My entire thesis is predicated on the insistence that the violent judgments of God cannot be justified, let alone made to look ‘loving and just’! Indeed, I argue that it is only when we abandon all attempts to justify them that we can see how these violent portraits bear witness to the cross.

“The myth of redemptive violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known. Furthermore, its orientation toward evil is one into which virtually all modern children are socialized in the process of maturation. The myth that lay like a threshold across the path of burgeoning empires also lies across the path of each individual bred in such societies. Children select this mythic structure because they have already been led, by culturally reinforced cues and role models, to resonate with its simplistic view of reality. Its ubiquity is not the result of a conspiracy of Babylonian priests secretly buying up the mass media with Iraqi oil money, but a function of inculcated values endlessly reinforced by the Domination System.”