[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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Von Rad foresaw the dangerous consequences of the Church cutting itself off from deep engagement with the Old Testament. Already in 1935 he remarked that ‘the links of the churches with Old Testament scholarship have been almost completely broken for more than one generation’…
A core tenet of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faiths is the claim that there is only one God, not that there used to be lots of gods until Yahweh emerged victorious.
In his 2003 essay on Joshua in the book Show Them No Mercy, Tremper Longman III draws an enlightening yet disturbing comparison between the extremist ideology of Osama bin Laden and that expressed in the herem (total) texts of Deuteronomy and Joshua…
(on fixing the problems of violence and wrath in the Bible) When preparing to teach on violence in the Old Testament recently I was reminded of a book review I once read. The reviewer recounted his neighbour’s efforts to remove a grease stain from his garage floor. The neighbour dumped a few gallons of gasoline […]
The Incarnation… The incarnation forms the climactic turning point of sacred history. The high point in the grand biblical drama of redemption involved the self-emptying descent of God in Jesus. For many, the incarnation may seem like a 33-year anomaly in the life of God. The God who is otherwise transcendent or at least invisible […]
The most prominent verses cited as evidence are Jesus’ ‘you have heard it said … but I tell you’ statements, especially His statements about enemies.