God Is Love, So God Is Violent?

Trying to reconcile a God of violence with a God of love

Photo by NEOSiAM 2021: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-s-hands-covered-with-blood-673862/

(A ten-minute read.)

In the opening paragraph of his second chapter in his 2006 best-seller, The God Delusion, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins famously painted this picture:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Dawkins’s charge has been repeated by many others, of course—including, in a roundabout way, Rainn Wilson, who, in encouraging spiritual revival, promotes a version of God that’s been stripped of all its personhood.

As I shared last week, I believe God is a personal being, characterized by all Wilson—and other contemporary spiritual seekers—yearns for.

And yet—and yet.

It’s hard to deny that the God of the Bible—both its Hebrew and New Testament iterations—sometimes comes across the way Dawkins and Wilson describe this God.

So what gives?

How do we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory ideas—that God is, in fact, the essence and source of the perfect love we yearn for, and yet he sometimes doesn’t come across that way in the biblical material?

This is a huge topic, and I’m no expert on it. But I’d like to briefly explain how I’ve come to a place of relative satisfaction in my own heart and mind.

But, first, let me share with you one possible way to relate to such stories that is quite popular among a significant number of Jewish and Christian thinkers—a way that, I do believe, has some merit to it, but one that I’m not entirely ready to embrace or get on board with.

Bypassing the “literal”

One possible way to reconcile the fear-inducing portrayal of God in the Bible with our modern sensibilities is to simply deny a “literalistic” reading of Scripture, instead maintaining that these portrayals are either allegorical or the mistaken perceptions of the various biblical writers.

This is essentially the way two contemporary Christian thinkers, David Bentley Hart and Greg Boyd, respectively see it.

Hart, who is one of the most entertaining and profound philosopher-theologian thinkers of our day, proposes that anyone who thinks the Hebrew Bible is supposed to be interpreted “literally” is both wholly unfamiliar with the way the New Testament writers related to those stories and is an unsophisticated fundamentalist.

In short, for Hart, the Hebrew Bible is allegory—used as fodder by the New Testament writers to uplift the supremacy and grace of Jesus.

For his part, pastor-theologian Greg Boyd proposes another version of this sort of explanation. While maintaining a deep commitment to the inspiration of Scripture, Boyd interprets the violence attributed to God in the Bible through the lens of the cross.

Essentially, just as God, through Jesus, made himself culpable on the cross for humanity’s sins, even though he didn’t really commit those sins, so God, in the more violent sections of Scripture, takes the blame for the acts of violence done by his people, even though he didn’t really command or perform them.

In other words, God, in an act of self-sacrifice, has allowed his reputation to be slandered and maligned by taking the blame for our violence, even though it wasn’t really him who commanded or executed it.

The bottom line with these approaches to the “violent God” of Scripture is to not interpret such stories “literally,” essentially casting them aside with one stroke of the pen.

For my part, I’m not entirely opposed to such explanations, but I’m also not ready to fully embrace them—for reasons I won’t explain here.

Instead, I remain comfortable living within the tension of a “loving” God and a “violent” God, believing such ideas aren’t necessarily implicitly contradictory.

I say this for a few reasons.

Our climate-controlled outrage

It suddenly occurred to me a few years ago that the loudest objections to the idea of a “violent” God come from those of us living our comfortable, middle-class, peaceful, climate-controlled lives.

In other words, most of us “modern” readers, because of our Enlightenment-influenced sensibilities, have a bias toward compassion, mercy, forgiveness, egalitarianism, and patience. We very rarely cry for justice or retribution—at least on any major scale—because our sheltered, middle-class lives very rarely encounter situations that would elicit such a desire from us.

I doubt we would have the same attitude, however, if we read about the violence in the Bible while sitting in war-torn Sudan, Ethiopia, or even Ukraine—where we’ve perhaps helplessly watched our wives and daughters being violently raped by invading tribes or armies.

Living in those situations, we’d no doubt whole-heartedly celebrate, and much prefer, a God who is defined chiefly by justice—a God who does step in and enacts vengeance against debauched and debased perpetrators in an attempt to defend the vulnerable and weak.

We must therefore approach the subject with a lot more humility, acknowledging that we very much read the Bible from a “privileged” position, largely free from adversity—where our greatest stress is whether we’re going to have enough money to pay for our 72” TVs (on which we will, ironically, be entertained by shows that glorify violence).

This doesn’t account for everything, nor does it get “God off the hook.” But it’s simply an invitation for us to recognize that the Bible was written and lived out in a different context than the one from which we read it in 2023.

Simply put, we probably have no idea just how utterly degraded the people in the Ancient Near East, who had no clue about the Geneva Conventions, were—and I’m guessing if we lived in that context for one minute, we’d quickly realize that “peace talks” over crumpets and tea probably won’t do us much good (just like we’d realize today if we suddenly found ourselves in conflict with the Taliban or ISIS).

The God who works with what he’s got

What I’m basically proposing here, as I’ve sort of touched on before, is that the God of the Bible meets people where they are, works with what he’s got, and can only go as fast as sinful and broken people can go.

That is one of the key insights, I do believe, from the incarnation of Jesus.

God, in the person of Jesus, inhabited this world in a specific place and in a specific time. He spoke the language, both literally and metaphorically, of the people he sought to redeem. He humbled himself and came down to the level of sinful, fallen, and immature humanity.

To use a metaphor: it’s like a college calculus professor dumbing down her lessons for a first grader who doesn’t know how to multiply or divide. To refuse to do so would be for her to undermine her own goals.

I think Jesus gave insight into this approach when he was asked about divorce at one point. “Why did Moses allow for divorce?” one religious leader asked him. “Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives,” he answered. “But from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:7-8).

This, to me, is one of the most important interpretive principles in all of Scripture.

Essentially, what Jesus explains is that God has an ideal, which he sought to instill “from the beginning,” when the world was perfect and without sin, but he’s had to go to Plan A, B, C, and Z since then—“because of the hardness of our hearts.”

In other words, he wants us to be breezing through calculus but we’re still stuck in addition and subtraction.

I see this whole trajectory in the story of Scripture.

God always longed for the world to be characterized by love, compassion, forgiveness, mercy—and, yes, non-violent justice. But our collective ability to live by these principles was at a first-grade level—that is, until we encountered the greatest revelation of what it means to be human (and who God is) in the self-revelation of God in Christ.

So, yes, I do believe God acted a bit “controlling” and “war-like” at times in the Bible—and this was really God, and not just a false perception of him.

But he acted like that because that’s essentially the only “language” humanity was capable of understanding at that time. And he thus had to act that way in order to prevent humanity from utterly self-destructing (this hermeneutical principle, by the way—of God, meeting us where we are—also helps me understand how to approach questions like polygamy or slavery in the Bible).

Modern analogies are aplenty, but the parent-child relationship probably works best—especially since it’s one of the Bible’s favorite ones.

Any good parent knows you can’t treat your five-year-old the same way you treat your fifteen-year-old. You have to account for their maturity level and their ability or inability to engage in abstract reasoning.

Thus, you will be stricter, and utilize more external motivations, with your five-year-old than with your fifteen-year-old. You will likely have to use the threat of punishment or the promise of reward more with your five-year-old than with your fifteen-year-old.

And you do this, not because you’re simply—to use Dawkins’s words—“a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak.” You do this because you love your child and know their survival is often literally dependent on them getting in line, regardless of whether they understand the reason they need to do so.

I’m not sure this perspective easily accounts for every particular in Scripture; but it at least gives me a somewhat-satisfying framework through which to engage those particulars.

The God who sacrificed himself

At the end of the day, however, one thing stands out to me when I read about the violence in Scripture: a cross.

According to Jesus, his life, death, and resurrection were a reflection of God’s heart. Indeed, they were God’s heart.

This tells me that though I may not be able to perfectly understand why God may have acted the way he did throughout Scripture, I at least feel comfort in the fact that God ultimately sacrificed himself in the person of Jesus, putting our existence above and before his own.

I thus, in somewhat Boydian ways (though a bit differently), interpret the whole Bible through the lens of the cross.

If I understand that God acted in our best interest at the cross, to the annihilation of his own life for all eternity, I can rest assured that he must have acted—and will be acting—in our best interest when it comes to the more “violent” acts the Bible attributes to him.

This is, admittedly, a huge act of faith—trusting that the sacrifice of Jesus is the greatest and most clarifying revelation of God’s character.

But it’s an act of faith I’ve decided to organize my life around, since the love that has emanated from the cross has been perhaps the most influential force in the history of the world.

In summary

In short, I take a “stages of development” view of the Bible’s narrative, believing God meets us where we are in order to mature us to where he ultimately wants us to be. And humanity in general, and God’s people specifically, couldn’t come to the fullest maturity until encountering the greatest revelation of God in the person of Christ.

Until then, God had to work with what he had.

Ultimately, of course, I place my trust and confidence in God, believing all his acts—no matter how troubling they may seem to me—are in the best-interest of his creatures, since I see he made an eternal sacrifice of himself in the death of Jesus.

None of these ideas help me to answer all the particulars, but they at least give me a helpful framework through which to approach them.

---

Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.