[This is pt 4 of a 4 part review. See here for part 1, part 2, and part 3] My review of Crucifixion of the Warrior God focused thus far on Boyd’s overarching approach to the problem of violence in the Old Testament. The review has been selective, but identified what I consider several large-scale […]
[This is part 3 of a 4 part review of Boyd’s book. HERE is part 1, and HERE is part 2] In my earlier post on The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, I discussed Boyd’s insistence that the cruciform hermeneutic requires us to interpret the OT in light of the cross. We can imagine that […]
In the previous post I noted several of Boyd’s hermeneutical starting points, as well as his expressed and tacit assumptions about Scripture. After this post, I’ll stick with his second volume, where he develops four principles for understanding the ‘cruciform’ God revealed in both the Old and New Testaments. But for now, I want to […]
Gregory A. Boyd. Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017. The Warrior God… Like most kids from Christian backgrounds, I grew up hearing the stories of flood, conquest, and war that we find in the Old Testament. These flannel-graphed (fuzzy-felt […]
Critique of Sacrifice… There’s a story I’ve often heard told about Old Testament prophets. I don’t think it’s true, but here’s how it goes. God apparently gave Israel a sacrificial system. He asked for obedience. He asked for victims. And he asked for bloodshed. But in time, and as Israel’s knowledge of God matured, certain […]
[This is Part III of a series on lament. Part I is HERE, and Part II HERE] Objections objections… Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. (Jas 4:9) Do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, ‘children of God without fault in […]
Time to Protest? In my previous post I discussed the continued lack of lament in contemporary worship (of the ‘worship band’ variety). My point was that there’s been very little appreciable movement toward lament in the past decades among the major producers of the songs listed on the CCLI lists and the like. Because of […]
The title of this post comes from Walter Brueggemann’s influential essay ‘The Costly Loss of Lament,’ written in 1986 (repr. in Psalms and the Life of Faith).
Readers of Genesis may be forgiven for assuming that the ‘curse’ in Genesis 3 introduced all forms of discomfort, pain, and trouble that exist within the created order. The woman would experience birth pains and the man would sweat while trying to uproot thorns from the ground. Reading back from the curses of Genesis 3 leads one to imagine a Garden of Eden full of blissful perfection. Adam and Eve waltzed through the garden effortlessly plucking fruit off (the right) trees and plucking roses from thornless bushes.
To begin, the Bible repeatedly affirms God’s love for all creation. This theme resounds from day 1 in Genesis 1,