Violence, Young Men, and the Culture War
When St. Dunstan’s Academy considered naming our program for high school graduates after Moses’s longtime apprentice and eventual successor, Joshua, we had some reservations. The book of Joshua is one of the most controversial in the Bible, thanks to a brutal conquest narrative that one could accurately, if anachronistically, describe as ethnic cleansing. Even if we follow the main stream of Christian interpretation — which has tended to read the book spiritually and allegorically — “genocide your sins” was, we decided, too cavalier and much too “online” for our tastes. Nevertheless, we did settle on Joshua — and ultimately not in spite of the book’s notoriously challenging violence, but partly because of it.
Joshua’s story has much to recommend it, entirely apart from the violence. The goal of our Joshua Program is to graduate tough, faithful, hard-working, and thoughtful young men — men who are ready to serve their families faithfully, their communities productively, and the Church devotedly. Three things are necessary to help young men embrace these vocations: strong mentors, like-minded peers, and meaningful challenges. Joshua’s rise to leadership is marked by all three.
Mentors, Peers, and Challenges
We first meet Joshua as Moses’s protege, benefitting from a long and deep apprenticeship under Israel’s prophetic leader. Although Joshua is only mentioned occasionally in the Pentateuch, we know that he was Moses’s aide (or assistant or minister) from his youth (Nb. 11:28; cf. Ex. 17:9, 24:13). By Exodus chapter 17, he has become Israel’s primary military commander. In chapter 24, Joshua alone ascends with Moses up Mount Sinai — above even Aaron and the seventy elders — perhaps witnessing Moses’ face-to-face meeting with God (Ex. 24:13f).
No doubt this apprenticeship prepares Joshua for wise leadership under duress, the proof of which we see in the greatest crisis of the Exodus. Joshua is among a dozen prominent leaders sent to spy out the Promised Land in Numbers 14, but, despite God’s repeatedly demonstrated covenant faithfulness, almost all of the spies deliver a fearful and unfaithful report. Joshua dissents from the majority, but he is not alone. He is supported by a faithful peer, Caleb — and it might be more accurate to say that Joshua supports Caleb, who takes the lead. Whereas the other leaders focus on the fearsome inhabitants of Canaan and their fortified cities, Joshua and Caleb have their eyes firmly fixed on God. Their faithful testimony comes in the teeth of violent opposition, so violent that the people take up stones to kill them. They are saved only when “the glory of the Lord appeared at the tent of meeting to all the people of Israel.” (14:10).
These three factors — a faithful mentor, a steadfast peer, a severe challenge — prepare Joshua to take the reins of leadership from Moses. In his farewell speech, Moses exhorts the people, “Be strong and courageous,” and then he gives Joshua the same exhortation “in the sight of all Israel, ‘Be strong and courageous, for you shall go with this people into the land that the Lord has sworn to their fathers to give them’” (Deut. 31:6-7). God confirms Joshua as leader, likewise exhorting him to “be strong and courageous” — an exhortation repeated three times in quick succession (Joshua 1:6-9; c.f. Num. 27:18-23; Deut. 34:9). God demands not only courage of Joshua but also contemplation in the study of Scripture: “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it” (Joshua 1:8). The assembled people of Israel accept Joshua’s leadership with a key qualification: “Only be strong and courageous” (Joshua 1:18).
Why all this repetition? One would think Joshua’s long career at Moses’s side, not to mention the crisis with the spies, would have proven strength and courage enough already. But, as they say, it’s lonely at the top. Joshua, now a leader in his own right and bereft of his mentor, will be confronted by a series of enormous challenges in the Promised Land, each requiring great strength and courage rooted in contemplative fidelity to God’s word.
Joshua’s career ends as a culmination of the fidelity that marked his entire life. In the very first verse of the book of Joshua, we are told of “the death of Moses the servant of the Lord,” and the Lord’s calling of “Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ assistant.” The implicit relation here — Joshua serving Moses as Moses serves the Lord — anticipates St. Paul’s apostolic exhortation to the Corinthians, “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1, KJV). So too does it anticipate Joshua’s famous final exhortation to Israel: “Choose this day whom you will serve… But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15). We then read this subtly poignant notice: “Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died” (Jo. 24:29, emphasis added). Joshua has now become like his teacher (c.f. Lk. 6:40). No better endorsement can be given.
Mentorship, peer support, and real challenges are universal essentials for growth into mature manhood. We will live them out in the Joshua Program by welcoming young men to campus with exhortations for strength and courage followed by challenges requiring exactly this strength and courage. These young men will face these challenges not alone but rather alongside their peers and “at the elbow” of mentors. Their lives at St. Dunstan’s will be a deliberate mixture of action and contemplation — meaningful work, formative prayer and song, biblical study, and challenging adventures — all designed to help young men embrace their vocations in the family, the community, and the Church. Having spent nine months growing into mature masculinity alongside peers and under the guidance of mentors, graduates from the Joshua Program will be sent out — not as lone agents, but as members of the Body of Christ — with Joshua’s exhortation to choose, this day and every day, whom they will serve.
Violence, Misdirected and Otherwise
So far, so uncontroversial. (Or, as a colleague put it while reading the manuscript, “Here endeth the youth group lesson.”) But what about everything in between Joshua chapter 1 and chapter 24? To put a fine point on it, what about the genocidal extermination of indigenous peoples, followed by the apportionment of these lands by the conquerors?
It might be tempting to attribute our squeamishness to modern sensibilities — certainly the framing above smacks of postmodern self-flagellation. As many have pointed out, divine violence is good news for the oppressed — but it is always bad news for the oppressor, for the comfortable, for the complacent. Perhaps, comfortable as we are amidst our culture of death, we object to God’s violent disruption of wickedness.
But discomfort with Joshua is hardly a modern phenomenon. It is implicit in the longstanding Christian tendency — at least as old as Origen’s third-century Homilies on Joshua — to read the book spiritually. According to Origen and the many who have followed his lead throughout church history, Joshua teaches us not to annihilate human enemies in literal warfare but rather to destroy our sins in an internal spiritual battle. The 16th-century Protestant Reformers tended to reject or at least qualify the overly adventurous spiritual readings of the fathers, closing off this particular escape from Joshua’s brutality. John Calvin — not particularly known for squeamish theology — repeatedly acknowledges the disturbing nature of the book’s extraordinary violence. The wholesale destruction of Jericho in Joshua 6, Calvin writes, “might seem an inhuman massacre, had it not been executed by the command of God.” When in Joshua 7 we read that an Israelite, Achan, took items from Jericho that were devoted to God for his own gain — thereby rendering his family and estate “devoted” (herem) — Calvin acknowledges that the subsequent killing of presumably innocent children alongside their father appears “harsh, nay, barbarous and inhuman… it seems a cruel vengeance to stone and burn children for the crime of their father.”
Accounting for such disturbing violence is a difficult task. So too the distinct-but-related question of what, if anything, that violence has to say to us now. One option is to de-historicize the account. Hebrew scholar Robert Alter suggests that the story of Joshua “belongs not to historical memory but rather to cultural memory.” This reality, he says, “offers one great consolation: the bloodcurdling report of the massacre of the entire population of Canaanite towns — men, women, children, and in some cases livestock as well — never happened.” One can theoretically hold this view without rejecting biblical authority. If the story was never intended as a historical report but rather as a kind of didactic myth-making for the community of Israel in exile, then questions of historical accuracy reflect an error by the reader, not the text. Still, this reading is hard to sustain. We ought not read Joshua as though it were a contemporary history textbook, but the text clearly purports to describe actual events through which Israel came to conquer the Promised Land. More to the point, even were that not the case, one must still ask why the authors, human and divine, considered wholesale massacre of populations an appropriate didactic tool for exilic Israel.
A related tactic contextualizes the story to minimize the offense. As Alter notes, “The herem, the practice of total destruction that scholars call ‘the ban’… was not unique to ancient Israel, and there is some evidence that it was occasionally carried out in warfare by other peoples in the region.” Israel did not invent the genocidal herem (“the ban” or “things devoted [to destruction]”). In most cases the ban was not applied fully. Even where it was said to have been fully enacted, there are reasons to suppose this is a generic (genre-based) hyperbole — an intentional and known literary device. (As is often noted, some supposedly annihilated peoples nevertheless persist in later narratives.) Be that as it may, no amount of textual throat-clearing quite accounts for the pitiable image of Achan’s sons and daughters being stoned and (perhaps) burned for the sins of their father.
A third approach suggests a kind of divine subversion of violence through violence, one which offers its own “(disruptive!) knowledge of God,” as Lutheran theologian Paul Hinlicky puts it. Hinlicky echoes Alter’s suggestion that Joshua should be read literarily not literally, but he recognizes that this still leaves us with genocidal violence within the story-world of the text. Ultimately, Hinlicky considers Joshua a subversive narrative, one which reveals “what I shall call a ‘politics of purity’ unfolding to its logical extreme until it is met and transcended by the intimation of a messianic politics of reconciliation, one that restores the fallen.” The internal inconsistencies in Joshua (areas both conquered and unconquered, nations annihilated but still existing) are not to be understood as incompetent redactions but rather as hints that “the politics of purity” ultimately does not work. War does not work. God, in this telling, enters into a world where war is a necessary evil — and in so doing commits evil himself. “So the God of Israel,” Hinlicky writes, “is responsible—guilty, if you prefer, for the warfare of Israel in Canaan. Having bound himself to Israel, God falls with Israel short of his own glory in this strange work of destructive love.” God enacts a “divine sinfulness more righteous than human righteousness.” In Hinlicky’s telling, though, this is not “accommodation” to context but rather a “disruptive paradox.”
For all Hinlicky’s nuance and subtlety, his subversive reading of Joshua still reads more like eisegetical importation than native exegesis. It depends upon a supposed trajectory that is difficult to see in Joshua, or in the Old Testament more broadly, or even in the entire biblical canon. Joshua — like the whole Old Testament, from Genesis to Malachi — shows that God’s people are incapable of keeping the covenant, that Israel’s greatest prophets, priests, and kings ultimately fall short of finally bringing about the redemption promised. Nothing ultimately “works” — a kind of Gospel-in-negative, showing that God will somehow have to keep both sides of the covenant in order to bring about redemption. But if this failure subverts Joshua’s violence, it also subverts his fidelity, given that his unswerving lifelong fidelity to God is ultimately no more efficacious than his violence (c.f. Rom. 3:10).
Indeed, the problem in the Old Testament often seems not violence per se but rather misdirected violence. The people of Israel attempt to kill Joshua and Caleb for proclaiming God’s fidelity when they ought to have been killing Canaanites instead. Israel’s first monarch, King Saul, is finally rejected by God when he fails to execute Agag of Amalek (1 Sam. 15). Later in Israel’s history, what ultimately dooms King Ahab’s evil dynasty in God’s eyes is his failure to execute Ben-Hadad of Aram (1 Kings 20). Incidentally, or perhaps not so incidentally, this comes a couple chapters after the prophet Elijah’s bloody slaughter of hundreds of priests of Ba’al. Both Saul and Ahab are guilty of the sin of Achan (Joshua 7) — claiming rights of ownership over what was dedicated to God. As Hinlicky rightly suggests, herem warfare places “devoted things” dramatically “out of all possible human usage” through destruction. Strange as it seems, herem hands things destroyed back to their Creator while taking them out of the possession of their human conquerors. You cannot profit from cattle you destroy; you cannot enslave or manipulate those you have killed. By contrast, both Saul and Ahab seek political and pecuniary advantage where God wanted obedience. Both act as though they know what should be done better than God — an attitude near the heart of all infidelity. Further, each act of clemency towards enemies is implicitly paired with a later act of violence against friends. Saul does not kill Agag, but he tries to kill God’s anointed, David — and he has Doeg the Edomite slaughter the innocent and faithful priests of Nob for aiding God’s anointed (1 Sam. 22). Meanwhile, Ahab’s next move after sparing Ben-Hadad is to permit his wife to murder Naboth the Jezreelite (1 Kings 21) in order to steal the latter’s vineyard. As Peter Leithart says of Ahab, “He loves Gentiles and their gods while hating faithful Israelites and their God… He does not know how to fight enemies, and, to say the same thing, he does not know how to protect friends.” This misdirected violence is the sin of Isaiah 5:20 — calling evil good and good evil.
Christ’s First Advent — and Second
But perhaps the Advent of Christ makes so much straw out of this reading of the Old Testament. After all, King Jesus explicitly rejects violent resistance by his followers, on the grounds that his kingdom — by contrast with that of Joshua, Saul, and Ahab? — is not of this world (Jn. 28:36; Matt. 26:53). Christ comes not to be served but to serve (Matt. 20:28). He conquers death — by dying (Heb. 2:14-15). To the Old Testament commands to love God (Deut. 6:5) and neighbor (Lev. 19:18) and stranger (Lev. 19:34), Jesus adds the commandment to love our enemies (Matt. 5:43) — which would seem to make short work of any notion of warring, literal or metaphorical.
Then again, Christ’s admonition to “love your enemies” presumes that we do in fact have enemies — that there are those who hate us and hate Jesus Christ. If some Christians need to be reminded that we can never hate our enemies in turn, others need to be reminded that perfect love requires perfect clarity about evil. Perfect love includes the possibility of describing your enemies as sons of the devil (Jn. 8:44) as white-washed tombs, as blind fools, as a brood of vipers (Matt. 23:17-33). After all, you cannot love your neighbor and, at the same time, be indifferent to the culture of death in this present evil age. “The friendship of the world is enmity with God” (James 4:4). If we refuse to accept the world’s enmity — if we are determined not so much to love our enemies as to have no enemies — then we have chosen enmity with God.
Perfect love also somehow includes the possibility of consigning one’s enemies to a lake of fire. As it turns out, humble King Jesus astride a donkey on Palm Sunday is not the final word on the violent enmity between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world. The cross is not the end of the story but only the beginning of the end. Our Lord’s eschatological restoration of the cosmos bears striking resemblance to the bloody narrative of Joshua. Jesus brings not peace but a sword (Matt. 10:34) — a “sharp sword” that will one day proceed from his mouth to “smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron.”
In the Apocalypse Jesus rides not a donkey but a white horse. He will “judge and make war” with “eyes as a flame of fire, and on his head… many crowns.” He will be “clothed with a vesture dipped in blood… and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS” (Rev. 19:11-16). Christ’s apocalyptic mouth-sword is the Word sharper than any two-edged sword (Heb. 4:12, Eph. 6:17). This relation of sword and Word does not so much neuter the sword as emphasize the violence of the Word. Rebellious kings of the earth, false prophets, the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and liars — all are either slain by that sword or thrown into the “the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death” (Rev. 21:8).
The people of God anticipate this final confrontation every time they confront an unjust and wicked status quo, provoking the violent enmity of this present evil age. Moses, Joshua, the judges, Samuel, David, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, Josiah, Nehemiah, John the Baptist, Jesus Christ, the Apostles — at their best, they are given the “grace fearlessly to contend against evil, and to make no peace with oppression,” as the 1928 Book of Common Prayer’s collect for “For Social Justice” puts it. There is no compromise. We must either combat evil or be part of it.
We want graduates of the Joshua Program to be combatants.
The Problem of Mercy
Wrongly framed, the problem of evil — “How can a good God permit such a wicked world?” — entails a prideful presumption, as though the questioner could organize things better than God. That attitude is closely related to the sins of Saul and Ahab — “For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and presumption is as iniquity and idolatry” (1 Sam. 15:23). Rightly understood, the problem of evil is the problem of God’s mercy. When we grasp that evil is human and cosmic rebellion against God — when we are confronted with Ammonites passing their children through the fire as a sacrifice for Molech (Lev. 18:21) or Americans slaughtering unborn children on the altar of Mammon — then the problem of evil becomes the problem of justice delayed and violence withheld. “How long O Lord?” (Rev. 6:10). The martyrs and saints yearn for the just violence of God to put an end to the wicked violence of man.
That God’s violence is our eschatological hope does not mean that we should be undisturbed by the violence. Quite the opposite. Just as attempts to soften Jesus’s hellish warnings are counterproductive — Jesus wants you to be afraid of hell! — so too with attempts to make the herem warfare of Joshua less disturbing. It ought to be disturbing. The violence of Joshua is a foretaste of the violence of hell. We must not theologize away the horror of hell or herem, for that is simply another way to achieve complacency amidst the sin and death that reign in this present evil age.
But sin and death, as it turns out, are not merely “out there” in the culture or among our enemies. They take root in our hearts every time we sin. Every time a baptized Christian sins, he lies — renewing an allegiance to the world, the flesh, and the devil that was broken and destroyed on the cross. And so, to give the longstanding Christian reading of Joshua its due, let us indeed annihilate our sins. Cut sin out of your life, by any means necessary. Spare neither eye nor hand (Matt. 5:29-30) — remembering (as Origen purportedly forgot) that neither hand nor eye has ever caused one to sin. “But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” (James 1:14-15). Kill lust in the womb before it gives birth to sin, or if not then kill sin in its infancy, before it grows. Because if you let it grow, it will kill you.
As we cry out for God’s justice in a sin-sick world, we do so fearfully, for we are all herem. We are all under the ban. We are devoted things. And we will, all of us, be consumed by God’s refining fire, one way or another. We who have been baptized into his death and raised to walk in life are now in Christ — Christus Victor! In Christ, we are refined in the fire of God’s love rather than destroyed in the fire of his wrath, a fire that is not two but one — the one destiny of us all.
Culture War Combat
And so, the first responsibility for any Christian — before attending to the speck in his brother’s eye, much less the state of the culture — is to attend to the battleground that is one’s own soul. It is all too easy for a politically active, “very online” young man to become a partisan hack in the culture wars. It is increasingly difficult for him to step into his primary vocations to Church, family, and community — which is exactly why we cannot be culture-war pacifists.
Note well: we remove the plank from our own eye so that we can see clearly to remove our brother’s speck (Matt. 7:3-5). “As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith” (Gal. 6:10). St. Paul’s instruction suggests that, having first removed our own plank and secondly attended to our brother’s speck, we ought in the third case to care for the polis too — the political communities in which all Christians and parishes are embedded. In the polis we enact love of neighbor, stranger, and enemy. But just as it is no use advocating for the good of the city while neglecting your own children (1 Tim. 5:8), so too fighting a culture war while neglecting the place from where renewal must begin: the Church and one’s own heart.
We must be combatants against the culture of death — beginning in the heart (kardia) and gut (splancha), continuing in the parish, and finally in the polis too. It is incumbent upon all our churches, schools, and communities to offer the mentorship, peer culture, and challenges that will allow young men to embrace their several callings and thus to grow up like Joshua — young men who will be strong, courageous and unswervingly faithful to God’s word; consumed by the fire of God’s love; utterly unwilling to make peace with sin, whether in their own lives or in the world; young men who can say, with the prophet Jeremiah, “there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot” (Jer. 20:9).
Editor’s note: This essay also appears at the North American Anglican.
Image: Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon (1816), John Martin. Wikimedia Commons.
