Boyd's Scripture

 I read Greg Boyd's book,  “Inspired Imperfection.” 

Boyd believes in the Divine Inspiration of Scripture, but he believes it has a multitude of errors in it. 

This came about after he had a crisis of faith, not being able to refute an evolutionary professor of his, after which, for a time, he abandoned his faith.

He eventually came back to the faith, but he concluded that Scripture had a multitude of errors. Yet he still believed in Divine inspiration of the Scriptures.

This can be explained by his accommodation view, that God accommodated all that error, historically and theologically as a kind of consequence of man's sinfulness. And this all fits more specifically with his "cruciform" view of Scripture, that all scripture points to the cross of Christ, the ultimate consequence of man's sinfulness.

Boyd's divine accommodation and cruciform theory understands inspiration of scripture to include exaggeration and lies and myths about historical events and requirements of the law that were Ancient Near East [ANE] in practice but not God's requirements. All the undesirable, offensive, and unexplainable things, and so-called multitude of errors of the OT were accommodations as consequences of man's sinfulness, and these all foreshadowed the ultimate consequence of sinfulness of the future rejection of Christ by crucifixion. God would forgive despite this. This is the love of God in all its fullness of loving your enemy.

This view allows him to explain everything he doesn't like or struggles with. The divine accommodation theory and the cruciform model. 

Boyd's approach to Scripture is all about God accommodating man's sinfulness and the consequences of that, and through that comes a view of the cross that is not penal substitution but the consequence of man's sinfulness, but God suffers that consequence and then offers forgiveness. 

I believe he has it backwards about God accommodating the Ancient Near East's influences being accommodated. The ANE were corrupted views about God and history, and the revelation the Hebrews had was accurate. They had an accurate worship and approach to God. God defined that approach--not merely accommodating an incorrect view of that approach. 

Also, the genocide of Canaanites was not due to the hate of the Hebrews but divine judgment on those nations. 

The OT said to love your neighbor and the strangers among them, but those genocides were divine judgment. 

We are to love our enemies, but the circumstances are not always the same. Some enemies are only philosophically enemies--they disagree with you, but they are not physical enemies as in someone who is trying to kill you.  You love them if you can but there can be circumstances when you have to physically fight back and maybe kill them. 

God uses government to enforce law and order and sometimes to defeat other nations. It is clear in the OT that God used nations to judge other nations, just like he called Nebuchadnezzar his servant. Neb was used to judge Israel and take her captive. 

Boyd can explain everything objectionable in the OT as God accommodating man's sinfulness from animal sacrifices to ethnic cleansing to exaggerated accounts and all this accommodating pointing to Jesus suffering at the hands of sinful man as a consequence of their sinfulness in crucifixion. 

Why would God intentionally mislead us or give us inaccurate accounts and laws that he hates when he could have given us the true account and laws? 

Boyd, as a new Christian,  thought he could take on the evolutionists and higher critics, but he lost. He took their word as truth and suffered shipwreck in his faith. He thought he could turn the world upside down, but he couldn't.   The result was to come up with a view of scripture that he didn't have to defend before the atheists and higher critics for anything that seemed historically difficult to substantiate or morally objectionable.