Cross Vision 16 – Review

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Sydney Smith quipped:

‘I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices one so.’

Well, I have read Greg Boyd’s carefully, summarising as fairly and as accurately as I can the contents of each chapter.

So here is my (prejudiced?) opinion.

Boyd’s aim is to exonerate the God of the Old Testament (OT) from the charge of violence.  Not just excessive, capricious or malicious violence, but violence of all sorts.

He has set himself an extremely challenging task: he wishes, while affirming the inspiration and authority of the entire Bible, to show that these OT texts of violence convey a completely new meaning – a meaning that actually eschews violence – in the light of the cross of Christ.…

Paul and Jesus

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Many Bible readers will have wondered why Paul, in his letters, makes so few references to the Jesus of the Gospels.

Does this mean that Paul was the ‘real’ founder of Christianity, with his teaching having very little in common with that of Jesus?

Craig Blomberg writes:

‘An interesting dimension of a number of Paul’s letters, penned in the 50s, especially Romans, 1 Corinthians and 1 Thessalonians are the quotations of and allusions to Jesus’ teachings that Paul could not have gotten simply by consulting a Gospel, since none had yet been written.…

Cathedrals: playgrounds or ‘sacred spaces’?

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Earlier this year, Chichester Cathedral was the venue for a ‘silent disco’ (where the music was played through wireless headphones, rather than loudspeakers).

Previous uses of cathedral space have included:

  • Stars Wars event (Peterborough)
  • Crazy golf course (Rochester)
  • Helter skelter (Norwich)
  • Indoor skate park (Gloucester)

Not surprisingly, these have provoked a certain amount of outrage:

‘Rochester Cathedral was founded in AD 604. It survived the Norman Conquest, 2 fires in the 12th century, and several rounds of pillaging.…

Cross Vision 15 – Commanding Child Sacrifice

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Summarising chapter 16

The idea that God could command Abraham to destroy his own son strikes many as being preposterous.

The problem is compounded by the fact the child sacrifice was very prevalent among the nations of the ANE, and by the consideration that the OT itself repeatedly condemns the practice.

The usual evangelical approach is to note that the Spirit of Christ finally breaks through.  At the last minute God prevents the sacrifice from taking place and provides a substitute.…

Cross Vision 14 – Misusing Divine Power

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Summarising chapter 15

Power – including God-given power – can be abused.

Jesus – fully human as well as fully God – submitted himself perfectly to his Father’s will.  Like us, he was tempted, but unlike us, he was without sin.  So, when the Father invested him with power, he used it wisely and obediently.  He could have abused that power (Mt 4:2-7; 26:53), but he didn’t.

But, in the case of Moses, Samson, Elijah and Elisha and others, there were times when they did abuse their God-given power. …

Cross Vision 13 – Dragon-Swallowing-Dragon Warfare

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Summarising chapter 14

The deliverance at the Red Sea (Ex 14) took place without any human assistance.  It has been argued that God would always have preferred to work that way, if only his people had trusted him.  But does God ever need to resort to violence?

The author of the narrative certainly thought that it was Yahweh, ‘a man of war’ (Ex 15:1), who drowned Pharaoh’s army in the sea.  But our cross-centred hermeneutic determines that we should see this ascription of divine violence to the writer’s fallen and culturally conditioned thinking. …

Cross Vision 12 – Creation Undone

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Summarising chapter 13.

Not all the violence in the OT can be attributed to human agents.

Take the flood, for example.  A cross-centred hermeneutic prompts us to discern Satanic powers using their God-given authority to brng this about.

Scripture assumes as certain solidarity between the human, animal and inanimate kingdoms.  In Gen 6:12f the same word (sāhat) is used to describe human sin, the effect of this on the earth, and the punishment.  This indicates that the flood ‘was an organic, not a judicial, divine judgment’.…

Cross Vision 11 – Cosmic War

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A summary of chapter 12.

So far, writes Boyd,

‘We’ve seen that the cross teaches us that at the center of the story of what else is going on in the OT’s violent portraits of God is the truth that Yahweh is a humble sin-bearing God and that God brings about judgments by withdrawing his restraining Spirit to allow sin to punish sin and evil to vanquish evil.’

Now for another aspect of this.  The NT construes the crucifixion of Jesus as the decisive battle in the age-long conflict between God and Satan. …

Biblicism: a failed project?

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In the course of a review of Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, Robert H. Gundry summarises, first, what Smith means by the word ‘biblicism’:

‘Biblicism means an emphasis on the Bible’s “exclusive authority, infallibility [or ‘inerrancy’], perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability,” though not every version of biblicism contains all these ingredients—at least not all in equal measure.’

Then, according to Gundry, Smith notes that this set of emphasis produces ‘pervasive interpretative pluralism’, with the result that:

‘Evangelical Christians differ widely on what they should believe and how they should behave; and their differences include important as well as unimportant matters.

…

Cross Vision 10 – Doing and Allowing

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In chapter 11 of Cross Vision, Greg Boyd attempts to draw a sharp distinction between what God does, and what God allows.

According to Boyd, this is a distinction which is often obscured in the OT.

In Ex 12:12, for example, Yahweh tells Moses: “I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn of both people and animals”.

In v23 of the same chapter, however, we read, “When the Lord goes through the land to strike down the Egyptians, he will see the blood on the top and sides of the doorframe and will pass over that doorway, and he will not permit the destroyer to enter your houses and strike you down.”…