Cross Vision - Gregory A. Boyd

⭐9/10

It's been a long time since I've read a theology book, but I decided to visit one from my good friend Greg Boyd. Nobody has had a bigger influence on the way I think about the Bible than Greg, and I will admit that I am so familiar with his theology that very little in this book jumped out to me. I've heard pretty much every argument he makes here in some lecture or sermon or podcast at some point, but still it was good to catch up on these points. 

This book is an attempt to make sense of the horrifying violence of the Old Testament. Greg's main argument is that the God that appears in the Old Testament often seems completely inconsistent with his character revealed in the person of Jesus, so how do we reckon with it? He goes through some of the options that scholars have put forth, ranging from disregarding the OT to attempting to justify the violence as a form of righteous love, but has trouble accept theories similar to the former because Jesus himself accepts the OT as inspired, and rejects the latter because he is sane. 

Ultimately he goes through his "cruciform hermeneutic" where one interprets everything through the "looking glass" of the cross, and then gets to the nitty gritty of specific OT passages. Lots of his theory boils down to God allowing himself to be perceived as a warrior God as a concession to a primitive people, and then rather than carrying out violence, sometimes withholds protection to allow people to go down the violent path they are already trying to go down. 

I am not doing these arguments justice because I'm trying to summarize a book in 3 paragraphs, and even this book is a 250 page summary of his 2 volume, 1500 page academic tome. But as always, I think Greg is a brilliant theologian and argues some of these points so convincingly that I'm willing to accept everything he says. He does such a good job of describing the issue from every angle to the point where you feel there couldn't possibly be a workable solution. Then he starts putting the pieces together and it makes you believe and love the Bible like never before. This book made me have those same feelings I had as a teenager where things start to click and you get it. 

It's not my favorite Greg Boyd book in large part because I've heard most of these arguments before, and also because there's simply books that from him that have meant more to me. I would also say that I'm not totally sure I feel it's necessary to go into such painstaking detail into these passages but mostly because I'm a little more willing to accept that the ancient near-eastern mind operated so differently from my own that these words meant something very different to them. Still, as Greg says, even if that's true, if the Bible is inspired like Jesus seems to think, these passages should still mean something to us. I'm glad he made the effort. 

So yeah, Greg is back! Or more like I'm back. Greg is prescient as ever with the topics he chooses to research and there's a handful of books right now from him that perfectly speak to the moment. The best to ever do it.