Ironlung and Project Hail Mary both are based on the idea of sin and absolution. Each placing Grace and Simon as Christ figures and what's so interesting is that PHM positions the viewers as Humanity being saved but Ironlung puts the viewers as complicate—as the people who puts Christ to die and is watching the crusifiction happen.
Stars in the Bible have been used as a way to talk about gods guidance and often when stars fall it symbolizes times of cosmic upheaval, divine judgment, or the collapse of earthly kingdoms. Such as in Revelation 6:13. So both stories inciting incident being the disappearance/dimming of the stars in itself is theological.
Grace's name quite literally being named GRACE and Being carried to be the savior of humanity by a ship called THE HAIL MARY! Grace is immediately separated from the rest of humanity with his only connections being to the children he teaches. Now this textually places him as a more traditional Christ figure.
Grace while never literally dying does die symbolically. Grace was placed on a ship with 2 others knowing that they were never going to return, leaving behind whatever life they had before, but the fact that there was two people with him is important because it mirrors the crusifiction. Christ in the Bible was not crusified alone, he was not special in his death, but instead was crusified with two criminals.
There's also the idea of diametrically opposed salvation. Salvation, or the return of the stars in PHM is a group effort, something that cannot be done alone but instead must be a collaboration with the care of rocky his friend symbolizing that salvation is not a one man journey but something that is born out of a love for others. That part of salvation was Grace figuring out what he needed to do to offer that salvation. It is not he needs to die but that he needs to continue to live on off of earth.
Simon is harder but that's because the text doesn't treat him as a traditional Christ figure but as HISTORICAL Christ figure.
Simon is a convict... A heretic to the COI (very similar to the roman empire) who as a punishment for his crimes is being sacrificed in an ocean of blood FOR THE BETTERMENT OF HUMANITY.
Simon is also a biblical name as well, meaning "God has Heard" and being one of the most common names in the Bible, Simon Peter being the one of the most important as he was the disciple instructed to lead the church after Christs crusifiction.
The leader of Eden (a reference to the Biblical garden) is called "the father" but the father has abandoned Simon, Echoing the crusifiction. "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"
Simons salvation is much darker than Grace's though, part of it is that he must suffer, he must suffer through an ocean of humanities sin. a reference to the blood sacrifice of christ. Searching in the dark for some light, hope, of continuing, and when he finds the black box of the sm-8, this guidebook of how to navigate through this blood ocean, how to save people he does what he must to give this to humanity, Praying to his mother, "Please keep this safe okay Mom? it's more than me.... It's more than me." Ultimately choosing to subcome to death to save the rest of humanity.
And In each story there is a woman who has to do what is "nesseary to save humanity" and by doing so place Grace/Simon in a position to be sacrificed for the good of humanity. In ironlung the woman's name is Ava in Phm it's Eva.
That's really similar huh? I wonder what these women could be a reference to. THE FIRST WOMAN EVE!
Think about it, Eve ate the fruit of knowledge, thus insuring humanities survival, but also sacrificing her own ability to live without sin.
Eva for her choice to sacrifice grace is put into prison for life BUT she doesn't regret it as she has found forgiveness in the success of Project hail Mary and Grace.
BUT AVA IS A DIFFERENT STORY Ava is Sacrificed herself, she knows she will not find absolution in Simon's success and Goes down in the ironlung herself and dies before him.
Even if this was not intentional I do find it interesting.
Hello! If you have the time and energy, i have a slightly weird question for you about Jesus Christ. Did Christ have a sense of humour? Are there stories of Jesus laughing, or seemingly joking, or taking the piss at some of his disciples? I was raised catholic but can't really recall any "knee-slapping" moments, and I genuinely think that's a bit of a loss. If He was both fully Divine and fully Mortal, that means He must have had belly laughs and ugly snorts at least once, and that's a story I feel could help more people connect to the Church
Hello!
I am not a biblical scholar or even aspiring to be one. Unfortunately, my answer will not be satisfactory.
What we do know is that if there were any jokes written in the Bible, we wouldn't necessarily get them right away. In the same way when we watch old comedian acts, we don't understand the humor unless we know the historical context that makes it funny.
There is one story that comes to my mind that is funny. That parable of the widow bothering the unfair judge. That story always makes me laugh: imagine an abeula banging on the door of her local judge/sheriff's office and generally being so loud and annoying she gets what she wants in the end. I don't know if it was meant to be funny. Is it possible the crowds that heard it and roared with laughter? Maybe. Is it possible there were other parables that were obviously funny or humorous at the time but the humor has since been lost? Also possible.
"We can, as I point out in my earlier piece, use Genesis 2 to trump (the term comes from bridge, not politics) Leviticus 18 and 20. If it is not good for human being to be alone, why would we condemn queer people to lives of singleness and celibacy? Similarly, we see the good in the “unnatural,” as Paul puts it, since it is through the “unnatural” grafting of the shoot from a wild olive tree into a cultivated tree that, metaphorically speaking, Gentiles can be justified."
Amy-Jill Levine, "How to Read the Bible's Clobber Passages on Homosexuality"
There's a curious but popular notion circulating around the church these days that says God would never stoop to using ancient genre categories to communicate. Speaking to ancient people using their own language, literary structures, and cosmological assumptions would be beneath God, it is said, for only our modern categories of science and history can convey the truth in any meaningful way.
In addition to once again prioritizing modern, Western (and often uniquely American) concerns, this notion overlooks one of the most central themes of Scripture itself: God stoops. From walking with Adam and Eve through the garden of Eden, to traveling with the liberated Hebrew slaves in a pillar of cloud and fire, to slipping into flesh and eating, laughing, suffering, healing, weeping, and dying among us as part of humanity, the God of scripture stoops and stoops and stoops and stoops. At the heart of the gospel message is the story of a God who stoops to the point of death on a cross.
Dignified or not, believable or not, ours is a God perpetually on bended knee, doing everything it takes to convince stubborn and petulant children that they are seen and loved. It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does.
I was thinking a lot about 1 Samuel 20:30 today (I was sort of already thinking about it, and then I listened to Shame from Beloved King and it got very in my head)
Saul flew into a rage against Jonathan. “You son of a perverse, rebellious woman!” he shouted. “I know that you side with the son of Jesse—to your shame, and to the shame of your mother’s nakedness!
I have believed for a long time that this verse indicates that Saul knows (or at least thinks) that Jonathan and David have a sexual relationship and is condemning Jonathan for it. (For the record, not because it’s a homosexual relationship, but because Jonathan is siding with the enemy. In fact nothing in the David-Jonathan narrative ever suggests that they would be condemned being two men in a romantic and/or sexual relationship.)
“But Vee, why do you think that? Saul doesn’t mention anything about sex here.”
Well, in the Hebrew Bible, nakedness basically means sex. Sometimes it can be taken more literally (as in Genesis 9:22-23, where it might mean rape or might mean simple embarrassment over being seen nakedness) but most of the time it means sex, especially illicit sex. This is most well-known from Leviticus 18, where one is commanded not to “uncover the nakedness” of one’s family members. This chapter also includes several examples of “[Person A]’s nakedness” being used as a stand-in for sex with a relative of Person A, rather than Person A themselves. For example: “Do not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife; it is the nakedness of your father.” This indicates not that sex with your father’s wife is literally sex with your father, but that this is a sexual act that will bring shame upon your father, mainly because the wife’s sexuality is under the father’s protection.
I posit, then, that when Saul mentions “the shame of your mother’s nakedness” he is referring to a sexual act that Jonathan has done which will bring shame upon his mother, that somehow relates to his relationship with David. Why does having sex with David bring shame upon his mother? Well, honestly, I think Saul is kind of projecting and means it brings shame upon Saul himself (or both parents together).
I also think that Saul referring to David as the “son of Jesse” is interesting here — perhaps because David’s sexuality is still under his father’s protection? Well, admittedly David is already married here, but assuming that a man’s sexuality can’t be under his wife’s protection his father would still be his authority. And you know, it would also be Jonathan having sex with his sister’s husband — this isn’t explicitly mentioned in Leviticus, but “uncovering the nakedness” of your brother’s wife is prohibited, so I think you could extrapolate brother’s wife -> sister’s husband, it is the nakedness of your sister -> your sister’s nakedness is the nakedness of your mother. Or something like that!
Now, there is a much more common interpretation of this verse that I want to present. This says that “[Jonathan’s] mother’s nakedness” is a reference to Jonathan’s birth, or specifically Jonathan’s conception. Basically, Saul is cursing that Jonathan was ever born (or along those lines). Combined with the first half of the verse — “son of a perverse, rebellious woman” — you can see this as Saul basically calling Jonathan “son of a bitch”.
I think this interpretation holds a lot of water, though not necessarily more than my interpretation. However, when I was looking more into this interpretation I found a really interesting midrash in the Tz’enah Ur’enah (old Yiddish Bible+commentary, kind of, you should just look into it) that seeks to expand on why Saul is insulting Jonathan’s mother (his wife!!) and how he’s comparing the two of them. The gist of the midrash is more or less that Achinoam (Jonathan’s mother) asked Saul out, rather than waiting for Saul to approach her as was proper. The midrash therefore says that Jonathan is too much like his mother: “[Achinoam] was brazen at the dance and you [Jonathan] are also brazen to me [Saul]”. Ok… I can see what they were going for, but why compare Achinoam’s immodest sexuality to Jonathan’s supposed political opposition?
And here, I posit again: Achinoam’s wrongdoing in this midrash is not simply being “brazen”, but going against sexual norms. “Approaching” someone who she shouldn’t approach, or in a way she shouldn’t have approached him. And now Saul is comparing Achinoam’s actions there to his mother’s? His perverse, (sexually) rebellious mother?? In a roundabout way, we come back to Saul accusing Jonathan of illicit sexual acts, somehow involving David…
Ergo, either way you spin it, Saul accuses Jonathan of having sex with David. And Jonathan doesn’t refute it!
Few biblical footnotes have generated as much fascination (or as much confident speculation) as the Nephilim. They appear briefly, cryptically, and at strategically unsettling moments in the biblical story. And then they vanish. No clarity. No genealogy. No real explanation. Just enough detail to raise questions and not nearly enough to settle them.
Which, of course, is why we keep talking about…
Part One: Why the Book of Revelation Speaks in Symbols
There is a reason the Book of Revelation has never rested quietly.
For nearly two thousand years, it has unsettled readers rather than comforted them. It has divided interpreters, fueled endless speculation, and inspired fear, urgency, obsession, and certainty all at once. Unlike other sacred texts, Revelation does not explain itself. It does not teach patiently. It does not move in clean lines. Instead, it confronts the reader with beasts rising from chaos, seals being broken, numbers that refuse to settle, and cosmic upheavals that feel both near and unreachable.
Every generation approaches it convinced that now, finally, the code will be broken.
And yet, the confusion remains.
This persistence of opacity raises a deeper question, one that is rarely asked honestly.
What if the difficulty of Revelation is not a problem of language, but a problem of authority
In every major prophetic tradition, revelation was never meant to stand alone. It always arrived alongside a living authority responsible for preserving, clarifying, and applying divine intent across generations. This series begins from that premise.
Not to dismiss Revelation as symbolic fantasy.
Not to claim superiority over other traditions.
But to take the text seriously enough to ask why it speaks the way it does.
When Prophecy Loses Its Voice
The Book of Revelation emerges at a moment of rupture.
Its author, a figure known as John, writes from exile on the island of Patmos. This is often treated as a simple historical detail, but it carries far more weight than that. Exile here is not just geographical. It is a condition. A separation from power, from center, and more importantly, from continuity.
Jesus has departed.
The foundational event has occurred.
The message survives.
But something essential is missing.
The early community retains memory, scripture, and belief, yet it no longer possesses a universally acknowledged figure endowed with divinely mandated authority to finalize meaning. There is no uncontested successor empowered to declare which interpretations are binding, how unfolding history must be read, and where prophecy ultimately points.
When revelation continues without recognized succession, memory remains but direction fractures. The community knows what it believes, but no longer has an unquestioned voice to determine how belief must confront unfolding history.
This condition can be described as hermeneutical orphanhood.
Revelation remains.
The living interpreter does not.
Why Clarity Becomes Dangerous
In such a condition, explicit prophecy is no longer safe.
A clear and linear revelation naming powers, timelines, and outcomes would be immediately exposed to suppression by empire, distortion by factions, or premature collapse under unfolding events. More dangerously, it would be left to human arbitration. Competing interpretations would multiply endlessly, with no final voice capable of settling disputes.
When authority collapses, clarity becomes a liability.
Symbolism, then, is not an aesthetic flourish.
It is a survival mechanism.
Images endure where instructions fail.
Archetypes survive regimes.
Numbers outlive empires.
By compressing meaning into symbol, Revelation preserves its core truths. That oppression is temporary. That divine justice is inevitable. That history is not random. The reuse of imagery drawn from earlier prophetic traditions is not imitation, but deliberate embedding within an established symbolic language. The message survives precisely because it is not exhausted.
Yet survival is not completion.
The Cost of Preservation
A sealed vision can endure.
But it cannot conclude.
Revelation sustains vigilance without orientation. It demands watchfulness without identification. It promises judgment, yet withholds its mechanics. The result is a text that endures across centuries but never settles. A book endlessly interpreted, yet never resolved.
This preservation through symbol does not imply the absence of divine guidance. Rather, it signals its relocation beyond the immediate horizon of the community preserving the text.
Prophecy has been held in protective stasis.
A Different Model of Continuity
This series contrasts that condition with a different paradigm. One in which revelation does not end with symbolic preservation, but continues through recognized succession.
In this model, symbolism is not a destination. It is a phase.
A living guide inherits the prophetic legacy through succession, carrying the mandate to translate symbol into identification, typology into history, and expectation into sequence. Earlier revelations are not endlessly allegorized. They are clarified.
Here, eschatological knowledge is not speculative theology. It is operational guidance for a community expected to pass through trials with orientation rather than confusion.
From this perspective, the enduring ambiguity of Revelation does not indict the text.
It points to a missing voice.
What This Series Will Unfold
This first part establishes the foundation. Why Revelation is encrypted at all.
In the parts that follow, we will explore:
• Why end time prophecy consistently centers on lineage rather than isolated individuals
• How figures hinted at in Revelation appear elsewhere with clarity and continuity
• Why symbols such as seals, false saviors, and the Lamb demand authoritative interpretation
• And how unresolved cries for justice find completion only when continuity is restored
Revelation does not fail to speak.
It speaks in the only language possible when authority is absent.
The seal has been preserved.
The question is not whether there is meaning, but through whom divine authority chose to safeguard its key.
Chapter End Hook
In Part Two, we will turn to a question Revelation never resolves on its own. Why divine victory is always promised through lineage, and never through isolated saviors.
Credit and Acknowledgment
This series was inspired by a detailed Urdu language lecture published on YouTube by the channel Blend of History. That presentation explored parallels between the Book of Revelation and Islamic eschatological traditions preserved through the family of the Prophet Muhammad Peace and Blessings upon him and his Purified Household.
While the structure, language, and analysis presented here are original and independently developed, intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that the initial spark and thematic direction came from that source.
Readers interested in the original lecture are encouraged to seek it out for additional context and perspective.
Spend any solid amount of time with scripture and you'll run into something that perplexes, disturbs, or downright horrifies you. Many of us have walked away from the Bible or from Christianity in general, sometimes temporarily and sometimes permanently, after encountering these stories. So how do we face them, wrestle them, and seek God's presence in (or in spite of) them?
In her book Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, the late Rachel Held Evans spends a whole chapter on the "war stories" of Joshua, Judges, and the books of Samuel and Kings. She starts with how most teachers in her conservative Christian upbringing shut her down every time she tried to name the horror she felt reading of violence, rape, and ethnic cleansing; I share an excerpt from that part of the chapter over in this post.
That excerpt ends with Evans deciding that she needed to grapple with these stories, or lose her faith entirely.
...But then I ended the excerpt, with the hope that folks would go read all of Inspired for themselves — and I still very much recommend doing so! The whole book is incredibly helpful for relearning how to read scripture in a way that honors its historical context and divine inspiration, and takes seriously how misreadings bring harm to individuals and whole people groups.
But I know not everyone will read the book, for a variety of reasons, and that's okay. So I want to include a long excerpt from the rest of the chapter, where Evans provides cultural context and history that helps us understand why those war stories are in there; and then seeks to find where God's inspiration is among those "human fingerprints."
I know how important it was to Rachel Held Evans that all of us experience healing and liberation, so it is my hope that she'd be okay with me pasting such a huge chunk of the book for reading here. If you find what's in this post meaningful, please do check out the rest of her book! A lot of libraries have it in print, ebook, and/or audiobook form.
[One last comment: the following excerpt focuses on these war stories from the Hebrew scriptures ("Old Testament"), but there are violent and otherwise disturbing stories in the "New Testament" too, from Herod killing babies to all the wild things going on in Revelation. Don't fall for the antisemitic claim that "The Old Testament is violent while the New Testament is all about peace!" All parts of scripture include violent passages, and maintain an overarching theme of justice and love.]
Here's the excerpt showing Rachel's long wrestling with the Bible's war stories, starting with an explanation for why they're in there in the first place:
“By the time many of the Bible’s war stories were written down, several generations had passed, and Israel had evolved from a scrappy band of nomads living in the shadows of Babylon, Egypt, and Assyria to a nation that could hold its own, complete with a monarchy. Scripture embraces that underdog status in order to credit God with Israel’s success and to remind a new generation that “some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God” (Psalm 20:7). The story of David and Goliath, in which a shepherd boy takes down one of those legendary Canaanite giants with just a slingshot and two stones, epitomizes Israel’s self-understanding as a humble people improbably beloved, victorious only by the grace and favor of a God who rescued them from Egypt, walked with them through the desert, brought the walls of Jericho down, and made that shepherd boy a king.
To reinforce the miraculous nature of Israel’s victories, the writers of Joshua and Judges describe forces of hundreds defeating armies of thousands with epic totality. These numbers are likely exaggerated and, in keeping literary conventions of the day, rely more on drama and bravado than the straightforward recitation of fact. Those of us troubled by language about the “extermination” of Canaanite populations may find some comfort in the fact that scholars and archaeologists doubt the early skirmishes of Israel’s history actually resulted in genocide.
It was common for warring tribes in ancient Mesopotamia to refer to decisive victories as “complete annihilation” or “total destruction,” even when their enemies lived to fight another day. (The Moabites, for example, claimed in an extrabiblical text that after their victory in a battle against an Israelite army, the nation of Israel “utterly perished for always,” which obviously isn’t the case. And even in Scripture itself, stories of conflicts with Canaanite tribes persist through the book of Judges and into Israel’s monarchy, which would suggest Joshua’s armies did not in fact wipe them from the face of the earth, at least not in a literal sense.)
Theologian Paul Copan called it “the language of conventional warfare rhetoric,” which “the knowing ancient Near Eastern reader recognized as hyperbole.”
Pastor and author of The Skeletons in God’s Closet, Joshua Ryan Butler, dubbed it “ancient trash talk.”
Even Jericho, which twenty-first-century readers like to imagine as a colorful, bustling city with walls that reached the sky, was in actuality a small, six-acre military outpost, unlikely to support many civilians but, as was common, included a prostitute and her family. Most of the “cities” described in the book of Joshua were likely the same. So, like every culture before and after, Israel told its war stories with flourish, using the language and literary conventions that best advanced the agendas of storytellers.
As Peter Enns explained, for the biblical writers, “Writing about the past was never simply about understanding the past for its own sake, but about shaping, molding and creating the past to speak to the present.”
“The Bible looks the way it does,” he concluded, “because God lets his children tell the story.”
You see the children’s fingerprints all over the pages of Scripture, from its origin stories to its deliverance narratives to its tales of land, war, and monarchy.
For example, as the Bible moves from conquest to settlement, we encounter two markedly different accounts of the lives of Kings Saul, David, and Solomon and the friends and enemies who shaped their reigns. The first appears in 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. These books include all the unflattering details of kingdom politics, including the account of how King David had a man killed so he could take the man’s wife, Bathsheba, for himself.
On the other hand, 1 and 2 Chronicles omit the story of David and Bathsheba altogether, along with much of the unseemly violence and drama around the transition of power between David and Solomon.
This is because Samuel and Kings were likely written during the Babylonian exile, when the people of Israel were struggling to understand what they had done wrong for God to allow their enemies to overtake them, and 1 and 2 Chronicles were composed much later, after the Jews had returned to the land, eager to pick up the pieces.
While the authors of Samuel and Kings viewed the monarchy as a morality tale to help them understand their present circumstances, the authors of the Chronicles recalled the monarchy with nostalgia, a reminder of their connection to God’s anointed as they sought healing and unity. As a result, you get two noticeably different takes on the very same historic events.
In other words, the authors of Scripture, like the authors of any other work (including this one!), wrote with agendas. They wrote for a specific audience from a specific religious, social, and political context, and thus made creative decisions based on that audience and context.
Of course, this raises some important questions, like: Can war stories be inspired? Can political propaganda be God-breathed? To what degree did the Spirit guide the preservation of these narratives, and is there something sacred to be uncovered beneath all these human fingerprints?
I don’t know the answers to all these questions, but I do know a few things.
The first is that not every character in these violent stories stuck with the script. After Jephthah sacrificed his daughter as a burnt offering in exchange for God’s aid in battle, the young women of Israel engaged in a public act of grief marking the injustice. The text reports, “From this comes the Israelite tradition that each year the young women of Israel go out for four days to commemorate the daughter of Jephthah” (Judges 11:39–40).
While the men moved on to fight another battle, the women stopped to acknowledge that something terrible had happened here, and with what little social and political power they had, they protested—every year for four days. They refused to let the nation forget what it had done in God’s name.
In another story, a woman named Rizpah, one of King Saul’s concubines, suffered the full force of the monarchy’s cruelty when King David agreed to hand over two of her sons to be hanged by the Gibeonites in an effort to settle a long, bloody dispute between the factions believed to be the cause of widespread famine across the land. A sort of biblical Antigone, Rizpah guarded her sons’ bodies from birds and wild beasts for weeks, until at last the rain came and they could be buried. Word of her tragic stand spread across the kingdom and inspired David to pause to grieve the violence his house had wrought (2 Samuel 21).” ...
The point is, if you pay attention to the women, a more complex history of Israel’s conquests emerges. Their stories invite the reader to consider the human cost of violence and patriarchy, and in that sense prove instructive to all who wish to work for a better world. ...
It’s not always clear what we are meant to learn from the Bible’s most troubling stories, but if we simply look away, we learn nothing.
In one of the most moving spiritual exercises of my adult faith, an artist friend and I created a liturgy of lament honoring the victims of the texts of terror. On a chilly December evening, we sat around the coffee table in my living room and lit candles in memory of Hagar, Jephthah’s daughter, the concubine from Judges 19, and Tamar, the daughter of King David who was raped by her half brother. We read their stories, along with poetry and reflections composed by modern-day women who have survived gender-based violence. ...
If the Bible’s texts of terror compel us to face with fresh horror and resolve the ongoing oppression and exploitation of women, then perhaps these stories do not trouble us in vain. Perhaps we can use them for some good.
The second thing I know is that we are not as different from the ancient Israelites as we would like to believe.
“It was a violent and tribal culture,” people like to say of ancient Israel to explain away its actions in Canaan. But, as Joshua Ryan Butler astutely observed, when it comes to civilian casualties, “we tend to hold the ancients to a much higher standard than we hold ourselves.” In the time it took me to write this chapter, nearly one thousand civilians were killed in airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, many of them women and children. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki took hundreds of thousands of lives in World War II, and far more civilians died in the Korean War and Vietnam War than American soldiers. Even though America is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, it takes in less than half of 1 percent of the world’s refugees, and drone warfare has left many thousands of families across the Middle East terrorized.
This is not to excuse Israel’s violence, because modern-day violence is also bad, nor is it to trivialize debates over just war theory and US involvement in various historical conflicts, which are complex issues far beyond the scope of this book. Rather, it ought to challenge us to engage the Bible’s war stories with a bit more humility and introspection, willing to channel some of our horror over atrocities past into questioning elements of the war machines that still roll on today.
Finally, the last thing I know is this: If the God of the Bible is true, and if God became flesh and blood in the person of Jesus Christ, and if Jesus Christ is—as theologian Greg Boyd put it—“the revelation that culminates and supersedes all others,” then God would rather die by violence than commit it.
The cross makes this plain. On the cross, Christ not only bore the brunt of human cruelty and bloodlust and fear, he remained faithful to the nonviolence he taught and modeled throughout his ministry. Boyd called it “the Crucifixion of the Warrior God,” and in a two-volume work by that name asserted that “on the cross, the diabolic violent warrior god we have all-too-frequently pledged allegiance to has been forever repudiated.” On the cross, Jesus chose to align himself with victims of suffering rather than the inflictors of it.
At the heart of the doctrine of the incarnation is the stunning claim that Jesus is what God is like. “No one has ever seen God,” declared John in his gospel, “but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known” (John 1:18, emphasis added). ...So to whatever extent God owes us an explanation for the Bible’s war stories, Jesus is that explanation. And Christ the King won his kingdom without war.
Jesus turned the war story on its head. Instead of being born to nobility, he was born in a manger, to an oppressed people in occupied territory. Instead of charging into Jerusalem on a warhorse, he arrived on a lumbering donkey. Instead of rallying troops for battle, he washed his disciples’ feet. According to the apostle Paul, these are the tales followers of Jesus should be telling—with our words, with our art, and with our lives.
Of course, this still leaves us to grapple with the competing biblical portraits of God as the instigator of violence and God as the repudiator of violence.
Boyd argued that God serves as a sort of “heavenly missionary” who temporarily accommodates the brutal practices and beliefs of various cultures without condoning them in order to gradually influence God’s people toward justice. Insofar as any divine portrait reflects a character at odds with the cross, he said, it must be considered accommodation. It’s an interesting theory, though I confess I’m only halfway through Boyd’s 1,492 pages, so I’ve yet to fully consider it. (I know I can’t read my way out of this dilemma, but that won’t keep me from trying.)
The truth is, I’ve yet to find an explanation for the Bible’s war stories that I find completely satisfying. If we view this through Occam’s razor and choose the simplest solution to the problem, we might conclude that the ancient Israelites invented a deity to justify their conquests and keep their people in line. As such, then, the Bible isn’t a holy book with human fingerprints; it’s an entirely human construction, responsible for more vice than virtue.
There are days when that’s what I believe, days when I mumble through the hymns and creeds at church because I’m not convinced they say anything true. And then there are days when the Bible pulls me back with a numinous force I can only regard as divine, days when Hagar and Deborah and Rahab reach out from the page, grab me by the face, and say, “Pay attention. This is for you.”
I’m in no rush to patch up these questions. God save me from the day when stories of violence, rape, and ethnic cleansing inspire within me anything other than revulsion. I don’t want to become a person who is unbothered by these texts, and if Jesus is who he says he is, then I don’t think he wants me to be either.
There are parts of the Bible that inspire, parts that perplex, and parts that leave you with an open wound. I’m still wrestling, and like Jacob, I will wrestle until I am blessed. God hasn’t let go of me yet.
War is a dreadful and storied part of the human experience, and Scripture captures many shades of it—from the chest-thumping of the victors to the anguished cries of victims. There is ammunition there for those seeking religious justification for violence, and solidarity for all the mothers like Rizpah who just want an end to it.
For those of us who prefer to keep the realities of war at a safe, sanitized distance, and who enjoy the luxury of that choice, the Bible’s war stories force a confrontation with the darkness.
