It is not God’s violence that killed Christ but human violence. This violence is projected onto God (as His will), obscuring who He is, and Christ reveals God through enduring, exposing, and defeating the power that killed Him. The final and full revelation of God in Christ displaces violent notions of God, as not only is Christ nonviolent, but his entire life journey through death and resurrection defeats the weaponization of death, exposing notions of originary violence as the lie of the devil. In Christ God is defeating both this violent image of God and deployment of death as the means to salvation. The power that killed Christ is exposed, and the death-dealing of the world and the ruler of this world are defeated in Christ. “Now judgment is upon this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out. “And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself” (John 12:31-32). Jesus ends the violent hostility by defeating death and making the God of peace known and knowable and thus ending the confusion between God and the devil.
We Know God Through Christ
The revelation given through Christ is not simply propositions about God (though this is not excluded) but a personal knowing, and this knowing stands in contrast to previous forms of knowing. Formerly God was not known in the fullness of his personhood (which also includes an inadequate propositionalism). The former incompleteness is variously described as dealing in “dead works,” “the law of sin and death,” “the body of death,” or “the letter that kills.” Life in Christ is the primary contrast with this former way characterized by death, and this life is characterized by peace, love, hospitality, and nonviolence. In the former system God is not known directly but is partially revealed through the mediation of law, angels, and human messengers, which are variously likened to shadows or subject to an entrapment to “elementary principles” or may give rise to a violent deception. Knowing God in Christ is to pass from death to life (inclusive of all those characteristics and orientations involved in each).
Hebrews: God in Christ Defeats Enslavement to the Fear of Death
The writer of Hebrews contrasts knowing God in Christ with every manner in which God was revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures and religion: “God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power” (Heb. 1:1–3). Chapter by chapter the writer describes the variety of means used previously and their inferiority compared to Christ: chapters 3-4: Christ is greater than Moses and the law delivered by angels and not God; chapters 5-7: Jesus is the true High Priest in that he is true mediator and thus perfect representative of God; chapters 8-10: Christ establishes a new relationship or covenant which brings about the life and peace lacking in the temple and its system; chapter 11 describes faithfulness of the Hebrew martyrs in the face of violent death even though they had not received the fullness of Christ; chapter 12 points out that though they may be suffering violent persecution the recipients of this letter have not yet shed any blood (12:4) thus they are experiencing the discipline of the life of faith; chapter 13, Jesus is the author and perfector of faith and thus they are to endure in love and not fear the violent things that might be done to the body.
The author consistently ties in the personhood of Christ, not only with a complete understanding of God but a complete understanding of the world: Christ “upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Heb. 1:3). The character of God revealed in Christ permeates the universe, as he creates and sustains, but also because he perfects and purifies. Though the world of man is given over to violence and persecution of Christ and Christians, we now have direct access to God, behind the veil that previously obstructed access but through Christ has been removed (chapter 10). Jesus has brought peace between God and man, where formerly hostility reigned, and he has established peace within human conscience (9:9-14): “how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” (9:14).
Though the writer does not explicitly equate the incompleteness of the old covenant with violence, nor the completeness of the new covenant with peace, this is the implicit comparison throughout. The danger is one of perishing in the wilderness like the Israelites rather than entering God’s sabbath rest (chapter 4); there is the danger of clinging to repeated blood sacrifices (dead works which leave one with a troubled conscience) rather than being united with God in the once and for all sacrifice of Christ which leads to a clean conscience (chapter 9); or there is the danger of dealing in death and being ruled by this fear, rather than finding eternal life through Christ’s defeat of death: “Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives” (2:14-15). Rather than dealing in death, Christ has opened “a new and living way” (Heb. 10:20). In the book of Hebrews Christ fully reveals God and this revelation amounts to the passage from dealing in death (the incomplete, the fearful, the sacrificial, the mediated, the shadows) to dealing in life (peace, rest, sanctification, clean conscience, faithfulness, hope, forgiveness, etc.)
John: God is Revealed in Christ’s Defeat of Violent Death On the Cross
Perhaps the most famous passage equating the revelation of Christ with knowing God is John 1:1-14. This passage identifies Jesus as the Word who “was with God” and who “was God.” He is creator and redeemer: “All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men” (John 1:3-4). The Word is God in the flesh, revealing the reality of God in and through his divinity and humanity. Throughout his Gospel John identifies Jesus directly with God, assuming the highest name for God (ἐγώ εἰμι, “I am” or YHWH) in his “I am” statements (e.g., John 8:58: “Before Abraham was, I am.”). He tells Philip, that to see Him is to see the Father : “Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? “Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me?” (Jn 14:9–10). Jesus is the full revelation of who God is, and again the two-fold characteristic of this revelation is that Jesus reveals the truth about God and the truth about all of creation.
In his confrontation with “the Jews” Jesus contrasts himself with their understanding: “You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (Jn 8:44). The Jews will kill Jesus to protect their understanding of the law and the temple, which certainly points to their failure, but also to the inadequacy of the Jewish system to change their thought world, grounded in violence and death. They speak the native language of their father, a lying murderer, while Jesus is offering the word of life (8:51). There are two streams of meaning or two heads or fathers of language (8:38); the deadly language of the devil and the Living Word of Christ. The law and the temple are not inherently evil, but taken as an end in themselves they are the basis for rejecting the reality about God revealed in Christ.
In their understanding they would kill Jesus to save their religion, and Jesus would rescue them from their entrapment to violence. Those who “continue in” or do the word of Jesus “will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31-32). They could be free from sin, which in the context pertains directly to killing Jesus, but their attachment to the law as an end in itself leaves no room for the Truth: “you seek to kill Me, because My word has no place in you” (8:37). They are committed to killing Jesus due to their understanding that Abraham is their father, and Jesus explains they have confused their paternity: “They answered and said to Him, ‘Abraham is our father.’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you are Abraham’s children, do the deeds of Abraham. But as it is, you are seeking to kill Me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God; this Abraham did not do. You are doing the deeds of your father” (John 8:39-41). They think they know God, and in killing Jesus they imagine they are doing the works of their father, but Jesus suggests they do not know God at all: “Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and have come from God, for I have not even come on My own initiative, but He sent Me” (John 8:42).
The mistake to be avoided is to imagine this misrecognition is a peculiarly Jewish problem. The Jews are representative of humanity, and their problem is the human problem. All people are captive to the violence (the murderous devil) that gives rise to the cross, and at the cross Christ exposes the lie behind the universal violence, and shows who God really is: “Now judgment is upon this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out. “And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself” (John 12:31-32). The ruler of this world rules through the sort of violence that put Jesus on the cross. This should be Satan’s triumphal moment, as he has accomplished the end goal of his work throughout history. He has enslaved the nations to the death dealing lie that puts Christ on the cross, but the lie behind violent killing is exposed and the fear of death is defeated.
In John 3, Jesus explains to Nicodemus, who seems to represent the Jew veiled from understanding the Scriptures (he has no concept of being “born again”, a theme of the Hebrew Scriptures) and in Jesus estimate he seems incapable of receiving things of the Spirit (3:6,11,12). Here too it is the being “lifted up” that unveils the truth of Moses in Jesus: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life” (3:14-15). The sting of death warded off by the upraised serpent of Moses is fulfilled in Jesus destroying the work of the devil on the cross. “Now judgment is upon this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out” (John 12:31). Sin and the devil rule through death, but God has decommissioned the singular weapon in the devil’s arsenal.
It is the “lifting up” which reveals Jesus’ identity as the “I am” (YHWH): “So Jesus said, ‘When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He’” (John 8:28). Here is the realization of Isaiah, that through the “lifted up” servant “you may know and believe that I AM” (Isa. 43:10; 52:13). The universal appeal of the gospel is found in the death of Christ, as it is in his violent death that violence and death are defeated. Universal violence is overcome in the cross, as the peace of God in Christ defeats the violence of the world through the final and full revelation of the peace of God. As J. Denny Weaver writes, “God’s overcoming of death puts on sharp display the contrast between God’s modus operandi and that of the forces of evil. Whereas the forces of evil employ death-dealing as the solution to their supposed problems, God’s answer and response is the overcoming of death, the restoration of life. God saves, not by taking life but by restoring life.”[1]
Universal Salvation Through Peace
The claim that God is not violent is strangely controversial, though this understanding is at the very heart of the gospel. It is the orthodox understanding of the Trinity, and part of a theological commonplace that the persons of the Trinity share the essential divine characteristics such as peace. The nonviolence of God is tied to salvation as incorporation into the universal peace of God realized in Christ (see my previous blog here dealing with Paul’s epistles), in that universal peace also speaks of an originary peace in God (the very definition of universal peace). Neither God nor the universe are built upon an originary violence in which peace is a by-product of violence (peace through war, harmony through an original disharmony, unity as obliteration of the other, divine satisfaction through violence and death, etc.). God’s capacity to extend and incorporate into his peace through the Trinity, through creation, and through redemption, is the reality revealed in Christ. The peace of God revealed in the cross (inclusive of the life, death and resurrection of Christ) means we know God in and through the peace he gives in giving himself. We know God most completely through Christ, who is the very image of God, and the peace of God revealed and realized through Christ is the gospel.
Conclusion
A “gospel” focused on God’s violence as that which killed Christ misses the gospel. Violence projected onto God obscures God as God is the very definition of peace, and Christ reveals God through enduring, exposing, and defeating the reign of death and restoring the peace of God. The final and full revelation of God in Christ displaces violent notions of God and the seeming necessity of the war within and without, as not only is Christ nonviolent, but his entire life journey through death and resurrection defeats the cudgel of death constituting evil. In Christ God defeats evil and the confusion between the devil (in the violent image of God) and the Father of the Prince of Peace. The power that killed Christ is exposed, and the death-dealing of the world is defeated in the peace that passes understanding. Jesus ends the violent hostility by defeating death and making the God of peace known and knowable.
[1] J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent God (pp. 32-33). Eerdmans. Kindle Edition.