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Crucifixion of the Warrior God, by Gregory A. Boyd – Review Part 1

Gregory A. Boyd. Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017.

The Warrior God…

Like most kids from Christian backgrounds, I grew up hearing the stories of flood, conquest, and war that we find in the Old Testament. These flannel-graphed (fuzzy-felt for Brits) stories captivated my imagination, and formed me in important ways. As I grew older, I learned the paleological arguments for a literal global flood, and the archaeological arguments for the destruction of Jericho. Those arguments built my faith, and gave me confidence—within a literalistic framework—that the Bible was true.

It never occurred to me that the same stories that built my faith were also horrifically violent. Perhaps it was the abstraction of violence in children’s Bibles, or the ‘moral of the story’ approach to the Old Testament, which shifted the focus elsewhere, but I didn’t ever mind the violence. That didn’t happen until later. I can’t remember the first time I grew uneasy with biblical violence, but I do remember that reading Richard Hays’ Moral Vision of the New Testament at the end of my undergraduate studies made a deep impression on me. Hays makes a powerful case for non-violence in the New Testament. I found it convincing at the time, and as a consequence, the radical non-violence of Jesus and the early Church caused me real problems as I read backward toward the Old Testament. The violence suddenly seemed at odds with Jesus’ teachings, and most significantly, his death for, and forgiveness of, enemies on the cross. This sent me on a challenging and difficult search through the Old Testament, looking for ways that the Old Testament might at least point toward Jesus.

Greg Boyd

In his Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Greg shares a similar story. Not all parts of his story are the same, but he describes how he became increasingly drawn toward Jesus’ radical non-violence. This experience prompted his first attempt to ‘put the best possible “spin” on the OT’s violent portraits of God’ (xxix). His hope was that this would resolve the tension Jesus ‘affirmation of the OT as divinely inspired’ and Jesus’ ‘nonviolent revelation of God’ (xxix). But unable to put a positive spin on the OT, he went back to the drawing board to propose something different. The result is a 1,445 tome. It’s a hard-hitting, astonishingly well-read, and deeply creative work.

Key Points

I don’t plan to rehash all the arguments in Greg’s book. At 1,445 pages, it’s too large for that. Greg covers a wide range of topics, to say the least. I suspect that some will fizzle out before reaching Volume 2, when Greg actually interprets OT texts, limiting the impact of some of his richer insights. This isn’t a comment on his writing, but instead on the simple challenge of reading a long book.

Here are a few key insights from Volume 1. I’ll offer some comment, but will save most evaluation for later posts:

On Scripture
  1. The Old Testament is inspired. Boyd insists that he cannot dispense with the Old Testament. His commitment to the idea that Scripture is God-breathed will not allow for him to dispense with it. The specific entailments of that claim are not determined, Boyd points out, and need to be considered along with the Church Fathers who employed allegorical methods of reading. Boyd prefers the term theopneustos (following 2 Tim 3:16) to ‘divine inspiration’ because the latter tends to place the locus of inspiration on the individual author rather than on biblical texts as such, where Boyd locates revelatory activity. I think this is a helpful distinction.
  2. Cloudy with patches of sunshine, or, direct revelation in the OT is episodic. On countless occasions Boyd says that amidst the fog and horrifying ugliness of violence in the OT, one can often witness the Spirit ‘breaking through.’ He says this too many times to count, but just to give a few examples from one section of the book: On p. 738 he says that ‘we see the Spirit of the cruciform God breaking through with remarkable clarity and beauty,’ in reference to God’s hatred for war in Ps 46, 120, and 140. On p. 745 we read about the ‘Spirit of the cruciform God breaking through’ again, within the conquest narrative (Josh 5:13-15). We ‘discern the influence of the Spirit’ (p. 752), the ‘Spirit further breaking through’ (p. 753), the ‘Spirit breaking through even further’ (p. 754), and so on. And this was just within 20 pages! Each of these ‘breakthroughs’ have to do with some move away from either violence or so-called ‘tribalistic’ religion (e.g., animals sacrifice). The way one discerns the activity of the Spirit in Scripture, in Boyd’s system, is by degree of likeness to the cruciform picture of Christ in the NT. Presumably, then, while the OT is inspired, it is not inspired in the same way as texts that portray divine love, or ultimately, the passages about the crucifixion.
  1. Misrepresentation as revelation. The correlate of those passages where the Spirit ‘breaks through’ is that countless OT passages are said to misrepresent and distort God, to present readers with a grotesque and horrific image of God. But these images are, in an odd sort of way, revelatory of a God who is willing to be misrepresented. I will discuss this more in a future post. For now, it’s important to note that for Boyd large swathes of the OT misrepresent God. They are ‘sin-stained portraits of Yahweh as a violent warrior god’ that should be ‘forever set aside’ (p. 552). 
  1. Maximal Discontinuity between OT and NT portraits of God. When read according to what some call its ‘plain sense,’ or in its literary presentation, Scripture offers wildly different portraits of God in the OT and NT. The OT offers ‘savage’ and ‘violent’ depictions of God that are, in Boyd’s estimation, directly repudiated by the NT portrait of Christ (p. 290). This is not to say that Boyd thinks the OT and NT are incompatible, but rather that one needs to re-read the OT through the lens of the cross to come up with anything other than a monster, especially in passages like we find in the book of Joshua.
  1. The OT nevertheless foreshadows Christ. Though much of the violence in the OT is ‘directly repudiated’ in the NT, ‘there is no dimension of the Old Testament message that does not in some way foreshadow Christ.’[1] This sets up a central question driving the book, namely, how can ‘macabre’ (p. 91), ‘horrific,’ and ‘revolting’ (p. 290) portraits of God testify to Christ? To what extent does his characterization of the OT stretch the bounds of Scripture’s God-breathed quality?
Hermeneutics
  1. Abductive scriptural hermeneutics. Rather than inductive reasoning (building a ground-up picture from the data), or deductive reasoning (starting from premises toward ‘necessary conclusions’), abductive reasoning asks, What state of affairs best accounts for all the data, and specifically for this case, the puzzling violent data?[2] In other words, abductive reasoning posits a scenario to account for what we have in Scripture, but is not in Scripture directly. Greg uses a helpful (fictional!) analogy of seeing his wife beat up a homeless person (puzzling data, given Greg’s knowledge of his wife), where by abductive reasoning he posits a number of scenarios that might account for this strange behavior (staged social experiment, he was harbouring a bomb, etc.).
  1. Jesus is the definitive revelation of God. Boyd makes this point forcefully on nearly every page of his book. He argues that the NT authors read the OT in this way, and that we should too. Heb 1:3 is thus central to Boyd’s project: ‘The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being’ (Heb 1:3). To know the character of God, Boyd contends, look at Jesus! Boyd thus considers his project Christocentric. For Boyd this means that ‘the ultimate God-intended meaning of any given passage, and of the OT as a whole, [is] only found when seen in relation to Christ’ (p. 98). In this, Boyd sees himself following the lead of NT writers and later Patristic authors, and ‘preaching nothing else but Christ, and him crucified’ (1 Cor 2:2). Boyd probably means Jesus-centric, since Christocentric would encompass the universal Christ, i.e., Christ in his pre-incarnate state all the way through his ascension. Boyd doesn’t mean that.[3] 
  1. More specifically, the cross shows us what God is like. It’s important to emphasize that Boyd’s hermeneutic if crucicentric, and not just Christocentric. Boyd uses a ‘Magic Eye’ analogy to describe his hermeneutic. ‘Magic Eye’ art looks like unimpressive 2D patterns to standard observation. But if viewed correctly, a 3D picture emerges. Boyd contends that looking at the OT through the lens of the cross ‘enables us to discern the beauty of the crucified God rising out of portraits of God that on the surface appear profoundly ugly’ (xxxv). He insists that interpreters ought to give the cross the ‘unrivalled authority to reveal God that the NT gives it’ (771). Giving it that authority yields, in Boyd’s estimation, a new outlook on violent texts in Scripture.
  1. The OT revelation of God is inferior to what we see in the NT. Calling Jesus the ‘definitive revelation’ of God (a phrase he uses over 70x in the book) has a specific connotation for Boyd. He means that Jesus supersedes all previous revelations of God in the OT. His point is not just that the OT is unclear about the coming Christ, but that it is inferior in its revelation of God, at least if read according to its literal sense (pp. 38, 110). The upshot of their inferiority is that all texts that do not meet the criteria of the cross, which I’ll discuss later, need to be re-read until they meet the cruciform standard of the cross. So for instance, if an OT texts depicts God exacting vengeance on enemies, that text will need to be re-read in light of the fact that God forgives his enemies from the cross. Boyd is thus critical of approaches that treat the OT and NT as ‘two equally authoritative revelations’ (p. 115), that in the language of Hebrews privilege the ‘reality’ in favour of the ‘shadow.’ Or, as he states elsewhere, one should not privilege ‘fallen’ representations over the cross. This sets the interpreter up for a very disruptive form of re-interpretation, such that the OT needs to be read radically against its grain in many places where the Spirit doesn’t ‘break through.’
  1. We need to read the OT like NT writers. Following the lead of NT writers in how they interpret the OT has been controversial over the years,[4] but Boyd maintains that we most certainly should follow the lead of NT writers as they ‘see Jesus’ in the OT.
  1. Tension is eschewed. It should be clear that Boyd’s proposal aims to resolve tension around the problem of violence in the OT. In contrast to most other approaches I know of—which typically include some measure of … ‘I know this doesn’t resolve all the problems around violence in the Bible, but …’—Boyd moves resolutely toward a comprehensive solution to the problem of violence.

In the next posts I’ll review and evaluate several specific portions of Greg’s weighty tome.

See here for part 2. 

[1] Graeme Goldsworthy, Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics: Foundations and Principles of Evangelical Biblical Interpretation (IVP, 2010), 252 qtd Boyd, Crucifixion, 91.

[2] Boyd, Crucifixion, 631.

[3] Special thanks to Lucy Peppiatt for raising this point. Lucy notes Ian McFarland’s query on this point, from his book The Divine Image: Envisioning the Invisible God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 13-14: ‘We see and know God when and as we look at Jesus as the one, true image of God. As the myriad images of Jesus that mark Christian literature and iconography show, however, there is no shortage of mutually inconsistent pictures of Jesus to choose from; and the fact that Jesus himself is now confessed to have ascended to heaven does not help matters.’ pp.13-14.

[4] Richard N. Longenecker, ‘Can We Reproduce the Exegesis of the New Testament?’ Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970): 3-38.

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Submission as Resistance: Romans 13 in the light of Psalm 2

The prophetic witness of Christians before the State has too often been muted by a surface reading of the Apostle Paul’s words in Romans 13:1-7, with its infamous “Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God” (Rom. 13:1).

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The Prophetic Critique of Sacrifice

Critique of Sacrifice…

There’s a story I’ve often heard told about Old Testament prophets. I don’t think it’s true, but here’s how it goes.

God apparently gave Israel a sacrificial system. He asked for obedience. He asked for victims. And he asked for bloodshed. But in time, and as Israel’s knowledge of God matured, certain groups came to realize that God didn’t actually want this. A religious system that depends on scapegoats, victims, and bloodshed stands in opposition to the divine way of justice and love.

Who made this discovery? It was the radicals … the prophets. It took prophetic insight to imagine a religious world beyond sacrifice. The religious establishment was bent on its own preservation, and lacked the imagination to see otherwise. Here are a few examples of what the prophets came to realise:

For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings (Hos. 6:6).

‘The multitude of your sacrifices—what are they to me?’ says the LORD. ‘I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals; I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats’ (Isa 1:11).

Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them (Amos 5:22).

With what shall I come before the LORD and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? [Implied NO!] He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God (Mic 6:6, 8).

Even the psalmist piles on:

Sacrifice and offering you did not desire—but my ears you have opened—burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require (Ps 40:6).

You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.  (Ps 51:16)

The prophets and poets make a forceful case. God apparently wanted one thing before, and then later said that he didn’t. To resolve this apparent tension, interpreters propose that their theology matured. It is somewhat akin to a parent helping their kids bzzzzaaaap! the bogeyman under their bed before they sleep. Later, kids realise that all the bzzzzaaaaping wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t doing anything but speaking their language.

Likewise with sacrifice. God spoke the language of the day (ritual sacrifice), and then later led the people to a more mature and even corrected religious practice.

Angels stained glassBeyond Sacrifice?

Some also contend that the prophets and poets presaged the abolition of sacrifice in the New Testament. God set his sights on substitutionary sacrifice, or specifically, the scapegoating and violence of victims in the sacrificial system, marking them for elimination. The prophets caught wind of this, and argued that worship would eventually move beyond its primitive state.

Greg Boyd reflects this evolutionary view of Israelite religion and ethics in his recent Crucifixion of the Warrior God, though from a slightly different perspective. He writes:

While an earlier tradition depicted Yahweh as enjoying animal sacrifices (e.g., Exod 29:25, 41; Lev 1:9, 13, 17), later authors make it clear that Yahweh placed no value on them.[1]

He states later the ‘canonical authors begin to realize that Yahweh completely disapproves of animal sacrifices.’[2]

In a provocative post on ‘God and Genocide,’ Brian Zahnd writes:

The Old Testament is the inspired telling of the story of Israel coming to know their God. But it’s a process. God doesn’t mutate, but Israel’s revelation and understanding of God obviously does. Along the way assumptions are made. One of these assumptions was that Yahweh shares certain violent attributes with the pagan deities of the ancient Near East. These assumptions were inevitable, but wrong. For example, the Hebrew prophets will eventually begin to question the assumption that Yahweh desires blood sacrifice. Jesus was fond of quoting Hosea’s bold assertion that Yahweh doesn’t want sacrifice, he wants mercy.[3]

I agree with much that Zahnd says here. Israel’s understanding of God certainly mutates and changes. The OT can provide us with countless cases of change and development.

Problems with the Prophetic Critique

There are serious problems with this story of advancing religion beyond sacrifice. Here are a few:

  1. In the same breath that the prophets excoriate the people for animal sacrifice, they also say that God also rejects songs and prayer. For example:

Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. (Amos 5:23).

When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. (Isa. 1:15)

We would also have to eliminate fasting as an effective spiritual practice. Jeremiah pronounces: ‘Although they fast, I will not listen to their cry; though they offer burnt offerings and grain offerings’ (Jer 14:12a; cf. Isa 58:3-6).

To argue that the prophets were urging Israel to move from one (primitive) worship system to another (enlightened) doesn’t work when we consider all the religious practices they attack, unless we also want to displace prayer, music, and fasting as legitimate spiritual practices.

  1. The prophet’s critique doesn’t reflect God’s inherent displeasure with the sacrificial system as such. Instead, the prophets insisted that God hates injustice. When a worshipper robs from the poor, and then uses that lamb, goat, or ox to worship God, God is disgusted. When a worshipper beats their slave to a pulp, and then lifts their hands in prayer, Yahweh says, ‘[Away!] Your hands are covered in blood!’ (Isa 1:15). The primary issue is that injustice + worship = foul play. God will shut the show down.

It’s important to remember that the prophets were rhetoricians. They used shocking language to arrest listeners’ attention. When the prophets said that God rejected sacrifice (and music/prayer), they weren’t making timeless assertions. Nor were they making claims about the evolution of religion in Israel! Instead, they wanted people to treat their neighbours with dignity. Isaiah thus urges the people to cleanse themselves for worship by looking after the oppressed:

Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow. (Isa 1:16-17)

  1. The same prophets that railed against sacrifice envision a day when God’s people would sacrifice rightly.

So the LORD will make himself known to the Egyptians, and in that day they will acknowledge the LORD. They will worship with sacrifices and grain offerings; they will make vows to the LORD and keep them. (Isa 19:21)

These [foreigners] I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations. (Isa 56:7)

These passages show us that the prophets weren’t moving beyond sacrifice. Instead, they were moving toward wholesome sacrifice.

Even one of the most forceful prophetic critiques eventually gives way to restored worship. In Jeremiah 7:22 the prophet exclaims that Yahweh ‘did not speak to your fathers or command them concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices on the day I brought them out of the land of Egypt.’[4] Taken on its own, one could imply that upon further reflection, God decided he didn’t want the whole worship system he set up after all. However, Jeremiah 7 is a textbook case of prophetic provocation, in the context of the most damning denunciation of the temple in the whole prophetic corpus (cf. 7:12). So again, the prophet is not issuing a press release about God’s changed religious expectations. Jeremiah does circle back to say that ‘in that day’ sacrifices would be restored (Jer 33:18, 21-22).

The psalmist also comes around. After saying that God does ‘not delight in sacrifice’ (Ps 51:16), the psalmist declares that God would ‘delight in the sacrifices of the righteous’ just a few verses later (51:19). The psalmist wasn’t of two minds. Instead, he recognised that sacrifice was not delightful to God when accompanied by adultery and murder (cf. Ps 51:1). Only after confronting those issues would God again delight in sacrifice.

  1. The prophets (or NT writers) never critique sacrifice on the grounds that it was violent, bloody, or anything of the sort. That’s modern squeamishness (and alienation from our food processing) speaking, not the Bible.
 Jesus’ Critique

In Mark 12, a young scribe came to Jesus and asked him which was the greatest command. Jesus, unwilling to give one law, says that the first is to love God, and the second to love your neighbour (vv. 29-31). The scribe who asked Jesus likely observed Jesus’ quotation from Deut 6:5 and Lev 19:11. Jesus had woven together the heart of the Torah. The scribe sees that Jesus answered rightly. But notice how the scribe, who was likely pro-temple, continues: ‘And [you answered rightly that] to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices’ (Mark 12:33).

But Jesus hadn’t said this!

Well, Jesus didn’t directly quote Hosea 6:6 (or 1 Sam 15:22), but the scribe teases out he hermeneutical implications of Jesus’ one-upmanship. He plays along with the hermeneutical game. The scribe asked for one. Jesus gave two. The scribe answered that Jesus was right, and gives three.

But notice the scribe’s answer. He says that loving God and neighbour is more important than burnt offerings or sacrifices. The OT says that God doesn’t delight in or want burnt offerings or sacrifices (1 Sam 15:22; Hos 6:6). The scribe isn’t misquoting; he’s interpreting what the prophets imply. He (and Jesus) recognise the prophets’ rhetorical point.  Love for God and neighbour take priority over the sacrificial system, and where the two clash, sacrifice must give.

Abolishment of Sacrifice & Other Means of Atonement

The early Christians did contend that that the sacrificial system would eventually be abolished. It wasn’t apparent to early followers of Jesus how this was so, and what it would mean. Even after the resurrection Peter and later Paul still worship and even sacrifice at the temple (Acts 3 & 21). Their actions complicate any attempts at an easy Supersessionism, and show the temple’s ongoing value to Jews, at least while the temple still stood.

The destruction of the temple accelerated Jewish and Christian thinking about a world without sacrifice. Note these words from Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, who responded to another Rabbi who lamented the loss of the temple and thus atoning sacrifices:

My son, do not be grieved. We have another atonement as effective as this (temple sacrifices). And what is it? Acts of loving-kindness (mercy), as it is said, ‘For I desire mercy and not sacrifice’ (Hos. 6:6) (Avot de Rabbi Nathan, A, 4).[5]

The book of Hebrews argued that Jesus’ death and resurrection brought an end to sacrifices at the temple. Though the temple and its sacrificial system was good, it was also provisional. From a Christian point of view, Jesus ushered in a more complete and permanent atonement.

Interestingly, Hebrews never quotes from the prophetic critiques of sacrifice. The reason, I imagine, is that the author recognised the prophetic critique of injustice (and not ritual). Moreover, Hebrews builds its argument on a ‘good-to-better’ logic, and not a ‘bad-vs-good’ logic:

For if the blood of goats and bulls, … sanctifies those who have been defiled … how much more will the blood of Christ … purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God! (Heb 9:13-14)

The fact that Jesus brings an end to sacrifice doesn’t negate its value in the story of God and his people, or even for some of Jesus’ early followers.

Perhaps most importantly, we see that Jesus does leave his followers with a sacrifice to ritually perform—the Lord’s Supper. This meal gathers up themes, symbols, and rituals from the atonement sacrifices, grain offerings, libation offerings, and Passover meal.[6] So, ‘Let us celebrate the feast!’ (1 Cor 5:8; Deut 16:3).

[1] Gregory A. Boyd, Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (2 vols.; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), 11-12.

[2] Boyd, Crucifixion of the Warrior God, 754.

[3] Brian Zahnd, ‘God and Genocide,’ https://brianzahnd.com/2013/04/god-and-genocide/ accessed 31/07/2017. Emphasis mine.

[4] Thanks to Brad Jersak for this example.

[5] Qtd in Mark Turnage, Windows into the Bible: Cultural and Historical Insights from the Bible for Modern Readers (Springfield: Logion Press, 2016), loc 5548.

[6] Thanks to Dru Johnson for this insight. Cf. Christian A. Eberhart’s What a Difference a Meal Makes: The Last Supper in the Bible and in the Christian Church (tr. Michael Putman; Houston, TX: Lucid Books, 2016).

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