1. God is the creator of all that exists and he is also giving being and existence to everything each second.
2. God has created man (male and female) so that he would enter into a personal, partner, I-Thou relationship with them. This relationship – both between God and man and between human beings and also with creation – is the absolute foundation of all that exists. The whole universe is created as a rich scene or a stage where this Love is acted out.
3. Man free-willingly withdraws from this relationship, which causes the intrusion of pain, troubles and death into the human realm.
4. Despite this, God does not forsake man, but continues the personal covenantal relationship with him and begins to prepare the salvation, which will renew the rule of the Love. Thus God assumes a role of a pedagogue and judge (the concept of the “permissive upbringing”, in which the pedagogue is not allowed to punish, did not yet exist).
5. The law given to Israel is a “pedagogue” which guides to Christ (Galatians 3.24–25). God now enters into a relationship with Israel, which is similar to the one the peoples then had with their rulers. Mosaic legislation formally resembles ancient oriental treaties between rulers and their vassals. God’s entering into this relationship and his giving of the law is a pure gift to the Israelites (and indirectly to the world), since God “steps down” into their everyday experience in such a way that is familiar to them. This is a prototype of Christ’s incarnation, his coming to dwell in our weak human nature.
6. The law must therefore be understood in the context of its time. As a good pedagogue, God guides the Israelites step by step, so they can follow him. The law actually limits vengeance: the principle of “an eye for an eye”, which is 1:1, was a revolutionary idea at the time, since people had considered that vengeance/retribution should be much greater (see for example Genesis 4.24). The “life for life” principle should therefore not be judged according to today’s standards, but it should rather be viewed precisely as an advance in the direction of the aforementioned Love. (The contemporary European view that the death sentence is not justifiable is the fruit of exactly this historical process; this opinion is held by the Slovenian philosopher Tine Hribar, who does not consider himself a Christian.)
7. God therefore enters into the concrete human realm as an educator and also as a judge/ruler. For the judges/rulers of those times, capital punishment was not debatable – if we try to assess them with the standards of our times, we are guilty of blatant anachronism. The question that emerges with respect to this “violence” is a question of justice and holiness, which belong to God’s character and to the Love as such.
8. In the Old Testament (especially in the books of Numbers and Joshua), the Israelites are sometimes used as the ones to execute certain sentences of God. It is important to understand that this “violence” has a prehistory: in Genesis 15.16 we see that God is patient with these peoples; for several centuries, he is calling them to repentance and waiting for their response. If in a certain moment God decides to put an end to evil, this is in accordance with his nature – as the creator he surely has the authority over his creation. And if in doing so, he uses this or that individual, this or that people (in later books of the Old Testament, he uses the pagan Babylonians), this is entirely his prerogative. However, at this very point is also a limitation of the “violence”: these executors do not get a permission to kill and destroy without distinction; they receive a precisely defined task (like jailers or the prison executors in the past). If they trespass it, they themselves become the objects of “wrath”.
9. In the perspective of the whole work of God, these interventions, too, appear as acts of God’s grace, since they reveal that God is concretely entering the world and stopping evil (“judging the sin”). With this, other people are protected from destructive forces. This “violence” is therefore like the “violence” of a doctor who amputates a sick part of the body in order to save the body and thus the life.
10. At the core of the Old Testament Law, it is already clearly manifested that God’s justice and mercy are not “symmetrical”; we have rather a revelation of God who is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation” (Exodus 34.6–7). Mercy extends to the thousandth generation, punishment to the third or fourth.
11. Later books of the Old Testament (especially the prophets) show the advancing of God’s pedagogics and say directly: God prefers mercy over punishment. Punishment is the extreme means, which he uses to bring back (other) people to himself.
“I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God. Turn, then, and live” (Ezekiel 18.32).
“Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over the transgression of the remnant of your possession? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in showing clemency” (Micah 7.18).
The message of the Book of Jonah is being merciful to the enemies (similarly Proverbs 24.17–18; 25.21).
12. The New Testament, as the “completion/fulfilment of the law and the prophets” (Matthew 5.17), continues the God’s pedagogics exactly in this direction. The “eye for an eye” principle is discarded and replaced by the love towards enemies and radical nonviolence (Matthew 5.38–48), even in the case of defending the Most Holy One (Matthew 26.52). In the cross, which from the human perspective seems like a defeat, a victory is revealed, the new rule of the Love and the life, which swallowed the death:
“Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4.8–10).
Because of this, the Christianity of the first centuries spread mainly through the witness of innocent victims, who were a living icon of this Love.
What began to take place from the time of the Emperor Constantine (4th century) onwards is another matter, which should be dealt with separately.
Matjaž Črnivec 