Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence

by Gregory A. Boyd

An increasing number of Bible scholars and theologians today contend that it was a grave mistake for the church to embrace this secular way of reading Scripture. In their view, we need to go back to reading the Bible like the unique, God-breathed book that it is, which means we need to recover the ability to discern God-intended meanings that go beyond the authors’ original meaning.

For example, I will later argue that the supreme revelation of God in the crucified Christ requires us to conclude that the author of the biblical Flood account (Genesis 6–8) was reflecting his fallen and culturally conditioned view of God when he portrayed God as the agent who caused this flood. Yet, my commitment to the Conservative Hermeneutical Principle nevertheless compels me to affirm this author’s claim that a flood occurred and that it was indeed a judgment of God. I must therefore give an account of how the Flood could be a judgment of God while denying that God was the agent who brought it about. That’s one of the places that you can put my thesis to the test.

My belief that the OT is divinely inspired is based on the authority of Jesus Christ who endorses it, not on the manner in which any of its narratives are related to someone’s version of actual history. Or, to put it another way, it is the text of Scripture that Jesus endorses as divinely inspired, not the relationship between the text and actual history.

Though they haven’t always thought about it consistently, theologians throughout church history have almost always assumed that God’s breathing of Scripture is conditioned by the medium he breathes through. Everyone acknowledged that God didn’t override the distinct personalities, styles, cultural perspectives, or intellectual capabilities of the authors of Scripture that he breathed through. And the reason is because the biblical writings obviously reflect the distinctive traits of their human authors.

The thing is, we are only able to discern that a portrait of God is an accommodation if we know what God is like apart from any accommodation, and it is at this point that I part company with the dominant (or “classical”) theological tradition. Theologians within the classical tradition assume that God is “above” time, “above” experiencing any kind of change, “above” being affected by anything outside himself, and “above” experiencing strong emotions or any kind of pain.[22] They thus interpret all biblical portraits of God moving with humans in time, changing his mind, being affected by what others do, or experiencing any sort of surprise, disappointment, frustration, sorrow or grief, to be accommodations.

And from this, Novatian concluded: “God, therefore, is not mediocre, but the people’s understanding is mediocre; God is not limited, but the intellectual capacity of the people’s mind is limited.”[25]

Gregory argues that God first “cut off the idol” from his people, but he “left the sacrifices.”[27] Although we later learn that God doesn’t actually approve of animal sacrifices, God saw that his people at this time were too spiritually immature to abandon this barbaric practice. So, for a period of time, God graciously stooped to take on the appearance of a deity who enjoys, and even demands, the ritualistic killing of animals. While Yahweh was able to influence the Israelites away from the ANE assumption that gods actually eat these sacrifices, he nevertheless accommodated their culturally conditioned belief that he enjoyed their “pleasing aroma.”

Gregory sums up the process by saying God “beguiled his people into the Gospel by gradual changes.”[29]

At its heart, my proposal is nothing more than this. As I argued in the previous chapter, I hold that God has always revealed his true character and will as much as possible while stooping to accommodate the fallen and culturally conditioned state of his people as much as necessary.

If you ask me, these folks are trying to have their cake and eat it too. If later conceptions of God in Scripture aren’t “more true,” “more worthy,” and “more mature” than earlier ones, in what sense do the later ones progress over the earlier ones? These Evangelical scholars want to acknowledge that God’s ancient people lacked clarity about God’s true character but were nevertheless perfectly clear—indeed, inerrant—when it came to identifying false beliefs about God.

Not coincidentally, as the church of Christendom arose, the reinterpretation approach to the OT’s violent portraits of God quickly faded away. And the reason is obvious. As Christians acclimated to the use of violence, the OT’s violent depictions of God became less problematic. In fact, these portraits went from being problematic to being positively advantageous, for now Christendom’s leaders could appeal to them whenever they needed to motivate Christians to engage in violence on behalf of the empire. Tragically, this is the primary role these violent portraits have played ever since.

We have a similar choice to make when we encounter the OT’s violent portraits of God. We can trust the crucified Christ to tell the whole story of God’s cruciform character, in which case we are forced to believe that something else is going on when God appears to act in un-Christlike ways in the OT.

we who read this account after the coming of Christ know how deeply God values monogamy, and this knowledge should enable us to see what else is going on in this passage.

And in this light, it’s apparent that when the Israelites demanded a king, they were at the same time asking Yahweh to function like the gods of all those other nations.

The only thing that must be questioned in light of the cross is the author’s violent interpretation of how God gave the king and/or Israel the victory that is credited him.

As we saw Gregory of Nazianzus taught in the previous chapter, God “cut off the idol, but left the sacrifices.”

Not only this, but if we have reason to conclude that the commands to slaughter animals as an act of worship were accommodations, how much more reason do we have to conclude that the commands to slaughter humans as an act of worship were divine accommodations?

To the contrary, I think we should be surprised that we find so many depictions that aren’t twisted, as assessed by the criterion of the crucified Christ. Each one reflects the Spirit of Christ breaking through the Israelites’ fallen and culturally conditioned hearts to reveal God’s true, cruciform character!

And in light of what we know about the sad spiritual condition of the ancient Israelites, this goes a long way in explaining why many portraits of God in the OT tell us more about them than they do about the true character of God.

This means that, whenever there is violence in God’s creation, it is an indication that the true knowledge of the Lord is absent. That surely is significant as we consider Scripture’s violent portraits of God. ***

For example, through Micah, the Lord expresses his dream that someday people “will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.”[8] When humanity is once again “filled with the knowledge of the Lord,” instruments of death will be transformed into instruments that support life, and people will no longer even be worried about the possibility of war.

The one thing the ancient Israelites seemed incapable of understanding was that “MAN IS NOT THE ENEMY” (see Eph 6:12).[12] And this shouldn’t be too hard for us to understand, for while everybody in the ANE trusted their god to help themfight, no one ever dreamed that their god didn’t want them to fight!

The first is Exodus 23:28–30. A long while before the Israelites violently invaded the land that Yahweh wanted them to live in, he promised them that he would “send the hornet ahead of you to drive the Hivites, Canaanites, and Hittites out of your way.” But, he added, he would “not drive them out in a single year, because the land would become desolate and the wild animals too numerous for you.” Rather, he says, he would “drive them out . . . [l]ittle by little.” That’s rather interesting. Getting the indigenous population of Canaan to slowly migrate off the land on their own by making it unpleasantly pesky strikes me as a much more Christlike way of acquiring real-estate than having your people engage in full-scale genocide. What ever happened to this nonviolent plan?

For my paper.

In the second passage, Yahweh told his people that the land he was going to give his people had become defiled by the Canaanites. So, as punishment for their sin, Yahweh was going to have the land vomit them out (Lev 18:24–25). Throughout the Bible the welfare of land is directly connected to the spiritual state of the people who occupy it.[13] It thus seems that the Lord decided he would allow the defilement of the Canaanites to render their land temporarily unfruitful so they would naturally migrate to greener pastures. No babies would need to be bludgeoned in the process.

All these passages suggest that “the original intent of the conquest implied the dissipation of the Canaanite population, who had the possibility of emigrating outside the Promised Land.”

With the cross as our criterion, we can assess the two nonviolent plans as reflecting the Spirit of Christ breaking through to reveal the way God actually hoped his people would inherit this land. This is confirmed by the fact that the portrait of God planning to acquire this land without the use of violence has no parallel in the ANE.

I am therefore in agreement with Yoder when he writes, “If only the Israelites had been able to place their complete trust in Yahweh, [the Canaanites] would have withdrawn without violence.”

Hence, when Moses reports that he “heard” Yahweh instruct him to have the Israelites mercilessly slaughter people to acquire this land, this tells us more about the character of Moses and the culture he was embedded in than it tells us about the true character and will of God.

Did you ever notice that the only person who claims to have heard Yahweh give the command to slaughter the Canaanites was Moses? Whenever Joshua later repeated this command, it was on the basis of what “God had commanded his servant Moses.”[17] Now, given their ANE context, we can understand why Joshua and the Israelites sincerely believed Moses. But the important question is, should we?

people into the Promised Land bear witness against Moses’s claim to have received the genocidal command from Yahweh. They thus provide further confirmation that the violent portrait of God giving this command, along with all other violent depictions of God, are accommodations. Their ugliness tells us much more about the heart of the people God was striving to work through than they tell us about God.

Nowhere does the OT contrast with its surrounding ANE culture more than when it depicts God in Christlike ways. Conversely, nowhere does the OT conform to its surrounding ANE culture more than when it depicts Yahweh as a violent warrior God. And this fact, together with the material covered in the previous two chapters, strongly confirms the cross-centered interpretation of the OT’s violent divine portraits.

In fact, far from being incompatible, the revelation of God on the cross was itself a divine judgment! As such, the cross should serve as the lens through which we interpret all other divine judgments. And, as we will begin to demonstrate in the following chapter, when we interpret accounts of divine judgment through the looking-glass cross, we can see how it is possible to affirm that God justly judges sin while denying that God ever acts violently in the process.

Forgiveness means releasing a debt, not collecting it from someone else!

Even a cursory survey of church history will make it clear that this is not speculation. It surely is not a coincidence that soon 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.

But when people are not willing to be protected, and when God sees that his mercy is simply enabling their sin, he has no choice but to “hand them over” to suffer these consequences, just as he did with Jesus. And his heart wails in the process.

Maybe no coercive instead of no choice?

Terence Fretheim sums up what God experiences when he decides people must experience his wrath when he says, “Grief is what the godward side of judgment and wrath always look like.”

since the ancient Israelites only caught glimpses of the truth,

First, the NT indicates that Satan and other fallen powers helped orchestrate the crucifixion. Among other things, John tells us that Satan entered into Judas just before he betrayed Jesus (John 13:2, 27). And Paul informs us that the “rulers of this age” (referring to Satan and other rebel cosmic powers) crucified the “Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:7–8).

Second, demons readily recognized Jesus as the Son of God, but they were completely mystified as to why he had come to earth.

Third, Paul informs us that, had Satan and the rebel powers who currently reign over the world understood “God’s wisdom,” they “would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:7–8).

There may be days when you suddenly find you’re thinking about God as though the cross did not fully reveal him. On occasion, you may unconsciously slip back into your old way of interpreting the OT’s violent divine portraits. There may come other times when you find it hard to discern how certain violent portraits of God point to the crucified Christ.

First, remember that the cross only functions as a looking-glass that enables us to discern what else is going on behind the scenes of the OT’s violent divine portraits when we remain fully confident that Jesus’s cross-centered life and ministry fully reveal what God is like.

Second, if you were once accustomed to believing in a God who has a dark side, you will likely sometimes find yourself thinking that allowing the cross to completely define your conception of God feels too good to be true.

Third, when you come across ugly portraits of God in the Bible, remind yourself that this ugliness is a reflection of the ugliness of our sin that Jesus bore on the cross.

Finally, and most importantly, if you aren’t doing so already, I encourage you to invest a good amount of time cultivating an ever-deepening relationship with the God of self-sacrificial love revealed on Calvary.