How do Christians deal with the violence in the Bible?

True martyrdom is not invited or sought after by the martyr. If so, we are testing God, not the other way around. A suicide bomber is testing God. Someone who deliberately puts themselves in danger - such as poisonous snake handling during worship - is testing God, not testing their own faith. Likewise if Abraham really did set out to sacrifice his son he would have been testing God. God expects us to use our brains. If we put ourselves in danger for no good reason (or even worse, put a child in danger - such as not seeking medical attention for a sick child but using prayer INSTEAD) we are testing God.Faith is not expecting that God will keep us from having bad things happen to us, it is believing that he will give us the strength to endure the bad things and be the stronger for it. Bad things happen to both good and bad people. Some bad things are just accidents or diseases (caused by germs, not God), some are because of bad choices (ours or someone else's).

Fair enough. But it amounts to the same thing, imo. The point was about testing God versus determining his will for our lives. Some of the OT stories present a view of God that is more akin to a capricious Greek or Roman God who is out to trick his subjects rather than help them find their way. I suspect the story of Abraham and Isaac tells us more about Abraham and the culture he was living in - where human sacrifice was sometimes practiced - than it tells us about God. It wouldn't have been the first time that Abraham misunderstood what God wanted him to do, would it? In fact, Abraham nearly always got it wrong the first time regarding God's will, didn't he? What makes you think that this time he was on the mark?

Ok. But I still think it is a warped view of God if we take the story literally - that God would command Abraham to sacrifice Isaac -to teach Abraham a lesson about trusting God and us a lesson about redemption. God is like a father, right? I am a father and I would not dream of asking one of my daughters to do something clearly wrong just to see if they really trusted me. If God is to be like a father I expect him to act like a father.

I didn't say that Abraham didn't actually set out to sacrifice Isaac. I just don't think God told him to do that. As I said, if God is a true Father, he will not behave that way. This is not something I am just making up - Jesus himself reasons this way:

Oh please. The traditional Church? The same traditional Church that questioned Galileo under threat of torture to get him to recant what he had observed through his telescope because it conflicted with the "factual account" of the Bible?The same traditional Church that tortured and killed Anabaptists for having the temerity to believe that baptism is properly administered to adult believers rather than infants?The same traditional Church whose representative (the Papal Legate) told the Crusaders beseiging Beziers, France in 1209 to "Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet." (Kill them all. God will know his own.)This is only part of the record of the traditional Church that gave us the Bible. So am I sceptical of what the 'traditional Church" considers to be a factual account?. You bet I am.

Its the THEOLOGIANS I distrust the most. You can't separate the theologians from the excesses of the traditional Church. They were part and parcel of it and provided the theological backing for the various inquisitions and crusades. The theologians were supposedly scholarly learned people who should have challenged the Roman apostacy. But did they? No. It was Catholic theologins who fought the reforms proposed by Martin Luther. Ia am sorry, but hanging your hopes on the theologians will carry no weight with me.

First, that's pretty much what the Catholic theologins told Luther, the Waldensians, and the Anabaptists. They didn't want people reading the Bible on their own, they wanted people to depend on the Church canon and the catechism.Secondly, I am saying the Bible MUST be read in the CONTEXT of the history of the church - with all of its disputes, negotiations, political deals, rewrites, translations, retranslations, etc. before a "Bible" emerged. You make it sound like the Bible was dictated by God to some scribes who faithfully wrote it down word for word and then had it all bound together into a book with Holy Bible stamped on the front of it and the words of Jesus in red. No, that is not how it happened. Different parts were written over a long period of time. In most cases the original author(s) are unknown but authorship was "assigned" to certain individuals with varying quality of academic evidence. Many Gospels were written, few were chosen. Which books were chosen depended partly on the political climate at the time and the particular church tradition. Whole books and parts of books were dropped and added.