Jesus and the Subversion of Violence: Wrestling with the New Testament evidence
Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld
SPCK £14.99
(978-0-281-06068-9)
Church Times Bookshop £13.50

“FIGHT the good fight” used to be one of the most popular and widely sung hymns in the Church of England, but today, like “Onward, Christian soldiers”, it is much more rarely heard. The imagery of war is regarded by some as an encourage­ment to violence; and yet such imagery is deeply embedded throughout the Bible. Thomas Yoder Neufeld provides us with a com­mentary on how the theme of violence in the Bible might best be interpreted.

He sees no essential difference here between the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the context of the Old Testament, the rule of “an eye for an eye” was more likely to limit a violent response than to encourage it. The Old Testament contains no command to hate one’s enemy, although an aspect of the New Testament develops this further in the require­ment to love one’s enemy, even if accompanied by strong warnings that God will be wrathful and vengeful if he so decides.

Will he so decide? It is rightly emphasised that more often it is the patience and longsuffering of God which puzzles the biblical writer than God’s justified wrath, which is rather taken for granted. For Neufeld, this indicates that the underlying development and trajectory in the Bible is in the direction of non-violence.

There is a helpful survey of theories of the atonement, from the perspective of divine violence. Substitutionary theories have recently been denounced as involving “cosmic child abuse”, but Neufeld argues that all the tradi­tional theories of the atonement try to give expression to the underlying love of God. The New Testament writers are surprised by joy rather than theoreticians of atonement, notwithstanding the violence of the Cross recently portrayed so vividly in The Passion of the Christ.

Neufeld struggles with the images of violence in some of the parables of Jesus — for example, the gnash­ing of teeth, and the violent judge­ment on the unforgiving slave. He sees this parable as a meta­phorical story, intended to lay bare a brutal world, but also to lend weight and urgency to the injunc­tion to forgive.

There is an interesting chapter on the “household codes” of the epistles. It is acknowledged that they have sometimes supported domestic violence, but feminist readings have tended to overlook the subtlety of these passages. Husbands and wives, slaves and masters, are first to be subject to God before they can be seen in qualified ways as subject to each other.

The chapter on political or state violence encompasses Romans 13 and Revelation. Do these passages encourage violence? Yes and no: there is no easy resolution of the different sides of the biblical witness. The Cross remains, mysteriously, a symbol equally of violence and of non-violence.

This is a subtle, sensitive book, which wrestles with its subject, like Jacob at the Ford of Jabbok in Genesis 32. But at some point a choice is unavoidable: should we go to war to stop Hitler’s mad violence? Should we continue to sing “Fight the good fight” (yes, please)?

Dr Peter Forster is the Bishop of Chester.