It is entirely appropriate that the Christians who adopt an active pacifist life, model their commitment on the life of the God with skin on man from Galilee, Jesus. He is for Christians the quintessential pacifist par excellence.
Difficulty arises, however, when one enters the vast and varied terrain of Hebrew scripture. It is there that one encounters the terrifying image of the God of war and violence. There is no gliding the lily here, as John Dear laments, “Hebrew scriptures are replete with portrayals of a war-making God.”1
All good theological-biblical inquiry, can be summed up in one word, ‘context.’
Some scripture scholars have identified six hundred passages of explicit violence in the Hebrew bible and one thousand verses where God’s own violent actions are described.2
It is hardly surprising therefore that many people throughout the ages have concluded that there must be no serious link between this Hebrew God with a propensity for violence and the ‘Peace God man’ who ends up slaughtered on the cross. Surely this overtly opposing conception of God presents an unbridgeable chasm between the New Testament and its antecedent Hebrew forerunner. Mercifully, there is solid theology available to address this conundrum. Actually, such scholarship asserts that there is not only continuity between the New Testament and the Hebrew scribes, but that the content of the latter is largely dependent on the former.3
The answer to this vexing problem about the war-mongering God, as with all good theological-biblical inquiry, can be summed up in one word, ‘context.’ It needs to be understood that the Hebrew bible was composed by multiple and varied scribes, frequently with opposing views, during a period that extends across hundreds of years.
“The Divine Warrior” was a widespread element in Near East mythology.
While it is certainly correct that these various authors are linked in producing an overarching narrative about the Hebrews and their journey with Yahweh. It is also the case that each of the scribes in question were writing within the context of the time that they lived. Most of the texts that have to do with the Hebrew God of war were composed at a time were such conceptions of God were entirely normal. Frank Moore Cross has shown that during, and long after, the Israelites became a discernible group of tribes, the concept of “The Divine Warrior” was a widespread element in Near East mythology. It is highly likely that this warrior God image was adopted by the Hebrews from the dominant cultures, and more militarily powerful nations that surrounded them.4
No religious movement is born in a vacuum. There will always be existing cultural influences that are carried forward, even when new dynamic religious thought is emerging.
History suggests that there is something about the warrior God image that both allures and terrifies the human psyche. Why else would the God of violence have such widespread and enduring effect across time and culture, including with many Christians, right up till today?
What is remarkable about the Jewish faith is not that its early scribes were enthralled by the warrior God image, which was the cultural lingua-franca of their age. It is rather the extraordinary fact that hundreds of years before the advent of Christianity, Hebrew theology had almost completely rid itself of the God of war, in favor of the ‘God of love and peace.’
Consider just one example, and there are plenty more. The Hebrew prophet Isaiah who is extensively quoted by those who wrote about Jesus, has this to say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths. For out of Zion shall go forth the instruction…He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; 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 anymore,” (Isa 2: 3-4).
For Isaiah, and the majority of later Hebrew scribes, the time of the God of war was dead and buried. A new age was foreseen, an unmovable covenant of Peace had been declared by Yahweh (Isaiah 54:10; Ezekiel 34: 25-28). Pacifists, including Jewish peace activists throughout the ages have understood this, the god of war is dead, long live the God of Peace!
- John Dear, God of Peace: Toward a Theology of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishing, 2005), 34. [↩]
- Dear, God of Peace, 34. [↩]
- Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, 5th ed. (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell 2011), 126. [↩]
- Frank Moore. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 38-39. [↩]