Violence in Scripture and the Nonviolence of Jesus

There is a thesis in Christian theology that goes something like this: it is problematic, and perhaps even irreconcilable, that Scripture includes both accounts of God permitting violence (especially the conquest of Canaan) and accounts of God's son, Jesus, advocating nonviolence. Whereas Deuteronomy 20:16 reads that God's chosen people, the Israelites, "must not let anything that breathes remain alive" in Canaan, Matthew 26:51–52 recounts Jesus telling a disciple to put his sword away after cutting off a slave's ear, saying that "all who take the sword will perish by the sword." There is no shortage of tensions like this in the Bible.

But as far as I can tell, such tensions are only problematic if nonviolence is a moral absolute. The easiest solution to this problem, then, is to simply say that nonviolence is not a moral absolute. It does not seem entirely unreasonable to me that violence could be permanently forbidden for the Christian since the time of Jesus's ministry, yet have been permissible for the Israelites on a situational basis in the past, whether that be historically or literarily. Moral absolutes not applying to a particular set of actions does not necessarily entail moral relativism altogether.

Chris Hedges wrote in a book published in 2003 that "Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history." Historically, violence is ordinary and peace is the exception.

Sometimes I wonder if pacifist theologians such as Gregory Boyd, who in Crucifixion of the Warrior God wagers that the conquest of Canaan was more so motivated by Ancient Near Eastern barbarism than God's commands, underestimate the difficulty of achieving nonviolence. As Christians today, we should certainly embody nonviolence. But perhaps it is utopian to think that this was a plausible option in the brutal conflicts of the past, and that nonviolence is readily achievable now and in the future for non-Christians.

Wolfhart Pannenberg might have been onto something when he said in an interview:

God is not that meekly love that many people say He should be. In the Old Testament, God is one who elected Israel, and this did not always include peaceful relationship with other people. We see, at present, what the problems are in that respect. That God elected Israel and that this would entail violence in relation to other nations was not the final aim of all of God’s actions. But God had elected Israel to become a witness of God’s will to righteousness for all human beings. Violence is not the last word. The last word of God will be the reconciliation and love.