Texts in travail: reviewing Crucifixion of the Warrior God—Pre-Review

It’s out. Ten years of research and too many manic all-nighters to count. Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God (CWG) is out and folks are diving in. I finished it this past weekend. I suspect the reviews will begin lighting up blogs. But if producing thoughtful responses was like making coffee, I’d be a ‘percolator’ as opposed to an ‘espresso machine’. I need to let things simmer and then let a response grow up around what strike me as the key points. Derek Flood is going to blog his way through as he reads. Should be fun. There are a couple of summaries out there already. Lord knows Greg himself has blogged and talked about it plenty over the past ten years. So the final arrival of CWG is a bit like the birth of a baby we’ve all gotten to watch gestate in vitro through videos and sonograms. Still, it’s only a labor of love that got it finished and delivered. So congrats again to Greg.

I know Greg would want CWG to receive careful, thoughtful and passionate reviews. He would want to see this come up against the best arguments against it. So I hope all you doctors of theology out there bring your best game. I’m a hack, but I plan on reviewing CWG as best I can. But like I said, it’ll take me some time to percolate. In the meantime, however, there are a few initial things I’d like to share, not as a review (I’m not there yet), but as a pre-review – just to express where I was when I closed vol. 2.

First, to those intimidated by the length (2 vols, 1,400+ pages). If you take off 350 pages of appendices, index, and bibliography, you’re only talking a bit more than 1,000 pages. And with tons of footnotes (thanks to Paul Eddy I’m sure) taking on average 1/3 of each page, you’re really talking just over 700 pages to read. Not bad. Obviously, I’m not saying the footnotes are pointless. Anything but. I’m just saying you can get through a first reading more quickly than you think. Don’t be intimidated by two heavy volumes and 1,400 pages.

Second, if you are already on board with the belief that “God is love” is a predicate of God, that it describes God’s essential, triune being, and that divine love is truly non-violent, then you may not need Parts 1 and 2 of vol. 1. These parts are good and have a lot of great stuff in them, but they’re designed to get people “on board” with the idea that “God is love” means God is non-violent love. If folks have any doubt about the extent and depth of violence in the OT (what CWG is all about), they need to read Ch 7 (a kind of crime scene investigation of God’s bloody behavior in the OT) and ponder that slowly so they appreciate the problem. Chs 8 and 9 outline two standard responses to this violence. Folks who aren’t already familiar with these standard approaches will want to see how their explanations of biblical violence resemble existing models.

Third, I didn’t agree carte blanche with Parts 1 and 2, partly because so much of where Greg ends up is in Parts 1 and 2. This was one of the things that frustrated me about this work. But I was already on board with the conviction that God is love and God doesn’t do violence to creation. So all I needed from vol. 1 I got in Part 3 (Chs 10-12, just 140 pages) which is the nuts and bolts of the Cruciform Hermeneutic. Similarly for vol. 2, I felt like Part 5 (what he does Christologically/Trinity-wise to ground his Principle of Redemptive Withdrawal) was the key. If he’s right on this, the rest is dominoes. If he’s wrong – well, then only others who disagree will know it, because after ten years of his working on this, I can’t imagine there’s any dissuading Greg at this point. Part VI’s Cosmic Conflict is a hard sell – not because nobody grants the reality of spiritual warfare, but because Greg insists on formulating it in terms that make Satan into a functional demiurge ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’.

Fourth, I said to myself repeatedly while reading through this, “There’s nothing new here.” That’s not a criticism by the way. Greg admits several times in the book that there’s nothing really new going on. There’s just a new application or appropriation of what’s been said by others to the question of divine violence. As Chs 8 and 9 also show, attempts to address that violence aren’t new either. Christians have been trying to put some distance between God and OT violence for a long time. So there isn’t anything new in the basic beliefs that create the conundrum for Greg, i.e., that God is non-violent love (on the one hand) and (on the other hand) the texts that attribute so much violence to God are this non-violent God’s inspired words. The truth of these two convictions creates his conundrum. But how Greg resolves that tension is definitely new. He doesn’t want to dump the OT and line up with liberals and Marcionites. But he doesn’t want simply to allegorize them either. He wants to take these violent passages as ‘pointing’ (non-allegorically) to the non-violent God of love on the Cross. What to do? That’s what CWG is about. My favorite part of vol. 1 was Ch 10’s section on Origen. Very interesting.

As Greg got into the most objectionable aspects of his theology (his kenoticism, the idea that the Father abandoning the Son ad intra/essentially so that the divine nature comes to be defined by godforsakenness, his quasi-penal substitutionary view of the cross), I also thought to myself that none of this is new. Then it dawned on me that what might be the unique virtue of this book is not any particular belief in it (this or that belief any number of people can agree or disagree with), but its place in the history of Evangelical theological thought as being where all these various streams of belief within Evangelical thought finally converge to form their most definitive picture of God. There have always been kenoticists in Evangelicalism. There have always been Evangelicals who affirm the non-violent love of God. There have always been Evangelicals who knew God wasn’t really doing all that violence the Bible ascribes to God. But it might be the unique accomplishment of Greg to have brought all these divergent thoughts together within the embrace of Kenotic Christology (for what it’s worth theologically – which is nothing, but never mind that for now) to its fullest, most consistent Evangelical expression.

Fifth, it’s true of my conversations with Greg that I always come away better and truly challenged to assess what I believe and why I believe it. So as deeply as I disagree with him on some of his fundamental convictions, I do come away learning something new and pushed to think through my own convictions afresh.

Sixth, in general the most frustrating thing about Greg’s arguments is his tendency to not discriminate between beliefs or aspects of a position that are essential to that position and those that aren’t when arguing why a position should be rejected. Examples will have to wait for a fuller review.

Seventh, one particular weakness of the book that I think leaves it basically incomplete is the complete absence of any definition of violence. That struck me as very odd. One might suppose it’s safe to take that definition for granted. Don’t we all instinctively know what ‘violence’ is? Not really, no. When you’re publishing a major hermeneutical/theological work on the nature of God and violence, it would help to define ‘violence’ (theologically speaking). I wonder if this absence opens up Greg’s thesis to unhelpful ambiguities.

Eighth, five pages to Rene Girard. Really? The man who has done more than anyone in the last 100 years to expose the violent tendencies at work in Christian thinking and argue a truly non-violent vision of God and atonement, gets five pages out of 1,400? I was extremely surprised. When I get around to a full review, I’ll explain why I think Girard finally proves not to be an ally to Greg in this project. Nor surprisingly, it has to do with Christology.

Ninth, another particular thing that concerned me (and this won’t concern anyone who isn’t already familiar with Greg’s published PhD dissertation Trinity and Process) was his repeated favorable referencing (in the footnotes to both vols) of Trinity and Process (TP). At different points Greg refers to TP’s claims that God doesn’t need the world, that God creates freely, or that God is essentially triune without the world (all true) when reassuring readers, for example, that his belief that the Father truly abandons/forsakes the Son (ad intra) doesn’t mean he’s unorthodox on the question God’s being essentially, unchangingly, triune. God only ceases to “experience” himself as triune, loving oneness, but he doesn’t cease to “be” unchangeably triune. (An impossible view of uncreated, necessary being, but where else is Greg going to go on this?)

TP is a wonderful philosophical work on God’s essential (triune) relatedness. But it’s not TP’s overall claims (e.g., ‘God is necessarily-essentially triune’) that can help Greg presently. Nobody wanting to remain remotely within the scope of orthodox Christianity is going to say God takes a break from being essentially triune. So yes, Greg says the right thing: “God is essentially triune and that can’t change.” The issue is that it’s TP’s arguments for why and how God is essentially triune that make problematic Greg’s calling TP to the witness stand on behalf of CWG. Why? Because when you appeal to a work in support of arguments you’re making, you reference that work’s arguments, and the arguments Greg makes in TP for what it is about God that makes him essentially triune are arguments Greg no longer believes. Some of us have read TP and we’ve talked about it here, and the idea that ‘godforsakenness’ should define God’s essential experience of himself contradicts the core understanding of the unity of God’s uncreated being as Greg argues it in TP. So when I see Greg referencing TP to support arguments he was making which contradict TP, I’m concerned.

These are a few of the initial thoughts I had as I closed vol. 2. Other opinions are still forming that a second reading will help me clarify, but there’s no doubt in my mind that Greg is as passionate and motivated a thinker as any you’ll ever know, and that the finality of God’s revelation of himself in Christ is the defining center of that passion and motivation. And there’s no faulting him there. How he fills that out with what he thinks God’s being love implies is a different matter.

Congrats Greg! You’re wrong, but congrats!