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

Podcast: Would a Loving Messiah Call a Woman a DOG?!?
Greg talks about why Jesus would say such apparently cruel things to some poor Canaanite woman. Oh, he also tells a joke about hamsters. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0202.mp3

Revolting Beauty
In this sermon clip, Greg shares the story of how foster parents entered into the pain of a severely abused child and demonstrated compassion rather than judgment when she displayed puzzling and revolting behaviors. This moving story illustrates the way that God enters into our sin and our curse on the cross, and gives us…

Response to the September 11th attacks
Was God Punishing Us? Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th, many people have asked the question, “Why did God allow this to happen?” In response, some Christian leaders have suggested that God was punishing our country for reaching an all-time low in moral behavior. As one well-known…

The Politics of Jesus
Many are so conditioned by the mindset of the world that they can’t even envision an alternative way of affecting society and politics other than by playing the political game as it is done by the established governmental system. Some thus conclude that, since Jesus didn’t try to overhaul the political systems of his day…

Scientific Support for the Open View
If a position is true, every avenue of reflection ought to point in its direction. What follows are two more “pointers” to the view that the future is at least partly open (indefinite, composed of possibilities). I’ll first consider an argument from quantum physics, followed by a pragmatic argument regarding what we ordinarily assume to…

The Cruciform Way of the Lamb
In this video, Greg offers insight into how to read the Bible with the cross at the center of the revelation of God, thereby reframing how we interpret the violent and nationalistic passages of the Old Testament. Travis Reed from The Work of the People did a series of interviews with Greg a while ago and…