Trevor Laurence
The journal Presbyterion has recently published my article “Serving the Sanctuary, Subduing the Earth: Human Mediation of Divine Judgment in Biblical-Theological Outline.” The following is a brief excerpt from the introduction.
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The violence contained in the pages of Scripture presents one of the perennially perplexing challenges for confessional interpreters. And of all the various iterations of and responses to violence in the Bible, instances of divinely commanded and commended human participation in violence raise perhaps the most tangled questions of all.
It is one thing for a text to depict God as directly administering his just wrath—either temporally or eschatologically—upon the unrepentant wicked (e.g., Gen 19:24–25; Rev 20:11–15), quite another for a text to record divine speech explicitly directing human beings to mediate that wrath upon fellow human beings and threatening that failure to execute his commands will itself be met with punishment (e.g., Num 33:50–56).1 Divine judgment is a thorny issue for Bible readers in its own right. But when finite, fallible, fleshly creatures are called upon by God to participate in the exercise of that judgment, the problems—hermeneutical, theological, ethical, apologetic, existential—only multiply. How ought one responsibly to interpret an account that straightforwardly appears to describe “God behaving badly”2 and demanding that his followers do so as well? Can these texts really be the inspired word of the Lord? What gives certain people the right to enact God’s vengeance against others? How can the same God authorize such practices and also speak in Jesus of Nazareth about the ethics of his peaceable kingdom? What conceivable moral rationale could legitimate human involvement in divinely prescribed judgment, especially when said judgment manifests as physical violence? And what prevents religious communities from engaging in similar actions today? Are such portraits of God insurmountable obstacles to faith for modern skeptics? Are they insurmountable obstacles to faith for me? Can I worship without reserve a deity who has asked his worshipers before to take up the sword in his name? If it comes down to it, will I be ready to lay down my life in fidelity to a God who has commanded his people to take the lives of others? The questions stimulated by the Bible’s testimony regarding human participation in the outworking of God’s just vengeance are no mere philosophical curiosity. They bear upon the goodness of God, the trustworthiness of Scripture, the beauty of the Christian faith, and, for some, even the viability of love for and trust in a Lord who could ask such things of his creatures.
Examples of human beings functioning as agents of divine judgment—acting with the approval and sanction of God—abound in the Scriptures and span both the Old and New Testaments. Levites slay their brethren at Sinai and are rewarded by God (Exod 32:27–29). The Lord commands the Israelite community to corporately exercise capital punishment (Lev 24:13–16). Yahweh instructs Abraham’s children to drive out the Canaanites from the land (Exod 23:20–33). The Psalter envisions king (Ps 101) and community (Ps 149) executing the vengeance of God, and the prophets anticipate a return from exile that involves the covenant people’s victorious battle against wicked nations (e.g., Mic 5:5–9). In the New Testament, the man Jesus overturns moneychangers’ tables in the temple, drives out demons, and triumphs over powers. The church bears witness with a gospel ministry that Paul describes in the language of Israel’s conquest (2 Cor 10:3–5) and engages in a kind of warfare (Eph 6:12) until she crushes Satan underfoot (Rom 16:20). John sees Jesus astride a white horse, accompanied by a disciple army, riding to strike down nations and rule them with a rod of iron (Rev 19:11–16). And history culminates with Christ’s revelation from heaven and recompense to the wicked (2 Thess 1:6–10), even as his ἐκκλησία takes part in judging the angels and the world (1 Cor 6:2–3). Is there a compelling biblical theological vision capable of uniting and clarifying the theological, redemptive-historical, and moral logic of these elements? With this brief article, I hope to take an initial step toward such a framework, situating the human mediation of divine judgment within the canonical narrative of sacred space.
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You can access the full text PDF of the article here.
Citation: Trevor Laurence, “Serving the Sanctuary, Subduing the Earth: Human Mediation of Divine Judgment in Biblical-Theological Outline,” Presbyterion 49, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 104–30.
Trevor Laurence is the Executive Director of the Cateclesia Institute and the author of Cursing with God: The Imprecatory Psalms and the Ethics of Christian Prayer (Baylor University Press, 2022).
Image: Johann Heinrich Schönfeld, Battle of Jericho
- Scholars of biblical violence regularly identify God’s commands for and Israel’s participation in the conquest of Canaan as uniquely vexing among the Old Testament’s theological and ethical conundrums. E.g., Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2011), 158; Eric A. Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior: Troubling Old Testament Images of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 24; Helen Paynter, God of Violence Yesterday, God of Love Today? Wrestling Honestly with the Old Testament (Abingdon, UK: The Bible Reading Fellowship, 2019), 125; L. Daniel Hawk, The Violence of the Biblical God: Canonical Narrative and Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2019), 140. But while the scope of humanly enacted violence in Israel’s dispossession of the Canaanites is indeed extensive, it should be recognized that the conquest is but one instantiation of the much wider scriptural phenomenon of human participation in divinely sanctioned violence. Though other expressions of this type of action may receive comparably less attention, they raise many of the same questions, and some even rival the conquest narratives in terms of the severity and comprehensiveness of judgment envisioned.[↩]
- Cf. David T. Lamb, God Behaving Badly: Is the God of the Old Testament Angry, Sexist and Racist? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011).[↩]