Ted Grimsrud—November 17, 2023
As I have evolved in my thinking, my convictions about the importance of peace—saying yes to social justice and wholeness and no to war and domination—have become ever stronger even as my commitment to self-identifying as a Christian has gotten weaker. As a young adult, I started my intellectual journey first as a Christian first and then as a pacifist. A main part of the Christian part was a strong belief in the truthfulness and centrality of the Bible for my belief system. I had to be convinced that the Bible had a peace agenda.
Once I came to see the Bible as a peace book, though, I threw myself into what has proved to be a lifelong project of trying to construct a strong peace theology based on the Bible. Interestingly, as I have become more and more persuaded of the Bible’s peaceable content over the years, I have become less and less impressed with how Christianity has appropriated that resource. That is, my movement away from self-identifying as a Christian has in part been due to the Bible. If I have to choose between the peaceable message of the Bible and the generally accepting disposition toward war of Christianity and Christian doctrine, I will choose the Bible every time.
I remain as interested as ever in wrestling with the stories in the Bible (and the big, over-arching story that I believe the Bible tells) in relation to our current needs for peace convictions and in relation to the troubling warist legacy of the Christian religion. My energy for putting thoughts that emerge from this wrestling into written words ebbs and flows depending on what else I am focusing on. I seem to be feeling more energized about these issues right now, and so I want to spend some time writing a number of blog posts on “Peace and the Bible” in the weeks to come—maybe to end the year with a small burst of creativity (here is a link to the homepage of the series).
In this first post, I will briefly address several of the general questions I have been thinking about lately. In the posts to come, I plan to range pretty widely. I don’t have an ordered agenda of material I want to discuss so much as simply a variety of ideas that have popped into my mind in recent months. Typically, some thought will get my attention, and I will jot a few notes in hopes that at some point in the future I will devote more reflection to the issue. Sometimes I do that; more often I don’t. Here’s a chance to pick up on some of these brainstorms. I think there will be a general coherence to the set of posts, though: The Bible is peaceable and relevant. These will be some of the reasons why and how.
Why is the Bible so helpful?
My convictions about social wholeness and the centrality of love have been shaped by the Bible—and they at the same time provide the interpretive lenses through which I read the Bible. The dynamic provided by the bringing together of my convictions and the Bible by this time has no starting point; it is a mutually reinforcing process. One of the main ways the Bible is helpful for me is how it guides and empowers my social ethical commitments.
The Bible starts with a picture of our world as infused with the love and creativity of its source. We start with an awareness that life is precious, and our existence is interrelated with that of all other creatures. Creation is good. We are good. Life is good. We know from our own experiences and also from the story the Bible tells that life is complicated, fragile, and at times broken. However, the Bible’s fundamental affirmation of life provides a base line as we seek healing.
As the story continues in the Bible, we read the inspiring account of God’s intervention on behalf of the enslaved Hebrew people within the Egyptian Empire. There is a political commitment in this foundational story, God takes the side of the vulnerable and oppressed. God intervenes to liberate these vulnerable people from their oppressors. And God does so in a surprisingly egalitarian and non-militarist way. The peoplehood that is formed with this intervention is contrast society over-against empire.
Following the exodus, God provides the people with a radical blueprint for common life as a community gathered around Torah—care for the vulnerable, just economics, hostility toward oppressors, processes for sustaining wholeness and mutuality. This blueprint was always embodied only in part; the community continued to struggle with the practice of genuine social justice that was restorative, generous, and merciful. But the core vision remained at the center of the peoplehood over countless generations down to our present day. The Bible tells a dramatic and inspiring story of the struggle to practice Torah.
The final phase of the biblical story tells us about Jesus, a practitioner of Torah who emphasized its compassionate heart and its anti-imperial focus. Reading about Jesus in the context of the legacy of Torah and the Hebrew peoplehood provides powerful guidance for the vocation the Bible points to—the vocation of blessing all the families of the earth. Properly understood, the Bible provides inspiration for joining hands with all who are committed to that vocation, “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Revelation 7:9). For that reason, the Bible is well worth engaging.
What are some of the problems with the Bible?
Of course, the legacy of the Bible is very complicated. More often than not, it has been used in service to a vision of life that is precisely the perspective that I believe the Bible intends to overthrow—power politics, exclusivist religion and ethnicity, retributive violence, and domination of the vulnerable by the powerful. The fact that such subversion of the Bible’s message is so common and seemingly so easy raises sharp questions about my positive orientation toward the Bible.
For one thing, it is clear that the Bible does contain materials that do directly support coercive practices—some even overtly presented as God’s intent (I’m thinking most obviously of the various Old Testament stories of divinely-initiated violence). More subtly, it is simply the case that the Bible has no internal protections against its misuse. Maybe the Bible teaches love as our ultimate reality, but it doesn’t force its readers to interpret it that way.
For now, I will simply say that I think it is important to recognize these problems. Much of what I expect to write about “Peace and the Bible” in the days to come for this blog will address various of the problems. But I will never fully resolve them. There is no all-powerful argument about the peaceableness of the Bible that will consistently defeat those who think otherwise. All we have are our human interpretations and our best efforts to present the case for peace. I think, though, that the way of love should recognize that this is exactly the way it should be.
What do we make of the “weakness” of the Bible?
The Christian tradition has constructed many doctrines of Scripture that present the view that the Bible is inspired, authoritative, even (for some of the doctrines) infallible and inerrant. The picture is that the Bible is strong and powerful, with overwhelming clarity and directive force. The reality of the Bible, though, is quite a bit different. It is an ancient human document, a collection of a wide variety of writings from numerous times and places. Whatever power it might have is not coercive power—“you must accept what I say.” Rather, it is persuasive power, the power of attractive stories and ideas that one may choose to respect (or not). It is a weak kind of power.
I would suggest that the power of the Bible is like the power of love; it is not coercive; it is not irresistible; it is not well suited to human hierarchical and institutional power. The only way the Bible can be used in coercive ways is that its contents are distorted, used selectively, applied in ways that contradict the actual message the Bible gives. That is, the only way the Bible can be used coercively is when human ideologies replace biblical motifs.
That the Bible has only non-coercive power in its content actually is an important reason to pay attention to it and use it as a privileged conversation partner. Any kind of authoritarian Scripture would ultimately underwrite domination and contradict the core message of the actual biblical story. The “weakness” of the Bible means it has little defense against being misused. Yet it also contains within itself the seeds for the overthrow of domination. Such a reality is fully consistent with the way of love.
We do not have to fight successfully for the correct interpretation of the Bible in order for history to turn out okay. We don’t have that kind of power. We need to trust that the Bible’s message of liberation will retain its attractiveness even when the Bible is misused. That, in fact, is the story of the Christian religion: In spite of its continual misuse of the Bible, the message of love remains available and persuasive. So, the task of those committed to that message is not to win a struggle but simply to keep the struggle to embody love going.
Thinking Pacifism 
I attended a Palestinian Christian webinar organized by Bethlehem Bible College. The speakers said that Palestinian Christians were mostly agreed that Jesus opposed violence. The webinar was called A Call to Repentance and they were asking Christians in the rest of the world to repent of their support of violence.
I appreciate and concur with your “minority report”, Ted… there are differing, even competing narratives and claims in the Bible. This, to me, is evidence of both its humanness and its wisdom.
The complicated exercise of a good many amateur and professional apologists to reconcile everything into a fully consistent whole is futile and a distortion of the nature of the Bible.
As you say, there are troubling contradictions in the Bible’s portrayal of Yahweh as a God of peace and non-violence. Whenever there are two seemingly opposing portrayals of God, or two seemingly contradictory instructions, I want to be a part of a faith community that always choose the one that most clearly embodies love for every neighbor as ourselves, and which defines love as never causing harm to others. Never.
I agree, Harvey.