The Crucifixion of the Warrior God

Boyd, Gegory A The Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Volume 1 and 2 Fortress Press, April 17, 2017

This mammoth contribution by Greg Boyd of over 1400 pages attempts to make sense of the violent portraits of God in the Bible by introducing a "cruciform hermeneutic" that helps reconcile the character of Jesus with the war like behaviour of God in the Old Testament. It is by far the most compelling argument that I have read for interpreting the biblical narratives of a war like God in our Scriptures.

In the first volume, Boyd presents the compelling cruciform hermeneutic that filters the violent portrait narratives of God in the Old Testament [OT] through the direct revelation of Jesus on the cross. Not forgoing a conservative hermeneutic of the Bible as the inspired word of God, Boyd takes his fellow Evangelicals to task for their inconsistency in holding up the character of Jesus - and particularly Jesus crucified - as the revelation by which the OT God as Father is assessed in the portrayals of the Ancient Near Eastern [ANE] OT writers. He [rightly in my opinion] criticizes the double tone of most Evangelicals who preach the love and mercy of the crucified Jesus and the holy vindictive and wrathful character of the OT God.

In the hermeneutical choices available to us, Boyd points out that there are three options he feels are not viable:

• We can all become Marcionites and completely ignore the OT Scriptures and its caricature of an angry God that cannot be reconciled with the peace loving merciful Jesus. 
• We can do what Peter Enns and others are doing by arbitrarily declaring  violent portrait narratives as not inspired or authoritative and so mess around with inspiration altogether. 
• Go on living with the tension of a wrathful God in the OT and a loving merciful expression of God in Jesus in the NT. 

Boyd says none of these three alternatives are appealing and so offers a fourth approach whereby the focal point of the Biblical narrative and the focus of the historical church becomes the working hermeneutic that helps make sense of each violent portrait narrative.  This focus is the direct revelation of Jesus who shows us the face of the Father and His overarching character of love through His suffering on the cross for the sin of humanity.  When we approach the violent narratives, this cruciform hermeneutic along with a continuing conservative hermeneutic of divinely inspired Scriptures, causes us to ask what is actually going on in these portraits and how can we reconcile them with the cruciform character of Jesus - the direct revelation of the Father. 

In this sense, Boyd sets up a canon within the canon paradigm of Jesus the Son of God as the measure by which all other inspired portraits of God are interpreted. A closer look at this reveals that the ANE OT writers were indirectly speaking of God [His actions and character] based on the knowledge of how ANE tribal gods behaved. In fact, by using these tribal descriptions and characteristics, they interpret events in their history identifying God as the cause and agent of suffering among Israel and the surrounding nations. They also associate the destructive behaviour of creation around them to the character of God Himself as their ANE counterparts did. 

Boyd points out that the evidence for this canon within a canon cruciform hermeneutic is the way the NT writers speak of Jesus and His communication of the Father and the character of the Father as contrary to the way He is portrayed in some of the OT scriptures - especially those of the violent portrait narrative type. Case in point is the calling down of fire by Jesus' disciples on a town where they were not well received, like Elijah did in the OT narrative, only to be chastised by Jesus for even considering that the Father do such a thing. Jesus informs them that this is outside the character of the Father. Such evidence as this in the NT narrative cause us to believe that what we read in the OT violent portraits of God are not accurately reflecting God's character as much as they reveal the understanding of the writers themselves. 

Drawing on hermeneutical approaches from early Church Fathers such as Origen, Boyd encourages the reader to consider that maybe what we are reading from these ANE OT writers is more allegorical than concrete depictions of what actually happened. He reminds us that allegory in ANE literature has an underlying truth to it that is derived by reconsidering at face value what is written for a search of a much deeper meaning. It is this aspect of interpretation that Boyd says we should consider borrowing in using the cruciform hermeneutic to interpret the behaviour of God in the OT. 

As he mentions toward the end of his second volume, the one worthy to open the scroll - as John the Revelator writes - is Jesus - the lamb who suffered and was slain for the sin of mankind. Only He can unlock the mystery by which the biblical story speaks of God. Refusing to let Jesus open the truth within the indirect revelations of the OT concerning God and his character is to forgo Jesus as the direct revelation of God to us. He says this in his summative pages at the end of the second volume: 

"Indeed, if we fail to fully trust the revelation of the crucified Christ and thereby credit ancient authors who depicted God in violent ways with getting it right, we are essentially trading the unclouded revelation of the Son, who alone is 'the radiance of God's glory' and 'the exact representation of God's being (Heb. 1:3), for the cloudy perspective of ancient authors who could only catch 'glimpses of the truth' (Heb. 1:1 Phillips). And among the many unfortunate consequences of this tragic exchange is that we now cannot discern how these authors' cloudy portraits of God bear witness to the crucified Christ, as Jesus taught that all Scripture is supposed to do."  p. 1252. 

In the second volume, Boyd unveils four working principles of God's behaviour and character as the working elements that appear when the cruciform hermeneutic and conservative view of Scripture's inspiration is applied to interpreting the violent OT portraits of God. The first is the principle of Divine Accommodation. Like a "non coercive heavenly missionary who accommodates to the primitive understanding of his people's fallen cultural condition," so God is willing to accommodate to Israel's distorted views of Him in order to be in relationship with them so that over time they may come to know who He truly is. God accommodates to the inaccurate sinful fallen imagery Israel has of him so that he can continue remaining connected and over time teach them about who He truly is. 

The second principle is that of Redemptive Withdrawal, where God has done all he can to draw people to him but to no avail as his efforts are met with further alienation. In this context, God withdraws his presence and involvement with the hope that by further alienation Israel will actually return to Him as they feel the full brunt of evil without God's protection or intervention. The third principle tends to work in tandem with the second as it is clear that there is a Cosmic Conflict that God is involved in that predates creation and humanity whereby He has been involved in a war versus other heavenly beings, some who have rebelled and others that haven't made up their mind yet and are in a neutral position as to where their allegiance is. God, from the beginning of time, has been keeping evil at bay - subduing the chaotic forces of this fallen world and bringing peace and calm. God is a controlling force in the creation where He keeps evil forces restrained from reeking havoc on the creation. His non-coercive and un-constricted power uses what Boyd calls an "Aikido like" warfare of non-violence that actually causes evil to implode on itself. This is seen in how Jesus conquers evil by suffering and dying on the cross and so causing the anger of evil to undermine itself through the violence it lashes out on Jesus. That very violence becomes the means by which evil itself is defeated. There are moments in the OT narrative where God actually withdraws His restraining of evil and its activity in the creation to allow evil to lash out punishment on itself. Like God who tamed the chaotic forces of the sea actually lets those forces loose and by doing so allows those very forces to defeat the Egyptian army that was pursuing the Hebrew people in order to reroute Israel's escape from Egypt. 

The fourth principle is that of Semi autonomous Power whereby God lends his power to people and artifacts so that they can independently make decisions on how to use such power. This principle makes sense of the narratives that speak of human agents of God using His power in violent ways such as Elijah's cloak used by Elijah and Elisha for lashing out violently or when the Ark of the Covenant is taken captive and misused and so incurring injury and death to those that attempted to use it contrary to God's own will and so inconsistent with His loving and protective character.  It's like the power of God that resided in Moses' staff and how Moses took that power hostage and used it to reflect his own personal anger when he struck the rock so that Israel could drink fresh water. 

These four principles help make sense of why sometimes God is portrayed as being very violent by ANE OT writers. In an analogy that is very helpful, Boyd speaks of a hypothetical encounter of having seen his wife slap a homeless man on the street as he watched the scene unfold from the other side of the street. It is completely out of character to what he knows about his wife and it forces him to consider that there must be some other logical explanation as to why she behaved that way even though the behaviour is contrary to what he knows about his wife. Later he finds out that she was involved in an undercover operation to uncover the evil plot of a terrorist cell posing as homeless men on the street. The visual cue for his wife to give FBI agents was to slap the man in the face whom she knew was not actually a homeless man even though he was acting like one outside the shelter where she volunteered hundreds of hours helping the homeless in their city. 

Boyd points out that we have to approach God the same way he approached that event he witnessed his wife in. Knowing that God's character is directly revealed to us through what we know of Jesus in his crucifixion, we need to discover what the underlying truth is to the event that on the surface seems rather cruel and violent. Taking the cruciform hermeneutic and conservative view of Scripture's inspiration, Boyd presents what I think is a very viable approach to actually bringing a continuity to the biblical narrative through the controlling hermeneutic of the person and mission of Jesus and applying it to the violent portraits of God accounted for in the OT to make sense of them in Jesus rather than strictly through the indirect notions and interpretations of the OT writers themselves. For Boyd, this does not diminish inspiration but actually sets it in its proper context as God has chosen the Scriptures to come to us. In my scholarly career, I have yet to read anyone else who has given us as viable a picture as Boyd has in making sense of the violence of God in the Biblical narrative. Do yourself a favour and take the time to read these two volumes for yourself and decide after that whether to consider the proposal in its pages a viable alternative.