You and me both. That book is preaching to me too; one doesn’t just slip into “seeing the cross as a victory” as easily as they might choose between different faith traditions or try on a new pair of pants.
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“Avert evil from me, though it be the thing I prayed for; and give me the good which from ignorance I do not ask.” – (attributed to ) Socrates
I don’t remember this from ancient Greek readings so I tried to track it down online, with no luck. I don’t know if that’s because it’s spurious or just that I’m not a greater web searcher.
But either way I see it related to “not my will, but Thine” in a way that points up our fallibility.
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I struggle with this, Mervin. While I appreciate Zahnd’s approach, and I loved reading “Sinners In the Hands of a Loving God,” I am reminded of conflict between concordist and accommodationist interpretations of the Bible in evolution. I feel his assertions that the Bible never supports war or violence to be strained.
When, in late high school and college through med school, I tried to accommodate evolution to Genesis, it became pretty abstract. It was through Lamoureux that I realized that Genesis was scientifically and factually incorrect. That took a load off my mind.
Regarding violence–I tend to Boyd’s accommodationist approach rather than Zahnd’s, as in “Cross Vision”–if I were to try to picture God as a pacifist (I struggle, and I have not come there yet)
In Boyd’s books, God accommodates to our belief that violence is necessary, to finally communicate the truth.
I like MacDonald’s quote–though as I realize that my own idea of justice is not the ultimate one, either.
i. If it be said by any that God does a thing which seems to me unjust, then either I do not know what the thing is, or God does not do it…Least of all must we accept some low notion of justice in a man, and argue that God is just in doing after that notion.
Thanks for provoking difficult thoughts.
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I’ve not read Boyd, though your brief encapsulation of his approach is enough to intrigue me too. And not have I read “Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God” either, though that might be a next purchase of mine given how much I’m appreciating Zahnd’s “Wood Between the Worlds”. Maybe part of what’s going on here for me is that Zhand strikes me as a relatively “fresh convert” to the notion that the myth of redemptive violence has been granted way too much (or any at all?) allegiance in Christian circles ever since Constantine. And as a lifelong Anabaptist myself, I’ve already been “world-wearied” by all the good counter-arguments to pacifism and all the struggle that almost impossibly bogs down any purist forms of that approach. But Zahnd brings a new zeal to these convictions of my youth (and still my present convictions too, though with layers of nuance - more on that in a bit) and as such, I find reading him exhilarating as he freshly (and so ably) rehearses so many (to my mind) solid biblical pursuasions that were always there, as any Mennonite or Quaker worth their salt would know. It’s a zeal that may help re-ignite languishing (but still needed) zeal among those who’ve already had a life-long routine of banging on these drums.
Would it help you to hear that (and this is just me speaking, and not purporting to speak on behalf of others, much less my entire faith tradition) - that I don’t think of pacifism as something the world is called directly to? Let me be clear - here’s what I mean … there might be some who would like to see the world converted to pacifism, and they are willing to enlist Christ as one of the persuasive arguments in that cause. That’s not where I’m at. I want to convert the world (and myself also conformed in obedience) to Christ - and then all these other things (pacifism included) can and will just fall out as they may. Or to put it another way - why would I expect others who know nothing of Christ to embrace something that I can barely aspire to embrace myself with Christ’s help! So to me - pacifism, for its own sake, is backwards. But for the one who gives themselves up to Christ’s way (the cross) - then and only then (from my perspective) can we hope to see or aspire towards fruits of nonviolent living and response in the midst of a very violent (and Christ-rejecting) world.
So does/did God accomodate or even endorse violent response - especially in the original testament accounts? To hear the prophets / priests tell it - yes. And perhaps that can fall under the same rubric that Christ uses for the divorce question … “because your hearts were hard…”. So what you mention of Boyd and accomodationism in all this is intriguing to me, and I certainly don’t reject it out-of-hand.
But one thing I’m increasingly certain of as years of life experience and continued bible reading / meditation keep reinforcing for me: There is no universe (except in the de-biblicized minds of so many evangelicals today) in which violence gets elevated as a legitimate and praiseworthy characteristic of God. The biblical narrative even in the original testament keeps steering us away from that. The biblical narrative is saturated with praise for love/mercy/care/tenderness … all such things, and is correspondingly filled (both testaments!) with warnings against violent people and their ways. Sure - one can find alleged proof-texts that can be used in the service of theological gymnastics of pretending that God does harbor some violence that surely must, then, be good and necessary - but this doesn’t change the overall biblical narrative any more than a verse ascribing evil to God (like Isaiah 45:7) must then mean God approves of and endorses evil or is an evil God. Anybody who reaches that conclusion simply has not read much of the rest of scriptures.
I’ll get off my soapbox now. Thanks for your own provoking thoughts in all this!
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Addendum … and a bit more on accomodationism … that may be a good way to see Romans 13 as well. When Paul warns us that rulers do not “bear the sword for nothing” - I don’t hear God saying that all these worldly governments (principalities and powers, if you will) are Christian. I hear this more as some kind of ‘reality-speak’ like “there will be wars and rumors of wars…” - this is just the way the world is, and yes, God is active in it - even using (and grieving) our sinful ways - our violent ways despite ourselves to eventually move us all closer to God - Christ being the ultimately needed final bridge for us to come toward and know God’s heart best. So I don’t hear mentions of swords as endorsements of those ways for Christ-followers, though the professions involved in those things, whether military or police, etc. certainly also don’t preclude all the involved people from coming to Christ and knowing God through him. But I do argue that once they do - that has necessary implications for every aspect of our lives, including our occupations.
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I always appreciate your deep, Christlike thoughts, Mervin. I’d be interested in your thoughts on Boyd some day. I certainly respect him.
Greg Boyd (theologian) - Wikipedia
Book Review: Cross Vision by Greg Boyd - Faith & Science Conversation - The BioLogos Forum
He’s Anabaptist, too.
Thanks.
Randy
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from “Losing Our Religion”, chapter 5 “Losing our Stability”
What many of us never realized is that every side of an issue has slippery slopes and if one only sees one of them, one is probably sliding down another.
-Russell Moore, p. 232
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Thanks. That is a good one… I should probably put up on my wall as a reminder!
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That’s really not accurate: you can only call something “incorrect” if is intended to communicate ideas about the material against which you are judging it. So Genesis isn’t “scientifically and factually incorrect” because it isn’t addressing anything scientific. It’s no different than declaring that Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is “factually incorrect” or Kilmer’s Trees is “scientifically incorrect”: neither intends to address such issues.
The relationship between Genesis and science is that Genesis is scientifically indifferent: there is no connection to science and no intention to address anything remotely scientific.
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Hi Randy,
Cool. I’ve read a lot of Boyd and like much of what he has to say. I think he’d put himself in the “Neo Anabaptist” camp.–That is someone not raised in the tradition or historically/culturally anabaptist, but someone who has come around to embracing many of the same theological perspectives of Anabaptism.
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One fascinating thing I’ve learned recently – primarily from Dr. Michael Heiser – is that of all the God-commanded violence in the OT none of it is random. It is rather quite focused on people among whom descendants of the Nephilim (or Rephaim or Anakim) are found, thus a program of eliminating all descendants of heavenly beings who procreated with human women. That task wasn’t completed when it should have been, under Joshua; he left some Anakim in the Philistine territories, where they survived until the time of David who finished them off.
So anyone who thinks the OT justifies war isn’t seeing the picture clearly: the only wars God sanctioned were against the “giants” and the peoples they ruled. Since David finished the job of killing them, no more war is justified (except defense).
For some reason my thoughts jumped to the three-day-long ice storm that struck when I was first in college and much of the campus was on a slope. To get to one building there were three ways to reach it, and in the ice storm all three involved slippery slopes.
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Good point–I agree that Genesis was not trying to address a scientific question. @DOL Dr Lamoureux came to that point prior to entering his evolutionary biology studies, while he was still at Regent College, I think. However, I’m thinking of the concordance to the details of the “raqiyya,” and so on. In Frost and Kilmer, they know what they’re using are pictures–just as I used to say to my kids, “The sun is rising,” but I knew that I was lying, so to speak. However, if I understand correctly, the principles in Genesis, with the 4 Ancient Near East motifs of 4 motifs of De Novo Creation, Lost Idyllic Age, Great Flood, and Tribal Formation (with a founding male), are trappings that the ANE would recognize, but definitely are not scientific. I felt that the science and the Bible had to be concordant.
Honestly, I still struggle with accommodationism, too. In a way, it feels uncomfortable, trying to filter out what is not correct.
However, I think that it does boil down to God being fair–He doesn’t really care too much about whether we get it right. He has more important things on His mind–like acting like His son–so that’s ok!
It’s not a comfortable place to me–but I think that I can really be a slippery slope either way.
But there are more issues than that that I don’t really feel solid on. I keep coming back to Rich Mullins’ “We Are Not As Strong As We Think We Are,” and give both myself and others space to make errors and learn; and trust in good intent–which I think we all really do have. I think you have a ton more Bible study than I do, and definitely teach me.
Thanks for the discussion.
Here’s a perspective: skip all the sections about warfare where Israel was supposed to wipe out entire peoples. The result leaves no clash at all between the two Testaments.
This is why scholars on several translation teams have said that the core of the Old Testament is the word חֶסֶד (khe-sed), which the translators of the Revise Standard Version said was the hardest word to translate. In various versions it is rendered “lovingkindness”, “steadfast love”, “covenant love”, loving faithfulness", and “great mercy”, though according to most scholars none of these is quite sufficient.
Skipping those warfare sections may seem like cheating, but it really isn’t because there are in a sense two different stories going on side by side. The first story is of God’s relation to His people, and that’s the story where חֶסֶד is the theme; the second story is if God’s campaign to wipe out all traces of descendants of the offspring of heavenly beings and human women. The first is the story of how Yahweh wants things to be, the second is the story of eliminating something that wasn’t supposed to happen.
Of course both stories are part of the greater story which is about Yahweh’s intention to have all peoples on Earth as His people; it’s just harder to see that in the warfare side of things. The two come together in the Psalms and the Prophets to point towards the Messiah, so both end up directing our attention to Jesus.
I don’t see the issue, personally; the question is “What does the text intend to teach?” I doubt there’s a place in the OT where the details matter in terms of being “correct”. It’s far more useful to look at how the original audience would have heard the message; you don’t have to filter out anything, you just read it taking it seriously the way they would have.
Sometimes that requires some serious scholarship, but there are a lot of good scholars (e.g. Dr. Michael Heiser) who go into more depth than most people will ever need; he goes into bits that even a serious student of Hebrew can learn from (for example in Exodus 6:3, which I’ve read in the Hebrew before, he made a point about the grammar that I never slowed down enough to read).
Not sure how pithy it is, but this made me stop and think a moment:
“Courage is rarely found at the bottom of a bottle of Scotch, but sometimes it doesn’t hurt to go looking.”
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
While listening to Dr. Heiser talk about Exodus, I decided to do some work on my avatar image–
That’s an interesting and beautiful design! I imagine all the numbers, patterns, and paths of things probably each carry significance.
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Here is the conclusion of a poem shared by Brian Zahnd in his “Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God.”
(Thanks for referencing that work, Randy - I’m finding it very insightful, and a needed call back to Christ. Though I’m not done reading it yet, I’ll be curious what sorts of things in it provoked concern for you.)
…So understand the medium, and don’t try so hard to miss the point
Try to learn what matters and what doesn’t
It’s not where and when Job lived But what Job learned
In his painful odyssey and poetic theodicyIt’s not how many cubits of water you need to put Everest under a flood
But why the world was so dirty that it needed such a big bathTrying to find Noah’s ark Instead of trying to rid the world of violence
Really is an exercise in missing the point
Speaking of missing the point— It’s not did a snake talk? But what the d*mn thing said!
Because even though I’ve never met a talking snake I’ve sure had serpentine thoughts crawl through my head
Literalism is a kind of escapism By which you move out of the crosshairs of the probing question
But parable and metaphor have a way of knocking us to the floorProse-flattened literalism makes the story small, time-confined, and irrelevant
But poetry and allegory travel through time and space to get in our faceInert facts are easy enough to set on the shelf
But the Story well-told will haunt youAh, the Story well-told
That’s what is needed It’s time for the Story to bust out of the cage and take the stage
And demand a hearing once again It’s a STORY, I tell you!
And if you allow the Story to seep into your life
So that THE STORY begins to weave into your story
That’s when, at last, you’re reading the Bible right
Zahnd, Brian. Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News (p. 75). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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Merv, thanks for another inspired book. I’ve checked it out and am enjoying what I’m reading. Here is a highly condensed excerpt from pp 10-12 from the book:
… I also discovered a number of things abut my Christian tradition that had not been apparent to me while I was busy upholding it.
Chief among these is the way [it] thrives on dividing reality into opposing pairs: good/evil, church/world; spirit/flesh, sacred/profane, light/dark. Even if you are not Christian it should be easy to tell which half of each pair is “higher” and which “lower”. In every case, the language of oppositions works by placing half of reality closer to God and the other half farther away. This not only simplifies life for people who do not want to spend a lot of time thinking about whether the divisions really hold; it also offers them a strong sense of purpose by giving them daily battles to engage in. The more they win out over the world of the flesh, the better. …
After years of using this language to pray, teach, preach, and celebrate the sacraments, I fell out of love with it - not just the words themselves but also the vision of reality they represent. …
…Of course, my language evolved through the years as I became more mature in faith, but the essential worldview did not change. Even after I found a church that affirms the goodness of creation as much as any I know, Sunday worship still turned on the axis of blood sacrifice, which made the death of the body the way of eternal life. …
…It was not until much later, after I had resigned from saying these words on a regular basis, that they began to sound lame. Their explanation for what was wrong with me was no longer a relief but an ongoing source of injury. Their description of divine reality no longer struck with the force of revelation but resounded with the clang of a truth claim that bore closer inspection. Saying them over and over again in a sacred place, it had been possible to overlook the way they divided people in two, teaching us over and over again that we had two minds, two natures, two sets of loyalties, two homes - and that only one was close to God. Too much of this made a person crazy.
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"Jesus teaches the paradox that self-denial is self-affirmation. (Matt. 16:25). It’s just that the “self” and the “affirmation” are defined by God, not by our fallible human whims. Who we are (children of God) and what it means for us to be fulfilled (union with Christ) isn’t up to us. To be with Christ is to be without our selfish desires.
So we must ask: what does it mean to deny ourselves? It means that we turn from sin. All sin is the act of choosing our own path against God’s will for us. It is a perverse affirmation of the self which puts its desires ahead of our neighbor and even God.
– from a Christianity Today newsletter
I was reminded of a situation when I was running cross-country in high school: I’d just made the JV team, and coach was correcting the way I ran, and I commented that the way he wanted me to put down my feet hurt. He said something to the effect of “That may be, but you’ll run faster”.
Changing habits to do something more correctly or better – or at all, sometimes! – can involve pain, but it will help us “run faster”.
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