Greg Boyd’s “Cruciform Hermeneutic”

The cross does not just happen to be the place where God decided to concretely illustrate the kind of love he eternally is. The cross rather contains within itself a logic that necessitates that we embrace it as the definitive, unsurpassable revelation of God’s loving nature. (CWG I, p. 154)

The crucified Christ…is nothing less than the key that unlocks all the secrets of Christian theology. (J. Moltmann, quoted in CWG I, p. 159)

The claim I will be defending throughout this work is that there is a way of interpreting Scripture’s violent portraits of God that not only resolves the moral challenges they pose but that also discloses how these portraits bear witness to God’s non-violent, self-sacrificial, enemy-loving character that was definitively revealed on Calvary. (CWG I, xxxiv)

I have argued that Jesus is “the center and circumference of the Bible” while the cross is the center and circumference of Jesus. And this means that everything in Scripture should be interpreted through this lens, including the OT’s violent portraits of God. Moreover, it means that while there are other criteria by which proposed interpretations of passages can be evaluated, such as their correspondence to the teaching of the whole canon, the ultimate criterion that interpretations must be assessed by is their correspondence to the revelation of God on the cross. (CWG I, p. 227)

• • •

It’s hard to know where to begin when responding to a 1400 page, two volume work. So I’ve decided to cut right to the chase in looking at Greg Boyd’s The Crucifixion of the Warrior God. The heart and soul of Boyd’s argument is what he calls the “Cruciform Hermeneutic.” I simply want to try and set this out before you as best I can today for your consideration and our discussion.

The Cruciform Hermeneutic can be summarized like this:

• The heart and center of Jesus’ identity and mission is the cross.
• On the cross, Jesus provided the definitive revelation of who God is — a God of self-giving, non-violent, enemy-embracing love.
• We are to read all scripture and its portrayals of God in the light of this supreme revelation on the cross.
• If we do that, even the Bible’s violent depictions of God as a Divine Warrior must in some way point to the cross and the loving God it reveals.

Thus, the subtitle for Greg Boyd’s book is “Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross.”

If you’ve been reading the past two days, I think you can see some differences between Boyd’s approach and the ones we’ve discussed from John Polkinghorne and Pete Enns.

Those scholars emphasize principles of accommodation and development. The violent depictions of God in the Hebrew Bible such as those in Joshua regarding the conquest of Canaan represent ancient ways of understanding God that remain intact in scripture. God accommodates himself to the points of view of the authors of scripture and allows them to tell his story.

Furthermore, the Bible shows a process of growth and maturation in the knowledge of God as Israel’s story develops. Since, in Enns’s words, “God lets his children tell the story” in their own words and out of the socio-cultural context in which they lived, we read many things in the Hebrew Bible that represent more immature perspectives. But one characteristic of the Hebrew Bible is that it contains an ongoing conversation in which these perspectives are debated within Israel. For example, the Israelites under Joshua could hardly conceive of God showing mercy to their enemies as they seized their land, while prophets like Isaiah envision a time when all nations will live in peace. The prophet Nahum calls down judgment upon Assyria, while the story of Jonah emphasizes God’s mercy toward the Ninevites. And so on.

Greg Boyd discusses these ways of reading the Hebrew Bible along with some of the other ways the church has wrestled with such violent portraits of God and their incongruity with the self-giving love of God revealed in Jesus. He lists two broad categories of approach:

• The Dismissal Solution, as represented by Marcion, who simply set aside the Hebrew Bible as having any authority for Christians.
• The Synthesis Solution, in which interpreters accept that Christ is the supreme revelation of God, but because of a “high” view of scripture, believe that we must simultaneously accept the Hebrew Bible’s violent depictions of God as accurate revelations.

I have difficulties with the way Boyd defines and describes these “solutions” and delineates their adherents, but we’ll save that for another day. The main point is that Boyd rejects these approaches as insufficient for a proper theological reading of the Bible.

The Synthesis Solution, as well as the Dismissal Solution, are premised on the post-fifth-century assumption that the meaning any particular divine portrait had for the original audience is the meaning it must have for us. Both approaches thus assume that the revelation of God in Christ affords us no privileged insight into the ultimate meaning of these portraits. And this is why these approaches assume that the only options available to us are to either reject these portraits and hold fast to the absoluteness of the revelation of God in Christ, or to embrace the surface meaning of these portraits and to thus allow them to qualify the revelation of God in Christ (p. 418).

Boyd’s alternative to these options is what he calls “The Reinterpretation Option.”

If, as I have argued, all Scripture must bear witness to the crucified Christ, and if we can neither dismiss nor simply embrace the OT’s violent divine portraits, our only remaining option is to look for a way of interpreting these portraits that discloses how they reflect the self-sacrificial love of God revealed on Calvary.

He sees this option reflected in the writings of a number of early church fathers, including Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, John Cassian, and especially Origen. Boyd’s approach differs somewhat from these witnesses, in that they interpreted the offensive materials in the OT allegorically.

Origen, for example, saw the conquest narratives “as types and shadows of the spiritual conflict Jesus had to engage in and, therefore, that his followers are to engage in” (p. 445). This, according to Boyd, reflects the church father’s “spiritual warfare worldview,” an apocalyptic perspective that sees the conflicts throughout creation as cosmic battles between God and the unseen powers of evil and sin.

What Greg Boyd shares in common with Origen and others is a theological approach to the biblical texts. In setting forth his cruciform hermeneutic, he does not try to actually engage the difficult texts of the Hebrew Bible and offer any novel interpretations of them. In fact, he does not deny that, in many of those texts (though not all), the authors intended to ascribe violence to God or to portray him as commanding it.

Rather, here — and at this point in my analysis I think this is the key to understanding Boyd, as well as the ultimate reason that I don’t think he can fully justify his approach — Boyd is encouraging us to come at the text indirectly, through a particular theological lens that allows us to see a deeper “meaning” in it. To read the Bible correctly (and thus come to terms with these texts), we must take up an explicitly theological way of reading.

Here is one of the key passages of CWG. Read this carefully; it is central.

Rather, as I mentioned in the introduction to this volume, the hermeneutic I am proposing is theological in nature, for it is premised on the conviction that God’s definitive self-revelation on the cross gives us a perspective that can discern a dimension of truth in OT passages, and especially in its violent depictions of God, that the authors of the passages could not have discerned. I will argue that as we interpret these violent portraits through the lens of the cross, we can discern that what God was doing when he “breathed” these violent portraits through ancient authors anticipates, participates in, and thereby bears witness to what God did in a decisive manner, and for all humanity, on the cross. We can, in a word, discern in these violent portraits that God was bearing the sins of his people and was thereby taking on an ugly literary semblance that reflected that sin, just as he did in a historical way for all humanity on Calvary. (p. 457)

Next week, we’ll talk more about this remarkable book, and I will try to give more of an analysis and response to Greg Boyd’s approach.

Note from CM: First of all, I want to commend and thank everyone for one of the best discussions of the Bible and theological issues this week that I’ve ever been part of. This has been most stimulating and encouraging.

Today, as we prepare to look at Greg Boyd’s book, The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, I give you one more quote on the nature of Scripture, especially in the light of some of the ways it portrays God and some of the apparently less-than-edifying materials it contains. Lewis’s focus is not on the violent passages such as the conquest, but on the Psalms. But the Psalms raise, in some ways, similar issues. How does God speak through words of humans about God and addressed to God? Words that convey clearly all of our human limitations and foibles? Words that are imperfect and messy; as Lewis says, “untidy and leaky”?

• • •

This is from C.S. Lewis and his book, Reflections on the Psalms.

The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naïvety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not ‘the Word of God’ in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.

To a human mind this working-up (in a sense imperfectly), this sublimation (incomplete) of human material, seems, no doubt, an untidy and leaky vehicle. We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form— something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table. One can respect, and at moments envy, both the Fundamentalist’s view of the Bible and the Roman Catholic’s view of the Church. But there is one argument which we should beware of using for either position: God must have done what is best, this is best, therefore God has done this. For we are mortals and do not know what is best for us, and it is dangerous to prescribe what God must have done— especially when we cannot, for the life of us, see that He has after all done it.

…Certainly it seems to me that from having had to reach what is really the Voice of God in the cursing Psalms through all the horrible distortions of the human medium, I have gained something I might not have gained from a flawless, ethical exposition. The shadows have indicated (at least to my heart) something more about the light. Nor would I (now) willingly spare from my Bible something in itself so anti-religious as the nihilism of Ecclesiastes. We get there a clear, cold picture of man’s life without God. That statement is itself part of God’s word. We need to have heard it. Even to have assimilated Ecclesiastes and no other book in the Bible would be to have advanced further towards truth than some men do.

• C.S. Lewis

Note from CM: When I have a question about reading the Hebrew Bible, one of my first stops is Pete Enns. We reviewed his great book, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It, a while back, and since one of its emphases is on helping Bible readers understand its portrayal of the violent, genocidal God portrayed in many OT texts, I thought we should hear from him on this week when we’re considering Mr. Boyd’s new book, The Crucifixion of the Warrior God.

• • •

God killing people, both Israelites and others, isn’t a last-ditch measure of an otherwise patient deity. It’s the go-to punishment for disobedience. To put a fine point on it, this God is flat-out terrifying: he comes across as a perennially hacked-off warrior-god, more Megatron than heavenly Father. We’re not the first ones to be puzzled and bothered about God’s violence in the Bible; both Christians and Jews have worked on this issue ever since there’s been a Bible.

• Peter Enns

✑

Let’s focus on one particular issue of the Warrior God in the Hebrew Bible — his treatment of the Canaanites.

Pete Enns reminds us that the Canaanites are toast from the beginning of the Hebrew Bible. Right after the Flood, Noah’s son Ham treats his drunken, naked father with disrespect. In response, Noah goes ballistic, cursing Ham and all his progeny forever. Turns out that means the Canaanites. Right from the beginning. Long before we ever get to Joshua and the conquest, we have been forewarned that “Canaanite” is a dirty word, and that they are doomed from the start.

Later, in preparation for the conquest, here’s what the author of Deuteronomy recorded as God’s instructions to the invading Israelites:

But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God.

• Deut 20:16-18

Enns comments on our impulse to vindicate God for these horrific commands.

Many Bible readers feel the strong impulse to get God off the hook for acting this way, which means finding a good way to end the following sentence: “It’s a perfectly fine and right thing for God to order the extermination of Canaanites and take their land because . . .”

Over the course of several chapters, he discusses a few of the most common, unsatisfying answers people give and responds to them effectively, showing that they really don’t hold up.

• God is the sovereign king of the universe, and his unfathomable will is not to be questioned by puny mortals, so shut up about it.
• Sure, Jesus talks about loving your enemies, but Jesus also talks about throwing sinners into hell to burn forever.
• Sure, God killed Canaanites, but we have to balance it out with those parts where God was nicer.
• The Canaanites got exactly what they deserved because they were utterly morally corrupt.

Then Peter Enns suggests a different approach.

He starts by suggesting that we respect the Bible’s ancient voice and realize that we are hearing stories from a very old time, place, and cultural context. The Israelites shared with their neighbors a common tribal view of the world — “Taking land and defeating enemies with the blessing of the gods was as common in the ancient world as Dunkin’ Donuts in New England.”

Second, he reminds us that, at least at this point in our understanding, archaeology does not support that the “conquest” of Canaan by the Israelites happened as the biblical narrative tells us. It appears that, whatever happened, the tales became exaggerated so that, for Israel, these narratives were transformed into great war sagas of battles with the Canaanites.

Third, being the ancient tribal people that they were, telling stories of their tribal past and glorifying tales about being led into battle by a warrior God against a God-cursed enemy is what we should expect if God let the Israelites tell the story. As Enns puts it:

The Bible — from back to front — is the story of God told from the limited point of view of real people living at a certain place and time.

It’s not like the Israelites were debating whether or not to go ahead and describe God as a mighty warrior. They had no choice. That’s just how it was done— that was their cultural language. And if the writers had somehow been able to step outside of their culture and invent a new way of talking, their story would have made no sense to anyone else.

The Bible looks the way it does because “God lets his children tell the story,” so to speak.

…I think at least parts of the Bible work something like that. It may be hard— sometimes impossible— to see the history in Israel’s stories, but we do get a good picture of how these ancient Israelites experienced God.

Reading the Bible responsibly and respectfully today means learning what it meant for ancient Israelites to talk about God the way they did, and not pushing alien expectations onto texts written long ago and far away.

Reading scripture this way means not reading it “flatly,” as though everything we find in it is to be equally accepted and endorsed — even things its authors say about God and/or historical events. The Hebrew Bible is not a “book” but an compilation of writings that is characterized by an ongoing conversation. There are debates between different perspectives going on within the scriptures themselves concerning Israel’s history and what it means. The story of the conquest is actually a great example of this, as the books of Joshua and Judges set before us two entirely different accounts of the “conquest.” We can’t reconcile them; we are meant to read them side by side. This forces us to think, to become part of the conversation, to seek wisdom.

Reading scripture this way also means, as Enns says, “the ancient tribal description of God is not the last word.” The Hebrew Bible portrays an ancient tribal nation that acted like one and for whom capturing land and keeping their enemies at bay by violence, slavery, and extermination was a way of life and survival. But in the ongoing conversation, other voices are heard. One further example of this is the conversation going on between books like Jonah and Nahum. One pronounces doom upon the city of Ninevah and the Assyrians while the other rebukes Israel for not understanding that God’s mercy is to be extended to those same “enemies” — “And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?” (Jonah 4:11)

For Christians, we see this ongoing conversation as moving to a point of resolution in the good news of the Messiah, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In a context of military occupation by foreign enemies who had seized the land God promised to Abraham, Jesus encouraged his followers to love their enemies not destroy them. And rather than exerting violence against those who opposed him, he ultimately absorbed the violence within himself and laid down his life for them.

Jesus, Israel’s final prophet, is the ultimate voice in the conversation. As Peter Enns affirms: “And for Christians, the gospel has always been the lens through which Israel’s stories are read— which means, for Christians, Jesus, not the Bible, has the final word.”

I am currently working through Greg Boyd’s massive and challenging new book, The Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Volumes 1 & 2, his two-volume explanation and defense of a hermeneutical approach that Christians can take to resolve the disparities between the wrathful, violent, even genocidal God of the Hebrew Bible and God revealed through the non-violent teachings and actions of Jesus, especially the cross. I had hoped to have some material ready to share with you by now, but I’m still working through how to best capture and summarize 1400 pages of fairly intricate reasoning.

This subject has, of course, become an issue of intense interest in the 21st century. Since 9/11/2001, horrific violence in the name of religion has been in the spotlight, and Jews and Christians as well as Muslims have had to face their own legacy of killing on behalf of God.

For we Christians, our problem starts with the Bible’s portrayal of God in the Old Testament. When we compare that with the revelation of God through Jesus, Boyd finds himself dealing with serious questions.

I have come to believe that Jesus revealed an agape-centered, other-oriented, self-sacrificial God who opposes violence and who commands his people to refrain from violence (e.g., Matt 5:39-45, Luke 6:27-36). I also believe in the divine inspiration of the Old Testament, primarily because I have good reason to believe Jesus treated it as such. …Yet I and everyone else who shares these two convictions face a condundrum.

How are we to reconcile the God revealed in Christ, who chose to die for his enemies rather than crush them, with the many OT portraits of Yahweh violently smiting his enemies? How are we to reconcile the God revealed in Christ, who made swearing off violence a precondition for being considered a “child of your Father in heaven” (Matt 5:45) with the portraits of Yahweh commanding his followers to slaughter every man, woman, child, and animal in certain regions of Canaan (e.g., Deut 7:2, 20:16-20)? How are we to reconcile the God revealed in Christ, who with his dying breath prayed for the forgiveness of his tormentors (Luke 23:34) and who taught his disciples to forgive “seven times seventy” (Matt 18:21-22), with the OT’s portraits of God threatening a curse on anyone who extended mercy toward enemies (Jer 48:10; cf. Debt 7:2, 16; 13:8; 19:13)? And how can we possibly reconcile the God revealed in Christ, who expressed profound love for children, promising blessings on all who treated them well and pronouncing warnings for all who might harm them (Luke 18:15-17; Matt 10:42, 18:6-14), with the OT portrait of God bringing judgment on his people by having parents cannibalize their own children (Lev 26:28-29; Jer 19, 7,9; Lam 2:20; Ezek 5:9-10)?

As I process Boyd’s book, I thought we might review what a few others have said on this subject. We start today with the  Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, whose book, Testing Scripture: A Scientist Explores the Bible, takes what he calls a “developmental” view of the Bible’s presentation of God and his dealings with his people and their world. We blogged through this book a few years ago, and this is an edited re-post of one of our articles.

• • •

“Development,” chapter two of John Polkinghorne’s small book on the Bible, is, for some, one of the more controversial sections in Testing Scripture. Whether you end up agreeing with him or not, you will admire his courage in dealing with some of the toughest questions honest Bible readers face.

We all know the story of how “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho,” and we delight in what it teaches us about how God gives victory to his people. However, if we have any human sensitivity, we shudder in horror when we read Joshua 6:21: “Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.” This and other texts that attribute massacres and genocide to the express command of God himself are difficult for modern readers to swallow. Even more challenging is reconciling this portrayal of God with what Scripture tells us of Jesus, who said, “Love your enemies.”

How do you deal with these seemingly incompatible views of God’s nature and ways?

Here is how John Polkinghorne handles the conundrum. He writes:

I believe that response to this dilemma demands the recognition that the record of revelation contained in Scripture is one of a developing understanding of the divine will and nature, continuously growing over time but never complete, and quite primitive in its earliest stages. Only slowly and falteringly could progress be made in Israel towards gaining a fuller comprehension of the reality of God.

This solution will probably not be acceptable to evangelicals and others who hold more conservative views about the nature of the Bible. There may be development of doctrine in Scripture, they would say, but even the earliest and most so-called “primitive” depictions of God were inspired by him and are accurate portrayals of his character and actions. If the Bible records that God commanded the destruction of their enemies, it is not just telling us that this is how the Hebrews, with a less developed view of God, interpreted their mission. Rather, that is what God actually commanded his people, and the divinely inspired account accurately records his perspective, not theirs. If the Bible says that God told them to do something, that’s what happened. With such an interpretive approach, the next step is inevitably to become an apologist for God, to defend the record of “inerrant” scripture as accurate reporting, and to come up with explanations that vindicate God of wrongdoing.

However, John Polkinghorne sees this development as part of the human side of Scripture. “We can recognize within it an unfolding process of insight and understanding as God’s nature was progressively revealed,” he says. Thus, the earlier depictions reflect an incomplete and inaccurate knowledge of God and their own time-bound interpretations of the events they were experiencing. “A primitive society could conceive no better insight than the use of force against unbelievers as the expression of its faithful following of Yahweh, the God of Israel.”

Polkinghorne gives a few other examples of development in the Hebrew Bible:

• In earlier parts of the Bible, Israel held henotheistic beliefs — they owed Yahweh exclusive allegiance but the gods of the other peoples around them were also real and a threat that must be faced. However, by the time of Second Isaiah, “henotheism has uncompromisingly become monotheism. There is no divine reality at all other than Yahweh” (Isa 42:8, 43:10).
• Likewise, the concept of individual responsibility only arose later in Israel’s history, whereas in early narratives we read about people like Achan, whose entire family suffered for his personal sin.

John Polkinghorne suggests that this “multilayered” understanding of Scripture may help us come to grips with some of the depictions or so-called “contradictions” in Scripture. “Often passages in the canonical text, presented as if they were a unity, have in fact been formed by intermingling material drawn from a variety of sources, composed at different times and, therefore, reflecting different stages of development.”

As those who worked with the sacred texts read and edited them into their final form, they let stand conundrums, conflicts, and inconsistencies that perplex readers to this day.

Thus it is clear that before the Hebrew Bible reached its final canonical form there was a long developmental process, involving reworking of much that had been inherited from the past in the light of the understanding and experience of the present. Yet the editors who assembled the final text apparently did not find it necessary to smooth out the differences present in the sources that they used. Instead, the deposit of many generations was often allowed to stand together in the formation of Scripture. The long process of development was not obliterated in order to produce the appearance of a single consistent text. The explorations of the past were not to be totally obscured from view.