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
What “God Loves You” Actually Means
From the beginning, God chose to have a people who would be the object of his eternal love, just as Christ is the object of his eternal love. God sought to acquire a “bride” for Christ who would receive and reflect the love of the triune community (Eph 5:25-32). And the only qualification for being…
Modern Theologians and the Centrality of Christ
During the twentieth century the development of a Christocentric reading of the Scriptures—which is crucial to understanding what I argue in Crucifixion of the Warrior God—surged in the wake of Karl Barth’s publication of his Romans commentary in 1916. It was justifiably described as a “bombshell” that fell “on the playground of the theologians,” demolishing…
How The Imperfections of Scripture Reveal God Perfectly
In my previous blog I discussed one important implication of a cruciform (“cross-centered”) approach to biblical inspiration. On the cross, I noted, God revealed his perfection by identifying with human imperfection. Jesus in some sense became our sin and our curse. In this light, I argued, why should anyone find it surprising, let alone disturbing,…
Did God Destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? (podcast)
Greg considers the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and speculates on the nature of the angels who were sent there. Episode 597 http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0597.mp3
Making God in Our Own Image
In this video, Greg introduces the idea of how we make God into our own image instead of allowing God to define himself through the revelation of Jesus. In an interview performed by Travis Reed from theworkofthepeople.com, we have a basic, quick introduction to a core element of Greg’s theology. This is a great piece to…
Podcast: Is the Cruciform Hermeneutic a Little Too New?
Greg looks at the history of the Cruciform Hermeneutic. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0446.mp3