A friend of mine sent me some verses with the attached argument that Christianity is a violent religion. Here are the verses and my corresponding responses.
Deuteronomy 20:16-18
16 But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, 17 but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded, 18 that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the Lord your God.
That sounds pretty vicious. "Save alive nothing that breaths." Christianity is a relationship between humanity (as individuals) and G-d. The idea is that G-d loves us and we, as Christians, have chosen to love Him back. Being that He is an all powerful being and the fact that we love Him it is natural that we obey him. So in this verse when G-d commands the Israelites under Joshua to kill all these people it they do it.
Notice though, G-d gives them two things. He gives them specific tribes or kingdoms to destroy, and He tells them why. There is violence, but it is limited in scope and purpose. So to answer the underlying question of are Christians violent and should other people worry about them because of this passage the answer is no. There is clear reasoning behind this command and it does not involve me or anyone else living today. There is no justification for current violence here.
Deuteronomy 21:18-21
18 “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, 19 then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, 20 and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ 21 Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
This passage is actually a great example of the rule of law. This is an internal societal issue. The young man is misbehaving and refuses to change his ways. The parents take him to the elders who acted as judges of the people and present their serially misbehaving and recalcitrant son to be judged. If found guilty they call for stoning.
I believe this is largely an issue of the time and the culture. The law was presented to the people of Israel in context to prevailing norms of the time. It is not a call for us today to institute such harsh rules. However, even if it was, the answer to the question of "should we be scared of Christians" would still be no. This focuses on the rule of law and strengthens it.
Leviticus 24:16
16 Whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him. The sojourner as well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death.
At the time that this law was established G-d was ruling directly over Israel with Moses serving as the mediator between them. This was a theocracy. Again considering the cultural norms of the time, kings and rulers held absolute power and people who insulted them were frequently executed. So I believe this law was established to reflect the people's expectations and to emphasize the seriousness of the crime.
Modern applicability is again limited by several factors. We do not live in a theocracy nor are we supposed to, the cultural norms and expectations are fundamentally different today, and finally, we are not G-d's people Israel. This was another case of different place and time and a structure within the established rule of law.
Leviticus 20:13
13 If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.
This passage is quite clear that homosexual activity is wrong in G-d's eyes. However, the way that it is dealt with is different today than it was in Old Testament Israel because of the structure of the way things are. In that situation G-d, as before, was the ruler of the theocratic nation of Israel. It was a nation and functioned in the way countries do. It administered laws and enforced them. Some of them, obviously, with the death penalty. Today the Church which is the child of sorts of the nation of Israel, does not function as a state. Therefore the laws in general of the Old Testament (and the old covenant) do not explicitly apply. The themes are still valid, homosexual activity is still a sin, but we are not supposed to run around stoning people.
Conclusion
There is a lot of violence in the Old Testament. But an honest review of the context shows that there is no theological basis for violence by Christians for religious reasons. The Old Testament covers the Israelites operating as a nation under the old covenant. We are under the new covenant, and have no reason to take action on others based on those passages. Especially to the point of capital punishment.
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