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.

key

Two Questions to Unlock Violent Divine Portraits

There are two basic questions that help us to interpret what is going on in the violent portraits of God in the Old Testament, as I propose in Crucifixion of the Warrior God.

The First Question: What does the “God-breathed” revelation of the cross teach us about the nature of God’s “breathing”?

God “breathed” his supreme revelation on the cross by both acting toward us and by allowing others to act toward him. Because God honors the personhood of others, and because he therefore works by means of the influential power of the cross (1 Cor 1:18) rather than by exerting coercive power, God’s “breathing” is a dialectical rather than a unilateral process.

This cross-centered, dialectical understanding of the way God “breathes” should shape how we interpret the way that God “breathed” the Old Testament witness. We must read it with the awareness that it reflects both God acting toward us, insofar as God’s people at that time could receive it, as well as God humbly allowing others to act toward him, insofar as God had to accommodate his people’s fallen and culturally-conditioned hearts and minds. We must read the written witness of the OT knowing that portraits of God will display the same beautiful character as is revealed on the cross insofar as they reflect the former, but they will reflect the same ugliness of sin that is revealed on the cross insofar as they reflect the latter.

In this light, the OT’s violent portraits of God can be understood as testaments to the truth that God has always been willing to humbly stoop to bear the sin of his people and to thereby take on a literary semblance that mirrors the ugliness of this sin, just as he did in a historical way on the cross.

The Second Question: How does a guilty-appearing, godforsaken, crucified criminal become the definitive revelation of God for us?

It is not what everyone can see on the surface of the crucifixion that reveals God. Rather it is only when we by faith look through the surface of this event that it becomes the definitive revelation of God for us. Only by faith can we discern the Creator stooping an infinite distance to become this guilty-appearing, godforsaken, crucified criminal.

Since the God who “breathed” this paradigmatic revelation is the same God who “breathed” his written witness to this revelation, we should read Scripture expecting that there will be times when the revelatory content of a portrait of God is to be found not on its surface, but in its depth. The first can be understood by straightforward exegesis, but the second calls for faith to discern the humble, loving condescension of God.

However, we can only interpret the OT’s violent portraits in this sin-bearing way if we place our compete trust in the character of God revealed on the cross. If we suspect that God has a dark side and is capable of doing the monstrous things that the OT authors attribute to him, we will mistake the “shadow” for the “reality” (Col 2:17; Heb 10:1).

To put it another way, if we fail to place our trust in the revelation of the crucified Christ, we are trading the unclouded revelation of the Son, who alone is the “radiance of God’s glory” (Heb 1:3) for the cloudy perspective of ancient authors who could only catch “glimpses of truth” (Heb 1:1).

Only the slain lamb unlocks the secret of how macabre portraits of God point to him.

—Adapted from Crucifixion of the Warrior God, pages 1250-1252

Photo credit: Vitor Sá Photo via Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-ND

Related Reading

Podcast: Can a Verse Ever Mean What the Original Author Never Intended It to Mean?

Greg talks about the theological interpretation of scripture in this rapid-paced, controversial episode. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0191.mp3

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

Getting Honest about the Dark Side of the Bible

 Eddy Van 3000 via Compfight While most of the Bible exhibits a “God-breathed” quality, reflecting a magnificently beautiful God that is consistent with God’s definitive revelation on the cross, we must honestly acknowledge that some depictions of God in Scripture are simply horrific. They are included in what is sometimes called “the dark side of…

Podcast: If the Biblical Prophecies are Flawed, Aren’t Those Prophets ALL False Prophets?

If you want to hear Greg sweat, listen to him work through this really really good question. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0200.mp3 Photo by Rex Boggs

Cruciform Theology in Four Steps

The culmination of the biblical narrative of the cross reframes everything about who God is, what it means to have faith in God, and how we read the Bible! The entire Old Testament leading up to the crucified Christ must be interpreted with a view toward discerning how it anticipates and points toward this definitive…

Podcast: Isn’t God the Author of Suffering in the Crucifixion?

Greg considers the implications of his Cruciform Hermeneutic on his previous work in God at War.  http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0274.mp3