We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

crucifixion-warrior-god-book

Renouncing Violent Appearances: CWG Excerpt

My ultimate hope for this two-volume work is that readers will acquire the cross-centered “Magic Eye” that allows them to discern the self-sacrificial, indiscriminately loving, nonviolent God revealed on the cross in the depths of the OT’s sometimes horrifically violent depictions of God. And in seeing this, my hope is that readers will see that the revelation of God on the cross must bring a once-and-for-all end to all of our own violent conceptions of him. Just as we renounce the sin and violence manifested on the surface appearance of the cross, even as we by faith discern God stooping out of love to break this sin and violence, so too, I contend, we should renounce the sin and violence manifested on the surface appearance of the OT’s violent depictions of him, even as we by faith discern God out of love stooping to bear this sin and violence. For when the sin of the world was nailed to the cross with Christ (Col 2:14), the sinful conception of God as a violent warrior god was included.

Hence, the revelation of the agape-loving and sin-bearing crucified God entails the permanent crucifixion of the violent warrior god.

Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Volume 1: The Cruciform Hermeneutic, pages xli-xlii

Related Reading

Trying to Acquire What You Already Have

Image by Joshua Earle The lies Satan told to Eve in the garden made eating from the forbidden tree (the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil) look desirable. On the one hand, the lies caused her to question God’s trustworthiness. And correspondingly, on the other hand, they also caused her to question whether it is…

Confronting the Divine Montage

The superiority of Jesus’ revelation over a montage view of God (see previous post) is captured when Paul and the author of Hebrews utilize an analogy of a shadow verses reality. Paul instructs his disciples not to “let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a…

Podcast: Greg Introduces His Cruciform Hermeneutic at the CrossVision Conference and Dialogues with Rachel Held Evans

Greg Introduces His Cruciform Hermeneutic at the CrossVision Conference and Dialogues with Rachel Held Evans.  http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0240.mp3

Podcast: HOW Does the Death of Jesus Allow Us to Be Forgiven?

Greg discusses love bombs and explosions of light.   http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0419.mp3

Who Killed Ananias and Sapphira? A Response to Paul Copan (#6)

In his critique of Crucifixion of the Warrior God (CWG), Paul Copan makes a concerted effort to argue that the God revealed in Jesus Christ and witnessed to throughout the NT is not altogether non-violent. One of the passages Copan cites against me is the famous account of Ananias and Sapphira falling down dead immediately…

Does Hebrews 11 Praise Violence? A Response to Paul Copan (#2)

Once or twice a week, as time allows, I will be responding to criticisms of Crucifixion of the Warrior God (CWG) that were raised by Paul Copan in a recent paper that he delivered at the Evangelical Theological Society. In my first post in this series I responded to Copan’s claim that Paul’s quotation from…