The key to a peaceable reading of the Bible: The single-story approach [Peace and the Bible #8]

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.

This type of reading strategy has greatly diminished the Old Testament. Christians thus miss much of the peace theology with which the Old Testament is filled. The story in the Old Testament has mainly been read as a problem for Christians rather than as a positive resource. Christians tend to amplify the violence in the Old Testament and have little interest in reading that violence in the broader context of the Bible’s overall peaceable emphasis.

One tragic and deeply problematic result of Christians diminishing the Old Testament with their two-story approach has been the idea that Christianity has replaced Judaism as the people of God. This supersessionism feeds directly into the long legacy of Christian anti-Judaism with its history of persecution, pogroms, and ultimately genocide. It seems likely that separating from Judaism contributed greatly to Christianity’s vulnerability to becoming a state religion with its attendant dynamics of imperialism, cultural exclusivism, white supremacy, and warism.

Another consequence of the two-story approach to the Bible has been that Christianity ordered its self-understanding around creeds, confessions, and doctrines rather than imitating Jesus’s peaceable way of life. The famous illustration of this problem is how creeds, when they do refer to Jesus’s life, skip directly from “born of the virgin Mary” to “crucified under Pontius Pilate,” effectively excising Jesus’s peaceable life and teaching. So, it is not surprising when Christians see warism as compatible with their faith. For the Christian tradition, what matters in the Jesus story are: (1) Jesus being born of a virgin and being sinless so he can be a perfectly pure sacrifice that will satisfy what God needs to bring salvation, (2) Jesus giving up his life on the cross so he may be this perfect sacrifice, and (3) God raising Jesus from the dead. There is no inherent call to peaceable living in these points.

The God of this version of the story of the Bible is fundamentally retributive and operates according to the logic of reciprocity—where wrongdoing must be punished to balance the scales of justice, and straightforward mercy violates the requirements of justice. Christians who worship such a God inevitably, it seems, imitate the practice of retributive and punitive justice—as may be seen in western societies’ criminal justice practices and reliance on war and its preparation as the main focus of dealing with international conflicts.

The value of a single-story reading strategy

We do have an alternative to this two-story reading. I call it the “single-story” reading strategy. Such a way of reading sees strong continuity within the biblical account from beginning to end—this is the Big Story. The Bible collects different kinds of writings as a diverse mixture of perspectives, many of which are in tension with other perspectives. The collection came together mainly due to how the various texts were used in the life of the community over the generations. So, it holds together loosely. Yet, as selected due to their usefulness for the life of faith, the pieces of the Bible do have a kind of coherence. These are the texts that do, together, give us a useable and coherent story to base faith convictions and practices on.

When we take a single-story approach, we will see that the salvation story of the Bible actually centers from the beginning on God’s mercy. The Old Testament certainly tells of brokenness and unfaithfulness, but throughout it tells even more of God providing the way back through repentance (simply turning back) and the embrace of God’s mercy. As it turns out, when we recognize the centrality of mercy throughout, we will see that Jesus tells the exact same story. It is remarkable how the Christian tradition has paid so little attention to Jesus’s own teaching and practices. He did not teach the need for a pure sacrifice to provide a salvation that prior to that sacrifice was unavailable. Rather, he simply taught about mercy available through accepting it and living in light of it (same as the Old Testament prophets).

When we take a single-story approach, we will better see the presence at the core of faith to be the call to shalom (social wholeness). The Old Testament highly values peace, wholistically understood as the wellbeing of all people. It helps us see justice and love as complementary parts of genuine shalom. Jesus and Paul simply summarize Torah when they say that love of neighbor is the most important orientation for faithful human beings. Torah and Jesus completely agree in insisting that shalom requires people of faith to pay special attention to care for and empower the community’s most vulnerable people—that reality is at the heart of the greatest commandments.

When we recognize the continuity between Torah and the prophets with Jesus’s life and teaching, we will then recognize that his message was not about him as an object of worship (as the sinless, necessary sacrifice to make salvation possible) but about a way of life. In light of Torah, the prophets, and the story of the Hebrew political journey, we may better understand Jesus. Only by reading Jesus in conjunction with the Old Testament will we understand Jesus’s own political vision.

The turning point within the single story: Jeremiah’s call for peace

Though I suggest that it is problematic for Christians to read the Bible as if there is a fundamental turning point that occurs with Jesus, I do think we may helpfully find a different kind of turning point. What changes is not the basic meaning of salvation—it is always about God’s mercy and human responsiveness. What changes is, we could say, God’s social strategy in implementing the blessing of all the families of the earth.

After the liberation of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, they settle in the “promised land” with the opportunity to live out the social blueprint provided by Torah, revealed to them in the wilderness following the exodus. This part of the story is complicated as it involved the expelling of the inhabitants of this land. I believe that it is possible to understand the Conquest story both as non-revelatory of the actual behavior of the Hebrews’ God (that is, as a fabricated account told for its rhetorical value) and as an important part of the plot. I don’t have the space here to reflect more on this complicated and problematic element of the story—but such reflection is necessary to render this story useful for a peaceable reading of the Bible. I’ll just say here that the overall Big Story makes it clear that the deepest meaning of the Conquest story is that it was part of a failed and ultimately repudiated strategy for the sustenance of the promise.

From the very start of the story of the peoplehood, we are told of empires and the practice of the politics of domination—and that these are God’s enemies. God blessed Abraham, Sarah, and their descendants in order that they make a fundamental break with empires and domination. The politics of the promise were anti-empire and anti-domination. So, from the start of life in the promised land, the people were explicitly warned that should they not practice Torah justice, they would not continue to be at home in the land.

In time, the community evolved from the original anarchistic sensibility of Torah (both in the positive sense of affirming decentralized power dynamics and self-organization and in the negative sense of life being chaotic and vulnerable) to a type of politics more aligned with “the nations.” A social elite emerged and tendencies toward hierarchical politics grew. Ultimately, the elders of the community chose in favor of power politics with a human king (a move rejected in previous generations), a standing army with generals and horses and chariots, and a centralized and hierarchical religious structure—all the accoutrements of territorial kingdoms.

As the injustices and idolatries grew, prophets arose to challenge the elite to return to the ways of Torah. These cries for repentance and healing largely went unheeded, and the foreseen disaster should the nation turn from Torah came to pass. The territorial kingdom was destroyed by the overwhelming violence of the Babylonian Empire.

The on-going witness of the prophets during the generations under corrupt kings and religious leaders did help a flicker of connection with the tradition stay alive. Then, just a few years before the final disaster, an old copy of the written Torah was found. King Josiah miraculously recognized that in that document could be found a vision for life and for connection with God that could provide a viable future for the peoplehood. Josiah restored Torah to the center of the community’s awareness and sought change to conform the people to the ways of Torah. He was too late to save the kingdom—within a generation of his death, the Babylonian hammer fell, and the Hebrew territorial kingdom and its temple were no more. However, the prophetic witness and the vision of Torah did survive, and they provided the essential resources for the peoplehood to be sustained amidst its trauma and without its territorial kingdom.

A key prophet, Jeremiah, provided an analysis and a vision that pointed to a future for the promise and the peoplehood. He showed that the fall of the kingdom was not a defeat of their God nor an invalidation of Torah. In fact, such a terrible outcome actually vindicated the faith that had warned of such consequences in face of injustice and idolatry. This outcome actually was evidence of God’s presence, not absence. Jeremiah went on, though, to articulate a vision for a future. The people still had their identity as people of the promise. The promise remained in effect. They still had Torah. They could order their lives around Torah and live toward the future with hope that their vocation to bless all the families of the earth remained in effect. And, crucially, Jeremiah offered a vision for how the people may proceed—not as a territorial kingdom but as a people oriented around Torah who would seek the shalom of each community scattered around the world where they might find themselves (see Jeremiah 29:7).

These events and Jeremiah’s analysis suggest that the territorial kingdom approach was a dead end—an inevitable path to corrupt Torah and the promise of blessing. Territorial kingdoms require borders that need to be defended by force, they require state bureaucracies, they lend themselves to social stratification and centralization of power. One of the main threats to trust in God in the Bible is the efforts of empires and other kingdoms to claim the ultimate loyalty of their people that belongs to God alone and is sketched in Torah.

Jeremiah’s key call for the people of the promise to seek the peace of the city where they find themselves sets the stage for a political strategy that emphasized the possibility of living under Torah without running a territorial kingdom. This vision highlighted creative possibilities to seek peace without the corrupting trappings of power politics. Helped by Jeremiah’s theological analysis and inspirational guidance, Torah does survive and continues to serve as the guiding message for a people who did not have to be in power in order to be authentic and faithful—complicated and tenuous as such a way of living as a peoplehood might be.

Jesus and the non-territorial Kingdom of God

In the centuries that followed, with only a few short-lived exceptions such as the Maccabean revolt in the mid-2^nd century BCE, the people of the promise struggled on with a viable sense of communal identity. Jesus entered the world amidst this struggling community and embodied an influential ministry in which his teaching and practice reinforced Jeremiah’s vision: resist empire, empower decentralized self-organizing, advocate on behalf of vulnerable people, and in many other ways embody a political vision that would repudiate domination and place restorative justice and love at the center.

That Jesus meant to embody a political vision may be seen in his use of the “Kingdom of God” as a central metaphor for his agenda in the world. He envisioned a genuine kingdom with God and not a human despot as the king. This kingdom would be political, transformative, subversive of power politics, and empower the communal practice of the central ideals of Torah. As well, this kingdom did not require control over a specific territory with coercive power.  

Understanding Jesus thus makes his peaceable vision available, central, and practicable. It allows us to see at the heart of the Bible Jesus’s own vision of God and Torah life. It makes that vision central to the single story that the Bible tells and stands in tension with a view of the Bible that sharply differentiates between the theology of the Old Testament and that of the New Testament. That two-story approach can’t help but marginalize Jesus’s peaceable vision, as we see in the all-too-violent history of Christianity once it diminished the Old Testament. A single-story approach can help present-day followers of Jesus work to repair the effects of that history.

Blog posts in the “Peace and the Bible” series