The Bible has many stories, but really there are only two. There is a story of violent humanity, and there is the story of a self-giving, nonviolent God. The question has been how to distinguish the two without creating a toxic dualism. Bartlett shows that the narratives in tension are not two opposed Testaments, even less two metaphysical principles, but the slow separating out of nonviolent revelation from the frame of violent meaning by which human beings have always signified themselves and their gods. In his prior, ground-laying book, Theology Beyond Metaphysics, Bartlett demonstrated the concept of semiotic change and how it emerges as the most appropriate way of understanding and affirming a relational shift in human and theological meaning. In this present work, he supplies a rich seam of biblical evidence with gripping essays on Old Testament books and their evolution of transformative signs and new meaning. Accounts of the life of Jesus and the teaching of Paul make the change exponential, bringing to definitive expression the inbreaking of the nonviolent divine. Signs of Change creates a theological masterstroke, showing step-by-step how semiotic evolution leads human existence to the truly saving knowledge of a nonviolent God.
Anthony Bartlett came to the US in 1993 and completed his doctorate at Syracuse University in 1999. Before that, he ran a center for the homeless in London, England, and was a Roman Catholic priest for eleven years. He is author of several books, and he and his wife are leaders of a local and online community, the Bethany Center for Nonviolent Theology and Spirituality.
“Bartlett understands the power of stories to create the future. Some stories produce a future that is more violent. Others lead to reconciliation and peace. At a time when so many are weaponizing the Bible’s stories to cause harm, Anthony invites us to rediscover the Bible’s trajectory out of rivalry and into deep conviviality.”
—Brian D. McLaren, author of Faith after Doubt
“A rigorous expositor, Bartlett profoundly re-dimensions our historic assumptions about divinely sanctioned violence. . . . In an age that often looks outside of the Bible for wisdom, Bartlett draws attention back to sacred Scripture as a culturally pivotal source of revelation—about God and ourselves.”
—Gena St. David, author of The Brain and the Spirit
“Say goodbye to biblical delusions and a religion of self-justifying purity with its necessarily violent God. Instead, discover faith—a new self and a new God in a new world, beyond a poisoned religious imagination. Tony Bartlett . . . takes us on a new, consistent, and compelling interpretative journey through Hebrew scripture, Jesus, and Paul. A master class in reading and teaching the Bible.”
—Scott Cowdell, author of René Girard and the Nonviolent God
“Humanity needs the hope this book represents! Bartlett teaches us to understand the Bible as the story of new creation, showing us how to read Revelation’s transformative signs and so engage in the work of bringing harmony to creation. We look around at the current ‘apocalyptic’ violence which threatens our survival, and the good news of this book becomes urgent: God in Jesus Christ has launched a project of human transformation from violence to nonviolence!”
—Paul Nuechterlein, Curator, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary
“A biblical theology of nonviolence: this book, both seasoned and entirely fresh in its rigorous ‘biblicality,’ persuasively reads the Christian canon as a cohesive story of re-signification and transformation towards non-retaliation. Exciting in the bold sweep of its storytelling yet firmly grounded in the generative matrix of the text, it opens up striking reencounters with Exodus, Job, the suffering servant, Jonah, Jesus, Paul, and the Slaughtered Lamb.”
—Brigitte Kahl, Union Theological Seminary
“Two decades ago, Bartlett midwifed a radical and permanent change in my understanding of God: that central to the gospel of Jesus Christ is the revelation that God is not violent. Now, with an even richer integration of Girardian hermeneutics . . . and much more, Bartlett’s seminal work, Cross Purposes, has been expanded in Signs of Change: the nonviolent God who requires no appeasement in order to reconcile humanity or make right this violent world.”
—Bradley Jersak, St. Stephen’s University
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