In the previous post, I argued that we ought to allow the incarnate and crucified Christ to redefine God for us rather than assume we know God ahead of time and then attempt to superimpose this understanding of God onto Christ. When we do this, I’ve argued, we arrive at the understanding that the essence of God— viz. what makes God God—is his unsurpassable, self-sacrificial, love. With Kreeft, I submit that all other attributes of God should be understood as expressions of this love, perceived and/or experienced from different angles.
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As we also noted in the previous post, this conception of God is foolish and scandalous to many. And this, I believe, is why the scandal of the cross has often been minimized in the church’s theological tradition by being blended with pre-understandings of what God is like. ... The crucified Christ was thus embraced as revealing God’s loving and merciful side, but the portraits of God (say) sending the flood, commanding the extermination of the Canaanites or destroying Sodom and Gomorrah were said to reveal God’s “wrathful” side. As a result, we’ve often been given a rather schizophrenic portrait of God: Jesus is loving, but the Father is terrifying.
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Against this composite portrait of God, I have argued that the revelation of Jesus on the cross should be understood as culminating and superseding all previous revelations. All previous revelations should be interpreted through the cross rather than placed alongside the cross. This means that we should never envision a non-Christlike, “dark” aspect of God lurking behind the revelation of God on the cross, such as Luther did. The self-sacrificial love of God revealed on the cross rather defines God down to his very essence.
... excerpted from a post by Pastor Greg Boyd. Suggest you read the whole post
here.
