Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 163:649 (Jan 2006)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Matthew S. DeMoss

BSac 163:649 (January-March 2006) p. 115

Book Reviews

By The Faculty of Dallas Theological Seminary

Matthew S. DeMoss

Is God to Blame? Beyond Pat Answers to the Problem of Suffering. By Gregory A. Boyd. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003. 211 pp. $13.00.

Boyd is pastor of Woodland Hills Church near St. Paul, Minnesota. With its low cost and easy reading style this book is aimed at the Christian laity and purports to provide Christians with a proper understanding of God’s role in relation to evil and suffering in His creation. As an open-theology proponent Boyd argues that God’s role is limited to knowledge of the present. Lay persons will not find the discussions of foreknowledge burdensome. However, this is both a strength and weakness of the work, as issues raised by questions of foreknowledge permeate the text and yet are not treated in depth.

From the outset Boyd says that part of the core of human suffering is that people tend to usurp God’s role in understanding good and evil. “We live by our knowledge of good and evil rather than by trusting our loving God” (p. 25, italics his). Boyd then argues that God is present in the world as a warrior struggling to fight against the sin unleashed on His creation by rebellious humanity as epitomized in the Crucifixion (p. 35). This view is placed in contrast to a “blueprint” view in which all that occurs is seen as part of a meticulously laid plan. While Boyd briefly acknowledges that there are “softer” views of God’s involvement, he simply merges all his intellectual opponents into the camp of the strong “blueprint” view. While Boyd repeatedly cautions his readers not to judge the actions of God by human standards of right and wrong, he himself does so both implicitly and explicitly when attacking the “blueprint” model of omniscience. In that model, Boyd says, an all-knowing God arranged every event of life, including terrorism, murder, and rape, as “part of God’s wise and just good plan” (p. 48). Seemingly there is no room in Boyd’s theology for a God who raised up the Chaldeans (Hab. 1).

Boyd often opens an issue with more than one expressed viewpoint and then quickly focuses on the most extreme and emotionally charged perspective or example from which to argue his case. While Christians must face the horrors in the world as questions of theodicy, this rhetorical strategy of persuasion through emotional appeals does disservice to the reader by masking the complexities of some issues behind seemingly “obvious” answers that will deflect apparent guilt for horrible suffering away from God.

Boyd does recognize that in his view of God’s limited omniscience questions of “why...