Which God? Violent Retributive, or Non-violent Distributive

That title will strike some as a false dichotomy, but false dichotomies have a way of forcing a conversation into some difficult corners. To foster that conversation I bring up the new book by Dom Crossan (John Dominic Crossan), How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian. Dom is a well-known historical Jesus scholar and he was a generous friend to me when I began to do historical Jesus studies so I’ve always paid close attention to his writings, even when I disagree (and I often do). We once were together on a WGN radio event — late at night, in the heart of Chicago … and Dom was his usual creative best.

The only two NT scholars I know who get better than their talks in the Q&A sessions are Dom Crossan and NT Wright, and Marc Borg was a close third.

To our topic: Is the God of the Bible a violent retributive justice God or a non-violent distributive justice God? That’s what Dom cares most about in this book.

We get a grand and glorious vision in Isaiah and Revelation of where the world/the cosmos is destined:

Our world will climax with neither bang nor whimper, with neither destruction nor extinction, with neither evacuation-to-heaven nor emigration-to-hell, but rather with a transformational feast “for all peoples.” God is, as it were, no longer the lord of hosts but now the host of lords—and ladies (10).

[Then Revelation]: It would be hard to imagine a more magnificent consummation. The biblical story ends, as do most comedic stories and romantic narratives, with a wedding feast. And yet, and yet, and yet….

The first “and yet” concerns the wedding scenario as climactic celebration. The problem is that you wade to that blessed event through a sea of blood. I do not exaggerate. We are dealing with metaphors and symbols, of course, but they are metaphors of massacre and symbols of slaughter. The Earth, for example, is imagined J as a vineyard ripe for a harvest not of wine, but of blood—like this… (11).

Some read the Bible — like Marcion — in an OT God vs. a NT God way, but Crossan knows better: “An Old Testament bad-cop God and a New Testament good-cop God were persuasive only to those who had never actually read the entire Christian Bible (16-17).

He puts together his problem, his question, his plan:

In summary, therefore, the disjunction between God as violent and nonviolent can be rephrased for the rest of this book like this: the biblical God is, on one hand, a God of nonviolent distributive justice and, on the other hand, a God of violent retributive justice. How do we make sense of this dual focus? How do we reconcile these two visions? This is what we will explore in the rest of the book (18).