How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian

March 16, 2015
Reading the Bible can be troubling for both Christians and non-Christians who wonder how to reconcile Jesus's teachings on nonviolence and love with stories about a vengeful and violent God. In his usual ingenious fashion, biblical scholar Crossan (Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography) locates the heartbeat of the Christian Bible in a cycle of assertion and subversion. Through close readings of texts from Genesis through Revelation, he illustrates that many biblical stories assert the radical nature of God's love and desire for nonviolent justice, while others illustrate subversion through the desire of civilizations for violent retributive justice. In the apocalyptic books of Daniel and Revelation, for example, God's dream for a kingdom of justice and peace is subverted by visions of divine punishment for not following God's rules for the kingdom. Crossan stresses that the historical Jesus, who teaches peace and nonviolence, is the measure by which Christians read the Bible: "We are called Christians, not Bible-ians." While sometimes repetitive, Crossan's provocative book challenges readers to pick up the Bible once more and pay close attention to the collision of violence and nonviolence in its pages.

Starred review from March 15, 2015
When we read the Bible, we should remain aware of the historical matrix, the cultural background, against which its events and its writing played out; for instance, the matrix of early Genesis is the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent. So says Crossan, one of the most prolific popular writers among the scholars of the historical Jesus. He goes on to advise that we notice a rhythm of assertion-and-subversion, a heartbeat, throughout the Christian Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, from Eden to the Four Horsemen. A vision of the radicality of God is put forth, only to be watered downindeed, reversedso that the normalcy of civilization is maintained. An initial order of nonviolent distributive justice, in which every person has a sufficient share of God's resources to live and thrive, is reduced to a system of violent retributive justice to punish sinners. Later in the book, Crossan proposes viewing the nonviolent movement of the historical Jesusand not some apocalyptic bloodbathas the end or center or climax of Christian time. Understanding that centrality is achieved by seeing that the norm and criterion of the Christian Bible is the biblical Christ but the norm and criterion of the biblical Christ is the historical Jesus. The Kingdom of God does not, it seems, include equestrian death squads.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)