The Javelin, the Dagger, & the Stake

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.