I had a great conversation about peace theology on the Libertarian Christian Podcast. The host, Doug Stuart, did an excellent job of asking questions and making comments that helped me say what I wanted to say.
We didn’t talk about capitalism, though….
[The link below goes to the podcast. I hope to post a written transcript before long.]
Ted Grimsrud—July 17, 2017
[This is the 11th in a long series of posts that will work through an important new book, Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Fortress Press, 2017). The tenth post may be found here—and an index of the series here.]
Boyd’s alternative
In chapter ten, “A Meaning Worthy of God: The Reinterpretation Solution,” (pages 417-62), Boyd sketches his alternative to the dismissal and synthesis “solutions” for the problem of the OT violent portraits of God. The “reinterpretation solution,” in a nutshell, involves understanding the cross of Christ as the key for interpreting every part of the Bible. Boyd will argue that if we keep the cross always central, we will ultimately be able to discern how every part of the “God-breathed” Bible confirms the truths revealed in the cross. As it turns out, such a reading strategy does involve some creative interpretations because the way that some texts confirm the message of the cross is not always obvious—perhaps at times not even apparent to the original writers and communities that produced the texts.
In developing this alternative, Boyd pays significant attention to early (pre-fourth century) Christian interpreters, especially the fascinating and controversial theologian, Origen. I think that Origen’s allegorical approach is fascinating. As Boyd points out, it is good—following Origen—not to obsess about “the original meaning” of a text (contrary to tendencies among both historical-critical and evangelical approaches). I tend to think that paying attention to the original context of a passage is important but that we also simultaneously should take other elements into account such as our own context, the broader biblical context, and the historical dynamics between our present and the time of the text; though I am not attracted to Origen-like allegorical readings. One big problem I have with Origen as presented by Boyd is a sense I have that Origen’s approach required a much more interventionist view of God as, in effect, controlling the production of the entire Bible (428).
I agree with Boyd to a degree when he emphasizes that the meaning of the whole Bible is best seen in Jesus as the culmination to the story (432-3). However, I would say that the Jesus who catches up the meaning of the rest of the Bible is not the same as the divine Christ and perfect savior of “historic orthodoxy” but is the prophet Jesus who taught and embodied the deepest meaning of Torah in continuity with the OT prophets. And unlike Origen, and maybe Boyd, I’d say the “deepest meaning” is not mysterious or hidden, but is open, mundane, concrete, practical, and embodied clearly and directly.
I see some parallels between the way Jesus embodied the prophetic tradition and the way much more recent prophets such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., (imperfectly) embodied that same tradition. What all three did as much as anything was make clear to the watching world what was potentially present all along—embodied restorative justice, love, and shalom. It strikes me that this kind of understanding of truth and meaning is a bit different than Origen’s sense of the “spiritual meaning” of texts and traditions (433) that the original writers and readers likely were not aware of. Continue reading
Ted Grimsrud—July 7, 2017
[This is the ninth in a long series of posts that will work through an important new book, Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Fortress Press, 2017). The eighth post may be found here—and an index of the series here.]
Three possible “solutions”
In chapter eight, “Wrestling with Yahweh’s Violence, Part I: The Dismissal Solution,” (pages 335-78), Boyd examines various approaches Christians have taken to resolve the challenges of understanding the violent portraits. He suggests three main options: (1) “The Dismissal Solution,” which is simply to dismiss the OT as an authority for Christians, in part due to the truthfulness of Jesus’ peaceable message; (2) “The Synthesis Solution,” the consensus approach since the 5th century, which is to accept that the “God-breathed” character of scripture requires accepting the violent portraits of God in the OT at face value in spite of Jesus’s message with the tension resolved by appeal to “the mysterious transcendence of God;” and (3) “The Reinterpretation Solution,” which is to accept the truthfulness of both the OT and the message of Jesus, but to reinterpret the OT so as to see it as consistent with the message of Jesus. (p. 336)
Boyd will argue for the third option. He will go to great lengths in the rest of the book to make the case for an reinterpreting approach where he argues that below the surface message of a violent God in many OT texts, “something else is going on” that ultimately affirms the message of a nonviolent God found in the story of the cross of Christ.
A different kind of approach
In my interaction with Boyd’s argument in the pages to come, I will make the case for a different kind of approach than any of these three. I find all three to be inadequate, including Boyd’s reinterpretation solution. Each of these approaches as described by Boyd misses the centrality to the OT when read as a whole of what my OT teacher Millard Lind called “theo-politics.” The politics of God as presented in the OT are best understood, in my view, by reading the OT as a whole and paying special attention to its Big Story.
The problem that Boyd’s three “solutions” all share is that they focus on discrete passages at least somewhat in isolation from the place each passage has in a bigger story with its theo-political emphasis. I will also argue that the politics of God as presented in the OT are pacifist politics, ultimately—and, the politics of God as presented in the OT are in close continuity with the politics of Jesus. And, I should add, by “politics” I don’t mean the partisan, state-focused politics that Boyd seems to understand politics to mean. Rather, I mean the broad sense of how human beings order our social lives, with the understanding that our social and spiritual lives are by definition part of one whole—so we cannot accurately talk of a separation between spiritual/religious life and political life. Continue reading
Ted Grimsrud—June 22, 2017
[This is the seventh in a long series of posts that will work through an important new book, Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Fortress Press, 2017). The sixth post may be found here—and an index of the series here.]
Arguments against seeing the cross as central
In chapter six, “Is the Centrality of the Cross Thesis Defensible?” (pages 229–77), Boyd responds to what he sees as the two main objections to his argument about the centrality of the cross both for Jesus’s mission and for the overall message of the Bible. These objections are: (1) that early Christianity did not see the cross as central as evidenced by the lack of the use of the cross as a symbol in Christian art during Christianity’s first four centuries and (2) that not very many theologians in Christian history have recognized the centrality of the cross. Since these aren’t the main questions I have about Boyd’s cross thesis, I read through this chapter fairly quickly. It did raise a few issues for me, though.
A question I do have is whether the main problem with Boyd’s thesis is with regard to how he interprets the New Testament, not whether he’s consistent with understandings of the cross in the history of Christianity. As a pacifist, I am used to having convictions that most Christians don’t have. That early Christian art or that Christian theologians over the past 2,000 years would not share Boyd’s view of the centrality of the cross is not necessarily evidence against Boyd’s argument in my mind.
My question is simply whether Boyd is correct in seeming to understand the main referent in New Testament cross language to be simply to Jesus’s death. Is it not possible that “the cross” and related images more often allude to Jesus’s life, a life that resulted in his being executed by the Romans? A significant point if we think of the cross more broadly would be that along with Boyd’s important emphasis on the cross as conveying a message of Jesus’s self-giving love, it would also convey of message of Jesus’s practice of forgiveness apart from sacrifice, of Jesus’s political radicalism that led Rome to crucify him as a rebel, and of Jesus’s continuity with the OT prophets and his embrace of a prophetic understanding of Torah. If the cross is seen as a symbol of the entirety of Jesus’s ministry, we may make more sense of Jesus’s oft repeated call to his followers to take up the cross in imitation of his life of service, resistance, and courage. As I have mentioned before, I do not mean to suggest that Boyd would necessarily disagree with my comments here about imitating Jesus’s life—but this kind of language is rarely a part of his discussion of the cross.
The NT text I am most familiar with, the book of Revelation, illustrates my point here. Revelation does not speak of the cross overtly very often, but it does commonly use the term “blood,” which I imagine most readers would understand essentially to be a synonym with cross. When Revelation mentions “blood,” we could generally substitute the term “cross.” I believe, though, that Revelation uses the image of blood not to refer to Jesus’s death per se. Rather, blood has to do with the entirety of Jesus’s ministry, with the emphasis on the life he lived. Because this life involved resistance to the political and religious structures, it led to bloody responses. And Jesus did not swerve from his commitment to a life of love and healing even in the face of those responses. So, the message Revelation gives us about Jesus’s cross is a call to discipleship. Continue reading
Ted Grimsrud—June 16, 2017
[This is the sixth in a long series of posts that will work through an important new book, Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Fortress Press, 2017). The fifth post may be found here—and an index of the series here.]
The cross in the gospels
In chapter five, “The Cruciform Center, Part 2: The Cross as the Thematic Center of the Gospel” (pages 173–229), Boyd has a helpful treatment of the cross as presented in the gospels. His discussion perceptively makes clear how the God of nonviolent love is revealed in the story of Jesus’s crucifixion—and, so importantly, makes clear how this picture of God’s love provides a model for how we ourselves should live.
However, though I greatly appreciate these points that Boyd makes, I still felt that his focus was a bit off. I think this may be an issue of tone more than intended content, though I am not sure. I will continue to reflect on this as I work through CWG. I am concerned that Boyd seems to say that the cross was the point of Jesus’s life rather than being the (not precisely foreseen) consequence of Jesus’s life. Was Jesus’s purpose from the start that he would die a sacrificial death? The NT can seem to suggest this, but I think it is a problematic emphasis.
I believe that the true meaning of the story the gospels tell is to be found in Jesus’s life—and that it is his life that is exemplary for us. The way the Romans (in collaboration with the religious leaders) executed Jesus—and the fact that they executed him at all—followed directly from the way he lived. Whatever meaning the cross has, then, derives from Jesus’s life. It was because he so profoundly embodied God’s love (both in the sense of how he showed mercy toward and practiced solidarity with “the least of these” and in the sense of how he confronted the blasphemies and injustices of those seemingly all-powerful human structures that claimed to act on God’s behalf) that Jesus was executed. The cross, then, reveals the fullness of the Powers’ opposition to God-in-the-flesh. It is not intrinsically revelatory or salvific.
So, I would say that Jesus’s cross is more mundanely (this-worldly) practical than Boyd seems to allow for. Boyd presents the meaning of the cross as having relevance most of all on what we could call the cosmic or theological level, as a necessary sacrifice that makes salvation possible. In doing so, he treats it almost ahistorically, as if the specific context for Jesus being executed is not particularly relevant. I would say, in contrast, that it is precisely the context that is most important. Jesus in his life that ultimately led to his death exposes the idolatrous nature of the political and religious institutions of his day. In doing so, he reveals what kind of life God wants human beings to live and what kind of resistance to the Powers is called for. The central meaning of the cross is for this world and for how we live in this world. Continue reading
Ted Grimsrud—June 12, 2017
[This is the fifth in a long series of posts that will work through an important new book, Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Fortress Press, 2017). The fourth post may be found here—and an index of the series here.]
The cross
In chapter four, “The Cruciform Center, Part I: The Cross as the Supreme Revelation of God” (pages 141–171), Boyd begins to explain what he means by what he calls a “cruciform hermeneutic”—his approach to interpreting the entire Bible in light of Jesus’s crucifixion. This doesn’t simply mean saying that the crucifixion is the most important story in the Bible. More than that, Boyd believes that everything else in the Bible (including the OT) must be seen as in some sense pointing to the crucifixion. It will take a lot of writing to explain how this dynamic works. The key purpose of explaining “the cruciform center” here, we will ultimately learn, is that this is how we might resolve the challenge of properly understanding “the OT’s violent portraits of God.”
Boyd asserts that the OT must be interpreted in light of Jesus, never placed alongside him as though it was a supplementary revelation. We should be able to discern how the OT narrative, and how each aspect of it, bears witness to Christ (142), especially Christ’s cross. In contrast, I would tend to take the opposite approach in that I would see the fundamental revelation being the exodus and the gift of Torah. We recognize Jesus as truthful, as the Son of God, because of how he embodies that same revelation.
Boyd suggest, sadly, that for the past 1,600 years theologians have indeed tended to read scripture christologically but they have not rethought the meaning of the OT’s violent portraits of God. This dynamic shows that we need to go a step further and advocate a crucicentric, rather than merely christocentric, orientation (142). By “crucicentric” Boyd means “the nonviolent, self-sacrificial, enemy-embracing love of God revealed on the cross” (142). This is helpful, but I ask why center this notion of self-sacrificial love on the cross rather than on Jesus’s life? I suspect it is because on some level Boyd still accepts the evangelical focus on Jesus’s death as a necessary sacrifice. I will need to monitor this issue as I go through CWG—paying special attention to the problems for nonviolence that belief in a necessary sacrifice raise.
“Wrath” and love
Boyd understands God’s “wrath” not to be an independent characteristic of God’s character. He writes, “If God’s love alone is the one ‘absolute,’ then God’s ‘wrath,’ as well as every other aspect of God, must ultimately be understood to be a manifestation of this love from a particular perspective, including the perspective of those who are hardened against it and thus experience it as ‘wrath’” (146). I think this is a good statement, but I would suggest that if God’s love truly is absolute, God would not turn away and would protect everyone—if God could. That is, I think Boyd’s point bumps up against the idea that God’s love has to be seen to have limits if we accept (which I don’t) that there are people who are excluded from it. I think it’s better to understand the “limits” as intrinsic in God’s actual lack of power to control the world. God simply can’t protect people. More on this in future posts. Continue reading
Ted Grimsrud—June 2, 2017
[This is the fourth in a long series of posts that will work through an important new book, Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Fortress Press, 2017). The third post may be found here—and an index of the series here.]
Christ as the center?
In chapter three, “Finding Jesus in the Old Testament: The Christocentric Hermeneutic of the Early Church” (pages 93–141), Boyd further deepens his analysis of how Christians might manage to find even the violent portraits of God in the Old Testament to be positive expressions of God’s nonviolent love. The key, he suggests, is to embrace the approach the first Christians used, which was to operate with the assumption that Christ was the goal and fulfillment of the entire OT, that is, of each part of the OT. The way they interpreted the Bible—and the way we should interpret the Bible—is to read it all christocentrically. For Boyd, that kind of reading boils down to seeing every part of the Bible in some sense witnessing to Christ on the cross.
He criticizes “the historic-orthodox church” for not “wrestling with a Christocentric way of interpreting the Old Testament’s violent portraits of God” (95). In effect, notably after the epoch-changing reign of Constantine as the first “Christian” emperor, Christians tended simply to affirm that the violent portraits provided a justification for their affirmation of the use of violence by their governments.
Insofar as Boyd means that Christians should have wrestled with applying the centrality of Jesus Christ to learning to embrace the way of nonviolence in face of the “violent portraits” instead of using those portraits to justify warism, I strongly agree. However, I suspect that the failure to do such wrestling is indicative of problems at the root of the “historic-orthodox” project in general and specifically with the version of “christocentrism” that came to characterize post-Constantine Christianity. What changed from the NT and early Christianity, among other things, was the meaning of “Christ” itself. Rather than hinting that the failure to wrestle with the violent portraits in a pacifist way is incongruous, I think Boyd would do better to scrutinize more critically the “historic-orthodox” tradition itself. How was it that the tradition could in some sense be “christocentric” without being pacifist?
The “orthodox” evasion of Jesus’s message of peace
One of my major theological concerns for years has been to try to understand why Christianity has been almost unanimously non-pacifist for the vast majority of history down to the present. I find it difficult to imagine that such a strong non-pacifist consensus could help but be a product of theological assumptions central to the tradition. Hence, I have reason to be critical of the entire theological framework of “historic-orthodoxy,” a framework that Boyd, amidst a few critical comments, seems to accept as valid. Continue reading
