God is non-violent. God does not prescribe violence. Violence should never be rationalized in God’s name. That is clear in Christian revelation. But that immediately poses the question: What about the violence in scripture that is attributed to God or to God’s direct orders?
Doesn’t God, in anger, wipe out the entire human race, save for Noah and his family? Doesn’t God ask Abraham to kill Isaac on an altar of sacrifice? Doesn’t Moses have to talk God out of destroying Israel because God is angry? Didn’t God give an order to Israel to kill everybody and everything (men, women, children, and even the animals) as she entered the Promised Land? Didn’t the Mosaic Law, attributed to God, prescribe stoning women to death for adultery? What about all the wars and capital punishment that have been done in God’s name through the centuries? What about extremist Islam today, killing thousands of people in God’s name? How do we explain all the violence attributed to God?
Whenever scripture speaks about God as being offended, as getting angry, as wanting to wreak vengeance on his enemies, or as demanding that we kill somebody in his name, it is speaking anthropomorphically, that is, it is taking our own thoughts, feelings, and reactions and projecting them into God. We get angry, God doesn’t. Our hearts crave vengeance; God’s heart doesn’t. We demand that murderers be executed, but God doesn’t. Scripture contains many anthropomorphisms that lead to a bad and dangerous theology if read and understood literally. To read parts of scripture literally is to turn God into a tribal God in competition with other gods.
When scripture says that we experience God’s wrath when we sin, it doesn’t want us to believe that God actually gets angry and punishes us. There’s no need. The punishment is innate, inherent in the sin itself. When we sin it is our own actions that punish us (the way excessive use of alcohol dehydrates the brain and the dehydration causes a headache). We may feel that the punishment as coming from God, from God’s anger, from God’s wrath, but it is nature’s wrath and our own that we are feeling. God has no need to extrinsically punish sin because sin already punishes itself. Nature is so constructed. There is a law of karma. Sin is its own punishment.
But still, what do we do with the biblical texts that prescribe violence to God? For instance, how can we interpret God’s ordering Israel to kill all the Canaanites as she entered the Promised Land? In archetypal stories, killing is metaphorical not literal. It’s about a death inside the heart. God’s command to kill all the inhabitants of Canaan is simply a hard metaphor for what Jesus refers to when he says that you have to put new wine into new wineskins so that the new wine will not burst the old skins.
Virtually every text in the bible which ascribes violence to God or puts into his mouth a command to do violence needs to be read in that same way. The violence and killing are metaphorical, even as the text is asking the heart to do something that cannot be a half-measure. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “God and Violence,” May 2011]
