Ok so the sausages were really good. We have a fantastic butcher here in Yanchep who creates some really interesting varieties – not your standard ‘meat paste’ rolled in plastic – but some really funky types like ‘cheesy-mite & bacon’ (bacon, vegemite and cheese) or ‘hot hot hot’ – so hot in fact I could only eat one before my mouth was on fire – and I’m a hot food lover!

But back to Boyd’s book…

He describes his idea as like one of those magic eye pictures that if you stare at it long enough it comes into view. Of course some people stare aimlessly for a very long time and just see blurry lines and he acknowledges that this may happen with the ‘cruciform hermeneutic’ for OT violence.. Right now I’m having rare moments of glimpsing the picture (you know that feeling?) but mostly its blurry lines and long periods of wondering if I’ve actually been conned… There is no picture after all…

I finished volume 1 earlier this week so it seems time for an update before I forget what I read. I appreciate that Boyd is unwilling to just dismiss what is inconvenient and that he takes a high view of scripture so obviously he needs a different plan for articulating the violence passages.

He is looking at possible solutions now and his next one is the Synthesis Solution where ‘the OT’s violent portraits of God must be accepted as accurate revelations alongside of Christ’. He acknowledges this as the broadest of the views with 4 main strands.

1. The ‘Beyond Our Categories’ Defense ie. he is God and subject to our ethical constraints and he sees the bigger picture so he can do what we might find abhorrent without failing to be good. Think ‘potter and clay’ and ‘will not the Lord of the whole earth do what is right’ type scenarios. The end of this thinking means that we have to somehow see that ‘barbaric and atrocious-appearing behaviour is in fact ‘good” While I think there is an element of truth in this explanation he goes on to argue well that we simply cannot accept that good is simply defined by what God calls it at the time otherwise our understanding of morality has no north point.
2. The ‘Divine Punishment’ Defense – this speaks to the violence being an ‘expression of God’s holy wrath against sin.’ Boyd rejects this on the basis that much of the violent behaviour in the OT seems unjust. eg being stoned to death for picking uo sticks on the sabbath (fairly harsh…)
3. The ‘Greater Good’ Defense – the idea is fairly obvious – God is at work doing something bigger than we see, but Boyd suggests it comes unstuck when we look at an example like the complete wiping out of the Canaanites as being ‘necessary’ yet ‘subsequent to the invasion of Canaan the Israelites continued to live side by side with – and when in exile even in the midst of – wicked and idolatrous neighbours.’
4. The ‘Progressive Revelation’ Defense – which he sees as the most tenable outside of this own ideas. This idea suggests that God interacts with his people in ways that are in keeping with their development. ‘In short God meets people where they are at, not where he wishes they were’. This view suggests ‘Yahweh acquiesed to violence as much as he had to but moved his people in the direction of peace as much as possible. He argues that if this were the correct view then why does God not minimalise violence rather than (as some times happens) allowing maximal violence. He maintains that this view means that under certain circumstances God’s character is such that he is willing to command and engage in horrific even genocidal violence.

These are very brief overviews and I’m not trying to argue for or against any of them. I’m just trying to keep my head above water and stay with his thinking.

He spends the rest of this volume in his ‘reinterpretation solution’ which he calls the ‘cruciform hermeneutic’. If I were to sum this approach up in as simple language as possible then it would be saying ‘If Jesus crucified is the ultimate revelation of God then when we read the violence texts we must assume something else is going on that bears witness to the crucified Christ and we need to ‘keep digging’ till we find that truth.

He cites Origen as an inspiration for this methodology and while he doesn’t agree with his conclusions he states that he was headed in the right direction by ‘digging deeper’. Boyd writes ‘Origen’s incarnational model of inspiration ld him to believe that there could never be anything superfluous in scripture’, so there has to be a way of understanding the difficult stuff and locate the ‘spiritual meaning’.

‘The method of the spirit’ he notes ‘is to conceal these truths and to hide them deeply underneath narratives which appear to be records of actual events.’

So this is where Boyd finds his ground to stand. Its a long spiel from here on and I’m no sure I will do it justice in this post, but perhaps Boyd’s summary of his path forward is enough:

I will argue that as we interpret these violent portraits through the lens of the cross, we can discern what God was doing when he ‘breathed’ these violent portraits through ancient authors anticipates, participates in and thereby bears witness to what God did in a decisive manner, and for all humanity on the cross. We can in a word, discern in these violent portraits that God was bearing the sins of his people and was thereby taking on an ugly literary semblance that reflected that sin, just as he did in a historical way for all humanity on Calvary p.457

I got to this point and then realised that the subsequent chapters in this first volume must have ‘gone in one ear and out the other’ so to speak, so I may need to re-read them to make sense of what’s ahead. (Don’t ya hate that?…)

I appreciate some folks are reading and commenting – and I’m not replying much – largely because I am yet to form any opinions on this subject and I am not writing this as an advocate for Boyd or to negate his ideas. I’m just curious… So if I don’t reply its largely because I don’t have a lot to say at this point.

I’m hoping to get into Volume 2 shortly, but the work of reviewing it is more than I anticipated – a bit like an ungraded essay for a theology class – so don’t be surprised if my next posts are thinner and more of a ‘good book’ / ‘bad book’ scenario!

(And I have stared at that ‘magic eye’ pic above for 5 minutes now and still can’t make out what it is so that might be indicative of my capacity for new ideas…)

Back in 1996 I ventured off to what was then called Baptist Theological College. I went reluctantly and not expecting to enjoy myself, but thankfully the experience was very different to the perception.

One of my first year units was Intro to Old Testament, a subject I really couldn’t give due diligence to because I was also studying New Testament Greek and it was the ultimate time thief. Every other unit got studied at half capacity while I sought to pass Greek and invested all my spare time in rote memorising Greek words and expressions. While I eventually got HDs for Greek I missed out on really digging into the other areas, something I was somewhat bummed about (and the reason I never did study Hebrew and subsequently dropped out of the accreditation process.)

In that first year of OT study I remember beginning to explore some difficult questions around the early chapters of Genesis. I picked up The Biblical Flood by Davis Young, that looked at the biblical flood and began to raise questions from a geological perspective about the legitimacy of a worldwide flood, an ark inhabited by two of every species and the sheer logistics of having predators housed with prey, not to mention the means of dealing with animal excrement.

The author made a very good case for reconsidering and re-reading the Genesis story, and I was intrigued by what that meant and how it would play out. But ‘Greek’ called (bellowed) and I was forced to abandon real learning to try and get my head around an ancient language I had very little interest in, but without which I couldn’t make it to second year.  I doubt I would have been half as resentful towards learning biblical languages if it hadn’t impinged so negatively on the learning I really wanted to do. But as it was I ended up shelving many pressing questions to make sure I could enter my next year with Greek behind me.

So when a friend recommended Adam & The Genome recently by Venema and McKnight I felt it may be time to re-open some of those questions. I also have Greg Boyd’s ‘Warrior God’ sitting on the table, but it only arrived this week so I felt it worth finishing the ‘Genome’ first.

I must admit I am something of a McKnight groupie – if theology lecturers had fan clubs then I would join his as he has a remarkable ability to express in readable English, thoughts and concepts that are often inaccessible to us mere mortals. I also find myself on a very similar theological trajectory to McKnight, who is (to my perception) thoroughly conservative evangelical but willing to think, reconsider and adjust his conclusions if needed.

My short ‘Danelle-language’ summary of the book is that these two make a case for Darwin’s theory of evolution to be the best explanation of human origins and as a result call for a reading of Genesis that does not see Adam (and Eve) as historical, but literary. Venema makes the case from genetics for modern humanity descending from approximately 10000 individuals rather than just two distinct people. If the science is correct – and it does seem to be quite compelling – then we either have to see the biblical story as an aberration in history where God intervened dramatically, or we need to consider how we read it differently.

So Venema writes the first half of the book and explains the science behind all the genome stuff. To be honest I struggled to stay with him at times, but I did pick up the gist of his argument – essentially that Darwin got it right. McKnight then begins to look at how we view Adam and Eve in light of this scientific insight and offers an alternate and (to my mind) fairly convincing reading of Genesis that does not see two literal human beings, but rather two people as part of a story suitable for its time that is a way of giving sense to origins.

I have never had any trouble subscribing to an old earth point of view, but up until reading this I hadn’t given serious thought to Darwin’s theory as palatable. I could swallow ‘intra-species’ evolution, but the inter-species form Darwin required for us to get here today was always a bit of a stretch for my mind. Venema suggests it is legit and part of God’s creative process. He suggests the sheer weight of scientific evidence leaves us with no option but to let go of our abhorrence towards evolution and begin to accept that God chose to work thru the evolutionary process.

I don’t have time to unpack all of McKnight’s discussion, but suffice to say that his tracing of understandings of Adam through history, the genre of Genesis and his subsequent conclusions are not easily dismissed either.

It certainly isn’t a denial of the miraculous or supernatural as McKnight agrees that we still read the gospels as historical documents. But I am certainly up for revisiting and re-considering the early chapters of Genesis and where they fit in the broader story.

Am I convinced?

It’d be foolish to be convinced on the basis of one author, but it has certainly led me to think more about the subject as it is a much more believable rendering of things than anyone else I have heard to date.

Anyone else read it and can comment?