In furthering is thesis that violence does not come (directly at least) from God, he takes a look at a couple of Jesus’s parables.
Concerning the parable of the talents, notice how the master judges the wicked servant at the end:
Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, though wicked servant… (Luke19:22)
The wicked servant is cowering in the corner, asking to be smacked. And he is. Just as he said he would.
And that is exactly what happens. Once again it is the subject’s imagination of his master that is absolutely determinant of his behavior. One who imagines this master as free, audacious, generous, and so on, takes risks, and himself enters into a fruitfulness that is ever richer and more effervescently creative; while one whose imagination is bound by the supposed hardness of the master lives in function of that binding of the imagination, and remains tied, hand and foot, in a continuous, and maybe even an eternal, frustration.
-James Alison, Raising Abel, p.154
Also, in the parable about the vineyard and the wicked owners who finally kill the owner’s son: Notice that it is the CROWD (not Jesus) who answers that at the end the owner will come back and kick the wicked servants out of the vineyard. We assume they are right because that’s what WE would do. But Jesus doesn’t say that. What, in fact, does the owner do? The son says “Forgive them, for they know not what they do” as they are murdering him. Does the owner (God) come back in the next chapter and kick the servants (us) out? No! The Son rises from the dead and redeems us – reconciling us to God despite our wickedness.
People project the image of their earthly father onto God all the time. In some ways it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The thing is, God is not defined by who we imagine him to be. We cannot project our own violence and rivalry on to him. Yet imagining him properly plays a big part in how we live our own lives.