Kelsi Vanada

Dear Friends,

Happy Summer! Maybe some of you have memories, as I do, of attending Vacation Bible School during the summer months. My parents used to drop my siblings and me off at our grandparents’ ranch in South Dakota for a week each summer, and we attended their prairie church’s VBS.

I don’t recall a lot of details, but I remember the tenor of the teaching around Israel’s conquest of Canaan and the entry into the Promised Land (see today’s OT lesson, Deuteronomy 3:18-28). We didn’t learn about this as a violent occupation of territory already inhabited. Picture instead a bunch of kids singing exuberantly about victory in “holy war.” (“The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon,” “Onward Christian Soldiers,” etc.) Pretty cringy, to say the least.

Thinking critically about the difficult or unsavory parts of our sacred text is part of my own process of redefining my faith. There are many issues with the way my childhood faith presented these instances, including a literal reading of the Bible, and human glorification of violence.

In her book The Case for God, Karen Armstrong writes that archaeologists have found no trace of the mass destruction in Canaan described in the book of Joshua. The ancient composers of the Hebrew Scriptures were not writing factual accounts; “they were less interested in what actually happened than in the meaning of an event.” One such meaning is that the Israelites “lived in the presence of a God who accompanied them wherever they happened to be.”

Much of the Bible is not prescriptive, but descriptive—not prompting us to violence, and not violent for violence’s sake (Brent A. Strawn, Lies My Preacher Told Me: An Honest Look at the Old Testament). “Both Testaments—Old and New—contain violent passages;” Strawn writes, “violence is not, however, part of God’s initial purposes in creation, nor is it the end goal of the divine plan. Instead, the Bible manifests attempt to limit and constrain violence, encouraging us to contain our own proclivities to hyper-violence.”

We must all wrestle with the Biblical texts that contain violence. And we work and pray for its cessation across the world and in our communities.

In Christ,

—Kelsi