I am reading through an article written by Brian McLaren entitled Is God Violent? I'm not a huge McLaren fan. In fact, I'm not sure I'm a fan at all. I stopped reading his work a few years ago. When I saw Sojourners publish this article on their website I had to check it out though. I'm not sure what I think about it all just yet but there was one portion I wanted to share. McLaren discusses the tension of reading the Old Testament scriptures that reveal God's violence and the Old and New Tetament scriptures that reveal God's compassion and mercy. He was wrestling with the the tension and in doing so was reworking his approach to scripture and theological issues. In his explanation of this approach he writes,
...if I see a tension in scripture, rather than appealing to Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Scofield, or the pope to resolve it, I should first turn to Jesus. If Jesus truly was the highest and fullest revelation of God, if Jesus was truly the logos, the radiance of God's glory, the exact representation of God's nature, the fullness of the godhead in bodily form, and in very nature God, then his life and teaching mattered in tensions like this. And if the Bible was intended, as Jesus said, to bear witness to Christ, or as Martin Luther said, to be the manger on which Christ was presented to the world, then "when in doubt, consult Jesus" seemed like good advice.
This is my view as well. Jesus is the pinnacle of God's revelation to mankind. If there seems to be a contradiction or some sort of tension in scripture that causes confusion theologically then we ought always to turn to Jesus and see what he said and did. This is true for issues like violence, but also for issues like marriage, sexual immorality, finances, and compassion.
The second half of John 12 points us to the unity between Jesus and the Father when Jesus is written to have said, "For I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken" (v. 49). In his sermon on the mount, Jesus points to Old Testament teachings and corrects the way the Jewish people have wrongly learned and applies them. It seems as though he is contradicting the old way of things when he is not. If we believe Jesus is who he says he is and who the apostles said he was then we have to side with him first and foremost when we find tension in scripture (no matter the issue).
I first came to this conclusion with firmness when I read through The Moral Vision of the New Testament by Richard B. Hays.
