I think it may help to explain some of my history, and why this thread and what it touches upon helps me to understand the contradiction of my Christian faith which I experienced as a student of the Bible many years ago in college with the intention to enter the ministry. You will see why what I am saying is not meant to be cruel, but to address head on a major conflict I had in my faith as it was presented to me through fundamentalists eyes. And I think Crossan's title of his book captures that dichotomy quite succinctly,
"How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Is God Violent?"
My entrance into Christianity began following an experience of the divine, prior to any religious associations of any kind. The experience was an encounter with Absolute Love, beyond all descriptions. It was timeless, absolute, and free. The weight of infinity could crush you, yet all held in absolute Grace, beyond fathoming.
When I was pulled into the Christian religion through a co-worker in my youth, it was the form of the religion which sounds very much akin to the types of things you have been taught yourself. As I was in their classrooms studying the scriptures, their descriptions of God sending sinners to a lake of fire, for eternal suffering, jarred deeply against everything my experience of God had shown me of God's Reality. There was absolutely no place for a threatening, fearful, punishing, tormentor, let alone a place such as hell itself. There was absolutely no place that could be a reality in God, or of God in any way shape or form.
Of course, being young and the novice in all of this theology they were teaching me, I had to assume there was something I didn't understand about God, and after all, doubt is the devil trying to steal your faith, so they taught me as well.
So I tried "faith" in the sense of denying genuine doubt, but because my experience was so absolute and undeniable as to its reality, and the power and depth of that absolute Love I that embraced me and filled me like a fountain of absolute Joy and Love and Life springing from the Wellspring of Absolute Reality, I had to face the reality that "I know more than all my teachers". ~Ps. 199:99
In the process of discovering the teachings of Christianity, there was also Truth. My first sermon was on Jesus' Two Great Commandments. And I said at that time that no other sermon need ever be preached but this one. I still say that to this very day. There were many real truths that did align with my experience of God. Many insights, language, poetry, and spiritual depths that are found in the Bible. And then there is also that other, completely non-reality stuff about God in the Bible. I didn't understand how it can speak to my experience of God, and of unconditional love itself in the world, with this other "foreign" image of God.
Fast forward many years of sorting this all out for myself. While I've lost faith in the things I believed in, I have never lost Faith, with a capital F, in the reality of God. Though I can doubt all things I conclude with the mind are "truths", the Heart knows that God is Truth, and that beliefs can come and go. That is what Faith with a capital F is. Not contingent upon rationalizing and justifying the arguments for one's beliefs. That sort of faith argues against Faith. It relies of the abilities of the reasoning mind to comprehend, rather that trusting in the Unknown, which is God, not understood with the mind in some "owner's manual" sort of way, but as intimate and close as one's very own breath itself breathing Peace.
But how do I think make salvage of this in Christian faith? There is Truth there, as well as a picture of human cruelty projected on its page as the face of the God of Creation. How can I legitimately say, these things of Christian faith still speak to me, while I in sincerity facing the truth of what is on its pages which represent something else, something like you find in the brutality of human societies attributed to God as the lead character?
No, Jesus is not coming to destroy sinners. But God is there to save those who abhor the savager of this world and its violence and retributions for wrongs. God does not force itself upon anyone, now or in the "last days".
What is the test of Truth that Jesus spoke of? "By their fruits you shall know them. A good tree cannot bear evil fruit, and an evil tree cannot bear good fruit". What is the energy you feel when you imagine Jesus, having put his donkey of peace down with a slit to the throat, mounting his war horse and charging forth with sword swinging and decapitating enemies, heads rolling and blood splattering all over his pure white robes? Does it make you feel tight in the chest? Clenching your jaw? Fearful?
There is your answer.