Boyd, Gregory A. 1957-

PERSONAL:

Born June 2, 1957, in Cleveland, OH; married; wife's name Shelley; children: four. Education: University of Minnesota, B.A. (philosophy), 1979; Yale University Divinity School, M.Div., 1982; Princeton Theological Seminary, Ph.D., 1988.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Vadnais Heights, MN. Office—Christus Victor Ministries, P.O. Box 40541, St. Paul, MN 55104. E-mail—boygre@bethel.edu.

CAREER:

Educator and author. Garden City Christian Church, Garden City, MN, interim pastor, 1988-89; First Baptist Church, White Bear Lake, MN, interim pastor, 1990-91; Crossroads Covenant Church, Forest Lake, MN, interim pastor, 1991-92; Church of the Open Door, Robbinsdale, MN, teaching instructor, 1989-92, interim pastor, 1992; Woodland Hills Church, St. Paul, MN, senior pastor, 1992—; Bethel College, St. Paul, professor of theology, 1986-2002. Speaker at church, para-church, and college-related functions; has appeared on radio and television programs.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Sears-Roebuck Foundation Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership Award, 1992; CBA Golden Book Award, 1995, for Letters from a Skeptic; People's Choice Award, Christianity Today, 1996, for Cynic, Sage or Son of God? Recovering the Real Jesus in an Age of Revisionist Replies.

WRITINGS:

Oneness: Pentecostals and the Trinity, Baker Book House (Grand Rapids, MI), 1992.

Trinity and Process: The a priori Construction of a Trinitarian Metaphysic from a Critical Evaluation of Hartshorne's Process Theism, Peter Lang Publishers (New York, NY), 1992.

Letters from a Skeptic: A Son Wrestles with His Father's Questions about Christianity, Victor Books (Wheaton, IL), 1994.

Cynic, Sage or Son of God? Recovering the Real Jesus in an Age of Revisionist Replies, Victor Books (Wheaton, IL), 1995.

Jesus under Siege, Victor Books (Wheaton, IL), 1995.

God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict (volume I of "Satan and Evil" series), InterVarsity Press (Downers Grove, IL), 1997.

The God of the Possible: Divine Foreknowledge and the Openness of the Future, Baker Book House (Grand Rapids, MI), 2000.

(With Paul Eddy) Evangelical Options: An Exploration of Issues in Theology, Baker Book House (Grand Rapids, MI), 2001.

Letters from a Skeptic Study Guide, Chariot Books, 2001.

Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Warfare Theodicy (volume II of "Satan and Evil" series), InterVarsity Press (Downers Grove, IL), 2001.

The Myth of the Blueprint: Examining the Augustinian Revolution in the Theology of the Early Church (volume III of "Satan and Evil" series), InterVarsity Press (Downers Grove, IL), 2002.

(With Paul Rhodes Eddy) Across the Spectrum: Understanding Issues in Evangelical Theology, Baker Academic (Grand Rapids, MI), 2002.

Is God to Blame? Moving beyond Pat Answers to the Problem of Evil, InterVarsity Press (Downers Grove, IL), 2003.

Seeing Is Believing: Experience Jesus through Imaginative Prayer, Baker Books (Grand Rapids, MI), 2004.

Repenting of Religion: Turning from Judgment to the Love of God, Baker Books (Grand Rapids, MI), 2004.

(With Al Larson) Escaping the Matrix: Setting Your Mind Free to Experience Real Life in Christ, Baker Books (Grand Rapids, MI), 2005.

The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church, Zondervan (Grand Rapids, MI), 2005.

(With Paul Rhodes Eddy) The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition, Baker Academic (Grand Rapids, MI), 2007.

(With Paul Rhodes Eddy) Lord or Legend? Wrestling with the Jesus Dilemma, Baker (Grand Rapids, MI), 2007.

Contributor to magazines and journals, including Christian Research Journal, Christian Scholars Review, Process Trinitarianism, Priscilla Papers, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, and UltraRunning. Also author of professional papers, presentations, and published debates. Contributing scholar, The Quest Study Bible, Zondervan, 1994.

SIDELIGHTS:

Gregory A. Boyd, senior pastor at the Woodland Hills Church, an evangelical institution in St. Paul, Minnesota, is the author of many books that embrace principles of Christian theology and activism. A former atheist, Boyd earned advanced degrees in theology from Yale and Princeton in the 1980s and has since become well-known throughout the world for his strong—and controversial—positions on Christian responsibilities. His views, declared a biography on his home page, www.gregboyd.org, "have been highly controversial in evangelical circles but have had a transforming impact on countless lives."

In Repenting of Religion: Turning from Judgment to the Love of God, Boyd explains his position on the modern problem of self-righteousness: the concept that Christian people, as a group, are innately ethically superior to all other groups, and that this gives them the moral authority to judge others. "Christians who judge others are, in effect, eating forbidden fruit," explained a Publishers Weekly commentator, "labeling people as good or evil in exchange for a tainted boost of spiritual energy." In Boyd's view, "religion is all about ‘getting life from the rightness of our behavior,’ a fatally delusive sense of self-satisfaction sustained by perpetually judging others and finding them wanting," explained John Wilson in Christianity Today. "Such judgment, Boyd argues—based on his Bonhoeffer-influenced reading of Genesis—is in fact the primal sin from which all other sins derive."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Christianity Today, May 1, 2004, "Pictures of God's Love," p. 68; February 1, 2005, John Wilson, "All You Need Is Unconditional Love: A Judgemental Assessment of Judgementalism Is, Predictably, Full of Contradictions," p. 87.

Publishers Weekly, February 23, 2004, review of Seeing Is Believing: Experience Jesus through Imaginative Prayer, p. 72; June 14, 2004, review of Repenting of Religion: Turning from Judgment to the Love of God, p. 60.

ONLINE

Gregory A. Boyd Home Page,http://www.gregboyd.org (July 2, 2007), author biography.