Beginning to work through Greg Boyd’s Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence (Fortress Press, 2017)

Summarising the Introduction: Something Else Must Be Going On

Suppose I happen to spot my wife in a public place, behaving in an aggressive and hurtful manner.  Given how well I know her, how long I have known her, and how trustworthy her character, I would not conclude that she was, after all, an aggressive and hurtful person.  I would conclude, rather, that something else must be going on.

We learn from Jesus Christ that God’s nature is love.  So, when, according to Deut 20:16, God commands the Israelites to kill ‘anything that breathes’, we have a similar kind of dilemma.  Of course, we could simply reject such texts out of hand, but since Jesus himself endorsed the OT in its entirety, we who claim to be his followers should do the same.  So, with regard to violence in the OT, something else must be going on.  And this something else can best be discerned by looking at those ancient events through the mirror of the cross of Christ.

Chapter 1 – The Elephant

Sometimes, whether in our relationships with one another, or in Christian faith, we have to face the ‘elephant in the room’.

We believe that God is altogether good.  This is witnessed generally in Scripture, and especially in Jesus Christ.

But, within an OT which we acknowledge to be God-breathed (2 Tim 3:16), there are some very ugly portraits of God.

Our usual strategy is to ignore such texts.  But turning a blind eye to them does not make them away.

And if we do pay attention to them, they will distort the image of God as revealed in Christ.  And, moreover, such depictions of a violent God may make believers more inclined to violence.  Furthermore, they provide fuel for sceptics, some of whom are former believers who lost faith precisely for this reason.

It is impossible to justify these OT portrayals of God.  We must face up to them, and seek to account for them in a way that puts Christ and his cross at the centre.

Then, we shall come to see that it is precisely by acknowledging that these OT portraits of a violent God are not compatible with the God who is fully revealed on the cross that we shall see that, actually, and paradoxically, they do point to the cross.

The strategy is not, then, to minimise the awfulness of these portrayals of God, but rather to see them for what they really are – morally repugnant.

Consider

• a young Canaanite family, in the light of the command for the Israelites to ‘show them no mercy’ (Deut 7:2f; we find similar commands 37 times in the OT!).  What makes matters worse is that the total destruction (hērem) is seen as an act of devotion to Yahweh.
• the scene where, in accordance with Yahweh’s command, Moses has the Levites striding back and forth, slaying theie fellow Israelites because of their idolatry (Ex 32:27ff).
• a God who orders the annihilation of all the Midianites, except for the virgin girls (who the Israelite soldiers were allowed to keep as spoils of war (Num 31).
• King David, who is celebrated for killing tens of thousands, making it his practice ‘never to leave a man or woman alive’.
• how the biblical writers commend God who ‘train their hands for war’, and ascribe their military conquests to the Lord (2 Sam 8:14).

According to the OT, adultery (Lev 20:10), fornication (Lev 21:9), homosexuality (Lev 20:13), incest (Lev 20:11,14,16), sex with animals (Lev 20:15–16) were capital offences. If a priest’s daughter becomes a prostitute, she must be ‘burned in the fire’ (Lev 21:9).

Capital offences also included cursing God (Lev 24:16), idolatry (Exod 22:20), witchcraft, sorcery and divination, looking on the furnishing in the tent of meeting, and working (including gathering sticks) on the Sabbath.  The same fate befell priests who entered the tabernacle with a scruffy appearance, or having drunk alcohol (Lev 10:6–10).

Even children were to be stoned, for offences ranging from stubbornness and laziness to drunkenness and gluttony.

Walter Kaiser argues that these laws tended to strengthen family ties.  But that, if it were the case, would prove too much, because we ought then to apply such laws today.

Yahweh not only commands violence; he engages in it.  Famous example include the Flood (Gen 6-8) and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 19).

Then there is the killing of the firstborn son from every family that did not have blood daubed on its doorposts, the drowning of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, and the slaughter of the Israelite revels (Num 16).

Violence attributed to God sometimes seems capricious, such as the death of Uzzah when he attempted to steady the ark (2 Sam 6:6f).

The Lord is described as using nations against nations as instruments of judgement.  The killing was often indisciminate, as in Ezek  21:3–4.

Jeremiah depicts the Lord using Babylon as a merciless instrument of punishment, Jer 13:14.

In Lam 1:15, Yahweh will trample the virgin daughters of Jerusalem as in a winepress.

Parents would have to witness their children being dashed to the ground.  Pregnant women would have their babies ripped out of their wombs.  Yahweh would cause children to eat their parents, and parents to eat their children.

How, as Christians, can we confess all these texts as God-breathed, while confessing our peace-loving Saviour as the ultimate revelation of God?  Clearly, something else must be going on.  And that something else must point to Calvary.

We can take our lead from Origen, along with other leaders from the early church, who do not seek to defend the violence of these texts, but rather looked for something deeper within them.