<\/p>\n
Last week\u2019s\u00a0Questions That Haunt Christianity<\/a>\u00a0came from Shira, who asked a question that provoked an unprecedented number of comments<\/a> for the series:<\/p>\n My question is this: How do Christian theologians deal with the fact that God is portrayed sometimes as a \u201cman of war\u201d who approves genocide and taking of women as war prizes, among other atrocities and sometimes as the \u201crighteous judge\u201d standing up for widows, orphans, and the strangers among us?<\/strong> I consider this a vital question because it seems to me that many people gravitate to one or the other of these ideas of God, and the actions in the world of these different groups are very distinct! I don\u2019t know if you require a background, but I\u2019m a Buddhist<\/a> of Jewish background.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Thanks to all who commented. Here\u2019s my response:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Shira, yours is an excellent question that has provoked intense discussion, and I am profoundly grateful for your involvement in that conversation. I am particularly motivated to give the best answer that I can due to your participation in the commentary, which is why my answer is a few days late. My apologies.<\/p>\n I think there are three questions to be addressed<\/strong>. I will take each in turn, from what I consider to be the least important to the most important.<\/p>\n First, you are interested in the behavior<\/em> of theists<\/strong>. Particularly, I assume, you are interested in the behavior of Christians, since you\u2019ve posed this question to a Christian theologian. Based on the behavior of Christians, is God a God of peace or a God of war?<\/strong><\/p>\n Honestly, I don\u2019t think this is a very important angle in answering your question. As a Buddhist, you\u2019re surely aware of something that most Christians are not: there are numerous examples of violence that Buddhists have perpetrated on persons of other religions, and all in the name of Buddhism<\/a>.<\/p>\n Earlier this year I visited Sri Lanka<\/a>, a country in which the Buddhist<\/em> government recently quashed a long-standing rebellion by the Tamil Tigers. Those Buddhists\u2014adherents of what many uninformed persons consider to be the world\u2019s most peaceful religion\u2014used extraordinary violence<\/a> to defeat the Tigers. And that same government is now bent on impeaching the chief justice of the Sri Lankan Supreme Court in order to further galvanize their power and repress dissent. When I was in Sri Lanka, I was asked by my (Christian) hosts to not blog or even speak in public about the (Buddhist) government, for fear of reprisals.<\/p>\n I say this not to criticize your religion, but to claim that it is never fair to judge a religion based on the often odious behavior of that religion\u2019s adherents<\/strong>. I\u2019m not proud of many aspects of Christian history, just as you surely repudiate some of your fellow Buddhists. While the followers of a religion do sometimes exemplify the root strangeness a religion (viz, Tom Cruise), the histories of both your religion and mine are deeply ambivalent, full of both saints and sinners.<\/p>\n Second, and more important, is what to do with the Christian sacred text, the Bible. Therein, we seem to find both a God of War and a God of Peace<\/strong>.<\/p>\n I was recently on the phone with a friend of mine\u2014another Christian leader\/author\/pastor. He said to me, \u201cDon\u2019t tell anyone, but I\u2019m basically a supersessionist.\u201d Supersessionism<\/a> is the theological name for Christians who for all intents and purposes ignore the Hebrew Scriptures (aka, the \u201cOld\u201d Testament). The reasoning goes that Jesus\u2014who said, \u201cI came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it\u201d\u2014basically did<\/em> abolish the Law. It\u2019s a common view among Anabaptists and some Lutherans.<\/p>\n I am not a supersessionist, and here\u2019s why: the Hebrew Scripture was very significant to Jesus and Paul, each of whom quoted it a lot, and to the early church. If they unanimously considered it important, who am I to throw it out?<\/p>\n That being said, I can relativize the texts of the Hebrew Scripture, just as I do the Christian Scripture. Jesus found a man who was chained up in cemetery, foaming at the mouth and screaming obscenities. Jesus looked at that man and saw demons. I see schizophrenia. Tomato, tomato. Jesus understood and spoke in the idioms of his time, and I do in mine<\/strong>. I think it\u2019s quite like that in another millennium, our descendants will think that schizophrenia is a very na\u00efve and archaic understanding of that condition.<\/p>\n The Israelites who first told and ultimately wrote down the stories and genealogies and laws that we know as the Hebrew Scriptures lived a long time ago<\/em>. Thousands of years ago. They were a primitive, tribal, warring people, and it\u2019s no surprise to me that their depiction of God reflects primitive, tribal, warlike characteristics<\/strong>. In other words, I have no trouble relativizing their written claims about who Yahweh is and how Yahweh acts.<\/p>\n The ancient Israelites\u2019 depictions of God are no more (or less) normative to me than Jesus\u2019 conversation with the 10,000(!) demons who plagued the man in the cemetery<\/strong>.<\/p>\n However, that does not release me from taking those biblical accounts seriously\u2014indeed, I think I am required to take them even more seriously: since I cannot take them at face value, I must do hard hermeneutical work to discover their value for me today. The normativity of those texts of a warlike God lies at a deeper level than the surface.<\/p>\n I will also say that my rabbi, Joseph Edelheit, and other Jews I know love the Hebrew Scriptures more than anyone I know, and they seem completely untroubled by the warlike God. I\u2019m still trying to figure out how they get there.<\/p>\n Finally, third and most important, is the heart of your question: Is the very nature of God warlike, or peaceful?<\/strong><\/p>\n Questioners asked Jesus questions like this all the time\u2014multiple choice questions with only two, bipolar options as answers. For example, the Pharisees and Herodians teamed up on Jesus to ask whether or not Jews should pay taxes. Jesus responded not by answering \u201cYes, we should,\u201d or \u201cNo, we shouldn\u2019t.\u201d Instead, he deconstructed their question<\/strong>, asking for a coin, pointing to it, and asking, \u201cWhose ikon<\/em> is on this coin?\u201d (He presumably asked in Aramaic, not Greek, but you get the point.) His questioners responded, \u201cCaesar\u2019s,\u201d but they knew they\u2019d been one-upped, because every Torah-believing Jew knows that every human being is created in the ikon<\/em> of God<\/strong>.<\/p>\n I take Jesus\u2019 answer to be basically this, \u201cYou\u2019re asking the wrong question.\u201d<\/p>\n Now it would seem supremely arrogant of me to respond to your earnest and sincere question like this. But I will say this much, at least: as a Christian theologian, if there is one tenet to which I am committed, it\u2019s this: God is never one thing or the other. A while back, I did a series of posts on What God Is Not<\/a>. I came to the unorthodox conclusion that God Is Not on the Side of the Poor<\/a>, for example. Because when I hear my colleagues say that God has a preference for the poor, or that God is more evidently at work in the lives of the marginalized, I don\u2019t buy it.<\/p>\n To a fault, I continue to hold to a semi-platonic view that God is all<\/strong>. Not in a pantheistic sense, but in a panentheistic sense \u2014 God embraces all of creation, and all\u00a0dichotomies\u00a0under the weight of that embrace.<\/p>\n Therefore, God is not\u00a0either<\/em>\u00a0war or peace.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n God is war, and God is peace. <\/strong><\/p>\n Or God is neither war nor peace.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week\u2019s\u00a0Questions That Haunt Christianity\u00a0came from Shira, who asked a question that provoked an unprecedented number of comments for the series: My question is this: How do Christian theologians deal with the fact that God is portrayed sometimes as a \u201cman of war\u201d who approves genocide and taking of women as war prizes, among other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,986,39],"tags":[973,966],"class_list":["post-7494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bible","category-questions-that-haunt-2","category-theology","tag-questions-that-haunt","tag-sri-lanka"],"yoast_head":"\n