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.

He insists that when we read of God commanding violence, or perpetrating it himself, ‘something else must be going on’.

Appreciation

There were several things I really appreciated.  These include:

(a) The attempt to face up to difficult texts, and seek a way of dealing with them as holy scripture (rather than ignoring or dismissing them).  Time and again Boyd has sent me back to the biblical text, to see if these things are so.

(b) The emphasis on the reality of Satanic and demonic powers, and of the necessity of engaging in spiritual warfare. I appreciate Boyd’s emphasis (in chapter 12) on the reality and pervasive influence of demonic powers.  In the evangelical circles in which I move, there is insufficient stress on this kind of spiritual warfare.  This chapter in Boyd’s book has prompted me to re-evaluate this issue, both in its biblical and experiential aspects.

(c) The insistence that spiritual gifts, even though genuinely God-given, may be (mis)used for ungodly ends.

Inspiration

Boyd thinks that the OT view of God is not merely incomplete, but frequently mistaken.  Appealing to Hebrews 1:1, he claims that in the OT the true character of God is clouded over for much of the time, so that all we get are glimpses of that character, along with much misunderstanding and error.

Boyd makes much of the opening of the Letter to the Hebrews, understood as teaching that, in the OT, God’s revelation consisted of ‘glimpses of truth’ (J.B. Phillips).  Boyd proceeds to argue that while, on the one hand, the OT as a whole may be regarded as divinely inspired, God has permitted it to contain many teachings that are inimical to his final and perfect revelation in Jesus Christ.

But, according to Boyd, this is not to say that the text of the OT is not God-breathed.  But it is to say that God graciously met his people of old where they were.  He did not all at once seek to sweep away their beliefs and practices, rooted as they were in the paganism of the Ancient Near East (ANE).

These OT texts of violence should be seen as ‘literary crucifixes’.  Even in their ascriptions of violence to God, these OT ‘texts of terror’ point towards the cross of Christ, the supreme example of God appearing to inflict violence in what was, in actuality, an act of pure love.

For Boyd, then, we have an Old Testament that is divinely inspired, and yet stuffed with theological error.

Despite Boyd’s protestations, this is a classic case of ‘wanting your cake and eating it’.  It ‘solves’ one problem (the problem of OT violence) by postulating yet more serious one: impuning the truthfulness of those Scriptures, against which our Lord himself spoke not a word.

I ought to add, on this question of the inspiration of the text of OT, that Boyd seems ambivalent about certain aspects of its historicity (he says that it is the text that is dvinely inspired, not the putative history behind the text).

Discontinuity

Boyd postulates a radical discontinuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

In doing so, I believe that he is selling both the Old Testament and the New Testament short.  For all his protestations that he believes that the entire Bible is divinely inspired, his approach to the OT collapses into Marcionism.  For all that he (rightly) magnifies the love of God as revealed in the cross of Christ, he is silent on those NT sayings and writings that speak of divine wrath and judgement.

I should add that, in a footnote to this chapter, Boyd mentions that for some, divine violence can be found in the New Testament as well as the Old.  But, says Boyd, he will not discuss because others have already done so to his satisfaction.  But this is an outrageous omission on his part: he wishes to read OT violence through the lens of the cross of Christ, and yet deliberately exclude any words and actions of Christ and the apostles that might count against his argument!

For Boyd, Jesus’ teaching on the lex talionis (“An eye for an eye…”, Mt 5:38) is ‘Exhibit A’ – the most ‘astonishing’ example of Jesus repudiating an OT law.  In Boyd’s understanding, the law required a person’s punishment to correspond to the severity of their crime.  The law was given not to limit the punishment (as some have argued), but to stipulate how much a person must retaliate.  Jesus goes on the enunciate precisely the opposite attitude and behaviour, by requiring his followers to ‘turn the other cheek’ and to love and bless their enemies.

But Boyd’s interpretation is idiosyncratic, unjustified and (I think) unjustifiable.

Although in Cross Vision, Boyd does not attempt to defend his interpretation, he does so here, in response to Paul’s Copan’s critique of his (Boyd’s) larger work, The Crucifixion of the Warrior God.  Copan maintains that the lex talionis applied the public office, and Jesus is objecting to its application, by his contemporaries, to personal vengeance.  Boyd’s response is threefold:

(a) Jesus is certainly (in Boyd’s view) referring to the OT command itself, and not to some alternative teaching;

(b) The OT context of these commands shows that they are dealing with interpersonal behaviour, and not with the judiciary.

(c) It is invalid to posit a distinction between what is appropriate at a personal level and what is appropriate at the level of the public judiciary.

I find Boyd’s defence unconvincing:

1. It is not simply that ‘some’ scholars argue that the law was given to limit the punishment, the vast majority so argue.
2. The entire set of six ‘antitheses’ (an unfortunate title) is prefaced by Jesus’ insistence: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish these things but to fulfill them” (Mt 5:17).
3. Consistent with this assertion, and as many commentators have pointed out, Jesus not so much repudiating the OT law, but rather filling it out (extending it and demonstrating its deeper meaning).  He does not contradict the law, but extends it.  Where the law puts a limit on personal revenge, Jesus teaches that his people should not seek revenge at all.
4. We may say that Jesus, in his teaching about the lex talionis, was (a) reasserting its original intent, which was to ensure that any punishment was commensurate with the crime; (b) willing to retain its place in judicial law, while denying it a place in personal attitudes and behaviour; (c) taking it to a new level, by denying a place for any kind of vengeance in personal life.  But it goes utterly against the grain of the text to suppose that Jesus intended to repudiate the law.

The Goodness and Severity of God

‘Consider the goodness and the severity of God’ urges the apostle Paul (Rom 11:22).

But Greg Boyd considers only the first of these.

In my judgement, then, he is often right in what he affirms (concerning the goodness of God) but wrong in what he denies (the severity of God).  His theology, flying only with one wing, is therefore blown dangerously off course.

Cross-centred interpretation

At the end of chapter 4, Boyd imagines his readers asking the question: If the cross-centered interpretation of the OT’s violent depictions of God is the way God intends us to interpret them, why has no one in church history proposed this before?

Boyd promises that the hurdle posed by this question is not nearly so high as might be supposed.

But I have another, yet more serious question: If the cross-centered interpretation of the OT’s violent depictions of God is the way God intends us to interpret them, why is there no evidence within Scripture itself that this is the case?

In chapter 5, Boyd, claims to be invoking church history to support his argument.  But he offers little by way of actual support from historical sources.  More seriously yet, the biblical support he offers is mainly by way of inference and extrapolation.  The one text he does discuss a little more fully (Mt 2:15, quoting Hos 11:1) by no means leads inevitably to his conclusion. (Kindly see my longer note on this passage).

That God grieves over human sin is beyond doubt.  But the attitude of God towards sin cannot be described only in terms of grief.

However, Boyd’s case is once again skewed his presuppositions (‘God cannot be the direct cause of violence’) and by his failure to see that there is not a huge moral difference between saying that God did something and that he permitted something.

That sin is sometimes (often?) its own punishment is, I think, indisputable.  But to allow the reader to suppose that there is no direct divine punishment, either in this age or at the end of the age, is to omit an important strand of biblical teaching.

That God punishes sin, after all due warnings have been issued, by abandoning sinners to the inexorable consequences of their sin, is an inescapably scriptural thought.  But divine punishment of sin is positive and penal, and not only privative.

Conclusion

‘Cross Vision’ represents a serious attempt to come to terms with a serious challenge to biblical faith.  It is certainly worth reading and pondering, even if, in the end, it proposes a flawed ‘solution’ to the problem.