The Book of Joshua: Understanding What We Don’t Like

The story is often told about how Thomas Jefferson, dissatisfied with the New Testament gospels as they had been handed down over the centuries, took a pen knife to the texts to remove the passages he didn’t like, the ones thought contrary to reason, or the ones believed untrustworthy. He believed all of the gospel writers were untrustworthy, so I suppose it made the excising easier. Generally, what Jefferson did was remove the references to miracles and the resurrection of Jesus (he kept the crucifixion and death). He entitled his new book The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.

We have our own version of this today, although it doesn’t involve a President (past or present). A few months ago, Andy Stanley, pastor of a large church in Atlanta and the son of Charles Stanley, published a book and gave a few sermons about the need to “unhinge” the Old Testament from the Christian faith. I’m not going to respond to this; a lot of other people with more theology and Biblical history in their heads than I do have already done that. Stanley wrote an article for Christianity Today in which he tried to explain and clarify what he said, but I don’t think he quite succeeded. 

What we think the point here is the Old Testament’s teaching on sexuality. It makes a lot of people uncomfortable that the teaching is so at odds with the prevailing culture. The problem that Stanley didn’t address was that, if sexuality is the concern, it’s not only the Old Testament that has to be unhinged from Christian faith. Quite a bit of the New Testament would have to be excised as well. 

If I want to deal with “problem” passages in the Old Testament, I need look no farther than the Book of Joshua. I reread it recently, and I’m still struck by the unequivocal instructions given to Joshua and the Israelites for conquering the Promised Land. It’s clear: God tells Joshua to kill every man, woman and child, and often includes farm animals and anything that lives or breathes. 

The mind boggles. The mind boggles even more when Joshua and the Israelites did it. The specific chapters in the book are five through twelve. After the land is conquered comes an extended discussion of how it was divided up for the various Israelite tribes. That division of the land is an easy one to skim and skip, but it’s worthy of its own study, starting with the question of why the division is so incredibly detailed.

But the killing part, what’s called herem in the Hebrew, is stark and troubling. It’s not genocide of specific ethnic groups; it’s genocide of all of them. 

More than eight years ago, I used that section of Joshua for a poetry workshop. Our assignment was to use poetry to explore a troublesome verse, story, or section of scripture. I chose Joshua, specifically because it made me so uncomfortable. It still makes me uncomfortable. (My account of that workshop can be found in three parts: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

But here’s the difference between me and Andy Stanley. Just because it makes me uncomfortable, or because it so conflicts with contemporary sensibilities and beliefs, doesn’t mean I think the Book of Joshua should be unhinged from the Old Testament, the Bible, or my faith. It would have made things a lot easier from a human perspective if the Book of Joshua had never been written or never included, perhaps covered with “And Joshua and the Israelites conquered the Promised Land as instructed by God” with the details omitted.

What we have instead is the whole story, with all its gory details. That’s true for a lot of the stories in the Bible. We’re not shielded from the hard and difficult things. Of course, we’re not shielded from the hard and difficult things in life, either. We’re not shielded from the reality that all of us are sinners. The Old Testament, far from being “something that Jesus set aside,” is an account of full array of human sin and depravity. 

But then, the New Testament doesn’t shy away from that either. That is point of why Jesus came in the first place. Only one thing would propitiate human sin, and that was a sacrifice like had never been seen or experienced before. 

Top photograph by Hasan Almasi via Unsplash. Middle photo by Jeremy McKnight, also via Unsplash. Both used with permission.

The evidence stands

After I Corinthians 15:3-6, 20-26

A phrase: according to the Scriptures,

a phrase we might ignore or

we’ve seen it so many times we pay

scant attention. But the phrase

stands there, refusing to be ignored,

because it was according to the Scriptures

that he died for our sins, and it was

according to the Scriptures that

he was buried and rose again. Scriptures

were the testimony, the evidence.

And the witnesses: the women

at the tomb, Peter and John and

the eleven as a group, and then

the five hundred. They all saw,

they touched, they were touched,

it was him, not a lookalike

or a poser but him, his voice,

his flesh, his spirit, his heart,

him there among them.

The evidence:

according to the Scriptures,

according to the witnesses.

Photograph by NASA via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Monica Sharman’s “Behold the Beauty”

It’s an invitation to engage with ordinary, simple, familiar things.

A painting in an art museum. A young boy building a light-bulb circuit. A migraine headache. Searching for thimbleberries. Family rituals, like reading stories aloud. Cooking from a friend’s recipe. Reading a much-loved story from your childhood.

It is in those simple familiar things that writer Monica Sharman finds beauty, and more than beauty. In the beauty of the ordinary she finds metaphors for Bible reading, and has collected those metaphors in Behold the Beauty: An Invitation to Bible Reading.

Her invitation is as simple as the beauty she writes about: “Come with me. Come to that which our ears can hear, our eyes can see, and our hands touch. Extend your hands. Take hold of the Bible, the very words of God Himself.”

This is not a call to excitement and thrills. This is a call to a deliberate, thoughtful walk, a walk with senses alert, yes, but a walk in the quiet things of the everyday. It’s an important call, because we spend most of our lives in the quiet things of the everyday.

And it is there that is the best place to read the words of God.

Monica Sharman

In addition to reading about God’s word, Sharman provides small anecdotes about herself and her family – a hike, a vacation by train, an over-stimulated baby, her own experiences with God at CalTech, where she majored in physics. Each anecdote is carefully woven into the fabric of the story she is telling. And Sharman is a storyteller, a storyteller who seems familiar because she is telling our stories as she tells her own. (Be sure to read the preface by writer Jean Fleming; she knows about Sharman and her storytelling abilities.)

Each relatively short chapter includes practical, simple suggestions – what Scriptures to read, questions to ask (and answer), ideas to try out. She suggests paying special attention to how Scripture uses metaphors and repetition, how conversations develop, how details help tell the story, why the setting is so often so important, and other helpful practices.

Behold the Beauty is written by a woman who loves God’s word and is eager to share that love in practical, familiar ways.

Painting: A Girl with a Broom, oil on canvas; artist unknown but possibly Carel Fabritius, about 1651; National Gallery, Washington, D.C. This is the painting that so captured Monica Sharman’s imagination, as she describes in Behold the Beauty.

Eugene Peterson's "Holy Luck"

He’s best known for writing The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language. (The Message was so popular that Bono quoted from it at U2 concerts.) He’s also written more than 30 other books. He was the founding pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland. In the words of Christianity Today, he is a “shepherd’s shepherd,” a guide and mentor to pastors who shepherd their congregational flocks.

And in addition to all of that, Eugene Peterson is a poet.

Over the course of many years, Peterson wrote poems and shared them with or gave them to friends and family. Two years ago, 70 of them were collected and published under the title of Holy Luck. The poems were an education in words, and what words can and should be. “I…learned that poets are caretakers of language,” he writes, “shepherds of words protecting them from desecration, exploitation, misuse. Words not only mean something, they are something, each with a sound an rhythm all its own.”

The poems are divided into three sections: “Holy Luck,” a series of poems based on the Beatitudes; “The Rustling Grass,” about finding God in the everyday; and “Smooth Stones,” the daily life of following Jesus. Not surprisingly, the poems are often from the perspective of the pastor, the shepherd, seeking to train, to educate, to explain, to encourage, to guide and to direct. They flow from scripture, often a single verse.

Here is “Tree,” taken from Isaiah 11:1 – “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, And a branch shall grow out of his roots.”

Jesse’s roots, composted with carcasses

Of dove and lamb, parchments of ox and goat,

Centuries of dried up prayers and bloody

Sacrifice, now bear me gospel fruit.

        David’s branch fed on kosher soil

        Blossoms a messianic flower, and then

        Ripens into a kingdom crop, conserving

        The fragrance and warmth of spring for winter use.

Holy Spirit, shake our family tree;

Release your ripened fruit to our outstretched arms.

        I’d like to see my children sink their teeth

        Into promised land pomegranates

And Canaan grapes, bushel gifts of God,

While I skip a grace rope to a Christ tune.

"Tree" is generally typical of the poems in Holy Luck, based on scripture, a combination of the personal and theological, with a psalm-like quality (Peterson says that the psalms of David were one of his early introductions to poetry). The presence of God is seen is something as everyday and common as a tree, in this case a tree that will eventually bear a shoot that signifies first David and then Jesus.

The poems range across human experience and daily life – a kiss, a choir, prayer, friends, hospitality, silence, beauty, snow, pregnancy, war, a candle, and more. They flow from scripture, and from the shepherd’s understanding of scripture.

These are quiet poems, some to be read aloud and some to be read silently, some to extend understanding and some to simply be in the experience of scripture, and God.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Can Poetry Help Us Understand Scripture? Part 2

This article was first published at The Master’s Artist.

Last week, I noted that I had attended a poetry workshop taught by poet (and University of Missouri professor) Scott Cairns. Twelve of us spent two days talking about poetry, and talking about poetry in relation to Scripture, and writing poetry, our overnight assignment: pick a difficult passage of Scripture and explicate it – using poetry. In other words, we had to write a poem that might help our understanding of the passage.

Much of that idea of explicating Scripture underlies Cairns’ Philokalia: New and Selected Poems. Published in 2002, the volume includes both new poems and poems from his previously published collections (he’s also published more since then). The term “philokalia,” or “love of the beautiful,” is taken from the collection of texts written between the fourth and fifteenth centuries by Easter Orthodox theologians.

Among the new poems in Cairns’ collection are five “Adventures in New Testament Greek,” in which uses the form of poetry the meanings of five words: metanoia (repentance), hairesis (heresy), nous (mind), mysterion (mystery), and apocatastasis (universal redemption – a heresy of Syriac origin). Here’s what he does with metanoia:

Repentance, to be sure,

but of a species far

less likely to oblige

sheepish repetition.

Repentance, you’ll observe,

glibly bears the bent

of thought revisited,

and mind’s familiar stamp

--a quaint, half-hearted

doubleness that couples

all compunction with a pledge

of recurrent screw-up.

The heart’s metanoia,

on the other hand, turns

without regret, turns not

so much away, as toward,

as if the slow pilgrim

has been surprised to find

that sin is not so bad

as it is a waste of time.

Philokalia contains far more than explorations of words; Cairns considers and examines all kinds of themes, divine and human. What the poems have in common is the use of a spiritual lens; these are themes and subjects best understood as subjects of faith, including issues we wrestle with and including the idea of poetry itself. (One poem, “Interval with Erato,” is a sexually charged poem about poetry and its inspiration.)

I have many favorites in this collection, but the one I found particularly appealing is “The Translation of Raimondo Luz.” It’s a long poem, and Cairns tells us it’s about “the greatest postmodern poet writing in Portuguese.” We learn he’s never left his hometown in Brazil; he’s self-taught, speaking seven modern languages and three ancient ones; he’s known as a radical theologian; he loves American rhythm and blues; and he’s an accomplished chef. And then Cairns tells us he is also a complete fiction.

That’s Scott Cairns – giving all of this extensive background and then offhandedly mentioned the person isn’t real, and then goes on to write a 10-page poem about him.

That same sleight of hand (or is it?) can apply to using poetry to explain difficult passages of Scripture. I know. I did it for the workshop.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Scott Cairns: Using Poetry to Explicate Scripture

This article was first published at The Master’s Artist.

In 2010, I attended a writer’s conference at Laity Lodge, in the Texas Hill Country about 90 minutes or so west of San Antonio. I had signed up for the poetry seminar taught by Scott Cairns, a professor at the University of Missouri, which is about 90 or so minutes west of where I live in St. Louis. I had previously read his A Short Trip to the Edge, an account of his pilgrimages to Mount Athos (Cairns in Greek orthodox), and Compassion of Affection: Poems New and Selected.

I was looking forward to the seminar; I was not disappointed (and I loved Laity Lodge). Twelve of spent two days doing something I’d never heard of – using poetry to explicate Scripture.

That’s the idea, or one of the ideas, behind Recovered Body: Poems, published by Cairns in 2003. Cairns uses poetry to explicate Scripture, and more than that, to explore poetry as a kind of Biblical enterprise. And it’s utterly fascinating.

The poems are divided into three sections.

The first, “Deep Below Our Violences,” covers a range topics – a line from a Wallace Stevens poem, the Old Masters’ paintings, archaeology, a rather erotic discussion between the poet and his muse Erato, the death of a father. The poems are characteristically Cairns, and I can hear his deep, slow voice now that I heard in Texas on a windblown patio near the Frio River. And I can hear that characteristic wonder of life. Here’s “Regarding the Body:”

I too was a decade coming to terms

with how abruptly my father had died.

And I’m still lying about it. His death

was surely as incremental, slow-paced

as any, and certainly as any

I’d witnessed. Still, as we met around him

that last morning—none of us unaware

of what the morning would bring—I was struck

by how quickly he left us. And the room

emptied—comes to me now—far too quickly.

If impiety toward the dead were still

deemed sin, it was that morning our common

trespass, to have imagined too readily

his absence, to have all but denied him

as he lay, simply, present before us.

In the second section, “The Recovered Midrashim of Rabbi Sab,” the reader is given an introductory warning about the rabbi, who has often been accused of “apostasy, blasphemy, manic-depression, drunkenness, bad manners. He has been praised for his compassion, revered—if not much liked—for his eager upbraiding of the pious.”

Then you read the rabbi’s “commentaries” on the image of God, sin, Lot’s wife, the sacrifice of Isaac, Jacob wrestling with the angel, Joseph thrown into the well and then sold, the death of Moses, Solomon and his Song, Jephthah’s terrible vow, Jonah’s imprisonment, and the exile. Yes, those accusations against the rabbi have validity, but his commentaries force the reader to confront and wrestle with the meanings of the Biblical texts being commented upon.

And I wonder if I didn’t hear a little of that rabbi down in Texas, too.

The third section of poems, “Supplications,” is devoted to New Testament themes – Christ in Gethsemane, the thief himself crucified who ridiculed Jesus on the cross, a beautiful poem about Mary Magdalene, and Jesus descending into hell, among others. The poem about Mary Magdalene, entitled “Loves” is simple and strong, and a memory, declaration and hymn all at once. Cairns subtitles it “Magdalene’s Epistle,” and it is written as a kind of deep, thoughtful and profound letter.

Recovered Body is a strong collection. Many of the poems were previously published by Chariton Review, Image, The Paris Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other publications and two anthologies. The poems, individually and collectively, provide a different way to look at both Scripture and poetry, as text and a way to understand text, and how to apply that text and understanding to life.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Scripture was reading me

The Scripture was reading me,

tripping sensibilities flat on their faces,

upending understanding, biases,

cultural expectations, uncovering

discomfort, anger, perplexing

my confirmations all because it

wouldn’t tell me what I wanted,

what I expected to and demanded to want,

confounding my tightly constructions,

my view, my line of sight, casting

a light on the interior shadows,

launching an attack on what previously

been an impregnable fortress, or so

I believed. Seven times the Scripture

read me, until with a shout

the walls collapsed.

Photograph by Alex Grichenko via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Discipline of Convictions

The first time I heard the term “predestination,” I was sitting in a Sunday School class for teens at a Southern Baptist Church. The teacher explained how and why it was a theological error.

That went right over my head.

Years later, after I was married and we joined a Presbyterian church, I heard predestination explained as truth, and everything else was an error.

It didn’t go right over my head.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the idea that some were predestined for salvation, and some – many – weren’t. It seemed to box the work of the cross into something less than it was.

Only later did I understand what my real problem was: the idea of predestination was un-American. It went against everything I had learned in civics and American history. It implied that all of us were not created equal, that some of us had a “predestined edge.”

Unfair, I thought. Grossly unfair.

I was letting my culture do my thinking for me. I was allowing the other Christians around me to influence my thinking, and listening more to them, and myself, than I was seeing what God’s word actually said.

I’m not alone, as it turns out. In The Discipline of Grace, Jerry Bridges says that most Christians “live according to the standard of conduct of Christians around us. We not only have morality by consensus, we have sanctification by consensus. We expect to become holy by osmosis, by the absorption of the ethical values of our Christian peer group.”

What we don’t do is turn to God’s word.

Well, Jerry, let’s just heap a little pile of burning coals on my head.

Perhaps more than a little pile.

If we are to make progress in pursuing holiness, he says, then we have to “aim to live according to the precepts of Scripture.”

Not the culture.

Not even the Christian culture.

Scripture.

And the only way to do that, to develop what he calls a set of Bible-based convictions, is to read, study and inhale the Scriptures. Delight in them. Meditate on them.

And the meditation on Scripture is a discipline. From that discipline will come transformation. And in case you didn’t realize it, Bridges reminds us that this takes work.

All those coals are leaving my hair singed.

Over at Informing the Reforming, Tim Challies is leading a discussion of The Discipline of Grace. Check Tim’s site to see what the discussion on this chapter, “The Discipline of Convictions,” is about.