Ted Grimsrud—December 30, 2017
[This is the 24th in a long series of posts that will work through Greg Boyd’s important book, The Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Fortress, 2017). The 23rd post may be found here—and an index of the series here.]
Due to the unusual length of this post, it has been divided into two parts. This is the second part, the first part may be found here.
God’s way of dealing with sin and evil
Boyd once more emphasizes the role of the withdrawal of God’s “protection” in dealing with the sin problem. “In a world that is presently caught in the cross fire of a cosmic war and that is engulfed by violent forces of destruction, God need never throw people down to have them experience the destructive consequence of their sin. Rather, God needs only to stop preventing people from falling to have them experience this” (1070).
Now, I do think that Boyd’s sensibility here could be helpful if it were part of a strategy to cultivate love as our only weapon—and if such a strategy were applied to socio-political analysis and action. Martin Luther King, Jr., would be a well-known example of a Christian leader who understood the call to resist evil being about both “spiritual warfare” and concrete political acts of resistance—all undertaken in the name of love. Boyd certainly does affirm love, but he offers little help in discerning our socio-political context (I have noted his tone deaf positive allusions to our militarized Department of Homeland Security in its work vs. “terrorism” in his story about his wife). A second thought is that Boyd’s discussion of God’s way of causing people to suffer the consequences of their sin turns our attention in precisely the wrong direction. It gives “Satan” way too much power, and it seems to reduce the struggle against evil and sin to a moralistic process where God mainly wants to punish sinners—albeit indirectly.
Boyd disagrees with the idea that he has a Manichaean-like dualism that gives equal power to good powers and evil powers. In his defense against that charge (1071), he argues for a biblical portrayal of the ability of Satan to corrupt nature, but that (unlike Manichaeanism) God is the sole creator and that creation was originally good and not a mixture of good and evil. I think, though, that even seeing Satan as a personal being who actively corrupts nature is problematic. I believe, instead, that we are better off using Satan as a metaphor for the corruption that is already there. Is Satan actually an active personal agent or simply a way of talking about the dynamics of the world we live in (that include human idolatry). Continue reading
Peace Theology 