Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. This episode, we are going to take a look at the first of 2 perspectives for interpreting violence in the Bible. As I said back to the beginning of, this podcast, we completely understand that there are a lot of issues in the Bible. There is violence galore. And I told you, I promised you, that I was not going to skip over that violence, but I was going to provide a framework, an explanation for how the nonviolent position deals with that.

So we're gonna take 2 episodes to do that, and then we are going to also take another episode to look at Revelation specifically, and talk about how the nonviolent individual can deal with with all of the violence in the Bible. So let's jump right in with the first view. And the first view for interpreting Biblical violence, I'm going to call the authoritative view. And, on the authoritative view, killing is not viewed as absolutely immoral, provided that 1 has the authority take life. Since God is the author and sustainer of life, he alone has the right to take life or to decree killing.

This view then would take killing as not something that is absolutely immoral. Like, let's say lying. We know that God cannot lie because as a part of his character, he cannot lie. That's just who he is. It is it is him.

To not lie is that. God is not anything but love. So something, God cannot perform an act that is not loving, because love is who God is. But on this view, killing is not really a a character trait, or the lack of killing, is not a character trait of God. For him to do that is not to deny his own self, to deny who he is.

And we recognize this type of morality all the time. Take parents, for example. And we recognize that parents have certain capacities that, let's say, their kids don't have. So for instance, my daughter should not punish my son when he does something wrong. What we tell our daughter to do is to speak to our son first, then come and talk to us and we'll take care of it.

We will, She will not discipline him, but she will talk to him and confront him. And if he does not comply, then she will talk to us, and we take care of the disciplinary aspect, and we will intervene. She does not have the right to do that. So I have some rights that she doesn't because of my my position of authority. But, also, there are commands that I can give that are not, are not universal or or true for all time.

So, for example, we might tell our daughter, do not use the stove. We do not want you to do that. It is dangerous. You can hurt yourself. You can start a fire.

Don't use the stove. Don't touch that. But she's learning how to make eggs, and we're trying to help her to be independent. And there might be a day where we are at the kitchen table in the other room, right next to our kitchen, and we say, you know what? Go ahead, and you give it a shot to make some eggs today.

You go ahead and you use that stove. The use of the stove is not something that is inherently moral or immoral. Stoves are amoral. They there's nothing there's no morality about them. Morality comes by being infused with what the authority gives to it.

So since I have authority over my daughter, and I have authority over the stove, I say, don't use the stove, and she should comply. But I can use the stove, and I can let her use the stove if I feel like it is warranted and safe and all of that. That's essentially what this view is going to say about killing. God has the authority over life. God can choose to take life if He so desires, and God can choose to allow other people to take life if He so desires.

But, that's the only way it works. I cannot choose to take life apart from God's authority over that. This view then will take the Bible at its word when attributing violence or permission of violence to God. When it says that God killed somebody, God killed them. When it says that God told Joshua to slaughter some, some people, some soldiers, some citizens, some children, whatever, then, no.

God told him to do that. And God has the right to do that because he has the right of life. And for him to kill or tell others to kill is not a direct contradiction of his character. However, we run into a problem. The the nonviolent individual says that we run into a problem when we get to the New Testament in terms of violence because all of a sudden, our directive is to leave vengeance to God.

God does not direct us or permit us to use violence today. He, we don't wage holy wars. God doesn't say, hey, United States President, go ahead and and attack this other country as an arm of my judgment, and I want you to destroy them. That we don't think that that happens today. God we are to leave vengeance to God.

And even if you take Romans 13, that has a limited application, in in terms of who is able to do violence. That would not apply to me on the streets, or me witnessing a crime or anything like that. And there's a limited application to government, and that's gonna apply to all nations equally, even nations like, say, Iran or North Korea. So, essentially, what we are saying is that, yeah, God did some killing. Maybe he still does.

I don't know. Bible's closed. God can do what he wants with life. But as far as permission for us, for his his people go, he doesn't give that permission anymore. We are not waging holy wars, and he does not tell people to go kill other people.

We leave vengeance in God's hands, and we live as Christ showed us we should live in this kingdom age until he returns. And that's also going to take care of revelation for us because if Jesus comes back and starts, whacking some people, well, that's kind of his prerogative. He can he controls life. He's the author of life. He's the sustainer of life.

By him, all things were made, and through him, all things are sustained. So if he decides to revoke that life, then that's his authority. The non violence then was not something that that always was, but it's more of a dispensation that we are to have at this time with the example of Christ, under his teachings, and through His Spirit, by His grace. As you can see, that position is actually pretty simple in terms of of what it espouses. It does not have to, really work around anything.

It doesn't have to change anything in the Old Testament, any any of our common understandings of it. It just kind of takes everything at purely face value and just goes with it. Since that is is such a short explanation, I wanna use the the rest of this episode to push back. And, if you're gonna argue that violence is for today, if you if you wanna say, okay. Well, I can see how somebody would would claim that view of nonviolence.

But, no, I think violence carries over from the Old Testament. I I think that, you know, just as people were right to defend their their nation or, to enforce capital punishment or whatever else, people could do that back then, and that carries over today. I don't think god has revoked that. So let's talk about the the opposite of the view I just kind of laid out today, and let's talk about the problems that you're gonna have if you don't take on this view, if you think that violence does carry over. So here are just a few questions.

Alright. In the Old Testament, you've got God prescribing killing. God tells Joshua to to go kill people. God tells Moses. God tells judges.

God tells David to kill people. Okay. Who gives that permission today? Who prescribes killing today? Are you really comfortable saying that, that God is prescribing killing for for any individual or group today?

If you think that the government has the legitimate authority to, legitimate killing, then which government is ordained by God in war? I live in The United States. That's a government. Some people live in North Korea. That's a government.

They're both governments. They both bear the sword. And if you're gonna use Romans 13 to legitimate violence, then North Korea and The United States are kind of on the same same field. If you really wanna take the the words there in Romans 13 as God's ordination, or, that that these governments are his ministers, and you wanna take that in a specific reading, then which government's ordained by God? All of them?

Well, then how can any government go to war against another government if both are ministers of God? How could I, as The United States, in The United States, wage war with another minister of God? Another question. In in any war, you can pick any war, but let's take World War one as a good example. Who was right in fighting for their country?

Which soldiers were morally justified? You had a lot of European countries historically Christian, whether that's nominally or or actually. Nevertheless, they identified as Christian. Was the German Christian, true Christian, immoral to fight for his country? His country, his government, who, according to this view, is a minister of God and has legitimate authority to wage war.

If you fought for Great Britain, the opposite side, and you're a Christian, were you moral for doing that, To submit to your government, God's minister of violence. It doesn't seem to make sense that both Christians were moral for fighting for their country. But at the same time, I don't know how you really escape that if you're going to kind of give this blanket authority to governments coming from Romans 13, especially considering that Romans 13 was written when it was written during, around the time of of Nero and and persecutions. It just doesn't make sense that that you can say 1 group was moral while the other wasn't. But it also makes no sense to say that both are moral.

Like, two two Christians can go to war on 2 different sides and kill each other, and they both kill each other morally. That just doesn't make sense to me. Alright. Another question. So we see how God wages war in the Old Testament.

We see that when God permits violence, he permits barbarism. He did some pretty terrible things to people. David chopped off Goliath's head. They hung it up and, like, waved it around. There's some really graphic things in the Old Testament, in particular, and Revelation.

And they kill women. They kill children as judgment. And if you're really going to say that we have carryover violence from the Old Testament, that, you know, God God showed us that violence can be used. Now, we we believe that it has to be used justly, but violence can be used against groups of people as judgment. Then why in the world don't we carry over the slaughter of civilians, or the barbarism, like we see in the Old Testament?

And, what you will hear most of the time when you bring something like that up is people will say, well, when when people slaughtered civilians and babies, that was a judgment on Canaan, who was was just extremely sinful. And, you know, they had direct permission from God to do that kind of thing, to to exact that kind of violence. Well, that seems a bit ironic to me that you wanna say that you don't need God's permission to engage in violence because you know that somebody is immoral enough to warrant your your use of violence. But then, you wanna say that you can't use violence to the same extent as you did in the Old Testament because you're not sure of of who is, who is worthy of having that violence waged against them. It's kind of a double standard.

You say it says 1 thing and follows that line of reasoning, but then because everybody recognizes that it's ridiculous to say that we're gonna go kill women and children, or or behead people and put their heads on pikes, people know that that's ridiculous, and so they have to completely reverse that line of reasoning, say we need God's permission. So either you know a group is just, or or, a group is evil and worthy of violence without God, or you need God. You need God, and God doesn't really do that thing today. So, that's non violence. If you don't need God, and you know that a group is unjust, then kill the women and children.

Alright. Next question. If the Old Testament violence justifies, violence in the New Testament. Why don't we have the same punishments for civil crimes? Like, take adultery or or disobedient children who used to be, who used to be executed.

Why, like, the my group, the conservative Christians, we want to make certain things illegal, like gay marriage or, abortion. But we don't want to make things like adultery or disobedience, disobedient children, we don't wanna make that civil crime a civil crime. And we really don't wanna make those things punishable by death. But why not? If if the Old Testament, if the New Testament is really just kind of a carryover of the Old Testament system of of what we're allowed to do to people, then and and if morality is objective, and so adultery was wrong and still is wrong, disobedience was wrong and still is wrong, that the morality hasn't changed.

This is not a, sacrificial turnover. This isn't this isn't ceremonial law that we're talking about. This is objective moral law. So if you've got no problem with governments bearing the sword on on God's behalf, if they're his ministers, and if we know what objective morality is, and God even showed us the types of things that he really doesn't like in the Old Testament, like adultery, and he showed us how he wants those things dealt with, and he's still for violence today and for governments using violence, then why aren't we all for things like adultery being, you know, being used by our our gov our government punishing adultery? So it seems like the carryover of violence to the New Testament really runs individuals who believe in objective morality into into some problems.

Some particularly some problems of consistency or inconsistency, I should say. Alright. Next question. What do you do with God's New Testament charge that we are to leave vengeance to him? That's a pretty simple question.

Straightforward. What do you do with that? If you are trying to, dissolve it in Romans 13, and I look forward to getting to the episode on Romans 13, because we won't just be reading the first few verses there in Romans 13. We'll take a look at 12 and, the section in 13 following the the section on government. But, yeah.

What what do you do with vengeance? And final question. And this 1 isn't really really as as big as the others, but, yeah, David was not allowed to build a temple because of the blood that was on his hands. And the text specifically says that was on his hands as a warrior. So we're not referring to blood on his hands, and I don't really know the timing of this, whether it was before or after he murdered Uriah.

But, nevertheless, the text says there's blood on his hands as a warrior. And, presumably, that was legitimate. Right? God wanted David to fight his enemies. But David couldn't build the temple because of that legitimate killing.

Right? Well, if God has issues with people who have blood on their hands building his temple, what do you do in the New Testament when we are the temple of God? Do Do you think God is any more okay with us having blood on our hands today than than he was before with David, a man after God's own heart? He couldn't have blood on his hands from from legitimate killing. What about us who reside, who the temple of God resides within us?

We are at the temple. That seems to be a little problematic. Anyway, I really hope that, this kinda gets you thinking a little bit about how pacifists can deal with with some of the Old Testament violence, as well as some of the the big problems and consistency issues that individuals have if they don't take on non violence in the New Testament, if they want to have that carryover of the Old Testament violence, there's some issues to deal with and some really problematic questions to answer. Well, hopefully that got you thinking. And that's all for now, so peace, and since I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.