ONE OF MY EARLIEST memories of church is being in the children’s choir, pumping my fist in the air and yelling as we sang about David’s victory over Goliath. While my vocal pitch was suspect, I didn’t lack for enthusiasm. But the whole performance taught me something dangerous: Righteous violence is exciting. It’s a lesson I’ve spent a large part of my adult life trying to unlearn.
Eric A. Seibert is a key figure in working through the violent passages of the Hebrew Bible. In his newest book, Redeeming Violent Verses: A Guide for Using Troublesome Texts in Church and Ministry, Seibert argues that the church can’t run away from violent Bible verses. Moreover, he writes, we must incorporate them into our religious experiences. But, Seibert cautions, we must always do this in a way that rejects the glorification of violence that is often found within scripture. Seibert offers several ways for church leaders to accomplish this, including refocusing attention on the victims of violence, or retelling the story to imagine a nonviolent outcome. Individual chapters highlight some specific ideas for how this can be done in children’s education, liturgy, and preaching.
The chapter that will be most troubling for many readers — but perhaps the most important — is Seibert’s chapter on how to handle God’s own violent behavior. Seibert begins from a founding premise that “God is not violent because God is love.” He points out that there are many claims about God in the biblical text that seem to be mutually exclusive. Seibert purports that Christians should acknowledge that the Bible does not always present a consistent portrayal of God. One way for Christians to do this without simply sliding into our own biases is to take “Jesus as the key to understanding what God is like.”
Some have accused Seibert of practicing a kind of contemporary Marcionism — viewing the God of the Old Testament as different from the God of the New Testament, and taking this as warrant to jettison parts of the Hebrew Bible. That strand of thinking is unfortunately present here as well. To be fair, Seibert calls out violent portrayals of God “in both the Old and New Testament [that] distort God’s character.” He’s not a fan of violent portrayals of God in either Testament. But when Seibert writes that “images of God behaving violently in the Old Testament do not correspond well with the way God is revealed in the New Testament through the life and teachings of Jesus,” it’s easy to see where the charge of supersessionism comes from. This type of either-or thinking about the two Testaments has been one of the forces behind Christian antisemitism for centuries.
Seibert’s ideas for how we teach these verses to children — and adults — are less immediately thrilling than my memories of jumping around in children’s choir. Seibert suggests we need to focus on other parts of the story, so that instead of valorizing David for killing Goliath, maybe we’re praising Abigail for her peacemaking skills. Seibert’s asking us to give up some pieces of childhood, but his challenge is exactly right: How can we get our children (and our adult congregants) excited about faith and the Bible without perpetuating a violent worldview?
Brandon Grafius is academic dean and associate professor of biblical studies at Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Detroit. His book Lurking Under the Surface: Horror, Religion, and the Questions that Haunt Us, was published in 2022 by Broadleaf Books; his next book, Scared by the Bible: Learning to Listen to What Frightens Us About Scripture, is forthcoming in 2025 from Morehouse Publishing.
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