The Bible’s Virus of Violence

by The Rev. Wayne Ibara

For nearly a year now, the world has been afflicted with the Covid-19 pandemic. But another virus has also been all too active, including in our own country. It is the virus of violence. We have always struggled with this virus, but its threat took new form on January 6, when the U.S. Capitol was invaded, looted and desecrated, and five people died, one a police officer. Many other officers were injured; some very seriously. And this weekend, as the inauguration of a new president approaches, there are more soldiers deployed in our nation’s capital city than in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria combined. Twenty-thousand fully armed and equipped national guardsmen. As a nation we are on edge. As former ambassador Fiona Hill said last week, we are on the brink of civil war. What is going on with us as a country? Why is the virus of violence so potent in our society?

One answer is that the Judeo-Christian faith and the Bible are huge in our history, culture and society. And the Bible contains a virus of violence that we have not fully acknowledged, addressed and dealt with. And I think we need to. What do I mean by “the Bible’s virus of violence”? I mean the many texts in the Bible, as in Deuteronomy 7, where God explicitly commands genocide. The Conquest of the Promised Land, filled with “seven nations larger and stronger than you.” God says, “…you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.”

Most of us are aware of this “Dark Side” to the Bible—those disturbing passages, especially in the Old Testament, where God calls for horrendous acts of bloodshed–the bloody pages of the Bible. Our response is often like the lectionary: we ignore them. We leave them out. But like a new coronavirus, ignoring the virus of violence in the Bible does not make it go away. And I’ve come to believe that continuing to ignore the Bible’s violent passages means the virus remains—and spreads.

Take the Conquest story—told largely in Joshua and in the Book of Judges. It’s cast a dark shadow throughout history. Most relevant to us is the way that the American Colonists used this story to justify warfare against Native American peoples, driving them out and often exterminating them from the East Coast to the West. The same thing happened in Central and South America with Spanish conquistadors. In the name of God, native peoples were killed, driven out and enslaved. In what has been called the Doctrine of Discovery, Christianity supplied the spiritual justification for the European conquest of the Americas based on Israel’s Conquest of the Promised Land. The U.S. Supreme Court in the 1800’s even provided the official legal basis for this racist policy.

Both the Catholic Church and some Protestant churches—including our own United Church of Christ—have for years now repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery. But the Bible’s virus of violence is a deeply-rooted and slippery thing. The ultimate anti-virus, of course, is Jesus. Instead of conquering, Jesus sacrificed himself, allowing human depravity, death and the devil to conquer him. The short version of my lesson today could be to simply look to Jesus as our example. But that leaves the virus of violence out there.

We will serve the LORD, Joshua proclaims. But what does this look like when in the context of Joshua’s declaration, serving the LORD has apparently meant all out genocide—the slaughter of men, women and children—even their animals? We will serve the LORD. This rallying cry resounds through the millennia to our present day and our own country, fueling self-identifying Christian right-wing militias wielding assault rifles. The Bible’s virus of violence is potent precisely because it is the Bible’s virus. And there are basically four ways to respond to it.

The first way is to ignore it, which we have largely been doing. But this doesn’t make it go away.

The second way is to defend it, usually by emphasizing God’s holiness over the Canaanites’ evil. This was my take for a long time. But I’m not satisfied with this argument any longer. Because in our own day, it’s become clear that demonizing groups of people is a tactic of thugs with their racist agendas. And in the end, it always seems to turn out that we have more in common with others than not. We are all flawed, broken, sinful humans.

The third way to deal with the Bible’s violence is to say that God changes from the Old Testament to the New, that God evolves. I’ve never been especially drawn to this approach because it solves one problem by creating another.

But the fourth way is the way I think most Christians ought to consider first, and that is to learn to read the Bible differently. To many of us who come from a conservative Christian background, the Bible was always the Holy Bible, inspired by God, inerrant or infallible, the Word of God. It was like God wrote it out himself and handed it to his people as a complete and perfect rulebook, written for our benefit and for all time. The problem is that reading the Bible this way creates a lot of opportunity for the virus of violence to grow.

Pete Enns, who teaches Bible at Eastern University, challenges this perspective in a good way. He urges his students to recognize that God didn’t write the Bible and hand it down. God let his children tell the story. God inspired the Bible, but God used people to write it. This introduces an important layer of human perception and experience into what we now have as our Bible. The Bible is revelation, but it is revelation from our limited, human point of view, expressed in the terms and ideas current in each of its historical human settings.

At the beginning, for example, in the earliest and most ancient stories, everything is tribal. It’s win or lose, us or them, and everybody’s god is a Tribal Warrior God. That’s the way the world was 3,000-plus years ago. But after Israel itself is conquered by the Assyrians and then the Babylonians, and sent into Exile, the Warrior God of Israel obviously does not reign supreme. And the Old Testament ends without a resolution. Yet out of this disaster, Israel is inspired—we would say by God—to reinterpret and transform her understanding of God. The Bible itself benefits from this dynamic process.

That is why we can take the bloody pages of the Bible with a grain of historical salt. We can notice that the Bible itself gives us a nuanced story. Deuteronomy 7 describes total genocide. Joshua offers specific stories of cities being razed, beginning with Jericho. But the first chapter of Judges reports plainly that the Conquest was not complete; that in most cases, the tribes of Israel did not drive out all the inhabitants. This is why Israel has a persistent problem worshiping the gods of these pagan people.

So the Bible is not a perfect, polished, supernatural account of the history of the world and of what the future holds. It is instead an authentic, inspired and ancient account of an ongoing relationship between a people and a God who hears their cries, chooses them and offers them guidance and grace.
The Bible is not a story of people who got things right and were therefore rewarded by God. It is a bunch of stories of all kinds of people, many of whom got things terribly wrong. It doesn’t give us all the answers. In fact, it triggers a lot more questions.

What the Bible offers us is not a black and white record of “everything you ever wanted to know about God” but a record of God’s people wrestling with life and coming to perceive God’s purpose for them. Rather than view the Bible as a rule book, or a how-to manual for life, Enns proposes that we look to the Bible for wisdom. And we do this by joining in the conversation of faith that the Bible represents. (argue like the Jews)

And the virus of violence? Jesus is our anti-virus—but we ourselves are the ones who need to carry the vaccine. And we do this by reading the Bible better.

Pete Enns often tells his Bible students, “The Bible is a terrible evangelistic tool!” He does this to jar them into looking at the Bible from a different point of view. His point is that the Bible is not really as simple as we’ve all been told it is. Using the Bible with someone who has never read it before can easily become confusing, complex and frustrating. What Enns tells his students is that they are—we are—the best evangelistic tool. It’s Christ the Word in us that communicates most effectively, most powerfully, most persuasively. And that’s really what the church mostly had for most of its history. Not a printed book to hold over people’s heads, but a living testimony—most convincingly demonstrated by a flesh and blood community—the church. If we can see the Bible as a supernatural idol and more as an inspired and unique human treasure that offers us wisdom for life as well as revelation of God—crowned by the coming of Jesus—the virus of violence is largely contained and defeated. May it be so with us. And with our nation as well. Amen.

The Rev. Wayne Ibara was born and raised on the island of Kaua‘i, and received his Master of Divinity degree from Fuller Theological Seminary. After serving as pastor for the Los Angeles Holiness Church, he returned to Hawai‘i, where he has led the Makiki Christian Church as its senior pastor since 1995. Rev. Ibara and his wife, Phyllis, have a teenaged son, Isaac.