One of the inevitable dangers of publishing a book is that once it’s out there, you cannot make new edits. But if you learn new information, you wish you could. At least I do. When I wrote All the Families of the Earth: Recovering Scripture’s Vision Beyond Nationalism, I painted a picture of John Winthrop that now I would like to revise.

Puritan lawyer John Winthrop was the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In his sermon of 1630 to his fellow Puritan pilgrims about to land in the New World, he famously called their project “a city on the hill” (a phrase lifted from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, Matt. 5:14), asserting that God had made a covenant with the Massachusetts Bay colonists.

In my book I said, “an assertion he pulled out of thin air.”

I need to revise that. Although there is no such thing as a covenant God made with anyone outside of the ones described in the Bible, Winthrop did not personally invent the idea. In fact, Puritans on the whole believed that they were specially chosen by God. Recall that the name Puritan is worn by people who identify themselves as the uniquely pure ones, the true believers, the righteous. John Winthrop was one of them, and his sermon was addressed to other Puritans.

Puritans had a long history of thinking of themselves as chosen by God for a missionary purpose. As Philip Gorski says, “the Puritans understood their story as that of a new Israel established in a new England.” What did it mean to be the New Israel? “It meant being chosen” (Philip Gorski, American Covenant (Princeton University Press, 2017),38).

It might seem like a long leap to go from Biblical texts about Israel, the chosen people, written several millennia earlier, to thinking of themselves as legitimate referents, but the Puritans took that leap quite regularly. They had a strategy for reading the Old Testament called “typology.” Old Testament characters and situations were “types,” like codes that found their fulfillment in the Puritans’ times.

The Puritans—and their Anglican contemporaries—were inclined to read history the same way that they read the Bible, namely, “typologically.” In a typological reading of the scriptures, the figures and events of the Old Testament are seen as prefiguring those of the New: Isaac, the son who was not sacrificed by his father, prefigures Jesus, the son who was; Noah’s flood is the seagoing version of John’s apocalypse, and so on. The Puritans—and the English in general—often read events in the same way and gave themselves the starring role: as the Pentateuch described the Old Israel, so would the English become the New Israel” (Gorski, 39).

The Puritan belief that they were the New Israel, the new chosen, or “elect” people was not original to them. It had been part of English self-identity since the days of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, written in 1563 (see William Haller, The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (Harper & Row, 1963). Haller says,

“not many Englishmen…were able to think about the issues at stake in their time, let alone express their thoughts, without the use of that familiar parallel code of reference to the saga of the chosen people of the Old Testament and the elect people of England which had come down to them in English print from the days of Elizabeth.” (240, emphasis added).

The very biblical concept that the church had inherited the status of chosenness, having been, like wild olive branches, grafted onto the cultivated olive tree of Israel with its deep roots in covenant and tradition, is, in scripture, explicitly not a national entity (Rom. 11; 1 Pet. 2:9).

But that nuance seems to have passed unnoticed by the Puritans. England, not just the church, was chosen as God’s elect. And if that were true for England, how much more was it true of the truly faithful Puritan pilgrims who set out to make a colony comprising the elect people themselves?

Winthrop was only saying what they all already knew to be true. National chosenness has no biblical basis, but when did that ever stop anyone from believing it?

Puritans stand in a long line of people who have claimed the special status as people with whom God had made a national covenant. In his book, aptly entitled Chosen Peoples (Oxford University Press, 2003), Anthony Smith tells the stories of a number of peoples who considered themselves chosen, including “early medieval Armenia and medieval Ethiopia, and among nineteenth-century Afrikaners and early twentieth-century Zionists…Russia, France, England, and medieval Scotland and Wales” (Chosen Peoples, 7). The field of nations that have claimed to have special covenants with God and hence his chosen is a crowded one indeed, with a long history. Winthrop and the Puritans were only one example among many.

Having a covenant with God and being God’s chosen is the theological justification for nationalism, which thus becomes a religion. The nation becomes sacred. Smith enumerates the four aspects in which the nationalist religion manifests its sacrality in the minds of its adherents:

In the first place, the community itself, the chosen people, the elect nation of believers and their families. Secondly, the holy land in which the people dwell, with its memories, heroic exploits, monuments, and the resting places of ancestors. Then there was the great and glorious past, our past, the golden age of the people, before the present sad decline. And finally there was the sacrifice of all those who had fallen on behalf of the community, to save it from destruction and to assure its sacred destiny. These became the stuff of the new religion of authenticity that is nationalism” (vii–viii, emphasis added).

We can easily identify how all of these are being expressed today in the States by white American Christian nationalists. After many generations of living on land that we were not original to, it has become the native land of white American Christians. They tell stories of the founding fathers as if they were nearly god-like in wisdom and honor. They commemorate battles of the past and honor those who have given their lives with religious ceremony. They remember earlier days of America as a white person’s past golden age that somehow slipped away but could be recovered.

To add to Smith’s list of four, we might include a text many consider sacred: the US Constitution. The Speaker of the House and some Supreme Court justices have called it inspired (notwithstanding the fact that we have had to amend it 27 times).

Winthrop did not invent the idea of the myth of an American covenant with God or the myth that we were God’s new Israel, chosen for a divine purpose. But he did assert it and authorized the Massachusetts Bay Colonists to believe it, which they were well prepared to do. And so he and they became the first in a long line of people on America’s shores to claim that status. Today, the seeds they planted have grown into a plant producing the bitter fruit of a religion of white American “Christian” nationalism. A myth, derived from a tendentious interpretation of a religion, has now become the new religion for some. Like all the other chosen nations before it, ultimate success is probably not its future.

For more, see:

Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity, Oxford University Press, 2003.

Philip S. Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present, Princeton University Press, 2017.

William Haller, The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Harper & Row, 1963.

In Part 1, we saw that everyone involved with Christian scripture picks and chooses which texts are still relevant and which are not (braids upset no one anymore).

That fact is simply required because of how culture changes and how moral understandings evolve, and no one escapes either.

Culture changes. Women wearing braids, gold, or pearls (forbidden by Scripture) no longer have any meaning. Nor do head coverings during prayer. Everyone completely ignores these—and honestly, they seem trivial and too irrelevant to take seriously. But they were serious enough issues in the first century that biblical authors included them and expected faithful Christians to feel compelled to obey. (I know that some groups make women wear those little caps that are so small as to not amount to a “covering” at all in order to comply with scripture, but look at them: really?)

The important point to acknowledge is that there is no indication within the text of scripture to distinguish between those parts that have lasting, timeless significance and those that have a sell-by expiration date. There are no asterisks or footnotes saying things like “*this next section on slaves, masters and subordination of women will expire after 1800–2000 years from now.” It is we who decide, as we should, and as we must. No one consistently treats all of Scripture as equally authoritative on all counts. No one does, in practice, regardless of what they claim.

Note: only the most conservative churches (denominations, associations) like Southern Baptists make the claim that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, authoritative for all time. Most Christian churches have a far more nuanced view of the nature of scripture, acknowledging both its lasting importance and relevance to the faith community and its human elements. The Scriptures of the New Testament were written in a specific time, the first and second centuries; and in a specific location, the Roman Empire; and from a certain cultural mixture, first century Jewish and Roman–Hellenistic.

So, given all of that, the question is: Are the Southern Baptists’ doctrines of Scripture even tenable?

My view is that they are not. I will lay out several arguments here. None are unique to me; all have been identified in scholarly New Testament research.

Jesus and Scripture: It’s Complicated

First, the SBC’s view of Scripture’s eternal authority is not Jesus’ view of Scripture, according to the Gospels. Initially, according to Matthew’s gospel, Jesus seemingly asserts the continuing authority of the Hebrew Scriptures saying:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished” (Matt. 5:17–18).*

Questions arise: what did he mean by fulfill, accomplished, and until? There have been a great variety of interpretations of this passage over the years, but one thing is certain: this passage is followed by a string of quotations of Jesus saying something to the effect of “you have heard that it was said by men of old… but I say to you…” (Matthew 5:21–47).

It may sound like Jesus is referring to hearsay when he says, “You have heard it said by men of old…” but sometimes he is referring to the Old Testament, and sometimes to the God-given Law of Moses, the Ten Commandments. Jesus did not treat the Scriptures as timelessly valid and unchanging as the Southern Baptists maintain.

Jesus felt free to apply scripture in new ways, sometimes contrary to its original intent, as, for example, when he said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer” (Matt. 5:38–39).

Paul’s Practice of Women In Ministry

Second, the Southern Baptist conclusion that women should not have pastoral authority on the basis of Scripture is at odds with Paul’s own practice of partnering with women in ministry, which is described in Scripture.

The most obvious case is in Romans “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.”

In an offhand greeting, Paul includes Junia, a woman, as a person who is not only an apostle but also prominent among the apostles. The translators of the King James Version of 1611 were so scandalized by the idea that a woman could be called an apostle that they changed the name to Junius, a male name. But there are no records of that name for males in the first century. Junia is a feminine name, and Junia was a prominent apostle. But the Southern Baptists would have banned her from preaching in church.

Paul had two colleagues, Priscilla and her husband Aquila, fellow tent makers, that he got to know in Corinth to which they had fled after Jews had been expelled from Rome (Acts 18:1–3). They accompanied Paul on part of his mission to Syria.

Later, they came in contact with a Jewish believer named Apollos, who was an excellent preacher but had some gaps in his theological knowledge. Acts says, “He began to speak boldly in the synagogue; but when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained the Way of God to him more accurately” (Acts 18:26).

In other words, both Prescilla and Aquila, a woman and a man, taught Apollos theology. Here, a woman is teaching a man, in contrast to the restrictions given in 1 Cor. and 2 Tim. Unlike the Southern Baptists, Luke, the author of Acts, had no problem with that.

Two other women, Euodia and Syntyche, were prominent enough in the Philippian church that their disagreement was an issue for Paul (Phil. 4:2). He called them out by name, asking them to come to an agreement. We do not know what the dispute was, nor do we know their roles in the church. But we do know that they were prominent enough that Paul named them and corrected them.

The Human Element

Third, the human element of the texts that we now call Scripture are undeniable. For example, back to the topic of hair and hair coverings in 1 Cor. 11. In verse 14 Paul says, “Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him…?” In Paul’s culture, maybe so, but that blanket statement is simply mistaken. Long hair has not always and everywhere been a shame for men, so no, nature does not teach that.

Besides, the very idea that nature can lead you to timeless truth is extremely problematic. For Aristotle, some people were slaves by nature. Yes, it was common in Paul’s day for Greek philosophers to argue from “nature” to morality, but it is easy to mistake the status quo’s prejudices for nature’s rules.

It gets worse. In the next verse, Paul again appeals to nature, but this time to what it teaches us about women’s hair, continuing the sentence above “…but if a woman has long hair, is it her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering.” The covering aspect of women’s hair cannot be a scalp covering, because men have that as well. It has to mean hair long enough to hang down and cover some parts of her body. And that too is what nature teaches.

But “nature” does not teach African women that. Their natural hair does not hang down to cover anything. There were plenty of African women in Paul’s world, he was just culturally blind to them. So, his idea that nature teaches men to have short hair and women to have long hair is simply wrong. Whatever Scripture is, it contains mistakes, errors, and human prejudices along with elevated moral truths. It has both.

So, there are obvious indications within the New Testament of cultural bias and perspectives limited by all-too-human vantage points. Hair styles and coverings, appropriate jewelry, and domestic patriarchal hierarchies illustrate the way culture is embedded in the views of the writers of the New Testament.

The deeply immoral practice of owning humans as slaves was not challenged, but simply assumed—until the conundrum that a Christian slave may be a brother or sister in Christ to his/her owner. That glaring contradiction is what prompted Paul to write the letter to Philemon. Philemon’s slave had become a believer. But that individual case did not, unfortunately, become the basis for a church-wide anti-slavery movement. That would have to wait another 1800 years.

Subjectivity and Honesty

The main argument against allowing for cultural development to influence our understanding of the authority of scripture is that once the door is open, everything is on the table for negotiation. Once there is no “objective” standard that says scripture is always and everywhere authoritative, then you open the door to subjectivity. Who is to say which teaching is simply a cultural prejudice of the first century, and which teachings are binding for all time?

If a patriarchal, hierarchical understanding of the roles of slaves and masters, and husbands and wives, is merely cultural baggage that we can let go of today, then what else is? Who gets to draw the line?

Should the sad fact that almost no women were given the opportunity to receive an education in the first century have anything to do with the restrictions that some of the New Testament limits their roles in the church?

Should the inconsistency of Paul’s practice of working alongside women in ministry make us wonder about the authenticity of the paragraph restricting women in 1 Cor. 14:33–36?

Culture has always influenced moral rules, and the direction is not always from darkness to enlightenment. It can go the other way. Paul’s vision of the new reality brought about by Christ had significant implications. Citing a baptismal formula, by then common in the churches, Paul said, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:27–28).

That radical equality between social classes of slave and free and the gender categories of male and female seemed to scandalize Roman society, so that as Christianity grew and became more widespread, the New Testament itself, under cultural pressure, backed down. Women were told to be subordinate to their husbands and restricted from public church ministry. These more conservative views do not mean that Paul reversed himself. They come from Ephesians, Colossians, Timothy and Titus, which many (probably most) scholars believe did not come from Paul’s pen, but were later works written in his name (a common practice called mimesis in the ancient world).

The radical equality of slave and free proclaimed in the baptismal formula was also eroded. In Ephesians and Colossians, slaves are addressed directly, as fully human, but told to be subordinate to their masters. But in the later book of Titus, they were not even directly addressed. Rather, masters were instructed, “Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to talk back” (Titus 2:9). The progression is clear: from radical equality, to subordination, but still fully human, to subordinate non-person who does not merit direct address.

So the issue is not whether Scripture has been culturally influenced. It clearly has. And the issue is not that our culture influences how we read scripture. It obviously does. Nor is the question whether Scripture contains human elements, perspectives, prejudices, and even errors. It does.

The only question left is, will we be honest about it?

Or, like the SBC, will we maintain the fiction that Scripture is not any of those things, because we have our reasons for wanting to restrict women from preaching to us men?

___________________________________________

* Should it matter that, according to some NT scholars, the community that produced the gospel of Matthew’s version of Jesus was likely Jewish refugees of the Jewish War of 66–70 CE, living alongside the numerically greater Gentile Christian community in the nearby province of Syria? For them, as Jews, the question of the continued relevance of the Jewish Law of Moses may have been a concern apart from whether Gentiles were similarly bound by it. (See Luz Ulrich, “Matthew 8–20,” in Hermenia (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2007) 49–50.

At its annual meeting, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment that bans women from being church pastors. If ratified by the required second vote a year from now, the so-called “Truth and Unity” amendment proposed by Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler would nail shut the door to women’s pastoral leadership in the SBC.

Why the Amendment? Because a growing number of Southern Baptist Churches have women in ministry positions that include the title “pastor”. The problem with this is the issue of scriptural authority, according to Tim Overton, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Home Education Association. He said,

“First and most importantly, the Truth & Unity Amendment must pass because it reflects the Bible’s own teaching. Scripture is the inerrant Word of God and the final authority for faith and practice. Southern Baptists have historically stood firmly upon biblical authority, and this issue is ultimately about whether the SBC will continue to submit to Scripture even when cultural pressures push in the opposite direction.”

The questions are,

• Can this understanding of Scripture be consistently maintained?

• Is this view of Scripture tenable?

I will address the first question here, and the second in part two

First, the Southern Baptists are correct that the New Testament, in several places, restricts women from teaching or exercising authority over a man. For example:

I desire, then, that in every place the men should pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or argument; 9 also that the women should dress themselves modestly and decently in suitable clothing, not with their hair braided, or with gold, pearls, or expensive clothes, 10 but with good works, as is proper for women who profess reverence for God. 11 Let a womana learn in silence with full submission. 12 I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man;b she is to keep silent. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve; 14 and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. (1Tim. 2:8–15).

If the SBC’s understanding of Scriptural authority is consistently maintained, then all of the New Testament teaching must be authoritative. In other words, Scriptural authority means that we cannot pick and choose those teachings that we like and disregard others. Cherry picking should be prohibited.

If, however, we are allowed to pick and choose which teachings are authoritative, then the Scripture does not have the last word—we do. If we can decide which teachings have authority and must be followed and which can be ignored, then we have become a higher authority than Scripture.

But even the SBC cannot avoid cherry picking. The timelessly authoritative scripture requires a lot more than prohibiting women from teaching or having authority over a man, and requiring them to keep silent. Notably, in the piece Tim Overton wrote about the Truth and Unity Amendment, he cited only verse 12 of the Timothy paragraph quoted above.

Notably absent from his quotation are the requirements in this text that:

• Men should pray, lifting up their hands. Baptists don’t pray that way; Pentecostals and Charismatics do.
  

• Women should dress modestly—this one is so vague as to be of little value, but it is a requirement, whatever “modestly” means.
  

• Women cannot braid their hair. I know that this sounds trivial and meaningless to us today, but is scripture timelessly authoritative, or do we get to cherry-pick?
  

• Women should not wear the following jewelry: gold or pearls. No gold wedding bands or necklaces, no pearl earrings. Again, if it’s timelessly authoritative, no picking and choosing. This jewelry restriction is repeated in 1 Peter 3:3, so it is doubly authoritative.

Those requirements for women are not the only ones in the New Testament. If Scripture is timelessly authoritative, then it all still applies. Other Scriptural requirements for women include:

Subordination of Wives in a Patriarchal Hierarchy

“Wives, in the same way, be subject to your husbands” (1 Peter 3:1). To what extent? Follow Sara’s example, says Peter: “It was in this way long ago that the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves by accepting the authority of their husbands. Thus Sarah obeyed Abraham and called him lord” (1 Peter 3:5–6). Submitting to husbands is also taught in the “household codes” of Ephesians 5:22 and Colossians 3:18.

Headcovering in Prayer

Women must never pray without wearing a head covering. Again, this sounds trivial and unimportant to us, but it was significant to Paul, who devoted 1 Cor. 11:2–16 to the head-covering issue and the different requirements for men and women: men must not cover their heads while praying, but women must. This is important not just for humans, but as Paul says, “a woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels” (1 Cor. 11:10).

The question of scriptural authority is not restricted to the requirements for women; men are included as well, as we saw in the requirement to pray with uplifted hands.

Masters and Slaves

Men who are slave owners are called “masters” and are required to treat their slaves without threatening them (Eph. 6:9), but with justice and fairness (Col. 4:1).

In America, we no longer own people as property, but if there were any slaves, they are required to obey their earthly masters in everything (Col. 6:22; Eph. 6:5) and not talk back to their masters (Titus 2:9).

Note: Never is slavery condemned as wrong; rather, it is regulated in the context of moral instruction. That is the timelessly authoritative perspective on slavery in Scripture.

Speaking in Tongues

No one is permitted to prevent people from speaking in tongues (1 Cor. 14:37). Most Baptists I know do not appreciate speaking in tongues today.

Despising all Cretans

People from the island of Crete are to be considered what they always are: “‘Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons.’ That testimony is true. For this reason rebuke them sharply” (Titus 1:12–13). I know a man from Crete who is none of those things yet. He still has time.

Even Southern Baptists Pick and Choose

This could go on and on. I hope the point is clear. The SBC wants to forbid women in the 21st Century from being able to preach in church because of their claim to maintain the authority of scripture for all time. But it should be abundantly obvious that they pick and choose which scriptures to assert still have authority while completely ignoring others.

It is not trivial to consider that Southern Baptists did the same cherry picking during the period of enslavement in America. They used those very verses about slaves and masters to maintain their position that slavery was biblical, as Jamar Tisby has analyzed. In fact, defending slavery was the very reason the Southern Baptists split from the Northern Baptists and founded their own new association.

To their credit, the Southern Baptist Association has since repudiated slavery and white supremacy. Not to their credit, they waited until 1995 to reach those conclusions.

Scriptural Authority is Not Simple

Bottom line: anyone wishing to maintain the doctrine of the authority of Scripture must admit that the way in which Scripture has continuing authority is complicated, not simple.

It is significant that cultures change. Whatever braids meant in the first century, they no longer mean. Whatever it meant for a woman to wear gold or pearls back then, it does not mean the same thing today. Whatever it meant for people to pray with or without headcoverings back then, it does not mean the same today.

Whatever you want to say about the nature of Scripture, you have to allow for the fact that Scripture includes hyperbolic and even prejudicial comments, like stating that everyone from Crete is a liar, vicious brute, and lazy glutton. The human element is undeniable.

So what about the role of women in ministry today?

If you want to ban women from preaching, then at least admit that you do so for reasons other than a high doctrine of Scriptural authority. Otherwise, cover their heads too, forbid them from braiding their hair or wearing gold or pearls, and require them to call their husbands “lord.” And while you’re at it, raise your hands when praying.

And for goodness sake, don’t let them teach vulnerable, impressionable children in Sunday School either. Children are far less able to discern their female errors than the men you will not let them preach to.

Or, just admit that you and everyone else cherry-pick because everyone understands that cultures change and therefore meanings change, and even moral ideas, like slavery, change.

If the only things you knew about Jesus were what you could learn from looking at a crucifix, you would know that he did not end his life as a conquering hero. He was executed.

If you know anything at all about Jesus’ life, as recorded in the four canonical Gospels, you know that he did not attempt to raise an army. In the end, he had no armed group available to protect him from arrest and execution.

According to the Gospel of John, he could have raised a rebel force. People, John tells us, wanted to make him a king, but he would have none of it:

“When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself” (John 6:15).

In fact, the charge against Jesus and the reason for his execution by Roman governor Pilate was that he was attempting to become the “king of the Jews” in place of King Herod Antipas. That was the charge inscribed on the sign Pilate ordered to be put on Jesus’ cross as a warning to other potential rebels. But that was clearly not Jesus’s intent.

Pilate’s confusion, it must be admitted, was partly Jesus’s fault. His central theme, according to the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), was that the “kingdom of God” had, at least in some sense, arrived. But according to John, when Pilate questioned him about his aspirations, he pointedly disavowed any claim to be an earthly king, noting that he had no army.

“Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over.… But as it is, my kingdom is not from here’” (John 18:36).

So, Jesus was not leading a violent insurrection. But he obviously had some kind of issue with the temple and/or its administration. He felt so strongly about it that he shut the whole thing down, at least temporarily.

The huge question is, what was it that got Jesus so upset that he felt he had to shut down the center of Jewish religion and identity, the temple? He probably knew that it was risky, to say the least. The temple authorities in his day belonged to the aristocracy who were at least grudgingly cooperative with the Roman authorities (who appointed and deposed high priests at will). Become their enemy at your own risk. Everyone knew that.

The temple was not just a temple. It was also the national bank. It was the repository of the records of indebtedness of so many peasants who had been driven off their land in preceding years. It was, in short, the center of power, in the hands of the wealthy aristocracy.

To make matters worse, from a Jewish perspective, the leadership was invalid. The high priests were not from the Levitical family line, as required by the Law of Moses. Worse still, the high priests were appointed and regularly sacked by Roman authorities.

To complicate matters further, Jesus had concluded that God did not need, nor even want, sacrifices. This idea was not new or unique to Jesus; in fact, according to the Gospels, Jesus quoted a centuries-old Hebrew prophet when he said, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’” (Matt. 9:13, citing Hosea 6:6).

The full quotation from Hosea makes it even more explicit:

“For I desire steadfast love (chesed in Hebrew, translated as “mercy”) and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

Going further, Jesus believed that forgiveness of sins did not require sacrifice, another idea not unique nor original with Jesus, but again, sourced in the Hebrew Bible, which repeatedly depicts God as forgiving sins on the basis of penitent prayer, without the addition of sacrifices. After Jesus healed the paralytic, according to the Gospels, Jesus said to him, “Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven” (Matt. 9:2).

It is interesting to note that the Gospels never record Jesus going to the temple to offer a sacrifice. In fact, apart from John’s suspicious chronology, the only time Jesus ever went to the temple as an adult was to shut it down, and then to teach in the temple courts the last week of his life.

For Jesus, the love of God and neighbor is superior to sacrifices. He said,

“and ‘to love him (God) with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’—this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” (Mark 12:33).

So, there are a host of reasons Jesus may have had for his opposition to the temple’s practices and administration: legitimacy, economic exploitation and corruption, the uselessness of sacrifices in the Kingdom age, or perhaps others.

Which was uppermost in his mind is a matter of great dispute among New Testament scholars, as Robert Guelich admits: “We cannot be certain precisely what angered Jesus.” (Robert W. Guelich, Word Biblical Commentary Vol. 34B, p. 181).

But the question is, was this action in keeping with Jesus’ character and teachings?

Jesus’ Consistent Teaching of Nonviolence

The fact that Jesus was arrested and executed without an armed struggle does not surprise anyone who reads the Gospels. Jesus was consistently against violence, at least on a personal level.

In Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, he said, “Blessed are the meek…the merciful…the peacemakers.” Violent people are not meek, merciful or peacemakers.

He was even willing to contradict the teaching in the Old Testament Law of Moses to make the point:

“You have heard that it was said (by Moses!), ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also” (Matt. 5:38-39).

Jesus said that instead of vengeance, we should love our enemies:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:43-44).

According to the Gospels, someone with Jesus when he was being arrested (John says it was Peter) pulled out a sword, but Jesus said, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matt. 26:52).

Nonviolence was characteristic of Jesus.

Was Jesus’ Temple Action Violent?

According to Simon J. Joseph, the answer is a clear “No.”

“Although Jesus is reported to have overturned tables, this use of physical force in the Temple does not seem to have been an act of violent contact against animals or human beings.” (The Nnonviolent Messiah, p. 43)

Joseph defines violence, as other ethicists do, as “the intentional use of force in order to hurt, damage, or kill another person or group” (Joseph, NonViolent Messiah, 33). That is not the only way violence can be defined. Some ethicists would include the destruction of property and even acts of coercion. Some go so far as to say that language alone may be construed as violence (though I personally think that would mean we need a different word for harming persons).

But would Jesus or any of his contemporaries in the first century find table-turning inconsistent with Jesus’ ethic of non-retaliation and non-violence? As evidence that the answer is probably “No, they didn’t,” consider the fact that all four Gospels record the event — John even intensifying it with the addition of the whip against animals — without any excuses or embarrassment. They are the ones who recorded all of Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence, and they felt no discomfort with that temple action.

Back to Hegseth and Christian Nationalists

The use of Jesus’ action in the temple as the correct lens through which to see Jesus, and calling it, as Doug Wilson does, “a righteous insurrection,” is in keeping with the muscular, violent Jesus that Hegseth wants to promote.

No, it isn’t. But this is in keeping with his other misuses of scripture that Brian Kaylor has reported on.

The evidence of the Gospels is that Jesus was nonviolent and frequently taught an ethic of nonviolence, at least on a personal level (whether that ethic has implications for nations is a much-discussed and vexed question).

Jesus’ personal practice was also non-violent. He made no attempt to resist arrest, had no armed group to protect him, and certainly did not try to raise an armed struggle against Roman occupation and oppression (as others in his day and shortly afterward were to do, disastrously).

The Gospel writers saw no contradiction between those ethics and practices and Jesus’ action in the temple.

Jesus was intentionally provocative. He knew what he was doing was risky, and for about a week after the event, the authorities, out of fear of the crowds that approved of him, refrained from moving against him. But the arrest finally came, by night, away from the crowds, and the rest is well known.

To cynically use Jesus’ temple-action as justification for misreading Jesus as a violent insurrectionist and as a paradigm is to throw under the rug his overwhelmingly consistent opposition to violence.

Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, would have us believe in a God who, as the Biblical Psalmist says, “trains my hands for war” (Ps. 144:1). He prays that God will help us violently attack our enemies. He is public about his Christian faith, quotes the Bible, and platforms formerly fringe Christian Nationalists like Rev. Doug Wilson, whose denomination he is a member of, and who he invited to preach at the Pentagon .

Doug Wilson likes to use the story of Jesus overturning the tables of the money changers at the temple in Jerusalem as a paradigm for Christian resistance to government corruption. He has called Jesus’ action a “righteous insurrection” and “a glorious act of civil disobedience.”

Two questions are important here:

• Is that the right way to read Jesus’ actions at the temple?

• Is that event the interpretive clue by which to understand Jesus’ ministry?

Wilson endorses other Christian Nationalists like Andrew Torba and Andrew Isker, the authors of Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide for Taking Dominion and Discipling Nations, who frequently argue that Christians must “take dominion” and reclaim institutions for Christ. Theirs is a muscular Jesus:

“We must realize that King Jesus is not some hippie Mr. Rogers that our culture makes Him out to be. He is King of Kings. He reigns. He rules. He flips over tables in the temple.”

Does or should that event define Jesus for all time?

The Bible itself resists easy, quick answers. It is a complex book with a complex past. I always wonder how much complexity readers of this Substack have an appetite for. I do not want to put anyone off, but neither can I forge a path through the complexity by ignoring it. So, here we go.

Some Background About the Gospels

Some people make the claim that “the Bible has been changed through the years.” They usually have no idea how both facile and deeply true that statement is. It is facile because they imagine that the process of change was willy-nilly, like the telephone game. Or that the changes were cynically introduced in the service of some agenda, like suppressing women.

But the claim that the Bible has been changed is also deeply true, if by “Bible” we include the original teachings of Jesus. I will not go into the long formation process of the Hebrew Bible (“Old Testament”), which transpired over centuries of development. We will stay with the New Testament, specifically the Gospels.

Everyone knows we have four Gospels accepted by the vast majority of Christians: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They all tell the story of Jesus in their own ways. The first three, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, seem to “see” Jesus very similarly, so they are called the synoptic (syn, “together” + optic, “view”) gospels.

John tells the story very differently. Most scholars agree that Mark’s gospel was first and that it served as the basis for Matthew and Luke, who extensively quote from it word-for-word, in addition to adding parts of the Jesus story of their own.

Interestingly, Matthew and Luke sometimes add vignettes that do not appear in Mark, using the exact same language, leading scholars to believe that, in addition to using Mark as a basic source, they also shared another source. But no one has ever found that other source, so it remains hypothetical.

Even the three Synoptic Gospels vary in how they present details of the story of Jesus. Both Matthew and Luke not only quote Mark but also edit Mark’s version. So, can we say they “changed the Bible” if by “Bible” we mean the basic story of Jesus’s life and teachings?

The story of the action that Jesus took in the temple is a perfect example of how this works.

Matthew 21 and Luke 19 mostly follow Mark 11, often quoting him word-for-word. According to Mark, Jesus Jesus did four things. Matthew recordes only two. Luke compresses it down to one. According to Mark’s original accout, Jesus:

• Drove out “those who were selling and buying” (notice the odd order of “selling” before “buying” (all three gospels agree, following Mark’s account);

• Overturned the tables of the money-changers (omitted by Luke)

• Overturned the seats of the pigeon sellers (omitted by Luke)

• Prohibited anyone from carrying a vessel through the temple (Omitted by Matthew and Luke).

As is typical, Matthew and Luke edit Mark’s account, thereby shortening it. Luke streamlines it the most. Luke has no table-flipping or seat-overturning, nor any prohibition on carrying anything.

For all three, there is a confrontation, intentionally provoked by Jesus, who prohibited people from accomplishing an essential duty at the temple: offering sacrifices. If a worshipper could not buy an animal to sacrifice and a seller could not sell one, sacrificing would stop, at least for the time being, when Jesus was there that day.

The added details in Mark’s first and probably most original account—the disruption of pigeon sales (the sacrifices of the poor, e.g., Mary and Joseph) and carrying vessels—only heighten the extent to which Jesus temporarily shut down the temple.

The synoptic gospels do not report Jesus making a whip or driving anything out of the temple with it. Only John, whose account was written decades after the Synoptics (as most scholars believe) included those more violent details.

But to correct the misperception of so many—probably caused at least in part by the artistic renderings of this incident, which are mostly based on a distortion of John’s gospel—John says Jesus specifically drove out only the animals, not people: “Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle.” The phrase “both sheep and cattle” specifies what was being driven out by the whip: animals, not people. Animal lovers like me may not like that picture of Jesus, but at least he was not described, even by John, as being violent towards people.

Here are the accounts set side by side for comparison, using the NRSV translation.

The Synoptic Gospels place this event in the last week of Jesus’ life. Many scholars believe it was the action that most upset the authorities in charge of the temple to the point that they plotted to have Jesus killed.

John’s gospel alone places it near the start of Jesus’ ministry. The difference in that chronology is striking. Either it was a culminating event that set up Jesus’ arrest, trial, and crucifixion, or it was a minor event that went unnoticed by the authorities in any significant way at the start of Jesus’ ministry.

In an attempt to make sense of John’s chronology, some have hypothesized that Jesus did it twice: once at the start of his ministry (as per John) and once at the end (as in Matthew, Mark, and Luke).

To shut down the temple, however, was such a provocative act that most scholars believe it could have only happened once and had severe, in fact, fatal consequences for Jesus.

So why would John move that event to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry? We cannot read John’s mind, but it seems likely that he believed we readers of his Gospel needed to understand something important about Jesus and his relationship with Israel’s central religious practice: temple sacrifice, right from the start of the story, or we would not understand Jesus’s whole ministry correctly. Jesus had an oppositional relationship with the temple and its administration. If you do not know that about Jesus from the beginning, you will read him wrongly.

That is a hypothesis, but it does seem plausible. Anyway, one thing is clear: if this event happened only once, as is most likely, then John felt free to move it chronologically,* despite knowing it occurred near the end of Jesus’ ministry. Just as Matthew and Luke felt free to edit Mark’s account, John felt free to adjust its chronology significantly.

This illustrates, as I said, that the Bible is complex rather than simple. To go from “what happened” to “a written story about what happened” is not straightforward. It includes an author’s goals, beliefs, perspectives, background, and agenda. All writers have agendas. Why else would they (including me) write?

So what? Who cares?

Now to the point about Hegseth’s muscular Jesus and the Christian Nationalists’ use of this incident as paradigmatic for understanding the non-hippy-ish Jesus. What was Jesus doing when he temporarily (symbolically?) shut down the temple? Was it out of character, or was it consistent with what we believe we know about Jesus from the gospels? Is this event the one to focus on as we try to understand Jesus? Should it inform our current hopes and dreams for our society? If so, how?

Stay tuned for part two.

_____________________________

*John also felt free to change the chronology of Jesus’s death, changing the Synoptics’ account of Jesus’s crucifixion on Friday (Good Friday) to Thursday, so that his death occurs on the day of the slaughtering of the Passover lambs, in order to complete his theological understanding that Jesus, is the “lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29).

May I make a request of those of you who have read my book, All the Families of the Earth: Recovering Scripture’s Vision Beyond Nationalism?

If you found it helpful in our common desire to understand the Bible and its implications for American Christian Nationalism, would you be willing to write a short review on Amazon or Barnes & Noble? Just a couple of lines is all that is necessary.

Reviews help other people find the book. This is not about sales, though who doesn’t want them? It’s about trying to get the word out to as many as possible that the Bible’s vision runs directly counter to the claims of American Christian Nationalism. We need all the help we can get at this moment in our country, so if you would write a review, it could help.

How? Just find the book on either platform. At Amazon, scroll down to the graph of ratings on the left.

At Barnes and Noble the link is just below the title.

Many thanks! According to the Amazon daily ratings, in the category of Christian Social Issues, the book seems to be doing well, though Amazon never reveals statistics, only comparisons with other similar books.

If you know of any groups that read books together for whom this one would be a good fit, please suggest it to them.

Many thanks,

Steven

My book, All the Families of the Earth: Recovering Scripture’s Vision Beyond Nationalism, now has a free downloadable study guide for each chapter containing:

• A content overview paragraph

• Key ideas

• Key passages

• Discussion Questions

The book is available from local bookstores that can order it from the publisher, Wipf and Stock, and from online retailers like Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, or directly from the publisher.

Links are available here.

I was raised in a Protestant Christian home.  But saying only that much reveals little.  There are all kinds of Protestants.  Not all of them consider the others real Christians.  The kind of Protestant Christian home I was raised in was a fundamentalist one.  We thought that we alone were the true believers.  

We took the Bible literally (or, we were told we did; we were taught that we did).  How literal?   Adam and Eve were real people, the Flood flooded the entire world, Jonah was really swallowed by a whale, and so on.  We were told that the liberals (mainline Protestants) who took these stories metaphorically were not genuine Christians.  

Neither were Catholics.  Their veneration of saints and Mary made them nearly, if not entirely, idolaters.  We were, after all, the descendants of the 16th-century Reformation in which people like Martin Luther were happy to identify the Pope as an anti-Christ.  As a child, I had a Catholic friend, but I was not allowed to go to church with him.  They were not real Christians.  

I moved on from that perspective a long time ago, but I still remember it.  Our world of true Christians was a small one.  Heaven was going to be a lightly populated place.  

The question is, who gets to define who a real Christian is and who is not?  

When you hear people speak of American Christian nationalism today, it may sound like a big tent movement supporting a broad Christian consensus, tolerant of a variety of views within Christianity, and of non-Christian monotheistic religions like Jews and Muslims (of the non-radical sort).  

That would be a mistake.  Recently, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense (or of War, as he would have it), has invited his spiritual mentor, and avowed Christian nationalist, Doug Wilson, to the Pentagon to lead a prayer service.  You may not have heard of Doug Wilson, but his being platformed at the highest levels of the American government should raise concerns.  

First, why are there religious services preferencing one particular religion in our constitutionally pluralistic country taking place at all?  

Second, what does attendance or non-attendance mean for the military careers of people outside of that particular religious perspective?  

And third, what does Doug Wilson’s brand of Christian nationalism want for our country?

Christian nationalists are inherently non-pluralistic.  “Exclusionary tribalism”  is characteristic of that perspective, as Paul D. Miller explains in his book, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with White Christian Nationalism. In interviews, Wilson has said that in his version of Christian America, only the Protestant version of Christianity would be legitimate.  He would outlaw Catholic parades, including a statue of Mary as a form of public idolatry. 

Maybe that restriction on religious liberty seems relatively benign (to a Protestant), but what about allowing married women to vote?  According to Wilson and other Christian nationalists, “family voting” would be the rule.  And of course, the man, as the Biblical head of household, would, after appropriate conversations with his wife, make the final decision about whom they would both vote for.  

But though Wilson has Hegseth’s ear, other forms of Christian nationalism hold different perspectives and wield influence.  The people seen in White House photos surrounding President Trump, with extended prayer hands, are all part of a loosely defined movement, called by some the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).  They take the Bible literally, too, as Wilson claims to, but with different interpretations. They believe in modern prophets who speak inspired messages.  They practice spiritual warfare against demonic forces and call on angelic forces to battle evil.  

They were at the Capitol on Jan. 6 praying that the election, which they, like Trump, believed had been stolen, would be reversed by spiritual power.  The Christian banners, flags, and symbols at the Capitol that day were their inspiration.  All of this has been discussed in Matthew D. Taylor’s book,  The Violent Take it By Force: The Christian Movement That is Threatening Our Democracy.  These are the ones who have embraced Lance Wallnau’s “Seven Mountain Mandate,” whose project of social domination has been detailed in Project 2025.  

Neither the NAR nor Wilson’s brands of Christian nationalism believe that mainline Protestants like Presbyterians (PCUSA) of which I am one, Lutherans (ELCA), United Methodists, or Episcopalians have Christianity right.  They are all mistakenly open to women in leadership and far too inclusive, far too soft on immigration, and far too woke to be legitimate.  Some Roman Catholics, like Vice President JD Vance, may be acceptable, but even the Pope, when he criticizes war in favor of peace, may be theologically suspect.  

Christian nationalism is not a single broad consensus perspective on Christianity in general.  It comes in multiple, often mutually exclusive varieties, none of which are tolerant of others.  

What does this mean when their leaders are surrounding the President in the Oval Office or preaching at the Pentagon?  Where would it leave those of us who do not share their versions of Christianity (whichever one among them might eventually prevail, that is)?   

Once the State is involved in asserting one particular religious perspective as authoritative, how far would it go to enforce its views?  Could a Mainline Protestant Sunday school teacher be accused of corrupting children?  Could a wife who voted against her husband’s preference be prosecuted?   Would we be free to disagree with a prophet’s pronouncements?   Is this the kind of  America we recognize?

America is a religiously diverse country.  Religious liberty has been one of our defining characteristics.  We have had a checkered history of religious tolerance.  In the early days, some colonies excluded Catholics, others, Unitarians.  But over our nearly 250-year national history, we have learned to respect each other’s right to practice their faith, of whatever variety.  We have shunned religious litmus tests for employment or leadership in government.  We have even made religious discrimination illegal.  We have not always been consistent nor successful in living faithfully to this inclusive vision, but we have, until recently, upheld it as an ideal to aspire to and to work toward.  Christian nationalists, of whatever variety, wish to dismantle this vision of a religiously tolerant America.  Insofar as their vision excludes me, I find this alarming.  Insofar as their vision undermines fundamental American ideals, I find it frightening.  

In 1630, John Winthrop, soon to become the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, delivered a sermon entitled “A Modell of Christian Charitie” to his fellow passengers on the Arbella, one of the fleet of 11 ships carrying 700 Pilgrims to begin the new colony. In that sermon, Winthrop, a deeply pious man, told the colonists on board that they had “entered into a covenant with God.”

That was an extraordinary claim. It is not at all clear what led him to make that bold assertion. The Bible describes several covenants God made with humans, first to Noah and all creation, after the flood, then to Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, and subsequently with the Israelites under Moses, renewed by Joshua, and to King David, but no covenants were ever made with any other nation.

Winthrop was not a clergyman, nor had he studied theology formally. His training was in law. But he imagined that this new colony could, by some means, inherit the status that had been uniquely Israel’s alone as God’s chosen nation. He went on to explain to the colonists that “we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants.”

The “city on a hill” phrase, according to the Gospel of Matthew, originated with Jesus. Addressing his (Jewish) disciples, in what we call the “Sermon on the Mount,” Jesus told them:

“You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one, after lighting a lamp, puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:14-16).

The “city on a hill” that “cannot be hid,” is like a lit lamp, not meant to be covered but to shine. The “light of the world” that shines is “your good works” on display.

So the “city on the hill” and the shining light are metaphors for the impact of the disciples’ “good works” that bear witness to their faithfulness to God, as exemplified in the Beatitudes (also from the same Sermon on the Mount). It should be clear that the disciples were not, then or ever, the leaders of any colony, state, or nation. Being the city on the hill was about righteousness (e.g., “blessed are the pure in heart”) and justice (e.g., “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness/justice [Greek uses one word for both]”).

Winthrop, however, pulled out that description of the disciples’ good works and applied it to the task of forming a colony of pilgrims in Massachusetts as a Christian commonwealth, as if that missional calling had been given to them.

Nowhere in the Bible is any nation other than Israel given the status of the Chosen People. In the New Testament, however, that description has been applied to the Church. According to the Apostle Paul, Israel is like a cultivated olive tree, onto which Gentiles, like wild olive branches, have been grafted (Rom. 11). Supported by the roots, that is Israel’s long history as God’s chosen people, the wild Gentile branches are grafted on, making one new multi-ethnic entity in which there is “no Jew nor Greek” (Gal. 3:28). The church, now participating in Israel’s status as chosen people, is not a nation, but comprises “every nation and tribe and language and people” (Rev. 14:6).

In spite of this most obvious fact, Winthrop started a cascade of people gratuitously identifying America as the “city on a hill” with a special covenant with God. Paul D. Miller, in his book The Religion of American Greatness, recounts the many historical references that used this highly charged language. Once the concept that America had, by some sleight of hand, acquired Israel’s or the church’s status of God’s chosen people, other scriptures were taken out of context to support it. Popular was 2 Chronicles 7:14, which says,

“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

In context, this is part of the prayer King Solomon prayed as he dedicated the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. The “my people” are the Israelites, and “their land” is Israel. Only stripping away the context could make this apply to other people or land. But that is exactly what many have done.

Miller recounts:

“President Dwight Eisenhower took the oath of office in 1953 on a Bible opened to 2 Chronicles 7:14 at Billy Graham’s suggestion. In fact, he placed his hand on two Bibles: one opened to 2 Chronicles 7:14 and the other opened to Psalm 33:12 [“Happy is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage”]. Jerry Falwell cited both verses and directly applied them to America in his 1980 book, Listen, America! Ronald Reagan once told someone that his favorite verse was 2 Chronicles 7:14, and, like Eisenhower, took the oath of office on Bibles opened to the verse in 1981 and 1985.”

Miller says, “Reagan invoked Winthrop’s image repeatedly throughout his presidency, popularizing the notion that America is that shining city on a hill in covenant with God.”

That claim is not faithful to the Bible. That’s part of the reason I wrote a book. I wanted to demonstrate that the biblical vision, while it does indeed begin with Israel as God’s chosen people, opens the door to non-Israelites as well. After all, in the very place where God promised to bless Abraham and his descendants, God also promised, through him, to bless “all the families of the earth” (Gen. 12:3). So the title of my book is All the Families of the Earth: Recovering Scripture’s Vision Beyond Nationalism.

The book is divided into two sections, one for the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and one for the New Testament. I explore stories of non-Israelites who are crucial to the success of the chosen people, such as Ruth the Moabite, the great-grandmother of King David, and Rahab the prostitute in Jericho, who hid the Israelite spies and saved their lives. In the New Testament, I show how much Jesus interacted with non-Israelites, such as the Roman Centurion, the Canaanite woman, and the people on the Gentile side of the Sea of Galilee. The final vision in Revelation is of people from every language, tribe, and nation together.

The idea, so prominent in American Christian Nationalism, that America is God’s chosen nation, the “city on the hill” with a covenant with God, is not biblical. The dream, expressed by some who advocate for American Christian Nationalism, that people flourish best when with their own kind, runs counter to the biblical vision of a multi-ethnic, trans-national community.

The American Christian nationalists’ assertion that the people who descended from Europe are somehow uniquely equipped to govern because of their Christian cultural heritage is sheer chauvinism. When we consider the history of brutality that the Europeans brought to the New World, from the displacement of the native population to the long history of enslavement, followed by the Jim Crow period, we may not have a corner on virtue as much as we would like to believe.

Those of us who respect and value the Bible need to be clear about its authentic vision of a reconciled humanity. So, I hope my book will help.

I am happy to provide an online study guide for groups that would like to read the book together. You can learn more here.

Unconfirmed reporting has asserted that US military commanders have told troops serving under them that President Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” The Department of Defense has not affirmed nor denied that reporting.

Jonathan Larsen’s Substack

U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for “Armageddon,” Return of Jesus

To support my reporting and keep it free for everyone, you can become a paid subscriber. Thank you…

Read more

6 months ago · 6131 likes · 1178 comments · Jonathan Larsen

But whether or not that reporting is accurate, it is the case that many American Christians expect a future Armageddon: an enormous end-of-times battle that ends with God’s annihilation of evil and the return of Jesus. In some versions of this event, it ends with blood “as high as the horses’ bridles for one thousand six hundred stadia” (NRSV “200 miles”; Rev. 14:20). More on the blood in a moment.

The reporting made me want to review the passage about Armageddon in the book of Revelation, so I tried to look it up in my Bible app. It came up with nothing. No references at all to Armageddon. It’s not in my Bible.

My Bible app was set to search the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) — a translation widely respected for its accuracy. But Armageddon is absent in my Bible.

I have since learned that the key words there are “my Bible,” meaning the NRSV. The NRSV translates the place of the battle described in Rev. 16:16 as “Harmageddon.” A little searching on BibleGateway.com, which allows searches across many versions, reveals that some go one way and others go the other. Here’s what I found:

Armageddon

• NIV New International Version

• KJV. King James Version

• Good News Translation

• J.B. Phillips New Testament

• The Message

• Living Bible (a paraphrase) “Armageddon—the Mountain of Megiddo.”

• New Catholic Bible (with a footnote: “the “mountain of Megiddo,”)

Harmageddon or Harmagedon

• NRSV New Revised Standard Version

• NASB New American Standard Bible

• ASV American Standard Version

• AMP. Amplified

• Disciples’ Literal New Testament

This is the only reference to (H)Armageddon in the entire Bible. There is no known location that is ever called (H)Armageddon in the Old or New Testament or any other known literature. Many scholars, like Brian K. Blount, have concluded that “More than likely John [the author of the book of Revelation] has conflated two Hebrew words, har megiddon, which means “mountain of Megiddo.”

John, in Rev. 16:16 says the name comes from Hebrew: “And they assembled them at the place that in Hebrew is called Harmagedon” (NRSV).

The Hebrew word for “mountain” is “har”. Putting “har” with the well-known place known as Megiddo yields the meaning “mountain of Megiddo.”

But Megiddo is not a mountain. As Blount goes on to explain, “Megiddo was an ancient city that guarded the pass through the Central Highlands at the Jezreel Valley.” The city in that plane is on a rise that archaeologists call a “tell.” A tell is a mound made by accumulated layers of habitation in one location. After destruction (e.g., by fire or war) and abandonment of a site, later settlers would rebuild on top of the ruins. Megiddo is on a tell; a far cry from a mountain.

By itself, that fact alone should be enough to alert everyone that this is not meant to be taken literally. There is literally no mountain of Megiddo. It does not exist. So, it is symbolic. The whole battle then symbolizes God’s triumph over the forces of evil.

So what about all that blood? New Testament scholars have alerted us to the fact that gross exaggeration of quantities of blood after a battle is what they call a literary “topos,” or commonplace.

David Aune cites another scholar, Richard Baukam:

Bauckham has shown that this hyperbole, consisting of an extraordinary amount of blood indicating a slaughter of exceptional proportions, is a topos frequently found in ancient literature The earliest occurrence of this topos is found in I Enoch 100:3 (tr. Knibb, Enoch), “And the horse will walk up to its chest in the blood of sinners.” A parallel from perhaps the second century AD occurs in 4 Ezra (6 Ezra) 15:35b–36, “and there shall be blood from the sword as high as a horse’s belly and a man’s thigh and a camel’s hock.” Though there is no evidence of any literary borrowing among these sources, it is striking that they share a common hyperbole for the extent of slaughter, namely, that horses will be wading in three to four feet of blood…. Josephus [a first century Jewish historian] historicizes this topos by referring to the many Jews killed by Romans when Jerusalem was captured in AD 70 (JW 6.406): the number of corpses “deluged the whole city with blood to such an extent that many fires were extinguished by the gory stream.”

So both the mountain and the blood are meant to be taken as literary symbols, not literal descriptions of a human battle in the near term.

The problem is that we live in a time when books like the Left Behind series and many others have popularized a reading of Revelation that completely ignores its symbolic nature. As scholar Greg Carey says,

[T]he vast majority of readers agree that Revelation responds in part to Roman imperialism with a particular emphasis upon imperial cults [that is, Emperor worship]…. Revelation reads Rome as idolatrous but also as violent, arrogant, and oppressive. Like other ancient Jewish apocalypses, Revelation is an example of counterimperial resistance literature.

Rome is called “Babylon” in the book of Revelation. Why? Again from Blount:

Though [the author of Revelation] gives it the name “Babylon the Great,” he is speaking to Rome, the beast from the sea (13:1–10; cf. 1 Pet 5:13). Babylon, we know, is the name of the great imperial force that destroyed Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E., desecrated the temple, and drove much of the populace into exile. For that act of infamy, Babylon became the prototypical enemy of the people of God.

Craig Koester agrees, saying, “Revelation’s imagery expresses an anti-imperial perspective.” Rome was the empire. The emperors were increasingly insisting on being worshipped as gods, pressuring—and sometimes even persecuting—Christians who refused.

Though the Book of Revelation depicts a symbolic battle between God and the forces of evil, it never suggests that Christians take part in any earthly battle. Blount again:

“John never sees God’s people operating with violence in the book, not even in response to the evil that is perpetrated continuously against them. Even the Lamb, operating like a lion of war at 19:11–21, wields a sword that John images more like a rapier tongue than a killing saber.”

The book of Revelation is not a roadmap for the future. It is a highly symbolic text. Scholars call this kind of work “apocalyptic”. John Collins defines an apocalypse this way:

“Apocalypse” is a genre [type] of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological [end time] salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”

In Revelation, the angel reveals to John the reality of the heavenly struggle between good and evil and that, in the end, God will win.

Scholars whose work I have cited do not enjoy the popularity of the Left Behind thrillers. They write big, expensive books after years of tedious research, which non-specialists do not read. So, scholars know that Revelation:

• is not predicting a human battle of (H)armageddon,

• is not about a roadmap for the future,

• never calls for human involvement in God’s struggle against evil,

but rather was about:

• the Roman Empire,

• its effect on Christians in the first century, CE,

• and the eventual triumph of God over evil.

Did the author of Revelation believe there would be a literal battle on earth in which humans would fight and be killed? Yes, he did. It’s been 2,000 years, and we are still waiting (although by now, there is no more Babylon/Roman Empire left to battle).

He believed the battle would be in some undisclosed future time of God’s choosing. Was he calling Christians to take up arms in his day? No, he was not. That future battle would be fought by God alone against people who opposed and even cursed him. Like the Old Testament’s description of the plagues of Egypt, no human participation would be required.

So now, after so much entertaining disinformation and so little attention to genuine consensus scholarship, we are left with the fact that it is conceivable that some US military commanders may, in fact, believe in a final battle and encourage their troops to join it. Let us hope that the reporting about that turns out to be incorrect. Otherwise, the results of that could be apocalyptic.

Works Cited:

Aune, David E. Revelation 1–5. Word Biblical Commentary 52A. Dallas: Word Books, 1997.

Aune, David E. Revelation 6–16. Word Biblical Commentary 52B. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998.

Aune, David E. Revelation 17–22. Word Biblical Commentary 52C. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998.

Blount, Brian K. Revelation: A Commentary. New Testament Library. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009.

Carey, Greg. Rereading Revelation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999.

Collins, John J. “Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre.” Semeia 14 (1979): 1–20.

Koester, Craig R. Revelation: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Yale Bible 38A. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

• Paperback or ebook from the publisher, Wipf & Stock

• ebook only from Bookshop.org

• Paperback or Nook ebook at Barnes- & Noble.

• The hardback version will be out in 4-6 weeks.

For those wishing to do a group read or study, an online AI-assisted study guide is available upon request. See details at the book’s website here.

Is there a reading group you would like to recommend this to?

Please like and share if you would like to help me get the word out.

My book has been published! It’s available at Amazon here.

The cover photo is an olive tree, which Paul used as a metaphor for the church as an inclusive community.

For group studies, I can provide a study guide with summaries, discussion questions, and a glossary. If your group would like access to the study guide, let me know.

My book website (still working on it) is here.

“Whether you’re a pastor seeking a resource to help you prepare your sermons, a small group wanting to dig deeper with your next book study, or an individual Christian hoping to read the Bible better, turn the page because you’ve picked up the right book.”

Rev. Dr. Brian Kayor
President of Word&Way and author of The Bible According to Christian Nationalists

If you “like” this post it will help get the word out to others; much appreciated!

In Black History Month, many of us have come across articles and social media posts celebrating the achievements of black Americans. Many have contributed to science, mathematics, engineering, physics, and many other areas. (For example, see The Complete List of Genius Black American Inventors, Scientists and Engineers – Part One)

This is important, especially in light of the recent social media depiction of a former president and first lady, both of whom are black, in a disparaging and dehumanizing manner.

My area is the Bible, so I would like to highlight the role an Ethiopian played in the book of Jeremiah. I develop this story in chapter 10 of my forthcoming book, All the Families of the Earth: Recovering Scripture’s Vision Beyond Nationalism. Without this Ethiopian, who risked his life in dangerous circumstances to save Jeremiah from execution by slow starvation, what would we miss?

It was Jeremiah who introduced the concept of the new covenant, so important to Jesus’ self-understanding, according to the Gospels (Jer. 31:31; Luke 22:20) and to Christian theology and liturgy (1 Cor. 11:23–36).

Jeremiah gave us the concept of God’s law written upon the heart, not solely on tablets of stone, as the law of Moses was (Jer. 31:32–34). This Jewish prophet anticipated Jesus’s emphasis on inward transformation (Matt. 5:18–19).

Without the book of Jeremiah, we would not have heard his strong criticism of those who believed that the temple of the Lord, apart from faithfulness to God, would provide magic protection, obligating God to defend the nation (Jer. 7:4). Jeremiah specifically defined faithfulness as defending the “the alien, the orphan, and the widow,” and protection of the innocent from violence (Jer. 7:5–7).

It was the book of Jeremiah which gave us the concept that the written words of the prophet, that is the text of Scripture, could continue the prophet’s voice, apart from his physical presence, thus expanding the understanding of the role of scripture for the future life of the community (Jer. 36).

If an Ethiopian man named Ebed-melech had not risked his life to save Jeremiah’s, we would not have his book, nor any of these important theological concepts so essential to Jesus and the New Testament. It is interesting to note that the color of an Ethiopian’s skin was specifically noted in the Bible as a distinguishing feature of difference: “Can Ethiopians change their skin or leopards their spots? (Jer. 13:23).”

The Story of Ebed-melech in Brief

Jeremiah lived during the time of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem. The king and his advisors had been counting on Egypt to come to their rescue, and at first, it did. But after the Egyptian withdrawal, the Babylonians were coming. Jeremiah advocated surrender as the only way to prevent annihilation. That sounded like treason to the courtiers, who demanded Jeremiah’s arrest. His sentence was to be thrown into a muddy, but otherwise waterless cistern and to be left there to slowly starve to death.

Because of his sentence of treason, associating with Jeremiah was a mortal danger. But that is the risk that Ebed Melech took. It was all the more risky because as a non-Jewish person, he was vulnerable to being accused of working against the national interests.

But in spite of the danger, when he learned what had happened to Jeremiah, Ebed-melech “went to the king and said, ‘My lord king, these men have acted wickedly in all they did to the prophet Jeremiah by throwing him into the cistern to die there of hunger, for there is no bread left in the city’” (Jer. 39:9).

Evidently, the king respected Ebed-melech highly enough to allow him to rescue Jeremiah. He got some men to assist him and found some ropes to pull him out with. But out of an abundance of compassion, knowing that the ropes might injure the emaciated prophet, he took care to provide old cloths to pad the ropes with.

Because of this, his brave and compassionate action, Jeremiah survived, and we have the record of his life and teaching today. For his action, Ebed-melech and his Ethiopian family were rewarded with God’s blessing (Jer. 39:17–18).

Far from disparaging this African man for the color of his skin, Ebed-melech is held up as a hero, honored by God. He is responsible for saving the life of the prophet at the risk of his own, thus enabling the Christian tradition to benefit from Jeremiah’s insights. We are all indebted to this black man of courage.

The administration, in the wake of the shooting deaths of two Americans in Mineapolis at the hands of ICE agents could have said to the American people something like:

“There have been two terrible tragedies in America, for which this administration apologizes to the American people. We have an Immigration and Customs agency and Border Patrol that are supposed to make Americans safe. We have failed. We will investigate the deaths of these two citizens with full transparency and cooperation with local and State officials. We will conduct a thorough review of our policies, training procedures, and command structure to ensure this never happens again. We offer our sincerest condolences to the families and loved ones of both Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, whose Constitutionally protected right to freedom of speech and of assembly was violated and whose lives were cut short, and whose families now grieve. We accept full responsibility. We are deeply sorry.”

But instead, we heard the opposite. We saw multiple videos from several angles, so we know that we were being lied to when Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, said that Ms. Good had “weaponized her vehicle” and that she was a “domestic terrorist.” We knew that she lied again after Pretti was shot, saying that he was “brandishing a weapon” and had acted “violently” towards officers as they attempted to disarm him. The fact that the President was forced by overwhelming public outcry to walk back these falsehoods was not an act of moral courage but of political necessity. At no time did we hear an apology.

We have a lot to be proud of here in America. We have a Constitution and Bill of Rights that enshrine ideals of freedom and equality for all people. We have been successful in helping to end the scourge of facism in Europe. We have created opportunity and prosperity at an enormous scale. We have opened the door to a vast variety of people from around the world whose creativity and diligence has helped make us the envy of the world.

But, can America ever get it wrong, do bad things, enact bad policies, or make mistakes?

Is it unpatriotic to publicly admit that we are not now, and never have been, perfect? Does it project “an image of weakness before both allies and enemies,” as Nile Gardiner, foreign policy analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said, referring to Obama’s speeches?

Mitt Romney wrote a book called No Apology to criticize President Obama for what he called his “apology tour,” because, without ever saying the word “sorry,” Obama had admitted that, like other countries, America had a checkered past that included things for which we should not be proud.

On a recent visit to Memphis, I toured The National Civil Rights Museum. It has incorporated the Lorraine Hotel into its venue, the place where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. In it are pictures that are hard for anyone with a moral compass to see: firehoses and dogs attacking peaceful civilians. A firebombed bus filled with “freedom riders” demanding voting rights. Black people in suits and dresses under violent attacks at lunch counters. The pictures and videos go on and on.

Should we not be able to say that our nation, for centuries, has enslaved, persecuted, lynched, and discriminated against people of color? And if that history is a record of shame, should we not apologize, recognizing that for white people, we have for generations, been able to accumulate and transfer wealth to our heirs, while black people, historically, have been kept out of VA benefits, good neighborhoods, good schools, bank loans and employment opportunities, such that our current wealth has a direct bearing on injustices of the past? I also visited the Freedom Riders Museum in Montgomery, Al; more of the shameful same.

I have been to the Greenwood Rising Museum in Tulsa that recounts the race massacre of 1921, in which a prosperous black commercial district known as “Black Wall Street” was bombed and burned out, and hundreds of innocent people were killed. I have yet to visit “The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration” in Montgomery, Alabama, which tells the story of slavery, lynchings, segregation, and racial bias in America, but I have seen samples of it online.

There was an entire cottage industry during the Jim Crow period of postcards people would send to each other of the crowds of approving white people surrounding the bodies of lynched African Americans. They even took their children to these “barbeques” as they cynically called them, as if killing human beings was a light-hearted afternoon frolic, fit for the entire family.

Is this not our national shame? Are we diminished by admitting our past? Does it make us weaker before other nations to uphold a moral standard higher than our predecessors did and accept that the harm they caused has lasting effects today?

I am writing from Arkansas, one of twenty-five American states whose names are derived from Native American words. I live near the Ouachita Mountains, now a national park, which took me months to learn to pronounce; another native-based word. I’m surrounded by State names, mountains, towns, and rivers whose names are Native American language-based.

But the native populations were dispossessed, and the survivors were pushed onto reservations generations ago. The “Trail of Tears” was watered by the ones who could still cry; many others died. Now, their land is our land. Have we nothing to feel guilty about? Nothing to apologize for?

The doubly tragic irony for me as a person who has been raised as a Christian in an overwhelmingly Christian-influenced culture, I find our lack of humility in the face of our dark national history irreconcilable. Why? Admitting we are on the wrong track is fundamental to being a Christian.

Jesus’ first public proclamation was “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15). Jesus called people to “repent.” Today, that sounds like a call to grovel in shame, but that is not at all what the word “repent” meant. The word comes from roots that mean to change your thinking (metanoeo: meta – as in “metamorphosis,” + noeo, “to perceive, or think”).

Of course, changing your thinking about something may involve remorse or regret if your former thinking (such as thinking of whites as superior) involved causing harm to people. But the point of “repent” is to acknowledge that you were wrong and want to put it right. It is all about realizing that you should apologize — at least to God, if not to living people, for the way you had been living.

I recently read Learning from the Germans, by Susan Neiman. She recounts the way small four-inch square brass plaques are sprinkled all over German cities, one for each person abducted, deported to concentration camps, and killed by the Nazis. The plaques bear the names of the people taken, the dates of their abductions, and mark the spot on which those crimes against humanity happened, as passersby ignored what was happening. They are called “stumbling stones.” They are meant to be a present reminder of the horrors of Germany’s Nazi past. They bear witness to what happened so that this present generation will not forget what the nation needed to repent for doing.

The Germans have tried to come to terms with their past in ways that America never has. Instead, we make apologies into weaknesses. “Sorry” is almost surrender. But surrender is the essence of the Christian life. Christianity is, at its very root, about redemption. Redemption requires something to be redeemed from, something to repent about, missteps, mistakes, missing the mark, or, to use a word full of red flags, “sin.” Sins like enslavement, lynching, discrimination, and a host of cruelties.

In America we have come a long way. In the government offices I have recently visited in Alabama and Arkansas there were many people of color working beside white colleagues, from the police at the door to the staff behind the desks. But now, we seem to be on a different path.

It takes a strong person to admit failure. It takes integrity to own your past failings. It takes self-reflection and courage to acknowledge that your present privilege may have been founded on your predecessors’ brutality.

It takes a strong nation to admit its past failures. It makes an even stronger nation to say, “never again” about its own past. We can honor the Germany of today for the way it has and does condemn past atrocities. Germany is not weaker for it; just the opposite.

It is profound patriotism to hold your own nation accountable to its own ideals, values, and Constitutional commitments. It is patriotic to love the Constitution and the Bill of Rights enough to apologize when they have been violated.

Today, we call on our leaders to repent of the brutalities of the ICE and Border Patrol agents’ actions, not just in Minneapolis, and not just because two white people were victims.

We call upon our leaders to be honest and admit the truth that we all see with our own eyes. We call upon them to apologize to all the people harmed by the cruelty of deportations to third countries.

We call upon them to stop calling people criminals who have only committed civil offenses (there is a difference in our legal system, and it is not trivial).

Is it patriotic to say, as a nation, “We are sorry”? It is the ultimate act of true patriotism, a strength severely missing in America at present.

Does God hate? Franklin Graham says yes. Oddly enough, that was part of his Christmas message at the Pentagon’s “Christmas Worship Service” called by Pete Hegseth this year. Graham also preached that God is a “God of war.” He spent much of the sermon recounting the story of how God told the people of Israel to slaughter every man, woman, and child, as well as all the animals belonging to the Amalekites.

You are in good company if you have never heard of the Amalekites or of the story Graham cited. The story has two Acts. Act one appears in two versions: Exodus 17 and Deuteronomy 25. The Hebrew people, recently freed from years of bondage under Pharaoh’s Egypt, are on their long journey to the Promised Land. On the way, they encounter the Amalekites who attacked them. If you have a church background, you may remember the story of the battle in which, as long as Moses lifted his hands, the Israelites prevailed, but when he became tired and let his hands down, the enemy prevailed (Exodus 17). This is that story. (Spoiler: the people helped Moses keep his hands up, and Israel won.) The other version of Act One in Deuteronomy 25 includes the detail that the Amalekites attacked when the Israelites were “faint and weary” and focused on the most vulnerable who “lagged behind.” For that, the Lord says, “you shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; do not forget” (Deut. 25:19).

Act Two takes place, according to the Bible’s chronology, 400 years later. Samuel has anointed Saul as king, so the tribes of Israel have just become a monarchy. Nevertheless, Samuel is still in charge. He orders King Saul to attack the Amalekites, who are surprisingly still around, because of what they did 400 years ago. The memory of that episode is still alive with emotional force. Samuel specifies that Saul’s forces should “utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Sam. 15:3).

The story of divinely authorized genocide has been troubling—if not horrifying—for centuries to Bible readers. How God could ever have been conceived of as authorizing such wanton cruelty is hard to imagine. But once that story was written in that way and became part of canonical scripture, then it was left to morally alert readers to deal with it.

In his sermon, Franklin Graham retold all these details, pointing out that God’s hatred of the Amalekites had not abated, even after four centuries. God is a God of war, he said. The story ends with Samuel upbraiding Saul for keeping the Amalekite king alive and keeping some of the animals as spoil. For his insufficiently thorough genocide, Saul’s kingship is curtailed.

Graham’s point was that God hates sin; we all sin, so we need salvation, and that is why Jesus came at Christmas.

Regardless of that point, Graham took the story of genocide literally and without hesitation or moral qualm. He even anticipated protests from someone who might say, “That’s not the God I believe in.” Graham’s response to that objection was to say, without a hint of irony, “Well, you had better believe in him.”

If you believe that all the stories in the Bible are historically accurate* and must be taken literally, then you must accept that God is a God of war who hates, and who remembers (holds grudges for centuries), and who responds to violence against the Chosen People with genocidal fury. Graham is apparently content to leave it at that.

The morality of this story, and the other similar stories of violence and genocide in the Bible, has troubled people for centuries and for many reasons. How is this depiction of God consistent with the Bible itself? How can this kind of God be the same as the God whose self-description includes being “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6)?

Let’s say that one could find a way to reconcile these two Janus-like faces of God. Are we then to accept that genocide is morally defensible today? Is God a hateful God of war, as Graham believes?

Some are willing to say that if God commands something, then it must be good. We may not understand God’s moral justifications, but whatever the Divine commands must be good. This has been called the Divine Command Theory. It has been defended by figures such as St. Augustine and by modern Christian apologists such as William Lane Craig. Most people, however, cannot accept that there could be any justification for genocide. What then are we to do with those Biblical stories?

Jewish scholars have struggled with this moral issue for centuries. Philo of Alexandria, a first-century Jewish philosopher, used several strategies for accounting for genocidal texts in his Biblical commentaries. Sometimes he would skip over verses that advocated genocide, simply ignoring them. When discussing the command to kill all the Amalekites, however, he used a different tactic: he allegorized the text. The Amalekites represented unholy passion that must be resisted. Later rabbis used another strategy, arguing that even if God commanded the Israelites to kill all the Amalekites in the past, there is no present justification for using it as a precedent in the future. Maimonides in the 12th Century said that before going to war, peace terms must first be offered, making the command to commit genocide inoperable. Of course, people would rather settle than be annihilated.

There have been other strategies for dealing with texts that some have called “texts of terror.” Eric Seibert, in his Disturbing Divine Behavior, makes the point that “God” is a character in the Bible. Someone wrote down those stories in which the character “God” commands genocide. But might there be a difference between the character “god” that shows up in the text of the Bible and the real God? Seibert says yes: the text comes from a time in which God could be imagined to hate and authorize violence, but for centuries, morally sensitive people have found ways to obviate that morally repugnant presentation.

Seibert and other Christian interpreters add more reflection on the subject. Jesus (who was, of course, Jewish) highlighted the Hebrew Bible’s presentation of God’s merciful and forgiving nature, making it central to his God-construct. The gospels record Jesus as teaching, “But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High” (Luke 6:35).

Jesus, instead of teaching a God of hate, taught that God is “kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” (Luke 6:35). Seibert points out that “Jesus’ view of God as one who ‘makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous’” (Matt. 5:45) runs counter to texts which present God as hateful (Disturbing Divine Behavior, Fortress Press, 2009, p. 204 Kindle).

Instead of holding a 400-year grudge against your enemies, Jesus taught, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:43–44).

When Graham chastises people who say that a warrior God of hate is “not the God I believe in,” did he know that Jesus would be included as one of them? Apparently not.

The Bible is a set of writings that have been collected and compiled over centuries. Ancient texts are still meaningful to many but pose numerous challenges. These challenges include the Bible’s complex and varied moral teachings. In the ancient world, slavery was permitted. Rebellious children were to be stoned. Touching a pigskin and eating shrimp were abominations. Women’s roles were severely restricted. And yes, God was described in various ways, some of which were beautiful, but others of which were brutal. The fact that Graham does not make those moral distinctions is troubling. The distance between his view and Jesus’ understanding of the Divine is telling. From my perspective, it certainly makes for a morally vexed Christmas sermon.

*The historicity of this and many other stories is a large, complex, and vexed topic. Archeology offers no support for the existence of the Amalekites, for example. One of the best treatments of the archeological record is A History of Ancient Israel 2nd. Ed. by Christian Frevel, SBL Press, 2023.

I participated in a prison ministry to death row inmates several years ago. It struck me that none of them described the reason for their imprisonment as having anything to do with a crime. They all described their imprisonment as catching “a case,” as in “I caught my case five years ago.” Perhaps that is simply prison slang and nothing more should be read into it, but I could not help hearing it as an evasion of moral responsibility. Being convicted of a crime, especially a capital offense, is not a matter of “catching a case,” like you might catch a cold.

Evading moral responsibility has a long history. Like questioning God, it seems hardwired into humans. Our universal tendency to excuse ourselves, to consider ourselves special cases and exceptions to the general rule, is acknowledged as far back as the Biblical story of the brothers Cain and Abel.

Genesis chapter four sets out the story of the two sons of Adam and Eve. Being the first generation of humans on earth who have come into existence the way all subsequent humans do, by birth, rather than by special creation as their parents had been, marks them as quintessential humans. As adults, they diverge occupationally. Abel is a herdsman; Cain, a farmer. Some have taken this narrative as an etiology of the natural competition between herdsmen and farmers, but nothing in their story is made of their occupational difference. Except that when they bring offerings to God, they bring different kinds. Abel’s offering was “the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions” (Gen 4:4). Cain brought “an offering of the fruit of the ground” (Gen 4:3). The narrator is laconic. He makes no comment or evaluation of either offering. That they are different and arise from their divergent occupations is all we know.

According to the text, however, God does make an evaluation: “The LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard” (Gen 4:4–5). This story is set in the distant past, long preceding the Law of Moses, so no one suggests that either offering violated a Biblical law. But from the Rabbis of the third to fifth centuries CE, who produced the Genesis Rabbah, all the way to present scholars, the reason given for God’s lack of regard for Cain’s offering was that it seemed off-handed, if not second-rate. Able offered, not just a sacrifice, but the “firstlings” of his flock, including the best part, the fat. Cain just brought “an offering” as if “any old plant” would do. But the fact that the author gives no reason for God’s differentiation means that we must look elsewhere for the point of the story.

The point is made clear by what follows next: Cain’s reaction to God’s disregard. He became “very angry” (Gen 4:5). “Anger” comes from the word “to burn”; we could say that Cain “burned with anger.” God noticed the angry look on his face and asked him about it, and warned that it was putting him in dangerous territory: “sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it” (Gen 4:7). Cain has choices. Though sin, like a crouching predator, is waiting at the door to pounce at the earliest opportunity, Cain, as a morally responsible adult, must “master it.” Cain does not reply to God’s warning.

Instead, we watch his plan to murder his brother unfold. It is premeditated; “malice aforethought.” Cain invites Abel into the field where “Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him” (Gen 4:8). Thus, Abel, whose name comes from the word for “mist” or “fog,” vanishes from the story. All that remains of him is his blood, which stains the ground.

God makes note of Abel’s absence and asks Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” (Gen 4:9). We notice that God’s question includes the phrase “your brother,” reaffirming their familial and moral ties to each other. Cain knows the answer but lies directly to God, saying he does not know. Then comes his attempt to evade all moral responsibility. Cain asks God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen 4:9).

In the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), God rarely reacts to people who question him. Most of the time, he lets questions, even accusatory questions, even unhinged rants go unnoticed. When he does notice, as in the case of Zechariah (see Part One), his displeasure produces only a mild punishment — temporary muteness in that case. In the case of Malachi, God threatened to act harshly against the insolent questions of the lax worshippers, but we are not told that the threat was ever carried out.

Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”, however, is different. This time, God reacts with shock and horror: “What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand” (Gen 4:10). As God reacts, instead of naming Abel, he twice calls him “your brother.” Cain’s doge has failed utterly. Nothing is clearer than a moral obligation between brothers. Cain’s effort to deflect moral responsibility, as if it involved “keeping” his brother like a shepherd keeps his sheep with constant vigilance, is an absurdity that God does not buy for a second. Brothers bear moral obligations to each other. In that sense, yes, of course you are your brother’s keeper. There is no smudge blurring that moral clarity.

We tell stories to teach lessons. The lesson of moral responsibility between brothers is clear. The meaning seamlessly expands to include moral obligation to all related kin. But the question remains, Can or should it be extended beyond kinfolk? How far do our moral obligations go?

The Law of Moses drew lines of distinction between “neighbors” and non-neighbors. The tenth Commandment forbids coveting one’s neighbor’s wife or property. In fact, Moses goes so far as to command, “You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin (lit. “brother”); you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.” (Lev 19:7).

It is this distinction between neighbor and non-neighbor that formed the basis of the question an expert in the law of Moses asked Jesus. After establishing that the greatest commandments are to love God and neighbor, the man asked, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29). In other words, what is the extent of my moral obligation?

Jesus’s answer was to tell the parable of the Good Samaritan. In that parable, a man is robbed, beaten, stripped, and left for dead beside the road. A priest and a temple employee, called a Levite, see the victim but pass by without offering aid. A Samaritan, a person from an ethnic community that despised Jews and was despised by Jews showed him mercy, dressed his wounds, and took him to a place in which he could recover, paying for it out of pocket. Jesus turned the lawyer’s question upside down by asking him, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” Not “who is my neighbor” but who was a neighbor to him?”

The legal scholar knew the correct answer, but still could not bring himself to say “the Samaritan,” so he said, “‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise’” (Luke 10:36–37).

The question of moral obligation is no longer limited to “brothers” or “neighbors” as relatives, but encompasses everyone in need of merciful care. This moral trajectory helps us re-frame Cain’s horrible question: “Am I humanity’s keeper?” If, as Cain’s question tried to do, this is asked to imply an impossible ethical demand to solve all the world’s problems, then no, we could no more do that than Cain could shepherd his shepherd-bother. But the answer has to be yes, we are humanity’s keepers as never before. Collectively, we live on the verge of destroying ourselves by multiple means. Whether by war, especially nuclear war (and subsequent nuclear winter), or by climate change, to evade being humanity’s keeper is now to become humanity’s killer.

We began this series in Part One by asking when, if ever, it is permissible to question God. We saw that the Biblical witness is varied, but the majority of good-faith questions of God were permitted as legitimate. Part Two concerned the way a belief in a God who is good in the face of a world of injustice and unfairness forces humans to question God’s morality. The Biblical characters of Jeremiah and Abraham both questioned God’s morality without reproach.

In Part Three we have seen that the one question that received a response first of horror, “What have you done?!” then severe punishment, was the question designed to evade moral responsibility, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” To question one’s moral/ethical obligations to brothers, to neighbors, or to humanity is to ask a murderer’s question. The very question is a horror.

According to the Bible, the question God reacts negatively to most strongly and decisively is the question posed as an attempt to dodge the most fundamental ethical fact: we are our brother’s keeper.

If we ask, what does the Bible say about whether or not we can question God, we get a mixed answer. Generally, and in the great majority of cases, God seems not to mind being questioned, unless the motivation is hostile (Malachi’s people) or needlessly skeptical (Zechariah). That’s what part one was about. Part two is about ethics: Is it okay to question God about His ethics, that is, His morality? The idea that God could possibly do something wrong seems absurd on the surface, but there is one glaring issue that forces the question: justice. Or, following some moral philosophers like John Rawls, justice, while not being identical with fairness, nevertheless depends on fairness. Is God fair? Is God okay with the conditions of unfairness among us?

One of the first cold, hard facts of life is that it is not fair. Some have more than enough, while others go without the basics. Some have all the luck, others feel like life keeps kicking them down. Some get away with murder, others are severely punished. This most obvious condition requires no further elaboration. It is what it is.

If there is no God, then this unfair and unjust condition of the world would simply be a brute fact. But for a believer in the Biblical God, it represents a problem. The Bible depicts God as just and as demanding justice of us: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice” (Micah 6:8). The Bible also depicts an imaginary scene in which God, surrounded by his heavenly court, criticizes them saying, “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? (Ps 82:2). In what specific ways were they judging unjustly? The Psalm continues, “Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked” (Ps 82:3-4). When the strong dominate the weak, when the rights of the defenseless are violated, when the bad guys get away with it, justice is not being done. So God demotes his divine council members, in this imaginary scene, removing their celestial status, condemning them to die like mere mortals. “I say, ‘You are gods, children of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, you shall die like mortals” (Ps 82:6). Do justice or lose your job and your status. So, God Himself, according to the Biblical witness, is not content to let conditions of injustice continue unchallenged. But look around: that is exactly what happens. It is a commonplace that “life is not fair.” That’s a problem. Biblical characters notice, and they react.

Jeremiah Legal Case Against God

We begin with the prophet Jeremiah. From the beginning of the monarchy, Israelite society was deeply stratified between the few rich, the aristocracy, and the vast majority of poor peasants. The elites occupied the places of power in the monarchy: they were the courtiers who advised the king — sometimes with ultimatums that he ignored at his peril.

In the days of Jeremiah, the couriers had the king’s ear and they were, besides maintaining lavish lifestyles on the backs of their peasants, were advocating disastrous foreign policy moves that Jeremiah believed would destroy the nation. But when Jeremiah challenged them, they accused him of treason and plotted his death. I have a chapter about this in my forthcoming book, All the Families of the Earth: Navigating Identity and Nationalism in Biblical Narratives.

In response to this social and political nightmare, Jeremiah questioned God. In fact, more than asking, Jeremiah framed his question as a charge, as if he had God in court: “You will be in the right, O LORD, You will be in the right, (that is, “I know you will win the case anyway, but”) O LORD, when I lay charges against you; but let me put my case to you.” (Jer 12:1a) His double edged charge against God includes injustice and allowing the treacherous courtiers to lead the king into political disaster “Why does the way of the guilty prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive?” (Jer 12:1b).

Did God find this insulting insubordination? Judging by His reply, not at all. He told Jeremiah that he needed to suck it up because things were about to get a lot worse: “If you have raced with foot-runners and they have wearied you, how will you compete with horses? (Jer 12:5). God goes on to detail the manner in which it will get worse, but our focus is simply on the fact that God does not take offense, even as Jeremiah accuses him of a failure to address the multiple evils of his day. Technically, this is called the issue of “theodicy”: Is God acting justly? Jeremiah does not judge him or accuse him of sin or doubt. He knows Jeremiah is suffering; God no more condemns him for his pain-based reactions than he did Jesus’ cry of dereliction from the cross many years later. The astonishing tolerance of God to be treated like a criminal suspect in court is part of the Biblical record.

Abraham’s Negotiations with God

Next, we look at Abraham in a scene from the Bible full of mystery and oddities. It begins simply enough: Abraham and Sarah, now elderly but still childless, are set up in their nomadic tent by the “oaks of Mamre,” a location within the Promised Land to which they had sojourned. Abraham looked up and suddenly, as if out of nowhere, “saw three men standing near him” (Gen 18:2). Their identity is not explained. Abraham and Sarah provide hospitality to them, then Abraham converses with them.

This is where the story becomes mysterious. The three men asked where Sarah was. Abraham says that she is in the tent. Then the original says “Then he said to Abraham” — suddenly the 3 speak as one, or become one (?) (Gen 18:10). The NRSV says “one of them said” but that is interpretive. The Hebrew says, “then he said,” as if the three merged into one. Anyway, he has a message that next year he will return, and Sarah will have a son. I include these details only to give you a sense of the narrative’s numinous nature. That will be important in what happens next. Clearly, this mysterious three-in-one is not a mere mortal.

Then the men, now plural again, rise to leave, facing Sodom (where Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family live) and apparently disclose to Abraham their next task. Suddenly, we hear the voice of God, musing to himself: “The LORD (Yahweh) said, ‘Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?’” (Gen. 18:17). The LORD then, in internal dialogue, reflects on the fact that Abraham is going to be the greatly blessed father of the chosen people through whom God will bless all the nations of the earth (Gen 18:18). As such, God says that he will “charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice; so that the LORD may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him” (Gen 18:19). The point to notice is that Abraham’s family line is given the task of doing righteousness and justice. This is the condition of the world that it is God’s will to achieve.

The LORD continues his internal dialogue saying “How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin!” (Gen 18:20). This implies that the LORD plans judgment against the twin cities, though that fact is only revealed by implication.

The scene shifts back to the departure of the plural men as Abraham watches them set out for Sodom. Abraham pursues them with a question, showing that somehow the planned Divine judgment has been revealed to him. He asks them, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? (Gen 18:23). A bargain sequence begins. Abraham first asks if there are as few as fifty righteous people – implying that they would not be deserving of the group punishment they would be swept up in – “will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it?” (Gen 18:24). Abraham makes his objection explicit: “Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you!” (Gen 18:25a).

Abraham then asks the fundamental question that is at the heart of all discussions of theodicy, the justice of God: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Gen 18:25b). If God has a right to judge the earth, then God has the obligation to be a just judge. Justice would demand that the righteous not suffer the fate that the wicked deserve. Righteous suffering produces the emotional intensity behind the question of theodicy. It is unfair that the righteous should suffer. Maybe the wicked deserve it, but not the righteous. This will become Job’s complaint as he, a righteous man, suffers horribly, and his so-called friends say he must have been wicked. They assumed that the answer Abraham asks, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” is clearly “Yes!”

Mysteriously, now it is not the men who answer, but the LORD (Yahweh) himself, as if he has been behind the apparition of the men/man/men all along: “the LORD said, ‘If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake”’ (Gen 18:26).

Emboldened, but humbly, Abraham asks if five righteous are missing, then what? The LORD says he would not destroy the city if there were forty-five righteous in it. The negotiations continue: what about forty? No. What about thirty? No. Twenty? Ten? The LORD said, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it (Gen 18:32). Abraham did not dare press the negotiations further. Perhaps he was satisfied that Lot’s extended family had to have at least ten righteous people, making them the salvation of the city. In any case, the whole negotiation was based on Abraham’s challenge to God. It would be unjust to make the righteous suffer the same fate as the wicked. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” God does not react negatively to the question. It was fair game.

Conclusion

Both Jeremiah and Abraham challenged God’s morality. They questioned God when it appeared that the unjust condition of the world constituted malfeasance on God’s part. They believed they could hold God accountable for acting ethically. God had, in his own internal dialogue, revealed his intention that Abraham’s family would be the means by which justice and righteousness would be done on the earth, indicating that He knew what justice looked like: a condition of fairness in which the needs of the vulnerable and powerless were not abused by the powerful. A condition in which the righteous were not made to suffer the fate of the wicked.

The basic fact that “the world is not fair” makes this question perpetual. One of the conundrums of monotheism is that it struggles to give an adequate account of evil. Theologians throughout the centuries have offered a host of solutions, but their inadequacy is apparent: none of them satisfies. After an attempt in one generation fails, the next generation offers a new one. We are still left with the facts of the world and the question, shown to be legitimate, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” Is it right to question God? Given the conditions we live in, it is almost necessary. Apparently, God understands and can take it.

In Part 3, we will look at one line of questioning God that goes too far.

Are we allowed to question God? Are we allowed to call God to account? Are we allowed to accuse God? According to the Bible, it’s a split decision. Many Biblical characters do question God and get away with it. But others have a different experience. Some experience a bit of both. We will look at a representative sample of God-questioners in the Bible in search of an answer.

The Questions They Got Away With

First, Abraham. God made a promise to Abraham, saying, “I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” But childless Abraham could not understand how that could be fulfilled. He asked, “O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” (Genesis 15:8). Surprisingly, he was not rebuked for that question, even with its implication that God’s word, without an evident means of accomplishment, was not good enough. In response, God instructed Abraham to prepare for a solemn covenant-making ceremony in which God, in a deep, dark dream, cursed himself, lest he break his promise.1 (That scene will be the subject of another article.)

Many people in the Bible ask God the “Why?” question. “Why, O LORD, do you stand far off?” (Psalm 10:1). “Why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1). These are similar to the question, “How long?” The poet of Psalm 13 asks it three times in a row:

“How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I bear pain in my soul,

and have sorrow in my heart all day long?

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?” (Psalm 13:1–2)

The prophet Habakkuk joins the Psalmist with the same question, “O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? (Hab 1:2).

Both “Why?” and “How long?” are interrogative accusations. “Why?” implies there is no good reason for what God has done or allowed. “How long?” accuses God of uncaring neglect or a failure even to listen. In none of these does the questioner seem sheepish or embarrassed at holding the Divine to human account, and in none of these does God get defensive. Apparently, in the eyes of the Hebrew Bible, this is just what mortal humans do, and God seems OK with it.

Job’s questions, like “Why did I not die at birth?” (Job 3:11) and “Why have you made me your target?” (Job 7:20), were shut down by a voice from a whirlwind meant to overwhelm him into silence. God asks Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (Job 38:4) to which Job replies with repentant dust and ashes (Job 42:6). Job’s humble response was his idea, not God’s. The fact that God responded to Job’s question with his display of power only shows that he considered the question legitimate. That display may not have constituted an answer, but the fact that God responded without reproach meant that he took Job’s question seriously as legitimate.

Moses, encountering God at the burning bush, innocently asks God his name, and receives an answer without reproach (Exod 3). Sometimes, Moses’ questions were clearly accusatory. When the Egyptian taskmasters force the enslaved Israelites to make bricks with straw that they themselves must procure, Moses asks God, “O LORD, why have you mistreated this people? Why did you ever send me?” (Exod 5:22). Despite two accusations, one, that God himself was mistreating the people, and two, that God lacked wisdom and foresight in sending Moses on such a fool’s errand. But God’s response is mild: “Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh.”’ (Exod 6:1). It was as if Moses challenged God to prove His plan was wise, and God said, in effect, “Just watch me prove it.”

When the Israelites run out of water in the desert wilderness, trouble breaks out. Moses asks God, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me” (Exod. 17:4). God’s gentle reply is to instruct Moses to strike the rock from which waters will flow in abundance, thus assuaging the people’s rebellious mood. The question with its implicit criticism of God was passed over in silence.

According to the Bible, Moses is capable of leveling a barrage of accusatory questions at God. When, in the wilderness, the people grow weary of the daily supply of manna from heaven and crave a meal of meat, with garlic and onions as they had back in Egypt, they form a rabble against him. So Moses launches into his tirade, “Moses said to the LORD, ‘Why have you treated your servant (himself) so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them,…? Where am I to get meat to give to all this people? …If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once” (Numb 11:11–15). As if God knew that sometimes Moses just needed to rant and that he would calm down afterwards, God again let his insolence pass without comment, saying, “Is the LORD’S power limited? Now you shall see whether my word will come true for you or not.” (Numb 11:23). Sometimes God answers accusatory questions with his own question, but not with judgment.

After an unexpected defeat in battle, the commander of the Israelites, Moses’ successor, also questioned God, “Joshua said, ‘Why have you brought this people across the Jordan at all, to hand us over to the Amorites so as to destroy us?’” (Joshua 7:7). While not reacting to the insolence of the question per se, God seemed irritated. But the source of his ire was more that Joshua did not get the gravity of the sin that had prompted God to withdraw his military aid, thus allowing for the defeat. God said to Joshua, “Stand up!… Israel has sinned… Therefore the Israelites are unable to stand before their enemies” (Josh 10:10–12). God’s reply is a correction, but not judgment for asking God to justify himself.

The great prophet Elijah, when staying in the home of a widow whose son died, asked God, “O LORD, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying?” (1 Kings 17:20). God made no reply to Elijah, but answered his prayer and restored the child’s life.

The Questions with Adverse Consequences

On the other hand, sometimes, according to the Bible, the questions are too much, and God responds negatively to them. The prophet Malachi includes some examples of questions that get a negative response from God. Malachi, speaking as if he is repeating the questions of the people (fairly representing them?) has them ask God, who has professed his love for them, “How have you loved us?” (Mal 1:2). Speaking for the priests who have been offering polluted sacrifices, Malachi says they ask, “How have we despised your name?” In response, Malachi then speaks for God, telling them he would rather they not open the temple doors at all, nor light sacrificial fires, so lax and disrespectful was their religious observance: “Oh, that someone among you would shut the temple doors, so that you would not kindle fire on my altar in vain! I have no pleasure in you, says the LORD of hosts, and I will not accept an offering from your hands” (Mal. 1:10). Their questions themselves were not the problem exactly. Still, it was the fact that the questions betrayed an attitude of dishonoring God, in a way they would never think to dishonor even their governor.

In the New Testament, questioning God or a messenger angel can signal a lack of faith, which God does not approve of. When the angel Gabriel told John the Baptist’s father Zechariah that his wife Elizabeth would conceive and bear a son, Zechariah asked, “How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.” (Luke 1:18) It seems like a legitimate question. Still, Gabriel cries “foul:” “But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.” Temporary muteness is not very severe, but it is a punishment. Here again, perhaps it was not the questioning that was punished, but the lack of faith it implied. As a counterpoint, however, Mary asks a similar question of Gabriel, after he announces her impending pregnancy, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” but is not punished with muteness or anything else. Perhaps her question is more curiosity than unbelief?

The harshest criticism of questioning God comes from Paul, who could get caustic when challenged. After describing God’s sovereign choice to save some and not others, Paul anticipates an adverse reaction among his readers, who may question God’s fairness. Paul’s response is to say that God, just like a potter, can mold from his clay whatever he chooses. He can mold some objects for special use and others for ordinary use. In either case, humans, no more than the clay, have no right to object: “Who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, ‘Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use?” (Rom. 9:20–21). For Paul, the very act of questioning God was out of bounds. Humans have no more rights before God than lumps of clay do before the potter.

But we must ask, was Paul in or out of bounds himself? The final act of questioning God we will look at in this part one is from Jesus himself. According to Matthew and Mark’s gospels, Jesus, nearing the end of his life, from the cross asks, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34). If Jesus can feel God-forsaken and can accuse God of abandoning him, which is what his question does, then surely, Paul has overstated the case. Perhaps, because the gospels were written after Paul wrote his letters, Paul had not heard that narrative account. Nevertheless, the Gospel writers present Jesus in his humanity as fully capable of feeling hunger and fatigue, compassion and frustration, love and grief, and, finally, doubt. The very human situation is of not knowing, not seeing the Divine perspective, not understanding the mind of God, and hence needing to ask questions, even to doubt.

Conclusion

The fact that Jesus himself was depicted as doubting the God whom he had asked his followers to trust implicitly, like the Good Shepherd, shows how endemic the difficulty of faith is in mortal minds. Faith itself, according to the author of Hebrews, is “the evidence of things unseen” (Heb. 11:1). But that can seem like weak evidence in the face of life experiences that we, like the Biblical characters, are subject to, including experiencing evil, pain, oppression, injustice, and even regular human depression.

They say that “To err is human, to forgive, divine.” We might also say that “to question is human, and to forgive questioning is divine.” According to the Bible’s majority witness, questions are fair game. To have even a mustardseed-sized faith, as well as having questions and Jesus-like doubt, is to be in the honest position of the desperate man who brought his seizure-afflicted son to Jesus for healing. Jesus told him that all things were possible for those who believe (that is, have faith). To which the man replied, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).

As a young boy on a choir tour with the Dayton Rotary Boys’ Choir, Mexico City amazed me. And in some ways, it confused me. I had seen the homes of wealthy people in the States and poverty from the back seat window of a car and on TV, but in Mexico City, they were often side by side. One shack was next door to a mansion. The mansions always had high walls around them with broken glass shards cemented into the top layer. I understood the wall; everyone wants security. However, the glass shards on the top of the wall seemed to be two things at once: an extra barrier to entry, and overt cruelty; “If you climb my wall, I’ll cut you to ribbons.” The glass pieces made the protected wealth behind the wall both the indulgence of he wealthy and a sneer to the poor. It seemed to assert the lack of relationship between the two, not to mention the absence of any obligation.

Do we have obligations to each other? Nothing seems more evident to me, but I admit, I am a product of my social situation. I was raised a Christian in a sincerely practicing Christian family. I have heard Bible stories forever; probably from the womb. The only one who would dare to ask, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” as Cain did after he murdered Abel, was asking it as a dodge to avoid his obvious culpability. God was not having it. Able was banished; the lesson was clear.

Then, there was that parable Jesus told about the rich man and Lazarus, the beggar, lying at his gate (Luke 16). The story always grabbed my little mind; the Bible was graphic. The dogs licked poor Lazarus’ wounds, while the rich man ignored him. Of course, their fortunes would be reversed in the world beyond the grave; that was only fair. The poor man went to Abraham’s bosom while the rich man suffered in flames. He got what was coming to him, according to my impressionable mind.

Then there was that other parable about another rich man who, instead of setting up a food bank for the poor when he had a bumper harvest too big for his present barns to hold, planned to build bigger barns (Luke 12). How will bigger barns make you any happier? How much can one person eat? Are there no limits on accumulation? How much is enough? To the rich man, the answer is “a little bit more.” But to God, in the parable, that idea was scandalous. The night on which he planned more barn space was his last. His soul was “required of him.” Jesus made the lesson, in case we missed it, explicit, saying, “a person’s life does not consist in the abundance of their possessions.” Two facts of life have always been true: wealth does not make you happy, and you can’t take it with you. The third fact seemed obvious to me, too: we have obligations to each other.

At home, at evening Bible story time, the Hebrew prophets never showed up. The Old Testament wasn’t absent; we had the Flood story, David and Goliath, the falling walls of Jericho, and others, but never the prophets. So it wasn’t until I was older that I found them as part of my morning Bible reading practice. When I did, I remember the thought occurring to me that Jesus seemed to have absorbed their take on poverty and wealth; he was not innovating, but amplifying. The prophets often seemed angrier than Jesus on the subject. They didn’t just tell parables, they pronounced “woe”s, or curses. They were furious, and they had reasons to be. The wealth disparity in ancient Israel was vast. A tiny aristocratic elite allied to and benefiting from the king’s court feasted while peasants scrounged and scraped to coax a living out of the soil of Palestinian farms. Taxes were high — someone has to pay for the banquets. So high that resisting them split the nation in two after Solomon’s death, according to the Bible’s telling. The prophets, raised in the Mosaic legal tradition, at least as literature if not history, believed every Israelite had the obligation to see every other Israelite as “neighbor.” The poor had the right to glean behind the reapers in fields and vineyards. The national tithe every third year was to support the quintessential disadvantaged, the “widow, the orphan, and the stranger (resident non-citizen, that is, immigrant).

But that was not happening, and it made the prophets apoplectic. Isaiah called the people who should have had the nation’s interests at heart, “dogs” because instead, they said to each other, “Come,” they say, ‘let us get wine; let us fill ourselves with strong drink. And tomorrow will be like today, great beyond measure’” (Isa 56:9–10). It got worse. He told them they were “offspring of an adulterer and a whore” (Isa. 57:3). From Isaiah’s perspective, religious observance was worthless in the face of such social conditions. Fasting was pointless. “ Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? (probably meaning the yoke of debt slavery) Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house? (Isa. 58:6). Even offerings and sacrifices could be called an “abomination” to God, who was so offended that he said, “I cannot endure solemn assemblies (that is, worship)” (Isa. 1:13).

Amos was angry, too. He said, the rich were trampling “the head of the poor into the dust of the earth” (Amos 2:7). He accused the elite of lying on beds of ivory while they “sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals” (Amos 6:4; 2:6). He, like Isaiah was not beyond animal insults. The wives of the elite were guilty too, not that they were out there trampling the heads of the poor themselves, but that they were passively participating in luxurious indolence that the wealth of oppression provided. So Amos called them “cows” and pronounced this curse on them, “Hear this word, you cows…who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, (indirectly) who say to their husbands, ‘Bring something to drink!’” (Amos 4:1). Ordering drinks while the poor were being crushed was an outrage. Amos predicted it would precipitate their demise. Their corruption extended all the way to the legal system, which they bent to their advantage. “You who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate (the ancient court). Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time” (Amos 5:12).

It is easy to see why the Bible molded my moral world, convincing me that obligations to each other were foundational. Wealth disparity was a problem, to say the least. And passively enjoying the benefits of a system that left so many in such misery was as bad as actively harming them. Those were my takeaways.

The prophets of Israel, and hence, Jesus, believed obligations were fundamental. You don’t just walk past the man whom the robbers beat half to death, like the Priest and the Levite did, you help him, like the “good” Samaritan did, why? because the question was never “who is (and so, who is not) my neighbor?” But instead, “Which one was a neighbor to him?”

But that does not solve any modern problem. Is it wrong to start a business that produces products that people want or need in such quantities that you become fabulously wealthy? Is it a sin to have a skill in enough demand that you are paid an enormous salary? How could it be a moral problem to provide a service that people find useful and will pay money for, making you rich? Wealth was not produced in these ways in the ancient worlds of Israel or Rome, so no one asked those questions or offered answers. The Bible has nothing to say about DNA or capitalism, which it knew nothing about.

But some things seem evident to me, given all those Bible stories. While having wealth and acquiring it by honest means is not the problem, it does present some issues for us. The first issue is the question of obligation. Are we obligated to provide for each other or not? Are we our brother’s keeper? The next question is about juxtaposition. Flaunting wealth in the face of poverty seems obscene. It is not wrong to remodel your kitchen, but it may be immoral if you know that the carpenters are not paid enough to keep their families housed and fed properly. Like glass atop a wall, it seems cruel to go out your door warm and well-fed, stepping over the bigger at your gate. It seems to me that there are times when ordering a drink puts you in moral peril.

I am happy to announce that the manuscript of the book I have been writing has been accepted for publication by Wipf & Stock Publishers. It still needs to go through the copyediting process, but it should be available sometime next year. My working title is All the Families of the Earth. This comes from God’s promise to bless Abraham and his offspring (Gen. 12:1–3), and through them, to also bless all the families of the earth.

I am excited to see it get published because the topic is important, even urgent at this time in America. Christian Nationalism has swept the Evangelical world and has taken many others along with it. It claims to be Biblical. My book will lay bare that claim. I show that from beginning to end, literally from Genesis to Revelation, there is a tension running through the whole Bible. That tension is that on the one hand, Israel is God’s chosen nation. God says as much.

On the other hand, the Creator God is the one who made humankind in his image and likeness and is the Lord of all the earth. The tension exists because while telling the epic story of the Chosen People, foreigners keep showing up, playing crucial roles in the narrative. Moses would have been killed if not rescued and raised by the daughter of Pharaoh. The Israelite spies would never have survived without the help of Rahab the prostitute in Jericho. David’s family line would have died out had it not been for Ruth the Moabite. And that is just the beginning; there are many more.

By the time we get to the New Testament, we see Jesus healing foreigners, going to their territory, and finally commissioning his disciples to go into the world with the gospel’s good news. Paul says that in Christ, there is no Jew or Greek anymore. The book of Revelation imagines people from every tribe and nation worshipping around the throne of the Lamb. The tension finally resolves: God loves the world. The quest for Nationalism is ethnic division. The Bible’s message is unity.

Thank you for following me here. I’ll keep you posted about the book.