I wish every entry wasn’t some kind of dialectical quarrel with Christianity. It would be nice to have fewer confessions of doubt and discomfiture at the beginnings of my reflections. But I’ve got another set today.

It seemed this morning that this song (about God destroying the Egyptian army and the descriptions of how the Canaanites are trembling in their sandals at the oncoming Israelites) was utterly human. I thought of Leopold Bloom telling someone in the Cylops scene in Ulysses  he thought Moses was a stone carver. We all know that reinterpretation of the story by now, don’t we? It’s gotten into me, too, and so I must choose to believe or not.

Clearly, there is less of a problem with God taking out the Egyptian army—Pharaoh had just reneged on his agreement to let the people go and they were bearing down on them to kill them. The Plagues? Well, that was pretty heavy metal. God doesn’t always seem like a good humanitarian. And that’s a major source of my doubt—he gets the Israelites to be bad humanitarians towards the Canaanites, too. I see how it seems for all the world like some ancient, violent culture needed to invent God to unify them and justify their imperialism.

Have you heard the explanations of this? The Canaanites were a bunch of child-sacrificers and all that? And if anyone was going to steal land, isn’t it a little more justifiable for a people who have (somehow) just gotten out of 400 years of slavery? They were Others! Come on! Still…genocide? That okay for them to do?

I’ve thought about this too much to rehearse it all here: it would be tedious. But David embodies the problem for me: it could be that he was a religiously self-justifying villain, something utterly natural and violent. But if he was—there is no grace anywhere in history—only violence and deception. I wrote a poem about it once.

Back

When night was insuperable,

And bronze death was cancer

The word ‘enemy’ had real meaning,

And the High King was as certain as death.

When no one was tricked to expect life,

When the wilderness was like space

And isolation was a real possibility,

When the only variety was

The fickleness of alliances,

Murders were common wares.

When the difference among men

Had acknowledged connection,

And it was known how wretched

All would always be,

Life was to be struggled for,

Righteousness and lawlessness

Were familiar ways.

No gray echelons of virtue

When tolerance was a crime

And sin had to be paid for in blood:

Israelite interminably annihilating Amelikite,

Monkey perpetually cracking skull,

Swords caused impotence,

Worn close to the groin;

Manhood was respected and expected,

While anything less was crushed.

Then mystery was certain—

The sky was a curtain,

Flung open to reveal our irrelevance at night.

The paragon of virtue, crowned with sense?

No—rather a doomed vapor,

Sentenced to misery then death.

Pits existed to receive men whole,

The Pit was life, languishing there—Sheol.

A poet, a warrior, sentenced to run,

A croucher in fields,

Sought by spears,

Claimed citizen by no nation—

By another borne: anointed.

A man of bloodshed

In the midst of slaughter,

Giving righteous voice to rage,

Extolling sheep-hood,

Praising weakness,

A prophet,

Musing by the fire,

Asking for numbers to his days,

Stealing the wives of men he meant to kill and killed.

Surely, no goodness could guarantee

This Natural thing—

Nor Sovereign forget such

Banality of sin;

But, back then, where else

Could God have been?

Unless you’re going to rebel against all that is—supernatural or natural—you will see that humanitarianism is a provision (albeit a good one, and better than nihilism). Christianity is more humanitarian than anything, and its solution to violence is utterly unique, though Christians have often ignored it (c.f. Crusades, Inquisitions, etc.). The heart of the religion is a man dying on an Imperial instrument of torture and execution, praying for his murderers, dying for his enemies. Christianity is violent—but the violence is cosmic: Satan against God, Satan against people, people against God, then people against people. At times, God poured his wrath on man, and one day, there will be a reckoning for the enemies of God. But “‘Vengeance is mine,’ says the Lord,” and the Lord solved the problem of violence by inflicting it on himself. In doing so, he restored cosmic peace. With that cosmic peace, mundane peace is possible.