Here is my third thesis on war and peace.
Previous posts in this series: here,
here
and here.
(3) We cannot live responsibly in our era
without coming to grips with the problem of war. Our fathers fought in past wars.
Our sons and daughters, it is reasonable to assume, will fight in future wars. Students
of antiquity know that war is a perennial subject of ancient history, and the
meaning of war, a perennial question. Students of the present know that the
situation is unchanged in our day. This fact makes the Hebrew Bible / Old
Testament more relevant, not less, to the tasks which hang over us.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Peter Craigie,
one of the finest scholars of the Hebrew Bible Scotland has produced. While a
student at the University of Toronto, I was in
danger of losing my way. The acids of modernity, not to mention the climate of
debauchery we call campus life, had just about destroyed my faith. By chance as
it were, I picked up a copy of Craigie’s commentary on Deuteronomy. While I
found his historical-critical conclusions on the book impossibly conservative,
there was something else I noticed while reading its pages: a certain humility,
an awareness of standing in the presence of a text that is greater than you or
me or anyone else who reads it. In a dark moment, Craigie’s approach pulled me
back from the brink.
In a book that still bears reading, Craigie
had this to say:
I have met too few [adults] who have grappled seriously with the problem
of violence and war. I have met many who have been puzzled by the Old Testament
treatment of war and who, as a consequence, have simply omitted large portions
of Scripture from their studying and teaching; many have virtually dropped the
Old Testament from the Bible and have kept on safe ground, namely, the New
Testament. . . .
[T]here is a further, perhaps more critical, aspect to the problem; it
relates to the curriculum of the theological colleges and seminaries. It is not
so much what is done there that worries me, but what is not done. Old Testament
studies are often pursued in a conventional fashion; the history of Israel, Hebrew
grammar, literary criticism in its variety of forms – these and other matters are
pursued in detail. I have no quarrel with that, for such matters form the
foundation of Old Testament studies. But rarely is anything built upon the
foundation. The theological problems posed by the Old Testament, the relevance
of the Old Testament to Christian preaching, these are matters left to the
individual’s initiative. When I was a theological student [Craigie began his
adult life serving in the Royal Air Force, and turned to the study of theology
later], I worried about the “holy war” problem in the Old Testament and sought
the advice of a professor for further reading. He recommended one or two
commentaries and von Rad’s Der heilige Krieg im alten Israel (“The
Holy War in Ancient Israel”). I went off to study and found a mass of material
of linguistic, historical, and cultural interest. But I found nothing which
spoke to my problem, the theological anxiety I had about the identification of
God with war.[1]
In the end, Craigie’s book is unsatisfying,
but it is still one of the best introductions to the topic available. I think Craigie
was right to emphasize that, in the history of God’s relationship with Israel as told
in the Bible, the truth about who God is and who we are emerges from defeat
in war, not in victory. More on that in future posts.
[1] Peter C. Craigie, The Problem of War in the Old
Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978) 105-106.
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