After our earlier conversation about the recent John Spong book, a conversation in which I came off as the conservative, I want to return to John Dominic Crossan's
God and Empire (Harper, 2007). Crossan is no literalist, but he does take the text seriously and his interpretations are often on the money.
In God and Empire Crossan is dealing with parallels between Jesus' context and the modern American one -- focusing on the centrality of empire to civilization and violence to empire.
In the midst of this conversation he deals with eschatology and the picture Scripture paints of God's dealing with evil -- God's great clean up job. He discerns two visions present in Scripture as to how God deals with evil, one is extermination and the other is conversion. Noah is the symbol of the first, for God despairing about the evil in the world decides to get rid of creation and start again with Noah. The image of Armageddon is the New Testament equivalent. On the other side of the ledger is Conversion or the Abrahamic vision and the correlative image is that of the Great Banquet, especially as it's defined in Micah 4:1-4. In this vision the peoples of the world hear the call to peace and come to Mt. Zion in search of the God's promise of peace and justice.
He writes in summary:
[T]he two final divine solutions for the problem of the Gentile empires, the Noachic solution of extermination by force and violence and the Abrahamic solution of conversion to God's justice and peace, are never reconciled anywhere in the biblical tradition. They are there together from one end of it to the other. Indeed, they often coexist in the same book or even in the same chapter. So once again, are we to take them both and worship a God of both violence and nonviolence, or must we choose between them and recognize, as I am arguing, that the Bible proposes the radicality of a nonviolent God struggling with the normalcy of a violent civilization? Is that its dignity, its integrity, its authority -- for any Christian -- and its value for any human being?
As we read the text of Scripture, we are often faced with choices, and here in this case we must choose the vision of violence or the vision of peace and justice. I must choose the latter, but if I hear the war cries of the prophecy pundits -- they've chosen the former.
Comments
How do we reconcile the ambiguity of our Bible's violent and/or nonviolent God? My proposal is that the Christian Bible presents the radicality of a just and nonviolent God repeatedly and relentlessly confronting the normalcy of an unjust and violent civilization. Again and again throughout the biblical tradition, God's radical vision for nonviolent justice is offered, and again and again we manage to mute is back into the normalcy of violent injustice....that struggle is depicted inside the Bible itself. That is its integrity and authority. If the Bible were only about peace through victory, we would not need it. If the Bible were only about peace through justice, we would not believe it.
I just love those last 2 lines.
I was at a conference with him and Borg in Portland at the end of June. In keeping with what you pointed out, Mike, he said several times, "when in doubt, read the text!". As Marcus handed out detailed outlines of his whole talk, Crossan handed out dense thought handouts just as one would get from the prof. in college. His were mostly scripture!
Because of this, Borg & Crossan make a great pair. I highly recommend their latest, _The Last Week_, which I am reading now. Word is the "first week," a book on the Jesus birth stories, is coming out this xmas.
I envy you the opportunity to be with Borg and Crossan.
I too enjoyed the Last Week. It is very insightful and shows excellent command of the situation. Even though I'm perhaps a bit more "traditional" than them, I do appreciate what they're doing.