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.
Reflections on Divine Violence in the Old Testament
As some of you know, for the last five years I’ve been working on a book addressing the problem of divine violence in the OT. (For alleged violence in the NT, see Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld, Killing Enmity: Violence in the New Testament (Baker Academic, 2011). It will be a highly academic tome, approximately 600 pages in length, and is entitled The Crucifixion of the Warrior God (InterVarsity). I plan to accompany it with a much shorter, popular level work articulating roughly the same thesis, which I’ve tentatively entitled Jesus Versus Jehovah?, though I haven’t yet official proposed this to IVP or any other publisher.
The forthcoming Crucifixion of the Warrior God has generated a good deal of interest, for the problem of divine violence in the OT is something that a large number of people are wrestling with today. It is especially problematic for followers of Jesus who embrace Jesus’ example of laying down his life for his enemies as something we are to imitate and who take seriously his unqualified teachings on loving enemies and swearing off all violence (e.g Mt. 5:38-48; Lk 6:27-35). For this reason I’ve decided to blog on aspects of my forthcoming book over the coming months. I’m not going to “let the cat out of the bag,” so to speak, for I can’t possibly replicate the fully developed argument of my book in this venue. Yet, while I will continue to offer video blogs responding to questions, I will regularly offer some little reflections from my book that I hope will be helpful.
Stay tuned!
Jay Dedman via Compfight
Category: Essays
Tags: Cruciform Theology, Essay, Jesus, Love, Old Testament, Picture of God, Violence
Topics: Interpreting Violent Pictures and Troubling Behaviors
Related Reading
The Religionless Church of the Future
“The time when men could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or simply pious, is over, and so is the time of…religion as such.… [W]hat is religionless Christianity?… What is the significance of a Church… in a religionless world?” Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Letter From Prison, April 30th, 1944. The Crisis of a…
The Lego Movie & Free Will
Last week Greg tweeted about two movies that have themes related to human free-will and God’s control of the world. They were: @greg_boyd: Does God want a permanently frozen “perfect” world or an open-ended world filled with wildly imaginative people? Watch “The Lego Movie”! @greg_boyd: Meantime, me & some peeps are going to watch (again!)…
Jesus Refuted Old Testament Laws
Although it’s clear that Jesus regarded the Old Testament as the inspired word of God, he also directly challenged aspects of the Old Testament law. To illustrate, Jesus was repudiating Sabbath law when he defended his disciples’ harvesting of food on the Sabbath (Mt 12:1-14; cf. Ex. 34:21). Some scholars argue that the disciples were…
Must wives submit to husbands?
The apostle Paul writes: Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to…
Podcast: By Celebrating Passover, Isn’t Jesus Tacitly Approving the Sacrificial System Passover Was Based On?
Is Jesus for or against slaughtering babies? Greg talks about exodus and sacrifice. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0405.mp3
Crucifying Transcendence
The classical view of God’s transcendence in theology is in large borrowed from a major strand within Hellenistic philosophy. In sharp contrast to ancient Israelites, whose conception of God was entirely based on their experience of God acting dynamically and in self-revelatory ways in history, the concept of God at work in ancient Greek philosophy…