Cross Vision

Author: Gregory Boyd

Introduction

Have you ever wondered how God could have commanded the slaughter of mothers and babies — especially if He’s the God whose essence and character were revealed through Jesus? Richard Dawkins, an outspoken atheist, expressed his Bible-based impression of God like so:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” The God Delusion

Sometimes takes an outsider to remind us of the obvious, much as it sometimes takes a little boy to blurt out the truth about the emperor’s clothes. If you’re so inclined, it’s easy to write Dawkins off as an irate God-hater (which he is, understandably). But if you’ve read the Old Testament and you have the freedom to be honest about it, you know that it’s hard to see Jesus, who taught love for one’s enemies, ordering the kill strikes.

So then, what is God really like? Is He a self-sacrificing savior, or is He a marauding warlord? To frame the same question in terms of Scripture, if Jesus is “the exact representation of God’s nature (Heb 1:3), and all Scripture, including the Old Testament, is God-breathed (II Tim 3:16), then how are we meant to conceive of God?

If God really is like Jesus, what are we to make of the God-breathed Scriptures that portray Him as being so unlike Jesus? And if the God we know through Jesus is the ultimate force behind the Bible, why would He have included accounts that give such a misleading view of who He really is?

Summary

Author Gregory Boyd points to the Cross as the most reliable criterion we have for recognizing where the human authors of Scripture have described God as He truly is, and where their vision has been clouded by other things. Boyd makes the case that the violent depictions of God in the Old Testament are indeed divinely inspired revelations of God — although not ones that we should take at face value, in light of God’s true character: He would rather die for love of his enemies than slaughter a single one. Boyd suggests that God is so completely humble that He has patiently endured our misunderstanding and misrepresentation of his character in order to continue in contact with us for the slow journey of opening our eyes and our hearts to see Him as He truly is.

Patterns of Projection

I once saw God
As through a window I peered.
He was just as I suspected,
Just as I feared.

So selfish and cruel
He appeared to be.
So very ugly,
So unlike me.

Then I looked deeper,
Still deeper with time.
T’was a mirror all along,
And the image was mine.
- Tye Gibson

“To the faithful You show Yourself faithful, to the blameless You show Yourself blameless; to the pure You show Yourself pure, but to the crooked You show Yourself shrewd.” 2 Samuel 22:26–27

The theme of projection is also prominent in the book Loving What Is.

How We Picture God

“It’s impossible to overstate the importance of our mental picture of God — for the way you imagine God largely determines the quality of your relationship with God. The intensity of your love for God will never out run the beauty of the God you envision. Relatedly, the depth of your transformation into the likeness of Christ will never outrun the Christlikeness of your mental representation of God.”

Paul wrote that we who look to God are being “transformed into His image with intensifying glory (from one degree of glory to another).” If we find that we have stagnated in this process, it may be because we have already become as glorious as our vision of God will allow.

“There is mounting neurological evidence that a person’s mental representation of God significantly affects their quality of life for better or worse. For example, it’s a neurological fact that people who have a loving representation of God tend to have a greater capacity to think objectively about controversial matters and to make rational decisions than do people who have a threatening mental representation of God.” (See The God-Shaped Brain)

The “Cruciform Through-line” of Scripture

“Jesus is not one revelation among many — as if his presence in the inspired pages of Scripture made him equal with everything else in those pages — he is the complete and perfect revelation of God.”

This idea suggests an interpretive framework for reading Scripture, which contains many different portraits of God. It suggests:

1. That the more a portrait reflects the character of Jesus, the more accurately it portrays God — and vice versa.
2. That there must be some explanation for the places where God looks more human or Satanic than Christ-like.
3. That the careful reader may expect to find fractals of the pattern of the cross: places where God, in his profound humility, is publicly misrepresented and put to shame, and says little in his defense.

If we believe that our loving Creator is capable of the malicious acts ascribed to Him in the Old Testament, it shows that we do not really believe that Jesus is the full and perfect representation of his true character.

Literary Crucifixes

The revolting portraits of God in the Old Testament show God’s willingness to submit to inaccurate, and even horrifying, depictions of himself — depictions that are due to the fallen, culturally defined understanding of the Old Testament writers.

If Jesus on the cross is the perfect reflection of God’s unchanging character, we should read the rest of Scripture expecting to see God occasionally revealing this same character — stooping an infinite degree to shoulder our sin, and becoming as ugly as that sin in the process. Each such instance is a kind of literary crucifix.

At bottom, the question we have is this: who are we going to trust to reveal God’s true character — the Jeremiahs of the Bible or Jesus?

Allowing Is Not Agreeing

“When you did these things and I kept silent, you thought I was exactly like you.” Psalm 50:21

If we want to hold to the idea that God is “the same yesterday, today, and forever,” what do we do with the fact that God is on record as having commanded practices such as animal sacrifice which he later repudiated?

Boyd claims that God allowed himself to be “understood” and “worshipped” in ways in which He took no pleasure. The Israelites may have thought, for example, that Yahweh relished the smell of burning animal flesh, but then Hebrews 10:6 says, “In burnt offerings and sin offerings You took no delight.”

Boyd points out that God’s general policy is to make his own preferred path or method known to his people, but then to persistently accommodate their preferences, their weakness, and their lack of faith. We see this pattern in Israel’s kings, polygamy, animal sacrifice, etc.

Judgement & Wrath

“God justly judges sin while never acting violently in the process.”

Boyd argues that God’s general policy on punishment is simply to withdraw his protective hand, allowing people to experience the natural consequences (the effects) of their actions (the causes). He asserts that God’s withdrawal of his protection is the substance of what the Bible refers to as his “wrath.”

“God longs to mercifully protect people from the destructive consequences of their choices… but when he sees that his mercy is simply enabling their sin, he has no choice but to withdraw his protective hand… and hope that what they couldn’t learn from mercy, they will learn from suffering.”

God’s Style of Discipline

If the above is God’s heart toward sin, it follows that He would have us adopt the same attitude toward it (as opposed to one of fear, disgust, vengeance, or anger).

In teaching on how to deal with a person in ongoing sin, Jesus said, “Treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector.” (Matt 18:17) Is he telling us to snub, reject, or excommunicate such a person? Boyd suggests that Jesus is telling us to release the person to enjoy his or her sin along with the natural consequences of that sin (very much as the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son released his son to enjoy a life of sin while never loving him any less).

At times, we take disciplining sin into our own sinful hands because we don’t want others to get away with enjoying something we’re not allowed to enjoy. Other times, as happens with God, if we allow a loved one to experience the natural consequences of their sin, we may get blamed for their suffering — often by those who feel that they themselves are to blame.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

“God never needs to resort to violence to punish sin or to overcome evil. We humans rely on brute force to stop evil only because we lack the character and wisdom to see other ways of arriving at peace.”

“After the myth of redemptive violence was introduced into the church’s thinking about the atonement in the 11th century, there were five centuries of almost nonstop church-sanctioned violence.“

Long before that, in the fourth and fifth centuries, in the wake of Constantine, the politically empowered church began to look for clever exceptions to Jesus’s and Paul’s clear teaching about love of enemies and non-violence. In this way, through the influence of theologians like Augustine, many churchmen have learned to walk in the way of Constantine more than that of Jesus.

Regarding earthly enemies, Boyd insists that if Jesus instructed his followers to love and serve their enemies — even enemies as terrible as the Romans were to the Jews — then we are mistaken to make exceptions of any other enemies. Regarding the atonement, Boyd writes, “The doctrine of penal substitution means that God doesn’t forgive; he merely collects the debt from someone else.”

From a human point of view, we may want to ask, if God doesn’t resort to violence, how does He get anything done? How does God accomplish his purposes without coercion?

God’s Aikido Methodology

God is apparently content to let free agents do their thing. As they do, He’s at work like some heavenly Aikido master, channeling even overtly antagonistic forces into his plan and using their natural energy to accomplish his ultimate purposes.

When demons encountered Jesus on earth, they readily recognized Him. Yet they were mystified as to why he was there (Mark 5:7, Matt 8:29). What they did know is that for some reason he had taken on human form, and because of that, he could be killed.

If the rulers of this age had understood the hidden wisdom of God, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory (1 Cor 2:7–8, paraphrase). For it was by means of the cross that God disarmed the rulers and authorities, and made a public spectacle of them (Colossians 2:15). In this way, Satan and other fallen powers rolled the stone that rolled back on them.

Objections & Answers

What about the angel of death who slew the firstborn males in Egypt?

• Boyd references passage that says “the destroyer” did the killing, not God: “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” (Exodus 12:23).

What about Elijah calling down fire from heaven and slaughtering the pagan prophets?

• Boyd points out Elijah’s fearful lack of trust in God, and the ability of those entrusted with divine authority to misuse that authority, making Elijah’s fire-from-heaven events an illustration of a man learning to trust in a misuse of God’s power rather than trusting God himself.

What about the God-empowered brutality of Samson?

• “Just because a person has received exceptional authority from God, does not mean that the way they use that authority agrees with God.”

What about drowning the Egyptian army in the Red Sea?

• Boyd suggests that this account is an allegorical retelling of the anti-creational forces that God overcame in creating the cosmos. Ancient peoples often viewed natural phenomena as synonymous with the spiritual forces they represented. In this sense, the Red Sea can be seen as a devouring monster that God held back in ushering his people to safety, just as he held back the forces of chaos in creating the universe.

What about Jesus returning as a military commander in the book of Revelation?

• Boyd does not address this question at all.

Personal Reflections

If God quietly submitted to the OT levels of mischaracterization, how might we today still be dull to certain aspects of his true character?

Blame, shame, and fear are so bound up in our nature. It’s so hard to take responsibility, and so easy to blame.

God has a history of allowing many who trust in Him to come to grisly ends. Why should we trust in something that sometimes acts like nothing?

Is there some means of distinguishing between the all-submissive, invisible spirit-God and the God who isn’t there?

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