Tag: Greg Boyd

The Centrality of God’s Love: A Response to Greg Boyd’s Cross Vision (III—An Alternative)

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 12 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—November 8, 2018

Greg Boyd’s book on reading the Bible nonviolently, Cross Vision (CV), sets before us a challenge. Is it possible to accept the Bible’s truthfulness while also affirming a consistently pacifist worldview? I conclude, after reading both CV and its more scholarly companion, Crucifixion of the Warrior God, that indeed the best, most respectful, reading of the Bible does support a pacifist commitment. However, I think the case for this might be made more persuasively following a somewhat different approach than Boyd’s. In this post I will sketch an alternative approach to Boyd’s for a biblical theology that also places God’s nonviolent love at the center.

Starting with God’s nonviolence

Like Boyd, I begin with God’s nonviolence (see my blog post, “Why we should think of God as pacifist”). I believe that the fundamental reality in our world is love. And God is love. So my interest in writing this piece is not to try to persuade people who might think otherwise that God is nonviolent. Rather, I want to explain why I think the Bible supports that conviction. What in the Bible leads to confessing God’s nonviolence? And what should we think about the parts of the Bible traditionally cited as the bases for denying that God is nonviolent?

Let me first, though, say just a bit about what saying “God is nonviolent” means for me. In a nutshell, to make such an affirmation is to confess that the Bible teaches that God created what is out love and for the sake of love. It also teaches that God participates in the world most directly in how God brings healing in the face of brokenness, binding wounds, reconciling alienated relationships, and empowering creativity and compassion.

And also like Boyd, I believe that the Bible’s definitive portrayal of God is found in the story of Jesus. That is, God is most clearly and reliably known to humanity in the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus. My affirmation of God’s nonviolence finds its strongest grounding in my affirmation of Jesus’s nonviolence. Just as it is unthinkable to me that Jesus would punish, hate, exploit, or violently coerce, so is it unthinkable that God would. Continue reading “The Centrality of God’s Love: A Response to Greg Boyd’s Cross Vision (III—An Alternative)” →

The centrality of God’s love: A response to Greg Boyd’s Cross Vision (Part 2: An assessment)

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 10 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—November 6, 2018

 Greg Boyd’s book, Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence (Fortress Press, 2017), deserves praise simply for being a book of serious theological scholarship with an original and creative argument about a crucially important issue that is written for a wide audience. I don’t find Boyd’s effort totally successful, but even as I raise some sharp criticisms I want to emphasize how grateful I am for Boyd’s book. This post is the second of three. The first summarizes Boyd’s argument and the third sketches an alternative view on the issues Boyd addresses.

For many years, I have been deeply troubled about the role Christianity plays in the acceptance of state-sponsored violence in the United States—to the point where self-professing Christians are quite a bit more likely to support wars and capital punishment than those who make no such profession. I’ve concluded that a key problem that contributes to this undermining of the message of Jesus Christ is theological—convictions Christians have that actually make acceptance of violence more likely.

Boyd may not fully share my critique, but he certainly is aware of the problem. And he is willing to write some gutsy and accessible books that take the problem on head on. Cross Vision (CV) is a much shorter and less academically rigorous adaptation of his two-volume work, Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Fortress Press, 2017). I recommend starting with the shorter book, which does a nice job summarizing Boyd’s argument—but the longer book is also pretty accessible and contains a wealth of analysis that those who are attracted to Boyd’s argument will want to explore (I have written a long series of blog posts that summarize and critique CWG).

What Boyd gets right

The main contribution CV makes is actually an assumption Boyd starts with more than a proposition he demonstrates. He asserts that Jesus Christ is the central truth for Christianity, that Jesus shows us the character of God more definitively than anything else, and that because Jesus was (and is) resolutely nonviolent we should recognize that God also is nonviolent—and always has been. Making such an affirmation about God a starting point means that Boyd does not equivocate when he comes face to face with difficult biblical materials. He focuses on how those materials might be understood in relation to the core convictions about God as nonviolent. This clarity is bracing and empowering. What the world needs now, I believe, are people who are committed to embodying healing love, not people who struggle over whether or not to kill others or whether or not to support the killing of others. It’s that simple, and Boyd gives us an important resource for following such a path. Continue reading “The centrality of God’s love: A response to Greg Boyd’s Cross Vision (Part 2: An assessment)” →

A short review of Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 3 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—July 18, 2017

I recently finished reading a fascinating, challenging book, Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Fortress Press, 2017). I have invested a lot of energy in this book because I think the subject matter is extremely important, and not only for Christian pacifists such as myself. And I think Boyd has done an impressive job of examining the issues related to violence in the Old Testament.

I am pretty sure I spent more time reading this book than anything since I read Ernst Troeltsch’s Social Teaching of the Christian Churches in grad school 30 years ago. Crucifixion of the Warrior God (henceforth, CWG) is a huge book—it actually takes up two large volumes, 1,487 pages in all. I have gotten so absorbed with this book, that I decided to blog my way through it. I have written an essay per chapter (I’m through chapter 10 so far) and have posted them at my Peace Theology site. I started on that before I had actually finished the whole book. Since I just now finished, I thought I would take a moment and write a quick reflection on the book as a whole. When I finish with my detailed, chapter-by-chapter critique, I will write a comprehensive review of the whole.

Initial excitement

I started reading feeling very excited. Here was someone who promised to give this important question of how to deal with the “violent portraits of God” the attention it deserved. I was also excited because I knew that Boyd would be working from a pacifist perspective.

I’ll admit that the book became a bit of a slog at times. I’m looking forward to seeing how he boils things down when he publishes his much shorter, “popular” volume on the same topic, Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of the Old Testament (due out August 15, 2017). Though Boyd writes clearly, as a rule, his argument is complicated and the detail with which he examines the various issues make it a hard to follow at times.

I remain delighted with Boyd’s consistent commitment to affirming that God is a God of humble, self-giving, nonviolent love—period. That commitment makes me want to recommend this book highly and to express my gratitude to him taking the huge risks and devoting the huge amount of energy to putting this volume together and to following it up with a more accessible version that will widen the book’s reach.

A different approach

And yet, on just about every point, I have concluded that I would make the case for reading the Bible as a consistent witness to this humble, self-giving, nonviolent, loving God in a different way. I strongly agree with Boyd that followers of Jesus must imitate God and always turn away from violent acts. But I don’t really think he makes as good case for this conviction as I had hoped he would. Continue reading “A short review of Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God“ →