In what will become one of the most discussed chapters in Greg Boyd’s The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Boyd sketches The Synthesis Solution. That is, four ways the church has attempted to include the violence passages in its theology without diminishing its view of Scriptures.

Which of these four views did you grow up hearing? Or did you learn as the best explanation?

While theologians within the historic-orthodox church have always viewed Christ as the most important revelation of God, they have, espedaily since the fifth century, also generally assumed that the plenary inspiration of Scripture entails that the OT’s violent portraits of God must be accepted as accurate revelations alongside of Christ. Rather than seeking for ways to reinterpret the violence found in these portraits as a means of preserving a nonviolent conception of God, the way Origen, Nyssa, and others had done, these theologians sought for ways to justify the violence these portraits ascribe to God. Consequently, the dominant portrait of God advocated by the church’s major theologians over the last sixteen hundred years has been, to one degree or another, a synthesis of the portrait of God we are given in Christ and the OT’s portraits of God as a violent divine warrior. 379-80

Boyd discusses four views and finds each of the four deficient.

First, the “Beyond-Our-Categories Defense.”

The first defense of the OT’s violent depictions of God by advocates of the Synthesis Solution essentially argues that we fallen humans are in no position to question God’s actions. In this view, the transcendent and all-holy God is not subject to our fallen ethical intuitions. God’s ‘thoughts are not [our] thoughts,” and God’s “ways are not [our] ways” (Isa 55:9).3 Hence, in this view, we must simply accept that everything God is said to have done and commanded in Scripture is perfectly good, regardless of how immoral it may appear to us. 381-382

In my experience this has been a common response by my Calvinist friends, or at least the more vocal kind of Calvinist. Hence, they appeal to this text: Romans 9:14-24.

[Discussing a typical violent text] With the honesty that typified Calvin’s commentaries, as we saw in chapter 7, Calvin grants that this behavior would reflect “boundless arrogance” and be a “barbarous atrocity” if it had not been ordered by God. But since it was so ordered, according to Calvin, he concludes that we must simply accept that in this one instance at least, barbaric and atrocious-appearing behavior is, in fact, “good.” 383

A moral problem arises and it either is acknowledge or morality must be redefined.

Yet, if we must call actions “good” that we would otherwise call “evil” if God had not told us otherwise, then our calling these actions “good” cannot be motivated by any goodness we actually see in these actions or in the character of God. 384

The next two observations are potent. At least they are for me.

Related to this, unless the word “good,” when applied to God, means something analogous to what it means when we apply it elsewhere, we must accept that we have absolutely no idea what we mean when we say “God is good” or when we claim that anything God does or commands is “good.” 386

In other words, if something we would otherwise always call “evil”—such as infanticide—must be considered “good” on the grounds that God commanded it, then we have to admit that there is no longer any intelligible distinction between what we mean by “good,” when applied to God, and what we would mean by “evil” (386-7).

Second, the “Divine Punishment Defense.” I would say this is the one I grew up hearing the most, and one I encountered often in my reading into this topic.

Throughout church history, the single most common defense of God’s apparent violence in the OT has been that it expresses God’s holy wrath against sin. In this view, if God sometimes commanded or engaged in violence against people, as we find throughout the OT, it was because they deserved it. Indeed, in this view, God would be unjust if he did not punish wrongdoers. 392

Third, the “Greater Good Defense.”

When God sanctions or engages in violent behavior, this defense argues, it is to promote some greater good, or to at least prevent some greater evil. For example, the reason God commanded capital punishment for sons who were slothful and drunkards, Copan argues, is because allowing sons like this to go unpunished ‘would have had a profoundly destructive effect on the family and the wider community.” 395

Fourth, the “Progressive Revelation Explanation.”

The final primary strategy for explaining violent portraits of God in the OT by advocates of the Synthesis Solution centers on the fact that God has always had to accommodate his revelation to the limitations and fallen state of his people. His strategy was to gradually increase his people’s capacity to know him as he truly is. The revelation of God within the “God-breathed” written witness to God’s covenantal faithfulness thus unfolds gradually. 399

Throughout church history, theologians have explained embarrassing or troubling aspects of the way God is depicted in Scripture by claiming that these depictions do not reflect the way God actually is; they rather reflect the way God had to adjust his appearance to accommodate the limitations and fallen condition of humans. 399

Advocates of progressive revelation hold that as parents must do with children, God had to initially accommodate his revelation to the immaturity of his people, which explains why we generally find God’s revelation getting filled out, clarified, and, some would argue, corrected as the biblical narrative unfolds, culminating in the revelation of God in his incarnate Son. 400-1

Among the four versions of the Synthesis Solution that we have reviewed, I believe this approach is the most profoundly grounded in Scripture and holds the most promise as a contributing aspect of an adequate account of Scripture’s violent divine portraits. 402

Problem?

First, if God truly abhors violence and commands and engages in it merely as an accommodation to the violent proclivities of the people he is dealing with at the time, would we not expect to find Yahweh consistently discouraging violence as much as possible and commanding it and engaging in it as little as possible? 404

An even more important objection to the way progressive revelation has usually been applied is that, as we have seen is true of the other three versions of the Synthesis Solution, this view compromises the definitiveness and beauty of the revelation of the nonviolent God in the crucified Christ. 404

No one in our culture defends the value of the Old Testament any more than John Goldingay, professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, and one of my favorite OT scholars (even if his books get a bit too long at times).

He’s also good at provocation, as can be seen in this title: Do We Need the New Testament?

It’s not just Greg Boyd’s book The Crucifixion of the Warrior God that provokes Goldingay but he is joined by Brent Strawn in his new book The Dying of the Old Testament. I don’t think these books — that is Boyd vs. the others — contradict so much as they are in tension, and I’m curious how Goldingay or Strawn (or both) would respond to the theological interpretation proposed by Boyd.

Having said that, I thought I’d draw attention to another book by John Goldingay, Reading Jesus’s Bible: How the New Testament Helps Us Understand the Old Testament. In this book Goldingay sketches give major themes in the Old Testament that determine how to understand the New Testament. For each Goldingay examines stuff in the Gospels that demonstrate the larger point — that we need the OT to comprehend the NT. Here they are, from p. 3:

The First Testament tells the story of which Jesus is the climax. Matthew begins here (Matt 1:1-17) with a kind of summary of the First Testament story up to Jesus in the form of a list of his ancestors. The summary tells us something important about how to understand Jesus and directs us back to the First Testament story in order to expand on that understanding.

The First Testament declares the promise of which Jesus is the fulfillment. After the list of names, Matthew goes on to tell the story of Jesus s birth and early months (Matt 1:18-2:23). It shows how passages from the Prophets are fulfilled or filled out in what happens; it thus uses the Prophets to help us understand Jesus and directs us back to read the Prophets.

The First Testament provides the images, ideas, and words with which to understand Jesus. Matthews account of Jesus’s ministry begins with his baptism by John and with God’s words to him from heaven, which come from the First Testament (Matt 3:1-17). So the account invites us to go back to the First Testament for an understanding of who Jesus s God is.

The First Testament lays out the nature of a relationship with God. Jesus models the nature of such a relationship during his temptations in the wilderness and teaches about it in the opening section of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 4:1-11; 5:1-16). The first passage quotes extensively from the First Testament, and the second alludes extensively to its motifs, so that it invites us to discover more about the nature of a relationship with God by studying it.

The First Testament provides the foundation for Jesus’s moral teaching. Jesus goes on to declare, “You have heard that it was said But I
 tell you …” (Matt 5:17-48). He is again “fulfilling” or “filling out” the First Testament, speaking like a prophet, helping people to see implications in the Scriptures that they might be avoiding, and inviting us to study what the Scriptures have to teach us about the way we should live.

From Goldingay’s Do We Need the New Testament?

In a sense God did nothing new in Jesus. God was simply taking to its logical and ultimate extreme the activity in which he had been involved throughout the First Testament story. 12

To be a little paradoxical, if God hadn’t acted in this way in Jesus, he wouldn’t have been acting in that way in Israel’s story and in the world’s story.

In letting his Son die; God was being true to himself in undertaking this ultimate act of submission to human self-assertiveness, and refusing to be frustrated by it or to abandon humanity to its sinfulness or to surrender his relationship with humanity. It was necessary for humanity’s sake in order to bring home to humanity the truth about itself and about God, and to draw it from rebellion to submission, from resistance to faith. As the point is classically put, the act of atonement had an objective and a subjective aspect. 13

Yet the dying and the resurrection were the ultimate expression of who the God of Israel is, and the story of the dying and the resurrection is the story of that ultimate expression of who the God of Israel is. 14

As I said, he likes provocation, and this is about as good as it gets:

God’s strategy in seeking to fulfill his purpose for creation worked somewhat as follows. First he commissioned humanity to subdue and care for the world. It didn’t work. So [second] he tried destroying most of the world and starting again with one family. It didn’t work. So he tried a third time with one family but separated them from the rest of the world in order to bless them so spectacularly that the entire world would pray to be blessed as they were blessed. This strategy also didn’t work, and the descendants of Abraham and Sarah ended up back in the Babylonia from which they had come. God tried a fourth time by reestablishing the community centered on Jerusalem, though many people who had been scattered around the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds stayed in the place of their dispersion or spread further. While this arrangement proved more effective insofar as these Jewish communities were in a position to attract many Gentiles to come to believe in the God of the Torah, the Jewish people centered on Jerusalem remained under the domination of the superpower of the day. So God tried a fifth time by sending his Son into the world. When this strategy again initially failed in particularly catastrophic fashion, God again transformed disaster into potential triumph. He turned the failure and his refusal to be beaten by it into a message that could go out to the entire world, making use of that already-existent dispersion of the Jewish community and the way it had already brought some Gentiles to believe in the God of the Torah. 18

There are two features of Greg Boyd’s massive study The Crucifixion of the Warrior God that I most appreciate: his squaring with the facts about violence and his relentless push to understand the Bible through the lens of the cruciform nature of God revealed in Christ.

You may not like Boyd’s conclusions or theories, but to offer a better theory you have to square yourself with the facts of violence and you must offer a thorough and compelling explanation.

In the book he discusses three possible solutions to the violence of God in the Old Testament as compared with the enemy-loving God of the NT: dismissing, synthesizing, and reinterpreting. It is the synthesizing theory, which we will look at in our next post, that has gained the upper hand with many evangelicals today. But is it the best?

Many have dismissed, many dismiss today and many dismiss but shudder at that the thought they are actually dismissing what the Bible says. Which is why Boyd takes on those who end up dismissing the violence connected to God in the Old Testament.

The most famous dismissal theory is that of Marcion.

In fact, Marcion did not even deny that the OT was divinely inspired. It was inspired, he believed, but by an evil god whom he believed created the material world, not by the good God revealed in Christ. In keeping with certain Gnostic groups that influenced him, Marcion believed that Jesus came to reveal the good God over and against the malevolent deity revealed in the OT. Thus, as Sebastian Moll has convincingly argued, the OT continued to play a central, albeit entirely negative, role in Marcion’s theology (338).

The church both saw through Marcion and faithfully rejected his theories. When the church arose with power and authority, it was able to silence Marcion’s followers — until (roughly) the Enlightenment and critical thinking in biblical and theological studies.

This trend culminated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when a number of noteworthy German scholars, including, most famously, Friedrich Delitzsch and Adolf von Harnack, made an explicit alignment with Marcion and boldly called for the church to sever its ties with the OT (340-341).

With differences, some evangelicals today are breathing the same air, and Boyd points at Eric Seibert and Pete Enns:

For example, despite his overall high view of Scripture, and despite offering many excellent insights regarding troubling portraits of God, Eric Seibert’s treatment of the OT’s violent divine portraits arguably falls into this category. “Acknowledging that there are some things in the Bible that did not happen,” he argues, “effectively exonerates God from certain kinds of morally questionable behavior.” [Also see this second book.] Seibert thus responds to the moral problems posed by the portrait of God commanding the merciless genocide of the Canaanites, for example, by citing contemporary scholarship that argues that the canonical conquest narrative is largely, if not completely, historically unreliable. For example, if it can be demonstrated that God did not actually (viz. in history) give the herem command, the thinking goes, then we have resolved the challenge posed by the biblical portrait of God giving this command.

Along similar lines, while I deeply appreciate much of the work of Peter Enns, he reflects the same perspective when he notes that most archeologists are certain that “the Bible’s version of events” recounted in the conquest narrative “is not what happened.” And this, he contends, “puts the question: ‘How could God have all those Canaanite’s put to death?’ in a different light.” For this scholarship, Enns concludes, means “He didn’t” ever give this command (342).

Boyd continues pointing fingers:

Something similar could be argued about the work of C. S. Cowles, Derek Flood, and Dora Mbuwayesango, who reject violent depictions of God primarily on theological grounds, as well as about the work of Wes Morriston, Randal Rauser, and Paul Anderson, who advocate similar solutions, primarily on ethical grounds (342-343).

But he wants to be clear about what he’s saying about these scholars:

want it to be perfectly clear that I am not suggesting that any of the Christian scholars I have mentioned could by any stretch of the imagination be accused of “Marcionism,” or even of “Apeleism.” Indeed, as I have said, far from rejecting the OT, most of these scholars affirm its overall divine inspiration. Nor am I suggesting that these scholars altogether dismiss violent divine portraits, as if they found nothing of value in them. To the contrary, Seibert, Enns, Flood, and others have worked hard to pull positive lessons out of them.25 Yet, each author ultimately assumes that the problem posed by biblical authors ascribing violence to God is to be solved by denying that this violence ever took place. So too, while some of these authors continue to work to find redemptive value in the narratives containing these portraits, they all stop looking for the revelatory content of the portrait itself, and it is at this point that I find I must part ways with them (343).

[On the next page:] Given their mistaken belief that they had to choose between Jesus and the OT, I admire their bold choice. But it is this false either-or proposition that I strongly reject.

Boyd then turns to four objections to the Dismissal Theory:

1. The whole Bible is inspired and therefore every passage is summoned to witness to Christ; one can’t dismiss a passage and find it witnessing to Christ.
2. They dismiss large portions of Scripture. The Bible’s narrative unravels without the thread of violence.
3. Dismissing intensifies the problem of evil in the Bible. Thus,

Despite the fact that Jesus reveals a God who abhors all forms of sword wielding, and despite the fact that Paul had just instructed believers to relinquish all violence and to instead love and serve enemies (Rom 12:14-21), it is clear from this and a number of other passages that Paul did not think God was above working within the fallen conditions of the world’s violent-prone governments to minimize evil and to maximize good (348).

4. Biblical infallibility:

The primary concern that leads me to embrace biblical infallibility is that I believe that confessing this is a foundational aspect of what it means to confess Jesus Christ as Lord (349).

Boyd believes we have to learn to read the Bible theologically and not simply as a part of the historical-critical method, and he stands here mostly with Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.

For while the historical-critical approach subjects Scripture to our questions, the theological approach, at least as I am espousing it, seeks to enter into the “God-breathed” “realism” of the biblical narrative and to allow it to shape us (359).

He examines such concepts as infallibility and inerrancy, preferring the former term, but connecting it to the central message of the Bible as the guiding hermeneutic while noticing the fallibility of humans who wrote Scripture.

Bloesch’s perspective reflects my own in as much as he understands that if biblical infallibility is defined in appropriate ways, it is not threatened by the presence of human fallibility or sinfulness in Scripture (376).

So Boyd thinks the Dismissal view dismisses itself from the stage when the opportunity arises for its most important performance:

In this light, I could say that my most fundamental objection to the Dismissal Solution is not that it dismisses Scripture’s violent portraits of God as “unworthy of God.” My most fundamental objection is rather that advocates of this approach assume they have thereby solved the challenge posed by these portraits. Having rejected the surface meaning of these portraits, they fail to patiently press in to discern the deeper cruciform meaning these portraits are intended to have for us. As I noted earlier, while many advocates of this approach work hard to bring some redemptive value out of these violent divine portraits, they abandon any attempt to find the cross-centered revelatory value of the portraits themselves. In a word, they stop short of disclosing how these often horrendous appearing divine portraits are the “swaddling cloths and the manger in which Christ lies,” as Luther put it.124 For, as Luther also noted, our ultimate goal in interpreting Scripture must be to “see nothing in Scripture”—including its violent portraits of God—”except Christ crucified” (377).

Consider the opening chapter of Genesis.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.

And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:1-4 NIV)

In this passage we see that God created the land and the sea. Not only did he create the sea, but he saw that it was good.

But the sea is also an image of chaos.

On the other hand, the image of the sea is often an image of chaos in scripture and in ancient Near Eastern culture more broadly. In the Genesis 1 the “deep” and the sea are inanimate objects, but remnants of this image of chaos are still present, if nothing else in the emphasis on them as inanimate objects.

A retelling of creation in the Psalms is somewhat more explicit in reference to the ANE view of sea as chaos: It was you who split open the sea by your power (Ps 74:13). References can be found in a number of other passages as well.

A little later on in Genesis 1 we read that God created “the great creatures of the sea,” that is the sea monsters, as well. And again he saw that it was good. Later Jewish tradition makes this idea of God’s creation of the great sea monsters explicit as we see in 2 Bar 29:4 And Behemoth shall be revealed from his place and Leviathan shall ascend from the sea, those two great monsters which I created on the fifth day of creation and in 4 Ezra 6:49-54. Both of these texts appear to date around 90-100 AD and likely reflect ideas current in first century Judaism.

Psalm 74 specifies Leviathan as well (13-14):

It was you who split open the sea by your power;
you broke the heads of the monster in the waters.
It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan
and gave it as food to the creatures of the desert.

It was very good. In some discussions of a Christian view of creation much has been made of the phrase “it was good” in Genesis 1 repeated in verses 3,9,12,18,21. In verse 31 we have the summary: God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. One can, of course, take the position that the image of the sea as chaos and the denizens of the deep as creatures of terror are a result of the fall. Prior to Genesis 3 they were “good” in an idyllic sense. If there had been no fall, they’d be good and tame yet.

But we still have a problem in scripture – at least if we take a literal approach as preferred and assume a motif of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. Revelation does not really depict a restoration of an idyllic primeval garden or the reestablished perfect creation of Genesis 1.

The consummation in Revelation 21 begins:

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.

If the sea in Genesis 1 was good – a part of God’s perfect creation – why is there particular mention in Revelation 21 that there will be no longer any sea? The sea is not necessarily evil, and can be quite beautiful. If the sea, however, represents chaos, the elimination of the sea makes sense. But it isn’t a recreation of Genesis 1.

And in Revelation 22:3-5 we read:

The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

Not only is there no longer any sea, there also is no longer any dark. The Lord God gives light everywhere. His face will shine upon them, an echo of Aaron’s priestly blessing in Numbers 6:24-26.

The Lord bless you
and keep you;
the Lord make his face shine on you
and be gracious to you;
the Lord turn his face toward you
and give you peace.

This is a blessing I think we should use more often. But, if the dark and night were part of God’s good creation of Genesis 1, why is night not a part of the new heavens and earth? Did the Lord’s face not shine on Adam and Eve?

Well, not a problem, but a pointer. I don’t want to claim that this “discrepancy” is a problem for faith. But I do think it points to ways in which an overly literal approach to Genesis and Revelation, without careful consideration of genre and message, can cause problems. I also think it points to a problem with a synopsis that characterizes the story of scripture as creation, fall, redemption, and new creation, as though the consummation is a return to the garden. This reading simply is not consistent with scripture as far as I can tell. Even without Genesis 3 there is a trajectory commenced in creation, and it would lead eventually to the consummation. The command to be fruitful and multiply (1:28) is part of this trajectory.

The role that death plays in God’s creation is a problem with which we must wrestle. But ultimately we have a promise. In the consummation, where there is no sea (however good it was in Genesis 1) and no night or dark (however good they were in Genesis 1), there is also no death.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

This doesn’t look like a restoration of Eden, but it is a restoration of the presence of God and even more.  It bears repeating. God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.  Isn’t this even better than the Garden?

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen.

Is the Christian story told as creation, fall, redemption, and restoration (i.e. return to Eden) true to the Bible?

Does it matter?

What do you make of the creation of the sea, the taming of the sea, and the elimination of the sea?

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail [at] att.net.

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

The pictures in this post, by the way, I took at Caesarea Maritima on a beautiful September day when the sea appeared quite tame.

This is a lightly edited repeat of an earlier post – as I am traveling and in meetings much of this week.

By Jonathan Storment

“You never feel completely sad or completely happy. You just feel kinda satisfied with your products. And then you die.” –Louis C.K.

It takes seven minutes before a conversation, almost any conversation, gets real.

Up until then we are able to talk about sports -“How bout them Cowboys?!!” the weather -“If you don’t like the weather around here just wait ‘til the next day” or a variety of superficial things in our day -“Did you catch last night’s Modern Family?”

But after seven minutes someone takes a risk. Someone makes themselves just a little bit vulnerable and allows themselves to be known.  These days we have more conversations than ever, but we rarely have seven consecutive minutes of it.

This is an observation from Sherri Turkle whose work in books like Alone Together has been incredibly helpful for the ways that technology is changing us. And it was a huge “Aha” moment for me.

Seriously, does this not help you make sense of so much of your life? Chances are, if you are like me, you talk to people all the time. Since the advent of the smart phone we haven’t stopped spending time at mixers/parties/churches/work, but we rarely go anywhere without our devices and without incessantly using them.

And Turkle says this changes the conversation.

Screen On/Tuned Out

So I am in the middle of a series reviewing Andy Crouch’s fantastic new book The Tech-Wise Family and today I want to introduce you to his radical idea that conversations matter enough to attend solely to them, to give space for them, and to create a pattern of life for the best kind of conversations to occur.

A conversation that is interrupted several times by checking your screen doesn’t get deeper slowly, instead it stays superficial, and never lets two people get into the very stuff that would help them bond and connect and develop a deeper relationship with one another.

This is one of the most fascinating observations Andy made in his book. And when I read this the first time I immediately thought “This is why so many people are lonely these days.”

The rise of loneliness in our late modern era is enough to be called an epidemic.  But what is truly surprising is not just that so many people feel lonely, but who feels lonely.

In my own experience, both personal and in ministry, loneliness is not just prevalent in people who have very little social interaction, but with people who from the outside looking in appear to have a lot of friends. These are people who many would consider to be popular and socially engaged, but many of them feel a great sense of loneliness too.

When I read Andy’s chapter on Conversations, I realized why.  It is not just quantity of conversations that makes us feel connected to one another, it is the quality of them, and the quality is trending downward.

This alone should make us revisit our relationships with the technology in our lives. Because this is great proof that our devices and social media are lying to us.

Think about the sales pitch you heard that made you first buy your smart phone or sign up for Facebook? Wasn’t it that you wanted to be more connected?

Well it turns out that is not working.

The Disruption of Devices

In an interesting Forbes article a few months ago, Caroline Beaton wrote Why Millennials Are Lonely and she said:

One reason the Internet makes us lonely is we attempt to substitute real relationships with online relationships. Though we temporarily feel better when we engage others virtually, these connections tend to be superficial and ultimately dissatisfying. Online social contacts are ‘not an effective alternative for offline social interactions,’… In fact, the very presence of technology can hinder genuine offline connection. Simply having a phone nearby caused pairs of strangers to rate their conversation as less meaningful, their conversation partners as less empathetic and their new relationship as less close than strangers with a notebook nearby instead.

And now that we know, what are we going to do with that information?

Andy suggests some basic but life-altering tips in his book. Like “Make Car time conversation time.” Don’t immediately turn on the radio, or have DVDs for road trips, instead practice getting to know and connect to each other.

Keep the TV out of the main room, put your smart phones to bed before you do, and never in the same room as you sleep. Make choices about a pattern of life you want to have, and keep your devices from creeping into your lives, and just as importantly into your conversations.

I know that sounds like a hard sell. Nobody else is doing this, and it requires some true courage and discipline, but c’mon, don’t we intuitively know it’s worth it? Don’t we all want true and deep friendships that don’t just involve being in the same room with someone while we each stare at our own screens?

The NY Times columnist David Brooks wrote last year that the best the internet can give us is a little fun and diversion. It is, at most, a way to have a day of happy touch points.  But then Brooks goes on to say:

“Phone addiction is making it harder to be the sort of person who is good at deep friendship. In lives that are already crowded and stressful, it’s easier to let banter crowd out emotional presence. There are a thousand ways online to divert with a joke or a happy face emoticon. You can have a day of happy touch points without any of the scary revelations, or the boring, awkward or uncontrollable moments that constitute actual intimacy.”

It is a way to go through life a little bit drunk with technology, always feeling the numb buzz of the ever present cloud, without engaging the true joy that might just be in front of you.

Brooks ends his article with the same thing Andy is suggesting:

“A modern version of heroism is regaining control of social impulses, saying no to a thousand shallow contacts for the sake of a few daring plunges.”

By Tim Suttle, reposted with Tim’s permission. Tim is author of the excellent book Shrink.

We may be living through a period in history that is every bit as revolutionary as the revolutions of 1848 that swept through Sicily, France, Germany, Italy, and Austria.  In trying to understand this confusing moment in our history I can’t help wondering if this is what revolution actually looks like?

As a pastor, I get to visit with people who are all over the political spectrum. I have found there is one singular issue that everyone can agree on right now: we have lost faith in the ability of our government to respond to the basic needs of the citizenry. Washington is broken.

A close second would be a growing lack of faith in institutions. Congress has a 7% approval rating. Law enforcement is in trouble. The FBI has become politicized. Education saddles students with massive debt. Wall Street gets a bailout while the middle class languishes. Church attendance is dwindling, and the list could go on.

So one has to ask, “Is there anything that is actually functioning?”

The answer, it seems to me, is simple: corporations.

Corporations have slowly, silently, and effectively seized the mechanisms of government, and corrupted them to serve their own needs over and above the needs of the citizenry.

Corporations have slowly, silently, and effectively seized the mechanisms of government, and corrupted them to serve their own needs over and above the needs of the citizenry. Most of the political institutions on both the left and the right are controlled by corporate interests. The result is, there are few effective checks and balances on corporate power.

In our society, Government is meant to serve as that check on corporate power, but government is dysfunctional. So when we elect a CEO president, then we should hardly be surprised when he thumbs his nose at the traditions and institutions of government.

Historically, what happens next in this story is that some movement or organization emerges to lead and reshape the future of the society in question. These often take the form of revolutions, and they are usually violent.

Revolutionary forces on the right (Brexit, Trump, Le Pen in our time) tend toward the authoritarian, and usually move quickly from nationalism to fascism. They simply cannot be trusted. Those the left are too disorganized, unfocused, corrupt and short sighted to function as a revolutionary body. Plus, most left-wing organizations in America have been systematically dismantled in the name of anti-communism anyway.

So, what is a Christian to do?

Weekly church attendance is somewhere between 50 and 75 million people. Over 50 million Christians claim to believe in the revolutionary love of Jesus Christ that assumes Christian identity should usurp party loyalty… (see Gal. 3:28)

Our society is poised for a revolution. The church is the vessels of the revolutionary love of God. What in the heck are we waiting for?

The kingdom of God is the place in which democrats and republicans are required to relinquish those labels for the label of brother and sister.

I’m not saying church should take over the government. I’m just saying our society is ready for a revolution, and we are sitting on the one story that can actually bring true peace. Instead of embodying and sharing that peace, most Christians cling to party loyalty over and above Jesus.

Let’s face it, Christians. This is our big chance and we are blowing it.

The church is perfectly designed to enter into this moment with the revolutionary love of Jesus Christ that seeks the good of neighbor and enemy alike. The gospel calls any Lordship of party or nation into question before the cross. The revolutionary love of Jesus is how enemies become friends, how neighbors get back to neighboring, how old wounds can be healed, and how old sins are forgiven.

The kingdom of God is the place in which democrats and republicans are required to relinquish those labels for the label of brother and sister. If we follow Jesus, then we are required to live on less, so that we can share generously with those who are struggling. When we actually do these things, then the church becomes the revolutionary peaceable kingdom that embodies peace to the watching world.

The love of God that is embodied in little communities of faith and peace is, in a sense, revolutionary. The location of this revolution is not Washington D.C. It’s the local church, your neighborhood, your work.

This revolution calls into question all of our –isms.” It was Shayne Claiborne who once wrote, “When we truly discover how to love our neighbor as our self, Capitalism will not be possible and Marxism will not be necessary.” Our isms are too small for the kingdom of God. Conservers are so important to the people of God. Liberators are essential to the kingdom of God. But, Conservatism is idolatry. Liberalism is idolatry. Christians cannot heed those revolutionary calls.

The true revolution the world is dying for is led by Jesus. His kingdom comes not at the tip of the sword, or through left-wing or right-wing politics. It comes through the wise and patient practice of revolutionary love of neighbor and enemy alike.

After a week break while we were out of country I want to resume blogging about Greg Boyd’s The Crucifixion of the Warrior God.

After sketching the cruciform center of the Bible’s vision and its view of God, Boyd feels the reader is prepared to encounter the “dark side” of the Bible — that is, what is often called texts of terror.

But he begins on a different note altogether:

Contrary to the overly generalized and sensationalized description of the God of the OT provided by Richard Dawkins in the quote at the beginning of this chapter, people who read Scripture sympathetically generally find that the God of the OT is by-and-large a relational God of hesed (i.e., covenant-love) who continually strives to bring all people—first the Israelites, and then, through them, all the “families of the earth” (Gen 12:3; cf. Exod 19:5-6)—into relationships of shalom and covenantal righteousness/justice with himself as well as with each other (281).

God’s covenant love then is more than a treaty or political alliance; it is the language of a family. (This is has been freshly stated recently in our last year’s book of the year, by Jon D. Levenson, The Love of God. If you haven’t read it, do your self a favor.) Thus, Boyd: “It is evident that the normative conception of God in the OT is perfectly consistent with the God who is decisively revealed in the crucified Christ. And this should never be forgotten when we turn to examine the “texts of terror” that comprises [sic] “the dark side” of the Bible” (286). He collects these into a few themes, and he does this to give the strongest impression possible of the dark side.

In this light, readers should know ahead of time that in contrast to the way Evangelical apologists typically deal with the OT’s troubling material, I am going to make no attempt to “minimize the moral awfulness” of certain depictions of God by trying to “explain … away” the violence that is ascribed to God. 288

Hence, while the common Evangelical strategy of putting the best possible spin on this material is certainly carried out with the best of intentions and out of deep respect for God’s word, I have come to believe it actually hinders our ability to find the crucified Christ “wrapped” in this material precisely because it tries to remove its offensive nature. 289

I simply cannot find a more polite way of describing, with integrity, portraits of God doing things like causing fetuses to be ripped out of their mothers’ wombs (Hos 13:16), instigating parents to cannibalize their children (Lev 26:29; Jer 19:9; Lam 2:20; Ezek 5:10; cf. Deut 28:53-57), or commanding his people to merciless massacre entire populations (e.g., Deut 7:2). If portraits of God doing things like this do not qualify as “horrific,” “macabre,” or “revolting,” what would? 290-291

Is it not somewhat hypocritical to admit that an action is “horrific” or “macabre” when carried out by a deity in someone else’s sacred literature but to then insist that this same action is “good,” “just,” or “holy” when ascribed to God in our own sacred literature? 291

Here are his major themes:

1. Divinely Sanctioned Violence

Thus, the merciless idea of Herem. Genocide is taught 37 times in the OT. Thus, Boyd: “The OT texts involving either the command or the practice of total destruction include Exod 17:13-14; Num 21:1-3, 31:1-18; Deut 2:21-22, 2:30-36, 3:1-11, 7:1-2, 7:16, 7:23-26,13:6-16, 20:13-18, 25:19, 31:3-5; Josh 6:21, 6:24, 8:22-28,10:28-40,11:8-22; Judg 1:17; 1 Sam 15:2-9,15:18-20” (294 n. 49).

Boyd objects to calling this “holy war.”

Beyond depictions of Yahweh commanding his people to engage in warfare against other people, the OT contains over a hundred passages in which Yahweh commands one particular person or group to kill another person or group. One of the most disturbing, and undoubtedly the most controversial, is the divine command for Israelites to ‘devote” firstborn sons to Yahweh, which many scholars argue means to offer them up as sacrifices. 305

Thus, Ezk 20:21-26; Judges 11:29-39.

What about Exodus 32:27-28? Deuteronomy 21:10-14?

Or this? “Adulterers (Lev 20:10; Deut 22:22), fornicators (Deut 22:13-21; Lev 21:9), and homosexuals (Lev 20:13), as well as people who have sex with their siblings (Lev 20:17), their daughters-in-law (Lev 20:12), or with animals (Exod 22:19; Lev 20:15-16) were to be executed. Included among the fornicators who were to be stoned to death were betrothed virgins who were raped, but who did not cry out for help (Deut 22:23-24).” 315-316

This issue aside, what are followers of Jesus to make of laws requiring capital punishment when we remember that Jesus refused to participate in the execution of an adulterer, as the OT demands (John 8.-2-11)? (318)

Greg Boyd continues marching through the OT on the following three topics.

2.Divinely Caused Violence, like the flood and sending destroying angels.

3. Violence in the Psalms, like Psalm 139:19, 21-23

4. Violence in Biblical Stories, like the Levite and his concubine in Judges 19–21.

Have we not seen enough? Have we not seen enough to say there’s a problem? or some kind of inconsistency? Is this a topic worthy of serious theological reflection?

Are you satisfied with the explanations you have heard?

The bush of hominins … a rather cryptic title for this post.

The term hominin refers to modern humans and groups affiliated with our immediate ancestors. In the figure this is certainly everything from Australopithecus up, and possibly everything from Ardipithecus up. Hominids (formerly used with roughly this meaning) is now taken to include modern and extinct great apes. (See here for a discussion of the terms.)

Although it is common to talk of a tree of life and to imagine images like the ubiquitous ascent of man, this is a faulty image. There is no nice straight line from ancient apes to modern humans, at least not one clearly defined in the fossil evidence. Rather we should consider a bush with multiple branches arising from ancient ancestors. Although we can trace a general pattern in the fossil record, it is difficult to say that any given fossil is a member of the pre-human or archaic human population out of which modern humans evolved.

The second half of chapter three in the new book Adam and the Genome by Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight looks at the fossil and genetic evidence for human evolution. The image above, from his post at BioLogos (here) is reproduced in the book. (Apparently the new “improved” (ha!) Patheos no longer allows you to click for a larger version, but there is a readable version on the BioLogos site.) There are two important points in this section.

(1) There is abundant fossil evidence of  possible and probable ancient hominins, of archaic hominins, transitional hominins, pre-modern Homo species and modern Homo sapiens. Although only modern humans remain from this population, many of the species coexisted at different times.

(2) It has been possible to sequence the genome of a few of these species including including Neanderthals and Denisovans. The analysis of genetic evidence suggests that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals to some extent and all but sub-Saharan African populations retain evidence of this interbreeding in the human genome. Humans also interbred with Denisovans in Southeast Asia and populations from Southeast Asia and Oceania retain evidence of this interbreeding. Sub-Saharan African populations may contain evidence of interbreeding with other extinct human species.  Given the revolution in the ability to extract and sequence the genome of ancient specimens, we may uncover additional connections in the future.

The evolutionary development of distinct and separate species is a process along a continuum. Perhaps we should consider Neanderthals and Denisovans as subspecies rather than distinct species. A debate on this issue continues. However we look at it though, the bush of evolution is complex with different twists and turns. Interbreeding among closely related species is a significant complication for any simple understanding of the “moment” when “hominin” became “human.”

Dennis Venema reflects on this:

One of the frustrating things about science is that while it is well suited to answer certain questions (and even better at raising questions in the first place), it is not suited to answer others. It’s very common, for example, for Christians, when they come to understand this evidence, to wonder where Adam fits in. I sometimes think of this as “pin the Adam on the phylogeny,” alluding to the children’s game. The main point of such an allusion is that the child is blindfolded, and so are we in this case, so to speak. Science can tell us a few things – we descended from a population rather than a pair; our ancestors likely passed through these sorts of forms; and so on – but it is simply unable to weigh in on the historicity of Adam and Eve as individuals. What we can conclude, however, is that if they were in fact historical, they were not the sole parents of all humanity but part of a larger population. Beyond this, science cannot say. (p. 59)

The evidence for interbreeding between modern humans and other closely related hominin species in an inhomogeneous fashion (i,e, different “races” have different mixtures from the occasional interbreeding) makes this effort to pin the “Adam on the phylogeny” even more troubling. Does this mean that different races contain differing corruptions of “the image of God”? Lord keep us from this kind of thinking. The history is terrifying (try David N. Livingstone’s excellent book Adam’s Ancestors for a taste).

We are all human, one interbreeding population created in the image of God, all in equal measure. I look forward to Scot’s contribution to the book when we will dig deeper into the question of Adam. This is an important question and “simple” answers won’t move us forward.

(Denis also has a nice explanation of mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam in this chapter. If you are interested read the book, or check out his post at BioLogos: Becoming Human, Part 1: Mitochondrial Eve and Y Chromosome Adam.)

What are your first impressions from the evidence for hominin evolution?

Is the evidence for interbreeding a problem?

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net.

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