August 2004

return to contents

The Peaceable Bible?
a book review by Bill Collinge

Patricia M. McDonald. God and Violence: Biblical Resources for Living in a Small World. Scottdale, PA: Herald, 2004. 373 pp. $16.99.

Quick quiz: Where does the motto in our masthead come from? Yes, from the Bible (exact answer at end of article). Yet many of us have an image of the Bible as a warlike, violent book. I am currently reading James Hillman’s A Terrible Love of War (Penguin, 2004), in which the chief culprit turns out to be “the raging intolerance of the biblical God.” “Is it fair to claim that the Bible depicts violence as an attractive option?” Patricia McDonald asks. “One purpose of this book is to answer with a resounding no.” The book has a second, affirmative purpose, as well: “to demonstrate from a range of biblical texts the way they can provide many (and sometimes surprising) resources for encouraging and enabling more peaceable ways of living.”

McDonald acknowledges that there is much violence and violent imagery in biblical texts. She does not address the texts from the perspective of a general theory of the origin and nature of violence; in fact, she devotes an appendix to criticizing the approach of René Girard, who does propose such a theory. Nor does she rely on a distinction between an Old Testament “warrior God” and a New Testament “God of love.” There is violence and love in both testaments, and both reveal the same God, although “that God . . . is to be definitively understood through the person and witness of Jesus of Nazareth.” She writes, then, explicitly as a Christian but expresses the hope that there is material in her book that will be of use to Jews and to those who do not affirm a biblical faith.

How McDonald proceeds is by way of careful reading of biblical texts in their narrative contexts and in the context of the canon, that is, the Bible as a whole. Most of the book is about the Old Testament, focusing on Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Isaiah, and a few passages from other books. The New Testament is represented by chapters on Mark and Revelation. For the most part, she concentrates on the biblical books that have a reputation for violence–such familiar “peace texts” as “swords into plowshares,” “the lion will lie down with the lamb,” “turn the other cheek” are mentioned only in passing, if at all. Her argument is (1) that there is much less violence in the Bible than is often thought; (2) “that most of what there is should be read as countering violence rather than encouraging it,” and (3) that what remains is very difficult to square with the thrust of the Bible as a whole.

Because her approach is through close reading rather than a general theory, it is difficult to summarize her book in a review. Instead, I will take two examples, one from the beginning of the Bible, the other from the end, to illustrate how she proceeds.

The two creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2 are thoroughly peaceful–remarkably so, in contrast to other ancient Near Eastern myths, such as the Babylonian Enuma Elish, which portray the world as the outcome of a struggle among the gods. But we read only two more chapters, in which the human population doubles to four, and we find number three killing number four. Cain’s killing of Abel is often blamed on God’s arbitrary preference of Abel’s sacrifice over Cain’s. That is how Cain sees it, to be sure, but is it what the text is saying? McDonald argues that the text reveals “Cain as oblivious golden boy,” secure in his status as firstborn, obviously more important than any younger brother, running up against “the most characteristic feature of [the biblical] God: a strong propensity for favoring the weak over the strong.” God invites him to reconsider the grounds for his resentment (Genesis 4:6-7), but Cain turns immediately to violence. “Thus right at the outset the Bible locates human violence in a defective response to what Cain mistakenly interpreted as an arbitrary challenge from God, because he was not sufficiently aware of his own advantages as the elder brother.” McDonald likens Cain to most of us in the West, who, without reflecting much on the situation, consider ourselves entitled to the lion’s share of the world’s natural resources and to food and merchandise sold at prices that do not give a fair return to workers.

The Book of Revelation, with which the Christian Bible ends, “tends to be regarded either as far too violent for polite society or as the only significant book in the biblical canon.” The truth “revealed” by Revelation, James Hillman says, is “the terrifying wrath of the Divine Lamb who wreaks havoc on the world.” No question, the Book of Revelation is full of violent imagery, which derives from the apocalyptic tradition in which it stands. But the violence of the images, McDonald argues, is subverted by the reality which they represent. How does the Lamb triumph? Not by violence, not by action at all, but by being slain, by “enduring the hostile action of others while remaining faithful to God.” The “sword” by which the Son of Man conquers is not physical force but the Word of God. The war which breaks out in heaven in Revelation, chapter 12, is not a real war at all, but a representation of the defeat of Satan by “Jesus’ death and Christians’ subsequent witness to it.” The fact that people have often read it as a real war “is one of many ways in which, despite the New Testament’s insistence on the centrality of Jesus’ crucifixion, popular imagination has assimilated God’s power to human power.” But the real point of the Book of Revelation is that “the slaying of the Lamb and subsequent Christian witness are sufficient to handle all the opposition that the cosmos can come up with.”

Some of you will remember Patricia (Patsy) McDonald from the time (1990-2002) when she taught at Mount Saint Mary’s, before returning home to England (the remote origin of this book was a guest lecture in my class in 1991–what you are reading is not a dispassionate, academic review). You may recall her command of the biblical languages and other tools of scholarship, which is on display here but never clutters the text. The book also exhibits what you would expect to see if you know her: a breadth of learning and interests (even some traces of her first academic field, biology), elegance of writing, and a subtle, understated wit. McDonald makes some reference to her own experience as teacher and religious sister and to political events of our time, but never in such a way as to distract from the biblical text. Rather, because she is reading the text so closely, the effect on me was to keep sending me back to the biblical texts themselves. If that is the impact on most readers–if they are stimulated to return to the Bible with a new sense of how it can be a resource for nonviolent living–McDonald will have succeeded in her task.

(Answer to quiz question: Isaiah 2:4.)

back to top | return to contents

Last updated August 15, 2004

Interfaith Center for Peace and Justice
©2007 All Rights Reserved
Contact the webmaster.