Normalising Violence: Part 2

To recap from the previous post: The Hebrew theologians looked at the world as it was in the aftermath of the destruction of all they knew and loved, and realized that violence was, at the least, endemic in human society; and that its roots can be found in the primeval past. The impulse to kill a perceived rival—even a brother—is a common human response to differences of opinion. From the earliest times stronger men bullied and dominated other men, and banded together to bully and dominate other groups of men; the pattern of a strong man of influence declaring himself the ruler over the others is seen in tribe, city, and nation. It seems assumed that it is normal for the strongest to force control over those around them—to seek to dominate all others, and to force them to obedience and slavery. Thus the strong man, the warrior, is most valued by society for the ability to bully, to plunder, and to kill for his own community’s prosperity.

[The Flood is a painting by Bill Bell which was uploaded on 15 September 2025]]

This, the theologians of Genesis 1-11 saw. The Flood Narrative begins with a starkly pessimistic statement: ‘God saw that the wickedness of men multiplied on the earth, and that every intention of the human heart was only evil continually’ (6:5). That word ‘intention’ stands in counterpoint to Gen 2:7—the basic sense of the word yester/yatsar is ‘form’. ‘The Lord God formed the human out of the ground…’. After Eden the human yester becomes malformed by persistent abuse.

So, God decides the only solution to this corrupt and violent society is to return the earth to the primordial formlessness that was ‘in the beginning’, before he began to create. The prophet Jeremiah draws a helpful picture of this very action as he watches a potter forming clay into vessels for food and drink. “I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him … Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel” (Jer 18:3-4,6). This is a promise of re-formation of the malformed.

Two matters to note by the end of the Flood story. One, there is one family of humanity that survives for the new beginning, ‘Noah finds grace’. Two, the conclusion is not a vision of peace and human kindness, as might be expected. Rather than ‘they lived happily ever after’, the tone is nearly as stark as the beginning of the story: “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth” (Gen 8:21). This leaves one asking, why go through all the bother of de-creation for nothing to change afterwards?

There is no neat answer to this, and it is not my purpose here to offer a nuanced response. I will just point to a subtlety of the narrative itself found in verse 21. Note the difference at the end; in 6:5, the formation of the human heart is ‘only evil continually’. Here, the depravity is not total; ‘from youth’ is a way of saying ‘from the age of moral responsibility’.

Which leads to our first note in the paragraph above: Noah found favour. We will come back to this.

Normalizing Violence, Part 1

  Genesis 6:11-13: ¹¹ Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. ¹² And God saw that the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth. ¹³ And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth. [NRSV]

 

[From the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki. The earliest writing in the region, 7th C BCE. The pottery handle is inscribed: 'Mine']

This is a story about violence. How one understands its meaning depends on where one starts. It is common in recent times to see the violence and condemn God for bringing about the genocide of humans and animals. This, unfortunately, is not only to miss the point but to ascribe to it quite the opposite of the story’s purpose.

The starting point for hearing the Flood Account is not from our modern, liberal and sceptical rationalism; nor is it from a simplistic literalist approach that considers this a historical account. To appreciate the genius and subtlety of this ancient story we need to place ourselves in the room with those who seek to explain theologically ‘how we got to the mess we are in’. This starting point has to look back from the end of the long ‘historical’ narrative of the people of Israel found in 2 Kings 25—following the destruction of Jerusalem and Temple and the deportation of the population except for the lowly ‘people of the land’. The position we need to take is that of the Wise Men of Judah, in Babylon, seeking to make sense of what had just happened. Was everything they had believed in false? Or, had they missed the point of God’s engagement with them completely?

‘How did we get to the mess we are in?’ Looking at the story of humanity, grasping that ‘every inclination of the human heart was only evil continually’ (Gen 6:6), the theologians came to the rational conclusion that the basic human state is a violent one. And violence leads to destruction.

At the heart of the Hebrew account of how things came to be the way they are, and of how God is involved in it all, is the acknowledgement of the normality of violence in human life. The ‘rest of the story’ in the Bible is about how God deals with this basic reality.

Of course, this part of the story is not the beginning. The earlier narrative describes, without any attempt to gloss over it, how the first human family was torn apart by murder, when Cain slayed his brother. And this is shown to flow directly from the violent decision of the first couple to choose their own way in life, saying of the fruit of the tree, ‘Mine’.

Those early theologians looked past this first ‘sin’ and saw a world of lost potential for human well-being in relation to God. There was a better way of being, but it was lost in what we now call ‘The Fall’.

What does this mean for our troubled present? It means the strong will use violence against those deemed weak. As we read through the story of humanity we see that power is in the hands of the physically strongest, with the best weapons; the bullies. Such has it been, such it is, and such—it seems—it will ever be. This is where we are. Why are we surprised?

The rest of the story? ‘Noah found grace’. That is for another time.

Diversity: The Variegated Grace of God

 [This article was first written in 2018 for the Nazarene Theological College LINK magazine, and then to the MCSCI Blog page. The celebration of diversity seems particularly pertinent in the current atmosphere of hostility to the ‘Other’. This is a slightly revised version of https://www.mcsci.org.uk/blog/post/diversity-the-variegated-grace-of-god. The photo from the Webb telescope of the Milky Way illustrates 'variagation' well.]

Not so long ago I heard a senior church leader in Manchester comment that his experience of the Church in Manchester was of congregations of multi-racial and multi-cultural membership. Someone observed that this is probably an urban phenomenon, and would not be the case across the whole country.

This comment set off a train of thought in my mind. In 1981, when I arrived in Manchester as pastor of a church in a part of the city called Chorlton-on-Medlock, I found a small-but-not-too-small congregation that included people from many parts of the world as well as from all over the UK. I discovered that this diversity was unusual in the city; I found only two or three churches in our very mixed part of the city that reflected that mixture in any way. Indeed, in the ‘80s it was not uncommon for African Christian students to come to our church after first visiting churches (consisting of a handful of people) of their own formerly missionary-sending denomination (where their home churches numbered hundreds of members), reporting that they had been politely told that they ‘might be more comfortable somewhere else with people of their own kind’. They were often in shock at what they found in their Mother Church.

Our church wanted to reach out to our community. Given the significant proportion of our community that was from the Caribbean (largely Jamaican), we wondered if we should focus reaching out to that ‘homogeneous people group’,[1] and searched for a minister of West Indian descent. We decided, ultimately, to affirm our multi-racial and multi-cultural make-up as our strength: we would witness to the variegated (explained below) image of God by our variety. The church did not grow rapidly, but we grew to accept diversity as normal.

The Manchester church was my introduction to the joy of worshipping and learning with the diversity of God’s people. My whole life of service since has been in multi-cultural settings, teaching in three Nazarene educational institutions all serving diverse nations, and returning to be a part of that Manchester congregation again. It has become so much the norm that I feel a sense of shock when I find myself in a single-culture setting—which can happen by travelling only a few miles from my church.

What has happened in nearly 40 years? On one hand, church membership as a whole has continued to decline in Britain at an alarming rate. On the other hand, immigration over the past twenty years—under the generous and highly criticized policies of the governments of the day—has brought a significant number of active Christians into the cities. An unexpected result has been the breath of new life these committed believers have brought to the often-dying local churches they have joined. Many have embraced the newcomers, and such churches are growing. It is a matter for thanksgiving and praise to God that diversity has become the norm across Manchester!

And this under a government system of ‘hostile environment’ to all immigrants. There are lessons to be learned from the debate over immigration that grips so much of the West right now. How do Christ’s people respond to ‘the Other’ on our own territory? The tabloids, as well as prominent politicians, tell us to be afraid, to reject, and expel the Other—the ones not like us, whom we deem to be a threat to our own existence. What do we do when we discover that so many, even among those deemed ‘illegal’ and arriving via leaky boats and across desert borders, are brothers and sisters in Christ?

I have come to the conviction (that is not too strong a word) that God intends us to be all mixed together. The sin of Babel (Genesis 11) was the human attempt to be one homogeneous unit—one language, huddling together in one place. On the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2), echoing the Babel story, the Holy Spirit brought languages and people together into one new community—not by reverting to one language for all, rather, all hear in their own languages. The diversity of God’s people is vividly displayed and celebrated.

The whole biblical story, in truth, is one of migration—Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are all migrants who settle in foreign lands; the Israelites migrate from Egypt to Canaan; Jesus was an undocumented migrant[2] to Egypt as a child.

One New Testament text that illustrates well the biblical affirmation of diversity is found in 1 Peter 4:10. At the beginning Peter describes his audience as ‘exiles of the Dispersion’, that is, scattered groups of God’s people across marginal regions of the Roman empire; these churches are urged to be ‘good stewards of the manifold grace of God’. That word ‘manifold’ (NRSV) can be translated ‘variegated’, ‘diverse’, ‘pluriform’, or ‘many-coloured’. It is the same word used of Joseph’s famous coat, in Genesis 37. We may speak of the ‘many-coloured Church of God’.

Peter’s focus is on the grace-gifts God gives which we are to give to each other. To me, when I look at the Sunday gathering in that church I came to those years ago, it embodies to me the image of God, the imago Dei (Genesis 1:26). Our modern tendency is to read this verse as speaking in the singular of an individual image: ‘I’ am created in the image of God. But the fact is the image is plural, ‘male and female’, and can only be seen fully in the whole of humankind and our manifold colours. ‘I’ am incomplete on my own, a partial picture of how God created humanity; ‘we’ fill out the picture, each adding our part. As the Godhead is triune, and diverse, so is His creation.

This translates into my everyday life in curiosity. When I meet someone different than me, or different than I have met before, rather than fearing the unknown I am curious to learn how this person expands my understanding and experience of the image of God in the human. In the past few years this curiosity has extended towards Muslims of many sorts. The experience has added more colour and texture to my sense of what God has done in creation, confirmed my expectation that God loves them too, and expanded my wonder at the grace of God in Christ.

The Holiness Movement of which I am an heir, in its middle decades stressed the meaning of holiness as separation—separation from sin, and, in its sectarian phase, separation from the world. At times it fell into a rather legalistic emphasis on keeping pure by avoiding any contact with the impure. A grave danger of the holiness-as-separation view is that it leads easily to other kinds of separateness, including racial and national, until churches become excluding rather than welcoming of strangers. When diversity is deemed a bad thing, as we are seeing in much of our world and the Church today, God’s grace becomes diminished to an unattractive narrow, monochrome, homogeneous spirituality of fear and reaction. But, when we catch a glimpse of the riotous diversity of sacred life springing from the creative Word, we can do nothing less than cry out in celebration of the unfathomable grace of God, ‘Holy, holy, holy’!

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[1] A ‘homogeneous unit’ is a group made up of people of the same social, racial, economic and/or political background.

[2] But then, no one was looking for documentation then.

A take on the current economic situation, from a ‘biblical’ slant - Sydenham Life Magazine

[The following is an article published in the June 2025 issue of Sydenham Life, the parish magazine of St Bartholomew's Church, Sydenham. The title was not of my choosing.]

On the morning of Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States of America he attended a service of Christian worship at the national cathedral. In her sermon the Bishop, the Right Rev Mariann Edgar Budde, urged the new president to ‘have mercy’ on people in the country ‘who are scared now’, particularly LGBTQ+ and immigrants. A month later Trump announced cuts to USAid amounting to $60bn in US assistance worldwide. As I write the UN Food Programme announces it is forced to halt treatment for more than 1/2m  malnourished women and children in Ethiopia due to lack of funding.

I have been asked to offer a ‘Biblical take’ on the economics of trade and aid in light of current events. The short response is, there is no economic theory in the Bible as we would think of it. There are certainly a lot of people who think otherwise. Go to your search-engine of choice for advice on what the Bible says about money and you will find many people willing to reveal ’13 secrets of wealth in the Bible’, ‘6 keys to guarantee Biblical wealth and prosperity’, or ‘5 biblical secrets to make you a millionaire!’. There are fewer who offer courses on a ‘Biblical Economics’, yet they select much the same Bible verses, scattered throughout the Bible, and develop ‘principles’ from them. Interestingly, most come solidly down on the side of the free market.

As in any discussion of a ‘biblical view’ on contemporary issues, the biggest question is the presuppositions of the interpreter. The websites just mentioned come to the Bible with a view that it consists of propositional truths that must be mined. One simply looks for verses that say something about money or finance, and derive ‘principles’ from them. Sayings in the Proverbs are favoured highly, then laws from Moses, then from the New Testament—leaning heavily on the letters of Paul. Context does not matter, whether historical or textual. Each text has its own principle. For example, one finds capitalism in the Proverbs: “The scriptures assume an understanding of supply and demand curves (Prov 11:26)”, which says ‘The people curse those who hold back grain, but a blessing is on the head of those who sell it’. It is possible to see this as an example of supply and demand, but it also an example of manipulation of supply of which the Proverbs’ Wise One clearly disapproves. Is it a God-given principle?

Bible verses/contexts that contradict these principles are not difficult to find. From the Old Testament, e.g., Exodus 22:25, ‘If you lend money to my people…you shall not extract interest from them’; not good news for capitalists. Studiously ignored are New Testament portrayals of some sort of communalism at the very beginning of the Jerusalem church, seen in Acts 2:44-45, ‘All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need’. A little later in Acts 4:32, ‘The whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions’ (NRSV translation).

In the years just after the fall of the Iron Curtain and Soviet-style Communism, I taught classes surveying the Bible in both Kiev and Moscow to young people who had never read the Bible before. It was a fascinating learning experience for us all. But what startled me was the responses to reading these stories of the beginning of the Church; these youngsters who had lived their whole lives under Soviet-dictated atheism immediately began speaking heatedly amongst themselves. My interpreters got involved in the discussions as well, and it took me some time to learn what had sparked off the response—they recognized Acts as a description of the socialism they had just discarded. Interesting conversations followed.

The point is, one can find free market capitalism, and one can find socialism in the Bible.

The New Testament is written in a world of empire. Rome was an occupier in Judaea and derived heavy taxes from the occupied. The economy was largely agrarian, and the land owned by a very few. As many as a third of the population were slaves, affecting the labour economy. The upper 1.5% held 20% of the wealth. The cost of military security was the largest budgetary item. Jesus was born into a low-economic status household in an occupied state. How do we apply this to our time?

It is reasonable, I think, to look at the history of Christianity as successive-if-not-successful experiments in engaging scripture with the politics of the day. We are now witnessing the collapse of the attempt to match democracy with capitalism. In the chaos that is the world of Trump we do not yet know what will be next. In 1921 R H Tawney, an economic historian at the University of London, delivered a series of lectures titled, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. He shared with Max Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, attribution of the rise of capitalism to late-17^th C Puritanism (there is another article in this!). Tawney lists four main attitudes toward economic relations by religious opinion which remain insightful today:

1. Ascetic aloofness and escape; exemplified in monasticism, and such as the Amish.

2. Ignore them as worldly matters of no concern to religion; seen in much of 20^th Century Evangelicalism.

3. Throw itself into agitation for some particular reform or revolution; found in every era of Christian history, with Christian Socialists (e.g., Methodist chapels and Labour), a British example; and, arguably, Puritans—founders of capitalism as we have come to know it.

4. Accept and criticize, tolerate and amend; probably the majority attitude throughout history.

With these in mind, we turn to the Bible, limited by space here to the Gospels, source of the teaching of Jesus, to see how money and the economy of its time is portrayed. Matthew, and Luke share most of the examples.

Firstly, the Gospels are non-committal on the economic system of the day.

·    In Mt 18 the parable is told of a steward to a king owed 10,000 talents (a talent of silver was equal to 6,000 denarii, which was the standard day-rate for labour) and could not repay it, so was to be thrown into debtor’s prison. The king forgave the debt. The steward then went out and found a co-worker who owed 100 denarii (three months’ minimum wage), could not pay, and had him thrown into prison. When this was reported to the king he had that steward handed over to the torturers until he paid his whole debt. (I know, how can you repay money while being tortured in prison?) Jesus does not comment on the system of debtors prisons, but the common practice is used as an illustration of forgiveness/remission of debts.

·    Mt 20 describes the Day-workers system, still found today, where men wait on street-corners for prospective work for the day. An employer cannot find enough workers at the start of the day, so returns several times to find more workers. At the end of the day he gives all the workers the full day’s wage (a denarius). Again, the system is not commented on, but the justice of giving a daily wage sufficient for the day’s needs (daily bread), regardless of circumstances, is argued.

·    Mt 21 tells the story of a landowner who plants a vineyard and lets it out to tenants. The tenants refuse to pay their rent, and ultimately kill the landowner’s son who is sent to persuade them. Jesus asks his listeners what they think the landowner would do; the answer given is ‘they would put the wretches to a miserable death’. The reader is left in no doubt that the landlord represents God. Jesus makes no comment on the answer given.

·    Perhaps most famous is the parable of the talents, in Mt 25 and Lk 19. A Master entrusts his wealth to three aides while he takes a long journey. They are given varying amounts of money (5, 2, and 1 talents), according to their abilities. Two invest theirs and double their principal. The third buries his money in the ground (no banks available, apparently). When the Master (God?) returns he rebukes this one and gives his money to the first one. There is no criticism of the system; the issue is being trustworthy of their stewardship.

Secondly, the Gospels say a lot about taxes

Tales about tax-collectors are numerous, clearly as the bad guys. We know from other sources that the tax burden was crippling to the Judaean economy—privatized by Rome, with local tax-collectors (tax farming) given license to raise money as they saw possible.

In some places tax-collectors are grouped with ‘sinners’ (Mt 9:9, Lk 5:29-32), who, whatever the nature of their sinning are clearly disapproved of. In one story a tax-collector called Zacchaeus climbed a tree to see Jesus pass by. Jesus saw him, and invited himself to dinner at this rich man’s house. Zacchaeus becomes a disciple of Jesus – and makes 400% restitution to all those he had defrauded (Lk 19:1-10). It is understandable why tax-collectors were hated – but Jesus shows that they are redeemable. Indeed, we know that he made one of them a disciple, Matthew!

3. A bias to the poor

Jesus doesn’t have much good to say about the rich and powerful: 

·    Mary’s song in Luke 1 (commonly called the Magnificat) rejoices in a coming Kingdom reversal that her child will bring – the powerful are brought down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up; the poor are filled with good things, the rich sent away empty.

·    Lk 16:20-25 tells of a rich man who banqueted every day, and a starving poor man named Lazarus who sat, ignored, at his gate and lived off food rescued from the dumpster. Both die, and Lazarus is seen in Paradise by the rich man, who now languishes in Hades. He begs for Lazarus to be allowed to bring him a sip of water, but there is ‘a gulf fixed between’ that cannot be crossed.

·    All three Gospels tell the tale of a rich young man who comes to Jesus seeking the secret to eternal life, but goes away grieving over the personal cost when Jesus tells him to give all his wealth to the poor. It is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of God (harder than a camel going through the eye of a needle) but, Jesus says, ‘with God all things are possible’.

It is hard for the rich, but not impossible. It is not that being rich is sinful, but about how wealth is used—and is judged by care for the poor.

 

The Gospel of release: Jesus at Nazareth (Luke 4:16-21)

In sum, the Gospels often depict the economic system of the day, but do not comment on the system. This is not an implicit endorsement of the system, but rather the use of common situations to illustrate the gospel response. As already said, there is no prescribed economic theory in the Bible.

But there is a vision of a better world. There is no single prescription, but there is an ordering of priorities. The Gospel priorities can be seen in the very first words of Jesus in Luke 4, sometimes called his ‘Nazareth Manifesto’. Jesus reads the Sabbath text from Isaiah 61 in his home synagogue: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor...to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’. The ‘year of the Lord’s favour’ refers to a provision of the Law set out in two places: Deuteronomy 15, which calls for the remission of debts every 7 years; and Leviticus 25, which calls for a Jubilee every 50 years in which all property reverts to the original owners. 

As Jesus’ first public sermon in Luke it has to be read as the template of his coming ministry, and for the community of his followers. We have seen this in Acts 2 and 4 (the Acts of the Apostles being the sequel to the Gospel of Luke). Whatever economic framework we live in, for the family of believers who follow Jesus the question will always be, ‘How does the system provide for the needy?’ It is by the measure to which a society succeeds in such provision that it is to be judged. And, ‘blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy’.