First, as an evangelical Christian Boyd finds that he cannot simply dismiss the narratives of violence attributed to God (or to God’s command) as historically untrue (that is, never happened). Throughout this work he takes the whole Bible seriously without taking all of it literally. While he does not embrace or make use of Origen’s allegorical method of interpretation (which he describes in depth and detail), he finds ways to embrace many Old Testament narratives of God’s violence as both historical and yet not literally true.
Bracketing other problems with Boyd's interpretation, isn't open theist hermeneutics committed to literal interpretation–in contrast to viewing various passages anthropomorphically (a la classical theism)? Isn't his approach to the "texts of terror" diametrically opposed to the general open theist hermeneutic regarding divine surprise, regret, changing his mind, asking non-rhetorical questions, testing people to learn what they will do?
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