Misunderstanding God: Greg Boyd’s non-evangelical approach to spiritual warfare
In “What’s War? The Existential Question of Spiritual Warfare,” pastor Matt Walker introduced the subject of spiritual warfare. In today’s piece he describes an approach to the topic which all Christians ought to reject. We offer it today as something of a respite to the “all virus all the time” coverage we are getting on the internet these days and to continue discussion about an important but overlooked topic. — Ed.
Greg Boyd’s approach to spiritual warfare is based on his unique (read non-biblical) solution to the problem of evil. Boyd is pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. After graduating with a degree in philosophy from the University of Minnesota, he went to seminary at Yale Divinity School and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University. His books on spiritual warfare include Crucifixion of the Warrior God, God at War, and Satan and the Problem of Evil. Though Boyd argues strongly in favor of spiritual warfare, his reason for doing so is because he believes that God does not know, and by consequence does not control, the future. This position is called open theism. In Boyd’s book God of the Possible, he rejects classical theism’s position on God’s omniscience out of hand. He refers to the common evangelical view of God’s sovereignty as a “providential blueprint worldview.” He argues when evil people do evil things, it is nonsensical to seek a divine “why” to explain the reasons behind their actions.
In God at War, Boyd tells the story of a little Jewish girl named Zosia whose family lived in Warsaw, Poland during the Nazi occupation of World War Two. When a group of soldiers noticed Zosia standing on a street corner in Warsaw, they grabbed up the girl and tortured and murdered her in front of her mother. As terrible as the story is, Boyd uses it as an example of millions of children butchered by evil people throughout the centuries. He quotes J.B. Russell: “The modern experience of evil is the reek of burning children. Every honest view of reality must confront the immediate, personal, physical reality of the burning child.”1 Boyd bounces off this story to question God’s sovereignty over the world.
If God is all-loving and perfectly good, he must want to protect Zosia. And if God exercises total control over the world, he must be able to protect Zosia. Yet Zosia suffers an unspeakable ordeal, ending in murder. This makes no sense and constitutes, in its starkest form, the intellectual problem of evil.2
At this point, Boyd asks:
How can we intellectually and morally believe that an altogether loving God is altogether sovereign over the world when the world he is supposedly meticulously controlling is in so many ways an obvious abomination?
Boyd even wonders if a church in Warsaw might have been singing Lina Sandell-Berg’s hymn “Day by Day.” He sarcastically speculates that maybe the sounds of the congregation singing “the protection of His child and treasure is a charge that on himself He laid” drowned out Zosia’s screams from down the street.
Boyd’s solution for this problem is to conclude that God would control the future if He could. Unfortunately, He does not know what is going to happen all the time. Open theism argues:
… because agents are free, the future includes possibilities (what agents may and may not choose to do). Since God’s knowledge is perfect, open theists hold that God knows the future partly as a realm of possibilities. This view contrasts with classical theism that has usually held that God knows the future exclusively as a domain of settled facts.3
Boyd attempts to explain that he does not deny God’s omniscience for what is knowable, only that God cannot know what is unknowable, namely, the future.
The debate is not about the scope and perfection of Gods’ knowledge, for both open theists and classical theists affirm God’s omniscience. God always knows everything. The debate, rather, is about the content of the reality God perfectly knows.
This view allows Boyd to conclude that the torture and murder of children like Zosia happens because God only knows the future as a collection of possibilities and is unable to prevent such atrocities from occurring. Thus, Boyd’s entire approach to spiritual warfare, what he labels christus victor, depends on his position of open theism. Man is caught in the middle of the battle between God and Satan and God is powerless to stop all the suffering that war creates. The spiritual bullets fly across the battlefield between the forces of good and evil. Unfortunately, sometimes people get in the way. Zosia was one of those casualties. She died in unspeakable pain because God could not prevent it from happening. He watched it occur, was aware that it might occur, but was unaware that it would occur until it did. In Boyd’s mind, this absolves God of any responsibility in Zosia’s death. What is really does is diminish the glory of God in spiritual warfare. It limits God’s foreknowledge into a series of possible events, not actual ones. This is a non-evangelical approach to spiritual warfare and should be rejected as not biblical.
In the next installment, I will address liberal theologian Walter Wink’s even wackier non-evangelical approach to spiritual warfare.
Matthew Walker (PhD, Piedmont International University) is pastor of College Park Baptist Church, Cary, North Carolina and adjunct professor at Maranatha Baptist University and Seminary.
- Greg Boyd in God at War, 34, quoting J. B. Russell in The Prince of Darkness, 256. [↩]
- Greg Boyd, God at War, 35. [↩]
- Greg Boyd, https://reknew.org/2019/06/how-people-misunderstand-open-theism/ [↩]