Allow me to differ with Michael Horton, then agree with him, and then differ again. I am referring to this article. Here, in the first place, is the key place of difference. “If the church is not to be identified with culture, is it necessarily a counterculture? If Christians as well as non-Christians participate in …
Low Empire
One of the things we have to get straight is the right relationship of the Church to various manifestations of earthly civil government. And in our setting, in our time, we have to come to grips with American hegemony in the world. That fact is a given — how shall we respond to it? One …
Imitation of Christ as a Nose of Wax
In the last chapter of the book, Boyd’s pacifism comes out in full force, and he argues for it by answering the most common questions he receives whenever he addresses the themes of this book. Although many things could be said about all this, I want to limit myself to two. First, the way Boyd …
The Dry Hole of Secular Leftism
As we continue our way through Greg Boyd’s The Myth of a Christian Nation, the internal tensions and incoherencies continue to mount. The longer he goes, the more specific he must become, and as he becomes more specific he sees contradictions where there are none, and suggests contradictory sentiments to us, even in the same …
Judgmental Non-Judgmentalism
In the next chapter, Boyd’s tendency to hydroplane on various evangelical cliches catches up with him. His central argument is that evangelical Christians have the beam in their eye, and hence are in no position to be “moral guardians” for the rest of the country. There’s a lot to that argument, actually, but the problem …
Knocking Down Walls for No Reason
I do not mean this as a backhanded slap at all. In his next chapter, “The Myth of a Christian Nation,” Boyd says many worthwhile and important things. He talks about the importance of prayer as social activism, and he emphasizes rightly that a power under approach can be used by God to accomplish great …
The Bronzed Nerve
Chapter Five is “Taking America Back for God,” and Boyd begins by describing a worship service that he attended around the time of the First Gulf War, one that sounds every bit as appalling as Boyd describes. “The video closed with a scene of a silhouette of three crosses on a hill with an American …
Smiting the Saracen
My engagement with Boyd’s next chapter — “From Resident Aliens to Conquering Warlords” — rests on the criticisms offered thus far, and consists of two basic points. In this chapter, Boyd’s commitment to “Christianity” in Leithart’s sense becomes highly visible. His criticism of the compromise the Church has fallen into consists of his rejection of …
Whacking the Nations With Nerf Rods
Boyd’s third chapter is on “Keeping the Kingdom Holy.” The wrong note is struck right at the beginning with a quotation from Bonhoeffer, who says “Jesus concerns Himself hardly at all with the solution to worldly problems . . .” (p. 51). Hardly at all? How could a mission to save the world not involve …
Still Shunning the Centurions
In his second chapter, Boyd discusses the Kingdom of the Cross, setting it in stark contrast to the Kingdom of the Sword, which he addressed in the first chapter. If I were to critique his argument in a phrase, it would be with the phrase false alternatives. Quoting Rosser and Yoder, Boyd says that the …