Christians should be talking less about punishment and more about flourishing.

If you’ve hung around churches that talk about “getting saved,” you and I share a common language. Have you been saved? is a familiar question to us. In those churches, the typical story of how we obtained salvation was this:  We were born with a sinful nature, doomed to suffer God’s wrath unless God saved us. Yes, God would save us…from God. And what’s more, the story claimed that we deserved God’s wrath for our sinfulness, but God made a transactional deal to save us. Jesus died a horrific death on a cross, which God accepted as payment for our sins, so we could avoid the eternal torture of burning in hell. So, if we prayerfully acknowledged that God’s violence saved us from…God’s violence???…we would go to heaven when we die. We’d walk the streets of gold, be reunited with all the saved people who had already died, and live eternally. Happily ever after. That was the salvation story presented to us, as ironic as it was morbid. How in the world did this story make its way into our lore? you ask. My answer: Certain portions of scripture have been elevated to support this violence narrative, while scriptures supporting other narratives have been overlooked. 

In the Bible, right out of the gate, “Divine violence quickly asserts itself”¹ early in Genesis. Theologian Grace Jantzen describes the flaming sword in Genesis 3:24 as “God’s first military act…to do guard duty to keep humankind out of the paradise which had been created for them.”² Keep reading in Genesis, and we see an act of Divine violence that destroys most animals and people in a flood.³ A father, following Divine orders, comes really close to sacrificing his own son.⁴ In Exodus, all the firstborn Egyptian males—both people and animals—are killed because of something their king did.⁵ By the time we get to the book of Joshua, the same Deity instructs the Israelites to take land from the Canaanites by force. Battle after bloody battle ensues. Adults, children and animals die. Lots and lots of violence. 

The influence of such stories upon human history can’t be overstated. Kate Common calls the story in Joshua a “conquest narrative”⁶ that is “embroiled in violence that has shaped the United States.”⁷ The doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the genocide of Indigenous people, and the Jericho March on January 6, 2021 are a few examples in American history. Globally, violent conquests such as the Crusades and South African apartheid were also fueled by this narrative. Presently, the bombs of war continue to fly. Meanwhile, Christianity has been so desensitized to violence that the notion of a salvation at the hands of a destructive, violent God has gone largely unquestioned. Stories of violence supposedly initiated and endorsed by the Divine being, when unchecked, have been used to support atrocities. In short, when it comes to salvation, the violence metaphor has led to a great deal of harm. Friends, we need some new metaphors. Let me suggest two. 

First, salve. Priscilla Pope-Levinson explains that the word salvation encompasses the word salve. This “suggests a full gamut of health, healing, peace, and wholeness.”⁸ The prophet Isaiah portrays God’s messenger as one who comforts, heals, encourages, and liberates those who are ashamed, brokenhearted, and oppressed.⁹ In Luke 4, Jesus says he is the fulfillment of this prophecy. All four Gospels tell of various people healed by his miracles. Once, he even made and applied actual salve to a blind man’s eyes.¹⁰ The ministry and work of the resurrected Christ is a salve to the wounded. It’s a balm for the hurting. When teaching this to her students, Pope-Levinson quips, “Have you been salved?”¹¹  

Second, the metaphor of flourishing. We see references to flourishing throughout the Hebrew scriptures.¹² (This has to do with spiritual, rather than material, blessing.) Hosea and Zechariah both prophesy that God’s people will blossom and flourish. “…they shall flourish as a garden, they shall blossom as the vine.”¹³ Psalms and Proverbs make similar promises about flourishing.¹⁴ While the word flourishing doesn’t show up much in the Newer Testament, “the ideas of fullness and abundance…express many similar ideas.”¹⁵ Jesus declared his earthly mission was to bring abundant life.¹⁶ The writer of Ephesians prayed that the readers “being rooted and established in love…may be filled with all the fullness of God” and said that God is “able to do far more abundantly than we can ask or imagine.”¹⁷ The products of flourishing—wholeness, wellness, growth, abundance—are freely offered to humanity. 

I’ve shared three metaphors for understanding the transforming power of God: violence, salve, and flourishing. Yet, “Christian theology since the Reformation has paid relatively little attention to the ideas of flourishing and abundance, focusing far more on the concept of [violence as] salvation.”¹⁸ Why? What’s the appeal of the violence motif? To answer that, let’s take a brief look at the work of 1960s feminist theologian Valerie Saiving. 

Saiving believed that men are more likely to be tempted by pride and the desire for power, while women tend to be tempted by “inadequate self-esteem and underdevelopment.”¹⁹ Following this rationale, it would make sense that the people creating the narrative surrounding our sacred text–historically, men in positions of power–would be drawn to the violence aspect of the story. Sixty years after Saiving‘s work, we now understand that gender isn’t binary and that assigned gender roles are reductive and harmful. However, I think we can learn something from her theory: Different people have different needs. Those who are in seats of power and privilege may indeed find meaning in submission to a strong Divine being, one able to “keep [them] from falling”²⁰ victim to their own pride and potential for destruction. People who are on the margins may be more likely to receive healing through salve, or experience abundance through flourishing. Scripture contains adequate support for all three. Our understanding of salvation needs to be expanded beyond the violence narrative.

Not every metaphor fits every person. Maybe I’ve mentioned one that resonates with you. Maybe you have one of your own. Uniformity should never be the goal. In whatever way Divine love works in and through you, enabling you to move toward becoming the best version of yourself, to better love yourself and others: that’s the goal.  So, what metaphor speaks to you?  

1. Grace Jantzen, “Introduction,” Violence to Eternity, (London: Routledge), 2008, p. 4  ↩︎
2. ibid, p. 3 ↩︎
3. See Genesis, chapters 6-9 ↩︎
4. see Genesis 22 ↩︎
5. See Exodus 12:29-32 ↩︎
6.  In their book Undoing Conquest: Ancient Israel, The Bible, and the Future of Christianity [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books), Kindle, 2024], Common reveals revisions, redactions and additions made to Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings in the seventh century BCE. Common calls the conquest narrative in Joshua “fake news” created to garner support for Judean politicians’ goal of independence (p. 95)  ↩︎
7. Common, p. 26 ↩︎
8. Priscilla Pope-Levinson, Models of Evangelism, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic), 2020, p. 119  ↩︎
9. see Isaiah 61 ↩︎
10. see John 9:6-7 ↩︎
11. Pope-Levinson, p. 119 ↩︎
12. Grace Jantzen, “Feminism and Flourishing: Gender and Metaphor in Feminist Theology,” Violence to Eternity, (London: Routledge), 2008 ↩︎
13. see Hosea 14:3-7 and Zechariah 9:16-17 ↩︎
14. see Psalms 92:12, 103:17; Proverbs 11:28, 14:11 ↩︎
15. Jantzen, “Feminism and Flourishing,” p. 206 ↩︎
16. John 10:10 ↩︎
17. see Ephesians 3:14ff ↩︎
18. Jantzen, “Feminism to Flourishing,” p. 206 ↩︎
19. Jantzen, “Feminism and Flourishing,” p. 207 ↩︎
20. Jude 1:24  ↩︎