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.
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
Category: General
Tags: Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Cruciform Theology, OT Violence
Topics: Interpreting Violent Pictures and Troubling Behaviors
Related Reading
The Cross and The Trinity
Out of love for humankind, Scripture tells us, Jesus emptied himself of his divine prerogatives, set aside the glory he had with the Father from before the foundation of the world, became a human being and bore our sin as he died a God-forsaken death on Calvary (Phil 2:5-7). Though Jesus remained fully God, he…
Reinterpreting the Law, Violence and Nationalism of the OT
The law of the OT was intended to serve a negative object lesson. This finds its clearest expression in Paul. To begin, Paul interpreted Jesus’ death on the cross largely in sacrificial and substitutionary terms. On the cross, Paul believed, Jesus suffered the full curse of the law on our behalf. Because of this saving…
Is the Bible History?
Even though I argued for interpreting the final form of the biblical canon as opposed to using the history behind the text in my post yesterday, I am not endorsing the radical post-modern view that biblical texts possess “semantic autonomy” and thus lack any historical referentiality. While I have no problem whatsoever accepting that God used folklore and myth…
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…
Does Jesus’ Abandonment on the Cross Destroy the Trinity?
In my previous blog I argued that Jesus’ experience of God-forsakenness on the cross was genuine and that, as a matter of fact, there was a genuine abandonment of Jesus by the Father on the cross. In fact, I am convinced that a good deal of our theology hangs in the balance on our affirming…
The Cross as a Trinitarian Event
On Calvary, the all-holy God fully identified with sinners, suffering the consequences of our sin as though he himself were guilty. While God is never culpable for the evil he allows, he nevertheless assumes responsibility for it by fully identifying with those free agents who are in fact culpable. While the Son alone suffered as…