Greg Boyd’s warfare theology part 6–how it all fits together

Last updated on: April 14, 2015 at 8:18 pm by Edwin Woodruff Tait

Greg Boyd’s warfare theology part 6–how it all fits together 2015-04-14T20:18:00-05:00 Edwin Woodruff Tait

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Boyd’s “warfare theology” is a comprehensive account of how God relates to the world in providence and salvation, from creation to the final consummation. Having looked at parts of this theology over the previous several posts, we’re now in a position to examine how it all comes together. And in doing so, I want to highlight several parts of Boyd’s theology that don’t come under the previous headings, particularly his eschatology (which is one of my favorite parts of his work).

Boyd’s fundamental starting point is that God respects creaturely freedom. Creation, for Boyd, involves God giving creatures a space in which to exercise a certain degree of autonomy. It is central to freedom, as Boyd sees it, that this decision be irrevocable. God can’t say “sorry, you are messing up and so I will step in and take away your freedom.” At the same time, freedom has a limit–eventually the created being will have worked out the potential for good and evil inherent in its creation, and will face judgment for how it has used the power God gave it. This power affects not only the creature itself but other beings, to a greater and lesser extent depending on the power of the being in question (very great in the case of Satan, for instance).

Boyd supports this high valuation of creaturely freedom by appealing to quantum mechanics and chaos theory. I’m not in a position to evaluate this part of his work scientifically, or even philosophically. But for Boyd, order emerges out of the chaos of myriad beings (or even just quantum particles) interacting with each other. God is in “control” in the sense that God rides the wave of created freedom, guiding it without ever determining the actions of individuals. God moves creation infallibly toward the final goal of union with Himself in peace and love, but God shows his sovereignty precisely by accomplishing this goal through (rather than against) the freedom of His creatures.

God’s providence, then, takes the form of responding to the free actions of created beings, sometimes in anger and sorrow, but always with an ultimate purpose of mercy and redemption. Boyd suggests that there have been moments in the history of the universe when creation became so messed up that God had to create the opportunity for a new start through a cataclysmic act of judgment. Boyd speculates that the destruction of the dinosaurs and the creation of the world described in Genesis 1 (recall his interest in the “gap theory”) was one such moment. Another, more clearly recorded in Scripture, would be the Flood. God’s “regret that he made humanity,” while genuine, is not the final word. God always finds a way to respond graciously to the destructive behavior of creation, setting the stage for a new act in the drama of created freedom.

Eventually, however, the misuse of freedom will end. Reality will catch up to those who have tried in vain to create a reality of their own. Following C. S. Lewis and Jerry Walls, Boyd understands hell as a self-imposed punishment, a prison to which people condemn themselves. But following on some hints in Lewis (quite differently from Walls), Boyd suggests that this false reality is, in fact, a kind of nothingness. I don’t see this as outright annihilationism, but Boyd certainly approaches annihilationism (and I understand that he may have embraced it more explicitly in recent years). He uses the concept of relativity, again, to suggest that the damned lock themselves into a “now” that is somehow separated from God’s “now” and thus left behind. Hence, from the standpoint of God and the redeemed, they no longer exist. (I may be getting this part wrong–it was pretty complex and my slow progress on these blogs has meant that it’s now quite a long time ago that I read the book.)

Boyd’s entire theology, then, is structured around a progression from an initial good creation rooted in the gift of freedom to a final consummation in which those who have insisted on misusing their freedom will be locked into the false reality they have created, and those who have opened themselves to God’s love will rejoice with God in a world from which evil has been banished. His open theism and “warfare theology” are key parts of this vision, but it’s important to understand them in their broader context within the compelling drama of salvation that Boyd outlines in these two books. In my final blog post in this series (yes, the series will finally end with the perfect number of seven), I will summarize my own reactions to Boyd’s theology as found in God at War and Satan and the Problem of Evil.

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March 15, 2015

Greg Boyd's warfare theology part 5--open theism

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