“There is no neutral ground in the universe; every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counter-claimed by Satan.”
CS Lewis
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Saturday, July 07, 2007
God at War
I've finally finished reading 'God at War' by Greg Boyd and I find I have mixed feelings about it as a book. The overall thrust of his argument is very compelling and his analysis of the warfare motifs in the ministry of Jesus particularly persuasive. I find his reading of the NT as being fundamentally about the Kingdom of God 'at war' with the world/the kingdom of Satan is hard to dispute.
However, attempts to build a coherent 'theory of everything', to systematize the Biblical material, should always be treated with caution. As NT Wright points out, when we come to the Bible "looking for particular answers to particular questions...we have thereby made the Bible into something which it it not" ('How can Scripture be Authoritative?' 1989, see also 'Scripture and the Authority of God'). Systematic theology never sits completely comfortably alongside the Bible taken as a whole - just when you think you've 'got it' an unruly verse turns up to confound the theory.
As with any thesis of this nature, 'God at War' seems a bit 'rough at the edges', where at times the thesis is stretched just that little bit too far. Boyd is an enthusiastic theorist and always interesting, but there were moments in the book when I felt uncomfortable with the extent to which he seemed to be 'trying too hard' to pull in a variety of Biblical material to support the warfare theme. Notable in my mind is his warfare re-interpretation of the Lord's Prayer.
Despite these criticisms, I found 'God at War' a provocative and always-interesting book which I would definitely recommend - if only as a starting point for conversation. Those who know me well will know I am a big fan of Greg Boyd - although more in his preaching and energetic exposition of ideas than in his books - and I came to the book already persuaded by his God-at-war theodicy and understanding of Jesus' ministry.
In my view, Boyd is most challenging and convincing in his teaching on Jesus and the Kingdom of God and I know that he would agree that it is these ideas that are worth paying the most attention to. As I mentioned in a previous post it is his high view of Jesus (as with NT Wright) which I find most compelling. I've often heard him start teaching / preaching with the statement 'God looks like Jesus Christ', from Jesus' statement in John 14.9 "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father." He will then go on to explain how we should always move from the known to the unknown - our understanding of God should start with Jesus, who is "the exact representation of his being" (Heb 1.3). If we want to know what God is like we should start by looking at Jesus (as opposed to philosophy or religion). As Boyd often says, "God looks like a man dying on a cross for those who crucified him."
The strength of this concept is what anchors his theodicy - his starting place in explaining the problem of evil. Since, he argues, the evil in the world around us does not accord with a God who, as Jesus Christ, rebuked sickness (and the wind and waves - Mk 4.39) and battled Satan (e.g Mk 3.23, Lk 13.16) it cannot be God's will. Evil is the result of wills other than God's. This fits with the NT's teaching that Satan is the archon (ruler) of the world (Jn 12.31, 16.11), the "god of this age" (2 Cor 4.4) and the "ruler of the kingdom of the air" (Eph 2.2), who has the whole world under his control (1 Jn 5.19).
Further explanation I will leave to Boyd as he is much more articulate than I! 'God at War' is the first book in a Trilogy, of which the second is 'Satan and the Problem of Evil' (onto which I shall move) and the last is as yet un-published. I would highly recommend his January 2005 sermon 'Being the Kingdom in a Groaning Creation' - given in the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami - as a summary of some of these ideas.
'God at War' concludes with a declaration of hope:
"The hope that the New Testament offers is not the hope that God has a higher, all-encompassing plan that secretly governs every event, including the evil intentions of malicious angelic and human beings, and that somehow renders these evil wills 'good' at a higher level. To my way of thinking, at least, that supposition generates a truly hopeless position... If justice is, on some secret transcendental plane, already being served, what do we have to look forward to? If God is already vindicated because 'the big picture' justies [a victim]'s torment 'for the good of the whole', then we really have no reason to hope that things will fare better for [a victim] or ourselves in the world to come.
"In direct contrast to all this, the ultimate hope that the New Testament offers is eschatological. As sure as the Lord came the first time to defeat his cosmic enemy and our oppressor in principle, just as certainly he shall return again to defeat him in fact. Because sickness, disease, war, death, sorrow and tears are not God's will, and because God is ultimately sovereign, we can have a confident assurance that someday, when his foes are ultimately vanquished, God will end all sorrow, and will wipe away every tear from our eyes (Rev 20:4). Precisely because our present suffering is not God's will - however much he can now use it for our ultimate good - we can have an assurance that it shall not always be this way."
As Boyd likes to say, "we live in a Good Friday world, but Easter Sunday is coming!"
However, attempts to build a coherent 'theory of everything', to systematize the Biblical material, should always be treated with caution. As NT Wright points out, when we come to the Bible "looking for particular answers to particular questions...we have thereby made the Bible into something which it it not" ('How can Scripture be Authoritative?' 1989, see also 'Scripture and the Authority of God'). Systematic theology never sits completely comfortably alongside the Bible taken as a whole - just when you think you've 'got it' an unruly verse turns up to confound the theory.
As with any thesis of this nature, 'God at War' seems a bit 'rough at the edges', where at times the thesis is stretched just that little bit too far. Boyd is an enthusiastic theorist and always interesting, but there were moments in the book when I felt uncomfortable with the extent to which he seemed to be 'trying too hard' to pull in a variety of Biblical material to support the warfare theme. Notable in my mind is his warfare re-interpretation of the Lord's Prayer.
Despite these criticisms, I found 'God at War' a provocative and always-interesting book which I would definitely recommend - if only as a starting point for conversation. Those who know me well will know I am a big fan of Greg Boyd - although more in his preaching and energetic exposition of ideas than in his books - and I came to the book already persuaded by his God-at-war theodicy and understanding of Jesus' ministry.
In my view, Boyd is most challenging and convincing in his teaching on Jesus and the Kingdom of God and I know that he would agree that it is these ideas that are worth paying the most attention to. As I mentioned in a previous post it is his high view of Jesus (as with NT Wright) which I find most compelling. I've often heard him start teaching / preaching with the statement 'God looks like Jesus Christ', from Jesus' statement in John 14.9 "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father." He will then go on to explain how we should always move from the known to the unknown - our understanding of God should start with Jesus, who is "the exact representation of his being" (Heb 1.3). If we want to know what God is like we should start by looking at Jesus (as opposed to philosophy or religion). As Boyd often says, "God looks like a man dying on a cross for those who crucified him."
The strength of this concept is what anchors his theodicy - his starting place in explaining the problem of evil. Since, he argues, the evil in the world around us does not accord with a God who, as Jesus Christ, rebuked sickness (and the wind and waves - Mk 4.39) and battled Satan (e.g Mk 3.23, Lk 13.16) it cannot be God's will. Evil is the result of wills other than God's. This fits with the NT's teaching that Satan is the archon (ruler) of the world (Jn 12.31, 16.11), the "god of this age" (2 Cor 4.4) and the "ruler of the kingdom of the air" (Eph 2.2), who has the whole world under his control (1 Jn 5.19).
Further explanation I will leave to Boyd as he is much more articulate than I! 'God at War' is the first book in a Trilogy, of which the second is 'Satan and the Problem of Evil' (onto which I shall move) and the last is as yet un-published. I would highly recommend his January 2005 sermon 'Being the Kingdom in a Groaning Creation' - given in the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami - as a summary of some of these ideas.
'God at War' concludes with a declaration of hope:
"The hope that the New Testament offers is not the hope that God has a higher, all-encompassing plan that secretly governs every event, including the evil intentions of malicious angelic and human beings, and that somehow renders these evil wills 'good' at a higher level. To my way of thinking, at least, that supposition generates a truly hopeless position... If justice is, on some secret transcendental plane, already being served, what do we have to look forward to? If God is already vindicated because 'the big picture' justies [a victim]'s torment 'for the good of the whole', then we really have no reason to hope that things will fare better for [a victim] or ourselves in the world to come.
"In direct contrast to all this, the ultimate hope that the New Testament offers is eschatological. As sure as the Lord came the first time to defeat his cosmic enemy and our oppressor in principle, just as certainly he shall return again to defeat him in fact. Because sickness, disease, war, death, sorrow and tears are not God's will, and because God is ultimately sovereign, we can have a confident assurance that someday, when his foes are ultimately vanquished, God will end all sorrow, and will wipe away every tear from our eyes (Rev 20:4). Precisely because our present suffering is not God's will - however much he can now use it for our ultimate good - we can have an assurance that it shall not always be this way."
As Boyd likes to say, "we live in a Good Friday world, but Easter Sunday is coming!"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
