The Violence of Scripture: Overcoming the Old Testament's Troubling Legacy

Notes

163 notes chapter 1: introduction: The bible Should never be used to harm others 1. Esther Epp-Tiessen, “Conquering the Land,” in Under Vine and Fig Tree: Biblical Theologies of Land and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, ed. Alain Epp Weaver (Telford, PA: Cascadia, 2007), 70, emphasis mine. 2. Laura E. Donaldson, “Postcolonialism and Biblical Reading: An Introduction,” Semeia 75 (1996): 9. Estimates of Pequot casualties are said to range from three hundred to seven hundred, according to Charles M. Segal and David C. Stineback, Puritans, Indians, and Manifest Destiny (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 137. 3. Donaldson, “Postcolonialism and Biblical Reading,” 8. 4. I am indebted to Matthew Kruer, “Red Albion: Genocide and English Colonialism, 1622–1646,” (master’s thesis, Graduate School of the University of Oregon, 2009), 109–10, for noting this connection. Although Underhill never mentions the specific war in question, Kruer argues that “Puritan chroniclers . . . clearly connected the two events [the Pequot War and David’s war with the Ammonites] in their histories of New England” (110). 5. Segal and Stineback, Puritans, Indians, and Manifest Destiny, 136–37. 6. Kruer, “Red Albion,” 110. 7. Examples include Jim Hill and Rand Cheadle, The Bible Tells Me So: Uses and Abuses of Holy Scripture (New York: Doubleday, 1996); John Shelby Spong, The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco , 2005); Adrian Thatcher, The Savage Text: The Use and Abuse of the Bible (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008); and Philip Jenkins, Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses (New York: HarperOne, 2011). 8. Thatcher (Savage Text) uses the phrase “savage text” to describe the Bible “when its use results in the marginalization, or persecution, or victimization, of any of the people or creatures for whom . . . Christ died” (4). He regards it as an appropriate designation for “what Christians have made of the Bible when they have used its pages to endorse cruelty, hatred, murder, oppression, and condemnation, often of other Christians” (5). 9. For some orientation to the issue of violence in the New Testament, see Michel Desjardins , Peace, Violence and the New Testament (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997); Philip 164 Notes to Chapter 1 L. Tite, Conceiving Peace and Violence: A New Testament Legacy (Dallas: University Press of America, 2004); Shelly Matthews and E. Leigh Gibson, eds., Violence in the New Testament (New York: T & T Clark, 2005); and Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld, Killing Enmity: Violence and the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2011). 10. The household codes (Eph. 5:21—6:9; Col. 3:18—4:1) are particularly problematic in this regard. For a critique of these codes, see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon, 1984), 65–92, who regards these as “patriarchal texts that must be critically evaluated rather than justified” (xxi). 11. See Spong, Sins of Scripture, 181–210. Spong (181) cites three “terrible texts”: Matt. 27:24-25; John 8:39, 44; Rom. 11:7-8. 12. For some of the difficulties associated with the penal substitution view of the atonement , see Brad Jersak, “Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ,” in Stricken by God? Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ, ed. Brad Jersak and Michael Hardin (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 23–24; Gregory Anderson Love, Love, Violence, and the Cross: How the Nonviolent God Saves Us through the Cross of Christ (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2010), 27–51. For difficulties with traditional views of hell, see Sharon L. Baker, Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught about God’s Wrath and Judgment (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 3–18. 13. Philip Jenkins, Laying down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses (New York: HarperOne, 2011). 14. Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Violence and Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 2006), 25. 15. For a brief discussion about the authority of Scripture, see the appendix. 16. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), esp. 12–31. 17. See chapter 10 for a very brief discussion of this and for some resources in the notes there for further reading. 18. For a brief discussion of how the Bible was formed, see John Barton, How the Bible Came to Be (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1997). 19. See, for example, the discussion of the book of Joshua in chapter 7. 20. See...