In the time in which we live there are many voices that cry out for divinely sanctioned violence. How does the name of God come to be associated with violence? And is there an alternative way of naming God that points us away from violence? We attend first to the voices of those who are called “church fathers” to notice how insistently they call upon us to think of a God without violence, a God who stands not in continuity with, but in utter contrast to the violence of empire and nation. We then turn to the construction in pre-modern Europe of a very different view of God, one that makes God to be so associated with violence as to make the wielders of human violence to seem like the very representatives of God. Finally we consider some of the ways in which the association between God and violence are brought into question in our own time. While this occurs in many ways in the theological and philosophical reflection of the last decades I pay particular attention to this deconstruction of the association of the divine and violence in the work of Jacques Derrida. The way the name of God is deployed is regularly connected to the behavior of those who are called upon to imitate the divine as the image and reflection of God in the world.
Jennings, Jr., Theodore W. (Mon,) studied this question.