The All-Too-Common Montage God
Category: General
Tags: Cross Vision, Cruciform Theology
Topics: Attributes and Character, Christus Victor view of Atonement
How do you picture God? It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of a believer’s mental picture of God. The intensity of your love for God will never outrun the beauty of the God you envision…
Jesus and the “Eye for an Eye” Command: A Response to Paul Copan (#10)
Category: General
Tags: Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Cruciform Theology, Enemy Love, Non-Violence, Paul Copan
Topics: Attributes and Character, Biblical Interpretation
Verse: Matthew 5
As I noted in my 9th response to Paul Copan’s critique of Crucifixion of the Warrior God (CWG), Copan argues that Jesus merely repudiated wrong applications of OT laws in his sermon on the mount,…
What About the Harsh Words of Paul? A Response to Paul Copan (#4)
Category: General
Tags: Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Love, Non-Violence, Paul Copan
Topics: Attributes and Character
This post is my fourth response to a talk given by Paul Copan at the Evangelical Theological Society in November in which he raised a number of objections to Crucifixion of the Warrior God. A…
Is Longing for Justice Inconsistent with Love? A Response to Paul Copan (#3)
Category: General
Tags: Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Justice, Love, Paul Copan
Topics: Attributes and Character
In a paper delivered at the Evangelical Theological Society in November, Paul Copan spent a good amount of time arguing that aspects of the NT conflict with the understanding of love that I espouse in…
Did Yahweh Crush His Son?
Category: General
Tags: Cruciform Theology, Jesus, Violence
Topics: Attributes and Character
Though Isaiah was probably referring to the nation of Israel as Yahweh’s “suffering servant” when these words were penned, the NT authors as well as other early church fathers interpreted this servant to be a…
Did the Father Suffer on the Cross?
Category: General
Tags: Cruciform Theology, Love, Trinity
Topics: Attributes and Character
When I argue that the cross is a Trinitarian event (See post), some may suspect that I am espousing Patripassionism, which was a second and third century teaching that held that God the Father suffered…
The Cross as a Trinitarian Event
Category: General
Tags: Cross, Cruciform Theology, Jürgen Moltmann, Trinity
Topics: Attributes and Character, Trinity
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…
Sin-Bearing God
Category: General
Tags: Cross, Cruciform Theology, Divine Accommodation
Topics: Attributes and Character
On the cross, God became our sin, as Paul wrote: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us” (2 Cor 5:21). However, God didn’t begin to be a sin-bearing God when…
Where Psychology and Theology Meet
Category: General
Tags: Cruciform Theology, God's Character, Guilt, Love, Sin
Topics: Attributes and Character
Guest post by Ty Gibson The biblical narrative reveals that God bears our guilt—not merely in the penal sense that Reformed theology asserts—but in the sense that He bears our misconceptions of His character as…
When God Wears Masks
Category: General
Tags: Bride of Christ, Character of God, Cruciform Theology
Topics: Attributes and Character
At various times throughout the OT we find Yahweh assuming the role of a tester, refiner, punisher and even an enemy of Israel (e.g. Jer. 9:7; Lam. 2:5; Isa 63:10). Yet, when we examine these…
Divine Accommodation in the Early Church
Category: General
Tags: Cruciform Theology, Revelation
Topics: Attributes and Character, Biblical Interpretation
One of the basic points made in The Crucifixion of the Warrior God is that the Old Testament reveals how God adjusts his revelation and instructions to accommodate the weakness of his covenant people. This…
Classical Theism’s Unnecessary Paradoxes
Category: General
Tags: Attributes of God, Classical Theism, Cruciform Theology, Jesus, Suffering
Topics: Attributes and Character
The traditional view of God that is embraced by most—what is called “classical theology”—works from the assumption that God’s essential divine nature is atemporal, immutable, and impassible. The Church Fathers fought to articulate and defend…
Challenging the Assumptions of Classical Theism
Category: General
Tags: Classical Theism, Cruciform Theology, Platonism
Topics: Attributes and Character
What came to be known as the classical view of God’s nature has shaped the common, traditional way that most people think about God. It is based in the logic borrowed, mostly unconsciously, from a…
Yahweh as the Dark Knight
Category: General
Tags: Character of God, Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Cruciform Theology
Topics: Attributes and Character
I recently received an interesting analogy for The Crucifixion of the Warrior God from Aaron Reini. Thank you Aaron! In the final scene of “The Dark Knight,” Batman and Commissioner Gordon are standing over Harvey…
Crucified Transcendence
Category: General
Tags: Classical Theism, Cruciform Theology, Nature of God, Transcendence, Trinity
Topics: Attributes and Character
If our thinking about God is to be faithful to the New Testament, then all of our thinking about God must, from beginning to end, be centered on Christ. I’m persuaded that even our thinking…
The Trinity and the Crucified God
Category: General
Tags: Character of God, Cruciform Theology, Love, Nature of God, Trinity
Topics: Attributes and Character, Trinity
God has always been willing to stoop to accommodate the fallen state of his covenant people in order to remain in a transforming relationship with them and in order to continue to further his sovereign…
The Heavenly Missionary
Category: Sermons and Video Clips
Tags: Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Cruciform Theology, Greg Boyd, Sermons, Woodland Hills Church
Topics: Attributes and Character
In his second sermon introducing the ideas in Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Greg suggests a metaphor to help us frame the things we encounter in the Old Testament that seem at odds with the…
A Cruciform Dialectic
Category: General
Tags: Character of God, Cross, Cruciform Theology, Love
Topics: Attributes and Character
One of the most important aspects of God’s action on Calvary, I believe, is this: God revealed himself not just by acting toward humans, but by allowing himself to be acted on by humans as…
God’s Love is Cruciform
Category: General
Tags: Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Cruciform Theology, God is Love, God's Love
Topics: Attributes and Character
Paul instructs us in what it means to follow Jesus, when he stated, “Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself…