Cross Vision

How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence

Gregory A. Boyd

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781506432601
• eBook ISBN: 9781506420745
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Renowned pastor-theologian Gregory A. Boyd tackles the Bible's biggest dilemma. The Old Testament God of wrath and violence versus the New Testament God of love and peace—it's a difference that has troubled Christians since the first century. Now, with the sensitivity of a pastor and the intellect of a theologian, Gregory A. Boyd proposes the "cruciform hermeneutic, " a way to read the Old Testament portraits of God through the lens of Jesus' crucifixion. In Cross Vision, Boyd follows up on his epic and groundbreaking study, The Crucifixion of the Warrior God. He shows how the death and resurrection of Jesus reframes the troubling violence of the Old Testament, how all of Scripture reveals God's self-sacrificial love, and, most importantly, how we can follow Jesus' example of peace.

I

The Problem and a Looking-Glass Cross Solution

1

The Elephant

The God of the Old Testament is arguably
the most unpleasant character in all fiction:
jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak;
a vindictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic cleanser;
a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal,
filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic,
capriciously malevolent bully.
—Richard Dawkins^[1]

Sixteen years into our marriage, Shelley and I had to name the proverbial elephant that was in the room of our relationship. And it was an ugly elephant! A void had grown between us almost from the start of our marriage. We loved each other and loved our three children, and we got along reasonably well and had memorable times together. But Shelley and I are wired about as differently as two people can be. Because of this, we never found a way to get deeply inside each other’s heart and mind, and at some point rather early on in our marriage, we gave up trying. Consequently, as the years rolled on, we both increasingly felt alone in our marriage. At the core of our being—our soul—we didn’t feel fully known, loved, or appreciated by the other.

For the first sixteen years of our marriage, the business of raising three children, finishing grad school, supporting the family, engaging in ministry, and everything else that life requires made it pretty easy to suppress our inner pain and ignore the growing gulf. But our kids were growing older, and we each had begun to wonder what our life together would look like without the children in the home.

The elephant became impossible to ignore. We had to finally get real with the fact that we felt like aliens to one another.

***

Acknowledging the elephant unleashed sixteen years’ worth of suppressed loneliness, resentment, and pain, and the ensuing six months were, frankly, pure hell. Only our commitment before God to stay married “for better or for worse” kept us in the game. And truth be told, even that was at times stretched almost to the breaking point.

Thankfully, with the help of some excellent counseling, something beautiful began to emerge out of this hell, and it has continued ever since. It took a lot of work, but Shelley and I slowly discovered ways of getting into each other’s alien inner worlds. And by doing so, we discovered a profound mutual love and friendship we previously never dreamed was possible.

This scary, painful, but transformative period of our marriage illustrates an important truth: The only way to discover the beauty that lies on the other side of a mountain of ugliness is to courageously confront and work through it.

Calling It What It Is

Brothers and sisters who follow Jesus, we have an elephant in our room. We believe that God is altogether beautiful, loving, compassionate, and just. And this belief is well founded, for this is how the Bible generally portrays God. Most importantly, this is the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ. What we tend to ignore, however, is that there are some portraits of God in the OT, which we rightly confess to be “God-breathed” (2 Tim 3:16), that are most definitely not beautiful, loving, compassionate, or just.

In fact, though it may sound irreverent to say it, some portraits of God in the OT are, quite frankly, reallyugly! How else can you honestly describe a depiction of God, for example, ordering his people to mercilessly annihilate every member of the Midianites except for the virgin girls, whom Israelite soldiers were allowed to keep alive to enjoy as spoils of war (Num 31:1–17)?

Suppose you came upon a depiction of a god like this while reading an ancient pagan religious text. Would you hesitate to call it ugly? Of course not. But isn’t it disingenuous to refrain from calling this same depiction “ugly” simply because it’s found in your holy book rather than in someone else’s?

At the same time, admitting that a biblical depiction of God is ugly seems to conflict with the Christian belief that God is beautiful and that everything in the Bible is divinely inspired. So, not knowing what else to do, most Christians go on professing that God is beautiful while trying to ignore the biblical depictions of God that are ugly. Whether we do it consciously or not, we subject the OT to a “textual cleansing” in order to create “an acceptable Bible Lite” for ourselves.^[2]

This is not a helpful strategy. Among other things, even if we rarely think about them, Scripture’s violent portraits of God will continue to pollute our mental images of God until we find a way to reconcile them with Jesus’s supreme revelation of God. And the thing about polluted mental images of God is that they inevitably compromise the vibrancy of our relationship with God, which in turn compromises the passion with which we live out our faith in God.

On top of this, numerous studies have shown that violent depictions of God in literature that is regarded as sacred make believers more inclined toward violence.^[3] Given the rising fear surrounding religiously motivated violence since 9/11, this makes many people understandably concerned about the OT’s violent representations of God.

These divine portraits also give plenty of ammunition to critics of the Bible, and I have met far too many former Christians, and even former pastors, whose faith was destroyed because they found they could no longer defend these ugly portraits against these critics.^[4]

The time for us to name the large and very ugly elephant in our room is long past due. We have to honestly deal with the awful violence that some OT authors ascribe to God.^[5]

The Book I Couldn’t Write

Ten years ago I set out to write a book that attempted to tackle the OT’s violent portraits of God. Like other Evangelical books on this topic, my plan was to put forth the best arguments I had accumulated over the years that attempt to justify the violence of God in the OT.

After writing about fifty pages, I had to quit. My arguments frankly struck me as woefully inadequate. Even if they succeeded in justifying the violence that God commanded or enacted—which they usually didn’t—none of them came close to showing how these portraits were compatible with Jesus’s cross-centered revelation of God.

Even more problematic, however, was that I had come to understand that, according to Jesus, all Scripture is supposed to point to him, and especially to his sacrificial suffering on the cross.^[6] While my best explanations might make the violently behaving God of the OT look a little less nasty, and perhaps sometimes even ethical, they did absolutely nothing to show how these violent divine portraits point to Christ crucified.

Admitting that I could no longer justify the OT’s violent portraits of God put me in a serious dilemma. On the authority of Jesus, I had to affirm that the whole OT is divinely inspired. But also on the authority of Jesus, I could no longer accept the violence that some narratives within this divinely inspired book ascribe to God.

I struggled with this inner conflict for several months. But then something unexpected and wonderful began to happen. I actually began to see how even the most offensively violent portraits of God in the OT reflect and point toward the self-sacrificial and nonviolent character of God that is revealed on the cross.

Most surprisingly of all, I found that the thing that enabled me to see this was that I was no longer trying to justify these offensive pictures! As paradoxical as it sounds, it was only by acknowledging that the violent portraits of God in the OT were not compatible with the God who is fully revealed on the cross that I came to see how these portraits actually point to the God who is fully revealed on the cross!

Well, this set me off on a ten-year reading and writing adventure that resulted in a highly academic, two-volume, 1445-page book called The Crucifixion of the Warrior God.^[7] Obviously, few nonacademics are going to try to tackle a book like that, which is why this much more reasonably sized book was written.

But it all began when I stopped trying to justify the violence that some OT authors ascribe to God while continuing to believe that all Scripture, including its most violent portraits of God, are divinely inspired for the ultimate purpose of pointing people to the crucified Christ, who is the very “life” of Scripture (John 5:38–47).

Embracing the Problem

For this reason, readers should be forewarned that I am not going to try to minimize the moral awfulness or put the best possible spin on the OT’s violent depictions of God, as Evangelical apologists typically do.^[8] If a biblical author ascribes an action to God that we would normally consider morally awful, I will not hesitate to admit th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Introduction: Something Else Must Be Going On
• The Problem and a Looking-Glass Cross Solution
• Biblical, Historical, and Ancient Cultural Support
• The True Nature of God’s Judgment
• Seeing Something Else through the Looking-Glass Cross
• Postscript: Four Words of Encouragement
• Acknowledgments
• Index of Authors and Subjects
• Index of Scripture