Greg Boyd - How to Reflect on Scripture Passages on Violence (a Jesus Centered Proposal)
⭐In this Theology Lab video, theologian and pastor (and long-time advocate of open theism) Greg Boyd challenges us to rethink passages on violence in the Bible and what they reveal about the character of God. Should Christians take depictions of divine violence at face value, or read them through the lens of Jesus and the cross? Boyd invites viewers to explore Scripture with honesty, humility, and faith, asking how difficult texts fit into the bigger story of God’s redemptive love. Perfect for non-expert Christians, curious believers, and those still in the church but wrestling with big theological questions, this conversation offers a fresh, accessible approach to biblical interpretation, violence in Scripture, and nuanced faith. #GregBoyd #ViolenceInTheBible #BibleStudy
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⭐ In this Theology Lab video, theologian and pastor (and long-time advocate of open theism) Greg Boyd challenges us to rethink passages on violence in the Bible and what they reveal about the character of God. Should Christians take depictions of divine violence at face value, or read them through the lens of Jesus and the cross? Boyd invites viewers to explore Scripture with honesty, humility, and faith, asking how difficult texts fit into the bigger story of God’s redemptive love. Perfect for non-expert Christians, curious believers, and those still in the church but wrestling with big theological questions, this conversation offers a fresh, accessible approach to biblical interpretation, violence in Scripture, and nuanced faith. #GregBoyd #ViolenceInTheBible #BibleStudy
Resources
📚 check out Greg's book! https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9781506455624/Inspired-Imperfection
Generated Transcript
speaker-0 (00:00.45)
Hey, it's Scott here. You ever been bothered by depictions of violence in the Bible? Whether it's things that people are said to do or even actions that God carries out. The biblical passages on violence raise some of the most difficult questions for reading the Bible and for many of us for faith in general. Well, this is exactly what Greg Boyd and I talk about in this theology lab. And for Greg, there's a way of hearing God speak to us in these challenging passages.
The key for Greg is reading the whole of the Bible through the cross. Jesus' death changes the way we look for God to speak to us in the Bible. Here's my conversation with Greg Boyd. So Greg Boyd, thanks so much for being with us at Theology Lab.
speaker-1 (00:44.436)
It's an honor to be here and I'm glad to see so many people who are interested in theology.
speaker-0 (00:49.462)
Let's get started here, right? You have written a book that deals with the Bible and biblical authority, right? I mean, isn't the authority, right? And inspiration of the Bible pretty much assumed by Christians. Why? Why write a book on biblical authority?
speaker-1 (01:03.938)
Well, I think the inspiration of scripture is assumed by Christians, at least that traditionally has been the Bible is our authority. But the church has never had an agreed upon definition of what its inspiration means. It's authoritative, it's our constitution, you know, it's our go-to, it's our community constitution, but what do we mean by the inspiration of it? And so that's where I want to weigh in on this and say something about
the Bible's authority, but also its inspiration. And the reason why I think this is an important topic is when I was first, I was a Christian for about a year when I went to the U of And I was in a Pentecostal church that was the real high premium on experiencing God, but a very low premium on thinking coherently about things. And so I couldn't find an intelligent Christian for my life. I took a class in evolutionary biology.
And I went in there with all my no cards because I was going to refute the professor and save the class, you know, I was really enthusiastic. And this professor just kind of gently carved me up every class. I bring up, yeah, what about the second law of thermodynamics? Because I had read three whole books, three whole books. They're short books, but they're all the I felt like an expert, you know, all on creationism and all the little arguments. And so that was the first blow to my faith. But the even worst blow was a class I took on New Testament. The New Testament is literature.
And I was taught that if the whole, unless the whole Bible is literally true, Genesis 1 and 2, seven literal days and Adam and Eve, the whole thing, unless it's all literally true, the whole Bible might as well be a book of lies. And I came to the conclusion that it's not all literally true. And I came to the conclusion that there's something about evolution. so then I lost my faith and I didn't want to lose my faith.
I really liked being a Christian. I liked having purpose and meaning and feeling like, you know, I liked it, but I could not get my brain to find any answers to the questions I was raising. And I came to the conclusion that it was all just, all those experiences with God must've just been my imagination. You know, maybe group psychology or something like that. It's so unnecessary. just feel it like, well, it's so we send kids out there and
speaker-1 (03:28.878)
thinking that, oh, the Bible is a perfect book. It's got everything and no errors. And they take a class in New Testament literature, or they read a book, or they meet an intelligent friend who knows about things, and push, goes sky high. I don't want to see that happen.
speaker-0 (03:44.866)
I appreciate that. And I think that like highlights the relevance of this conversation because it's, the Bible and this is what's make sure your proposal is so interesting. The Bible is so foundational to Christian faith. The question is, right? How is it foundational? And if you're taught away that it's foundational, but all of sudden just becomes like, you know, unraveled and faith is on the line. Right. And I highlight these personal stories in your book about just how devastating these revelations about, you know, the complexity challenges, problems in the Bible were. So, I think this sets up.
why a conversation like this is so important and what a positive proposal going forward could look like. Before we get to that, I want to talk a little bit more about popular, a popular theory of scripture, like biblical inerrancy. So if we could, if you could first just give us a general definition of what do people mean when they say biblical inerrancy in the most kind of general sense that you can. And then, how would you try to persuade someone?
who sees inerrancy as foundational to their faith, but they're open to talk, and you want to show them, maybe this is not the most helpful way to view the Bible.
speaker-1 (04:52.59)
Yeah. Well, what I'd, I guess approach with them would be to start off by saying, I would go to Jesus' teachings where he presents himself as the whole point of scripture. He said, John five, you Moses wrote about me. If you believed in Moses, you'd believe in me because everything he wrote was about me. In Luke 24,
He opened up the eyes of the disciples so they could see all scripture testifies to him. The law and the prophets all testify to him. And those statements are all encompassing. He's not saying, there's a one or two passages that predict Jesus. No, the whole narrative is about him. And that's what he's the word of God. The capital W word, it's not a book, it's a person. And the whole point of the book is to point to the person. So that already sets up a different framework. If you can get a person to see how
The Bible's not a flat book. It's a story with a very surprising twist to it. Who would have thought that Messiah would have been crucified and then rose again from the dead? But we have to read it through the lens of Christ and interpret it as all being about Christ. And once you resolve that as the purpose of scripture,
It takes the weight off of everything else. As long as scripture is pointing us to Jesus and revealing Jesus to us, it's doing what it's inspired to do.
And so we don't have to, it's authority doesn't rest on having every king consistently mentioned or all the numbers of the armies of consistency mentioned, or maybe there's not exactly historical, you know, whatever. It's the narrative that's inspired. Jesus says the narrative points to him. And so I read that narrative because I believe that Jesus really was the revelation of God. I take his word very seriously. And so I'm now going to read that whole book as though it's pointing to him. And that's his function. Its purpose is not to give us
speaker-1 (06:46.35)
100 % accurate history, tape recording, what you would have seen if you had a video camera kind of thing. Its purpose, it has all these different kinds of genre, all these different modes of writing, but it's all pointing towards one person and that person is Jesus Christ. Then if there was, if you still resistance, you can just show a couple of places where there are clear errors and start to loosen that up a little bit.
speaker-0 (07:12.878)
Thanks for watching this Theology Lab video. If you're enjoying it, you can subscribe to the channel below and you'll get more Theology Lab videos as soon as they're released. Yeah, yeah. How do you think about this? when folks say, well, Jesus talked about the story of Jonah and so therefore shouldn't we think about Jonah as a literal historical event?
speaker-1 (07:32.066)
Yeah, you know, when, or when he refers to Moses having written the first five books of the Bible, when it's clear that he didn't write all of that, there's all sorts of redactions that go on, they have an obituary at the end and whatever, but Jesus isn't trying to answer historical critical questions when he's speaking like this. In fact, you don't get the kind of bifurcation that we have in the modern world between the text and history.
That didn't exist in ancient consciousnesses, not very much. They didn't do critical history. Oral cultures are passing out oral stories, know, and so this is how it is. So when you, it's really important not to read in contemporary issues into scripture and project our concerns onto theirs. There's a movement author called the Theological Interpretation of Scripture. It's one that I firmly endorse.
It's just the traditional way we read the Bible was, it some call it like, it's naive. You just read the story, you enter into the story. And this is how Christians read the Bible throughout. You enter in the story, the story teaches you and all that kind of stuff. Now, when we get to the enlightenment, we start having critical scholars saying, well, you know, how does the story correlate with history? How does it, you blah, blah. And now it's raising a whole separate set of questions. And unfortunately, that
it was all these liberal humanists that the first ones to insist that the only meaning that a Bible verse can have is the original meaning. Well, those were secular humanists. And they were saying that because they were saying you have to interpret the Bible the same way you interpret every other book. You can't, you know, it's not academic, respectable to give it a privileged position. And so the pastors get to be trained in this. And now we have a large group of people who don't know how to read the Bible traditionally, because they're reading it through a historical critical lens.
So, when he says Moses wrote five books of the Pentateuch, or David wrote the Psalms, those are figureheads. It's kind of Uncle Sam. It represents, you know, it's representative. But I'd be very careful about reading in historical critical answers to questions.
speaker-0 (09:46.126)
Now, okay, so we've identified, like why you've written a book on scripture, the need for thinking about authority, talked a little bit about inerrancies, problems within scripture. The important part here of your work that I want to get us to, to spend a little time with, right, is your positive proposal, right? Because can be really challenging. think we, you write about this in your book, we talked about this before the interview, of really difficult experiences years ago we had when like,
Like someone showed us that the Bible wasn't what we thought it to be and how, how deep that, that went. Um, but here's what I, you know, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on here is right. As you give a really intriguing, positive proposal called the cruciform model of interpretation. Let's pause here. Tell us a little bit. What is the, what is your cross inspired approach to reading the Bible?
speaker-1 (10:35.95)
The cruciform hermeneutic. So here's the thinking on it. I can't do this thoroughly here, but I make the case that Jesus is the center of all scripture and the cross is the center of what Jesus is about. And I've got a number of different arguments that I laid out. Paul identifies the gospel with the cross. He says, determine to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Which means that everything he has to say is found in Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
and all the gospels are oriented towards the cross. The cross is, and now when I say the cross, I don't mean the cross as opposed to everything else Jesus was about. I mean the cross as the culmination and the fulfillment of everything Jesus was about. That's why in John especially, the crucifixion is the hour that he was sent into this world. I was sent in for this hour and this is the hour in which the Father will be glorified. It's always true that if you see him, you see the Father. That's what he says.
John 14, 8, and 9. But on the cross, he most unambiguously puts on display the character of the Father, that other oriented love. God is love and love is known by the cross. 1 John 3, 16. Here's how we know what love is. Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. So that's the center of the center. And so just as we interpret all scripture through the lens of the cross, we should interpret all of Jesus through the lens, we interpret all scripture through the lens of Jesus, and then we interpret Jesus through the lens of the cross, which then means we're interpreting
Scripture through the lens of the cross. Now the thing that's, here's kind of the unique thing that I said about this. I asked the question, and I'd never heard this question asked before, but once I asked it, it seemed like the most obvious question in the world, and the question is how does the cross reveal God to us? Because like Paul said that, you know, before he was converted, he once saw Christ from a natural point of view, you know, a strictly human point of view.
But now we see something very different. What changed in Paul? Because he's looking at the same physical Jesus, but at one moment he's seeing just a crucified criminal, then he's now seeing the revelation of God. Well, what happened was he believed the message of the cross, and this comes out in a lot of his writings, his many pericopies he's got, where he kind of condenses the gospel down. the cross is always at the center of that.
speaker-1 (13:01.096)
So he says, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. And that's what changed. It's the same crucified criminal. It's a hideous scene, know, tortured and all that. And so it's revoltingly ugly on one hand. But then if you believe the message of the cross and you have faith, you see something else going on there. And what you see going on there is that God stepped into this. God became a human being, as Philippians 2, became a human being, and then became obedient unto the point of death.
So the revelation is the condescension. It's God stooping to this level, become one of us and then entering into our sin and entering into our hell, the curse that accompanies all sin. so the depth to which God was willing to stoop on our behalf, embodying the sin, all the imperfections, all that's wrong with humanity, embodying all of that, that's what reveals the depth of God's love.
The unsurpassable extremity to which God was willing to go, even experiencing his own antithesis, the perfectly united God experiencing alienation when he cries out, God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And the perfect Holy God becoming our sin. So God's experiences antithesis, which means in all eternity, God couldn't have gone further than he went on our behalf. He went all the way. And that's what reveals the infinite, the unsurpassable nature of the love that God is. So if God reveals his beauty by becoming ugly,
and his holiness by becoming our sin. And the cross reveals what God's truly like, so the cross reveals what God's always been like, including what God was like when he inspired the Bible. Maybe we should read the Bible expecting there might be times where God will reveal himself by stooping this distance and entering into solidarity with people, which is what I think he does all the time, because if God is love, he's not coercive. If God is love, he doesn't turn humans into robots, even when he's gonna breathe through them.
All scriptures, God breathed. But do think they got all of a they went into a trance and then kind of just dictated whatever God told them? That's clearly not the case because you see the different personalities, different contexts, different situations, all these different perspectives. It's a cacophony of voices, not just one single voice. So my proposal is that God is the kind of God who sometimes when people are ready, he can speak directly and reveal himself.
speaker-1 (15:23.586)
but he's not gonna coerce people into hearing truth or seeing truth or having true thoughts. So he works by means of loving influence as far as possible, but then there has to come a point where he's gonna have to accept them as they are. And that's stooping, to remain in solidarity with them and in covenant with them, he stoops to accommodate where they're at. And so that's something we have to take into consideration as we're reading the scripture. It's almost like you've got to read it now with bifocals.
because you're reading through the lens of Christ. And you'll find pictures of God in the Old Testament that look remarkably like Christ. And there you can see the spirit breaking through. And you can always tell those places because when you have pictures of God that are like the idea of God being our bride, no one in the ancient Near East talked that way. Whenever the spirit breaks through and you have a Christ-like kind of portrait of God, it's radically different than what you find in the rest of the ancient Near East.
But you find times where there's pictures of God that don't look anything like Jesus. And coincidentally, those are where the Bible most agrees with the surrounding culture. And so it's clearly that God's accommodating that. Christ is always the criteria. This isn't just pick and choose whatever verses you like, you know, be your favorite verse and ignore the rest. No, it's all inspired. It's all authoritative. It all points to Jesus Christ crucified. And that's why we need to read it through a cruciform lens.
distinguish in between when God can speak directly to people and when he has to speak indirectly because he's accommodating their sin.
speaker-0 (16:56.238)
Okay. Okay. Can I try to try to say this back to you? What I hear is like he steps to this and then we're going go to examples, which I'm really excited about. Okay. So I hear this is saying, all right, you've got the whole Bible and you're making the case, right? The center of that Bible for Christians is Jesus. The center of that is you just said the part across the resurrection, we're kind of looking at this as one angle, right? The cross, the death of Jesus. Right? So we've got the whole Bible. We're looking at the center of the center, as you say at the cross and Jesus, and then asking, and this is that key question, right? You said how
does this event, how does the cross reveal God? It's like, wow, God is speaking to us through a very, very dark event. And then it's kind of expanding outward saying, well, looking at the rest of the Bible, could it be the case that God is able to speak to us this way elsewhere? How is that?
speaker-1 (17:46.894)
You said it very well. In fact, it seems to that we should expect to find this. Given the humility of Christ and given the shamefulness of the cross and all that, we should expect humble, God always works through the weak things of this world. That's not a one-off thing.
The cross isn't a one-off thing. This is what God's always like. And it reminds me of the Indiana Jones movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. Do remember where, I'm dating myself here. But there's a point where Indiana Jones comes down and he's in this cave and there's that old wise man there who's been there for 900 years. there's a Nazi and there's Indiana Jones and they have to choose what chalice did Jesus drink of, drink out of on the Last Supper. But if you choose poorly, well, then you disintegrate.
speaker-0 (18:20.526)
Keep going.
speaker-1 (18:38.658)
So the Nazi thinks, Jesus being a glorious king, he'd want the best chalice in the place. So he grabs the most luxurious chalice, drinks from it and incinerates. Well, Indiana Jones, he remembers that Jesus was a humble carpenter and that he hung out with these lowly fishermen and they didn't have fancy silverware. And so he finds the most common cup in the room and drinks from it. And that was the right one. Some people want a Bible that is shiny and perfect and bright and surely God.
would surely inspire a perfect book. It must be the best literary quality. It has to have the best erudition. It must be inerrant. Well, that's not the God that Jesus reveals. He reveals this humble God who works through broken things all the time. And once you get that perspective, the brokenness of scripture becomes endearing. like, in itself is a reflection of God's willing to work with people who think this about Him.
is willing to deal with people who have these weird ideas, you know, and that's, that, that's what reveals God, the movement of coming down, becoming a man and dying on the cross.
speaker-0 (19:44.27)
Let's go to some examples of this examples can help clarify How do you take your cross inspired understanding of scripture? How do you apply it to something that's really central to your books? divine violence Warfare and the Bible I'm thinking explicitly like like of like a chapter like Deuteronomy 7 where like God makes the command to say hey go and annihilate the the people and in the promised land
Entirely all of them. this is, I your book, you say something like that happens about 30 times within scripture. Um, how do you take your, your model and apply it to passages like that? Okay.
speaker-1 (20:25.742)
Good, Well, so the first thing is to honestly enter into the horror of the passage. And this is something when I, you know, as a younger evangelical, tried to defend inerrancy, because even when came back from the faith, you know, I still wanted to hang out with these people. So I tried to use that language and I tried to salvage, you know, as much as possible. But one of the things I found was that
I couldn't be honest with myself when I was studying the Bible. the conclusion always had to be, it was always set for me. It can't be, it has to be inherent. And the mental gymnastics you go through trying to defend that, it was just, at some point I just had to get honest and just say, come on, if I saw this in any other book, I'd say this is horrendous. So why has it become holy just because it's in my book?
If I were to read any other religious book, I find a picture of God saying to a saint, show them no mercy. And you might be tempted to because slaughtering women and children can get kind of hard. But no, you must cut off all mercy and slaughter everything that breathes. Men, women, child, babies, infants, and even the animals. Though Deuteronomy 22 specifies, do not kill the trees because they've done nothing wrong.
You might think that logic would apply to babies too, but it didn't. So they're told to utterly destroy them. The word is Kharim. And it has a religious connotation to it. It's not just kill them all. It's kill them all as an act of devotion. You'd offer them up to God. Which is kind of interesting because one of the sins for which they're being judged, the Canaanites were being judged, was they sacrificed their firstborn children to Moloch. And so they're gonna be punished.
So you punish them by doing the same thing to everybody? You just gotta let the horror of the passage hit you. Origin, went for, Origin was a turning point for me because there was a point where I was really,
speaker-0 (22:32.11)
Early church theologian
speaker-1 (22:34.804)
Second century. Yeah. And he said this in his commentary on Joshua that the Holy Spirit, he thought intentionally, puts things in scripture that are unworthy of God. That's his phrase, unworthy of God. And when you come to those passages that are unworthy of God, and they're judged unworthy in light of Jesus Christ, he sheds light on the whole thing. When you come upon that, he says, don't arrogantly dismiss it.
because it's all the word of God. And see, I have lot of trouble with more liberal scholars today who, they're good at criticizing it, but they don't then show, well then how does it show it's pointing to the cross? so origin says, don't throw it out, but patiently seek the Holy Spirit and keep digging. Cause there's always gonna be a treasure under there, hidden treasure. And that is the revelation of God.
And he even said that if believers take literally all the things that are ascribed to God in the Old Testament, they'd be worshiping God that's far worse than the pagan gods out there. the origin was a saint, but he was really honest about scripture, you know, don't fool yourself. So, I sat in this conundrum for several months, and this is what finally got me going towards crucifixion of the warrior God, where on the one hand, I can't accept a picture of God
that is commanding people to engage in religious genocide is what it is. Slaughter, everything, I can't. On the other hand, Jesus endorses this whole book. And so I have to take it seriously. And so I was in a state of complete cognitive dissonance and I stayed in that state for several months. It wasn't pleasant, but I just insisted somehow I must point to this. And that's when I, it could be I am projecting
you know, my ideas onto, you know, the scripture, or it could be a divine revelation, that's for the church to determine over time. I just put forth what I saw, but it was like one those magic eye books where, where, know, you look at it, at a picture and it looks just like a wallpaper, but if you look at it just the right way with the right eye, a picture will emerge, a 3D picture will emerge. And that's kind of what happened. It's like, so I saw the horror of the cross and the horror of the genocide.
speaker-1 (24:59.928)
and there's one other factor to put in here. There's a number of accounts where God says to the Israelites, I will fight your battles for you. I'll drive out your enemies ahead of you. You won't have to fight just like you didn't have to fight when you came out of Egypt. You won't have to fight if you'll trust me. Now that already tells you that the very fact that they went in there with swords swinging, they were not in line with God's will. You have in the very, there's two passages, Leviticus,
18 is one of them, where the Lord says, you know, if it's a plan, he goes, you won't have to fight your enemies, I'll drive them out ahead of you. And then he tells how he says, I'll send a pestilence ahead. I'll make it too pesty so that they'll migrate out. But I'm not going to do it quickly, because then the land would become overgrown and wild. That is you grow more numerous, they'll grow less, and then I'll move you in.
there's another spot where he offers a different plan. says, I'm going to drive the land, the land's going to vomit them out. Since they've degraded the land, the land will vomit them out. And apparently, he's saying that they'll become unfruitful, they're going to migrate off because it's no longer pleasant. You got to ask the question, what happened to those plans? It's a, and now there's a number of different traditions that get woven into this, and they're not all consistent, but
But it's a reflection of somewhere they had the intuition that God was gonna do this. Now either God changed his mind and all of a sudden, forget those less violent plans, we're gonna slaughter them all. Or maybe the Israelites just were capable of hearing what God was saying. Here's one way of thinking about it. I have no doubt that God wanted his people in on that land. It was prime real estate. It was a perfect launching pad that reached the nations of the world. All the trade routes went through there.
So I think God wanted his people there, but it all requires trust. And the Israelites had always struggled with that. It's hard to trust an invisible, that's why they eventually wanted a king to go out and fight wars for us. It's hard to trust an invisible God. So I can see God saying, go into the promised land. I want you in there. I give this land to you. But in the ancient Near East, what it means to go into someone's land is you go and slaughter them or you go and enslave them.
speaker-1 (27:17.974)
And everyone prayed to their gods to help them do that. No one prayed to a God to do it for them. So that was a total foreign concept to them, that God would do it for us. No, everyone attributed their violence to God because that's what you do in the ancient Near East. In fact, violence was a form of worship. They always had contests whose God could be more macabre. And so they have these songs about Annette, know, drink the blood of the soldiers, da da da. Of course it never happened, but they showed you their faith.
They're trusting God to help them slaughter. So God says, I gave you this land. What Moses hears is, I gave you this land and I'll help you slaughter them. unless God's gonna coerce him into having true thoughts, he's got to work with them having false thoughts. It's a little bit like, you Jesus, he tells his disciples three different times, I'm gonna go to Jerusalem, get crucified. I'm gonna go to Jerusalem, get crucified. They're gonna arrest me, they're gonna crucify me. But when it happens, they're shocked. Why? Well,
because what he was saying was too counter-cultural. Everyone was expecting a Messiah who was gonna triumph. No one was expecting a Messiah who gonna get crucified. So Jesus says it and it goes in one ear and out the other. When Peter finally does catch on like, what, you're gonna suffer? He tries to say, we won't let you do it. Jesus says, get behind me, saying, I think this is what happened with Moses. It goes in one ear out the other.
speaker-0 (28:38.542)
couple of things I hear you saying. One is that like you have other passages that speak to different ways than simply annihilating these, these people that are there in the passages, what to do, what to do with them. you have a very common conception around this time of like attributing divine violence to your God as a way of showing the kind of superiority, the transcendence of your God. And there's this one line that I really want to make sure that like we, that we catch onto. And you said, right, there's this way of seeing these passages where in the genocide of them.
you see reflected the horror of the cross and the genocide. see the horror of the cross. And then if I, if I understand you right, you want to still see that there's something positive that's going on there that also reflects something we see in the cross. It reflects Jesus for, it reflects God's love. Can you, can you elaborate on that a little bit for us?
speaker-1 (29:29.176)
knowing that God's a stooping God, a God who reveals his love by stooping. So I'm looking at this passage and as I read it through the lens of the cross, it becomes another, I call it a literary crucifix. It's a testament to how low God is willing to stoop to stay in solidarity with his people. And imagine the pain that it must have caused God to do that. Cause he loves those people more than they love themselves.
And so I think that the genocide and all the violence that's ascribed to God, different pictures of God, slaughtering people, whatever, it bears witness to the cross, that God enters into our sin and into the consequences of those sin in solidarity with us in order to keep us moving in the right direction. If it was not for that, you would not have a progress of revelation scripture, you God would just give up. No, so it's a gradual...
gradual thing.
speaker-0 (30:28.558)
So that's the thing is right. Hearing that to say that that's why you're not just, just being critical of these passages, why you're not ultimately rejecting these passages and Hey, why are, how are, how are, and the question is, are, how are these passages still somewhat inspired? Cause that's the unique part of your book, right? Is you're saying you can be critical of these things, but still the whole Bible itself can, can we still see it as inspired is, is yeah. Can can you speak to
speaker-1 (30:53.55)
It's all pointing to Jesus, but in different ways and in different degrees and different levels. So that's where like I disagree with I'm very sympathetic with Peter and and Derek Flood and some other authors who have and wanted to in order to counter religious violence, they have been really critical of the violence in the Old Testament and I'm very sympathetic to that. There's a lot of studies that have shown that
when people look to authoritative books that contain divine violence, it inclines them towards violence. It desensitizes them towards violence and then it inclines them towards it. in our world today, this is really big concern. There's a ton of literature that's been published recently about religious violence. And so I'm totally in agreement with that. But see, they stopped too soon. It's not enough to say, no, no, we don't have to pay attention to that because as Origin pointed out, all scripture is inspired by God. And so I think we...
Whatever else you mean by inspiration at least means you have to wrestle with the passage. You're not allowed just to say, I don't worry about it. No, you got to do something with it. And the crosses, I think what we should do with it.
