Texts in travail: reviewing Crucifixion of the Warrior God—Part 2

In our last post I briefly summarized Vol. 1 of CWG. Here we’ll browse Vol. 2 and in forthcoming posts I’ll share some of my own responses. I was tempted to just repost Rob Grayson’s summary of CWG. It’s a great snapshot of the content. But I need to make sure I’m expressing Greg’s points accurately, so here’s how I see Vol. 2.

Volume 2 (Parts 4 through 6): “What’s going on behind the scenes?”
If the heart of Vol. 1 was the Cruciform Hermeneutic, the heart of Vol. 2 is the Cruciform Thesis. They are similar but distinct. Each is a side of the same coin. The Cruciform Hermeneutic tells us ‘that’ we should expect a dialectical mode of divine inspiration to give us a text whose surface claims and descriptions often reflect the fallen, mistaken, and violent beliefs of authors but in whose depths something else is going on. Inspiration doesn’t insulate the text from such beliefs. The Cruciform Thesis, on the other hand, tells us ‘how’ this hermeneutic actually works. It shows us “what’s going on behind the scenes” (an oft repeated phrase in Vol. 2), how to see beneath the surface of texts to perceive the cruciform depths to which surface claims and descriptions point.

This harkens back to Ch 10 of Vol. 1 where Greg picks up on Origen’s talk of texts having a “depth” to them which faith perceives. The Cruciform Thesis describes what one finds in those depths that accounts for the often ugly, violent, surface descriptions of biblical texts. A text’s “depths” reveal “what’s going on behind the scenes,” and is what Vol. 2 sets out to describe. In short, what’s going on behind the scenes (or beneath the surface) is the non-violent love of God accommodating his self-revelation to Israel’s fallen worldviews, sometimes withdrawing in judgment, always involved in cosmic conflict, and always making room for the freedom of created agents to use their gifts and powers to cooperate with or oppose God’s purposes.

What I’ve just described are the four principles of Greg’s Cruciform Thesis:

• The Principle of Cruciform Accommodation
• The Principle of Redemptive Withdrawal
• The Principle of Cosmic Conflict
• The Principle of Semiautonomous Power

Developing and defending these are the purpose of Vol. 2. I’ll describe each very briefly and then engage more specifically in forthcoming responses.

Part 4 (Chs 13-14): Cruciform Accommodation
Divine accommodation is a familiar, longstanding concept in Christian theology. Greg gives it a unique cruciform shape, so that the ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ of God’s accommodating presence in the world always involves God’s stooping to take on the appearance of evil. Greg grounds this briefly (1 page) in the cruciform nature of the Trinity. Greg contrasts this with classical theism. Whereas the classical Christian tradition (viz., God as absolutely simple, immutable, impassible, pure act) constructs its view of God beginning from Greek metaphysical categories and assumptions, the Cruciform Thesis begins with Christ crucified. God is most profoundly defined in the event of the Cross, the supreme act of cruciform accommodation. Greg appropriates Luther’s idea of “divine masks” to describe how God takes on the appearance of the ugliness of our evil in order to maintain covenant relationship with us and secure our final redemption through gracious, forgiving love. There is also a brief (5 page) engagement of Rene Girard’s thought on “scapegoating” that interprets Jesus as the “arch-scapegoat.”

Part 5 (Chs 15-20): Redemptive Withdrawal
In Part 5 Greg develops what some feel is the most controversial aspect of this work, the principle of Redemptive Withdrawal. This principle states that God’s judgment upon sin is nothing other than God “withdrawing” in order to allow the consequences of our choices to play themselves out and to bring evil to its own self-destruction. Greg calls this “divine Aikido.” Aikido, a modern Japanese martial art, is a form of self-defense that seeks to avoid injuring others. Divine Aikido would describe God wisely sidestepping the violent tendencies of evil that he otherwise holds at bay. When God withdraws, evil is allowed to wreak the havoc it intends, but this turns out to be God’s judgment on sin and his defeat of it.

The supreme act of divine withdrawal is God’s withdrawal from Jesus on the Cross, abandoning Christ in judgment upon our sin which Jesus bore. This abandonment was no mere charade. On the Cross, godforsakenness came to define the triune relations ad intra, reducing God’s experience of himself to the pain and despair of Jesus’ cry “My God, why have you forsaken me?” This quintessential withdraw is both an act of judgment and love, and it becomes, for Greg, the measure of a cruciform understanding of divine transcendence and that divine act which saves and atones for the world. There is a great deal in these six chapters which will have to wait until I engage Greg more specifically in forthcoming responses.

Part 6 (Chs 21-24): Cosmic Conflict
Greg’s Trinitarian warfare theodicy (expounded fully in Satan and the Problem of Evil) is one of the most well-known features of his writing. If you’re familiar with these works you’ll be familiar with what Greg’s points are here in CWG. The created, material order in its entirety, from the simplest quantum event to the broadest cosmic realities (including the laws of physics, entropy, thermodynamics, etc.) is a scene of warfare between God (with obedient angelic beings carrying out his will) and Satan (and his demonic cohorts). We human beings literally have our being in and as this state of war.

The abiding reality of evil’s reign in the material order is grounded in a pre-creational covenant of creation God established with Satan as a prince of matter. When Satan fell, all creation was implicated in his fall and caught up in all-out warfare. What we know as the laws of physics and other principles that maintain the intelligible regularities of the cosmos are all to greater or lesser degrees perversions of pre-fall laws governing matter as God intended but whose original goodness we can hardly imagine given their present perverted state. This means that there is no such thing as purely ‘natural evil’ (what we traditionally call mud-slides, earth-quakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.) for in truth such events are caused by fallen, angelic beings who were covenanted by God the administration of the material order but who came to abuse their gifts and callings to oppose rather than promote God’s purposes for the material universe. Such an understanding of ‘natural evil’ obviously figures into Greg’s account of what’s going on “behind the scenes.”

Part 7 (Ch 25): Semiautonomous Power
The last principle that defines the Cruciform Thesis is that of Semiautonomous Power. This principle states that the various spiritual gifts and powers which God grants us to partner with him in accomplishing his will remain relatively operative even when we fail to line up with God’s intentions and purposes. We can and do employ these powers in unloving and violent ways. This capacity to misuse our God-given gifts is called upon to explain many instance of evil brought about in God’s name by God’s servants in both the Old Testament and the New.

What Greg has done is lay out the various types of violence either directly or tacitly attributed to God and suggest four governing principles that explain in cruciform fashion ‘what is going on behind the scenes’. Recall the flow of the argument as follows:

• God is non-violent, other-oriented, self-sacrificial love as revealed in the Cross.
• The same God-breathed Bible that gives us this gospel story also describes God as willing and doing violence, contrary to the cruciform character of God revealed in Christ.
• Various attempts to resolve the tension between these two portrayals of God include (a) dismissing the violent passages as uninspired and thus non-revelatory, (b) synthesizing the violent and non-violent portrayals of God into a single, consistent, interpretation that attempts to defend divine violence as compatible with the goodness of God, and (c) the patristic allegorical method of reinterpreting the violent passages. All three, Greg argues, fail finally to resolve the tension in a satisfying way.
• Greg’s proposal offers two fundamental theses: the Cruciform Hermeneutic, by which we take the Cross as the authoritative and defining center from which all Scripture is to be read, and the Cruciform Thesis which shows us ‘what really is going on behind the scenes’ when we apply this hermeneutic to the violent portrayals of God throughout the Bible. What is going on may be one or more of (a) God’s accommodating his self-revelation to the errant worldviews of his covenant partner Israel, (b) God’s withdrawing himself in judgment upon sin, (c) God combating spiritual warfare on a cosmic level, and (d) human agents misusing their God-given spiritual powers to do violently.

Responses forthcoming.