Here I take up Chapter 3 of God Looks Like Jesus: A Renewed Approach to Understanding God by Gregory A. Boyd (“Greg”) and M. Scott Boren (Herald Press). If you have read the chapter, feel free to comment. If not, only ask a question.
Chapter 3 is entitled Cross-Tinted Glasses. In the previous chapter Greg argued that the cross is the “center of the center” of the Bible and its true interpretation. The cross is where God most deeply revealed himself to humanity as self-giving love.
Now, in Chapter 3, he pursues this line of thinking in relation to the Old Testament texts of terror further. This paragraph on page 62 nicely sums up the chapter: “At this point, we can begin to understand how Scripture’s violent divine portraits bear witness to the cross. What is going on behind the scenes of these sin-distorted portraits is precisely what was going on behind the scenes of the cross. God was stooping to bear the sin of God’s people and therefore taking on a surface appearance that reflects the ugliness of that sin. But again, this can only be seen if we trust fully in the ‘message of the cross’ and are therefore willing to exercise a surface-probing faith that looks behind the scenes.”
Greg uses the hermeneutical principles of divine accommodation and progressive revelation to explain how Scripture can be inspired and infallible and yet contain “imperfections.” Obviously, for him, Scripture is not inerrant in the way many conservative Christians, especially conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, claim. But it is nevertheless inspired and infallible with “infallible” meaning something like perfected with respect to purpose. He says “In the process of ‘breathing’ Scripture, the Spirit influenced the authors in the direction of truth as much as possible while accommodating their limitations and sin as much as necessary.” (59)
Also according to Greg, in this chapter, Christians should believe, as he does, that all of Scripture, including all of the Old Testament, witnesses to Jesus. “According to Jesus,” he writes, “we aren’t really believing Moses if we don’t realize that he was writing about Jesus.” (54) For support he appeals to John 5:39-40).
I have often heard that some Old Testament professors, even in evangelical seminaries, teach that students should not “see” Jesus in the Old Testament. Some even say that doing so is anti-Semitic. I say, with Greg, that’s nonsense. The New Testament itself, Jesus himself (!), saw Jesus in the Old Testament in the sense that the Old Testament pointed toward him even if the Hebrew authors did not know it. Several New Testament passages treat the Suffering Servant motif of Isaiah as referring beforehand to Jesus.
What do I think of Greg’s view of the Old Testament texts of terror? I guess I think (my “musing”) that it would be simpler simply to say that the Israelites wrongly blamed God for what they intended to do, namely, committing genocide, slaughtering men, women, children and showing them no mercy. Yes, in his wisdom, God permitted them to do that. Was he consciously doing that in order to point forward to the cross? Possibly, but I’m not yet convinced that is what was happening. And, either way, I don’t think it is possible to reconcile it with biblical inerrancy. But, then, I don’t think “inerrancy” does justice to the data, the phenomena, of Scripture.
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