"Proclaim Peace" Season 2, Episode 10 // Reconciling Old Testament Divine Violence and a Peaceful Christ, with Terryl Givens
- May 20
- 34 min read
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube.
Terryl Givens joins Jen and Patrick as they explore how faith traditions, especially within Christianity and Latter-day Saint teachings, approach the difficult questions surrounding violence in the Old Testament. Terryl shares insights on understanding scripture, God's nature, and the path to peace amidst challenging texts.
Chapters
00:00 Introducing the challenge of violence in the Old Testament
03:56 Historical Christian responses to Old Testament violence
09:11 The impact of Marcionite theology on Christian history
14:09 The transmutation of God's nature from love to justice and power
20:01 The Gospel of John's emphasis on love
24:40 Approaching scripture as a sacred space
29:24 Responding to rising political violence
34:43 Responding empathetically to questions about difficult scripture
39:02 The weeping God of Enoch as a vision of compassion
43:49 Guidance for believers struggling with Old Testament violence
Transcript
Patrick Mason (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to the Proclaim Peace podcast where we talk about how we can learn principles of peacemaking from the scriptures. I'm Patrick Mason and I'm here with my co-host as always, well, almost as always, Jen Thomas. I'm glad to be back, Jen.
Jennifer Thomas (00:11)
Almost always. We're glad to have you back, Patrick. We missed you. So it's good to have you in the chair. We are going to jump into a conversation today at the very beginning of this year or this season of the podcast. We address the fact that the Old Testament is difficult for people. And we talked a little bit about why it was exciting to both you and I to actually embrace this conversation. But we're four or five months into this process and we're still getting a lot of questions as people have dug back into the Old Testament as they kind of are revisiting it. There are real tensions inherent in this text and especially for people that are dedicating at least a lot of their thought and spiritual practice to becoming peacemakers. And so we wanted to have an upfront conversation about that today and talk a little bit about violence in the Old Testament.
Patrick Mason (01:03)
Yeah, I was doing an event the other night, on Saturday night. We did this lovely kind of potluck picnic. And Chad Ford and I were talking about peacemaking. And it was really terrific. And we had Q &A at the end. And one of the questions came from a recent graduate of the peace program at Utah State University, just a really lovely guy with a heart for peace and devout Latter-day Saint. And he asked this question. He said,
You know, I'm really committed to peacemaking and I've learned so much about it. I want to do this in my life. And here I am reading the Old Testament this year. And, you know, we've just read numbers like Joshua's on the horizon. There's all these like really difficult texts. And he said, like, how do I wrap my mind around God in the Old Testament as a peacemaker? And I said, well, I'm recording a podcast about this in a couple days, so I hope he listens. But it is, it's a big question that is, if you are troubled by the God that you encounter in the Old Testament, you are not alone. For hundreds, actually for a couple of thousands of years, I mean, early Christians, but certainly over the last couple of hundred years, it's been one of the frequent critiques of the Bible, is that the God we encounter there, especially in the Old Testament, is kind of a monster. He does things that no moral or ethical human being would do. And so I think sometimes we're a little shy to raise those questions in church if it makes us sound faithless or like we're questioning Scripture or something—questioning God, exactly. And so I think it's important to like say, no, these are conversations that we have to have. They're faithful conversations, not conversations that are meant to erode faith.
Jennifer Thomas (02:44)
I think it also as I've put some thought into this, I agree with everything you said and I think it can be particularly difficult for Latter-day Saints because we've always been taught to develop a deep personal relationship with deity, right? We're not doing it at a remove. We're not praying to intercessors. It's that our job is to develop a trust in and a relationship with God that God cares about us that he's aware of our needs that our heavenly parents, you know, are monitoring our path and doing all their best to support and help us on the way. And I think one of the troubles of the Old Testament is that it calls into question that relationship. It almost puts us in this space of being, can I trust my parents? Because if my parents would do this, then will they do this to me? And so I just want to, I think I just want to acknowledge that, that I think to me, that's the heart of the problem. It's not just a morality issue, is God this bad? But to me, it feels very personal.
Is the God that I am willing to put my faith in, dedicate everything to, capable of things that I'm deeply uncomfortable with? And that is a reasonable question. And to me, it says that the people wrestling with it actually have good hearts that are really aligned with the values that Christ introduced in the New Testament.
Patrick Mason (04:00)
Yeah, in some ways it's easier just to read it, be troubled by it and throw away the book rather than to hold onto the book and wrestle with it and say, what does it look like for, because I felt God's love and how do I square that with what I'm reading in these texts that I hold to be sacred, right? So we think it's a really important conversation and we're so grateful to have the guest that we have today, who will be familiar to many listeners. We're glad to have Terryl Givens with us. Terryl is a senior research fellow at the Maxwell Institute at Brigham Young University. He's the author of many, many books for academic audiences, but a lot of people will know him from the books that he's written along with his wife Fiona Givens to Latter-day Saint audiences, ⁓ The God Who Weeps, The Christ Who Heals.
The Crucible of Doubt. Just amazing books. Terryl and Fiona have just been incredible voices, I think, for recovering and highlighting and lifting up a God of love while being really faithful to trying to understand, you know, how that's revealed to us both in Scripture and in prophetic teaching. So we're really grateful to have Terryl with us today to discuss this difficult topic.
Jennifer Thomas (05:12)
And I think he offers us quite a few pathways out of it, out of kind of this mind maze that that Latter-day Saints might be finding themselves in.
Patrick Mason (05:20)
Well, Terryl Givens, welcome to the Proclaim Peace Podcast. Thanks for joining us.
Terryl L Givens (05:23)
Thank you, honored to be here.
Patrick Mason (05:25)
All right, well, before we start talking about some really hard stuff, we'll ask what is perhaps a little easier question, maybe. But when you think about peace, how do you define it?
Terryl L Givens (05:36)
You know, that's not a word I've given much thought to actually in the past. knowing I was going to be speaking with you, I have thought about it. And not to sound overly rhetorically self-aware or anything, but it does seem that thinking of peace as the coming together of faith, hope and love makes sense to me. It seems to me that you have to have a faith that is a dynamic real living belief and trust in Christ and his promises that you have to have experienced some kind of evidence of the reality of those processes and you have to be engaged in the work of love. Maybe if those three come together in the right way then you experience peace.
Jennifer Thomas (06:17)
I think also puts you in the best position to bring peace to others. I really like that. Yeah.
Terryl we want to do a hard podcast today. So one of the things that we're bumping up against is questions from our listeners about how we can avoid violence in the Old Testament. And so we want to dive head into that with you today. And I think my first question is just that the Old Testament is full of violence. It's all the way from, you know, starting with Cain and Abel through to genocide.
And I guess my question for you would be in all of your years of studying scripture, how do you experience violence in the Old Testament? How do you think about it? How do you make sense of it personally?
Terryl L Givens (06:52)
Yeah, well, I may be jumping ahead here into other topics that we'll engage, but I experience the Old Testament through the witness of John. And my life and my discipleship and my theological commitments and my take on scripture are all filtered through the witness of John. And I read John as having one thesis that he is arguing.
⁓ in his first epistle as well as in the Gospel. And that is, you folks had no idea who God was until you saw him manifest in his embodied form, crying in a cradle and weeping at the tomb of Lazarus and washing the feet of his disciples. And in my work in early Christian history,
I have found a remarkable self-awareness about that witness in early Christian writers. So I think it begins with John. One finds it in the early second century writer Irenaeus. He says that God is not revealed behind Christ, but in Christ. C.S. Lewis thought the most beautiful piece of early Christian writing was the letter to Diagnetus written by an anonymous Christian, maybe as early as the middle second century. It's our earliest witness of what Christianity meant to converts outside of the New Testament. And in this, the anonymous writer is answering a question from apparently from a friend of his who is asking, who are you Christians? And what is your unique message? And he said, until we saw him manifest in the flesh, who had any idea who God was?
And then we find Origen teaching the same thing. says even Moses didn't know who God was. I find it consistent through the first six centuries. So that seems to me evidence of the fact that the Christians are aware of the problem of Old Testament violence and that they're saying we have a way to move beyond this. Their understanding was incomplete.
They were trying to sketch a vision of God through their experiences in their history. But now we can get it right. And so that's how I resolved the problem of Old Testament violence. think that's the chronicle of a people imputing to God motives and actions that help them make sense of their history, but that are in many cases not an accurate reflection of God's real nature or actions.
Jennifer Thomas (09:09)
So I love that this feels very in line with the way we try to think as Latter-day Saints. Hopefully we don't get it right all the time. But this openness and willingness to say, we didn't know and now we know better and so we're going to act differently and act better. And so it sounds like what you're saying, and tell me if this is wrong, that one of the biggest mistakes we make is to try to kind of look through the glass darkly backwards and say, okay, we're gonna carry all of this forward with us and try to keep it in our faith backpack. And maybe what you're saying is, no, it's okay to put some of these things down. We just didn't know. And now that we know better, we're gonna think about God differently. Is that fair?
Terryl L Givens (09:44)
No, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's ironic that we, especially Latter-day Saints, have this kind of unique version, right, of where the Old Testament fits. And it's that the Mosaic code was a retrogression, right? And so, okay, so they weren't ready. Well, then why do we teach the Old Testament in Sunday School class as if it's commensurate with and on a par with the New Testament witness? That seems to me to fly in the face of this unique version of dispensational history that we get. So why forfeit some of the best tools we have in our toolkit for reconciling, making sense of those discrepancies that we find.
Patrick Mason (10:22)
So I like that a lot. Let me channel what I think somebody listening might think ⁓ by way of counter-argument. We do hold the Old Testament to be scripture. Somebody might not know the early Christian heresy of Marcionism, but...
Terryl L Givens (10:39)
I'd like to talk about that a little bit, but go ahead.
Patrick Mason (10:41)
Yeah, let's talk about it. I mean, one of the earliest heresies of what was proclaimed as a heresy, when I say that, that the church collectively proclaimed it as a heresy, came from a man named Marcy. And this is very early, this was second century, right? And he says, you know, God has been more fully revealed to us ⁓ in Jesus. He recognized that the stories that they were telling about Jesus and the Second Sergant and the New Testament hadn't been fully compiled in the way that we think about it now. But the gospels were circulating and so forth. And he says, we have a better idea of it than the Jews did, than the people in the Hebrew Bible. And so I'm sort of simplifying things, but we can kind of dispense with that.
He also had actually a smaller New Testament than we did. He wanted to dispense with some of the New Testament writings too. But how do we not fall into the Marcionite trap of just saying, we have Jesus, we have the gospels, isn't that all we need to know? Why bother with the Old Testament at all?
Terryl L Givens (11:28)
He had the Gospel of Luke. Well, you should know that I'm a big fan of Marcion. Now, you do, and you know, I want to make clear my caveats. It's easy to quote me out of context. He was an anti-Semite. I don't approve of that. He was a docetist. He didn't believe that Christ was actually physically incarnate. He got that wrong. But I think, I think for the most part, his impulses were exactly right.
And, you know, I've recently completed a history of Christianity. And I narrate the history of Christianity using Marcion as my point of departure. Because I think that was the first really important challenge the church faced. I think more important than Gnosticism. So yeah, you're right, about 160 AD, Marcion suddenly shows up on the scene. from Pontus in Asia Minor. And his...
His message is pretty blunt and it's pretty simple. And it's, have Christ, we've seen him. What are we doing trying to reconcile this beautiful gospel of love with this Old Testament? And he writes a book, it doesn't survive, but we can kind of reconstitute it, called the Antitheses, where he enumerates eight or 10 or 12 blatant contradictions between the person of Jesus Christ and certain versions. I don't wanna...
I don't want to conflate everything in the Old Testament until one Old Testament God, but he points out most of the dilemmas. I don't think it's an overstatement to say that between Paul and Thomas Aquinas, Marcion is one of the two most important influences in Christian history, along with Augustine. And that is because he precipitated a crisis. Christianity fractured. Some people, like Bart Ehrman and others, think that Marcionite-ism was a real challenge numerically to the Church. It proliferated all the way through the fourth century. People found his dismissal of Old Testament violence very, very appealing. And so the Church had to respond to this crisis by saying, well, if we're going to keep the Old Testament, we got to find more creative ways of dealing with it. And so the first who responds is Tertullian in the second century.
And Tertullian is the guy on your debate team that you hope is sick on the day of the championships. Because mercy, or Tertullian's rebuttal, this is really important, because I mean, like I say, I think this is formative moment in Christianity, and certainly it's a formative moment in how Christians deal with scripture. Tertullian says, well, yeah, it's true that he killed all the Egyptian children, but at least they got, hey, nine months of life in the womb.
And yeah, it's true, Elisha sics the bear on these young children, but you know, children are old enough to know better and it's a disaster, his defense. And then where he really shapes the tradition is when Tertullian says, love has to be constrained by reason. I think that is to get us off on a catastrophic foot because nothing about my love for my children is reasonable.
It's unconditional, it's times illogical and it's persistent. So anyhow, Origen, I think in a more positive direction says, well, I want to salvage the Old Testament, but I recognize the power of Marcion's critique. And so Origen develops spiritual allegorical ways of reading scripture. And he enunciates this principle, which I have made my own principle.
Origen says, in the life of Jesus, the nature of God is made known to us. Now, when we find a problem in the Old Testament, we have to assert first and foremost our witness of God's nature. And if that comes into conflict with the scripture, then it's the scripture that has to go, or our reading of it. And so he, as I said, of initiates, I mean, Philo earlier, but it's principally Origen who grounds this way of reading scripture allegorically or spiritually or metaphorically. And what's kind of remarkable is that, you if you think back to early Christian ways of reading scripture, think, for example, of somebody of the towering stature of Augustine, right? Most everybody's read his confessions. But you have to remember, after he tells his spiritual autobiography, he does a reading of Genesis. And it's all spiritualized. It's all allegorized. So it isn't until we get to the Reformation that we get this obsession with historical legitimacy, literalism, and Mormonism inherits that burden. And I think to our detriment, yeah.
Jennifer Thomas (15:46)
And literalism. As protestants, so what do think it is? I mean, this is all so fascinating and I'm just trying to figure out what are the driving points of human nature that led people to need to bifurcate this way? Like why do you think it was just impossible to say no violence is bad, this is not what God was? That feels to me like the easiest doubt. I'll be honest with you. It's like no, we just didn't understand God. Why would we want to carry that forward with us? And yet, they were unwilling to walk through that door that Marcian opened for them. So what was it about? Was it a desire to retain access to violence because you want to be able to justify violence as you're leading a church? What do you think it was that made it difficult for the early saints to just let that go?
Terryl L Givens (16:26)
Well, you ask, what is it in human nature? And I think there is something in human nature. And I'm going to make a claim now that we probably, I don't have time to unpack today. But if I were to kind of summarize where I think Christianity loses its way. And I mean, this can be as true of my tradition as of the general Christian one. And that is when everything that Christ attempted to do in terms of inverting our whole value system and deconstructing retributive justice and expectations of equity and symmetry, reinstantiate themselves. Largely at that moment when the Roman Empire assimilates the Church to itself and those structures and values just get transmuted.
And so I think, and I've tried to trace this in great detail and specificity, that John's claim that God is love by the early fourth century has become instead God is justice or God is power. And so if I can get technical for a moment, forgive me here, but
The argument hinges in the earliest centuries on this question. Do those words that we use to describe humans and human values apply with equal efficacy and force to God? And Augustine says, absolutely not. And Augustine, along with many of his contemporaries, will argue that God is, right, this is Platonism.
right, through and through. But God is so ineffable, He's so transcendent, He's so beyond and other, that none of our language can adequately describe God. And I think there isn't ⁓ an atrocity in Christian history that wasn't predicated on that rationale. So whether you're talking about crusades or inquisitions or damning children to hell,
And we react with astonishment as Christians and say, wait, what kind of a God is this? And the answer is, well, it's a God beyond our understanding, a God that we don't have the moral authority to pass judgment on. And so I can't find anybody to distract the history of that. The doctrine is called the doctrine of equivocity. And it means no word used in a human context has legitimacy applied to God. And that is virtually unchallenged until Duns Scotus challenges it in the 13th century, but then it doesn't really get challenged in a big way until the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries when Hume and the Sosinians and a number of other theologians come on the scene and say, what's the use of trying to imitate Christ if his moral universe is different than ours? What does any of this even mean? And I just summarized this whole countervailing sense, summarize it with the words of Elie Wiesel, who wrote one of the most astounding pieces of theodicy in our literature, The Trial of God, in which a rabbi cries out in desperation, if God doesn't inhabit the same moral universe as we do, then what's the use of any of this? But that idea didn't come back with force, as I said, until the 18th and 19th centuries.
Patrick Mason (19:41)
How does that, I'm quite sympathetic to that idea, Terryl, and I actually think that Latter-day Saint theology, think restoration theology, and of course you and Fiona have captured a lot of this, but I think it very much resonates with this, right? The fundamental similarities between humans and our heavenly parents, right? And yet, God is different than me.
Right? In knowledge, in perfection, in perspective, in power, in almost... We might be ontologically similar, but God and I are on very different planes. And we would say that there is a kind of moral universe available to me as an adult, as a parent, that is not available to my children. Because my children are fully human just like I am, but a three-year-old doesn't have the full range of moral options available to them, or a 10-year-old or a 13-year-old doesn't have the full range of moral options that an adult does. so can we, and this I'm trying to sort of come back and sort of examine this question of God's reported violence in the Old Testament, might it be that God, he's not...
He doesn't occupy a different moral universe than us, but it's just that he sees things and he's in a place where sometimes he has to do things that are complicated and we're basically moral children compared to him.
Jennifer Thomas (21:12)
I'm just bringing this to the level of my brain.
Patrick Mason (21:12)
Yeah, or somewhat more sympathetically, Jen. I mean, your child is going to run into the street and you forcibly withhold them, right? It is an act of force. It is an act of coercion. You're not going to kill them, right? But you're going to coerce them. And they think that you're restraining you to freedom, but you know that you're protecting them.
So, Terryl how do you think about this? That my thoughts are not your thoughts. God actually does live on a different plane than I do, certainly.
Terryl L Givens (21:40)
Yeah, I don't think he lives on a different moral plane. And I don't think I think the analogy breaks down with children because there's never a moment when we are inculcating in our children moral virtue and then later contradicting it when they get older. They grow into an ampler expression of virtue and morality. And then let me come back to John, because I do think this is a fantastic question and I think it deserves serious engagement. But here again,
Patrick Mason (21:52)
Mm-mm.
Terryl L Givens (22:06)
I think that what makes John the greatest writer in the history of scripture is how powerfully he anticipates that possibility. John uses the word love over 120 times. And if you take God, the Father, Christ, and disciples, there are seven conceivable ways that they can relate to each other.
John addresses all seven of those interrelationships and gives them all the same name, Agape. And he consistently tells us you are to love God in the way that God loves Christ. And Christ loves you in the same way you are supposed to love each other. And you're supposed to love each other in the same way that Jesus loves the... I mean, you can chart them, all seven.
And so he flattens them. There is only one definition of love that applies to God, to Christ, and to us. And so it just, to my mind, it can't be a coincidence that he is trying to forestall any differentiation of moral requirements or ways in which love is manifest. There's one template and we are all to conform to that.
Jennifer Thomas (23:14)
So it also, I would assume what you're saying to me is in a very diverse society that has the potential to be really religiously divided. They're saying, no, this new message of Christianity flattens God's love. We are all kind of equally loved by him. are not levels of relationship ⁓ to him. Is that what you're saying? Yeah.
Terryl L Givens (23:31)
That's right. That's right, absolutely.
Jennifer Thomas (23:35)
And so using language to reinforce that principle that was very new to people at the time and didn't allow space for violence, hopefully. Yeah.
Terryl L Givens (23:42)
It was absolutely new at the time, right?
It's the eradication of hierarchy. It's the eradication of differentiation, of privilege, of class, even of gender, although none of that vision was ever fully realized, but it's there in its template. And as I said, the history of Christianity would have been radically different if we would have just taken that principle seriously.
Every time a dogma goes off the rails, seems to me it's because in some way that principle has been violated or deformed.
Patrick Mason (24:12)
So I want to return to a point that you made earlier in terms of what the Old Testament is and the way that it's written and the way that we can profitably read it. We do as Latter-day Saints, you know, uphold it as the Word of God, as Scripture. We also, we have a, I think, a somewhat nuanced relationship to to scripture in general, but including the Old Testament, right? mean, Joseph Smith said like Song of Solomon that doesn't rank, although actually it's probably better than we think. We can probably learn some things from it. Yeah, I always say like that's the one book in the Old Testament that every 14 year old boy in the church has read. But,
Terryl L Givens (24:37)
He was a was a spoil sport there.
Patrick Mason (24:47)
But we do have, I think we do have some tools as Latter-day Saints to come to Scripture in nuanced and complex ways. We do not, at least doctrinally, have the same view of Scripture that many of our evangelical brothers and sisters do, that is the inerrant Word of God. ⁓ But we do, it's in, whether you like it or not, it's in the Sunday School rotation every four years.
We do spend as much time on it as we do on the New Testament as we did and we do on the Book of Mormon, again, whether we should or not. So again, come back to this idea of then what is the Old Testament? How do we understand and how do we read it in a way? You've pointed it in a couple directions. I just want to kind of pull this thread a little bit more.
How do we think about it? How do we approach it as a text, as a set of texts? And it's a library. It's not just one text, as you said. There's not just one Old Testament. There's lots of books within it. So help us think about some skills, some lenses that we can bring as we approach this text as Christians.
Terryl L Givens (25:48)
Good, okay, I'll give you one lens that's LDS and I'll give you one lens that's Jewish. So I'm gonna read a statement here. I read this to my classes at BYU and the reaction is always, wait, where did that come from? And I say, well, it's the church website.
Remember that God speaks to us according to our understanding. All human beings, all human beings, who's the all meant to encompass here? It seems to me clearly the context is scripture writers and prophets. All human beings are shaped by culture.
Jennifer Thomas (26:15)
Mm-hmm.
Terryl L Givens (26:20)
Beliefs, customs, languages, and values we share. Cultures vary greatly from place to place and time to time. God spoke to the ancient Israelites according to their ancient Near Eastern understanding. Now I was in the British Museum a couple years ago and my youngest daughter was with me. And we were in the Assyrian Hall. And she has seen all of these bas reliefs and these freezes. And she's seen all of these confusing things going on with just multitudes of prisoners. And I remember she said, she read one of the things and she said, dad, what is impalement? And I, being a far too foolish academic than father, answered her in very vivid, exacting detail. She broke down, literally she broke down and fell into a sobbing heap.
Patrick Mason (27:09)
Which is the appropriate response, by the way.
Jennifer Thomas (27:10)
to impalement
Terryl L Givens (27:11)
Which is the appropriate response. She's 35 years old and she's just bawling her head off and saying, how could human beings do this to each other? That's the world of the Old Testament. These Israelites have seen that, they've experienced that and their worldview is shaped by that. So yes, God spoke to them according to their near Eastern understanding.
We don't live in that environment. We're not burdened by that worldview and vision. And so we should be horrified by the things that we read about that are attributed to God in the Old Testament. So that's an LDS take that is sanctioned by our official institutional voice.
A Jewish way of thinking about this, a couple of Jewish insights that I think are just beautiful. One is Abraham Heschel, right? He talks about God in search of man. And I think that's a good way of thinking about what the Old Testament is. It's not man describing God, it's God trying to find man. And then, Patrick, you might remember, I can't identify the Jewish rabbi who made this analogy, but I think many have. He says, Jews treat the Hebrew Bible like the Temple Mount. We don't know exactly where the foundations of the Temple were so we take our shoes off on the whole Mount. And then he goes on to say we don't believe every word of the Torah is inspired.
but we treat the totality as a holy place. And I think that's just a beautiful way for Latter-day Saints to think about scripture. I go to the scriptures with a desire to believe and with an open mind and heart, but I have to filter what I'm reading through my own conscience, through my own spiritual lens and tools.
And of course, the question that then immediately arises as well, isn't that a slippery slope? And my answer is absolutely. Isn't that dangerous and risky? Absolutely. That's the risk of conscience and individual responsibility.
Patrick Mason (29:09)
So what's the retaining wall? What do we do to keep the slope from completely eroding underneath us and the sloping authority of Scripture?
Terryl L Givens (29:18)
Yeah, I don't know that I can enunciate a principle that works in all times and places. You know, I encourage listeners to read the incredibly beautiful article that David Holland wrote in the recent collection of Thoughtful Faith, in which he talks about his own kind of spiritual crisis confrontation with just radically disparate voices in scripture. And where he says, it's just a continual triangulation that we have to engage in between scripture, the prophetic voice, and our own personal witness.
You know, we can go the way of Catholicism and say, well, we're just going to mindfully defer to authority, or we can go with the way of Protestantism and we get a million different versions of what these scriptures mean. And it seems to me that when personal revelation became paramount in the restoration, we took the latter path.
Jennifer Thomas (30:06)
So I have a question that I'm wrestling with as I listen to you talk. It can make sense to me that this scripture was absolutely relevant to a people in their time. Impalement, really robust example of that, right? Just of the horrors that people lived with and the way they needed to kind of find a spiritual framing to make sense of that and a God that could help them respond to that.
I personally work in political and civic work and we know for a fact that political violence is on the rise from both sides of the aisle in our culture. And I've also seen corresponding justifications for that and justifications for response to that that have come from the Old Testament. Sort of also tracking the rise of religious nationalism.
So it's like, okay, violence is on the rise. And so I'm going to find scripture that is retributive. What would you tell our listeners? Like how can they avoid falling into that trap? How can they avoid using scripture as a justification to kind of go backwards, if that makes sense, to a place that is worse instead of using scripture as a pathway out of, which is what the New Testament offered civilization. It was a pathway out and enough people took it that over centuries we don't impale people anymore, right? And I would attribute that to Christianity. So I'm just curious about your thoughts. How if I'm sitting there, do I directly counter respond to someone who's like, well, bring back, you know, the God of justice rather than the God of love?
Terryl L Givens (31:20)
Yeah, I think the hardest thing is to read the character of Christ in a pre-sanitized way. We airbrush Christ and we make him conformable to a kind of modern sensibility. If you read him like David Bentley Hart does, as the wildly radical revolutionary disturber of the peace It's everywhere there to see, right? He keeps contrasting his ethic with everything that's familiar to human political and cultural life. If you're arrested by your system, you'll stay until you pay the uttermost farthing. Not in mine.
You want to stone this woman, I say go your way, listen no more. You want to pay the guy at nine o'clock for a full day and only half for the afternoon shift, I say I pay him all the same. You want to make the sunshine only on the good, my sunshine's on the good and the wicked. Right, at every stage he's saying if you are at all comfortable living the gospel in this environment, then you're not getting the gospel.
And so I think there's nothing more emphatic in the gospels than Jesus's utter repudiation of our retributive impulse. And it's not just the Old Testament, right? When Augustine is confronted with a challenge, what do we do with these Donatists, right? These schismatics in North Africa. And he quotes scripture, right? He quotes Luke who says, well, The Lord said, go and compel them to come in. So yes, violence and effective genocide against these Donatuses is permissible. So you can rest any scripture if you're reading scriptures out of context. But if you're looking at the totality of the witness of Christ, it's inconceivable that we could be engaging in Christian nationalism or...persecution of immigrants or any of these others horrific things we're doing in the name of Christianity.
Jennifer Thomas (33:34)
So how do I respond to someone who in my Sunday – I agree with you 100% – and how do I respond to someone in a Sunday school class that I'm sitting in as we're reading the Old Testament and I say this is not what Christ would have us do everything in the Old the New Testament is you know, I list what you've just listed and they say to me but Christ is the God of the Old Testament. This is who he was because you know this uniquely Latter-day Saint position that Jehovah is you know, this Christ with the Old Testament. just help me understand how I would help someone wrestle their way out of that, who wants to just embrace love and talk to their neighbor about how and why they can put down this retributive God of the Old Testament without putting down all of the associations we have made with that God and Jehovah and Christ, right?
Terryl L Givens (34:25)
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's a question I have to confront every other week because I do teach gospel doctrine. may not after this podcast, I'll just, know, wards differ enormously, but I'll just say this. In my experience, like Brigham Young said, people are good. They want to be good. In many cases, they're looking for excuses to give in to their most tender feelings.
And so I find that if they're actually asking questions, if they're not, then I don't try to interpose. But the point that I try to make is, you know, quoting that passage from the gospel topic essay, that we never get a transparent record of God's words, even in third Nephi, when we have Christ speaking. No, no, no, we're getting what they hear him to be saying. And so if you just...
Jennifer Thomas (34:48)
I love that, than what has then been translated into a different language and a different culture. Yeah.
Terryl L Givens (35:16)
Exactly. And so I try to just go back to that principle of origin, of what you're reading is not consistent with what you know in your heart to be true of God's nature. Then just assume that there's some error in the mediation between the voice and what we're reading and God's original truth.
This is a principle that I think has been pretty emphatically taught by both President Oaks and by Elder Holland before he passed. And I don't know which one was plagiarizing the other, but I found the identical quotation in talks by each one of them where they said, scripture is not the source of ultimate truth. That's an amazing thing to say. Scripture is not. I said, the spirit is the source of ultimate truth. So the burden is on us. I'm just going say we have to be equipped, as I said, to try to help people who are trying to align their sentiments and what they're reading and do it in a faithful way. And when I say we, I mean those of us who...
Patrick Mason (36:08)
So let me think about another person sitting next to me in Sunday school, right?
Terryl L Givens (36:14)
I'm glad I'm not your ward Spatchbeck.
Jennifer Thomas (36:18)
I'm in a great ward and I teach gospel doctrine, so I'm telling these people are all imaginary. They live somewhere else, but...
Patrick Mason (36:22)
No, exactly. Yeah, this is all fictional, says, Terryl you've articulated a beautiful vision centering the Gospel of John and John's writings. That's those those are just some writings within, you know, the many dozen books of the Bible. I happen to privilege, I don't know, numbers or, you know, Leviticus or Revelation, or something like that. And it kind of seems to me, Terryl, that aren't you just creating God in your own image? Here we are living in comfortable 21st century, know, love and tolerance and compassion and all this kind of stuff. And so haven't we just found the Jesus who we kind of like and who's lovey-dovey and gentle and so forth? But actually, you know, there's probably by page count, more of the God of justice in the Bible. And so I'm going to privilege that. You can have your Gospel of John. I'll give you that. But I've got all these other witnesses of Scripture. How do I know that you are not engaged in an idolatrous reading of Scripture, that you're creating God after your own image? That was coming in hot, but I know you can handle it.
Terryl L Givens (37:31)
Thank you for that question. And here's my answer. I'm not afraid of a lot of things. I almost died once. I think I know what that's like. If I have a fear, I'm haunted by the scripture. Depart from me, ye never knew me.
So clearly there will be many of us at the last day who think we've committed our lives to the worship and adoration of this Christ, only to discover that we created an idol after our own heart. So I live with that recognition. I'm fallible. I could be reading this wrong.
I wouldn't try to persuade anybody to embrace my views unless they're looking for a way to make better sense of these scriptures. But I would say this by way of like exhibit A. Joseph sets out, almost immediately after the Book of Mormon goes to print, right? Turns to Old Testament. We're going to retranslate this thing.
And it's as if, so I'm not reconstructing a real scenario, but it's as if. He barely gets, he barely opens Genesis. And it's like, this can't be fixed. It needs too many band-aids. And then what does he get? He gets this incredible vision, including Moses seven. And that to me is a powerful witness that God could not salvage out of the record that has come down to us the most perfect portrait of the God of the Old Testament. And so he gave us a new one, unique to our faith and tradition, and it's the weeping God of Enoch.
Patrick Mason (38:55)
I like that. yeah, that answer may not, of course, satisfy all of our other non-Latter-day Saints, sisters and brothers, but that's our answer. That's our tradition. This is what we believe and have canonized as an inspired rereading, retranslation, whatever you want to use of those opening chapters of Genesis that almost, you know, it's...
There's one way to say like, he didn't even need to publish the rest of the Bible translation, because these few chapters, right, give us the tools, the lens to then say, okay, now you keep reading the Old Testament this way too, right? What would happen if you took Moses seven and the god of the weeping God of Enoch, and then just kept reading with that God in mind, with a kind of restoration project of your own?
Terryl L Givens (39:40)
Yeah, yeah. And there are those moments that do flash, right? Like fireflies in a dark sky. They pop up in Exodus, right? When this relationship that Moses forges with God, where Moses says, hey, if you're not going with us into this promised land, I don't wanna go. When God tells him, know you, I know you by, read in in Judges 10 that God's heart was grieved for the misery of Israel. So there are those moments that shine through and I think that's what we should be looking for as
Patrick Mason (40:18)
And the later prophets who say, you know what God really wants is mercy and compassion and justice. And they're talking there about doing just, treating each other justly, right? And they even, after these centuries now, and they've seen how the Israelite, you know, a kingdom set up like all the other kingdoms, right? I mean, President Kimball sort of famously talked about this, we want a king just like everybody else. Well, they got one.
They set up a kingdom just like everybody else, and they used the same tools that everybody else did. And after, you know, a century or two of that, you have these prophets coming in saying, maybe that's not the model either.
Jennifer Thomas (40:53)
This isn't working.
Terryl L Givens (40:54)
Yeah.
Jennifer Thomas (40:55)
So if you're talking to our listeners who I still we're now what five months in to the reading of the Old Testament, I still have sitting with me in the pews many reluctant Latter-day Saints. They are worried that, you know, this brings out the this the this scripture often brings out the worst in people rather than the best that it ascribes it, of describes a god who is monstrous and I think some of the people that I felt have struggled the most are people with teenage kids because as an old as older adults we've had deep rich spiritual experiences we've come to know god ourselves we're able to I don't want to say compartmentalize but we we just have a different experience with god and if you're trying to find god and you're a few years into your journey and you're immersed in the old testament it's I think sometimes harder for young people to reconcile this so . . .
My question to you is if you're talking to either people in the pews that are old, that are very uncomfortable with the Old Testament, or young people who are figuring out how to reconcile and find a god that is not a monster and that is good, what's the path that you would encourage them to take?
Terryl L Givens (42:04)
Well, I'd say maybe we should just have a 25 minute Sunday school. We minimize the damage we inflict. Now, you know, look, I'll be honest, nobody's asked me, nobody's going to ask me. But I don't think we should be teaching the Old Testament. ⁓ I don't. I think the costs are too high.
Jennifer Thomas (42:07)
You've solved the problem.
Patrick Mason (42:10)
Ha ha ha ha!
Jennifer Thomas (42:18)
We're asking you. Good news. Okay.
Terryl L Givens (42:27)
Because our manuals have not kept pace with the best in biblical scholarship. They haven't kept pace with the statements from the first presidency. I mean, we have things like Elder Christopherson three years ago said, what the scriptures call God's vengeance is usually the unfolding of natural consequences. We had Elder Holland say, God will not destroy, it is not in his nature.
But the manuals are still right from a different era. And the contortions people go through or the spiritual anguish of people trying to accept that on equal terms with the New Testament, I don't think it's worth the cost. I think we need to empathize. I think we need to recognize the difficulties and just, as I said, try to center on the book of Moses as Patrick said, as a kind of paradigm for how we should move through the Old Testament.
Jennifer Thomas (43:15)
I think one of our other struggles is that we tend to often read the Book of Mormon or this, right? The Old Testament as a series of justifications for the restoration. We pick out little pieces and we say, look, this is this is either signaling Christ or this is signaling the restoration. And that could very well be true, but we fail to spend time saying like there are a group of people here who did things not optimally like we should if we're going to spend time in the book, we probably need to spend as much time saying this is not the path. Look how it ended just to Patrick's point like what happens when the Israelites chose a different path. How did it end? What can we learn from that these days rather than saying? ⁓ this is this is you know, the scripture should not be gained said and we shouldn't be asking questions about this because I think that's where it gets difficult.
Terryl L Givens (43:49)
Yeah.
Jennifer Thomas (44:06)
You don't know which part you pick up and trust, right?
Terryl L Givens (44:06)
Yeah, that's right. That's right. I wish that we had a voice in the Old Testament like the one in the Book of Mormon saying, I hope those who read this will be wiser than we have been. There's that beautiful, but we don't have an editor of the Old Testament. And so we don't have.
Jennifer Thomas (44:14)
Mm-hmm. Yes. But wouldn't you argue that that is essentially what Christ was doing in the New Testament, right? He's saying.
Terryl L Givens (44:27)
Well, I think so, and it's lovely that I have time to get this point in. One of the most magnificent incidents of Christ editing the Old Testament is Luke 4, his annunciation in the synagogue, where he quotes verbatim, right? Isaiah 61, is that right? But he leaves out the day of vengeance.
Terryl L Givens (44:48)
And this is where a really close reading really bears fruit because the wording of Luke is, and then he closed the scroll. And what that is meant to emphasize is everybody is expected, they're waiting for the next verse and it doesn't come. And Christ is saying, no, no, I'm not going to own that association with vengeance. So, yeah, it's a beautiful moment.
Patrick Mason (45:12)
I think that's powerful, Terryl I think that's a great place to end because it's Jesus willing to edit the Old Testament, but without discarding it. And in fact, he embraces most of it. mean, it's, I don't know, 85, 90 % of that verse that he takes. mean, we don't have to necessarily apply that percentage, but he embraces it. And I think it's significant. He made a choice.
Jennifer Thomas (45:13)
It's beautiful. Yeah.
Terryl L Givens (45:24)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Patrick Mason (45:41)
You know, there are hundreds of messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. He chose that one ⁓ to read, the Spirit of the Lord is upon you, to heal the brokenhearted, right? And to reach out to the poor, the outcasts, the downtrodden and so forth. And then to edit it like he did. That was a choice he made to announce his messianic ministry and to say, hey people, this is it, I'm here. This is what it's gonna look like. And then he spends the next three years showing what that's gonna look like when you close the book, a phrase earlier than you thought. Yeah. And of course, how do the people around him respond? They want to throw him off a cliff. This goes back to your psychological thing. There's some part of us that almost can't abide that kind of love that got off.
Jennifer Thomas (46:11)
When you close the book on vengeance, functionally, right?
Terryl L Givens (46:12)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You can't go to bed until you see the bad guy get his comeuppance in the movie. And that's how we are.
Patrick Mason (46:30)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, well, Terryl, we could keep going, we'll end there. But I do want to ask you one last question that we ask all of our guests. In a world of conflict and craziness and confusion, where and how do you find peace?
Terryl L Givens (46:43)
You know, President Uchtdorf, I'm sure he said this somewhere, I can't find the citation, but know somewhere he said, theology matters. And what I think he means by that is that nothing has a greater effect on how we treat other people than our vision of God's nature.
And so I've spent the last six years just immersed in reading primary sources of the early Christians and trying to understand what it was like for them to hear Christ's message for the first time. And what stood out and what transformed them and what led them to the martyr's stake and the ignominy and terror. Today, conversion to Christianity comes with cultural capital, right? You can't run for president unless you're a Christian. And so I want to get back into the minds and hearts of those early Christians and find reason to venerate and understand them and try to see and understand Christ with the freshness novelty that they did.
Patrick Mason (47:42)
That's amazing. Terryl, thank you so much for joining us for all the insight you brought.
Terryl L Givens (47:46)
Patrick, I love you and you're happy to be with you both today and thanks for asking me on. This has been really wonderful.
Jennifer Thomas (47:46)
It was amazing. Thank you for coming. This was a, I think, actually really important and timely conversation. We really appreciate it.
Jennifer Thomas (48:03)
Thanks for listening to this episode of "Proclaim Peace." To hear more, you can subscribe on a podcast app of your choice or on YouTube. You can always find full show notes or transcriptions at proclaimpeace.org.
Patrick Mason (48:17)
"Proclaim Peace" is a partnership between MWEG and Waymakers. You can learn more about Waymakers at waymakers.us. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
