Abstract
En route to attending the World Youth Day in Krakow this summer, Pope Francis made a comment which raised more than a few eyebrows. ‘The world,’ he said, ‘is at war.’ The immediate context of his comment was the brutal murder of Fr Jacques Hamel by sympathisers of so-called Islamic State. But, the Pope went on to say, we misunderstand if we treat this as a religiously-motivated war. Rather, it is a war over ‘interests’, money, and the world’s resources. He added: ‘All religions want peace; it’s the others who want war.’
But is it quite so easy to separate religious commitment from terrorist violence, ‘religions’ from ‘the others’? Commentators often note the apocalyptic worldview which inspires ISIS. Others point to the rhetoric of holy war, and the potential for actual violence, at the heart of both Jewish and Christian biblical canons. As a New Testament scholar, I am acutely aware of the very real charges directed against the violent book of Revelation, from Carl Gustav Jung, through D. H. Lawrence, to Richard Dawkins.
Maybe they are right. Maybe our Bibles would be safer, more ethical, if we expunged Joshua, the imprecatory psalms, and apocalyptic texts like Daniel and Revelation. More importantly, maybe our world would be a safer place with a sanitized Bible, shorn of any language that could provoke fanatical believers to actual violence.
Yet Christianity has stubbornly refused to relinquish the apocalyptic dimension to its biblical canon and, I believe, rightly so. A book like Revelation confronts us with the horrifying reality of evil and violence in our world, and the possibility of our own collusion with it. It also presents a vision of its resolution, albeit in profoundly militaristic language about a Divine Warrior and his white-robed armies.
But what the Church has often failed to do is teach the very particular grammar of Revelation, without which the Apocalypse ceases to be a Christian book. Yes, on the one hand, it teaches that violence must be confronted violently. The kingdom of this world, built on violence, injustice, and bloodshed, must violently fall. But—and this is fundamental—that violent confrontation with violence comes only in the violent slaughter of the Prince of Peace. A man, brutally killed by the agents of a brutal regime. A lamb, violently slaughtered on a sacrificial altar. Countless martyrs, faithful witnesses, like Fr Jacques Hamel.
Here we may come close to what Pope Francis was articulating: a protest against a necessary link between religious faith and destructive violence. For Revelation, there is indeed a ‘violence’ forceful enough to shake the violence of this world to its foundations, a ‘violence’ which is powerful enough to bring the enemy to its knees. It is not the violence of the bomb, the bullet, or the knife. It is the victory of the Cross, the victory of the martyrs. In the words of the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero, himself the victim of brutal violence, it is ‘the violence of love’.