Book Review: Crucifixion of the Warrior God

Crucifixion of the Warrior God Vol. 1 and 2, The: Volumes 1 and 2 by Gregory A. Boyd
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Boyd exposits the utter centrality of Christ and the cross to all biblical theology, particularly the problem texts of the OT. This is quite simply the best (and the only good) book I have read about the problem of texts such as the Canaanite genocide.

Not many theologians get to write a book like this in their career -- a 10-year project written in community with many other theologians and Christians and based on an impressively comprehensive corpus. The length of the two-volume work is definitely warranted. Boyd belabors over chapters and chapters the indispensable nature of a Christocentric, crucicentric hermeneutic, and he also points out how many, many theologians who have promoted such a hermeneutic have failed to live up to it when it comes to Yahweh-sanctioned OT violence.

After the hermeneutical groundwork, Boyd establishes his apparently unique Cruciform Thesis, comprised of four principles that make sense of otherwise inexplicable passages, mainly in the OT, where it appears that God commands, sanctions, or executes horrific violence that appears to be in direct contradiction to the teaching and life of Jesus. Fortunately, Boyd tackles head on and completely rejects Marcionism, and he also reviews other approaches to the texts in question. Finding that they fall short, he argues for a reinterpretation of the texts based on the following four principles:

The Principle of Cruciform Accommodation: This principle will be the most controversial of the four because it does require an unconventional reading of some texts. Boyd states the principle as follows: "In the process of God 'breathing' the written witness to his covenantal faithfulness, God sometimes displayed his triune, cruciform agape-love by stooping to accommodate his self-revelation to the fallen and culturally conditioned state of his covenant people" (644). Boyd coins the term "literary mask" for what is going on; he argues that at times God is willing in his own revelation to be portrayed as a violent ANE God because the people through whom he was revealing himself were so fallen in their understanding of him. Boyd believes that this representation is a literary parallel to what Christ did in assuming the position of a dangerous criminal being executed on the cross. This principle will be controversial because it means reading some violent passages as not meaning what they explicitly state. Boyd would argue that everything must be interpreted in light of Christ and the cross.

The Principle of Redemptive Withdrawal: I find it easier for me to agree with this principle, which states that "God judges sin, defeats evil, and works for the redemption of creation by withdrawing his protective presence, thereby allowing evil to run its self-destructive course and ultimately to self-destruct" (768).

The Principle of Cosmic Conflict: This principle is related to a lot of Boyd's work from the 1990s on the invisible conflict between spiritual forces. Boyd expressed the principle this way: "The agents that carry out violence when God withdraws his protective presence to bring about a divine judgment include perpetually-threatening cosmic forces of destruction" (1010). He uses this principle, sometimes in conjunction with others, to explain such violence as the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and even the death of Korah and his rebels.

The Principle of Semiautonomous Power: Like the first principle, I had never really thought about this possibility; unlike the first principle, I find it much easier to accept that "when God confers divine power on select people, he does not meticulously control how they use it" (1196). The section of the book on this principle I found quite edifying, particularly in Boyd's exposition of how Christ could have at any time disobeyed God and abused the power he had (e.g., by calling on angels to deliver him from Satan, or even by not dying on the cross), but that he never did, in sharp contrast to Moses and the OT prophets. Boyd uses this principle to explain incidents such as a bear mauling 42 young men.

The last three principles are much easier to accept, coming from a conservative hermeneutic, than the first principle, and I need to think about the Cruciform Thesis for a long time. Boyd works his Open Theism into the Thesis, and it seems to work fine, but fortunately it is not essential to the Thesis. Much closer to the core of the Thesis is his Christus Victor view of the atonement, for Boyd assumes an Anabaptist, fundamentally nonviolent view of God. If that view of God and the atonement is correct, then he may very well have the key to all violence in the Bible; if it is not, then I still am not entirely sure where that leaves us exegetically, especially in regard to genocide in the OT. The only plausible alternative I see is allegorical interpretation, which of course has its own problems. But regardless of whether he is entirely right or wrong, Boyd has delivered a tour de force that represents the most honest and humble consideration of these hard passages that I have ever read. Theologians and OT scholars will be able to build on his work, and I am grateful to him for reintroducing me in a hopeful way to a set of passages to which I had all but thrown up my hands.

On a final note, I am just happy to have actually read the whole two volumes, and I think that it should count as two books (at least) on Goodreads!

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