By Kevin Johnson

“Lo! How a Rose E’er Blooming,” or in the original German, “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen,” is one of those songs that’s so old no one knows precisely when it was written or who originally wrote it…and it sounds like it, too. Even the Theodore Baker translation that Sufjan sings earlier on his Songs for Christmas collection uses a word like “Lo” (a term we should absolutely bring back, by the way). Personally, I love these older hymns; they are beautifully written, even though they often touch on theological and religious themes that mean nothing to me personally.

This hymn, however, is different from other famous ones like “Amazing Grace,” “It Is Well with My Soul,” or “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” in that it doesn’t celebrate God’s loving and forgiving nature. Instead, it celebrates something that might seem foreign to many listeners in the modern day: Jesus’ place in a divine lineage.

The song depicts Jesus as a rose sprouting from the stem of the Tree of Jesse, emphasizing Jesus’ descendance from the line of David. Royal lineage doesn’t hold the same esteem in much of modernity, but the historical significance is undeniable. The author of the Gospel of Matthew believed Christs’ lineage important enough to open his gospel (and the entire New Testament) with it, and the Tree of Jesse appears abundantly in medieval religious art, including psalters, stained glass, and stone carvings.

I find Jesus’ connection to King David interesting since it gets at the core of one of the central tensions of the Christian religion.

On the one hand, Jesus is often viewed as a teacher of peace — he’s the long-haired hippy who criticized the religious establishment. On the other, David is a violent warlord who committed atrocities that today we would call genocide. Yet they are supposed to be representatives of the same God (or, I guess, in Jesus’ case, he is God…).

In some sense, these two are the different sides of the coin that is the Bible. It is the tension that has caused so many problems for religion in the past. This is the tension that led Marcion, an early Christian theologian, to believe that the God who created the world and the God of Jesus Christ were not the same God at all. And while Marcion came to be denounced as a heretic and excommunicated from the church, Christians often dabble in a kind of soft Marcionism, in which the Old and New Testament God are treated differently.

When I was young and I read the Bible for the first time, adults in my life told me not to start in the beginning because the Old Testament was “confusing” and “complicated” and instead begin with the Gospels. This is, of course, very different from what Marcion taught, but it does speak to the fundamental alienness of the Old Testament God to Christian readers.

However, I think there is a better way to explain all of this. Something better than what Marcion had to offer. That is to imagine the Bible as an unfolding story about humans trying to understand their place in the cosmos, oftentimes during very difficult circumstances. In this interpretation, God is whoever we need him to be at that moment. When we need him to be kind, he can be kind. When we need him to be just, he can be just. When we need him to be cruel (and sometimes we do), he can be cruel too.

More concretely, the story of the Bible goes something like this:

A series of warlords, first Saul and then David, unify a group of local tribes into something resembling a nation called Israel. This kingdom stands only briefly until it splits in two: Judah and Israel (though these two kingdoms likely maintained a sort of shared cultural identity). Not long after that, these kingdoms were crushed by the Babylonians, who took the Israelites into captivity, where they would live for nearly a hundred years.

The Babylonian exile is perhaps the single most important event in Abrahamic religious history. It is what transforms the Israelites’ theological outlook into something resembling what we would today call monotheism. Prior to captivity, Yahweh, the God of the Israelites, was a local god, possibly part of a broader pantheon. This means that he was physically connected to a location in space, the city of Jerusalem, and to sacred objects as well, mainly the Ark of the Covenant.

During the exile, the Israelites were separated from Jerusalem, and the Ark was either destroyed or lost. It might be hard for us to imagine today how traumatic this must have been for the Israelites, so let me try to explain: it is likely that they saw themselves as being physically removed from God, like a child stolen from their parents. Perhaps, given the fate of the Ark, they may have even thought of their God as having been defeated.

This led the intellectuals among the Israelite people to do some serious soul-searching. In order to explain how this had all happened and to give their people something to hope for again, they developed a new theology. This theology had to explain why Israel, a once great kingdom, had been humiliated by people who worshipped false gods.

The idea they invented was: maybe God had not been defeated at all, maybe he allowed this to happen to the Israelites to punish them for wrongdoing, for failing to honor the one true God properly. They looked back and saw examples of the Israelites turning to worship other gods, concluding that these transgressions caused God to react with anger, sentencing the Israelites to a life of oppression as punishment. We cannot really know how people reacted to this new theology, but it’s easy to imagine why this works in a certain way.

Not only does it explain political oppression, but it also gives new meaning to the actions of everyday Israelites. Obeying God’s commandments was now more than simply an abstract spiritual act — it was a political one. It was a way to will a better world into existence for your people.

This is why, for much of the Old Testament, it seems like the Israelites are screwing around, incurring God’s wrath then correcting their ways. It was a story the writers of the Bible wanted to tell about their own lives, so they projected it onto both mythical and historical events.

But there was one more thing that the Israelites needed from their God in order to cope with this oppression. They needed to feel empowered again, which means they also needed violence, retribution, and cruelty.

This is where we get the violence of someone like King David. King David, who was likely a real warlord, must have done his fair share of pillaging and conquering — that’s kind of in the job description. But it is celebrated in the Old Testament because the Israelites were fantasizing about something they lacked: power and strength. They felt humiliated, and so they imagined themselves humiliating others. Sometimes this humiliation was symbolic (like in 1 Samuel, where the Ark of the Covenant causes a Philistine idol to the god Dagon to collapse in the night). In other places, the humiliation involved horrific and brutal violence (like David’s massacre of the Moabites).

The Old Testament is often seen as the side of the Bible that is for oppressors. While there may be some truth to that in our time, where the Bible is often cited to justify hierarchy and oppression, I think it is better understood as the side of the Bible that is for the oppressed. The Israelites wouldn’t have needed a god like Yahweh if they had been strong; it was only when they were weak that they felt they needed that sort of deity.

Obviously the violence that occurs in the Old Testament is unconscionable, but it is a consequence of the political circumstances of the Israelites at the time it was written. It was a reaction to oppression that was likely very horrific in its own right.

But theology cannot only look backwards, it also needs something in the future to look forward to, which, over time, caused scribes to develop ideas about apocalypticism – a time in the future when God would deliver political and military victory to the Israelites and, perhaps, bring about the end of the world.

It is out of this desire that the concept of the messiah is created. The messiah was expected to be a military leader, descended from the Davidic line, who would liberate the Israelites and then bring about an age of peace and justice under his own righteous rule. Of course, Jesus did not do any of these things, but for Christians, that is actually not a problem at all. They believe that the Israelites misunderstood what the messiah was supposed to be; that he was not meant to bring about a political revolution, but a spiritual one.

On paper, this shouldn’t work because Jesus clearly seems to represent a failed prophecy — a false messiah whose failure was reinterpreted by his followers who couldn’t cope. But it does work. It works better than any religion before it in terms of ability to spread and resonate.

It works because Paul and the other early Christians broaden their scope. Christianity begins as a Jewish apocalyptic movement but expands to welcome Gentiles, giving it limitless potential to spread.

That’s great and all, but it’s a double-edged sword. Christianity spread further than Judaism but lost its Jewish character, and with it many of the laws and practices that characterize Judaism. The God of Christianity had to be a god for everyone. The rich, the poor, the slave, the master, as well as every race and ethnic group on Earth. He needed to have fewer rules and fewer laws. And the ones that he did have, he needed to have more forgiveness around. In short, he needed to be more flexible.

This is how we get the Christianity that we know and love today. The broad list of laws that characterized Judaism is simplified into two core principles: love God and love your neighbor. Forgiveness is given a new emphasis: all of your sins were forgiven by Christ on the cross. In some ways, this is religion watered down. But in the end, maybe that’s better. Friedrich Nietzsche would say that Christianity introduced a “slave morality” into the moral landscape, one that would cause the powerful in society to willfully limit their own capabilities. Even if Christianity had to introduce a less strict, less just god to maintain legitimacy with various groups, that legitimacy has occasionally restrained rulers, presidents, and the rich throughout history.

Others will say that Christianity invented a sort of universalist ethic. Jesus was a God for everyone, not just one people group.

All of that is above my pay grade, but I think there’s a lesson in this idea of Jesse’s Tree that appears so prominently in “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” and in Christian art more broadly. One that can help us to empathize with and understand different religious traditions, particularly those that feel grotesque or foreign.

It is wrong, I think, to regard these as distinct gods the way Marcion did. It is essential to recognize that all of these people are seeking the same creator and ruler of the universe. They come up with different interpretations of that creator because they are confronting different problems when they describe him.

At the end of the science fiction novel Solaris, two scientists, Kelvin and Snow, engage in an interesting conversation about the concept of an evolving god. One who is imperfect, but not in the sense that gods like Zeus or Hercules were imperfect.

““No,” I interrupted. “I’m not thinking of a god whose imperfection arises out of the candor of his human creators, but one whose imperfection represents his essential characteristic: a god limited in his omniscience and power, fallible, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his acts, and creating things that lead to horror. He is a sick god, whose ambitions exceed his powers and who does not realize it at first.”

I empathize with this depiction, and I see it in all religions. In Genesis, Yahweh is depicted as flooding the Earth, killing most of his creation, and then, after, he promises never to do it again. One interpretation of this myth, which is sure to piss off a lot of theologians, is that God made a mistake. He saw how bad humanity had gotten, then hastily hit the reset button, not thinking about how brutal such an act would be, and when he saw the fruits of his action, he regretted it.

I know this conversation in Solaris isn’t meant to be taken literally. There are lots of readings on what the author meant when he wrote this conversation, but he almost certainly didn’t literally believe in this god. Yet, in some ways, this remains the best explanation of both King David and Jesus Christ, as well as the many other religious perspectives out there. It is a God who is fumbling in the dark almost as much as we are, leaving behind confusing and contradictory bread crumbs that point us all in a variety of different directions.

Kevin Johnson is a data engineer who enjoys writing about religion, history, and politics in his free time.