The Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Volumes 1 & 2

By Gregory A. Boyd

Renowned pastor-theologian Gregory A. Boyd proposes a revolutionary way to read the Bible in this epic but accessible study. His "cruciform hermeneutic" stands as a challenge to the field of biblical studies and to all thoughtful Christians.



A dramatic tension confronts every Christian believer and interpreter of Scripture: on the one hand, we encounter Old Testament stories of God commanding horrendous violence. On the other hand, we read the unequivocally nonviolent teachings of Jesus in the New Testament. Reconciling these two has challenged Christians and theologians for two millennia.



Throughout Christian history, various answers have been proposed, ranging from the long-rejected explanation that these contrasting depictions are of two entirely different "gods"; to recent social, cultural, and literary theories that attempt to dispel the conflict.



The Crucifixion of the Warrior God takes up this dramatic tension and the range of proposed answers in an ambitious constructive investigation. Over two volumes, Gregory A. Boyd argues that we must take seriously the full range of Scripture as inspired, including its violent depictions of God. At the same time, he affirms the absolute centrality of the crucified and risen Christ as the supreme revelation of God.



Developing a theological interpretation of Scripture that he labels a "cruciform hermeneutic"; Boyd demonstrates how the Bible's violent images of God are reframed and their violence subverted when interpreted through the lens of the cross and resurrection. Indeed, when read in this way, Boyd argues that these violent depictions bear witness to the same self-sacrificial nature of God that was ultimately revealed on the cross.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781506420769

Gregory A. Boyd

Gregory A. Boyd (Ph.D., Princeton Theological Seminary) is a pastor at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Previously, he was a professor of theology at Bethel University, also in St. Paul. His books include Recovering the Real Jesus in an Age of Revisionist Replies, Letters from a Skeptic, God of the Possible, Repenting of Religion, Seeing is Believing, Escaping the Matrix, The Jesus Legend, Myth of a Christian Nation, Is God to Blame, God at War and Satan and the Problem of Evil.

Book preview

Introduction: The Magic Eye of the Crucified Christ

My Conundrum

For reasons that will become clear later on in this book, I have come to believe that Jesus revealed an agape-centered, other-oriented, self-sacrificial God who opposes violence and who commands his people to refrain from violence (e.g., Matt 5:39–45; Luke 6:27–36).[1] I also believe in the divine inspiration of the Old Testament (OT), primarily because I have good reason to believe Jesus treated it as such. Since I confess Jesus to be Lord, I do not feel free to disagree with him on this matter.[2] Yet I and everyone else who shares these two convictions face a conundrum.

How are we to reconcile the God revealed in Christ, who chose to die for his enemies rather than to crush them, with the many OT portraits of Yahweh violently smiting his enemies?[3] How are we to reconcile the God revealed in Christ, who made swearing off violence a precondition for being considered a child of your Father in heaven (Matt 5:45), with the portraits of Yahweh commanding his followers to slaughter every man, woman, child, and animal in certain regions of Canaan (e.g., Deut 7:2, 20:16–20)? How are we to reconcile the God revealed in Christ, who with his dying breath prayed for the forgiveness of his tormenters (Luke 23:34) and who taught his disciples to forgive seven times seventy (Matt 18:21–22), with the OT’s portraits of God threatening a curse on anyone who extended mercy toward enemies (Jer 48:10; cf. Deut 7:2, 16; 13:8; 19:13)? And how can we possibly reconcile the God revealed in Christ, who expressed profound love for children, promising blessings on all who treated them well and pronouncing warnings for all who might harm them (Luke 18:15–17; Matt 10:42, 18:6–14), with the OT portrait of God bringing judgment on his people by having parents cannibalize their own children (Lev 26:28–29; Jer 19:7, 9; Lam 2:20; Ezek 5:9–10)?

Because Jesus affirmed the inspiration of the OT, I cannot agree with the many today who argue that we must simply reject such violent portraits of God, even though I cannot disagree with their claim that some of these portraits strike us as sinister and evil.[4] Yet, because I believe that Jesus reveals an agape-centered, other-oriented, enemy-embracing God who opposes all violence, and because I have become convinced that the New Testament (NT) presents Jesus as the revelation that surpasses all others, I also can no longer agree with many of my fellow Evangelicals who insist that we must simply embrace these violent divine portraits as completely accurate revelations of God alongside the revelation we are given in Christ.[5]

I am thus caught between the Scylla of Jesus’s affirmation of the OT as divinely inspired and the Charybdis of his nonviolent revelation of God. This is the conundrum that motivated me—that forced me—to write this two-volume work. With Jerome Creach and many others, I am convinced that resolving the conundrum created by the OT’s violent portraits of God constitutes one of the greatest challenges the church faces today.[6]

The Background

I think it will benefit readers to know a bit of the story that forced this conundrum upon me. The book you are now reading is not actually the book I started to write ten years ago. When I began this work, I still shared the above-mentioned common Evangelical assumption that affirming the divine inspiration of the OT required one to embrace the straightforward meaning of every one of the OT’s violent depictions of God. My plan was to write a relatively brief book that would combine all the best exegetical and historical explanations I had compiled over the years as to why God commanded and engaged in violence in the OT, with a few of my own ideas thrown into the mix. My goal, which is shared by most Evangelical books addressing this topic, was to put the best possible spin on the OT’s violent portraits of God, demonstrating that God was justified in each instance in which he commanded and/or engaged in violence.[7]

To my dismay, around fifty pages into my writing project, I felt I had no choice but to abandon it. Four considerations brought me to this conclusion.[8] First, while the arguments I had compiled once felt rather compelling to me, most now struck me as strained and inadequate. Second, as I mentioned above, and as I will demonstrate later on (vol. 1, chs. 2–3), I had come to the realization that the NT presents Jesus not as one revelation among others but as the revelation that culminates and supersedes all others. As Mark Buchanan notes regarding the conviction that permeates the book of Hebrews, in every way, Jesus . . . is superior to whoever and whatever has come before him. The past is a mere shadow of Christ’s present reality and of his glory.[9]

Third, and closely related to this, I had come to the realization that Jesus not only supersedes all previous revelations, he is the ultimate focal point of these revelations. As he himself taught, and as a multitude of passages in the NT confirm, all Scripture bears witness to him (e.g., John 5:39–47) and especially to his sufferings on the cross (Luke 24:25–32, 44–47). And fourth, this last point led to my eventual discovery that the cross forms the thematic center of everything Jesus was about, from his incarnation to his resurrection and ascension (see vol. 1, chs. 4–6). Whereas I once understood Jesus’s saving work on the cross in isolation from his life, teachings, and ministry, I now saw that everything Jesus was about was orientated around the revelation that God is other-oriented, self-sacrificial, agape-love (1 John 4:8) as defined by his all-surpassing sacrifice on the cross (1 John 3:16). And since all Scripture bears witness to Christ, I came to realize that this means, more specifically, that it bears witness to the Christ whose identity, life, and ministry were oriented around his passion.

Now, at first blush, I realize that these new insights may not sound very revolutionary. Indeed, they may strike some as the sort of things one might learn in an intro-level seminary theology class. It is not that I had never heard these four insights before. Indeed, it is not as though I did not, to a certain degree, previously believe in them. After all, the NT clearly reflects these convictions in a variety of ways. Yet, it was only when I began to write the book I had initially planned on writing that I began to grasp the profound significance of these convictions. And the more clearly I grasped the significance of these convictions, the more I sensed the inadequacy of the best-spin explanations I had planned on using.

At the same time, I increasingly sensed the peculiarity of the fact that my professed belief in the supremacy of the revelation of God in Christ had virtually no impact on my wrestling with the violent portraits of God in the OT. Though I had always professed that all Scripture should be interpreted in a way that bears witness to Christ, as the church has always done, it had never occurred to me to wonder how this holds true of portraits of God commanding his people to mercilessly slaughter anything that breathes (Deut 20:16) or prompting parents to cannibalize their children. And frankly, I do not think I am alone here.

Seeing these insights in this deeper way reframed my conviction about how we are to arrive at our understanding of God. Like most Christians, I had up to this point assumed that while Jesus’s revelation of God should be at the center of my understanding of God, I was also supposed to accept every other portrait of God in Scripture as revelatory as well, including the violent portraits. Hence, like most Christians, I had a mental picture of a God who was Christ-like to a degree but who was also capable of commanding merciless genocide and bringing about familial cannibalism. And like most Christians, I had no way of reconciling these conflicting perspectives other than by trying to put the best possible spin on the violent portraits. But my deepening appreciation of Jesus as the one and only exact representation of God’s being (Heb 1:3) and the one to whom all Scripture points meant that my conception of God should no longer be Christ-like to a degree. I now understood, in a brand-new way, that to see [Jesus] is to see the Father (John 14:9).

This meant that the challenge we face with regard to the OT’s violent portraits of God is not about how to make God look less like a moral monster, to use Paul Copan’s phrase.[10] Our challenge is not even about how to reconcile these portraits with the revelation of God in Christ. The challenge, I now realized, is about how we can disclose how these portraits, together with all Scripture, actually point to Jesus, whose identity, life, and ministry are centered on the revelation of the self-sacrificial, agape-love of God most fully disclosed on the cross. And as it concerns this challenge, I came to see, the relative adequacy or inadequacy of my best spin arguments was completely irrelevant, which is why I had to abandon my project and start from scratch.

The New Challenge and the New Perspective

If the challenge of reconciling brutally violent portraits of God with the revelation of God in Christ was daunting, the challenge of disclosing how these portraits actually bear witness to Christ, and more specifically to Christ crucified, initially seemed impossible. Yet, as I pondered the new challenge before me, I found my first glimmer of hope in the writings of a second- and third-century scholar and preacher named Origen.

As I will discuss later on, Origen (and he was not alone here in the early church) was admirably forthright in acknowledging the challenge posed by canonical material that seemed unworthy of God.[11] Origen encouraged disciples to never allow themselves to become angry, disgusted, or frustrated when they confront such material, and to never give in to the natural impulse to reject this material as though it was not divinely inspired. Origen rather advised disciples to humble themselves before God as they held the unresolved conundrum in mind, all the while remaining confident that all Scripture, including material that appears unworthy of God, is divinely inspired. In time, Origen taught, the Spirit will enable us to see beyond the surface appearance of things, where the conundrum resides, and find a resolution in a deeper, more profound, revelatory truth.[12]

I took Origen’s advice to heart. For several months, I poured over a long list of written-out passages that I had compiled in which God is depicted as engaging in or commanding violence. As I did so, I pondered the question of how, on the authority of Jesus, this material could be divinely inspired for the ultimate purpose of bearing witness to the crucified Christ.

What eventually happened to me was a bit like what happens when a person stares the right way at the two-dimensional patterns of a Magic Eye picture and suddenly discerns a three-dimensional object rising out of it. Prayerfully contemplating Scripture’s violent portraits of God with the conviction that they are divinely inspired and thus must somehow point to the self-sacrificial God revealed on Calvary, I suddenly began to catch glimpses of the crucified God in them.[13] Origen’s advice, it seemed, proved right.

This new perspective set me on a course of research that was completely different from my first project. And the more I researched, the sharper this perspective became and the more I found confirmations of it throughout the biblical narrative.

It is this perspective, and this research, that ten years later produced the two-volume work you are now reading. And whereas the violent depictions of God in the OT used to pose the greatest challenge to my faith in the God-breathed nature of Scripture (2 Tim 3:16), I must confess that I now consider the manner in which these portraits bear witness to the crucified Christ, and the manner in which this is confirmed throughout Scripture, to be one of the strongest demonstrations of Scripture’s divine inspiration.

The Cruciform Hermeneutic

The claim I will be defending throughout this work is that there is a way of interpreting Scripture’s violent portraits of God that not only resolves the moral challenges they pose but that also discloses how these portraits bear witness to God’s nonviolent, self-sacrificial, enemy-loving character that was definitively revealed on Calvary. More specifically, I will be making the case that when we interpret these divine portraits with the resolved conviction that the true character of God is fully revealed in the crucified Christ, we are able to see beyond the surface appearance of these portraits (viz. beyond what mere exegesis can unveil) and discern the cruciform character of God in their depth, to use a common metaphor of Origen’s. I will refer to this cross-centered approach to Scripture as the Cruciform Hermeneutic.

The driving conviction of the Cruciform Hermeneutic is that since Calvary gives us a perspective of God’s character that is superior to what people in the OT had, we can also enjoy a superior perspective of what was actually going on when OT authors depicted God engaging in and commanding violence. If we remain committed to the conviction that all Scripture is inspired for the ultimate purpose of bearing witness to the revelation of God on the cross, and if we therefore humbly look for the crucified God in the depths of the OT’s violent depictions of God, my claim is that we do, in fact, find him. Like a beautiful three-dimensional object rising out of a two-dimensional mundane pattern in a Magic Eye book, I believe the Cruciform Hermeneutic enables us to discern the beauty of the crucified God rising out of portraits of God that on the surface appear profoundly ugly. The crucified Christ, in short, gives us the Magic Eye to discern him in the depths of even the most horrifically violent portraits of God.

The Theological Interpretation of Scripture

Like all analogies, the Magic Eye analogy has its limitations, for it could be thought that I am suggesting that God inspired his word to function as a sort of cryptogram, requiring a special eye to discern its revelatory content. This is not what I am suggesting. Rather, I will argue that because God supremely values authentic agape-love relationships, and because he does not want to dehumanize people, he relies on influential rather than coercive power to accomplish his purposes. For this reason, I submit, God had to accommodate his self-revelation to the spiritual state and cultural conditioning of his people in the ages leading up to Christ. Only gradually could God change people’s hearts and minds so that they could receive more and more truth about his true character and about his ideal will for them. And whenever God’s people have come to understand more about his true character and will, they have always been able to look back and find divinely intended meanings in earlier writings that the original authors could not have perceived.

Nowhere is this more evident than with the NT authors, as I will demonstrate in volume 1, chapter 3. Because of the surprising revelation of God that they received through Christ, the authors of the NT read the OT through the lens of Christ. With this Magic Eye, they were able to find Christ in passages that would otherwise appear totally unrelated to Christ. Not only this, but following the precedent of the NT, the vast majority of theologians up until modern times have assumed that Scripture contains divinely intended meanings that the human authors of Scripture could not have known but that could now be discerned in light of God’s fuller revelation in Christ.

As I will discuss later on, this approach to Scripture only began to be rejected when the historical-critical method began to be applied to Scripture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The assumption behind this method was that the only academically respectful way to read the Bible was to study it the same way one would study any other ancient work—namely, without the faith assumption that this literature is inspired by God and may therefore contain divinely intended meanings that the original human authors could not have anticipated. This humanistic approach to Scripture unfortunately came to be widely shared by Christian pastors and scholars alike, and as we will see, it has had a strongly erosive effect on the faith of the church.

Fortunately, throughout the last century, and especially over the last several decades, an increasing number of Christian scholars have championed the legitimacy, and indeed the necessity, of returning to the traditional Christian way of interpreting Scripture. This approach has received the label Theological Interpretation of Scripture (henceforth TIS), and as I will discuss at length in chapter 12, most who advocate it argue that a return to a precritical way of reading Scripture entails that we must return to a Christocentric way of reading Scripture (viz. a way that discloses how all Scripture bears witness to Christ). Indeed, many theologians in the past, as well as some in the present, have shared my conviction that the cross is the thematic center of Jesus’s ministry and have thus held that a truly consistent Christocentric reading of Scripture entails a crucicentric reading of Scripture.[14] The Cruciform Hermeneutic I will develop and defend in this volume and apply to Scripture in the subsequent volume is my attempt to build upon this crucicentric conviction.

Luther was undoubtedly the most emphatic advocate of this perspective, arguing that the cross was the center around which everything in Scripture revolved.[15] He went so far as to transform Paul’s resolve to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified (1.Cor 2:2) into a key hermeneutical principle, claiming to see nothing in Scripture except Christ crucified.[16] Undoubtedly the most ardent contemporary defender of this view, and, therefore, perhaps the single most influential theologian on this present work, has been Jürgen Moltmann. He went so far as to claim—rightly, in my opinion—that the crucified Christ . . . [is] the key for all the divine secrets of Christian theology.[17]

A Curious Omission

I trust I have said enough to demonstrate that the Magic Eye analogy is not suggesting anything more unusual about the Bible than what the church tradition has always espoused. Indeed, there is absolutely nothing in principle novel about the Cruciform Hermeneutic I will be developing and employing. To the degree that it contains anything new, it is only because I am attempting to apply the traditional Christocentric—and therefore crucicentric—hermeneutic of the church more consistently than has been done in the past.

I believe the clearest indication that the Christocentric hermeneutic of the church has not been applied as consistently as it should have been is that so far as I have been able to determine, no one since the fifth century has attempted to apply this hermeneutic to the OT’s violent portraits of God.[18] While Luther claimed to see nothing in Scripture except Christ crucified, for example, he never disclosed how he saw nothing except Christ crucified in Scripture’s portraits of God commanding the merciless slaughter of entire populations. Indeed, despite the fact that the church has always held that Scripture should be interpreted Christocentrically, the church’s chief theologians have tended to interpret Scripture’s violent portraits of God exactly as they would have were they not reading Scripture Christocentrically. Curiously, these theologians have been willing to go to great exegetical lengths to reconcile large portions of Scripture with their understanding of God’s metaphysical attributes (e.g., his immutability and impassability). Hence, any Scripture that ascribed change or suffering to God was typically interpreted to depict God as he appears to us, not as he actually is. But until rather recently, no one has seen the need to apply this same strategy to reconcile Scripture with God’s moral attributes, especially as they are revealed in the crucified Christ.

The conviction driving this work is that it is time to correct this inconsistency. For the revelation of the crucified God is primarily a revelation of God’s moral character. Hence, if there are any passages of Scripture where a Christocentric, and, more specifically, a crucicentric, hermeneutic ought to make a difference, it is with those portraits of God that seem to flatly contradict this character.

Outline

It will prove helpful for readers to have a broad road map of where I am heading before embarking on this journey. The first volume of this work is focused on developing and defending the Cruciform Hermeneutic while the second volume is focused on developing and defending the Cruciform Thesis, which is simply my label for what we find when we read the OT with this hermeneutic.

The argument of this present volume will unfold as follows. In part 1 (chs. 1–6) I will set up the problem we will be addressing while also laying the foundation for its solution. Chapter 1 is foundational for my entire project, for I will here demonstrate that in contrast to the conception of faith many embrace today, biblical faith has always allowed for, and indeed encouraged, people to honestly question God when he appears to act in uncharacteristic or unfaithful ways. I will in this chapter also address the urgency of boldly exercising this questioning kind of faith in our post-9/11 world, in which we have become acutely aware of the dangerous influence violent portraits of God exercise on people who deem them sacred.

In chapters 2 and 3 I make the case for my previously mentioned claim that the revelation of God in Christ is not merely one revelation among others, nor even the greatest revelation among all others. Rather, I will argue that the NT presents Christ as the revelation that culminates all others, the revelation through which all previous revelations are to be interpreted, and the revelation to which all previous revelations point. I will follow this in chapters 4 and 5 by building on the work of Thomas Torrance and others to demonstrate that the cross should be understood to be the thematic center of Jesus’s atoning life rather than merely as an atoning event at the end of his life. Hence, to say all Scripture bears witness to Christ is to say it bears witness to Christ crucified. And in chapter 6 I will defend my understanding of the centrality of the cross against objections that have been, or that could be, raised against it.

In part 2 (chs. 7–9) I will spell out the challenge that the violence ascribed to God in the OT poses. Since this material presents the problem I am wrestling with in this work, some readers might legitimately wonder why it was not placed before my case for understanding the crucified Christ as the definitive revelation of God. The answer is that I have come to believe that the full depth of the problem this material poses can only be appreciated when viewed in the light of the firm convictions that the cross reveals what God is really like and that all Scripture is ultimately intended to bear witness to this revelation. Without these two convictions in place, some readers might assume that the OT’s violent divine portraits present us with a mere moral problem that we could perhaps adequately respond to simply by putting the best possible spin on them. Such a response, I will argue, would actually prevent us from discerning how these portraits bear witness to the cross, for we shall see that it is precisely in their morally problematic nature that these portraits point us to the cross.

In chapter 7, therefore, I provide a comprehensive overview of the OT’s most troubling portraits of God. Far from putting the best possible spin on them, my aim is to emphasize how thoroughly they contradict the revelation of God in Christ, despite the fact that I regard them all to be divinely inspired. Following this, I will in chapter 8 critically discuss the Dismissal Solution espoused by scholars who believe the only proper response to violent portraits of God within the canon is to reject them. And in chapter 9 I will critically discuss the Synthesis Solution espoused by scholars who believe we must embrace the surface meaning of violent divine portraits as bona fide revelations of God alongside the revelation of God in Christ. I will argue that there are a host of serious shortcomings in both the Dismissal and Synthesis proposals, the most important being that they fail to disclose how the OT’s violent divine portraits bear witness to the nonviolent, self-sacrificial, enemy-embracing love of God revealed in the crucified Christ.

Finally, in part 3 (chs. 10–12) I will develop and defend the Cruciform Hermeneutic. In chapter 10, I will review the historic precedent in the church tradition for the hermeneutic I am proposing by exploring a theological approach to Scripture’s violent depictions of God that was widespread in the early church but was unfortunately abandoned in the fourth and fifth centuries. Theologians such as Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Cassian felt they could not reject Scripture’s violent portraits of God, for they believed them to be divinely inspired. At the same time, they also believed they could not synthesize them with the revelation of God in Christ, for they believed the violence that these portraits ascribed to God contradicted this revelation and was unworthy of God. Instead, these fathers explored ways of reinterpreting these portraits, which is why I label this approach the Reinterpretation Solution. I will focus my attention on Origen, for he was the most prolific, and arguably the most brilliant, advocate of this approach. Although I will argue against the allegorical way in which Origen reinterpreted violent divine portraits, I will contend that he and others who espoused this approach were correct in seeing the need for a Christ-centered reinterpretation of these portraits and were heading in the right direction. As such, their theological interpretation of the OT’s violent portraits of God constitutes the closest precedent in church history to the one I am defending in this work.

In chapter 11, I will develop the Cruciform Hermeneutic by analyzing the manner in which faith gives us the unique ability to discern the cruciform God in a crucified and cursed first-century Jew from Nazareth (Gal 3:13). I will then argue that if we simply exercise this same faith while interpreting the OT’s violent portraits of God, we can begin to discern the same cruciform God in the depths of these portraits. We shall see that when interpreted this way, Scripture’s violent divine portraits become mini-literary crucifixions that function as harbingers of the historical crucifixion.

I will then bring this volume to a close in chapter 12 by providing a more nuanced understanding of the Cruciform Hermeneutic as I flesh it out in light of the previously mentioned TIS movement. More specifically, I will flesh out the manner in which our cross-centered approach to Scripture nuances five generally held convictions by advocates of TIS: namely, our understanding of the Bible as the Word of God, the sensus plenior (surplus of meaning) of Scripture, the unity of Scripture, the Christocentric purpose of Scripture, and the role of the reader in interpreting Scripture. We will find that the distinct way the Cruciform Hermeneutic appropriates each of these aspects of the TIS movement will have implications for our interpretation of violent divine portraits of God in volume 2.

My ultimate hope for this two-volume work is that readers will acquire the cross-centered Magic Eye that allows them to discern the self-sacrificial, indiscriminately loving, nonviolent God revealed on the cross in the depths of the OT’s sometimes horrifically violent depictions of God. And in seeing this, my hope is that readers will see that the revelation of God on the cross must bring a once-and-for-all end to all of our own violent conceptions of him. Just as we renounce the sin and violence manifested on the surface appearance of the cross, even as we by faith discern God stooping out of love to bear this sin and violence, so too, I contend, we should renounce the sin and violence manifested on the surface appearance of the OT’s violent depictions of him, even as we by faith discern God out of love stooping to bear this sin and violence. For when the sin of the world was nailed to the cross with Christ (Col 2:14), the sinful conception of God as a violent warrior god was included.

Hence, the revelation of the agape-loving and sin-bearing crucified God entails the permanent crucifixion of the violent warrior god.

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To be discussed in vol. 1, chs. 4–5. On the disputes over the definition of violence, see vol. 1, ch. 1, n. 34. On issues surrounding the nature of agape-love, see vol. 1, ch. 4, n. 4. All Scripture references are to the NIV unless otherwise noted. ↵

So argues M. A. Rae, J. Goldingay, C. J. H. Wright, R. Wall, and K. Greene-McCreight, Christ and the Old Testament, JTI 2, no. 1 (2008): 3–4; G. K. Beale, Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament: Exegesis and Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 95–96. The classic defense of this perspective is B. B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, ed. Samuel S. Craig (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1948), 299–407. On Jesus’s high view of Scripture, see John Wenham, Christ and the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994); R. T. France, Jesus and the Old Testament: His Application of Old Testament Passages to Himself and His Mission (London: Tyndale, 1971); Leon Morris, I Believe in Revelation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 49–67; Warfield, Inspiration and Authority, 138–45; David S. Dockery, Biblical Interpretation Then and Now: Contemporary Hermeneutics in the Light of the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992), 23–26. On debates surrounding what precisely constituted the canon Jesus believed in, see vol. 1, ch. 8, n. 43.

I should acknowledge that there is a great deal of scholarly debate about the proper label Christians should use for the Hebrew Scripture. Some contemporary scholars argue that referring to it as the Old Testament reflects an attitude of superiority toward Judaism, sometimes expressed as supersessionism. While sensitive to this concern, I nevertheless concur with those who argue that the alternatives of Hebrew Bible and First Testament are even more problematic for various reasons. I have therefore decided to follow the lead of Philip Jenkins (Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses [New York: HarperOne, 2011], vii) and others who continue to refer to this body of literature as the Old Testament. For a balanced discussion, see Fredrick C. Holmgren, The Old Testament and the Significance of Jesus: Embracing Change—Maintaining Christian Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 119–38. I will address the charge of supersessionism in vol. 2, appendix X.

↵

I will review these violent portrayals of God in vol. 1, ch. 7. In vol. 1, ch. 5, I will briefly address several instances in Jesus’s ministry in which some allege that Jesus condoned or engaged in violence. I provide a more comprehensive response to allegations of violence in the NT in the four appendices to this volume. Aside from this, however, this work will be focused exclusively on violent portraits of God in the OT. Readers should also note that throughout this work I will be using the concept of a portrait or depiction of God to refer to any understanding of God that is explicitly or implicitly present in a biblical passage, regardless of its genre. As I am using these phrases, most canonical narratives and poems in the OT reflect certain assumptions about God and in this sense contain a divine portrait. ↵

Kenton L. Sparks, Sacred Word, Broken Word: Biblical Authority and the Dark Side of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 37. ↵

On Jesus as the revelation that surpasses all others, see vol. 1, chs. 2–3. ↵

Jerome F. D. Creach, Violence in Scripture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2013), 1. ↵

See, for example, Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011); David T. Lamb, God Behaving Badly: Is the God of the Old Testament Angry, Sexist and Racist? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2011). For other works that argue along these lines, see vol. 1, ch. 7, n. 28 On an unrelated matter, while I believe males and females are equally created in the image of God (Gen 1:26–28), and while I respect those who may disagree with my decision, I will in this work follow the convention of referring to God as he. Among my reasons for following this practice is the fact that I will be quoting a great deal of Scripture, all of which uses the second person male pronoun to refer to God, and I felt it would be cumbersome as well as distracting to continually adjust my language. ↵

Each of these factors will be developed and defended in subsequent chapters. ↵

M. Buchanan, Can We Trust the God of Genocide?, CT, July/August 2013, 23. See, e.g., Heb 1:3, 8:5, 10:1; cf. Col 2:17. ↵

Copan, Moral Monster?. ↵

Origen’s approach to problematic portraits of God and other puzzling material in Scripture will be discussed in vol. 1, ch. 10. ↵

For a similar contemporary assessment on how paradoxes can open our eyes to supernatural truths, see Ian T. Ramsey, Paradox in Religion, in Christian Empiricism, ed. Jerry H. Gill (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 107. ↵

Michael Gorman prefers "the cruciform God to the crucified God, for he worries that crucified God may imply that there is no distinction between the Father and the Son." Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 18n26. It is not clear to me, however, why we should any more worry that the crucified God collapses the Father-Son distinction than we worry that referring to the Son or to the Spirit as God collapses this distinction. In fact, one could argue that refusing to speak of the crucified God reflects a subtle form of either subordinationism or Nestorianism (viz. separating the crucified humanity of Jesus from the divinity of Jesus). Throughout this book, therefore, I will follow the precedent of Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann and Richard Bauckham, as well as of Martin Luther and other church fathers, and not hesitate to speak of the crucified God. See Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism, trans. Darrell L. Guder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983);  Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Richard Bauckham, God Crucified: Monotheism and Christianity in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). On a related note, the term cruciform literally means having the shape of the cross. Yet, as is illustrated in Gorman’s work, it has become customary for scholars to use this term as a metaphorical reference to the self-sacrificial loving character that Jesus exhibited when he freely offered up his life on the cross on our behalf. This is how I will be using the term throughout this work. ↵

The term crucicentric—meaning centered on the Crucifixion—is from D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History From the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 14–19. ↵

WA 1:52, quoted in A. Skevington Wood, Captive to the Word: Martin Luther, Doctor of Sacred Scripture (Exeter, UK: Paternoster, 1969), 172–73. ↵

WA 4:153, quoted in Wood, Captive to the Word, 176–78. ↵

Moltmann, Crucified God, 114. I should add that Jüngel (God as the Mystery) is also particularly emphatic on the absolute centrality of the cross for Christian theology, as is N.T. Wright throughout his many writings, but especially in his latest work. See N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (New York: Harper One, 2016). ↵

I will discuss the significance of the fourth and fifth centuries in vol. 1, ch. 6. I should note that some sixteenth-century Anabaptist leaders were moving in the same direction I am taking in this work, as I will discuss in vol. 1, ch. 6. Their reinterpretation project was short-lived, however, due to the intense persecution they were subjected to. I should also note that while a number of contemporary theologians and biblical interpreters have attempted to wrestle with Scripture’s violent divine portraits from a Christocentric perspective, I know of none who have disclosed the Christocentric, let alone crucicentric, meaning of these portraits. They have rather tended to merely discuss the manner in which these violent portraits were part of an overall trajectory of progressive revelation leading up to Christ (see vol. 1, chs. 8–9). ↵

I

The Centrality of the Crucified Christ

1

The Faith of Jacob: Wrestling With Strange and Alien Portraits of God

The L

ord

will rise up as he did at Mount Perazim . . .

to do his work, his strange work,

and perform his task, his alien task.

—Isaiah 28:21

A curse on those who are lax in doing the L

ord

’s work!

A curse on those who keep their swords from bloodshed!

—Jeremiah 48:10

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief

—call it what you will—than any book ever written.

—A. A. Milne[1]

It behooves us to be careful what we worship,

for what we are worshiping we are becoming.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson[2]

The goal of this chapter is to lay the groundwork for all that is to follow by discussing three foundational issues. First, since my concern in this volume is to develop and defend a particular hermeneutic of Scripture, I need to go beyond what was said in the introduction and spell out a bit further my understanding of what is entailed in the confession that all Scripture is God-breathed (2 Tim 3:16).

Second, throughout this volume, as well as the one that follows, I will be encouraging readers to honestly wrestle with Scripture’s violent portraits of God. Yet, I am aware that the frank wrestling I will be encouraging readers to participate in may strike some as undermining faith in the God-breathed nature of Scripture. In this second section, therefore, I will argue that while the concept of faith that many contemporary western people embrace is incompatible with honestly questioning the way God sometimes is depicted in his written word, it is not at all incompatible with the biblical concept of faith. Indeed, I will argue that one’s willingness to question the way God appears when this appearance is out of character with the way God has revealed himself to be is, from a biblical perspective, an expression of faith, not the negation of faith.

Finally, while I am focused on the urgency of the theological challenge that Scripture’s violent portraits of God pose, there are also some very serious practical challenges that these portraits pose as well. I thus want to close this chapter by reviewing three of these challenges.

Implications of a God-Breathed Book

As I mentioned in the introduction, I consider it beyond dispute that Jesus and the authors of the NT shared the traditional Jewish view that all the material found within the canon was God-breathed (theo-pneustos [2 Tim 3:16]).[3] For this reason, the church throughout history has traditionally confessed that all material within the canon of Scripture is God-breathed. Without going into the multitude of disputed issues that surround how God breathed Scripture—issues that I will in a moment argue are as unnecessary to unravel as they are impossible to resolve—I will begin to flesh out my understanding of this confession by simply registering my agreement with the historic-orthodox tradition that this breathing entails that God is, in some sense, the ultimate author of all canonical works.

I consider the translation of theopneustos as God-breathed to be superior to the more common divine inspiration, despite the fact that it may sound wooden and/or idiosyncratic to some readers.[4] In my opinion, retaining the noun God in the translation better serves to remind us of the ultimate source of the breathing than the adjective divine does. Moreover, inspiration has come to be broadly applied to literature, music, art, and a host of other human productions that have nothing specifically to do with God. More importantly, inspiration has tended to lead people to locate God’s revelatory activity and authority on the individual human authors of Scripture. The assumption often is that God inspired (viz. breathed into) these people, thereby causing them to write what they wrote. By contrast, when Paul says all Scripture is theopneustos, the focus is rather on what God breathed out, thus making the biblical texts themselves the focus of God’s revelatory activity and authority.[5] Indeed, the Greek word says nothing about the process (or various processes) God may have used to expire his word. It simply implies that whatever were the means, the end result is that these texts were breathed by God and thus carry divine authority.[6]

Restricting our attention to the God-breathed nature of canonical texts relieves us of the impossible burden of trying to determine the means by which God made Scripture suitable to speak on his behalf.[7] It also means that insofar as we are reading Scripture to hear God’s word (viz. insofar as we are reading it theologically), we can focus on the final form that texts have assumed within the canon and not concern ourselves with whatever prehistory a text may have had prior to taking this form.[8] This is not to deny the value of source, form, and/or redaction criticism for the academic investigation of the Bible. It is simply to assert that for a distinctly theological reading of Scripture such as we will be conducting in this work, nothing of consequence hangs in the balance on the extent to which we can (for example) confidently discern earlier, previously independent sources that were redacted together in the process of the canon’s formation. The theological reading of Scripture simply takes the final God-breathed form of the canon as its starting point, and it allows the interpretation of every particular passage to be influenced by the canon as a whole.[9]

Another important consequence of locating the God-breathed nature of Scripture on the canonical texts is that it means our estimation of Scripture’s divine authority does not depend on our determining the relationship any particular text has with actual history—which, of course, is always a scholarly reconstruction of what happened based on an evaluation of available evidence.[10] As I will discuss at length in chapter 8, it is the God-breathed nature of the text that renders it authoritative, not the relation a text may or may not have with actual history. Yet, as I will also discuss in chapter 8, this starting point also means that I am not free to dismiss any portion of Scripture, including its violent portraits of God, simply because the narrative in which the portrait is found is judged by some to lack historical veracity.

In any event, while I will not altogether discontinue using inspiration in contexts in which God-breathed is simply too cumbersome, my preference throughout this work will be to use God-breathed. At the same time, it seems appropriate to place quotes around God-breathed as a reminder that I am quoting 2 Timothy 3:16 and that I am using it in place of the more customary term inspired.

Having spelled out in general terms the view of Scripture that will be assumed throughout this work, I turn now to the legitimacy, and even the necessity, of honestly questioning this very Scripture when it depicts God in ways that seem strange and alien to the way he has revealed himself to be in Jesus Christ (Isa 28:21).[11]

Embracing an Israelite Faith

Faith and Doubt

A widespread assumption among contemporary Christians is that faith is the antithesis of doubt. Hence, a person’s faith is typically thought to be as strong as it is free of doubt. As I have argued elsewhere, I believe this concept of faith is (among other things) unbiblical, for as we will see in a moment, there is a strong motif running throughout Scripture that suggests that being willing to honestly struggle with God and with his scriptural word lies at the heart of true faith.[12]

In my thirty-six years of working both as a pastor and professor at a Christian university, I have observed that when Christians assume that faith and doubt are incompatible, they typically work hard to avoid the latter. Indeed, when the strength of one’s faith is equated with the degree to which they are psychologically certain, the cognitive dissonance that accompanies doubt easily gets interpreted as something that is evil and that is therefore to be avoided at all costs. Hence, many who embrace this unfortunate model of faith understandably find it difficult, if not impossible, to honestly acknowledge—let alone feel the full force of—the merits of perspectives that challenge their belief system. Rather, they tend to quickly find solace in whatever responses are available to them, however inadequate these responses may be.

I am addressing this issue at the beginning of this work because while I trust it is by now clear that I strongly affirm the God-breathed nature of Scripture, the Cruciform Hermeneutic I will be proposing challenges the straightforward way most people have interpreted violent portraits of God, at least since the fifth century, and asks them to question the assumption that the meaning these portraits had for the original audience is the meaning they are supposed to have for us on this side of the cross.[13] Yet this assumption, and, therefore, this straightforward way of interpreting these portraits, may feel so obvious to readers that to question it is tantamount to questioning the divine authority of Scripture itself. Hence, if these readers also assume that faith and doubt are antithetical, the request to question the straightforward meaning of any biblical portrait of God may be heard as a request to sin. And in this case, my proposal will be dismissed before it even gets a hearing.

To prevent this, I would like to help readers understand that biblical faith does not equate the strength of a person’s faith with their level of psychological certainty. It thus does not view doubt as the antithesis of faith. And it therefore does not assume that questioning the way God sometimes appears in Scripture is sinful. To the contrary, it views our willingness to wrestle with God as virtuous.

Faith and Wrestling with God

Let us start by considering the name God gave his covenant people, Israel. According to the Genesis narrative, this name goes back to a rather curious event that took place at a turning point in Jacob’s life. This forefather of the nation of Israel entered into a night-long wrestling match with a man, who turned out to be none other than Yahweh (Gen 32:24–32). Oddly enough, we are told that the Lord could not overpower him and that Jacob would not let the man go until he blessed him (v. 25). It was because of this tenacity that the Lord renamed him Israel (Yisra’el), which, according to this narrative, signifies one who struggles with God (v. 28).[14] And it was for this reason that his descendants were called Israelites. Their chief characteristic was that they tenaciously wrestle with God, just as their forefather had done.

Many of the heroes of the faith throughout the OT lived up to this name.[15] Like Jacob, they had the courage and the integrity to challenge God when his behavior seemed strange and alien (Isa 28:21). Abraham, for example, was forthright in pushing back on the Almighty when he shared with him his plan to annihilate Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 18:23–33). Moses had enough faith to protest God’s plan to annihilate his covenant people (Exod 32:10–14). A short while later, he challenged Yahweh’s expressed plan to send the Israelites into the promised land without Yahweh (Exod 33:12–16). Significantly enough, far from being offended at the audacity of these challenges, God responded positively to all three, with the latter two resulting in a merciful alteration of the divine plan. When God’s people wrestle with him, it seems, it affects God as well as humans.

The Bible is filled with similar examples of Jacob-like wrestling matches with God. For example, the biblical lament genre—including the complaint against God tradition—is found throughout the OT.[16] Many psalms boldly raise questions, express doubts, and even level accusations concerning God’s faithfulness while challenging the justice of his providential rule (e.g., Ps 89:19–44). Similarly, the prophet Habakkuk boldly charged God with treating the wicked better than the righteous (e.g., Hab 1:3–4, 13), while Jeremiah had the audacity to accuse God of torturing his own people to the point of causing mothers to devour their own offspring (Lam 1:12–15; 2:1–12, 17–22; cf. 4:9–10).

Yet, perhaps the most poignant illustration of the Israelite faith comes from a servant of God who was not even an Israelite. Precisely because of his exemplary faithfulness, Job was unwittingly recruited to refute Satan’s accusation before the heavenly court that God was a Machiavellian ruler who manipulated people into serving him (Job 1:8–11). As Job’s pain and anger grew, he ended up accusing God of viciously mistreating him and others (e.g., Job 9:17, 22–24; 10:3, 8, 16–20; 16:12–14; 24:12). Though God eventually chastised him for his uninformed accusations (for which Job himself repented [Job 42:1–6]), God nevertheless commended the honesty of his talk. Unlike his pious-sounding friends, Job’s speech was authentic (kûn, Job 42:7).[17] Yahweh clearly appreciates raw honesty more than pious platitudes. And it is this honesty that vindicated God’s character in this work, which means that this honesty is considered to be a form of faithfully serving God, even though it involved Job revolting against God. Job is considered a hero of faith (e.g., Jas 5:11) because, like so many others, he engaged in a faithful revolt.[18]

A different way in which Scripture arguably illustrates the wrestling-with-God motif concerns the manner in which certain canonical traditions challenge and/or qualify earlier canonical traditions.[19] For example, while an earlier tradition depicted Yahweh as enjoying animal sacrifices (e.g., Exod 29:25, 41; Lev 1:9, 13, 17), later authors make it clear that Yahweh placed no value on them (e.g., Ps 51:16–17; Isa 1:11–14; Mic 6:6–8; Amos 5:21–25; Hos 6:6; Matt 9:13; Heb 10:8). While I will later offer a crucicentric interpretation of this alteration that discloses how it bears witness to the cross (vol. 2, ch. 14), for the present we need only note that its inclusion within the canon illustrates that the biblical understanding of faith does not rule out calling long-established traditions—including biblical traditions—into question.

Another example of later traditions pushing back on earlier ones, according to some scholars, concerns several traditions embedded in the canonical conquest narrative that speak of Yahweh hoping to nonviolently relocate the Canaanites (Deut 7:15, 18–19; Exod 23:20–23, 27–30; Lev 18:24–25). While I will again offer a crucicentric interpretation of these traditions later on (vol. 2, ch. 20), it may be true, as some argue, that they were originally redacted into the conquest narrative to soften and qualify the depiction of Yahweh commanding Moses to have the Israelites engage in a practice known as hērem, which involves annihilating a people-group as an act of worship.[20] Related to this, Douglas Earl argues that despite its reputation as the most violent and parochial book of the Bible, the book of Joshua was written, in part, to challenge earlier authoritative traditions that depict God as for and against people simply on the basis of their ethnicity and geographical location (e.g., Deut 7:1–5).[21] The unexpected and very cryptic appearance of the captain of the Lord’s angelic army who announces his neutrality in war (Josh 5:13–14) is an important element of Earl’s interpretation, as are various episodes in which outsiders become insiders and vice versa.[22]

Much more could be said, but I trust this suffices to demonstrate that while challenging the way God may appear in certain biblical traditions may seem antithetical to the model of faith and/or model of biblical inspiration embraced by some contemporary believers, this is certainly not the case in Scripture. For the essence of faith in Scripture is not about blind submission to authoritative traditions or the quest for psychological certainty. It is rather an Israelite faith in which the depth of a person’s faith in God is sometimes reflected precisely in their willingness to authentically wrestle with him.

A Covenantal Rather Than Psychological Concept

The reason why the widespread contemporary understanding of faith differs so much from the biblical understanding is that faith in the Bible is a covenantal concept while today it has largely become a psychological concept. And whereas the modern psychological concept motivates people to seek and cling to a feeling of certainty, the biblical concept is about retaining covenantal trust in one’s covenant partner in the face of uncertainty.[23] When Yahweh’s covenant partners voice their questions and objections to his apparently strange and alien behavior, they are manifesting their confidence that their covenant relationship with God is solid enough to handle their expressed complaints, confusions, and even occasional accusations.[24] And they are manifesting their confidence that at the end of the day, God will demonstrate that he has the faithful and benevolent character he claims he has, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

This book stands solidly within this Israelite tradition. Precisely because I am convinced that we are called to believe that God looks like Jesus Christ (John 14:7–9), the one and only exact representation of God’s being (Heb 1:3), I am equally convinced that we must tenaciously wrestle with God over the canonical depictions of him that are inconsistent with the agape-centered character disclosed in this supreme revelation. And, above all, I believe we must do so with complete honesty: honesty before God, ourselves, and others, and honesty with the texts that we are struggling to understand.[25]

The Fear of Novelty

While some readers might have reservations about my proposal because their conception of faith makes them hesitant to question or doubt the way they have always interpreted certain passages of Scriptures, I suspect that others may have reservations simply because my proposed interpretation contains seemingly novel elements.

The first thing that needs to be said in response to such reservations is this: as I noted in the introduction, there is in principle nothing new about the claim that Scripture should be interpreted through the lens of the crucified Christ. I am, in fact, simply trying to be completely consistent with the Christocentric hermeneutic the church has always professed.

Closely related to this, there is absolutely nothing novel about the fact that I am questioning the exegetical meaning of portraits of God in Scripture while looking for a deeper theological meaning, since this too has been a widespread practice of the church. As I also mentioned in the introduction, the only novel aspect of my approach is that I am applying this practice to violent portraits of God. I strongly suspect that had the reinterpretative approach of Origen and others not been aborted in the fourth and fifth centuries—for illegitimate reasons, as I will argue in chapter 6—and had the church been fully consistent with its own Christocentric and, sometimes, crucicentric hermeneutical convictions (e.g., Luther), something like the Cruciform Hermeneutic I am developing in this volume and the Cruciform Thesis I will be developing in the next volume in all likelihood would have been proposed centuries ago.

A third response to any who are concerned with novelty is that we need to remember that the church has always confessed that the Holy Spirit is at work as Christians struggle with God and with one another to interpret Scripture. While the principle ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda (the church reformed and always reforming) is a distinctly Reformed principle, it captures a humility and openness that the church has always tried to advocate, though it has often fallen short of this ideal. The shared assumption has been that while the foundation of the church was laid once-and-for-all in Scripture, we must never assume we have arrived at a once-and-for-all place in which we need no longer be open to God giving us new interpretive insights into his written word.

This emphasis has been especially strong within the Anabaptist tradition, which is the primary theological orientation out of which this book is written.[26] Because their theological convictions placed them outside the Christendom paradigm that all others worked within, Anabaptists have typically demonstrated a greater willingness than others to question the church’s official interpretations of Scripture. Moreover, as we will discuss in chapter 6, Anabaptists have tended to place significantly more emphasis than others on a Christocentric and crucicentric approach to Scripture and discipleship.[27] For this reason, they have tended to be more sensitive than others to the ways in which the church’s hermeneutical tradition might conflict with Christ’s teaching and example.

Finally, I believe that the traditional confidence that God is always working through a community’s wrestling with Scripture to reveal insights that go beyond, and even sometimes against, traditional interpretations is well-grounded in Scripture. For example, as we will discuss in the following chapter, Jesus certainly interpreted the OT in ways that defied its traditional interpretation (e.g., Matt 5:21–48). Indeed, it is significant that Jesus several times warned people of being overly bound by religious traditions (e.g., Mark 7:8–9). Similarly, NT authors were clearly led by the Spirit to find new, Christocentric interpretations of OT passages that had no precedent in their Jewish tradition, as we will discuss in chapter 3.

The same Spirit-led openness to new insights is reflected in Luke and Paul when they taught that the Spirit worked to open the minds of disciples so they could see something in Scripture they had not seen before: namely, how the OT is fundamentally about Jesus (Luke 24:25–32, 44–47; 2 Cor 3:7–4:6). And we can discern this same openness to Spirit-led novelty at the first church council in Jerusalem. After a period of intense conflict (yes, the Spirit works through conflict), James announced the council’s decision by proclaiming what seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us (Acts 15:28). The Spirit-led decision of the church’s leadership to embrace Gentiles as sisters and brothers in the Lord without imposing the Jewish law on them was novel, bold, and controversial. Yet, it was of God and moved the church forward in its ministry to Gentiles.

A Question of Balance

In this light, it seems that the wisest approach for Bible interpreters to assume is similar to the approach taken in science: namely, we should never simply disregard the authority of tradition, but we should also never fear modifying it and moving beyond it when given sufficient reason to do so.[28] I will attempt to exemplify this balanced approach throughout this work in several ways.

First, out of respect for the church’s interpretive tradition, I must accept that insofar as the cruciform interpretation of violent portraits of God that I will be proposing modifies the way they have traditionally been interpreted, at least since the fifth century, the burden of proof is on me to establish sufficient reason for accepting it. Second, because I share the traditional conviction that God has always been working within the interactions of the community of his people to deepen their understanding of Scripture and of himself, I will constantly place my own perspectives in dialogue with the views of others, past and present.[29] Indeed, it is precisely