Gregory A. Boyd (1)Rezensionen
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Here are his 4 principles:
1) Since God is fully revealed in Jesus on the cross, any act attributed to God that doesn't match this character is an accomodation. God let's himself be misrepresented (as he does on the cross too).
2) Judgment in the Bible is God withdrawing his protection and letting sin reap its own consequences.
3) We are in the middle of a cosmic conflict, and there are spiritual beings and forces that oppose God and work to harm people.
4) God gives gifts/abilities that agents can use semiautonomously , meaning that humans can misuse supernatural gifts (akin to misusing our natural gifts/abilities).
Overall, while I'm still working some of this through, I find Boyd's case compelling. I also find that he is able to retain the authority of Scripture, while offering defensible interpretations of difficult passages.
“I realized that my trivial, self-centered mental chatter about the past and future — like a dark cloud block in the sun — had kept me from seeing the glory of God that surrounded me every second of every day.”
“The important question, therefore, it’s not what you believe. The important question is what you believe to do, moment-by-moment, on the basis of what you believe.”
“You may be so accustomed to living in the past and future that you find it difficult to notice how much of your thought-life is spent there. You’ll probably find that most of your past and future oriented thoughts revolve around you and are centered on your attempts to feel worthwhile and significant. When we live perpetually hungry in the flesh, we spend a great deal of our thought-life savoring past experiences or possible future experiences that make us feel worthwhile and significant.”
“God’s love compels us to do the things Jesus did and live out the things Jesus taught. Instead of merely learning about the Kingdom, we begin to sacrifice our time, energy, and money to feed the hungry, house the homeless, welcome outcasts, and befriend prisoners.”
Any book, when separated from its cultural context, may be made to say whatever you want. Furthermore, any book, when properly place into its cultural context, may not always say what you expect or think it should.
Boyd attempts to put the Bible in its context, but then chooses his own feelings over the more obvious answers. And for a book which aims to interpret all Biblical violence in light of Christ on the cross, it is very odd and annoying to me that Boyd never deals with Jesus cleansing the temple or the prophecies of his return where he slaughters armies. It's a case-in-point example of cherry picking and hoping the audience doesn't think about those stories because they're inconvenient to deal with.
Was Jesus pacifistic? Yes. Would Christians today do well to be more pacifistic and like Jesus? Absolutely. Does Boyd make a good argument for God's preference for pacifism? I think so. But when the pacifistic character of the sacrificial Christ is our interpretive lens (and it's a good one, to be sure) for all scripture which seems to contradict this character, what do we when the sacrificial Christ himself acts in violence? Reading this book will not answer this question because Boyd never deals with it.
Also, Boyd is so wishy-washy on whether or not scripture is inspired as to cause eye-rolling. How can the scripture be both inspired and (in places) inaccurate? But Boyd is certain this is the case, since anytime violence is attributed to God it is the mistake of the author (based on their worldview). So was the author inspired or mistaken? Can they be both? How does that work? If the author was wrong about this (pretty fundamental) understanding of God's character, then what else might they be wrong about? Boyd never addresses this (and, to be fair, such is outside the scope of his book), but it leaves a gaping hole in his book that is otherwise well researched, sourced, and (at times) even well reasoned.
As an apologetic text, this book is somewhat successful (only somewhat). It also opens the gate to a better cultural understanding of the Bible, which is highly helpful, even if a significant portion of what Boyd writes is only half-baked or entirely unbaked altogether. But it is so fundamentally uneven and annoying that I can in no way recommend it as anything except a bibliography of better books and papers on the same subject matter.
Boyd's main thesis seems to be "power over," the worldly American culture operates, versus "power under," the Jesus way of living in this world, two phrases he frequently uses.
Two things I will say, I do not believe nor ever will believe that America is a Christian nation and that this Boyd's argument, while a bit too wordy at some points, convincing if not valid. However, the one thing I do regret is that he did not tangle with certain texts to defend his position; he just seems to assume they do support it.
Also, he seems to go to such an extreme the other way that, for example, gives the impression the Bible does not support Christians being policemen, although he doesn't really cover that issue. I would think that being wholly against violence, the logical step would be to see Christians policemen to be lowering the Gospel standard.
There is much twirling my mind about the book, although, in general, I do agree with it. My only contention is on certain particular points. But if you think America is a Christian nation and you want to be left uncomfortable with reading a book, this is the one.
A good book to end 2017 with...on to 2018
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snotbottom | 10 weitere Rezensionen | Sep 19, 2018 |
snotbottom | 10 weitere Rezensionen | Sep 19, 2018 | 
The author expounds upon themes present in other works he has written throughout; this volume is more accessible. He speaks of the difficulties which arise in theology when people presume that God has actively willed all the things that happen, including evil.
He speaks of the "blueprint model," a way of speaking of the Augustinian Calvinist synthesis informed by a Neoplatonic perspective on God (prevalent not only in Calvinism but in much of Protestantism). He analyzes this perspective and demonstrates where it is lacking. He advances and prefers the "warfare model," in which God has created both humans and spiritual beings with free will and allows those free will decisions to exist even when they would go against His purposes.
The book then sets forth the contrast between these two perspectives as they relate to the problem of evil, difficulties people encounter, and exploring the question why some prosper but others suffer. The author wisely recognizes that such questions are vanity, and encourages considering everything in light of God defeating sin and death in Jesus, and looking at everything in terms of seeing God in Jesus. In this way he seeks to dismiss the stronger claims of the "blueprint model" and provide people with a way of understanding God which affirms His sovereignty while making it clear that He is not responsible for the evil that takes place in the world.
On the whole it is persuasively argued, although at times the author falls into the same, albeit opposite, of the trap in which Augustine fell: certain presuppositions are not challenged. Since God loves us in Christ, it is imagined, God would not bring calamity. And yet Scripture speaks frequently of YHWH bringing calamity in judgment on those who continually resist His will...and Jesus Himself spoke condemnation on Jerusalem because they rejected their Christ. If one's view of God cannot see Him upholding justice in judgment and displaying love, grace, and mercy in Christ, it remains as warped as that against which one is arguing.
Nevertheless, on the whole, a good way of looking at the issue and getting away from the Neoplatonic God of the Augustinian tradition.
The author does well at exploring the nature of the powers of government vs. the work of God through Jesus, using the helpful imagery of "power-over" forms of domination and coercion by the state vs. "power-under" forms of service and sacrifice manifest in Jesus and in early Christians. He proceeds at length indicating how nationalism can easily become idolatrous and what generally passes for American Christianity has a lot more to do with America than Christianity. He does well to expose the fallacies and myths behind the story of America as a Christian nation, and how such a thing does not truly exist in this fallen world. He explores the dangers for Christians and the church in the pursuit of worldly power. He speaks well regarding what went wrong with the Constantinian compromise and Jesus' death as a means of triumph over the powers and principalities, and why we need to follow Jesus' way to gain that victory. His concluding concerns about violent means of protection and military service are worthwhile.
You'll either agree with it and appreciate it or hate it. If the latter, please prayerfully consider why the discomfort exists, and search the Scriptures to see what is so.
The author is upfront regarding the frame of reference: whether or not all evil can be truly attributed to God's mysterious will as would be demanded by what he deems the "classical-philosophical" view of God as manifest in Augustine. He then proposes the spiritual warfare prism, as if God is constantly at odds with forces of evil and darkness and they are the ones truly responsible for the evil which takes place. He then explores both Old and New Testament passages suggesting a spiritual warfare framework and the various possibilities for spiritual forces and the like. He concludes with an explanation of how Christians could envision themselves as part of that spiritual conflict in light of some New Testament passages.
The author is quite aware of the controversial nature of much of what he has to say. He communicates well in a "discovery/journey" type context, and is willing to offer suggestions and possibilities regarding which he himself is not convinced are true. He does well at discomfiting the modern Western post-Enlightenment reader and Bible student by taking very seriously a lot of passages and ideas which are often de-emphasized or "mythologized" in some way, such as an angel being hindered by the prince of the kingdom of Persia in Daniel 10, or the psalmic odes regarding YHWH's defeat of primordial beings as reflecting actual warfare.
The author has written elsewhere regarding his open theism views; perhaps he is willing to entirely dispense with the "classical-philosophical" view of God a la Augustine, but he might well be rejecting more than he ought. The question of Hellenistic influence on good theology is quite the knotty one, and neither extreme is likely accurate in its assessments. The author also gives great weight to the consistency of narratives throughout cultures around the world; while this kind of apologetic is often used in terms of, say, the Flood, and it might well be good evidence for his claims, we do need to keep in mind the Pauline denunciation of idolatry in Romans 1:18-32 and the possibility that these stories do not represent a valid substratum of divine conflict with primordial forces of chaos.
The premise that the creation is actually much older than the Genesis 1 account and featured all sorts of primordial contests between YHWH and various beings and forces as seen in various psalms, consummated in the final defeat of the forces of chaos, allowing YHWH to "re-create" all things as good in Genesis 1, suggested by the author yet without affirmation, is at least intriguing, even if on the merits it probably cannot be fully sustained based only on what has been revealed in Scripture.
Nevertheless, while there are many questionable statements and certain arguable propositions, it's hard to resist the author's general conclusion. We have de-emphasized the spiritual warfare element of things and do not see evil as existing in any kind of systematic way. Demonology and such things are often seen as the arena of quacks and holy rollers; our faith has been very much "rationalized" thanks to the Enlightenment, and we're all quite convinced that those matters of superstition of the past have no basis in reality, but that's certainly not the picture presented in Scripture, and perhaps our theology, our faith, and our ability to understand the creation and God's purposes within it have suffered accordingly.
A work worth reading and with which to grapple and contend, if nothing else.
But Greg Boyd argues that it doesn't work that way. We are not saved by our certainty, we are saved by Christ and his cross. If we make certainty our goal, we will never struggle through the questions and grow in our confidence in Jesus.
Through out this book Boyd uses the illustration of marriage and marriage vows. People with good marriages don't 'trust the strength of their original marriage vows.' Nor do they enter a marriage with anything like certainty about the future. Nope marriage just requires enough trust to act on it. Similarly we don't need to be certain about every aspect of our faith or spiritual life, we only need to have enough trust and Jesus that we will act on his behalf. Faith is covenantal. It is relational. It is something we do something with.
Boyd shares his own journey with doubt and faith, his past struggle with sin, his awakening to the reality of grace, his wrestling with difficult passages and his rebuttal of the certainty proof texts. Good book. First book I read on my Kindle Paperwhite.
Boyd’s general admonition and apparent motive for writing is that the believer should doubt, meaning that the believer should consider other truth claims and seek to know whether he/she is right or wrong and should be applied by all. If the Christian claim is true it will be proven true even under scrutiny. If the Christian claim is false, then the believer should desire to know that more than anyone, regardless of the cognitive dissonance this will assuredly bring. If, as Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living, then Boyd is right in saying that this “applies to faith as well”. The unexamined faith is not worth believing.”
While I wholeheartedly agree with Boyd’s point of the dangers of certainty seeking faith and the need to doubt and to examine, there were many parts of this book I struggled with greatly. It seemed, oftentimes, that Boyd was embracing pluralism and submitting Scripture, God’s revelation of Himself to us, to culture and to our experience. Boyd’s handling of the book of Job is at times simply horrible.
He begins early on by making the claim that God was surprised when Satan appeared in Heaven and uses Job 1:7 as his evidence of this surprise. He then goes on to show how Satan forces God to act via his cleverness and God’s apparent inability to keep control and His motivation not to lose face after being unwittingly challenged by His enemy. I cannot find a translation that even comes close to indicating any of this. I really wished that this was the extent of the butchering of Job, but Boyd takes aim at God’s sovereignty(not surprising) but does so in a way that is very unfaithful to the text (very surprising). Boyd looks at the statement by Job that the Lord gives and the Lord takes away and says that this is a “misguided conviction”. He says that people are “arrogantly misguided” if we ever “blame God (as Job did) when tragedy strikes.” “Blaming God” in the sense of Job’s words in 1:21 and 2:10. Boyd claims that God rebukes Job for making these statements. Boyd uses some real emotional, heart wrenching examples as to why one cannot attribute these things to God and how offended he is when people use these verses to draw comfort, but he refuses to address the immediate context which refutes entirely his premise. The author of Job, immediately after each statement, anticipating a negative response, cuts it off with the statement, “In all this Job did not sin with his lips.” The author of Job seemed to know how shocking these statements would be to the human mind, the sinful, self-loving, rebellious human mind. So he cuts the argument that Boyd raises off before it can even be raised…unless of course you just ignore completely those statements. This seems to be the approach Boyd takes, and it is well beneath a scholar of his repute.
I did love a definition of faith that Boyd offered. Faith is not “psychological certainty” but “trusting another’s character in the face of uncertainty.” Amen! For his example of this he offered Jesus as He suffered through the garden of Gethsemane. He showed how Jesus, who had perfect faith, struggled in the garden and begged for another way to be offered but in the end submitted wholly to His Father’s will, knowing that His Father was and is worthy of perfect trust and allegiance. Boyd offers that this is true faith, and I would wholeheartedly agree. “So whether your struggle is with doubt, confusion, the challenge of accepting God’s will, or any other matter, the fact that you have this struggle does not indicate that you lack faith. To the contrary, your faith is strong to the degree that you’re willing to honestly embrace your struggle.”
Boyd spends a lot of time attacking penal substitutionary atonement and attributes its existence to lawyers becoming theologians and attributes to it almost all the ills that face Western Christianity…this seems like an exaggeration, but not so much. I found it slightly amusing that Boyd would attribute the lack of faith-led works in the life of a believer to the belief in penal-substitutionary atonement, seeing as how the Reformers and the Puritans wholly held to this view…and we all know how lax those Puritans were in pursuing personal holiness!! The false dichotomy Boyd creates between accepting a legal view of salvation and a fruitful Christian life is laughably absurd and somewhat offensive.
Boyd concludes the book by looking at how a Christian should deal with a modern, pluralistic world and Scripture. He makes some very interesting arguments, abandoning a house of cards model of Scriptural authority for a concentric circle model and submitting all revelation in Scripture to the revelation in the God-man, Christ Jesus. Boyd says one of the keys is not basing your faith in Jesus on the Scriptures but rather basing your faith in Scripture on the person Jesus. While he gives some examples of how one could come to faith in the person of Jesus apart from Scripture, I think his examples are flimsy and do not take into full account the fact that apart from the revelation of Scripture, we today would have no understanding of the revelation of the person. We receive our revelation of the person of Christ in the revelation of Scripture. To act as if we could, and should, come to faith in Christ apart from the Scriptures seems misguided.
That reservation, although a large one, aside, I was greatly intrigued by how Boyd dealt with all revelations being in submission to the ultimate revelation in Jesus Himself and how this impacted how we deal with certain debated points (the historicity of Jonah, evolution, global deluge, Samson, the character of God in the Old Testament, etc…). Essentially, the point of revelation is to point us to Jesus Christ and Him crucified and inerrancy is only important as it deals with that specific revelation of God’s character. Boyd labors intensely to deal with the violence of God in the Old Testament. It is especially troubling to him and he feels a genuine need to go beyond the surface reading and, in some way, rescue the character of God from the plain reading of the text. This is imperative in a system that, while claiming to submit all Scripture to the person and work of Christ, actually quite often submits all Scripture to the experience and opinion of men. Not once,as best I can recollect, in this book does Boyd even offer the argument that instead of doubting the Scriptures when conflicted with experience, reason, science, visceral reaction, etc…, that the reader should maybe doubt his or her experience or reason or science or visceral reaction. The doubt always seems to be placed at the foot of Scripture and Scripture seems required to conform, rather than vice versa. Boyd trumpets this throughout as a new way to look at Scripture, but it really seems like the same old way that unbelievers have always looked at it. The unbelieving heart is probably not the best role model for faithful, Biblical exegesis. Boyd seems to feel that appealing to mystery in these hard texts is a cop out, that it is not genuine faith. I think that maybe it would be a more humble and more faithful way of dealing with hard texts that we all agree are troublesome to one degree or another rather than feeling the need to be absolutely certain about what they do or do not/cannot mean.
Boyd is a great writer. This is an easy read that really makes the reader think. While I disagreed with much of this book, I would recommend it to the discerning reader to have his views on many things challenged, to be led to doubt, and to find that the truth of God and the faith He gives to believers can and will withstand much scrutiny and much doubt.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher through Netgalley.com for review purposes
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