Divine aikido (cross vision)

(fyi - i have no idea what sankyo is)

I'm stepping back a bit here - to a past book. I don't know what made me think of this, but in Chapter 9 of Greg Boyd's 'Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence,' he discusses some of the more popular atonement theories and gives his take. I'm not going to go into much detail, but I was intrigued by this one aspect.

Boyd refers to the Japanese art of self-defense known as 'Aikido,' which utilizes the principle of nonresistance to cause an opponent's own momentum to work against themselves. He likens this to how God deals with evil in the world.

On p. 139 Boyd writes:

"Prior to the eleventh century, most Christians believed that Jesus died not to free us from the Father's wrath, but to free us from Satan's wrath. This is known as the Christus Victor view of the atonement, and in contrast to the penal substitutionary view, this view doesn't implicate God in any violence.

The truth is that, according to the NT, God the Father didn't need to engage in any violence to have Jesus suffer in our place. Jesus certainly suffered a lot of violence, but every bit of it was carried out by wicked humans who were influenced by Satan and other rebel powers.

The only thing God the Father did when Jesus suffered the judgment that we deserved was withdraw his protection to allow other agents who were "bent on destruction" (Isa 51:13) to do what they wanted to do to Jesus.

This is important in discerning violence in Scripture. It is not God who is violent, and therefore I find it hard to see God ever using violence - for redemptive purposes or otherwise!

On p. 143 Boyd states:

The cross not only reveals that God judges sin by turning people over to the consequences of their sin; it also reveals that this is how God defeats evil. He uses what I call an Aikido-style of judgment. Aikido is a nonviolent school of martial arts in which practitioners never respond to aggressors by using their own aggressive force. Instead they outsmart their opponents by using techniques that turn every aggressive action back on the aggressor. Aggressors thus end up punishing themselves.

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It's been awhile since I read the chapter, and I'm not very good at summarizing all this, but I do feel this an important concept in understanding the difference between our loving God, and the contemporary view many have today of a violent God. It is Satan who prefers violence. And God used Satan's bent to bring victory at the cross...

"God wisely used the evil of Satan's loveless heart and inability to understand love to get him to orchestrate the destruction of his own evil kingdom. In other words, God used evil to vanquish evil!"

Amen.