The Warrior God
A commenter on my guest post at Per Caritatem questions whether the Old Testament imagining of God as a “mighty and violent warrior” can be discredited by the New Testament figure of Christ when the old image is “one rather large chunk” of scripture.
I don’t have a problem with the “large chunk” of scripture that depicts an almighty, violent warrior God. That understanding of God makes sense given the culture of those who conceptualized him thus. The symbols, figures, images, and myths about God have developed over time. Some have been figures of violence and war. As they are a part of a text I believe to be God’s Word, I don’t think they should be dismissed or discredited, but understood both within their proper context and in light of the revelations of Christ. Like any image of God, the warrior God both reveals and conceals. I may not take it literally, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t disclose to me a truth about God that God wanted revealed.
That God revealed himself as “Father” shows that he reveals himself through partially erroneous and flawed figures. The biological understand of fatherhood at the time of the New Testament’s writing wasn’t entirely accurate, to put it mildly. The father was the source of life; the mother just a vessel. Yet if we want to understand the meaning of God the Father, we have to take a detour through that flawed former understanding of fatherhood. I suspect a similar detour is necessary to understand God through the figure of the warrior deity.
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I greatly appreciate your point about the imperfection of figures (father, warrior) used to speak of God, figures that have been deformed in our fallen world. However, even a superficial reading of the New Testament shows that the same warrior-judge-dispenser-of-justice imagery is routinely applied to Jesus, not only by the apostolic writers but by Jesus himself. And some of his kingly interventions do involve violence; for example, the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 and the fall of the Roman Empire, both of which are depicted explicitly as divine judgments carried out by the Christ. The attempt to paint a drastic contrast between an Old Testament God who dispenses justice among the nations and a New Testament Messiah who does not cannot stand up to the consistent witness of the New Testament texts themselves.
My aim wasn’t to paint a drastic contrast between the two testaments, but to consider two prominent images of God, which, I grant you, appear in both the OT and NT.
Good point, Kyle.
Max, I find Christ word’s helpful: “Go and learn the meaning of the words: I deserve mercy, not sacrifice” (MT 9:13). JPII’s encyclical Rich in Mercy is rich resource on that subject.
Kyle, This makes my head spin within the context of all the images of God just in the OT. The most obvious image is of God as a Warrior and a Father. Then God is described more subltly with the feminine trait of nurturing and also His wisdom being identified as feminine. In Jeremiah 31:22 God is credited with creating “…a new thing upon the earth: the woman must encompass the man.”
What is it that we are to learn from the obvious God as Warrior and Father compared to the description of God exhibiting feminine characteristics which seem to conflict with the Warrior?
And then when the OT describes the Father as the source of life conflicts with the knowledge that the DNA of the mitochondria, which inhabit each cell in the body bringing in life-giving and life-sustaining oxygen and nutrition, only comes from the Mother.
Is God showing us the consequences of depicting “Him” in the male understanding of what it means to be human and to survive and thrive within this male dominated system of beliefs?
Kyle, My comments were indeed off target because I did not, as I should have done (my apologies) follow the link to your Per Caritatem piece. If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that the repugnance that modern Christians feel toward the genocidal actions ordered by God against certain pagan nations (1 Samuel 15, for example) can be resolved by denying that these orders actually came from God, but were the result of false prophecy on Samuel’s part or deformed history on the part of the Biblical writers. As an exegete, I would not follow you down that path, even though I do not claim to be able to successfully defend all the actions of God that I don’t understand.
Over and above that point, your articles were insightful and furthered my thinking on an idea that I have been toying with for a while. Here it is for what it is worth; maybe you can glean something useful to your own reflections.
One big difference between divine judgments in the Old Testament and the New is that God does not use the Church as a military instrument as he sometimes used Israel. (The nation of Israel was just as often on the receiving end of these judicial actions. For example, the prophets clearly state that the Assyrian invasion of Samaria and the Babylonian invasion of Judah were judgments of God. Both of these judgments included mass deportations.) In fact, coming back to the two New Testament examples I quoted—the Jewish-Roman War of 66-70 and the fall of the Roman Empire—, the Church was violently persecuted by the powers under God’s judgement; the Christians were killed as martyrs by the Jews then by the Romans but did not take up arms to kill their enemies. Jesus’ rebuke to Peter could be seen as sort of a verdict pronounced against the whole theocratic idea: He who lives by the sword will die by the sword.
Here is what I am getting at: just as God gave the Law of Moses to demonstrate the inadequacy of Law to solve man’s problem, so he gave the Jewish theocracy to demonstrate the inadequacy of Theocracy. One of the main reasons the Jewish religious establishment rejected Jesus as the Messiah is that he did not fulfill first-century judaism’s THEOCRATIC (political-military-religious) hopes and ideals. This is a constant thread in the Gospels. That would imply that any idea of a christian theocracy or that islam (essentially a Law and a Theocracy) is a regression, and not the progression it claims to be, in God’s revelation of his will.
I think St. Paul covers this pretty well in his letter to the Ephesians.