Scripture records a progressive revelation of God culminating in Christ which ends up pitting an obscure earlier understanding, with its own tradition and cultic development, against the fulness and truth of Christ. My argument (here) was that Christ bore this difference in his death. My argument below is that this development of two competing concepts of God, coming to a final conflict in Christ, is what constitutes revelation and that to miss this point is to miss the word of the cross and the nature of inspiration.
The two biblical uses of “God breathed” illustrate the point that God’s life or breath animates human-kind (Gen. 2:7) and stands behind biblical inspiration (2 Tim. 3:16) in a similar way. In both instances the human impinges upon, is allowed to act upon, the divine gift. The human bearer of the divine breath or image is capable of obscuring that image in a way that the rest of creation cannot. That is, the rest of God’s creation bears his fingerprint but it is only humans, those who directly bear his image, that are empowered to erase it. They might erase the image within themselves as individuals, corporately as part of societies, or as part of their religion. This is brought home most starkly by the cross in the one who was “the exact representation of his nature” (Heb. 1:3) who was tortured to death in an attempted annihilation. I presume that there is no divine breath that is not marked by this deadly human impetus to erasure. If the person of Christ, God incarnate, is acted upon by evil men, how can there be any word that does not bear the mark of this encounter. If the God breathed revelation in Christ bears the human attempt at erasure (murder, violence, deicide) in his flesh, is Scripture miraculously protected where the Word was not?
There are occasions, such as when his hometown synagogue tried to assassinate him, that Jesus “passed through their midst” (Lk. 4:30) unharmed. He had the ability to escape, but we cannot see how he did it and the mode of his passing is such that it leaves no trace. He might have carried out his entire ministry, passing through their midst and “going on His way” so that he slips through their hands and minds. But the implication is that his ministry and teaching would have passed, as he did on this occasion, undetected through their midst. Apparently, a word that is untouched by human hands will also not touch upon the human mind. The revelation occurs when they get their hands on him. The height of revelation occurs when humanity acts upon him and shapes the Word to the contours of the cross. Far from the cross silencing or erasing revelation, the Gospel message is this “word of the cross.” But the cross is revelation because the message pertains to what they would do to him. Their murderous intent is the condition that is exposed as what always acts upon revelation but it is only in Christ that the Word exposes and defeats these conditions.
We might call the cross an accommodation of the message to those who have received it, and incarnation certainly indicates God willingly submitted himself to the human condition, but the cross ends the shadowy form of revelation which preceded it, as Hebrews describes it. Perhaps as Novation put it (c. 200-258), God has allowed himself to be fitted to a “mediocre” state of belief so that in Israel he was understood “not as God was but as the people were able to understand.” It is not, Novatian concluded, a problem with God but with human limitations: “God, therefore, is not mediocre, but the people’s understanding is mediocre; God is not limited, but the intellectual capacity of the people’s mind is limited.”[1] Perhaps we could agree with Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329-390), that God allowed aspects of fallen understanding to get mixed in with his self-revelation, as they could not have otherwise received it. Like a wise physician he blended flavorful juice with the nasty-tasting medicine so they could stomach it. As they were able to endure more, he gradually peeled away their fallen beliefs so as to reveal more and more truth about himself. As Gregory notes, God first “cut off the idol” though he “left the sacrifices,” and then we learn in the latter prophets that he doesn’t approve of animal sacrifices. He allowed for sacrifices and even stooped to a level of spiritual immaturity which pictures him as enjoying the great smell (Gen. 8: 21; Exod. 29: 18, 25; Lev. 1: 9, 13; 2: 9; 4: 31) but which he clearly reveals he never enjoyed or wanted (Psalm 50:8; Hosea 6:6; Psalm 51:16; Psalm 40:6–8; Isaiah 1:11–31; Jeremiah 7:21–23; Hebrews 10:4–10).[2] In Christ, while there is still a form of subordination to the human condition, there is a revelation of the whole truth without the former admixture or impurity.
With Christ, the accommodation has given way to conflict between God and Israel’s conception of God. While God in Christ is addressing the human understanding, he is also challenging it as it has never before been challenged. Now God is commanding all men everywhere to repent, as he is finished with overlooking the times of ignorance. The cross marks the contradiction and difference with this former time as it is now being challenged. It is a challenge to every aspect of human understanding. It pits the human power of death against the divine power of life and it pits a human conception of God against God incarnate. Jesus will die because of the threat he poses to the Jewish Temple, the Jewish Nation, the Jewish religion, and the Jewish conception of God. And of course, the Jews are simply the best of humankind, so that Roman, Babylonian, American, or the universal is represented in what is Jewish.
The cross, then, reveals divine communication in an odd sort of dialogue, a reciprocal give-and-take, in which human agency is given free reign and Christ is willing to bear this sin. The sin, in this instance, is a form of thought, a state of mind, a belief system, or simply the symbolic order in which meaning is attached to violence and death. The violent symbolic order and religion (the Jewish religion which is the prototype of human religion) conceives of God in its own image, so that the worship of this God requires sacrifice and it results in killing God in the flesh.
This misrecognition of God is one that Israel’s Scriptures describes as slowly evolving. God has accommodated their desire for a king, their desire for polygamy and divorce, their desire for sacrifice, and even their desire to take the promised land violently. Indicators are that he planned for a slow movement in which he would remove the population by angel power (Ex. 33:2), by his own divine means (Ex. 34:11; Lev. 18:24), or by a gradual expansion of borders (Ex. 34:24). The land itself would spew out its inhabitants due to their own moral wickedness (Lev. 18:25) but also due to a hornet infestation (Ex. 23:28). But for God’s nonviolent means to be realized, patience would be required: “I will not drive them out before you in a single year, that the land may not become desolate and the beasts of the field become too numerous for you. I will drive them out before you little by little, until you become fruitful and take possession of the land” (Ex. 23:29-30). The picture is of a gradual migration, in which one people moves off the land while another occupies it.
Throughout Israel’s Scriptures there is a tension between God’s original ideal and the actual execution of the plan. It is not always clear that God has accommodated as much as he has been made to accommodate. For example, there is a clear record of his warning against having a king and the curses that will be bound to follow. Nonetheless, he accommodated their desire for a warrior king and then succumbed to their notion of a warrior God. All of these accommodations are codified into the law, so that what was “allowed” becomes what was legal. But contained in Israel’s Scriptures is also the evidence of God’s true desire. Yahweh concludes, you were mistaken: “you thought I was just like you” (Ps 50: 21). The end result is that they do not know or recognize God: “An ox knows its owner, And a donkey its master’s manger, But Israel does not know, My people do not understand” (Is. 1:3).
Would it be too much to suggest Israel made a mistake fostered by their religion and recorded and challenged by their Scriptures? Though, modern conservatives believe the Bible is a progressive revelation and even a revelation which passed through human vessels, it imagines this involves no errors or misconceptions (that it was inerrant). To save the Bible from error the trade-off is an illogical flattening out into something worse than Novatian’s mediocrity. Without the possibility for the sort of critique, which the Bible allows itself, no distinction can be made within the various prophetic traditions and portrayals of God. The result is to ignore the counter-prophets who maintain God never desired key elements codified in the Law, which cumulatively serve to misrepresent him. In order to accommodate the notion of an inerrant Bible, rather than the Bible accommodating human failing, the trade-off is to fit belief in a violent God to the person and work of Christ. Thus, doctrines like penal substitution or divine satisfaction not only hold that Christ satisfies God’s need for violence (to restore his honor or to assuage his anger), but historically mark the reshaping of atonement to fit Constantinian nationalism and the just war tradition, in which God is turned into something like a tribal deity.
As Jeremiah describes the false prophets and priests, “They have healed the brokenness of My people superficially, Saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ But there is no peace” (Jer. 6:14). This false peace is promoted by the prophets who imagine God’s blessing is achieved through wars for national interest and they inaugurate and sanctify a nationalism which goes on into the Maccabees and to the various parties which challenged Jesus. The Sadducees would collaborate, the Zealots would rebel, the priests and Pharisees would appease, but they agree upon the need for the violent sacrifice of Jesus that the nation might survive. Jesus refusal to wage war for national independence and his revolutionary non-violent peace, in turn succumbs in large measure, in Constantinianism to the lie which put him on the cross.
Between the Edict of Milan (C. E. 313) which established toleration for Christianity within the Roman Empire and Augustine’s master work, The City of God (circa 410), which argues that Christianity is responsible for Rome’s success, the church became identified with the Holy Roman Empire. No longer is Jesus teaching conjoined, as it had been for three centuries, with the obedient nonviolent, anti-sacrificial, line of the true prophets but it is made to serve national interests through cultic means (Jesus as one more sacrifice) which, according to the true prophets, had corrupted Israel’s religion. As John Howard Yoder puts it, “The church does not preach ethics, judgment, repentance, separation from the world; it dispenses sacraments and holds society together.”[3] It is no longer a matter of discerning the will of God in a corrupt society, as now all of society is Christian (i.e., all are baptized) and the most that one need be concerned with is personal sin and attaining the lesser evil. Augustine imagined the Roman church was the millennial kingdom and that the conquest of the world had been achieved and all that was left was a clean-up campaign. As a result, the Roman state as God’s agent in the war on evil is set (by the beginning of the new millennium in 1096, the first crusade), not to preserve peace (the purpose of kings, I Tim. 2), but to wage war for faith and Empire against the heathens.[4]
Just as Jesus enemies would have annihilated him on the cross, the symbol of the cross in the Crusades, in The Thirty Years’ War and in the multiple “Christian” state wars, comes to represent the demonic force which killed him rather than his defeat of this power of death. Rather than the cross depicting God’s willingness to bear violence, it is now justification for the state to pronounce God-like judgments on its enemies. The state can now enact its own hell in exterminating all it deems to be evil. As a result, we continually hover on the brink of world annihilation as a theologically inspired nationalism, a reenactment of Jewish nationalism, mistakes the Father of Christ for the father of the nation state.
Is there the possibility that this violent image of God is mistaken and we know that it is mistaken due to the Word of the cross? Isn’t the message of the cross precisely the Word encountering and overcoming this death dealing human condition?
[1] Novatian, De Trinitate, 6, cited in Gregory Boyd, Cross Vision (Kindle Location 1563). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.
[2] Gregory of Nazianzus, “Fifth Oration: On the Holy Spirit,” in Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, trans. P. Schaff and H. Wace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, n.d.), 326. Cited from Boyd, (Kindle Locations 1564-1565).
[3] John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (Kindle Locations 3312-3317). Herald Pr. Kindle Edition.
[4] Yoder, (Kindle Locations 3322-3326)
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