Crucifixion of the Warrior God Update

Did you know that authors generally don’t have much say-so about the cover art for their books? It’s considered part of the marketing, so the author may or may not like how it ends up looking. I’ve had a few book covers that made me scratch my head. (I won’t tell you which ones, but it would be fun to hear all of your guesses.) That being said, I’m thrilled with these covers, and I wanted to share them with all of you. So exciting!

Here’s the Fortress Press description:

A dramatic tension confronts every Christian believer and interpreter of Scripture: on the one hand, we encounter images of God commanding and engaging in horrendous violence: one the other hand, we encounter the non-violent teachings and example of Jesus, whose loving, self-sacrificial death and resurrection is held up as the supreme revelation of God’s character in the New Testament. How do we reconcile the tension between these seemingly disparate depictions? Are they even capable of reconciliation? Throughout Christian history, many different answers have been proposed, ranging from the long-rejected explanation that these contrasting depictions are of two entirely different ‘gods’ to recent social and cultural theories of metaphor and narrative representation.

The Crucifixion of the Warrior God takes up the dramatic tensions between depictions of divinely sanctioned violence and the message of peace centering the New Testament. Over two volumes, Gregory A. Boyd argues that we must take seriously the full range of Scripture and the centrality of the crucified and risen Christ as God’s supreme revelation. Developing a theological interpretation of Scripture involves what Boyd calls a cruciform hermeneutic. This reading leads us into the proper way of understanding the character of God, revealing God as loving, sacrificial, and subverting violence.