Category Archives: violence

Greg Boyd’s Christ-Centered Reading Strategy [CWG chapter three]

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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 →

Greg Boyd’s Peaceable God and the Bible [Chapter one]

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Ted Grimsrud—May 27, 2017

[This is the second 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 first post may be found here—and an index of the series here.]

In chapter one, “The Faith of Jacob: Wrestling with ‘Strange’ and ‘Alien’ Portraits of God” (pages 3–34), Boyd addresses several foundational issues. He writes about the importance of understanding the Bible as inspired (“God-breathed”) Christian scripture, the difference between reading the Bible in covenantal (traditional) rather than psychological (modern) terms, the profound problems that arise when God is seen as “a god who fights” (21) rather than a god who “refuses to fight,” and the need for his sympathetic readers actively to “renounce” the “violence in our own sacred Scripture” (31).

The authority of the Bible

Boyd’s first word about the Bible is that it is “God-breathed” (or, an alternative translation of 2 Timothy 3:16, “inspired”). He agrees “with the historic-orthodox tradition that this ‘breathing’ entails that God is, in some sense, the ultimate author of all canonical works” (5) I can’t say that I find the metaphor of God as the “author” of the Bible to be very helpful. I believe we should start with the assumption that the Bible is written by human beings—some of whom are identified for us, some about whose authorship we may gain pretty good guesses, and some who will remain anonymous. I find any hint that God in some sense overrode the humanness of these texts to be problematic, and a misleading detour from our needed work genuinely to understand the texts and their meaning.

Part of the issue in talking about “divine authorship” (this term strikes me mainly as a rhetorical device to strengthen claims concerning the authority of the Bible), though, is how we apply that idea. I’m not totally opposed to affirming some weak sense of divine involvement in the fitting together of the entire collection of books we call our Bible. Not that God was the “author” but that there was a gentle guidance in bringing the various writings together. We could call this a kind of a macro-inspiration that is best discerned not in the Bible’s “infallibility” (a word Boyd will affirm later in the book) as much as in its coherence and its applicability for “training in the ways of justice” (the words, actually, of 2 Timothy 3:16).

Boyd seems to want to apply authority and inspiration more on a micro-level in giving God-authored status to each particular text. He will qualify this application in major ways; surely many strong inerrantists will find his approach woefully problematic. However, I suspect that part of the “conundrum” he will wrestle with in this book is made more difficult by the priority he seems to place on finding each specific text in the Bible to be “infallible” in its theology, if not literal historicity. Continue reading →

Is the Bible a Peace Book? Engaging Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God [Intro]

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Ted Grimsrud—May 25, 2017

It is a measure of Greg Boyd’s stature that Fortress Press, perhaps the most highly respected publisher of theological books in the United States, would indulge him by publishing Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross in the form that it has. Crucifixion of the Warrior God (hereafter CWG) comes to us as a single book in two volumes, a total of 1,486 pages.

CWG, though, is not an esoteric work of high-level academic density, accessible only to elite initiates. Certainly its size and detailed argumentation are not for the faint of heart, but CWG is the kind of book one might expect from a pastor-scholar—which is what Boyd is. It is clearly written, passionate in tone, and pursues a deeply practical agenda: How do Christians who are committed to the message of Jesus, the Peacemaker, understand their faith in light of biblical materials that paint a picture of God as a God of war and violence?

I find wrestling with this book to be one of most engaging and challenging investments of intellectual and spiritual energy I have made in quite some time. I have had a hard time putting the book down, though it’s not exactly a page-turner. In fact, I have turned the pages very slowly because there are so many ideas that demand my attention. Given the number of pages the book contains, I have decided that the only way I can justify to myself the energy I put into wrestling with CWG is to write about it. So I am embarking on a series of blog posts that will work through the book at some length.

I am not going to write a review exactly nor a summary of the book’s main ideas. Rather, I will reflect on issues that arise for me as I read and thereby develop my thinking about peace, the Bible, Jesus’s crucifixion, and the character of God with Boyd’s impressive book as a catalyst. There will be chunks of the book that I will not address and there will be some parts that I will pay a great deal of attention to. And I won’t claim that in focusing on what I will focus on I will be reflect Boyd’s own priorities so much as my priorities.

We already have many reviews and many more will come. Boyd himself has provided summaries of his main ideas in writings and on-line sermons and lectures (see his ReKnew site). As well, he will publish a shorter and more accessible version of his argument this summer (Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence). What I offer here is more about my own thinking—as a pacifist, Anabaptist, anarchistically-inclined social ethicist who has deeply ambivalent feelings about mainstream Christianity, theological orthodoxy, and the legacy of the Christian tradition. However, I also offer one critical reading of CWG that will probably provide a distinctive angle for understanding Boyd’s project. Continue reading →

New thinking on nonviolence: A review of Advancing Nonviolence and Social Transformation: New Perspectives on Nonviolent Theories

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Heather Eaton and Lauren Michelle Levesque, eds. Advancing Nonviolence and Social Transformation: New Perspectives on Nonviolent Theories. Equinox Publishing, 2016. Xiii + 364pp. 

The 20th century has been called the century of total war. The incredible expansion of the devastating power of war, the heretofore unimagined globalization of warfare, and the creation of new weapons of mass destruction have left humanity on a precipice of vulnerability that renders the survival of our species in jeopardy. Many other expressions of violence have also continued to undermine human and ecological wellbeing.

On the other hand, one glimmer of hope arises from the reality that the 20th century also saw the emergence of strategies of self-conscious nonviolent action that provides ways to imagine overcoming the scourge of out of control violence. Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., are the two great prophets of nonviolent action who consistently show up on lists of the world’s most influential people of the 20th century.

Gandhi famously stated that nonviolence is a very young and immature “science” that can only get stronger and more effective with practice. Erica Chenoweth is a more recent thinker who has researched social change movements and argues, based on her data, that nonviolence is noticeably more effective than violence for bringing about change.

Nonetheless, our understanding of nonviolence remains rudimentary. The literature is expanding, as is the broadening sense of the applicability of nonviolence to a wide range of human endeavors—not only with political action but also education, criminal justice, and many more areas. Continue reading →

An interview on justice, mercy, and God’s love

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Ted Grimsrud—June 17, 2015

In February, 2015, I was privileged to be a guest on a radio show, Community Justice Talks, on KHEN-FM, Salida, Colorado. The show’s host, Molly Rowan Leach, interviewed me for about half an hour. We talked about an article I had written, “Violence as a Theological Problem” and my two books, Instead of Atonement: The Bible’s Salvation Story and Our Hope for Justice, and The Good War That Wasn’t—And Why It Matters: World War II’s Moral Legacy.

The recording of that interview is now available. Here’s a link to a page that allows visitors to listen to the interview directly or to download a podcast. Or it can be listened to here as well. What follows is an edited written transcript of the interview.

Molly Rowan Leach—This is Community Justice Talks. And I’m your host, Molly Rowan Leach. And you’re listening to KHEN-LP Salida, Colorado, 106.9 FM. You can stream us at khen.org. It’s great to be here today and I am really looking forward to the conversation that we’re about to have with Professor Ted Grimsrud from Eastern Mennonite University. He’s on the line live with us, coming from his university back east in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Here on Community Justice Talks we like to talk with people from local and statewide as well as nationwide movements towards solutions in conflict and crime. This show aims to provide hope, solutions, and to have an open, honest dialogue about justice that is unfiltered—at the very personal as well as communal and national levels.

We are focusing today on unpacking violence as a theological problem. Ted had a blog post that was published just last week on Open Democracy, which is an excellent blog and news site. You can get more information and read blogs and news there at opendemocracy.net. His post, on the 16th of February, was called “Violence as a Theological Problem.” It has a lot of inspiring details that unpack why we in the United States seem to justify violence. He writes: “Deeply ingrained in the religious consciousness of the United States is the belief that retribution is God’s will. According to the logic of retribution, holiness governs God’s behavior. As a holy God, God cannot stand to be in the presence of impurity, of human sin. Human beings invariably violate that holiness because all of us are sinners. God is bound to respond to sin with punishment because to forgive would violate God’s holiness. Compassion without satisfaction is not possible for God in this tradition.”

Further on in the article, Ted talks about restorative justice. And of course at Eastern Mennonite University, there’s a powerful program called the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice that was spearheaded by Dr. Howard Zehr, who is considered and honored as one of the wayshowers and leaders of the movement here in the United States, at least of the modern movement.

Ted is Professor of Theology and Peace Studies. Prior to teaching at EMU, beginning in 1996, he served ten years as a pastor in Mennonite churches in Oregon, Arizona, and South Dakota. He is especially interested in the connection between Christian theology and pacifism. He teaches classes in theology, peace studies, ethics, and the Bible. His books include, most recently, published just this last November, The Good War That Wasn’t—And Why It Matters: The Moral Legacy of World War II. He also blogs at ThinkingPacifism.net and has a website that gathers his writings at PeaceTheology.net. Continue reading →