More on Greg Boyd’s Magnum Opus: The Crucifixion of the Warrior God

Back in September 2016, I noted that Greg Boyd was about to publish a two-volume work, The Crucifixion of the Warrior God. I had assumed this was going to be a retitled version of his promised The Myth of the Blueprint; but judging by the publicity that’s now out (see here and here), it seems that Crucifixion is more about divine violence in the Old Testament and its theological reinterpretation through the lens of the cross than it is about divine providence and open and classical theism. (Indeed, open theism doesn’t appear as a listing in the index.) Here’s a quotation which appears to give a flavour of what to expect from Crucifixion, a quotation taken from p. xxxv of the introduction that’s freely available here:

I will argue that because God supremely values authentic agape-love relationships, and because he does not want to dehumanize people, he relies on influential rather than coercive power to accomplish his purposes. For this reason, I submit, God had to accommodate his self-revelation to the spiritual state and cultural conditioning of his people in the ages leading up to Christ. Only gradually could God change people’s hearts and minds so that they could receive more and more truth about his true character and about his ideal will for them. And whenever God’s people have come to understand more about his true character and will, they have always been able to look back and find divinely intended meanings in earlier writings that the original authors could not have perceived.

I can detect open theist presuppositions in this quotation, but Crucifixion seems essentially to be a thesis about the theological interpretation of Scripture with a focus on the cross. Thus it looks like publication of The Myth of the Blueprint (or something like it) is still far off into the future—which, if you’re an open theist, God may or may not know, anyway.