Growing up, Megan Phelps-Roper had superheroes. Instead of wearing capes and masks, they wielded javelins, daggers, and tent stakes. Instead of fighting crime, these were holy assassins, brutally killing the enemies of God.
Here she recounts three stories of holy violence, righteous blood, and God’s enemies getting exactly what’s coming to them. What do these stories reveal about our human nature? And have we, as a society, really fundamentally changed in who we are? Or maybe most uncomfortable of all: what happens today when someone is certain they know exactly who deserves to die?
After listening, please (especially with this episode), share your own stories as well as your questions and comments below.
Discussion (3)
As strange as it sounds, I've always had a soft spot for Judges. I took a great class on it at my very religious, Seventh-day Adventist college. But the class was team taught by a professor of Biblical Archaeology and an English teacher. So we got the book in it's social/political context--and also an honest discussion of how the archaeology does not support the historical accuracy of the text, which was very controversial for our school. And we also got the literature of it, how the story makes narrative sense. Just a note on Jael's motivation. When Sisera "enter's her tent," he's guilty of rape. Entering a tent is a euphemism for sex. In this world, sex is bound up with property and economics, so he is attempting to usurp Jael's husband's household. Jael is taking power like an underdog, which is a major theme running through the entire Hebrew Bible. She can't match Sisera head on, and so she pretends to ally herself with him until she finds a moment of weakness and can act as her household's protector.
I’ve been reflecting more deeply on the part about the pressure to treat any moral disgust as the real problem. As if the faithful thing was to assume the error was in me. That pressure was part of my own experience too. Naming it has helped clarify some of what I was trying to say in my previous comment. Still turning it over.
Megan! Since discovering Book Keeping (via Tangle), it’s become my favorite Podcast series because you and I seem to be wrestling with a lot of the same questions. I think I might be responding to Episode 3 and Episode 4. I listened to them back-to-back. I hope I don't seem preachy at any point. My wife thought I did get a bit prescriptive. I'm still working on it all. I’ve been sitting with the same discomfort you name, especially in the way these stories from the book of Judges were taught as factual history directed by God. I grew up with a version of God who was presented as jealous, petty, vengeful, and seemed ready to back the worst of these all-too-human attitudes and actions even in our times. Leaving that portrait took a long time. What I’m still turning over is whether the Bible, read as one long story, Old Testament through the New, shows the spiritual development of the chosen people themselves. The Old Testament as the real historical and theological journey of Israel: called, failing, drifting, being judged, being preserved, and still carrying the promise forward until it reaches its climax in Jesus. The dark material (including Judges) is part of that journey, not a detour from it. The repeated line in Judges about there being no king and everyone doing what was right in their own eyes feels like the narrator’s own acknowledgment of how far they had drifted. The story is going somewhere, and the people are being formed (and malformed) along the way. For me, the New Testament part of the story — the way it moves toward a king who absorbs violence rather than multiplies it — has been the piece that lets me stay with the hard texts without returning to the old certainty that God was calling for the bloodshed. Jesus did the opposite and calls upon us to surrender our egos and do the same. And yet, “Christian” groups such as the ones you and I were raised in do the opposite, claiming to be God’s voices of righteousness and judgment. And as you allude to in this podcast, secular political groups are claiming the same thing in the name of—well, in the name of themselves, it seems. It’s basically the same thing.