Ted Grimsrud—December 7, 2023
I have what may seem like a counter-intuitive impression about how Christians tend to read the Bible. They make Jesus Christ too central to how they read scripture and as a consequence make the Bible less peaceable. That is, by making Jesus Christ too central in the way that they do, many Christians actually misinterpret his message. In a nutshell, I believe that the Bible as a whole is a book of peace. When it is not read as a somewhat coherent whole, even the seemingly peaceable parts may actually become less peaceable.
The typical Christian way of reading the Bible assumes a major turning point in the message that comes with Jesus’s entry into the story, a turning point that in practice turns the Bible into two stories. I believe that we are better off to think more in terms of a single story, what I call the “Big Story,” that encompasses both the Old Testament and the New Testament. This single-story approach allows us better to appreciate the peaceable elements of the Old Testament and the political elements of the New Testament. With the single-story approach, we do still have an important turning point. It comes sooner, though, and may be the key to a thoroughly peaceable reading of the whole. Let me explain.
Problems with the typical Christian reading
Christian approaches to the Bible tend to assume that something qualitatively new happens with Jesus. This new thing does not simply intensify what was already present in the Old Testament but is something categorically unprecedented. This newness, it is said, may be seen is in terms of salvation. Whatever was practiced before Jesus was not adequate to make salvation fully available. The main “new thing” is that Jesus’s death provides the definitive atoning sacrifice that was necessary for God to be able to offer salvation.
To read the Bible in light of this atonement theology results is what we could call a “two-story” understanding of the Bible. The Old Testament provides the first story, one that ultimately ends in failure because the means for salvation were not fully available. The second story, told in the New Testament, does depend upon the first story for establishing the problem for which Jesus’s sacrificial death provides the solution—hence, a two-story Bible. But the second story is the necessary and authoritative one.
Thinking Pacifism 