Theology in the Raw - 763: #763 - Nonviolence, “Open Theism,” and Heavy Metal: Greg Boyd

Episode Date: October 28, 2019

In this energetic conversation, Greg and Preston talk about various hot-button issues from nonviolence to nationalism in the church to Open-Theism (a term Greg doesn’t actually endorse), along with Annihlationism, hopeful Universalism, violence in the Old Testament, hermeneutics of hard passages, and Greg’s favorite less-then-sanctified heavy metal bands. Follow Greg on Twitter @greg_boyd He is pastor at Woodland Hills Church and the website there is www.whchurch.org Greg is President of Reknew www.reknew.org and he has a new book coming out in January called Inspired Imperfection which is published through Fortress Press. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. Today is finally here. My guest today is the one and only Dr. Greg Boyd. He needs no introduction. All I want to say is that he has probably been the most requested guest for the show. I've had so many people that said, when are you going to have Greg on? When are you going to have Greg on? He is a pastor. He is a theologian. He is an apologist. And he's just honestly an all-around fun guy to be around. I so enjoyed this conversation. We talked about nonviolence. We talked about nationalism. We talked about pastoral ministry. We talked about his crazy view of violence in the Old Testament. We talked about open theism and we talked, we talked about all kinds of stuff. It was so much fun. And we talked about speed metal too,

by the way. Anyway, Greg lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He pastors Woodland Hills Church in Minneapolis. And this is a good time to say that I am coming to Minneapolis on November 5th. Let's see, when is that? November 5th, I'll be speaking on sexuality and gender for an all-day pastors, leaders gathering through Transform Minnesota. This is technically a closed leaders forum, but if you are part of the Transform Minnesota community, which is several hundred churches, I believe, then I might be seeing you there in Minneapolis, Tuesday, November 5th. And then again, I'm coming back to speak at University of Northwestern, or is it Northwestern University, on Monday, November 11th, and Tuesday, November 12th. I'm not quite sure which of those events at Northwestern are open to the

public. I don't know. I just kind of get an airline ticket and say, all right, go speak here. And so I go. And so I'm not sure all the details there, but if you want to check it out on my website, that's Monday, November 11th and Tuesday, November 12th in Minneapolis. So two weeks in a row in Minneapolis. So looking forward to seeing some of you there. Without further ado, let's get to know this wonderful guy, theologian the one and only Greg Boyd. Greg, thanks so much for being on this podcast. I'm honored to be on your show. Thanks for inviting me.

I appreciate it a great deal. You might be the most requested guest on my show. I get people all the time saying, when are you going to have a great go? I am so flattered by that. I am really flattered by that. That's great. Yeah. The Pope is number two.

N.T. Wright is number three. I mean, I'm the Pope. Good night. So, okay. Here's where I want to begin. I heard that you, and for my audience, I've got some construction going on above me. So, if you hear some annoying noise, that's what it is.'ve got some construction going on above me.

So if you hear some annoying noise, that's what it is, but we're going to push on through. Or it could be the wrath of God kind of just getting built up here, the rumbling that you're hearing. It's either the devil trying to prevent your voice from being heard, or it's Jesus, or it's Jesus trying to prevent your voice from being heard. One of the two.

I get them confused all the time. I want to begin with you and your journey in ministry and how you started to encounter what I would refer to as almost like a counter-imperial, counter-nationalistic gospel and how that relates to nonviolence. And I heard that you, once you started really formulating your views that you started preaching on this and you, I don't know what emptied your church, but a lot of people weren't happy about that. Can you tell us a little bit about that journey? It wasn't a conversion experience or anything.

It was a slow growth from, I would say beginning in like the mid eighties the, the, the, the, the the the moral majority was a thing that was a catalyst there's something about you know i was the evangelical and we were all supposed to be on the moral majority and all that and something about it just didn't feel right it was just the wrong spirit it just didn't seem like jesus and uh kel thomas came out with a book after he and he was jerry fow fall's right hand guy and and then then he saw that this is going nowhere uh you know in fact it's corrupting the church and so he broke with follow and wrote this book i forget the title of it but

that was an interesting catalyst catalyst this guy was such a top dog and he's saying you know jesus kingdom is not just another perfect version of a new and improved version of the kingdoms of this world and and we've we've been barking up the wrong tree, fighting the wrong battles and which all of that. And, and, and books like that, I discovered Jacques Gallal, who I just found to be so fascinating. And, and I began to read scripture differently. I just came to see more and more clearly a,

that that God is fully revealed in Jesus Christ and and b and non-violence is a central aspect of this that uh and and that and the non-violence is just one aspect of the kingdom that sets us apart from all the kingdoms of the world and i think even that distinction clear is all important we're supposed to look like a corporate version of Jesus, reflecting the same Calvary character that he exemplified. Coming under people, serving people, loving people, embracing people as they are, instead of trying to grab hold of this world's power in order to impose our will on others. And I think that not keeping those two things distinct throughout history brought a lot of corruption on the church and compromised the gospel a great deal.

So I got clear and clear about how distinct the kingdom is from the kingdom of the world, how central nonviolence was. And then in the 2004 election, there was an unprecedented amount of pressure put out by the Christian right for people in congregations to get their pastors to steer the flock to vote in the right way, in a godly way, in a Republican way. And I saw this as a teaching opportunity. For like 12 years we've been involving, longer than that, but we've been involving in this direction.

But yet I hadn't ever like made really clear where we're going. And so this was an opportunity to really spell out clearly the difference between the kingdom of God, the kingdom of the world. The kingdom of God always looks like the cross. The kingdom of the world always looks like Caesar. And I laid out the distinction and the call of the gospel and the nonviolence and why we don't have a flag in our sanctuary and why we don't celebrate the 4th of July or Veterans Day.

And, yeah, we had about a third of the people of the church ended up leaving. And they were almost all white, and they were almost all our bigger givers. But, you know what, I'm so glad it happened because I didn't realize how much I had been tiptoeing around those people until I finally stopped tiptoeing around them.

And once they left, I was like, now we can be us. I can be in total congruity with this new uh vision of the kingdom that we've evolved into yeah so it was a really necessary and very good step for us did you expect that big of a fallout and what was your response to that that one third leaving we you know i talked to my board ahead of time and we knew that there would be a price to pay. And I so appreciate having these folks around who are not, they put integrity as a far higher priority than offerings and attendance. One thing that really helped us is that we had gotten clear sometime in the early 90s, they became very clear that the criteria by which we are going to be have to give an account as leaders.

In Paul, it's really clear. Whenever he's saying, I labor to present you before Christ, his concern is that they're fully mature. I want to present you fully mature. He never once says, I want to get more and more and more to present to Christ.

It's the quality of who he has that he's concerned with. And so we came to the conclusion that the quality of discipleship far outweighs the importance of the crowd. And if you have that, then you're willing to preach hard messages that will lose the crowd, but it will make disciples. And that's the difference, I think, between a kingdom church and a consumer church. So has the ministry been a lot, I mean, for lack of better terms, fun or more exciting since then? That you have a family of believers that you're pastoring that you feel like, man, these kind of fundamental values that you want to instill in this family of believers that they're sharing on some level? We finally got clear on our distinctives.

And we stopped being, instead of minimizing those to not offend the crowd, we maximize those. And it does make it a lot more fun. You don't have to be second guessing. I don't have to tiptoe. I still try to really, you know, stay out of the fray politically, you know, because I know that that's the essential part of it. So I tipped around political issues sometimes unless they cross a line where like racism is racism and you got to name it and bigotry is bigotry and you got to name it. But I'm always naming the issue rather than going after a candidate. But it has allowed us to – yeah, it has been more fun and to be more bold and saying things straight. And then when I begin to get clearer on – when I gave myself permission to say it straight and not as a tiptoe, well, then you start to see things

more clearly, you know, and the more you see, the more you say it, the more you say it, the more you see it. So it was a very good, I'm so glad it happened. I, it could have been done more gently. I suppose I'm never very good at, you know, tiptoeing. It's soft words, but I don't regret any of it. Yeah. So it was pretty bold. I mean, you didn't come out and kind of nudge people along. I mean, it was, you kind of dropped the hammer. Is that right? It was called the cross and the sword. Yeah. And it was something of a hammer. But what it was, the different church might have felt like a hammer, and it felt like a hammer to some here, but we had been evolving in this direction.

So it was more of a statement of you're planting a flag in the ground. And there's been a long – we lost people along the way just because we weren't right-wing enough. But this was the one that really was a defining moment for us. Now, before that, I mean, years ago, a long time ago, I guess, you were more in the kind of reformed camp. And then, I mean, most people know your name, if not through the nonviolence conversation, but through the Providence or open theism conversation. I mean, honestly, my first exposure to you was in seminary where we didn't read your stuff. We read Bruce Ware's critique of your stuff.

That was our section on open theism and theology proper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We didn't dare read your stuff. We read the critique. So, I mean, I didn't think you were a Christian until a few years ago. Why don't you give us that journey through Reformed Christianity, open theism, and maybe even explain what – can you explain what open theism is? Because I hear other people explain it from a critical standpoint. I'm like, I don't know if that's what open theists are actually saying. The few people who have come to actually ask me what I believe, who at first had heard the critics' version of what I believe,

are always surprised to find out what I believe. Really, that's what, yeah, in fact, that happened just recently. Okay, so I went through a little foray into Calvinism via Barth. I was in, you know, when I was working for a master's degree, I got into Karl Barth, and I read half of his church dogmatics, and I just, you know, I was infatuated with him. Well, I think mainly through him and for exegetical reasons, I ended up becoming a Calvinist. Now, as a Calvinist who was a hopeful universalist, which is a lot easier pill to swallow than if you're Calvinist

and believe in eternal conscious suffering. But Calvinist nonetheless. And I've always told people that I totally, totally get on exegolical grounds why someone would become a Calvinist. I know those arguments. I can state them as strongly as they can be stated. I've come to disagree with those arguments, but I understand. Romans 9 and John 6, John 8, and all those passages.

What I never quite understood was how anyone could really like it because even when I even when I was a Calvinist and even a Calvinist who was Bardian and kind of a hopeful universalist even there the suffering of this present age just the holocaust and things like that um I I really struggled with this whole idea of but especially with the election thing and where I'd be hanging around Christians and they were all, they were like, oh, God was so great to elect me through no merit of my own. It was all by his grace and all the joy and beauty of God. And I could never get into that because the minute I would think about my election, I thought about that guy's not election or maybe my granddaughter or my daughter's not election. You know, and I'm supposed to praise

God, even though he predestined my newborn baby to go to eternal hell. And I could not ever, out of obedience, I would believe it. But it's like, no, I can't say this is, I can think of a more beautiful God, one who didn't do that, you know? And, and so I've had some Calvinists tell me that I was predestined not to be a Calvinist because if you can't get in and if you, if you don't see the beauty of it, well then, then you're not one of the elect. I don't know how they see the beauty of it. I just don't. A God who predestines, you know, children to get raped. I just don't see. So, um,

eventually I worked my way out of that. I found Armenian ways of explaining or interpreting Romans 9 and other passages like that. At the same time, I was really helped by Peter Geach, a philosopher named Peter Geach and Charles Hartzorn, who finally rendered free will intelligible to me. I could finally get it. And that was a big problem for me. If it was free will caused, well, then it's not free. If it's uncaused, well, then it's arbitrary.

And I couldn't get my head around that. Once I turned that corner, I began to read Scripture differently. I began to notice a lot of openness, you know, God changing his mind, and the story's going this way, and then it goes a different way and whatever and um i i i now had no reason to think that those were just anthropomorphisms or you know ways of speaking the traditional way of interpreting those things and peter geach was the first open theist that i read although he was a philosopher and he wasn't open i mean that I read, although he was a philosopher, and he wasn't open. I mean, that term wasn't used. He held the open view of the future. And he initially put that plan,

that idea in my head about, oh, what if possibilities are real? What if God even knows possibilities as possibilities? For about a year, maybe a year and a half, I was actually, get this, you won't believe it, but I've actually met with two other people who who are in this transitional stage i was a calvinist openness or openness calvinist because i held to the uh that that possibilities are ontologically real um and then we have free will to choose between possibilities except when it came to election and it was strictly for exegetical reasons i still had not found ways of of getting around or not getting around reinterinterpreting, you know, the John 6 and Johnny and those kind of passages. So I was in this kind of weird thing. God creates this with free will, except not when it comes to salvation. But eventually I came clean on that.

And by 1987, I guess it was, I had fully embraced a kind of open ontology. And I just always refer to it as the open view of the future i don't like the term open theism i've never liked open theism oh really it's about god that did that so that term doesn't come from you or you've never actually i i've never liked the term it came from the book the four people before and i didn't know these guys very well so i it wasn't part of this but oh that the openness of god was published in 1994. Clark Pinnock edited it. And they coined the term open theism because they wanted to stress the relationality of God. The trouble, I think, the trouble, Preston, is that who doesn't want to stress the relationality of God?

I mean, most Reformed folks will say, yes, while God is holy other and immutable and impossible, he is so in such a way that he's very relational, totally relational. So everyone, the issue is not about God at all. The issue is, I mean, there is a distinct reciprocal kind of picture of God, but any Arminian would affirm that. What's distinctive is simply the belief that among the ontological furniture of the world that God created are possibilities. Because God created agents who are free, if you grant that supposition, and if you grant that free will, it means you resolve the question of whether you could possibly go down trajectory A or go down trajectory B. You are the one who resolves that. You could possibly

go down A or you could possibly go down B. You as a free agent make a choice and you are the final explanation for why you went down B rather than A. If you grant that, then I think you have to grant that when God creates a world that has free agents, possibilities are real because agents might resolve to go down A or go down B. And that's the most simplified way of saying it. It would be infinitely complex with all the decisions we make. But that's the whole distinct thing. Possibilities are real. And since God knows all of reality exactly as it is, He's omniscient, God's knowledge and reality are coextensive. And so if possibilities are real, then God knows possibilities as possibilities.

So let me try to explain it back. So you would still affirm, for lack of better terms, a classic view of omniscience, all-knowing. Absolutely. predetermined kind of every fabric of what's going to happen in the future that human agents have actual agency that effect that has a real effect on the future is that right right but i go one step further and that is it's not just because any arminian would say the second thing that you just said right uh open the open view goes future and or goes goes a step further than that and says that it doesn't matter whether God predetermined you to go down B rather than A, or whether it's just an eternal fact that you will go down B rather than A. If the fact eternally precedes your choosing it, then you aren't the final explanation for why it's chosen.

precedes your choosing it, then you aren't the final explanation for why it's chosen. Okay, so according to the traditional view, every fact of what you will do eternally precedes you doing it. Calvinists say that's because God determined it. Armenians say, no, it's just because God knows what's going to happen. But the facts are there. And so if the facts are there eternally before you, well, that's what the Greeks believed. They called it fate. It didn't have a personal God decreeing fate. It just was. And so it doesn't matter how the facts got concrete. If the facts are eternally concrete, settled, can't do otherwise, in eternity before you choose them,

then I don't see how you could have chosen otherwise. How you could have chosen otherwise i get a free will so so that's so the difference between uh your view and classic armenianism is that you're you you would use to say that you're ascribing a more real sense of agency in in in human free will i mean is that well i i i think it's more consistent i i you know it's just consistency i mean armenians all do actual agency and all that. The question is, it comes down to, can the fact of what I will choose in 2033, can that fact eternally precede me? And yet I bring about that fact by my own free choice in time. That's the question. If you can accept that mystery, then you can be an Arminian. If you can't,

then you'd be an open theist. But see, the other way of explaining it would be like this. In the classical Arminian view, God looks at one timeline, and that's the timeline of what will be. And all facts on what will be are exhaustively settled. In the open view, God looks at innumerable possible future scenarios. And it's like a choose-your-own-adventure book, and God's the author. And so God creates the parameters of all the future scenarios. And if God wishes, he can predestinate things to happen in all future scenarios. But God would anticipate every one of those possible futures. And every possible future

is defined by any decision you could have done otherwise so like um there's a trillion trillion decisions that you possibly could make in your lifetime God would know if the world unfolds in such and such a way that Preston on September is the 10th 2019 has these decisions that he can resolve. And God has a plan in store for each one of those in case you choose it. So here's the thing, Preston. People worry about, they worry that the open view of God grants God less providential control than the classical view. I submit to you that that is only true if God is stupid. If God has finite intelligence, then God would have to spread God's intelligence thin to cover the possibilities that God has to anticipate,

like human beings do. So we're a lot more nervous if we have to think about, you know, one of 30 possibilities and try to anticipate which one's going to happen, because we have to spread our intelligence thin to cover it. But if you have infinite intelligence or unlimited intelligence, you don't have to spread your intelligence thin to cover the possibilities. You can't divide up infinity. So it's as though all of God's attention is on option A, and as though all of it was on option B and option C. So whatever comes to pass, I can say as robustly as any Arminian that God has been anticipating this event from the foundation of the world and preparing a plan on how to bring good out of evil

and how to use it to his advantage. I can say it as robustly as any Arminian. It's just that I think God is so smart, I would be saying that any number of other things could have happened, and I'd be saying the exact same thing. So the open view, God knows every possible future with the same accuracy as the traditional God knows the one future. Yeah.

Does God ever step in and do the Calvinistic thing? Like, does he ever say, all right, I need to really intervene here and just, like, steer this person? Or, for lack of better terms, violate somebody's free will? So think about, like, God is the creator of this whole thing. He sets the parameters on all the, you know, free will always has its limits, its parameters. In any given moment, I'm mostly unfree, all right? Who I am right now is the product of numerous causes and my own decisions, building my character right now.

So there are things that maybe would have been possible for me had I gone down a different trajectory 20 years ago, but now they're not. So it's always delimited. And God sets the parameters of that. And then as one who anticipates all future scenarios, God would know that if the world unfolds in such and such a way, then at this point I will intervene and stop that from happening. So that's just one of the – and that no more impinges on anyone's free will than does the fact that I didn't get to choose the texture of my hair. I got curly hair.

I used to have hair anyways. And I didn't choose that. But I'm free in other respects. So in everyone's life, we're free in some respects and not in others. And God is the one who delimits all that. That's helpful. Yeah, the free will thing, this is – I've never been a theologian in the classic sense like that. So, these categories are just, my mind's already kind of hurting. and just like, or just think hard. I mean, like when people talk about free will,

it's like, well, you know, I was born into a Christian family. I wasn't one of the many people who had been sexually abused or abused. I wasn't born in Saudi Arabia to a Muslim family. There's so many things outside of my free will that I can't say I just kind of woke up one day as a fair blank slate and chose God or whatever. No, obviously not.

The world's radically unfair in that respect. And most of our reality is not chosen by us. See, rather than that taking away your freedom, it seems to me, Preston, that that is what establishes it. So think about, like, right now, say I have to make a decision on, do I want to take the Delta flight to Oklahoma next week, or do I want to take United? And so I'm looking at the two flights.

The fact that I'm deliberating about which flight I should take, I am presupposing that it's up to me to make this decision, which is itself an interesting point. Because, I mean, Charles Peirce said that you know what a person really believes by how they act. And we all act like open theists because there's no other way to act. Open theists was really just saying the way that you experience the world is actually pretty accurate. Because we all act as though most things weren't up to us, but some things were. So if I'm deliberating between these two airlines um i have to presuppose a that i'll wake up tomorrow the same person that i am right now basically the same person uh laws of physics will be the same the sun's going to rise cash will still have value laws of physics are going

to be the same you know i have to presuppose all that so that i can make this one decision if i had if i had to choose everything i couldn't choose anything and so so the givenness of reality has to be there for us to make any kind of decisions. But you're right, it's profoundly unfair. If I thought that a person's eternal fate hung upon where they were born and how they were raised, well, then I might as well be a Calvinist because, you know, it's very rare that a person can just choose outside of the stream in which they're raised. It happens now and then, and God breaks through.

But it's not a coincidence that most people born in Muslim countries tend out to be Muslim and so for Christians and so on and so on. Yeah, the whole fairness, I'm with you. And we talked about this before. I was raised in pretty hardcore reform circles. And right now, I don't know. I haven't thought on that level in a long time. I'm too busy trying to figure out what gender people are it's a pretty thorny issue yeah

i mean i got my own uh stuff television is nothing compared to that um uh you are you free to talk about um and this is pre-recorded so we could edit this out like i know that i mean you're in minneapolis uh there's another big name evangelical in Minneapolis that you guys have had some relational contact with, John Piper. I don't know if he's still in Minneapolis. He was when he was pastoring First Baptist. Oh, is he not there anymore?

No, he resigned the church quite some time ago. I don't know if he lives in the Twin Cities anymore or not. How was that interaction early on when you went to open theaters? So John led a group of pastors, a number of hundreds of pastors, signed his signature, I'm told, to get me fired from Bethel College. At that point, the Baptist General Conference, he and I were both part of this denomination. It's now called Converge, and they own Bethel College. And since I teach at Bethel College, they got these pastors to say I should be fired

and that my church should be kicked out of the conference. And so for two years, we had this controversy, and the annual meeting was, should Lloyd be kicked out or should he be allowed to stay? And I ended up being allowed to stay. So that was great. I've only had one real interaction with him. And that was, I mean, face-to-face. He invited me to come out to a lunch with him and his livingston, his kind of right-hand guy. And I went out with Paul Eddy, who was my right-hand guy.

And we had a sit-down kind of meeting. And he wanted to just kind of explain to me and i appreciate this but he was explaining why he given his beliefs he must uh do all he can do to silence me and to make sure i'm not influencing kids at bethel and that my church should be uh exiled from the denomination and given his beliefs i can see why he says that you know and the thing is, is I never, I never felt any personal animosity from John from some of his followers. Yes. But, but from John, it was always above board. And he was always courteous. And, and, you know, I, I,

I wish he understood my position a little clearer sometimes, but you know, it's so different than his own that, that, that'd be hard to understand. I appreciate the fact that, you know, on his 25th anniversary of being a pastor at First Baptist, he published, and this is quite John, his top 25 mistakes and sins and errors and failures. And I think I was like number 17 or so. At one point, he got mad and said some nasty words and then he publicly confessed he had some overseas confront him saying now you're getting personal I appreciate that wow that's cool

I've had I appreciate all these I bet I've had 20 25 different people over the years come and apologize to me for things that they have said when they were under that during that kind of hail storm. I appreciate that.

That's what it is. I understand why you had to do it. He said he considered me dangerous, the most dangerous man to evangelicalism because my system was so consistent. He said, Armenians stay in the fold by a felicitous inconsistency. He says, the trouble with your view is that it's so consistent he said armenians stay in the fold by a felicitous inconsistency he says the trouble with your your view is that it's so consistent and then he actually used this word paul was there and he could testify he says it's irrefutable and i thought are you serious isn't

that like i said well isn't that a good thing since you convert to it he goes no because you're it's premised on the wrong you don don't premise it. Your thinking is so consistent, but your starting point is wrong. In his view, I start with man, not with God. Well, your starting point is the Bible, right? I mean, you agree or disagree on your interpretation, but I mean, it was out of your interaction with biblical texts that was the root of your whole view, right? Absolutely.

I think the biblical narrative, it's so full of contingency, it's ridiculous. But coming out of our church tradition that has always kind of leaned towards favor and determinism, we tend to notice more all the passages that seem to support that, and we don't as much notice all the passages that just show radical contingency. Yeah. God's saying, okay, I'll give you three choices here. David, you get to choose what punishment you want. Behind door number A is a plague.

He gives them options. It's his own real place. Now, you mentioned hopeful universalists. I think we're on the same page here on the annihilation side, but almost like, man, if it ends up being universalism, fine by me kind of thing.

Is that, or? Sure. You know, love believes all things and hopes all things. And so if you love all people, how could you not hope that somehow, and I know given God's character, if there's a metaphysical way to hardwire into being such as ourselves, that we have a finite capacity to be stupid and rebellious, I think God would do that.

Eventually, everyone will get it. And there's some passages that you can interpret as really kind of pointing in that direction. But it seems to me that the greatest thrust of Scripture is there's a warning, and the warning is about a loss. It's about death. It's about this. You're forfeiting an opportunity for eternal life. And so I think that the end fate of the wicked, so far as I can see, is nothingness.

The last act of judgment is also the act of mercy, and that is euthanasia. It's like, I have to let you go. If you get to the point where to go on existing would be eternal conscious suffering because God sees that we're solidified, irrevocably solidified against him. If an agent gets to that point, then God would just mercifully let them go. I've often said that the – I've wrestled a little bit with the problem of evil. It does keep me up at night. I've seen all the responses.

I have known then too, just kind of as an offhand hobby. dabble with it yeah i think you do too i really appreciated your book by the way that was that was really really good read um the the what's the one that you paul told me i should read suffering and the providence um or is god to blame yes yes yes so yeah just for my audience if you haven't read a a Greg Boyd book and you wanted kind of an intro into kind of your way of thinking, whatever, that book is super, super helpful. Is he gone to blame? Yeah, yeah. Is that the one that somebody says, I'm going to read one Greg Boyd book? Would that be in the top?

Yeah, it depends on what you're interested in. Some folks who are dealing with legalism would say repenting of religion. I've had a lot of folks where that was their entry point. And it's kind of it's had an interesting history in some circles in terms of shaking up legalism. It's been fun to watch. Oh, and?

It depends on what you want. If you're struggling with Old Testament violence, you might want to check out Cross Vision or Christ Fiction and the Warrior. Okay, so let's go there because a lot of people want us to talk about this because we both hold to a nonviolent position, but I think we handle the Old Testament differently. I have to confess, man, I, again, since I've been so absorbed in sexuality and gender, if you're not writing about LGBT stuff, I'm probably not going to read it.

So I haven't read your book. I apologize, confess. LGBT stuff, I'm probably not going to read it. So I haven't read your book. I apologize, confess. And it's not a short book. But can you, because people that have read it say, yeah, you guys take different approaches to the Old Testament. Can you sum up your view of violence in the Old Testament? And we can maybe mix it up a little bit. Okay, I'll do my best here to it's, it's, okay, so here's sort of my elevator speech version of this okay i'm talking about a book that was 1492 pages long so really uh you know i don't try to defend it i'll just state it so it's my conviction is that um that well i i first started to write a book about 13 years ago now that was along the lines of your approach,

where I took all the passages that needed explaining, you know, God commanding genocide and all that. And then I had all these explanations that I acquired over the years about why God had to do that. Why did God have to slay the sloth of Canaan? Well, he's not as nasty as it looks. There's a rationale for it. And so he put the best possible spin on it, and he gave the cultural explanations. And I got about 40, 50 pages into this thing,

and I just thought it sucked. My explanations, once upon a time, they seemed very persuasive, and now they just seemed so empty. It just didn't work. So it failed at an ethical level. I didn't think I succeeded in making God, I was trying to write Paul Copan's book, Is God a Moral Monster? Although I think he did a better job of it than I would have done. But those arguments just don't persuade me. But not only do they not succeed in making God look more ethical in those portraits of God, you know, the warrior God kind of thing, but I came to see that the real challenge is not just to make God look a little better, but

rather to show how all passages bear witness to the crucified Christ. And so I have a long section in Christ, the Lord, our God, and in Cross-Fiction, trying to argue that all Scripture, Jesus said all Scripture is about me, John 5. It bears witness to me. If you believe Moses, you believe me. He wrote about me. It's all about me. Luke 24, he opened the disciples' eyes so they could see how all the Scripture, the prophets of the law, show that the Son of Man had to suffer before entering into glory.

So the question to ask is, how does all this? Paul says that Jesus Christ was crucified and rose from the dead according to the Scripture, 1 Corinthians 15.3. And then he writes, he goes, he's not talking about one or two proof texts. The whole Scripture is pointing in this direction. He's not talking about like one or two proof texts. The whole scripture is pointing in this direction. So how do these portraits of God commanding show no mercy, slaughter everything that breathes, you know, rain on hail and brimstone,

earth swallowing up people, how do those portraits of God bear witness to the self-sacrificial love of God that's revealed on Calvary? That's, I think, the hermeneutical challenge. So to answer that question, I submit we should start with the cross. In fact, I submit we should start with the cross to answer any theological question, because all the treasures of God's wisdom are found in Christ, Paul says. So why would we go anywhere else to find out what God's like? And so I argue that we should read everything through the lens of the cross. And the shortest truth thing I can say about that as it pertains to this book is this.

On the cross, what reveals God to us is not what we see on the surface. On the surface, which any believer or non-believer can see, it's ugly, it's hideous, it's grotesque. Because we know that it reflects the ugliness of the sin that Christ bears and the curse that he bears. We know that it reflects the ugliness of the sin that Christ bears and the curse that he bears. What reveals God to us is that we, by faith, look through the surface, and we behold God stepping an infinite distance, stooping an infinite distance, to step into our humanity, our sin, and our curse. And it's the condescension that is the revelation, that stooping,

that God would go this distance for us and pay this price, that's what reveals God's perfect love to us. It's not what we see on the surface. It's what we see behind. Now, if the cross reveals what God's truly like, then it reveals what God's always like. The cross isn't an exception to the way God is. It should be the exemplification of the way God always is. And so, you know, God didn't start being self-sacrificial and loving when Jesus came.

He's always been that way. This is what God's always been like. So we need to read the Bible knowing that that's what God's always been like. And this is how he reveals himself. So if all Scripture is inspired by this God, to point to this cross, shouldn't we read the Bible expecting there might be times where it's not the surface appearance that reveals what God's like, but rather it's knowing that we serve a God who scoops who steps down into our humanity enters into solidarity with our humanity and

therefore takes on a semblance that it reflects the ugliness of that humanity and that sin I think God's always been doing what he does in the cross and and and so the portrait of God saying, show no mercy, slaughter them all, that bears witness to the ugliness. That's the sin that God bears. That's not what God's like, that's what God's people are like.

Okay, so here, so, because when I was doing research on the Old Testament and stuff, there was a view that, let's just say Moses, and this is Deuteronomy 20, 16, 17. When you go into the land, save alive nothing, the breeze, slaughter them all. Right, right, right. I take that as a bit of hyperbole.

I don't think I'm making excuses or trying to whatever. I think there's textual evidence from Joshua and others that they didn't actually kill everybody, the breeze, and they still fulfilled that command. They said, as the Lord commanded, we did that. It was like, well, you didn't kill everybody. You drove them out, and you did kill a lot of people. But either way, it's still problematic. God commanding his people to kill people. Are you saying that? Copeland advocates that.

It's war bravado. And you can find other ancient texts where people are like, we utterly demolished them. We left nothing standing. And that tells you a lot about the mindset of the ancient Near East. But are you saying that God didn't actually command, that command didn't actually come from God, that they misunderstood it? Let me first just say that on that hyperbolic thing,

you've got to really wonder how much distance you're going to get with that. Copeland says that when he said they slaughtered Jericho, it was probably just a war front. They only had soldiers there, maybe an occasional prostitute. Yeah, still, yeah. The other thing is, why would God need to use war bravado? I mean, you can see these ancient Christian people doing this, like, oh, we slaughtered them all. But for God to stoop to that, it presupposes an ethic where slaughtering everybody would be a good thing if you could do it.

So you're just bragging that you did it. Would God do that? Well, the thing is that there's some texts where it's absolutely impossible to, like in Numbers 31. Yeah. There, Moses says, go out and slaughter the Midianites. Well, they bring the women and the boys back, and Moses is enraged. He says, I said slaughter everybody. Right.

But then he has a little change of heart, and he says, well, I'll tell you what. Slaughter everybody except girls who haven't slept with a man, those you can keep for yourself. Well, clearly it was a total annihilation. The same holds true for other things, like the city of Ai, where the Israelites tricked them to come out. They left the men and the children, or the women and children, back in the city. So then they went back in the city men and the children or the women and children back in the city. So then they went back in the city and burned the city while the women and children were there.

And then they slaughtered all the guys. So the hyperbolic thing, I just don't think gets you very far in terms of – And I can't answer for Paul. My motivation with the hyperbole is not to try to soften it or whatever. I'm just trying to identify that this is ancient Near East warfare rhetoric. And the Bible, I think, seems to clearly reflect warfare rhetoric because it's written in time and space. It just didn't fall out of the sky.

But sometimes they did slatter a hole. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I mean, from my reading, I mean, it seems like, yeah, God does command violence in the Old Testament. I think sometimes, like, I don't even like the term genocide. No, you wouldn't. But I get it. Like, it still is very much an ethical difficulty.

But I would say, exegetically, I'm willing to let the difficulty lie. But what would you, so how specifically when you have that quote in Deuteronomy 20, would you say God didn't actually command it, that they misunderstood it? So what I propose is that, I mean, there's a number of criteria we always use as we're trying to assess what does or does not apply. But my main criteria would be the cross. And so whatever is consistent with the character of God as revealed on the cross, that I will acknowledge as the Spirit of God breaking through the hard-heartedness of people and we're here We have here a genuine direct revelation and and many of the portraits of God in the Old Testament are very much like that And insofar as those portraits are are Christ like they contrast with everything else you find in the ancient areas

They just stand out beautifully But then insofar as as anything in any portrait of God, and see, it's not an all or nothing, it's a matter of degrees, but insofar as any portrait doesn't cohere with the character of God as revealed on the cross, or contradicts the character of God as revealed on the cross, and by the cross, I mean the cross as the summing up of all of Jesus' life and teachings.

So I'm not like playing one off the other against the other. The cross is the thematic unity of everything Jesus was about. So whatever contradicts that, that reflects the sin that God is bearing. And so I have every reason to think that God did say, I give you the promised land. That was locationally very strategic, and I think that God wanted them to get in there. I think Moses hears, and by Moses, some will think, wait, you really think Moses wrote that? I'm entering in the narrative here.

Moses hears, therefore slaughter all the people. Because that's what it meant in the ancient Near East. You don't get land. The gods never do anything for you. You've got to help the gods with it because those gods don't even exist. But to take a person's land, to inherit land, means you slaughter the inhabitants. Or you enslave them. Or you do a little of both, and that's what the Israelites did.

And so what's interesting is that you find, and this is why the book got to be so long, is that when I resolve that I'm going to trust that what Jesus, I'm going to trust God looks like Jesus, the crucified Christ, and anything that is not coherent with that, I will see that as God bearing the sin of his people. Once I make that hermeneutical move, I find all the supporting evidence. Like, I didn't notice before, but there's two passages leviticus 18 and i think exodus 22 that may be wrong but where god announces non-violent plans to get the children of israel into the promised land and get the inhabitants out he says in uh exodus i'll send the hornet ahead of you this pestilence yeah and i'll drive them up. I'm not going to do it quickly because then the land will be overrun.

I'll do it slowly so you can grow in size, and then you can gradually take over the land. What happened to those plans? And I submit to you that they went in one ear and out the other because they were just so contrary to the mindset of where people were at. Much like when Jesus, for three years, he tells them, I've got to go suffer until I get crucified. But when it happens, they're shocked because it went in one ear and out the other. Their preconception of what a Messiah was supposed to be prevented them from hearing that.

I think that's, unless God's going to lobotomize people to force them to think the truth, God has to put up with the way they think at some point. And that's where he bears their sin. The dominant language, it's actually only a few passages that actually talk explicitly about slaughtering people. The dominant language is driving them out, which, you know, when Jesus, or sorry, when God drove Adam and Eve out of the garden, he didn't kill them. He drove them out, you know? And so, I mean, maybe 95% of the passages that talk about conquering the land have language of driving them out, but you still do have a few that do say, don't leave alive anything to breathe. So again, you're saying that when that verse was recorded, you're saying that it didn't actually record the voice of God.

It was a misunderstanding of what they thought God said. What we're getting is always interpreted, and I don't see anywhere around that. You're getting it through the eyes of Moses. And it's interesting that Moses is the only one who ever gets that. Even when Joshua carries out the commands, he says, let's do it according as Moses commanded. So it all relies on, and that's typical of ancient cultures, where there's one person entrusted with delivering the word of the Lord,

but it comes through interpretation. So now we're dealing with more with kind of how scripture works, really, right? I mean, inspiration. This may lead into your other book, which I want to get to in just one second. But what about one more thing? Sure.

I'm not quite convinced, but I respect it. I'll take that. I can understand where you're coming from and hats off to you wanting, I mean, ethical, I will very much agree that ethically there's, I mean, the Old Testament is just to me, ethically messy for many, many different reasons. Treatment of women, slaves. I mean, Well, yeah, yeah. You've got all of that. Yes.

And so part of it Preston is this, is What I'm trying to do kind of is I want you, I affirm, and I think it's important to affirm, the full plenary inspiration of the Bible. Full. And I think that's absolutely central. So it's not a question of what is inspired or what's not. I think it's all inspired. What concerns me is that some folks who are appropriately offended by or don't think that God actually did those violent things in the Old Testament,

they think that that means that that's not inspired or that it's less inspired or something. And the minute you let go of the planar inspiration of the Bible, you're heading down a dangerous road. To me, it's not a question of whether it's inspired. It's a question of how we interpret it. No, that's fair. And I'm just saying that we have to interpret it through the lens of the cross.

What about the whole book of Judges, or at least the setting of Judges, is they didn't drive out everybody from the land, and therefore that was wrong. The book of Judges begins by how they failed to drive out people to land. So it's not just Joshua. It is the whole book of Judges seems to assume that, hey, look, I told you to drive them all out. You didn't do it. And now they're going to infiltrate you and they're just going to cause all kinds of sin. At the end of Judges, you have kind of the results of here's what happens when you don't drive them out of the land. You become like them. You become canonized. So how do you just, and again, we don't need to keep kicking the dead horse, but... It's well worth it.

We get a wonder, Preston, is, you know, the Israelites were surrounded by idolaters all the time. Why is it that they never had to kill them to avoid being influenced by them? In fact, even in the carrying out the conquest narrative,

sometimes they slaughter them to be free of their idolatry, but other times they don't. They make slaves out of them, or they say you can keep an attractive woman that you find. It's completely inconsistent on the whole thing. What's particularly puzzling is before they even go into the Promised Land, the Lord tells Moses it's not going to work. They're going to fall back into adultery and so why would you why would god command your people to slaughter a bunch of people to prevent a problem that you know is not going to work it's because he's already commanded the future greg he's already predetermined i forgot about that well there you go there you go so so

the way i would read judges would be more like this, and this is from a Christocentric perspective, and that is that it was the failure of the Israelites that brought the Israelites down, but the failure was that the Lord always told them that if you'll trust me, you'll never have to fight. So the very fact that they picked up swords to go into the land tells you that they were already in rebellion, and when you conquer a land violently, you're inviting more violence, and I think what you see in the book of Judges is what happens. The Israelites get in there and they're former slaves. What do they do?

They enslave people. And, and now I said, you know, not going to fight, just trust me, but they're slaughtering everybody. And I think what you see there in Judges is much what you see in Genesis four and five and six, and that's the escalation of violence. And just the coming and done things. Yeah, I know. I could see. I know.

I could see, I know we're, we're running out of time here. Um, I got a bunch of questions on Twitter. I, so I think we've covered several of these, but the most important one over and over on Twitter, people want to know,

um, who's your favorite metal band or favorite album? It varies a lot. okay. I mean, I, I've like, you know, Stradivariusadivarius and and uh amorphous and uh uh within temptation and uh you know what was that one um eden's uh eden's curse i like a lot

okay lately i've been just getting into now this is controversial okay this is controversial and and i i wouldn't recommend this for young people uh there's the line between you know the potential for anything for good is also its potential for evil and and um okay so that i for me lyrics mean nothing when i'm listening to heavy metal music it's the feel it. It's the sound. That's why Rammstein, this German metal band, is one of my favorites. It's all in German, but lyrics mean nothing. So I like Slipknot.

They're demonic. The lyrics are demonic. I grant that. And if you're not mature in Christ, you should listen to them. Because you have to put, you know, delete the negatives. Eat the apples,

spit off the seeds. But I just musically, syncopation, rawness, it's the sound. Oh, it just grabs me. I just love it. Duality. You play, right? You're a drummer, right? Do you still play in a band? On Sundays you play?

I have a band. We haven't played for about a year and a half because we had a guitar player move, and then we had a guitar player die. But, yeah, I'm in a band called Not Dead Yet, ironically, though we keep on not playing because we are dead. But we don't do metal music, but myself, I'm learning how to play it. I like the speed metal. It's awesome.

Last question. We've got to talk about your forthcoming book, Inspired Imperfection. I imagine that this new book coming out, I think it's February or so? January 7th. January 7th. Okay. Just after my birthday. If anybody wants to buy me a birthday present, buy me Greg's book.

Can you give us an over-the-pitch what this book is all about? I imagine it's somehow kind of related to your… It is related. I'm kind of taking the of related to your it is it is related i'm kind of taking the cross approach and now just applying it to to everything in the bible um and the whole the whole thing is this what motivates this two concerns one is i just mentioned the concern about folks who are cutting the cord with the full inspiration of the bible that concerns me uh i understand why they're doing it. They're doing it for historical critical reasons and whatever,

but they don't need to. And that's what I'm trying to say is that those things don't need to threaten us. The other thing I'm concerned with is what happened to me happens to a lot of kids. And that's, I come out of a, you know, evangelical background, go to the university of Minnesota. It takes one semester, less than one semester for me to ruin my faith. Cause I was told that, you know, a perfect God, as far as a perfect Bible. And if there's one error in the Bible, one semester, less than one semester for me to ruin my faith. Because I was told that, you know, a perfect God inspires a perfect Bible. And if there's one error in the Bible, one contradiction, one historical inaccuracy,

or if Adam and Eve aren't literal, then the whole Bible is a book of lies. And it didn't take very long at all for me to get convinced that. I took a class in the Bible as literature. Boom. And so I think it's so unnecessary and so tragic that a person would lose their relationship with Jesus Christ, feel they have to give up this relationship. And for me, it was very, very painful because I loved it. But my mind just, I could not, with any intellectual integrity, believe it. But it's so unnecessary to give up all that because the book of joshua isn't quite historically accurate or because of this contradiction or whatever and it's so i'm writing this my point

is that everyone's been trying to defend the inspiration of the bible despite the problems here's the way to get around the problems right minimize the problems what if the problems are part of the inspiration what if they're what if that's part of the good stuff and and i argue we start with the cross where god the one who bears all that's broken and and wrong with humanity god reveals his perfect self through one who's broken and why would we ever think that god would have a problem revealing himself through a contradiction or a sinful story or i mean jesus bears all the sin of the world right yeah and so uh and so for all the reason that the sin of the cross the ugliness of the cross is what makes it beautiful so also

the sin and the ugliness the humanness the imperfection of the bible is part of what makes it beautiful that god is able to use folks like this like us is it similar like pete ends approach the bible or is it different i mean well p, Peter Enns and I agree in terms of the historical critical reading of Scripture and the stories told from God lets God's people tell the story. What he doesn't do is that he doesn't show the positive content of these problems and the positive content of the warrior portraits of God. I think if all scripture is inspired, it all contributes somehow positively to the revelation of God.

And so to me, once I adopt a cruciform conception of God, I see God bearing the sin of his people, the way he bore our sin, the sin of the world on Calvary. And Peter hasn't yet made that move where he doesn't show how do these sub-Christ-like portraits of God actually point to the cross and all these problems. It sounds like you've deconstructed and reconstructed a coherent bibliology or whatever within plenary inspiration,

where I think Pete, I think Pete just enjoys the deconstruction part. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, in some ways you could almost see me as sort of picking up where he left off. I also do the deconstruction, but I think the reconstruction is so important. Most people need help doing that.

I've often said that it feels like me going through conservative evangelicalism seminary and Bible college and everything, that we almost began with this presupposition of what the Bible must be. And then we have all these problems. Rather than beginning with what the Bible is, with congregate development intentions and this, that, and maybe there's some myth integrated in, and maybe Job's a parable. Parables are okay.

And maybe two million people didn't come out of Egypt because that's just archaeologically impossible in the ancient Near East. Maybe there's hyperbole. If that's what the Bible is, then we're left to deal with it and form out a bibliology from that. Exactly.

And so, Preston, what we've done with the Bible is really what the disciples did with Jesus. They had a preconception of what a perfect Messiah is going to be. He's going to come down here. He's going to be perfect. He's going to keep rolling buttons. He's going to restate Israel. Hallelujah.

Well, not so much. When God shows up, all of our common sense assumptions get turned upside down. Well, the Bible comes along and we do the same thing. It must be perfect. It must be great. It must be blah, blah, blah. Right. And God always works through that.

He always surprises us that way. We never seem to learn. We want the shiny, the pizzazz, the Cadillac. Then he comes on a donkey. Greg, I've kept you over a little bit, so I just want to give a shout out to your organization, Renew, R-E-K-N-E-W.org. Rethink everything you thought you knew. Yeah. Is that just like a website with resources and stuff?

I've got all sorts of writings on there. We've got a great search engine. You can plug in anything. We have podcasts there every other day. And I've got resources like my favorite books on different topics, you know, all sorts of stuff. And your church is Woodland Hills Church, whchurch.org and your forthcoming, I mean, tons of books.

Just, you know, if you're not familiar with Greg's work, just Amazon him. Follow me on Twitter. Follow him on Twitter. Please follow me on Twitter. I want to be popular. And also in a couple months, his book will be released, Inspired Imperfection. And if you're listening and you're in Minneapolis, I'm going to be there, I think, in a couple weeks.

Are you? Well, I'm going to be there in November, but this podcast will probably be released late October, maybe early November. So I'm there the first two weeks in November. It was great seeing you here in the Twin Cities. Isn't that weird? Speaking of Providence, Greg, thanks. You're going to do your sexuality seminar? I'm doing something

at a college. Is there Northwestern College? Yep, yep, yep. And then there's an organization called, I think, Transform Minneapolis or something. Oh, yeah, yep.

Oh, good. So doing a day-long seminar and then the next week I come back to Northwestern and doing stuff. So I'm not 100% sure, but I'll be there. All right, good.

Let's get in touch when you're up here. Sounds good, man. Thanks so much for being on the, but I'll be there. All right, good. Let's get in touch when you're up here. Sounds good, man. Thanks so much for being on the show. I'll turn out some good heavy metal. All right, sounds good.

And then an open VS after that. Hey, take care, Greg. Appreciate it. God bless. Bye-bye. Thank you.