing is utterly clear: Jesus teaches us to love people, not to hate them, not to make them feel hated, and not to stand by while that is happening. From the perspective of the New Testament there simply is no room for doubt on this. We know exactly where Jesus stands in this regard. He stands on the side of the least, the condemned, the vulnerable.

The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be “revolutionary” now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions. This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims. ... The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc. Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition. Faithful observance of the moral law is perceived as complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious... Neo-paganism locates happiness in the unlimited satisfaction of desires, which means the suppression of all prohibitions. This idea acquires a semblance of credibility in the limited domain of consumer goods, whose prodigious multiplication, thanks to technological progress, weakens certain mimetic rivalries. The weakening of mimetic rivalries confers an appearance of plausibility, but only that, on the stance that turns the moral law into an instrument of repression and persecution.

when Jesus tells His followers not to resist evil people, He uses a word that suggests a violent resistance. In fact, New Testament scholar N. T. Wright translated the verse “Don’t use violence to resist evil” to remove all ambiguity.6 Put simply, when Jesus says, “Do not resist the one who is evil,” He specifically prohibits using violence to resist evil.

and so made Jesus Christ nothing but the restorer and preacher of pure natural religion; thereby doing violence to the whole tenour of the New Testament.

One of the great tragedies and errors of the way people have understood the Bible has been the assumption that what people did in the Old Testament must have been right ‘because it’s in the Bible’. It has justified violence, enslavement, abuse and suppression of women, murderous prejudice against gay people; it has justified all manner of things we now cannot but as Christians regard as evil. But they are not there in the Bible because God is telling us, ‘That’s good.’ They are there because God is telling us, ‘You need to know that that is how some people responded. You need to know that when I speak to human beings things can go very wrong as well as very wonderfully.’ God tells us, ‘You need to know that when I speak, it isn’t always simple to hear, because of what human beings are like.’ We need, in other words, to guard against the temptation to take just a bit of the whole story and treat it as somehow a model for our own behaviour. Christians have often been down that road and it has not been a pretty sight. We need rather to approach the Bible as if it were a parable of Jesus. The whole thing is a gift, a challenge and an invitation into a new world, seeing yourself afresh and more truthfully.

The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent’s greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child’s own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing—as every parent fears—that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father’s guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader.

It is often argued that the greatest tragedy of the Old Testament was not man’s exile from the Garden of Eden, but the fall of the Tower of Babel. For Adam and Eve, though cast from grace, could still speak and comprehend the language of angels. But when men in their hubris decided to build a path to heaven, God confounded their understanding. He divided and confused them and scattered them about the face of the earth. ‘What was lost at Babel was not merely human unity, but the original language – something primordial and innate, perfectly understandable and lacking nothing in form or content. Biblical scholars call it the Adamic language. Some think it is Hebrew. Some think it is a real but ancient language that has been lost to time. Some think it is a new, artificial language that we ought to invent. Some think French fulfils this role; some think English, once it’s finished robbing and morphing, might.

Reading on a trajectory thus means recognizing that what we find in the New Testament is not a final unchangeable eternal ethic, but rather the first major concrete steps away from the dominant religious and political narrative which understood oppression and violence as virtuous, and towards a better way rooted in compassion.

If we ask a random orthodox religious person, what is the best religion, he or she would proudly claim his or her own religion to be the best. A Christian would say Christianity is the best, a Muslim would say Islam is the best, a Jewish would say Judaism is the best and a Hindu would say Hinduism is the best. It takes a lot of mental exercise to get rid of such biases.

This sort of reading of the Apocalypse was nowhere more eloquently performed than in the simple anthem of the U.S. Civil Rights movement: “We Shall Overcome.” The word “overcome” was taken from the King James Version’s rendering of the verb nikan, used pervasively in Revelation and translated in most modern versions as “conquer.”33 The word is used in the refrain of promise that concludes each of the letters to the seven churches. For example, “To him that over-cometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne” (3:21, KJV). As freedom marchers from the black churches joined hands and sang, “We shall overcome someday,” they were expressing their faith that, despite their lack of conventional political power, their witness to the truth would prevail over violence and oppression.

I have proposed that such appropriation necessarily entails a complex fourfold task: reading the individual witnesses closely, reflecting synthetically about the common elements in their moral visions, considering the hermeneutical procedures that we employ in bringing the texts to bear upon our own situation, and performing the texts in Christian community. In order to illustrate how this procedure might work in practice, I have offered a series of discernments about five test cases: violence, divorce, homosexuality, anti-Judaism, and abortion.

(...)because Miss Temple has generally something to say which is newer than my own reflections; her language is singularly agreeable to me, and the information she communicates is often just what I wished to gain.” “Well, then, with Miss Temple you are good?” “Yes, in a passive way: I make no effort; I follow as inclination guides me. There is no merit in such goodness.” “A great deal: you are good to those who are good to you. It is all I ever desire to be. If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should—so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.” “You will change your mind, I hope, when you grow older: as yet you are but a little untaught girl.” “But I feel this, Helen; I must dislike those who, whatever I do to please them, persist in disliking me; I must resist those who punish me unjustly. It is as natural as that I should love those who show me affection, or submit to punishment when I feel it is deserved.” “Heathens and savage tribes hold that doctrine, but Christians and civilised nations disown it.” “How? I don’t understand.” “It is not violence that best overcomes hate—nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.” “What then?” “Read the New Testament, and observe what Christ says, and how He acts; make His word your rule, and His conduct your example.” “What does He say?” “Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate you and despitefully use you.

(Inevitably, someone raises the question about World War II: What if Christians had refused to fight against Hitler? My answer is a counterquestion: What if the Christians in Germany had emphatically refused to fight for Hitler, refused to carry out the murders in concentration camps?) The long history of Christian “just wars” has wrought suffering past all telling, and there is no end in sight. As Yoder has suggested, Niebuhr’s own insight about the “irony of history” ought to lead us to recognize the inadequacy of our reason to shape a world that tends toward justice through violence. Might it be that reason and sad experience could disabuse us of the hope that we can approximate God’s justice through killing? According to the guideline I have proposed, reason must be healed and taught by Scripture, and our experience must be transformed by the renewing of our minds in conformity with the mind of Christ. Only thus can our warring madness be overcome. This would mean, practically speaking, that Christians would have to relinquish positions of power and influence insofar as the exercise of such positions becomes incompatible with the teaching and example of Jesus. This might well mean, as Hauerwas has perceived, that the church would assume a peripheral status in our culture, which is deeply committed to the necessity and glory of violence. The task of the church then would be to tell an alternative story, to train disciples in the disciplines necessary to resist the seductions of violence, to offer an alternative home for those who will not worship the Beast. If the church is to be a Scripture-shaped community, it will find itself reshaped continually into a closer resemblance to the socially marginal status of Matthew’s nonviolent countercultural community. To articulate such a theological vision for the church at the end of the twentieth century may be indeed to take most seriously what experience is telling us: the secular polis has no tolerance for explicitly Christian witness and norms. It is increasingly the case in Western culture that Christians can participate in public governance only insofar as they suppress their explicitly Christian motivations. Paradoxically, the Christian community might have more impact upon the world if it were less concerned about appearing reasonable in the eyes of the world and more concerned about faithfully embodying the New Testament’s teaching against violence. Let it be said clearly, however, that the reasons for choosing Jesus’ way of peacemaking are not prudential. In calculable terms, this way is sheer folly. Why do we choose the way of nonviolent love of enemies? If our reasons for that choice are shaped by the New Testament, we are motivated not by the sheer horror of war, not by the desire for saving our own skins and the skins of our children (if we are trying to save our skins, pacifism is a very poor strategy), not by some general feeling of reverence for human life, not by the naive hope that all people are really nice and will be friendly if we are friendly first. No, if our reasons for choosing nonviolence are shaped by the New Testament witness, we act in simple obedience to the God who willed that his own Son should give himself up to death on a cross. We make this choice in the hope and anticipation that God’s love will finally prevail through the way of the cross, despite our inability to see how this is possible. That is the life of discipleship to which the New Testament repeatedly calls us. When the church as a community is faithful to that calling, it prefigures the peaceable kingdom of God in a world wracked by violence.

But I feel this, Helen; I must dislike those who, whatever I do to please them, persist in disliking me; I must resist those who punish me unjustly. It is as natural as that I should love those who show me affection, or submit to punishment when I feel it is deserved.” “Heathens and savage tribes hold that doctrine, but Christians and civilised nations disown it.” “How? I don’t understand.” “It is not violence that best overcomes hate—nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.” “What then?” “Read the New Testament, and observe what Christ says, and how He acts; make His word your rule, and His conduct your example.

in A Moral Vision of the New Testament. Hays says, “This means that for the foreseeable future we must find ways to live within the church in a situation of serious moral disagreement while still respecting one another as brother and sisters in Christ. If the church is going to start practicing the discipline of exclusion from the community, there are other issues far more important than homosexuality where we should begin to draw a line in the dirt: violence and materialism, for example.” [117] I am convinced that how the biblical prohibitions apply to monogamous gay relationships is indeed a disputable matter and that the teaching of Romans 14-15 should guide our response.

Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust. With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.

I am now going to turn to a couple of the ways in which the New Testament depicts significant silence. One of the most dramatic of these moments is Jesus’ silence before his judges, before the High Priest and the Governor. The gospel narratives show us how the High Priest or Pontius Pilate urge Jesus to speak: ‘Why don’t you answer me?’ says Pilate, ‘Don’t you know that I have the power to crucify you or to release you?’ And we’re told in St John’s Gospel that when Jesus gives no answer to the charges made against him, Pilate wonders, he is ‘amazed’. Now the odd thing in these stories is that Jesus is precisely in the position of someone having his voice taken away; he is a person who has been reduced to silence by the violence and injustice of the world he is in. But then, mysteriously, he turns this around. His silence, his complete presence and openness, his refusal to impose his will in a struggle, becomes a threat to those who have power–or think they have power. ‘For God’s sake, talk to me!’ says the High Priest, more or less (‘ I adjure you in the name of the living God, tell us!’). And Pilate’s wonderment, bafflement and fear in the face of Jesus’ silence are a reminder that, in this case, Jesus as it were takes the powerlessness that has been forced on him and turns it around so that his silence becomes a place in the world where the mystery of God is present. In a small way, that’s what happens when we seek to be truly and fully silent or let ourselves be silenced by the mystery of God. We become a ‘place’ where the mystery of God happens.

How could the crusaders be motivated by love and piety, considering all the brutal violence and bloodshed they committed? Not only is such a question anachronistic—violence was part and parcel of the medieval world—but centuries before Islam, Christian theologians had concluded that “the so called charity texts of the New Testament that preached passivism and forgiveness, not retaliation, were firmly defined as applying to the beliefs and behavior of the private person” and not the state, explains historian Christopher Tyerman. Christ himself distinguished between political and spiritual obligations (Matt. 22:21). He praised a Roman centurion without calling on him to “repent” by resigning from one of the most brutal militaries of history (Matt. 8: 5–13). When a group of soldiers asked John the Baptist how they should repent, he advised them always to be content with their army wages (Luke 3:14). Paul urged Christians to pray for “kings and all that are in authority” (1 Tim. 2:2). In short, “there was no intrinsic contradiction in a doctrine of personal, individual forgiveness condoning certain forms of necessary public violence to ensure the security in which, in St. Paul’s phrase, Christians ‘may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty’ (1 Tim. 2:2).”27 Or as that chief articulator of “Just War” theory, Saint Augustine (d. 430), concluded, “It is the injustice of the opposing side, that lays on the wise man the duty to wage war.

Jesus himself remains an enigma. There have been interesting attempts to uncover the figure of the ‘historical’ Jesus, a project that has become something of a scholarly industry. But the fact remains that the only Jesus we really know is the Jesus described in the New Testament, which was not interested in scientifically objective history. There are no other contemporary accounts of his mission and death. We cannot even be certain why he was crucified. The gospel accounts indicate that he was thought to be the king of the Jews. He was said to have predicted the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven, but also made it clear that it was not of this world. In the literature of the Late Second Temple period, there had been hints that a few people were expecting a righteous king of the House of David to establish an eternal kingdom, and this idea seems to have become more popular during the tense years leading up to the war. Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius all note the importance of revolutionary religiosity, both before and after the rebellion.2 There was now keen expectation in some circles of a meshiah (in Greek, christos), an ‘anointed’ king of the House of David, who would redeem Israel. We do not know whether Jesus claimed to be this messiah – the gospels are ambiguous on this point.3 Other people rather than Jesus himself may have made this claim on his behalf.4 But after his death some of his followers had seen him in visions that convinced them that he had been raised from the tomb – an event that heralded the general resurrection of all the righteous when God would inaugurate his rule on earth.5 Jesus and his disciples came from Galilee in northern Palestine. After his death they moved to Jerusalem, probably to be on hand when the kingdom arrived, since all the prophecies declared that the temple would be the pivot of the new world order.6 The leaders of their movement were known as ‘the Twelve’: in the kingdom, they would rule the twelve tribes of the reconstituted Israel.7 The members of the Jesus movement worshipped together every day in the temple,8 but they also met for communal meals, in which they affirmed their faith in the kingdom’s imminent arrival.9 They continued to live as devout, orthodox Jews. Like the Essenes, they had no private property, shared their goods equally, and dedicated their lives to the last days.10 It seems that Jesus had recommended voluntary poverty and special care for the poor; that loyalty to the group was to be valued more than family ties; and that evil should be met with non-violence and love.11 Christians should pay their taxes, respect the Roman authorities, and must not even contemplate armed struggle.12 Jesus’s followers continued to revere the Torah,13 keep the Sabbath,14 and the observance of the dietary laws was a matter of extreme importance to them.15 Like the great Pharisee Hillel, Jesus’s older contemporary, they taught a version of the Golden Rule, which they believed to be the bedrock of the Jewish faith: ‘So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the message of the Law and the Prophets.

We can understand why one of the titles given to Jesus is that of ‘prophet.’ Jesus is the last and greatest of the prophets, the one who sums them up and goes further than all of them. He is the prophet of the last, but also of the best, chance. With him there takes place a shift that is both tiny and gigantic – a shift that follows on directly from the Old Testament but constitutes a decisive break as well. This is the complete elimination of the sacrificial for the first time – the end of divine violence and the explicit revelation of all that has gone before. It calls for a complete change of emphasis and a spiritual metamorphosis without precedent in the whole history of mankind. It also amounts to an absolute simplification of the relations between human beings, in so far as all the false differences between doubles are annulled – a simplification in the sense in which we speak of an algebraic simplification. Throughout the texts of the Old Testament it was impossible to conclude the deconstruction of myths, rituals and law since the plenary revelation of the founding murder had not yet taken place. The divinity may be to some extent stripped of violence, but not completely so. That is why there is still an indeterminate and indistinct future, in which the resolution of the problem by human means alone – the face-to-face reconciliation that ought to result when people are alerted to the stupidity and uselessness of symmetrical violence – remains confused to a certain extent with the hope of a new epiphany of violence that is distinctively divine in origin, a ‘Day of Yahweh’ that would combine the paroxysm of God’s anger with a no less God-given reconciliation. However remarkably the prophets progress toward a precise understanding of what it is that structures religion and culture, the Old Testament never tips over into the complete rationality that would dispense with this hope of a purgation by violence and would give up requiring God to take the apocalyptic solution by completely liquidating the ‘evil’ in order to ensure the happiness of the chosen.

To understand the New Testament we need to understand that religious past, in order to recognize what it is protesting against. Properly interpreting the New Testament - not as detached scholars but as followers of Jesus and his way - thus involves recognizing the redemptive trajectory it sets away from religious violence, and then continuing to develop and move forward along that same trajectory ourselves. In other words, we cannot stop at the place the New Testament got to, but must recognize where it was headed. A clear example of this can be seen in the institution of slavery: The New Testament takes major steps away from slavery, encouraging slaves to gain their freedom if possible (1 Cor 7:21), counseling masters to treat their slaves as Christ treats them (Eph 6:9), and, most significantly, declaring that in Christ there is “no slave or free,” that is, no concept of class or superiority (Gal 3:28). While we can recognize here a movement away from slavery that set a trajectory which would eventually lead to the complete abolition of the institution of slavery centuries later, we do not see the New Testament directly condemning slavery or calling for its abolishment. Masters are not told to give up their slaves as Christians, but simply to treat them well. Slaves are not encouraged to participate in an “underground railroad” to gain their freedom, but instead are told to submit - even in the face of the cruelty, oppression, and violence that characterized slavery in the ancient Greco-Roman world at the time. If we read the New Testament as a storehouse of eternal principles, representing a “frozen in time” ethic, where we can simply flip open a page and find what the timeless “biblical” view on any particular issue is - as so many people read the Bible today - then we would need to conclude that the institution of slavery has God’s approval in the New Testament, and that we should therefore support and maintain it today. This is in fact exactly how many American slave-owning Christians did read the Bible in the past. Yet all of us would agree today that slavery is immoral.

The other problem with empathy is that it is too parochial to serve as a force for a universal consideration of people’s interests. Mirror neurons notwithstanding, empathy is not a reflex that makes us sympathetic to everyone we lay eyes upon. It can be switched on and off, or thrown into reverse, by our construal of the relationship we have with a person. Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity, and communal solidarity. Though empathy can be spread outward by taking other people’s perspectives, the increments are small, Batson warns, and they may be ephemeral.71 To hope that the human empathy gradient can be flattened so much that strangers would mean as much to us as family and friends is utopian in the worst 20th-century sense, requiring an unattainable and dubiously desirable quashing of human nature.72 Nor is it necessary. The ideal of the expanding circle does not mean that we must feel the pain of everyone else on earth. No one has the time or energy, and trying to spread our empathy that thinly would be an invitation to emotional burnout and compassion fatigue.73 The Old Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following ideal: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them. What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses. But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary. Empathy, like love, is in fact not all you need. SELF-CONTROL

Not all monotheisms are exactly the same at the moment. They're all based on the same illusion. They're all plagiarisms of each other, but there is one in particular that at the moment is proposing a serious menace not just to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but to quite a lot of other freedoms too. And this is the religion that exhibits the horrible trio of self-hatred, self-righteousness, and self-pity. I am talking about militant Islam. Globally, it's a gigantic power. It controls an enormous amount of oil wealth, several large countries and states, and with an enormous fortune it's pumping the ideologies of Wahhabism and Salafism around the world, poisoning societies where it goes, ruining the minds of children, stultifying the young in its madrassas, training people in violence, making a cult of death and suicide and murder. That's what it does globally. It's quite strong. In our societies it poses as a cringing minority, whose faith you might offend, who deserves all the protection that a small and vulnerable group might need. Now, it makes quite large claims for itself, doesn't it? It says it's the Final Revelation. It says that God spoke to one illiterate businessman in the Arabian Peninsula three times through an archangel, and that the resultant material—which as you can see as you read it is largely plagiarized ineptly from the Old and The New Testament—is to be accepted as the Final Revelation and as the final and unalterable one, and that those who do not accept this revelation are fit to be treated as cattle infidels, potential chattel, slaves and victims. Well, I tell you what, I don't think Muhammad ever heard those voices. I don't believe it. And the likelihood that I am right—as opposed to the likelihood that a businessman who couldn't read had bits of the Old and The New Testament re-dictated to him by an archangel—I think puts me much more near the position of being objectively correct. But who is the one under threat? The person who promulgates this and says I'd better listen because if I don't I'm in danger, or me who says, "No, I think this is so silly you can even publish a cartoon about it"? And up go the placards and the yells and the howls and the screams—this is in London, this is in Toronto, this is in New York, it's right in our midst now—"Behead those who cartoon Islam." Do they get arrested for hate speech? No. Might I get in trouble for saying what I just said about the prophet Muhammad? Yes, I might. Where are your priorities, ladies and gentlemen? You're giving away what is most precious in your own society, and you're giving it away without a fight, and you're even praising the people who want to deny you the right to resist it. Shame on you while you do this. Make the best use of the time you've got left.

Rather, she writes about violence from the perspective of its victims: How can we point to the eucharistic bread and say “this is my body” as long as women’s bodies are battered, raped, sterilized, mutilated, prostituted, and used to male ends?…As in the past so still today men fight their wars on the battlefields of our bodies, making us the targets of their physical or spiritual violence. Therefore, the ekklsia of women must reclaim women’s bodies as the “image and body of Christ.” It must denounce all violence against women as sacrilege and maintain women’s moral power and accountability to decide our own spiritual welfare, one that encompasses body and soul, heart and womb.286

The question for her is not whether to exercise violence but how to survive it, how to denounce it in a way that will effectively set women free from its destructive effects.

Second, we must be wary of attempts to use one mode of appeal to Scripture to override the witness of the New Testament in another mode. Niebuhr, as we have seen, engages in this sort of hermeneutical trumping of the text in “The Relevance of an Impossible Ethical Ideal,” when he argues that fidelity to the ideal of love exemplified in Jesus sometimes requires us to use violence to seek justice; thus, adherence to Jesus’ love ideal requires rejection (in practice) of Jesus’ explicit but unrealistic teaching against violence in the Sermon on the Mount. A community that has been taught to see the world through Matthew’s eyes, however, will sense that something has gone awry here. In fact, Niebuhr’s argument is finally a sophisticated dodge of Jesus’ call to costly discipleship, allowing us to call Jesus “Lord, Lord,” without doing what he commands.

One of the purposes for treating a range of different issues is to show that the decisions reached are not based on ad hoc prooftexting; rather, they represent the coherent outworking of a considered set of judgments about the way in which the New Testament ought to form the life of the church. One reason that appeals to the authority of Scripture often seem unconvincing is that the church has been inconsistent in shaping its life according to Scripture. For example, some voices in the church have insisted stoutly on the normative authority of a few texts dealing with sexual morality while ignoring or finessing equally clear New Testament teachings on possessions and violence. In such circumstances, is it any wonder that the church’s witness is ineffectual? If the church is to have any credibility, any integrity, we must seek to be a Scripture-shaped community in all respects, not merely on selected issues of our own preference.

Is it appropriate for those who profess to be followers of this gentle Shepherd to take up lethal weapons against enemies? More broadly, is it ever God’s will for Christians to employ violence in defense of justice? The New Testament contains important texts that seem to suggest that this question must be answered in the negative, but human experience presents us over and over again with situations that appear to require violent action to oppose evil. An often-cited example is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s agonized decision to participate in a plot to kill Hitler.

what are we to say about the Catholic military chaplain who administered mass to the Catholic bomber pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki in 1945? Father George Zabelka, chaplain for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb squadrons, later came to repent of his complicity in the bombing of civilians, but his account of that time is a stunning judgment on the church’s acquiescence in violence. To fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction of civilians was to fail as a Christian and as a priest as 1 see it…. I was there, and I’ll tell you that the operational moral atmosphere in the church in relation to mass bombing of enemy civilians was totally indifferent, silent, and corrupt at best—at worst it was religiously supportive of these activities by blessing those who did them…. Catholics dropped the A-bomb on top of the largest and first Catholic city in Japan. One would have thought that I, as a Catholic priest, would have spoken out against the atomic bombing of nuns. (Three orders of Catholic sisters were destroyed in Nagasaki that day.) One would have thought that I would have suggested that as a minimal standard of Catholic morality, Catholics shouldn’t bomb Catholic children. I didn’t. I, like the Catholic pilot of the Nagasaki plane, “The Great Artiste,” was heir to a Christianity that had for seventeen hundred years engaged in revenge, murder, torture, the pursuit of power, and prerogative violence, all in the name of our Lord. I walked through the ruins of Nagasaki right after the war and visited the place where once stood the Urakami Cathedral. I picked up a piece of censer from the rubble. When I look at it today I pray God forgives us for how we have distorted Christ’s teaching and destroyed his world by the distortion of that teaching. I was the Catholic chaplain who was there when this grotesque process that began with Constantine reached its lowest point—so far.4 It is difficult to read such accounts without recalling the story of Jesus’ weeping over Jerusalem, because “the things that make for peace” were hidden from their eyes (Luke 19:41

The Old Testament is characterized by the affirmation of God’s sovereign kingship. God is sovereign as Creator and Sustainer of the earth and all that dwell therein; as Judge; as Redeemer of Israel; and in relation to all nations and peoples. Yet the created turned against their Creator. The earth reels under the consequences of human rebellion. Human life is characterized by violence, injustice, unrighteousness and misery. Israel itself was shattered by cataclysmic wars, most notably the war with Babylon that destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, displaced the royal family and ended in the exile of her leading citizens, forcing Israel into a seemingly endless period of occupation at the hands of pagan armies—in Jesus’ time, the Roman legions. Thus the later Prophets are redolent with a deep yearning for salvation, in the deepest and most holistic sense of that word. In Isaiah, it is based on God’s forgiveness, and it is eternal. It includes deliverance from oppression and injustice, from guilt and death, from war and slavery and imprisonment and exile. It includes peace and justice and forgiveness. The promise is that salvation is coming—for Israel and ultimately for the world, for societies, for families and for individuals. This is where the hope of a Messiah is located in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Old Testament hope of salvation is not merely for an eternal salvation in which our disembodied souls are snatched from this vale of tears. Nor is it merely for physical justice while fellowship with the presence of God’s Holy Spirit is ignored. To the extent that Christians adopt any kind of body/soul, earth/heaven dualism we simply do not understand the message of Scripture—or of Jesus. God’s salvation is the kingdom of God, and it means that—at last—God has acted to deliver humanity and now reigns over all of life, and is present to and with us, and will be in the future. The New Testament will bring a greater emphasis on eternal life, but it will not negate the holistic message of deliverance. The only possible response to this good news is great joy!

Roman imperial theology is the oppositional context for much of early Christian language about Jesus. The gospels, Paul’s letters, and the other New Testament writings use the language of imperial theology, but apply it to Jesus. Jesus is the “Son of God”— the emperor is not. Jesus is the “Lord” - the emperor is not. Jesus is the “Savior” who brings “peace on earth” - the emperor is not. The contrast is not just a matter of language. The contrast is also about two different visions of how the world should be. The world of the domination system is a world of political oppression, economic exploitation, and chronic violence. The alternative is a world in which everyone has enough and no one needs to be afraid. The gospel phrase for this is the “kingdom of God,” the heart, as the gospels proclaim, of Jesus’s message.

During the Crusades, Christian warriors, fighting for their one true god, were busy slaying infidels—non-Christians—throughout the Holy Land. With little or no mercy, devout Christians imprisoned, tortured, and killed Moslems and Jews. Yet, what did these Christian believers hold to be true? They believed in the rightness of persecuting disbelievers in the one true god—the omnipotent and just god of the Old and New Testaments.

Sub-Christian? Some read the Old Testament as so much primitive groping and guesswork, which the New Testament sweeps away. But “God . . . spoke through the prophets” (Hebrews 1:1), of whom Moses was the greatest (see Deuteronomy 34:10-12); and his Commandments, given through Moses, set a moral and spiritual standard for living which is not superseded, but carries God’s authority forever. Note that Jesus’ twofold law of love, summarizing the Commandments, comes from Moses’ own God-taught elaboration of them (for that is what the Pentateuchal law-codes are). “Love your God” is from Deuteronomy 6:5, “love your neighbor” from Leviticus 19:18. It cannot be too much stressed that Old Testament moral teaching (as distinct from the Old Testament revelation of grace) is not inferior to that of the New Testament, let alone the conventional standards of our time. The barbarities of lawless sex, violence, and exploitation, cutthroat business methods, class warfare, disregard for one’s family, and the like are sanctioned only by our modern secular society. The supposedly primitive Old Testament, and the 3000-year-old Commandments in particular, are bulwarks against all these things. But (you say) doesn’t this sort of talk set the Old Testament above Christ? Can that be right? Surely teaching that antedates him by a millennium and a quarter must be inferior to his? Surely the Commandments are too negative, always and only saying “don’t . . .”? Surely we must look elsewhere for full Christian standards? Fair queries; but there is a twofold answer. First, Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:17) that he came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it; that is, to be, and help others to be, all that God in the Commandments had required. What Jesus destroyed was inadequate expositions of the law, not the law itself (Matthew 5:21-48; 15:1-9; etc.). By giving truer expositions, he actually republished the law. The Sermon on the Mount itself consists of themes from the Decalogue developed in a Christian context. Second, the negative form of the Commandments has positive implications. “Where a sin is forbidden, the contrary duty is commanded” (Westminster Larger Catechism, question 99). The negative form was needed at Sinai (as in the West today) to curb current lawlessness which threatened both godliness and national life. But the positive content pointed up by Christ—loving God with all one’s powers, and one’s neighbor as oneself—is very clearly there, as we shall see.

As the riches from the slave trade from Africa to the New World poured forth to the Spaniards, to the Portuguese, to the Dutch, and lastly to the English, the biblical passage would be summoned to condemn the children of Ham and to justify the kidnap and enslavement of millions of human beings, and the violence against them. From the time of the Middle Ages, some interpreters of the Old Testament described Ham as bearing black skin and translated Noah’s curse against him as a curse against the descendants of Ham, against all humans with dark skin, the people who the Europeans told themselves had been condemned to enslavement by God’s emissary, Noah himself.

Jesus told his disciples, 'I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth' (Matthew 28:18). He confers a derived authority on his male and female image bearers as his coregents--not to rule over each other, but to rule the earth to ensure both welfare and flourishing. Equality is a foundational truth that extends to every human being and is rooted firmly in our image-bearer identity. The Bible doesn't nuance or debate equality, but sets it in stone. Equality distinguishes the kingdom of God from kingdoms of this world that rank, rate, discriminate, and privilege some human beings over others. No second class rating, no marginalization, oppression, or mistreatment can alter this rock solid truth, for it is grounded in our unchanging God. Both concepts were distorted by the fall, along with everything else. God's image bearers turned authority and ruling on one another instead of jointly pursuing God's glory for the benefit of all creation. Equality went missing from human relationships as the human race plunged into self-seeking, murder, violence, power, and oppression. Evidence of how far the human race has fallen is rampant in the appalling oppression and violence perpetrated against women throughout the world. The New Testament restores authority and equality in the teachings of Jesus and the writings of Paul in ways that are truly 'not of this world.' Jesus did not come to affirm or make slight alterations to the world's way of doing things. He came to rebuild both load-bearing walls--to reconnect a lost and fallen humanity to our Creator and to reestablish the Blessed Alliance between men and women. His construction methods take us down a different, countercultural path.

In such instances a person serves not only as a representative but is acting in the stead of the other. In such passages as 2 Corinthians 5:15, “He died for all,” and Galatians 3:13 where it is said that Christ became a curse on our behalf, the idea of substitution is demanded and “only violence to the context can get rid of it.

So, what does the potter do? He stops the wheel and takes the clay into his hands. He forms a new ball of clay out of the old. He returns the clay back to a state of useful formlessness. The potter returns the clay to this preformed state in order to remake it.

What we do find in the Bible is the progression of instruction. The Old Testament gave guidance to protect slaves and give them more dignity. This made Israel distinct from other nations. The New Testament moves one step farther, declaring that regardless of whether one is the slave or the one the slave serves, they are equals, brothers and sisters in Jesus.

Slavery is evil. God did not create it or endorse it. God specified the death penalty for slave traders in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament he clearly said it is sin. The Bible verses on slavery guide us in how to bring better treatment to people caught in a system that was established by humans. • Most of ancient slavery in the time of the Old Testament and New Testament was different from the slavery we are familiar with in modern times. Back then people were bought as servants, the money going to pay a person’s debt. Poverty forced others into servanthood just to stay alive. This slavery, or servanthood,

Slavery is evil. God did not create it or endorse it. God specified the death penalty for slave traders in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament he clearly said it is sin. The Bible verses on slavery guide us in how to bring better treatment to people caught in a system that was established by humans. • Most of ancient slavery in the time of the Old Testament and New Testament was different from the slavery we are familiar with in modern times. Back then people were bought as servants, the money going to pay a person’s debt. Poverty forced others into servanthood just to stay alive. This slavery, or servanthood, was not race based.

At the same time as suggesting the language game we clearly do not have a change in the name of God as our only way to think in New Testament terms of an earth at peace. There is Jesus! It is very hard to attribute violence to the originator of the gospel, of the good news of God’s forgiveness and love, of divine healing and welcome. Despite the fact that people refer to his action in the temple in the last days of his life as an exceptional yet conclusive ‘proof’ of Jesus’ use of violence no serious bible scholar would look on these actions divorced from his whole ministry. And because of that we have to see them as a conscious and deliberate prophetic sign-action, taking control of the temple for a brief period to show how it stood in contrast to the direct relationship with God which he proclaimed, and to make the point with a definitive emphasis. The whip he plaits in John is used to drive the animals, probably with the sound of the crack alone. No one is attacked. No one gets hurt. And very soon the situation reverts to the status quo: the authorities take back control of the temple and decide on Jesus’ suffering and death in order to control him. Overall the event is to be seen as Jesus placing himself purposely and calculatedly in the cross-hairs for the sake of the truth, much rather than doing harm to anyone else. The consequences of his actions were indeed ‘the cross’, and supremely in the situation of crucifixion Jesus does not invoke retaliation on his enemies, or threaten those who reject redemption; rather he prays for their forgiveness. No, Jesus’ whole life-story makes him unmistakably a figure of transcendent nonviolence. The problem lies elsewhere, with the way the cross is interpreted within the framework of a violent God. It is unfathomably ironic that the icon of human non-retaliation, Jesus’ cross, gets turned in the tradition into a supreme piece of vengeance—God’s ‘just’ punishment of Jesus in our place. My book, Cross Purposes, is about the way this tradition got formed and it represents just one of a constant stream of writing, gathering force at the end of the last century and continuing into this, questioning how this could be the meaning of the central symbol of Christianity.2 I think the vigor of that question can only continue to grow, while the nonviolence of Jesus’ response must at the same time stand out in greater and greater relief, in its own right and for its own sake. And for that same reason the argument at hand, of ‘No-name’ for a nonviolent God, can only be strengthened when we highlight the nonviolence of Jesus against the traditional violent concept of ‘God’. Now

Now if we turn to the Book of Revelation—which we saw as a cause of offense in its apparent celebration of a God of violence—we have to say in all honesty that it is in fact a nonviolent New Testament writing, and profoundly so. ‘The Lamb’ is the general symbolic name given to Jesus in the book, mentioned 29 times, an image of nonviolence and the book’s undisputed hero. The essence of the Lamb is not to use violence. When we first hear of it is ‘standing as if it had been slaughtered’ (5:6): it does not fight, it is slaughtered, and it continues exactly ‘as if it were something slaughtered (i.e. it does not lose this identity). Furthermore its followers do not fight, they also are killed. We learn that the Lamb holds the key to human history, opening its seals to reveal its purpose and meaning, including its intense inner violence. The Lamb is able to do this because it represents a completely different human / divine way of responding, other than that of violence. At the same time, precisely because of this revelation, all hell (literally) breaks out around the Lamb. The old world system—the Beast—does not remain indifferent to the introduction of a new way and the absolute challenge it makes, but reacts with continually redoubled violence. At the end of the book there is a final battle when the Beast and the kings of the earth with their armies are all slain by a figure called the Word of God, by the sword which comes from his mouth. But directly afterwards the new earth and the city of the Lamb welcome and heal these very kings and nations which have just been slain! The only figures not to be restored are the Beast and its prophet which represent the system of violence, the imperial order with its ideological apparatus of cult and worship. No doubt there is a powerful tonality of anger running through the book, against the oppression and murder that the Christian communities were then experiencing at the hands of the Roman Empire. And there is pretty clearly a sense of emotional release offered by the images of destruction and vengeance unleashed against the forces of oppression. But the final structure of the book is redemptive and life-giving, and that has to be admitted in any honest assessment. The duality then is not between a vengeful God and a gentle Jesus, or an initially gentle Jesus and then a violent one, but between an actual world and culture of violence and a core message of forgiveness and nonviolence. The early Christians were sorely oppressed by the former and seeking desperately to hang on to the latter. If they use language and symbolism derived from the former to restore hope in the substance of the latter then the tension is literary and poetic, rather than two moods or identities of God. The book of Revelation was intended to have a cathartic effect on emotion, in order that the Christians who read or heard it could arrive, in their minds and hearts, at the transformed perspective where they welcomed and blessed their enemies. In other words it was and is intended to be therapeutic.3 In contrast the split between Jesus and a God of punishment—which came to full growth in the Middle Ages—is ontological, and can only lead to a fundamental division in the Christian soul, with eternal love on the one hand, and eternal violence on the other. In other words, a spiritual schizophrenia. This

It would have been amazing enough if Jesus had said, "I always turn the other cheek when someone wrongs me," or "I refuse to return violence when violence is done to me." After all, Jesus is the Son of God, and we expect him to be nice. Unfortunately, Jesus commanded his disciples—us, those who presumed to follow him—to behave nonviolently. How do we get back at our enemies? "Love your enemies!" What are we to do when we are persecuted for following Jesus? "Pray for those who persecute you." Thus, we have many instances in the New Testament of people violating and killing the followers of Jesus. But we have not one single instance of any of his followers defending themselves against violence, except for Peter's inept, rebuked attempt at sword play. This consistent, right-to-the-end, to-the-point-of-death nonviolence of Jesus has been that which Jesus' followers have most attempted to modify. When it comes to violence in service of a good cause, we deeply wish Jesus had said otherwise. There are many rationales for the "just war," or for self-defense, capital punishment, abortion, national security, or military strength. None of them, you will note, is able to make reference to Jesus or to the words or deeds of any of his first followers. You can argue that violence is sometimes effective, or justified by the circumstances, or a possible means to some better end, or practiced by every nation on the face of the earth—but you can't drag Jesus into the argument with you. This has always been a source of annoyance and has provoked some fancy intellectual footwork on the part of those who desire to justify violence. Sorry, Jesus just won't cooperate.

The history of the centuries which followed Constantine unfolds the growth in worldliness and ambition of the clergy, both of the Eastern and Western Catholic churches, until they claimed entire dominion over the possessions and consciences of mankind, enforcing these claims with a violence and guile that knew no limits. It also reveals vistas here and there of the path of tribulation trodden by countless saints who, at all times, and in various places, have suffered all things at the hands of the dominant World-Church, rather than deny Christ or be turned back from following Him.

Rome rules by the power of violence, but the one who is the true King of kings and Lord of lords rules by virtue of his submission to death—precisely the opposite of armed violence against the empire. That is why he alone is worthy.

As in earlier times the literature of the Christians had been destroyed, and their histories written by their enemies, so in the 16th century the same thing was done again, and in view of the unbridled violence of language common at that time in religious controversy, it is more than ever necessary to search out whatever remains of their own writings and records.

SB: I think this is the recognition that something profound has taken place. There has been a new birth of consciousness.   RG: A new birth of consciousness, yes, because human consciousness is born in violence, through violence.   SB: Thus Joseph can say, "You meant it for ill, but God meant it for good."[36]   RG: “God meant it for good.” So in other words, you have the two religions that are, in a way, signified by the story of Joseph. In the end what Joseph says is that shift, that shift which must be represented in the First Testament. That's why the First Testament is so powerful, because it constantly demonstrates that shift in its greatest stories. I think you said something very profound in the Joseph story, "You meant it for ill, but God turned it to good." In other words, all your violence leads you to a higher stage of humanity. So in a way that would also be one of the reasons why even if the Joseph story is a late story in terms of literary production, it is placed very early in the Bible, because it announces what the Bible is about.   SB: The other thing about these stories is that you'll notice they give hope because none of the people in the Bible are perfect. If they were perfect we couldn't identify with them.   RG: For certain they're all human, because you feel it in the Joseph story too, when they find Joseph dressed as the most important guy at the funeral. Their temptation must be to turn him into a god there, to see him as a god. Not only is he the viceroy, but he also has food, which they don't have. So he's like a transcendental Joseph, but since we’re in the Jewish world here they don't divinize their brother.   SB: No idols.   RG: No idols, that's right.   SB: This could not have been told in Greece. RG: This could not have been told in Greece. That's for sure.   SB:

the New Testament highlights Jesus’s nonviolent response to violence as a pattern to follow more than any other aspect of His ministry.

The New Testament is ubiquitously clear: don’t retaliate with evil for evil; do good to those who hate you; embrace your enemy with a cross-shaped, unyielding divine love.

It is apparent that Jesus and the New Testament authors are simply not interested in trying to improve the ethical behavior of the people and governments of the world. In this sense it is fair to say that the New Testament doesn’t contain an ethic for humans in general, and perhaps even fair to say that the New Testament doesn’t espouse pacifism, in the sense that it doesn’t advocate non-violence for all people and as an end in-and-of itself. Jesus and the authors of the New Testament are rather exclusively focused on the call of disciples of Jesus to love enemies, which therefore rules out killing them. The very fact that Jesus established the ability to love like this to be the distinguishing mark of a child of God (Mt 5:44-5; Lk 6:35) indicates that he did not intend his command to function as a universal ethical principle.

In short, the coming of Christ changed how we worship, but not how we live. The moral law outlines God’s own character—his integrity, love, and faithfulness. And so everything the Old Testament says about loving our neighbor, caring for the poor, generosity with our possessions, social relationships, and commitment to our family is still in force. The New Testament continues to forbid killing or committing adultery, and all the sex ethic of the Old Testament is re-stated throughout the New Testament (Matt. 5:27–30; 1 Cor. 6:9–20; 1 Tim. 1:8–11). If the New Testament has reaffirmed a commandment, then it is still in force for us today.1

One of the most striking words in the New Testament is σπλαγχνίζοµαι–—splanchnizomai—compassion. In Greek class in seminary we learned it meant “shaking guts.

Viewed from one angle, Jesus’s entire ministry of peace was a colossal failure. But the resurrection changed everything for Him. And the resurrection changed everything for us. We no longer view the world through the dim mist of justice and reward, but through the bright lens of resurrection, where suffering leads to glory and slaughtered lambs rule the earth. Therefore, even if we fail to bring down dictators, our rock-solid hope is that God will take care of dictators in His own way, and He will carry out perfect vengeance in the end. God can use human agents to carry out His wrath on evil even today (Rom. 13:4), but nowhere in the New Testament does God use the church to be an agent of wrath. We are commanded unequivocally to love our enemies and trust that God will judge the wicked in His own timing.

It’s time that Christianity should be redefined by the world based upon the original teachings of Jesus, instead of the Old and New Testaments which have been interpreted, reinterpreted and distorted by all the Ecumenical Councils, i.e. the Church Councils.

Christ did to the Jewish orthodoxy, what Buddha did to the Hindu orthodoxy.

Jesus recognized that God within him and became Christ - so did Siddhartha Gautama and became Buddha - so did I - and so can you.

One reason that appeals to the authority of Scripture often seem unconvincing is that the church has been inconsistent in shaping its life according to Scripture. For example, some voices in the church have insisted stoutly on the normative authority of a few texts dealing with sexual morality while ignoring or finessing equally clear New Testament teachings on possessions and violence. In such circumstances, is it any wonder that the church’s witness is ineffectual? If the church is to have any credibility, any integrity, we must seek to be a Scripture-shaped community in all respects, not merely on selected issues of our own preference.

It is increasingly the case in Western culture that Christians can participate in public governance only insofar as they suppress their explicitly Christian motivations. Paradoxically, the Christian community might have more impact upon the world if it were less concerned about appearing reasonable in the eyes of the world and more concerned about faithfully embodying the New Testament’s teaching against violence.

endowed by the paper mill family and would have sufficed for a church four times the size. It nicely complemented the organist, a retired high school math teacher who felt that certain attributes of the Lord (violence and capriciousness in the Old Testament, majesty and triumph in the New) could be directly conveyed into the souls of the endowed sinners through a kind of frontal sonic impregnation. That he ran the risk of blowing out the stained-glass windows was of no consequence since no one liked them anyway, and the paper mill fumes were gnawing at the interstitial lead. But after one little old lady too many staggered down the aisle after a service, reeling from tinnitus, and made a barbed comment to the minister about the exceedingly dramatic music, the organist was replaced.