Summarising Chapter 2 of Greg Boyd’s Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence (Fortress Press, 2017).

Are all the parts of the Bible equally true and authoritative, or is it right to privilege the teaching of Jesus over that of the Old Testament?

We unconsciously do the latter when we refrain from stoning disobedient children.  But, also, we have the explicit teaching of Jesus himself, who said that he had ‘a greater witness than John [the Baptist]’ (Jn 5:36).  And this statement should be understood in the light of Jesus’ claim that John was the greatest of all the prophets who had come before (Mt 11:11).

Let us think, not so much about our beliefs about God, but rather our mental representation of him.  This is important, because whether our representation of God is loving or threatening will have a profound effect upon the way we live our lives.

If we have a flat view of biblical inspiration – conceiving the two testaments as equally true and equally important – then our image of God will be something of a montage, containing harsh, vengeful elements alongside loving, Christlike elements.

But the Bible itself teaches us to base our image of God solely on Jesus Christ.  Other biblical portraits may nuance that image, but only so far as they are congruent with what we learn about God in Christ.

Jesus himself teaches that everything in Scripture points to himself.  Nothing else in Scripture can be interpreted in such a way as to quality or compete with his revelation of God.

Consider Heb 1:1-3.  This teaches several things: (a) that Jesus is God’s only Son; that he is God incarnate; (b) that previous revelations were glimpses in a sky that was otherwise cloudy and therefore offered obstructed vision; (c) compared with these glimpses of the truth, Jesus is the truth itself (cf. Jn 14:6).  Jesus, then, is the exact representation of God’s very being; the complete revelation of God to us:

‘For this reason, Jesus must be our sole criterion to assess the degree to which previous prophets were catching genuine glimpses of truth and the degree to which they were seeing clouds.’

This is not to question the divine inspiration of the OT, or of any part of it.  But it is to say that for a passage to be recognised as divinely inspired does not mean that it necessarily reflects an unclouded image of God.

Jesus asserted that the OT Scriptures point to him, Jn 5:39-40; 45f.  They testified beforehand to his death and resurrection, Luke 24:25–27; cf. vv. 44–45.

According to Paul, Jesus is the one mediator between God and humankind, 1 Tim 2:5.  It follows that he is the one mediator of all that we know about God.

The most important question to ask of any Bible passage is, ‘How does this testify to Christ?’  And this applies to the OT passages that speak of divine violence.  How do these passage testify to Christ when seen through the looking-glass, or lens, of his life and (especially) his death?

So we should view these OT representations of God not as independent sources of information about the divine character, but rather as pointers to Christ.

According to Col 2:2ff, Christ is not only the embodiment of all God’s wisdom and knowledge, but the full embodiment of God himself.  All that God is and does is disclosed in Christ.  Everything we need to know about God is found in him.  It does not need to be supplemented by anything we find in the OT or elsewhere.

Jesus says, in Mt 11:27, that all things have been committed to him by the Father, and that ‘no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.’  There must be a hyperbolic element here, because Jesus certainly didn’t think that the OT writers were devoid of knowledge of God.  The point is that in comparison to the revelation of God in Christ, the OT revelation pales very considerably.

The old is but a shadow of the new (Col 2:16f; Heb 10:1).  Indeed, the writer to the Hebrews can say that there was something ‘wrong’ with the first covenant, and that it has now become ‘obsolete’ (Heb 8:7,13).

In answering Phillip, Jesus declares: ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’.

The same point is made at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel: the Word is precisely God revealing himself (Jn 1:1), and can thus rightly claim to be ‘the way to the Father, the truth of the Father, and the life that the Father offers (John 14:6).

Jesus is the (one and only true) Light of the world.  No one before him had seen God, or adequately made God known, but he ‘who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known’ (Jn 1:18).

Burge: Jesus Christ does not have a relative superiority to Moses and the law, but an absolute superiority.  The Son’s revelation of God is unrivalled.

Christ’s superiority over all that went before is seen in his repudiation of multiple aspects of the OT:

People are not defiled if they eat the meat of unclean animals (Lev 11; Mk 7:19).  A woman with a bleeding disorder is not to be shunned (Lev 15:25-27) but rather her touch is welcomed (Lk 8:43-48).  Jesus defended a more relaxed attitude towards the Sabbath (Mk 2:23-28).  He subverted the OT command that a woman who committed adultery sould be stoned (Jn 8:1-11).  Contrary to Deut 6:13, Jesus taught that oaths were not to be taken (Mt 5:34), and that we should answer with a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.  To do other than this would be of the devil (v37): the urge to obey a divinely inspired law might be a demonic urge!

So, while Jesus regarded the whole of the OT as God-breathed, he was free to set aside, cancel, or contradict various aspects of it.  Its authority was under his authority.

When James and John wished to emulate Elijah in calling down fire from heaven, Jesus rebuked them (Lk 9:54).  The prophet’s destructive miracle was inconsistent with Jesus’ nonviolent love.

Whereas the OT taught a law of retaliation, stipulating how much a person ought to retaliate (not simply how much they may retaliate), Jesus instructed his disciples to set that law aside, and not to resist an evil person (Matt 5:38–39).  Indeed, they are to love and bless their enemies (Matt 5:38–39).  To be considered a ‘child of the Father’, we must do exactly the opposite of what the law commands!