Review of Greg Boyd's Crucifixion of the Warrior God Vol. 1

Purpose of the Crucifixion of the Warrior God

Greg Boyd wants to reconcile the Old Testament's violent portrayal of God as smiting his enemies with the New Testament's portrayal of Jesus as loving his enemies, while at the same time recognizing that the Old Testament is "God-breathed".

In the first volume Boyd presents his Cruciform Hermeneutic as the lens through which we should interpret the Old Testament including all the violent passages.  In the second volume, Boyd applies this hermeneutic; the results form his Cruciform Thesis, which I will discuss in another blog.

Cruciform Hermeneutic

Boyd begins with the claim that the true character of God is fully revealed in the crucified Christ.  According to Boyd, the God we find portrayed in the Old Testament accommodates the situation he finds Israel in so lets himself be portrayed as violent.  However, Christ is the culmination of all revelations of God and so we should interpret all scripture through the lens of Christ.  Boyd goes further because he thinks just having a Christological hermeneutic is too ambiguous, so he puts forward the cross as the heart of the heart, the absolute true lens through which to interpret scripture.

Two Fundamental problems with Boyd's Cruciform Hermeneutic

I would register two fundamental and related issues with Boyd's project.  First, why restrict the hermeneutic lens to the cross and second, why define "love" as self-sacrifice?

Why Restrict the Hermeneutic Lens to the Cross?

First of all, work needs to be done to show that all of scripture needs to be interpreted through a Christocentric lens, let alone a crucicentric lens.  One of Boyd's arguments comes across to me having the following form:

1. God accommodates (in the Old Testament)
2. Jesus is God
3. Therefore Jesus is the non-accommodating God

Paul Eddy brought up this point in a Q and A devoted to Boyd's book.  He pointed out that the Sitz im Leben of the first century was not all that different from that in Old Testament times.  So, if God accommodates, why couldn't Jesus?  I would add a couple of verses from John to highlight this point.  In John 16:12, Jesus says he has more to say but the disciples "cannot bear" it now and in 16:25 he says that even though now he speaks in figures of speech the day will come when he will speak plainly.  Most commentators think that the "day' in the latter refers to either after the resurrection or via the Spirit.  Both these verses hint that Jesus was accommodating his speech.  I'm being a bit facetious here, but what if one of the issues the disciples couldn't bear was "just war theory" for the time when certain Christians would gain political power?

This is an avenue I myself wouldn't go down but there are interpreters that place some stock in the context of Jesus's audience.  They would say that Jesus said different things to his disciples than he did to the common crowds.  Could it be that some of his more strident demands were only meant for the disciples?  It could be pointed out that Jesus did say things to individuals in New Testament that are not meant to be normative.  Also, did Jesus's political situation help influence his teaching?  Again, I wouldn't go down this route for I think the Church has interpreted Jesus's teaching to his disciples as pertaining to all the Church, that is, we are all disciples.  Likewise, in some sense the particular political situation of the early Church does not significantly affect the applicability of Jesus's teaching thorough out Church history. .

One of Boyd's arguments is that the New Testament writers used a Christocentric hermeneutic.  It is interesting that Boyd make the apologetic point that the fact that the Old Testament is fulfilled "so awkwardly" is many cases proves that the Gospel portraits of Jesus are not fabrications.  I agree, but this is an admission that the Christological lens may be a bit tricky.  For example, there is a respected pre-Constantine Christological interpretation of Genesis 18 in which the three vistitors to Abraham were the Son of Man and two angelic associates.  Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen are a few who held this view.  This Christological interpretation later vied with a Trinitarian interpretation in which which the three visitors were the three members of the Trinity.  So either the Son of Man was associated with the desolation angels (Christological) who destroyed Sodom (Genesis 19) or he was one of them (Trinitarian).

What is particularly pertinent about the destruction of Sodom is that Jesus mentions it in the Gospels.  In Luke 17:29 Jesus says that that it rained fire and brimstone from heaven.  That Jesus means from the realm of God by "heaven" is clear but also backed up linguistically because every instance of "heaven" in Luke with the preposition "from" has this realm in mind and not merely "sky" (see especially Lk. 9:54, 21:11, and 22:43 which use the same "from"-preposition).  Not coincidentally, the book of Revelation, which I will discuss in depth later, alludes to the destruction of Sodom with it use of the phrase "fire and brimstone".  The important point is that Jesus did not seem to correct the equation that the judgment on Sodom was in some sense "from" God.

But let's assume the revelation of Jesus is "special" perhaps using the idea of the "fullness of time" (Gal. 4:4, cf. Rom 5:6).  Perhaps God chose this time precisely because Israel's political situation was what it was.  However, the question remains why narrow the Christological lens with the cruciform lens?  I want to now question Boyd's arguments for the cruciform lens.  After all, preexistence, incarnation, earthly teaching/miracles, resurrection, ascension to right hand, parousia and final rule are all important aspects of Jesus in the New Testament.  The most quoted Old Testament verse in the New Testament, Psalm 110:1, has Jesus's enthronement in view and not the cross.

One argument Boyd gives is that a Christological lens is too ambiguous.  My main response to this is simple, the cross itself is ambiguous, and this is admitted by Boyd when he argues against the penal substitution view of the atonement which also elevates the cross.  I would claim that Boyd's emphasis on the cross is a tactical error precisely because much of his audience (evangelical Christians) will hear his mantra of "cross, cross, cross", as "penal substitution, penal substitution, penal substitution".  I believe it would have been better to have emphasized Jesus's obedience (Rom. 5, Phil. 2) or to use a broader concept, Jesus's love. This way evangelicals would be faced with a concept that demands an imitative response.  Even Boyd is clear that what he means by the "cross" goes beyond merely the crucifixion. For Boyd, the cross expresses everything that Jesus was about from the incarnation to his ascension.

Boyd marshals a few argument for the centrality of the cross.  First, the Gospels center on the cross.  True, but the Gospels also include the resurrection.  Furthermore, Boyd notes the predictions of Jesus death in the Gospels, but those often include the resurrection.  Famously, the set of three predictions in the Gospels (Mt. 16:21, 17:22-23, 20:18-19 and par.--note how Boyd cuts short these predictions on p. 175) all also refer to the resurrection.  Furthermore, the cross in not the sole element in the prediction; they also highlight suffering in the form of mocking, arrogant mistreatment, spitting, and scourging.

Boyd also claims that the cross is the central message of scripture and quotes Luke 24 where Jesus explains to the two followers on the way to Emmaus from Scripture that the Messiah should suffer before entering his glory (v. 26).  Note that his verse ends with the ascension/enthronement.  Also, later in that chapter, Jesus explains to the disciples from Scripture that the Messiah must suffer and to rise from the dead (vs. 45-46--quoted by Boyd himself pp. 43, 176). Boyd quotes 1 Corinthians 15:3: "Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures".  But that verse continues: "...and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with Scripture."  Boyd quotes Paul's preaching to Agrippa from Acts 26:22-23 that he is "saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen--that the Messiah would suffer..."  Guess what, the verse continues: "...and that, by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light both to our people and to the Gentiles."  Boyd quotes Peter in Acts when he says "God fulfilled what he had foretold through the prophets, saying that his Messiah would suffer" (3:18).  But Peter's sermons are replete with mention of the resurrection.  For example, in 2:24, Peter mentions resurrection and backs it up with a Christological reading of Psalm 16:8-11.  In 4:10, Peter mentions resurrection and backs it up with a Christological reading of Psalm 118:22 (Acts 4:11--Jesus used the Psalm in the same way in Matthew 21:42).

Boyd also points to the call to the cruciform life.  But it is interesting that for Paul, this cruciform life is made possible by the resurrection.  Romans 5:10: "For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life" (see also Rom. 4:25: "handed over to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification").

John's Gospel also has a set of three predictions of Jesus's death (Jn. 3:13-14, 8:28, 12:32,34).  However, even though one of them explicitly refers to Jesus' death (12:33), some scholars interpret "lifted up" to include the ascension/enthronement.

One of Boyd's go-to verses is 1 Corinthians 2:2: "For I decided to know nothing among you except Christ, and him crucified."  Boyd admits there is a bit of hyperbole here but there is also a context to this statement.  Paul was self conscious of his missionary style (and appearance?) and so by highlighting Jesus's humble death, he could show his "super-apostles" that Jesus too was not a show-off.

Why define Love as Self-Sacrifice?

I think the heart of Boyd's Cruciform Hermeneutic is the belief that love is best defined as self-sacrifice.  He states that "the depth of love one has for a beloved can me measured by the sacrifice the lover is willing to make for the beloved" (p. 154).  The citadel of this belief are these verses:

• I John 3:16 We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us--and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.
• John 15:13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends.

However, even if self-sacrifice is the greatest proof of love, I do not think it is the ideal definition.  First of all, it should be noted that the word apape is not used in the New Testament as a special divine self-sacrificing word.  James Barr has critiqued Anders Nygren, who championed this idea in his influential Love and Eros, by arguing that there is too much semantic overlap with other love-words to make the case.  Barr states that "the effect of his book on a large public was to leave them thinking that agape formed the unequivocal designation of a particular kind of love, self-giving and self-sacrificing."  Boyd recognizes the critique of Nygren but continues to use the word agape in a thematic sense (see pp. 144-4 n.4).

According to some thinkers true morality requires death because otherwise the moral would not be pure because it would be tainted with self-interest.  However, if self-sacrifice implies death, then death cannot be the ideal of love.  The theologian John Milbank has stated the point well:

Now all this is of course not to deny that to preserve conviviality, to preserve the spirit of feasting, one may very often have to make one-way gestures, without apparent return.  Indeed, one can go further to say that in a corrupt, fallen world, the only way to the recovery of mutual interaction will pass through sacrifice unto death.  But the point is that his sacrifice is not in itself good, but rather that which sustains a road to the good in adverse circumstances.  If one values every single individual as unique and irreplaceable, and if one's image of the good is of the widest possible conviviality, then in order fully to aim for the good, even the sacrificial offering of oneself must sustain the hope of one's own ultimate redemption.  I myself am unique and irreplaceable; without oneself, as without anyone, the universe would have lost something good.

 Milbank's point is that self-sacrifice unto death requires resurrection because it aims at mutual conviviality.  I take this to be the ideal of love: "infinite reciprocity".  The ideal of love in the Trinity to me involves mutual give-and-take where self-giving expects return.  How could death be an ideal of divine love?  This idea comes up Biblically in the idea of a covenant. The Gospel of John is especially relevant because I take the idea of "abiding" to be the divine ideal.  The ideal love-relationship is when two being are abiding in each other, what the Orthodox call perichoresis.

I understand Jesus's overall mission to be one of reconciliation to create the oneness that the ideal of love implies.  After all, the word atonement, means "at oneness".  Sure, Jesus gave his life but he expected it back.  The whole salvation drama was just one give-and-take that defines the ideal of mutual love.  Jesus's crucifixion demanded the resurrection.  (A Christological reading of Hab. 2:4 says just this: "the righteous by faithfulness will live"--a growing nmber of scholars argue that Paul and Hebrews used this verse this way).  Of course, this death needed to happen because of sin, otherwise I'm not sure if there would be death in the love-defined Trinity.  God's mercy is supposed to lead to repentance.  There is a claim God's grace makes.

Given this, I'm not sure what to make when Boyd states: "I contend that this divine perichorsis entails a sort of self-emptying (kenosis) in the very essence of the Trinity" and the "very identity of each distinct divine person is found in the unique way each selflessly and completely offers himself up in love to the other two."  That might be, but the context of that mutual selflessness is always returned.  There is no (ultimate) death in the Trinity only life.

Theological Upshot

I think I have cast a big enough doubt on Boyd's Cruciform Hermeneutic to make sense of at least some of God's wrath found in both testaments.  The reason I think Boyd wants to hammer home self-sacrifice as the ideal of love is because it does away with any divine motive to punish evil.  If God is always self-sacrificing, then punishment makes little sense.  However, even Boyd does not go this far, but I think it proves the case that love is not reducible to self-sacrifice.  The mechanism that Boyd gives for God's wrath is that he simply withdraws and lets evil have its way--punishment by omission, not punishment by commission.  However, this withdrawing in and of itself is no long self-sacrificing.  Even Boyd, admits that complete self-sacrifice leads to the concept of enabling.

Divine Wrath as Divine Jealousy

I'm not here claiming I have solved Boyd's "conundrum" because I have not, but I do think I have gone a bit further than Boyd's self-sacrifice model can go.  I want to imagine a situation similar to Boyd's which opens his second volume.  Suppose Boyd finds out that his wife has been unfaithful.  He comes home one night and finds her with another man.  He might get angry.  In the same way, on my model of love, when God is not loved correctly, he gets angry or jealous.  The Old Testament often views God as a jealous God, even in the ten commandments.  Now Boyd has nothing against God having emotions.  So, why would the emotion of jealousy not be a part of God's emotional world?  On the mutuality model of love, this would make sense.  There has been a breakdown in the mutual give-and-take.  One party has proved unfaithful.

Appendix 1: Interpretation of the Book of Revelation

One of the weaknesses of Boyd's Cruciform Hermeneutic is that it leads him to misinterpret Revelation, or so I claim.  I totally agree that Revelation demands non-violence from human actors, but I don't think Boyd makes sense of divine "violence".  One of the key verses in Revelation is 6:10, where the saints pray for God to uphold his reputation as a just God in punishing sin and vindicating the saints.  This verse is answered in various portions in the book and especially 19:2: "he has avenged on her the blood of his servants."  The rest of Revelation 19 has been a battleground of interpretation.  I want to claim that there is a sort of chiastic structure:

A) 12: His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems; and he has a name inscribed that no one knows but himself.
B) 13a: He is clothed in a robe is dipped in blood
C) 13b:  and his name is called The Word of God
D) 14: And the armies of heave, wearing fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses.
C') 15a: From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron
B') 15b: he will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty
A') 16: On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, "King of kings and Lord of lords."

If this is true than 13a and 15b correspond and this would seem to prove that the blood on Jesus robe was of his enemies.  That the blood is on the robe before that battle is not decisive, something the Boyd's interpretation depends upon.  Following Beale, the ironic conquering by shedding ones own blood makes sense in the inaugurated Kingdom, but this does not preclude a more literally conceived final conquering that consummates the Kingdom.  Ironically, the argument is also too mechanical: "The seeming contradiction is explained by the nature of the prophetic genre, which describes future events as past or present in order to stress the certainty of their occurrence.  That this is true here is clear from the fact that v. 13 alludes to Isa. 63:1-3, where the same prophetic language employing past and present tenses is woven throughout to give assurance of future fulfillment."  Boyd's interpretation of Revelation 14 which he uses to bolster his interpretation of 19:15b is also weak.  He claims that the grapes in this imagery are there simply to represent the harvest.  But in Revelation 14:17-20, we are told nothing of  drinking wine, which is what Boyd thinks is main judgment imagery of the winepress metaphor.

A word about the Lamb is also in order.   There are 29 references to Jesus as a lamb in Revelation (a 30th involves a pseudo-Christ=13:11): 5:6, 8, 12, 13; 6:1, 16; 7:9, 10, 14, 17; 12:11; 13:8, 11; 14:1, 4(x2), 10; 15:3; 17:14(x2); 19:7, 9; 21:9, 14, 22, 23, 27; 22:1, 3. The distribution of this term in the structure of Revelation is highly significant. In part one of my blog, I claimed that there are basically three time periods in Revelation:

1. Tribulation and Persecution
2. Wrath and Judgment
3. Salvation

I argue that “lamb” is used mainly in stage one and is largely absent in stage two. This is a significant indication that the divine violence we find in stage two is not easily swept under the pacifist rug. This makes sense. Christians are to be pacifists in the here and now precisely because evil will be dealt with by divine powers at the end (Deuteronomy 32:35, Romans 12:19). If this is the logic of Revelation, and a strong argument can be made that it is, then the pacifist reading is in trouble.

There are heavenly worship scenes in Revelation (4:1-5:14, 7:1-17; 10:1-11:14; 14:1-20; 15:1-4; 19:1-10, 21:9-22:5). Of the 29 references to the lamb, 22 appear in those sections. I claim that those scenes are meant to remind persecuted Christians of heavenly realities and encourage them to imitate the Lamb in the face of evil powers. Significantly, in those passages directly related to wrath (the trumpets, bowls and 19:11-21:8) there are zero references to the Lamb. I think the reason for this is obvious, in the wrath scenes Christians are not given a model of imitation. Rather, they are only given a vision of justice to comfort them in their suffering.

Appendix 2 Reasons why the Resurrection is Shortshrifted in Modern Scholarship

The resurrection involves the miraculous and the crucifixion does not.  This may explain a couple of facts about two modern day Catholic scholars.  Fact one:  Raymond Brown's two volume work on the crucifixion is some 1608 pages, while his book on the resurrection is 95 (though he does have another half of a book devoted to the resurrection).  J. P. Meier's multi-volume set on the historical Jesus will not cover the resurrection because it involves the miraculous, even though Meier treats Jesus' miracles performed during his ministry.  This trickle down effect no doubt has passed on to evangelical scholars.  I'm not claiming that Boyd's Cruciform Hermeneutic is a product of this prejudice but I'm sure it didn't help.