The Radicality of God

The Radicality of God

I’ve been reading John Dominic Crossan’s book How to Read the Bible and Still Be Christian. In that book he sets forth one primary thesis. There is in the Bible, he says, a pattern of the radicality of God being countered by the normalcy of civilization. His primary example of this dynamic, at least the primary example in the opening pages of the book, is the way the normalcy of a violent Christ in Revelation counters the radicality of sacred nonviolence in the Gospels. Jesus says “Love your enemies.” Matthew 5:44. In Revelation Christ, called in a passage Crossan focuses on King of kings and Lord of lords, rides forth on a white horse “with which to strike down the nations.” Revelation 19:15.

There are numerous other examples of this dynamic in the Bible. A passage from the lectionary readings for May 24, 2020, reminded me of one of them, namely, Psalm 68:2c: “Let the wicked perish before God.” This line reminded me of this passage from the Sermon on the Mount: “But I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” Matthew 5:44-45. The Psalm gives us at least a desire that the wicked perish. Jesus gives us a God who treats the good and the evil equally.

There is no doubt that in the Old Testament God sometimes appears as violent and sometimes demands that God’s people be violent. At I Samuel 15:1-3, for example, we read:

Samuel said to Saul: ‘The Lord sent me to anoint you king over the people of Israel; now therefore listen to the words of the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’

I’ve heard of people who have lost their faith in God altogether over this passage because they couldn’t deal with the Bible making God that vicious, petty, and violent.

I get that, but this isn’t the only image of God in the Old Testament. Not by a long shot. Most of us know Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” “Even though I walk through the darkest valley [traditionally the valley of the shadow of death] I fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff—they comfort me.” “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” Or consider this passage from Isaiah:

     Ho, everyone who thirsts,

     come to the waters,

and you that have no money,

     come, buy and eat!

Come, buy wine and milk

     without money and without

          price….Isaiah 55:1

Or these words from the great eighth century BCE prophet Micah:

He has told you, O mortal, what

          is good;

     and what does the Lord

          require of you

but to do justice, and to love

          kindness,

     and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8.

And again from Micah:

He shall judge between many

          peoples

     and shall arbitrate between

          strong nations far away;

They shall beat their swords into

          plowshares,

     and their spears into pruning

          hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword

          against nation,

     neither shall they learn war

          any more,

     but they shall sit under their

          own vines and under their

          own fig trees,

     and no one shall make

          them afraid,

     for the mouth of the Lord of

          hosts has spoken. Micah 4:3-4.

Examples like these prove Crossan’s point. The Bible frequently give us the radicality of God. God is a God of goodness and mercy, of justice, of nonviolent abundance for all people. But the Bible is a human document, and we humans have rarely been able to hold to the radicality of God for long without the violent norms of human civilization pushing their way into the narrative.

Crossan asks the obvious question: How are we to choose between these two voices in the Bible, the radical justice and nonviolence of God on one hand and the violent, unjust norms of human civilization on the other? Crossan gives the obvious answer to his question, obvious to us Christians at least: Jesus. That’s how we decide. That’s how we choose. But of course that answer raises as many questions as it answers. There are after all at least two images of Jesu in the New Testament. There are actually a lot more images of him than that in the New Testament, but for our purposes here the two that matter are the nonviolent Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount and the violent Jesus of Revelation. How do we choose between them?

I think we choose between them by asking just why God would come to us in human form as we Christians confess God did in Jesus. Would God come to us that way just to affirm the ways of the world, the ways of empire, the ways of violence and oppression? Or would God come to us as one of us to show us a better way, to show us God’s way, a way so radically different from the ways of the world? The answer seems obvious, doesn’t it? We don’t need God to teach us the ways we already follow. We’ve got those ways down cold on our own. We need God to show us a better way, a way that makes life better for everyone, that ends the suffering that violence brings, that ends the suffering that unequal and unfair distribution of the earth’s resources brings. When we see Jesus doing that in the New Testament we know we are hearing the voice of God. When we see him acting according to the ways of the world like he does in Revelation we know that we are hearing the voice of the world.

There is of course a basic assumption behind that answer. I’ve already mentioned it. It is that the Bible is a human document. If we cling to the hoary notion that the Bible comes from God in all of its content we have somehow to reconcile all of its different voices. Yet if we’re honest we have to admit that that’s impossible. If we recognize that the Bible has human handprints all over it we’re free to accept some of it and reject some of it. Everyone who looks to the Bible as sacred scripture does that anyway, but when we recognize the human origins of the Bible’s many different texts we can be honest about it. We can see that some of the biblical texts reflect the ungodly ways of the world, and we can see that some of those texts give us a radical new vision of the world the way God wants it to be. We can see that it gives us both God’s radical vision of a transformed world and a refutation of that vision in the terms of the world as it already is. May we be wise enough to tell the difference and brave enough to follow the radical ways of God.