Book Report: “Crucifixion of the Warrior God” by Greg Boyd

Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross

Here’s a conundrum. Jesus could not be more emphatic or clear that the people of God should not return evil for evil: “Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Mt. 5:39). And yet this same, non-violent, kill-‘em-with-kindness Jesus was an earnest follower of the Jewish Scriptures, calling them the very “words of God”. These very words of God do not always seem to sync up with the purported Messiah’s instruction to turn the other cheek. The God of the Old Testament sometimes seems more interested in slicing off cheeks than turning them.

The divinely-sanctioned violence of the Old Testament (which can fairly be described as genocide, in many instances) is well-known. On innumerable occasions God instructed his people to wipe out everything that moves. To make matters worse, the violence actually committed by God is an even more obvious problem. To take one example, remember when God decided to kill everybody on earth (except Noah and his family) because they had all become so depravedly evil? Could God not anticipate this would happen to the creatures he formed, in his wisdom and power? And, was there absolutely no other way of solving this problem than making everyone and everything drown in a torrential downpour? Not even Thanos was as terrible in his wrath.

Hence the conundrum. How can the Son of God who did not raise a fist to the Romans be the very image of his Father who commanded his people to “go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys’” (1 Sam. 15:15). 

Many have taken up the challenge to “solve the conundrum.” Greg Boyd is the latest.

The Quick Project that Was Not

Boyd is a Princeton-educated theologian and pastor serving at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, MN. He is a prolific author, and I’ve been reading Boyd’s stuff for decades. I don’t always agree with his conclusions, but I so admire his willingness to engage with the tough issues and take unpopular stands. His opinions are creative, engaging, well-researched, and understandable. Even with the mind of a brilliant scholar, he maintains his pastoral tone and finds a way to write for both experts, laypersons, and those (like me) in the middle.

His recent, two-volume, 1400-page tome “Crucifixion of the Warrior God:  Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross” is the result of 10 years of research, and a lifetime of thought on the matter. (For those who want the lighter treatment, he followed it up with a slightly less intimidating 500-page version called, “Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence.”) As Boyd recounts, he started researching the problem of Old Testament violence, thinking he would take a year or so. He anticipated that he would find the least offensive solution, put the best “spin” on it, and move along to other topics.

He found he couldn’t. The problem is too intractable, and even the least bothersome solutions aren’t altogether satisfying to those who aren’t willing to pretend the problem isn’t there. Indeed, the reality of OT violence is so difficult that many have found is necessary to jettison this portion of the Bible from God’s Word altogether. (Heard of Marcion? He decided the OT was so different in theological form and substance that it must have been written by a violent god other than the God of the New Testament.) Or, many have just added the problem of OT violence to the list of other problems—suffering, Christian hypocrisy, scientific reasoning—that would keep anyone from believing altogether.

Boyd is not of the opinion that the OT was written by a lesser, evil deity, or that it gives us any sort of reason to reject Jesus as the Son of God. Among other reasons to believe, he is too committed to the historical and experiential reality of Jesus to give up on faith. (For the record, so am I.) This only serves to highlight the problem, though: how can the non-violent Son of the New Testament be related to his occasionally murderous Father of the Old Testament? It would be one thing if God the Father and God the Son were substantively different persons, but that is not the Christian understanding of the Godhead. In the words of Hebrews, the Son is the “exact representation” of the Father (Heb. 1:3). In the words of Jesus, anyone who has seen him has seen the Father (Jn. 12:45). The Son and Father share the same character and ontological identity. (And for the record, this is not just an Old vs. New Testament problem. If you read the book of Revelation in the New Testament, you know that not all the blood on Jesus’ robe is his own.)

Reading the OT through the Cross

It took 10 years, but in “CWG” Boyd proposes his thesis. In the author’s mind, the key to understanding OT violence is the crucifixion of Christ. The execution of Jesus on the cross demonstrates God’s willingness to be violently “acted upon” in history, and to use those violent events to advance his own redemptive purposes. We must read the OT with this “crucicentric” hermeneutic. Inasmuch as the OT is, in a way, also the “word” of God, is it possible that God allowed the OT authors to be acted upon by the violent standards of the ancient near-east culture, as part of a long-term strategy to fully and perfectly reveal his genuine character in the eventual non-violent image of Jesus? In other words, is it possible he allowed the ancient Israelites to conceive of Yahweh as a god not unlike other violent ancient deities, slowly revealing to them the fact that he is not like those deities at all? No missionary enters a foreign country and immediately changes everything. Doing so wouldn’t even work. Missionaries work with what they have, lovingly allowing people to misinterpret the story in the long-term hope that the truth, which has been hinted at all along, will slowly come out. As it eventually did, in Jesus.

Perhaps God is our “heavenly missionary,” who worked with what he had, slowly revealing the truth of his character and our subsequent non-violent calling through centuries of patient, non-coercive revelation.

This principle of “Cruciform Accommodation” is one of four pillars upon which Boyd builds his thesis: As he did on the cross, God willingly accommodates himself to prevailing standards of violence. But there are other notions upon which Boyd builds his case. “The Principle of Redemptive Withdrawal” points to God’s withdrawal from the lives of evil people, who are allowed to receive the natural consequences for their evil as their own punishment. So, much of the violence of the world is not his doing, but the natural consequences of our own depraved choices. We fall into the pits we have made. Next, “The Principle of Cosmic Conflict” refers to the fact that Yahweh is not the only supernatural being at work in the world, and that much of the Old Testament violence is the work of other gods, not God himself. And “The Principle of Semiautonomous Power” is a reference to the fact that not everybody who is given power by God chooses to use it responsibly. Just because Samson had power to slay thousands with a donkey’s jawbone did not mean that he did so under the direction of the God who empowered him.

1400 Pages to Where We Began?

I found “Crucifixion of the Warrior God” fascinating. It is well-researched, and the crucicentric nature of his theory is compelling and bold. You might wonder why the book needs to be 1400 pages long, but after reading it, I see why. There are too many millennia of theological history and opinionating to deal with the problem briefly. Also, Boyd’s thesis requires a rethinking of many key doctrines, including the personification of God, the extent of human freedom, the nature of Biblical inspiration, and the notion of divine judgment. You can’t address the problem of OT violence without touching on just about every part of the Apostle’s Creed, it seems. The treatment had to be that long, if not longer.

Even at 1400 pages, though, I’m still not sure what to think or where I wound up. In fact, while the book has been surprisingly well-received as a helpful resource to people who themselves are troubled by the problem, it has its critics. Paul Copan is another theologian who has addressed the matter of OT violence in his book, “Is God a Moral Monster?” (His answer: No.) Boyd engages with Copan’s own theories in CWG, and Copan returns the favor by publishing a highly-critical review. (Read here.) In addition to criticizing the long list of typos and grammatical mistakes—which are aplenty, and distracting—Copan takes Boyd to task for leaving out some of the more problematic passages of Scripture, and not even defining his terms. (Somewhat conspicuously, Boyd glosses over the matter of what even qualifies as “violence,” deciding the book was too long. It was the wrong choice.) Copan also finds it implausible that, as Boyd proposes, Moses and other OT heroes could have so misled by their own cultural assumptions and yet still be so commended by NT authors, and Jesus himself. And to be sure, if Boyd is right, as often as the OT records that “The Word of the Lord came to ____,” what we sometimes have to believe really happened is that, “The Word of the Lord came to ___, but ___’s cultural norms were so skewed by the violence of our demon-controlled world that ___ interpreted God to mean that he should kill everybody he sees. And God was okay with that because of his cruciform character.” That’s not implausible. But it makes it much harder to maintain any notions we have of the Bible being God’s very word. To me, it makes it hard to even know how to read the Bible.

In Copan’s mind, Boyd’s solution to the problem of OT violence is motivated more by the author’s anabaptist pacificism than it is by an honest reading of Scripture. How can the Son of God who overthrew tables in the temple, threatened furious judgment on the Pharisees, refused to rebuke Roman soldiers for their war-mongering ways when given the chance, and promised that people who harm children would be better off being drowned with a millstone around their neck than face the wrath of God…how can that Son of God who said and did all these things be a “pacifist” in the Greg-Boydian sense of the term?

(As another resource, Paul Copan and Greg Boyd are given a two-part opportunity to debate each other on a favorite apologetics podcast, “Unbelievable.” It’s entertaining as always. Listen here.)

The Real Problem

So even after 1400 pages, I find there is no easy answer. I suspect the answer is somewhere in the middle of everybody’s theories. There’s lots of arrows on the target, but none in the bullseye. Everybody’s book has a critic, everybody’s theory has a flaw, every thesis forgets a passage, every solution has a loose end.

That’s not to say the problem isn’t worth attempting to solve, inasmuch as a solution may be possible. Not only does the conundrum of OT violence flummox Bible-readers and undermine the credibility of Scripture in the eyes of many moderns, but examples of OT violence have been used by God’s people over the centuries to justify their own murderous, and even sometimes genocidal, ways. Church historians note with regret how many times the Church Militant has employed the Biblical language of the Canaan Conquest in their own violent takeovers of America, or Europe, or Africa, or the middle-East, or here or there. The unresolved, ambiguous nature of this problem has given too many Popes and Christian marauders justifiable grounds on which to slaughter innocents in God’s name—like the ancient Israelites did, seemingly at God’s behest.

So the problem is real, and the search for an answer continues.

Having said that, while plenty of us would have loved nothing more than for some sort of explanation from the Son of God, while he was one earth, on why his Father can seem, at times, so petty and genocidal, is the OT problem of violence really the most urgent problem we have to deal with in this regard? Jesus’ instructions on non-violence and loving enemies are hard enough to obey on their own. In my own personal quest for an understanding of religious truth, I’ve come to realize that these sorts of questions, while legitimate, oftentimes serve as a mere distraction from the real question, and one of the few questions which I can affect the answer. The question isn’t how to reconcile the violence of the OT with the non-violent mercy and love that Jesus shows towards his enemies. No, the REAL question is how to reconcile MY violence and hatred with the non-violent mercy and love of that Jesus shows towards his enemies. I’m not a genocidal maniac, let alone a murderer. But I hate lots of people who are different than me. I do not pray for them and would be a little too happy if something bad happened to them. Sometimes I even wish it. And, of course, I certainly wouldn’t die for my enemies, or even many of my neighbors. I mean, sheesh, who would?

In a well-known act, Jesus did. In order to show the world the mysterious, all-pervasive love of God, Jesus died for the very people who murdered him on a cross. He could have called down angels with weapons to stop the deed, and even some of his disciples had swords and were ready to go. But he called them off. He had a higher calling. 

As do we all. The world has seen enough violence. It needs more of what we know of God’s love. As much as I would love an explanation to the problem of OT violence, the bigger problem is why I can still be so reluctant to live out what Jesus clearly tells me to do. I can’t do anything about the violence attributed to God in the Old Testament.

But I can do something about mine.

MRH (4/29/2019)