Ted Grimsrud—October 10, 2025
Peace theology centers on Jesus’s life and teaching. Jesus’s life and teaching, though, make the most sense in relation to the bigger story of the Bible. In two posts, I will emphasize a few elements of the story. First, in my previous post, we note the Bible’s strong antipathy toward the big empires. Those empires powerfully challenged the Bible’s faith community—due both to the empires’ violence directed at the community and to the empires’ demands (often met) for loyalty and even idolatrous trust. The Bible offers a counter-empire vision for human life in the teaching of Torah and Jesus. These teachings explicitly offer alternatives to empire ideologies.
Second, Torah politics differ from state politics. Territorial kingdoms and nation states imitate the empires. They use coercion, exploit the vulnerable, protect boundaries, and demand absolute loyalty. The Bible’s faith community, called to bless all the earth’s families, sought to carry out that vocation as a territorial kingdom. The story shows the eventual incompatibility between the vocation to bless and identifying too closely with a territorial kingdom.
Abraham and Sarah and a new intervention from God
Genesis 12 tells of God calling Abraham and his spouse Sarah to parent this community. God gave them a child even though Sarah thought herself too old to bear children. The story that follows in the rest of the Bible presents the community in both success and failure. It offers guidance for the faithful practice of a politics of blessing. The continuation of the promise will be risky and tenuous. The human actors always risk derailing the process by their injustice, violence, and turning toward other gods. The channels for the blessing will always be imperfect human beings. The process will often be surprising. Key actors consistently will not be the people we would expect to be heroes. God’s hand in the dynamics is often difficult to discern, but somehow the promise and the blessing remain alive.
At the end of Genesis, the family of the promise moves to Egypt in order to survive a terrible famine. Then, in the book of Exodus, we learn the family does survive and multiplies, but in a condition of enslavement in the Egyptian Empire. These suffering, enslaved people cry out in their pain. God remembers the promises to Abraham and resolves to intervene. God will guide them into a recovery of faith and a new resolve to embody the promise to be a blessing.
Moses steps up as leader of the people now called “Hebrews.” He demands the god-king of Egypt, “Pharaoh,” let the enslaved people go. In a deadly dance, Moses displays God’s great power and Pharaoh ultimate acquiesces. The people find their way out of Egypt. This founding experience involved the trauma of living under the whip of ruthless enslavers and the joys of God’s liberating intervention. Such an experience provided the basic dynamics of gratitude and responsibility that define the peoples’ sense of identity going forward.
Shortly after the Hebrews left Egypt, they received from Yahweh a blueprint for their common life called “Torah” (or “instruction”). Torah states: God calls you to a life that contrasts with the life you suffered in Egypt. You will not be worked to the bone; each week will include a day of rest, the “Sabbath.” Sabbath will provide the core for each element of your common life. Lives of freedom and creativity are for everyone. Torah cares especially for the vulnerable in the community and will sustain the liberation from enslavement the exodus provided.
The need for a homeland
The story assumes the people needed a place to establish a permanent home in order to embody Torah and turn from injustice and idolatry. God intended this homeland to contrast with the nations’ injustices. To live faithfully to Torah would be difficult in a world hostile to genuine justice. Torah called the people to security in the face of hostility from surrounding nations and faithfulness when tempted to conform to the social and religious practices of their neighbors.
Establishing the people in their given territory with boundary lines and stable leadership was always a mixed affair. Success mixed with failure and faithfulness with unfaithfulness. The people always existed in the midst of struggle and chaos. Moses guided the transition into the people’s homeland. Their ability to be in the land required the people to commit to the way of Torah. If you turn to other paths, you will be dispossessed. The account of entering the land in the book of Joshua tells of successful conquest and settlement. However, the next book, Judges, makes clear the conquest remained unfinished. Many Canaanites remained and caused unrest. The people never managed to establish just and peaceable communities. The social instability pushed the community toward coercion—a dynamic that moved the society away from Torah.
Would the Hebrews manage a decentralized order under the leadership of charismatic judges? Or would they need to structure their life like the nations, with the kings and standing armies? Moses anticipated these questions in Deuteronomy. The people may turn to a king, but if they do, the king must remain subordinate to Torah (see Deut 17). As the story plays out, the prescriptions in Deuteronomy 17 serve as a kind of litany of what the Hebrews’ kings did not do.
The kingly way as disaster
The hoped for harmony in the promised land never arrived. Corruption characterizes too many judges. External threats continue. Life seems disorderly and insecure. Community elders demand that Israel’s leading judge, Samuel, intercede with God to request a king, “like the kings of the nations” (1 Sam 8:5). Speaking on God’s behalf, Samuel argues against the elders. He fails to persuade them to withdraw their demand. However, he does tell us about major problems with kingship. If you get a king, he will take and take from you. He will take away your children, set up a permanent army, take your wealth and your harvest. “You will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you” (1 Sam 8:11-18).
The Hebrews end up with a human king. King David, early in his reign, was a “man after God’s own heart.” Then comes the turning point. David faces temptations to use his power in destructive ways and gives in. He lusts for beautiful Bathsheba, violently disregards Bathsheba’s husband Uriah (a loyal officer in David’s army), and lies about it. David proves to be a taker. The die has been cast. The remainder of David’s reign faces constant trouble. One problem in a monarchical system arises when the king dies. Who will follow him? Israel had a procedure for succession, but it could not prevent bloody conflicts between rival claimants to the throne.
David’s son, Solomon, overthrew the legitimate heir, his older brother Adonijah. As king, Solomon turned from God and left a destructive legacy. He gathered many foreign wives despite the warning that to do so would turn the Hebrew kings toward idolatry (1 Kings 11:2). Solomon does turn toward idolatry (1 Kings 11:7). He also gathered horses and chariots, accumulated gold and silver, and used forced labor to build his palace. He turned to the ways of empire. He built a Temple. The Temple helped create the impression that God sided with the king even as the king turned from Torah. Centralized, king-supporting religious practices empower the kingdom’s ideological self-justifications. Such religion undermines the possibilities of the message of Torah critiquing the king’s policies and suggesting more just ways to order the society.
Solomon’s son, Rehoboam caused a schism. People revolted against his leadership and established a new kingdom, Israel (the “northern kingdom”). The split directly followed from Rehoboam’s injustice (1 Kings 12:14). However, the new kingdom quickly conformed to the unjust, top-down domination dynamics of the southern kingdom, known as Judah.
After a long line of unjust kings, Israel fell to the Assyrian Empire. Judah survived for several more generations despite its own unjust kings. A change comes when young Josiah became king and responded positively to Torah. He hoped to return Judah to its founding values. However, things had gotten too bad. Josiah falls in battle. The new king did not follow his reforms and soon the newly emergent great empire of the world, Babylon, crushed Judah. It was destroyed with its Temple in Jerusalem. Had the people of the promise reached their end?
Abandoning territorialism
The prophet Jeremiah helped the community to survive. He taught that the destruction of Judah and the Temple did not mean that Israel’s God was powerless. In fact, these events actually would be expected if indeed Yahweh acted in the world. Judah’s fate followed from Torah’s message. Torah warned of negative consequences should the community depart from it. The rampant injustices that the prophets critiqued led directly to the final catastrophe. Jeremiah meant to point forward as he insisted that the people of the promise do have a future even amidst the rubble of their failure. This would be an anti-empire future, an anti-territorial kingdom future.
The failure of the kingdom and the Temple to sustain the way of Torah did not mean that the way of Torah had ended. It does not require a territorial kingdom or a Temple. In fact, the territorial kingdom and the Temple proved to be its enemies. Jeremiah points to a new vision for the community. He offers instruction for the people who found themselves taken from Judah and relocated in Babylon: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jer 29:7).
This instruction hearkens back to the promise to Abraham and Sarah that God would give them descendants who would bless all the families of the earth (Gen 12). The story about the politics of the people of God intends to lead to that kind of blessing. It points away from power politics or empire politics or territorial kingdom politics. It points toward a politics of peacemaking, a politics of servanthood, a politics of compassion and generosity.
The politics of non-territorialism
In the Old Testament, the faith community begins with a call to bless. They expected to bless by establishing a community in the land they would possess, a land with boundaries that would make a clear distinction between citizens and non-citizens. God had rigorous expectations of this community. Torah’s blueprint for the community involved ordering its politics in terms of justice, peace, and compassion—for all members. Thus, economic sharing, restorative justice practices, trust in God for their security, and decentralized power. Failure to embody Torah in the land would lead to severe consequences, including, ultimately, separation from the land.
The leaders of the community forgot their founding vocation of being a blessing. Rather than being a nation unlike “the nations,” the elders in time demanded from God a human king in order to “be like the nations” (1 Sam 8). They soon imitated their neighbors with their unjust social practices that impoverished many in the community and with their militarized society. The warnings were fulfilled. The Hebrew territorial kingdoms of Israel and Judah fell.
Here we come to a key point in the entire story in the Old Testament. The end of the territorial kingdoms did not mean the end of the peoplehood or the end of the promise and calling to bless all the families of the earth. Though the linking of this calling with territoriality did end, the peoplehood continued. The community would be centered around Torah and would not need a territorial kingdom or a Temple. All they needed was Torah as their guide.
The story in the New Testament, as we will see in our next post, shows that Jesus embodied precisely the lessons learned from the story of ancient Israel and its territorial kingdom. The Bible tells one story. Jesus provides clarity concerning Torah and fleshes out its politics as he reiterates and extends the teaching of the prophets.
[This is the 12th of a long series of blog posts, “A Christian pacifist in the American Empire” (this link takes you to the series homepage). The 11th post in the series, “The Bible’s suspicion of empires,” may be found by clicking on this link. The 13th post, “Jesus’s political alternative” may be found by clicking on this link.]
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