crucifixion of the warrior god

Crucifixion of the Warrior God, by Gregory A. Boyd – Review Part 4 (on Joshua)

[This is pt 4 of a 4 part review. See here for part 1, part 2, and part 3]

Crucifixion of the warrior God - CoverMy review of Crucifixion of the Warrior God focused thus far on Boyd’s overarching approach to the problem of violence in the Old Testament. The review has been selective, but identified what I consider several large-scale opportunities and problems with his approach.

In this final review post, I focus on Boyd’s approach to the book of Joshua. Often considered the crux interpretum for anyone attempting to wrestle with the problem of violence, I felt it important to see how he actually reads this portion of Scripture, and whether his ‘cruciform thesis’ provides a way forward.

Reading Joshua

After reviewing and critiquing Paul Copan’s Is God a Moral Monster? and finding it unsatisfactory (rightly, in my view, pp. 917-960), Boyd turns to his alternative cruciform approach to Joshua. To restate the problem Boyd sees: The story of divinely mandated merciless slaughter of men, women, children, and animals is incommensurate with the portrait of Jesus’ non-violent response to his enemies and his command that his followers treat enemies the same.

Boyd’s primary thesis regarding Joshua is that God originally gave a non-violent promise to Israel that he would gradually displace the Canaanites. We’ll call that ‘Plan A.’ This promise was subsequently mis-interpreted (perhaps willingly) as a command to violently exterminate the Cnaanites. We’ll call that ‘Plan B.’

Plan A: Non-Violent Displacement

There is ample biblical support for Plan A. Note the following example:

‘I will drive out the Hivites, the Canaanites, and the Hittites from before you … little by little’ (Exod 23:20-33).

Other texts in the Pentateuch, and even Joshua, repeat the idea that Yahweh would gradually displace the Canaanite population before the Israelites (Exod 33:2; 34:11; Lev 22:23; Num 32:21-22; Deut 4:38; Josh 24:11-12). And no text suggests that the gradual displacement would be an alternative if a Blitzkrieg slaughter failed. Instead, the Pentateuch repeatedly suggests that the conquest would involve forced resettlement. Moreover, Yahweh alone would drive the Canaanites out by making the land inhospitable to them such that it ‘vomits’ them out (Lev 18:24-25).

Boyd suggests that this earlier plan was both non-violent and Yahweh’s ideal (p. 971). He considers this part of the story a ‘direct’ revelation because it coheres with the image of Jesus’ non-violent response to enemies on the cross.

Plan B: ‘Giving the Canaanites Over’ to Israelite Violence

However, as often occurs, the people didn’t hear or heed what Yahweh commanded. Instead, they adopted a ‘culturally conditioned assumption’ that Yahweh wanted them to acquire the land through violence (p. 973). Thus the claim that God told them to ‘eliminate’ the Canaanites ‘all at once’ (Deut 7:22), which appears to flatly contradict the idea of God displacing the Canaanites ‘little by little’ (Exod 20:33). This extermination plan is an indirect revelation, since it is both culturally conditioned and not what God said.

The cross, for Boyd, not only guides our choice of what constitutes a direct revelation (Plan A) vs. an indirect revelation (Plan B); it also gives us a specific indication of ‘what else is going on.’

Here we return to Boyd’s idea that when faced with a text that does not cohere with the non-violence of the cross, we must nevertheless treat such texts as revelations of ‘something else’ that the text only hints at. In other words, the interpreter is to reconstruct from Plan B-type texts a scenario that looks like the cross.

Thus with confidence Boyd hypothesizes that the Israelites distorted Yahweh’s initial word—his Plan A. Like Jesus’ disciples, Moses and the Israelites listened selectively to Yahweh’s commands, opting for violence. They then ‘conceive[d] of God along the lines of a typical ANE warrior deity’ (p. 980). Whereas God had originally planned to displace the Canaanites non-violently, now via Plan B God gives them over to Israelite violence by withdrawing his protective presence. The story of Joshua preserves traces of both plans.

Evaluation

In Boyd’s ‘what’s really going on’ scenario, he attempts to stick as close as possible to the biblical text. I appreciated this dimension of his work, as well as his close reading of Brueggemann on Joshua 11 (see pp. 986-1002). Several aspects of his thesis deserve attention here.

For Boyd, Plan A reflects ‘what we would expect’ a cruciform hermeneutic to yield. A non-violent displacement of Canaanites squares with Jesus’ non-violent treatment of his enemies. In this story of displacement, we discern the Spirit ‘breaking through’ and bearing witness to the way of the cross.

Displacement is Not Non-Violent

However, it is difficult to see how his displacement scenario paves a road to Calvary—especially as Boyd understands Calvary. He states that God’s plan was ‘to make this region so unpleasant with hornets that the indigenous population will voluntarily relocate themselves’ (p. 966). Rendering the land inhospitable due to insects would have inflicted widespread damage and death to the indigenous populations. Moreover, it would have thrust the Canaanites into the hands of their inhospitable neighbours, precipitating significant conflict. In short, displacement is not as non-violent as it sounds.

Embracing Enemies & Plan A

Moreover, I don’t see how displacing enemies (Plan A) fits at all with Jesus’ act of embracing his enemies on the cross. If God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor 5:19), even Plan A would need to be re-interpreted to bear witness to the cross. The inhospitable land thesis seems to fly in the face of the ‘hospitality of the cross,’ to use Hans Boersma’s phrase.[1] To this end, Boyd’s approach shows signs of stress. His hermeneutical principle of ‘conservation’ requires him to salvage as much of the text as possible, yet even the texts he salvages rarely meet the standards he sets.

I don’t think this is a problem with the biblical story, per se, but rather a problem with Boyd’s approach of squeezing each text until it submits and confesses to things that match exactly his reconstructed picture of the cross. This approach flattens the biblical text into a series of direct and indirect ‘literary crucifixes,’ such that each OT text only ever confirms what we already know from the cross. It flashes pictures of God from one moment in time.

Other Potential in Joshua

Boyd covers a wide range of material in his 1,400-page book. For a 1,400-page book on OT violence to spend only about 50 pages on Joshua is a missed opportunity. Granted, he’s dealing with quite a few texts. Indeed, the book is full of biblical references and specific examples. However, it seems to me that Joshua is the case for any theory of violence in the Old Testament, and for there to be almost no discussion of the Rahab-Achan story, very little discussion of the ways that Joshua was actually re-applied non-literally within the Old Testament itself (e.g., during Josiah’s reign), hardly any investigation of ways that the herem (ban) instructions resist easy literalization,[2] no attention to the possible post-exilic setting of Joshua in its final form, and much more. In all these ways, Joshua and the ongoing OT traditions engage in re-framing and critiquing the book’s surface violence in ways that Boyd misses. While Boyd engages in a close reading of Joshua 11, and to good effect, I expected to see a more nuanced treatment of the whole book.

Conclusion

In sum, Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God will likely engage interpreters for years to come, and will have significant impact via his popularized Cross Vision. I highly recommend that students of the Bible engage Boyd’s book, if for no other reason than to look the problem of violence squarely in the face. However, I doubt Boyd’s book will win the day, even for Christians willing to engage in ethical critique of the Old Testament. Boyd’s book ultimately drives readers into the same untenable position as the interpreter who says, ‘There’s no problem here.’ Both propose a total solution to an intractable problem. Both leave readers vulnerable to that one small crack in the glass that splinters a thousand ways and eventually shatters the whole.

[1] Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Baker Academic, 2004).

[2] See Moberly’s chapter ‘A Chosen People,’ in Old Testament Theology (Baker Academic, 2014), 60-62.

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crucifixion of the warrior god

Crucifixion of the Warrior God, by Gregory A. Boyd – Review Part 2

In the previous post I noted several of Boyd’s hermeneutical starting points, as well as his expressed and tacit assumptions about Scripture. After this post, I’ll stick with his second volume, where he develops four principles for understanding the ‘cruciform’ God revealed in both the Old and New Testaments. But for now, I want to consider the cruciform thesis itself, and whether it yields enough explanatory power to solve the riddle of violence in Scripture. As a caveat, Boyd’s book does a nice job raising and responding to possible objections to his thesis, so I highly recommend that readers of this review get his book to see his responses to other parts of his argument.

The Cruciform Thesis

As noted in my last post, Boyd’s proposal is crucicentric. According to Boyd, the cross reveals most fully what God is like—even more than other aspects of Jesus’ life. He’s non-violent and self-sacrificial in his love. All other (biblical) portraits of God pale in importance to the revelation of the non-violent love of God on the cross, even if they are God-breathed portraits.

Boyd ties his cruciform thesis closely to a doctrine of inspiration. Because (a) the cross is the fullest revelation of God, and (b) all Scripture is God-breathed, (c) we should expect a cruciform God across all the pages of Scripture … if we look deeply enough. Moreover, (d) any portrait of God that seems to conflict ‘should never be allowed to undercut, compromise, or qualify in any way the portrait of God we are given in the crucified Christ’ (p. 280).

Thus, as one interprets the OT—even its ‘dark side’—the driving concern should be to discern ‘how it [the OT] bears witness to this very portrait’ of the crucified Christ (p. 280), and to reject all portraits of God that hint of violence. This task is easy for Boyd when reading of God’s covenantal love for Israel—often portrayed as a marriage—and his overwhelming commitment to show mercy and grace to his people, which Boyd beautifully details (pp. 281-285).[1] Boyd calls those texts ‘direct revelations.’[2] But it proves immensely challenging when peering into the heart of ‘damnable texts’ (p. 287).[3] In these cases, OT texts confront us with portraits of God that contradict the portrait of God in the crucified Christ.[4]

This puts the interpreter in a bind. The OT is God-breathed, but when interpreted in its literal, or even literary (i.e., in accordance with its presentation in the literature of the OT) sense, the Warrior God of the OT is not the Slain Lamb of the NT. Abiding with the literal sense of the text would require a Marcionite rejection of the OT, according to Boyd. But while he is sympathetic to Marcion, he parts ways. He writes:

To be perfectly honest, I have a certain respect for Marcion and his followers who decided it was better to “cast away the Old Testament than tarnish the image of the Father of Jesus Christ by mixing in traces of a warlike God.”[5] Given their mistaken belief that they had to choose between Jesus and the OT, I admire their bold choice. But it is this false either-or proposition that I strongly reject. (p. 344)

So what options does an interpreter have?

Literary Crucifixes

To work out of that bind without succumbing to the Marcionite temptation, Boyd sides with Origen and other church fathers who pursued more admirable images of God in the OT. For Origen, the OT was to be read allegorically to conform to the image of Christ, and often in striking agreement with Greek philosophical and moral concepts.[6] Of course Origen also sought to discern the spiritual meaning of the whole Bible, including the NT, when the literal made no sense.[7] His pursuit of meaning beneath or beyond the surface was not a specific mode of OT interpretation.[8]

While Boyd rejects the allegorical method he perceives in Origen, he embraces Origen’s effort to resist literal readings of violent texts. Boyd’s particular method is abductive. Though critical of interpreters who try to put the ‘best spin’ on the OT,[9] Boyd assumes the best of the whole OT by suggesting that God allows himself to be misrepresented, and in that allowance, we see—as a literary crucifix—the God who ‘became sin,’ and ‘bore’ humanity’s sin on the cross.

We can, in a word, discern in these violent portraits that God was bearing the sins of his people and was thereby taking on an ugly literary semblance that reflected that sin, just as he did in a historical way for all humanity on Calvary. (p. 457)

In other words, he ‘postulates a hypothetical scenario that, if true, … [renders] otherwise puzzling data intelligible’ (631). While the OT’s texts ‘conceal God’s true nature on their surface, they reveal God’s true nature in their depths’ (650). Those depths, however, are not native to OT texts. Instead, they come from elsewhere, from the NT. When adopted as an interpretive grid, finding that deeper meaning proves easy to predict, since the outcome is always the same—a cruciform image of God.

7 Questions & Critiques

In light of what I’ve just sketched, I want to offer a few reflections, critiques, and questions. I realised once writing the 7 points below that each relates to my distrust of approaches to extremely complex issues that resolve all tension. The danger, by my reckoning, is that there are always hidden costs when we do this. I’ll discuss those later, but for now, a few questions/critiques:

  1. To what extent is the cruciform hermeneutic really a hermeneutic? Boyd insists that cross can function like a ‘magic eye’ to make sense of otherwise horrific OT texts. But in practice, those violent OT texts are simply re-written so that they look like the cross. I don’t see this as a reading of the OT so much as it is a case of finding what one needs to find. I wasn’t always sure why Boyd went through all the trouble of interpreting OT stories (e.g., the conquest) when he knows what he’ll find anyway, namely, a crucifixion-like image of God. Boyd says as much. For instance, when, according to Boyd, Israel projected its own violent plan for conquest onto God (pp. 979ff.), we see that ‘the presence of these plans within the canon confirms what the cross leads us to expect—namely, that the depictions of God ordering his people to annihilate others as an act of worship to him are sin-bearing, literary crucifixes’ (p. 980).
  2. To what extent is allowing oneself to be misrepresented like ‘bearing sin’? Allowing oneself to be depicted as a malevolent bully (in Boyd’s estimation) would only be 1 of 10 steps toward actually ‘bearing sin.’ To even look like ‘bearing sin,’ wouldn’t there need to be some actual move to deal with that sin? Sin-bearing and atonement are about actually dealing with sin, removing it, and cleansing its stain. In Boyd’s rendering, the God of the OT does no such thing. He only allows himself to be misrepresented. So how does Boyd gain access to the true state of affairs to know that the misrepresentation is actually a crucifix, and part of a fully reality leading to the cross? Falling back on the idea that the cross requires us to see things this way does not work, unless you see the cross as a static and timeless (and wholly transparent) revelation of God, which I’ll address later. This leads me to my next question.
  3. Why should Boyd’s hypothetical scenario/solution commend itself more than any other? Boyd believes that God not only accommodated so as to allow violent misrepresentations of himself, but that those misrepresentations are ‘literary crucifixes’ that point the way toward the sin-bearing God revealed in Christ. If Boyd’s concern was to somehow stay with the OT as God-breathed (even though as a misrepresentation in many places), why couldn’t the OT texts of terror just be literary foils that God inspired to allow the cross to shine ever brighter? Or, why couldn’t the OT texts of terror be about how the cross enables us to put to death the deeds of the flesh? (I’m not actually suggesting those as options). Boyd’s model has no anchor holding it to the OT itself (it’s a cruciform re-interpretation), I see no text-driven reason to choose the particular benefit-of-the-doubt scenario he posits.
  4. Boyd’s thesis requires us to read decidedly against the grain of the OT. To the best of my knowledge, allegorical and/or spiritualizing interpretations of the OT always try to read along the grain of the OT. For instance, even when Origen critiqued violent passages of the OT, they always ended up being—somehow—about putting to death the passions or some such act.[10] By contrast, Boyd’s proposal requires us to read vast portions of the OT as (a) straightforward misrepresentations of God that are simultaneously (b) revelatory of a God who is willing to be misrepresented. In other words, the deeper reality runs directly cross current to the surface reality. I wonder, then, what brings together the surface and deeper realities of the text, besides some kind of yin and yang balance of opposites.
  5. Boyd’s cruciform hermeneutic ends up flattening the full witness of Scripture. For Boyd, if anything in the OT does not meet the criterion of enemy-love, it requires reinterpretation (p. 475). If it looks like enemy love, then it can be left alone. As a result, the OT ends up chopped into bits, with one pile that can be read according to its surface meaning, and another pile that is read against itself. This is part of the collateral damage of solving one problem. Boyd loses the tension and difference between different acts of God in history.

The NT itself assumes difference between (or narrative development) between the cross and other acts of God. For instance, in Peter’s sermon in Acts 3, Peter distinguishes between the way Jesus treated those who crucified Jesus in ignorance, and the way he would judge those who knew Jesus as exalted Lord and yet rejected him (v. 23; cf. 13:40-41; Heb 2:2-3). Paul also recognizes that God treated him differently when he was, unwittingly, a blasphemer: ‘I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a violent man; yet because I had acted in ignorance and unbelief, I was shown mercy’ (1 Tim 1:13). Or take Jesus’ own imprecation against Judas in John 13:18 (cf. Ps 41:8-10), who knew him and yet betrayed, or the disciples’ treatment of the same (Acts 1:16-20; cf. Ps 69:25; 109:8). My point here is not to overplay the contrast between crucifixion and other acts of God, but to observe that God’s response to enemies is not exactly and always the same (insofar as we can tell, but I’m up for surprises!). The examples I’ve given suggest that God treats ignorant enemies different than those who possess fuller knowledge yet act against him.

  1. Boyd renders timeless the revelation of God on the cross. For Boyd, the cross shows us that God only and always deals with his enemies non-violently (hence the strong re-reading of other texts). But would this timelessness still obtain for other dimensions of the cross? E.g., does God only and always wield power through suffering?[11] Does God only and always remain (mostly) silent in the face of enemy aggression? I don’t think Boyd would say yes, but on what basis?
  2. Boyd underplays the extent to which the NT writers anchor their interpretation of the crucifixion in the OT. In other words, the NT writers are at pains to demonstrate that what God revealed in Christ is consistent with, and not in direct opposition to the revelation of God in the OT. But what, in Boyd’s analysis, gives the cross its meaning? Boyd is choosing some interpretive framework for making sense of the crucifixion. What I didn’t see in the book was a clear sense of how NT interpreters consistently looked back to the OT to make sense of the cross. At least four lament psalms, for instance, shape Mark’s passion narrative. Matthew’s passion narrative, including the very stories the narrator chooses to tell, are clearly influenced by the events of Ps 22. The Passover shapes John’s understanding of the cross. This is not to mention the way that the sacrificial system shaped Paul’s and the author of Hebrews’ understanding of the cross. How, then, can the cross function as a lens for re-interpreting the texts that give it meaning?

I am sympathetic to some of Boyd’s concerns over violence in the OT, and have made attempts myself to try to wrestle through it. But unfortunately, the way Boyd unfolds his cruciform hermeneutic pulls the OT-shaped legs out from under the NT’s presentation of the cross. To that extent, it doesn’t give adequate privilege to the entire kerygma—or core teaching about Jesus, which begins with the story of God and Israel, and moves through the incarnation to the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, and presupposes the unity of divine revelation.[12] Nor does he give adequate attention to the discreet witness of the OT, including its nuanced and complex wrestling with the problem of violence itself.

But more on that in the next posts.

See here for part 3.

[1] Of course the specifics of that covenant, which involve threats against disloyalty, would not meet Boyd’s cruciform standard.

[2] See my previous post for examples of this phrase in use.

[3] Boyd, Crucifixion, 287 quoting Thom Stark, The Human Faces of God, 218.

[4] E.g., p. 327.

[5] Quoting Harnack, Militia Christi, 47

[6] See Provan, The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture, 179. F

[7] Cf. p. 122 for an interesting parallel in Luther.

[8] See especially Origin’s On First Principles: Book IV, pp 178ff in Rowan A. Greer trans. Origin (Classics of Western Spirituality; Paulist Press, 1979).

[9] Cf. xxix, xxxi-xxxii, 333.

[10] Origen recognizes the problems of divine vengeance and anger in the OT that his opponents address, and claims that the problem is ‘quite simply that they understand Scripture not according to the spiritual meaning but according to the sound of the letter’ (On First Principles 2.2)

[11] My thanks to Matt Bates for that question.

[12] Matt Bates raised a question to this effect in our podcast interview with Boyd.

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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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