Thank you for this very thorough response to my ‘sanitization’ of the Conquest of Canaan. I have a number of comments in response to some particular points in your post, though I must say first that your use of the word ‘sanitize’ seems ironic: my argument is that from a hermeneutical point of view we have to allow the episode to stand in the narrative whether we like it or not; you, on the other hand, want to obscure it by reinterpreting the whole of the Old Testament in the light of an idealized (and frankly post-biblical) christology. Who is really doing the sanitizing here? Anyway, the details…

God is, in His Essential Nature, Always Consistent with Himself.

Yes, in principle, but it is always risky to take upon ourselves the task of deciding what that essential nature is. You quote Malachi 3:6, but this belongs to a prophecy of destruction against the unrighteous in Israel, which is carried over into the New Testament and applied to the circumstances of a nation facing destruction by Rome. There is a tension in the book between God’s faithfulness towards his people (Mal. 3:6-12) and the prospect of judgment, but this is certainly not resolved in favour of a benign understanding of God who would not hurt a fly.

God Has Disclosed Himself Fully and Finally in Jesus of Nazareth.

Agreed, but…

The God Revealed in Jesus is Nonviolent.

I don’t think it’s as simple as that. How do we deal, for example, with Matthew 10:34-38?

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

Jesus did not mean this ‘sword’ to be understood metaphorically. He alludes here to Old Testament passages (cf. Jer. 12:12; Mic. 7:6) that speak of judgment against unrighteous Israel in the form of war (in contrast to a false sense of peace and security). That must be understood as a divine judgment and in the context of first century Judaism it took the form of the war against Rome and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. Jesus foresaw these violent events and understood them as in some sense an outworking of the wrath of God.

Love for one’s enemy, the non-violent response, is called for from his followers as the right way for righteous Israel to respond to aggression whether from the Jews or from Rome. Hence the cross. Hence the refusal to bring destruction upon the Samaritans. The additional statements that you quote from Luke 9:55 are textually suspect: ‘You do not know what kind of spirit you are of; for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.’ But in any case, the fact that Jesus came to save rather than destroy cannot be taken to mean that when destruction comes God is not to blame….

Neither did Jesus lend his support to the deeply held conviction that those executed by political authorities or killed in natural disasters were being punished by God (Luke 13:1-5).

To my mind this is a common misreading - and indeed sanitization - of the text. Jesus’ point is not that these events were not to be regarded as divine punishment. What he says is that those who died were not worse sinners than all the other Galileans - and that if the rest of them do not repent, they will ‘all likewise perish’. The same for those killed by the collapse of the tower in Jerusalem. This again is his warning that unrepentant Israel will be punished by God by the Roman sword or through the collapse of Jerusalem.

So I disagree with the argument that ‘Jesus begins his public work with the scandalous, radical, earth-shaking news: Our God is nonviolent and is liberating us all, beginning with the poor and oppressed, from our addiction to violence and death.’ Like John the Baptist, Jesus announces the coming of God as king to judge his people. What Jesus adds to this is the hope of a restored community, emerging through the impending eschatological crisis, that exists and behaves on the basis of faith in YHWH rather than on the basis of fear or legalism or violence. The church, therefore, is certainly called to respond to threatening circumstances through non-violence, to love its enemies, to turn the other cheek. But I don’t think we can honestly tell the biblical story without at least acknowledging that for Jesus (as for the whole prophetic tradition) God reserved the right to punish his people through foreign aggression.

The “wrath of God” is against “all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men,” not against men themselves (Romans 1:18-33).

So what’s all the following about then?

But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. He will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and  peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality. (Rom. 2:5-11)

Not everyone will agree with me that ‘wrath and fury’ should be understood just as concretely and historically as they are in the Old Testament (ie. that Paul has in mind judgment on Jerusalem and an analogous judgment on the pagan world). But surely we cannot escape the conclusion that Paul regards the ‘wrath of God’ as punishment in the form of ‘tribulation and distress’ intentionally directed against people who ‘obey unrighteousness’. Or are you just picking out the bits of Paul that support your view of things?

So it seems to me that the idea that God punishes a sinful people through military disaster runs right through the Old Testament and into the New Testament. Indeed, it is a fundamental presupposition of Jesus’ ministry: he seeks to save Israel from the final destruction of divine judgment. Interwoven into this story about Israel, however, is a story about the enemies of YHWH who likewise do not escape comparable punishment (so Habakkuk argues, for example). It’s against this background that we have to read the accounts of the entry into Canaan, whatever we may choose to make of them historically. As narrative they are, on the one hand, part of the fulfilment of the seminal promise to Abraham; and they presuppose, on the other, a pervasive biblical understanding that God punishes idolatry and wickedness.

My concern is, in the first place, that we read the narrative for what it is, which means acknowledging the historical, theological, and moral problems that arise not only in the Old Testament but also in the New. This is not about defending a ‘literal reading of those texts’ - nor is it about condoning genocide or diminishing the horror of war. What I am wary of is dismissing these texts on the basis of modern sensibilities because we risk then distorting the narrative as a whole or in other areas, which is what I think you have done with your reading of the Gospels.

Personally, I would rather let the conquest narratives stand as an affront to our complacent moralizing, our sense of theological superiority, than suppress them - that seems to me dishonest. There is certainly a conversation to be had about the implications of letting them stand - of recognizing the integrity of the biblical narrative. I think Ryan’s comment about Israel making sense of its calling under dangerous conditions is helpful - it respects the historical character of scripture. But that is another matter.