God - Cosmic Caesar or Passionate Lover?

As I work through Wright's book, "Simply Jesus", I want to insert this post with a wonderful piece about the love of God in Christ Jesus from Greg Boyd's book, "Repenting of Religion" (http://www.amazon.com/Repenting-Religion-Turning-Judgment-Love/dp/0801065062/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341869495&sr=8-1&keywords=repenting+of+religion). This portion is about "the criteria for all theology":

"Theology is thinking (logos) about God (theos). It is a good and necessary discipline, but only so long as it is centered on Christ...more specifically, on the decisive act by which he reveals God and redeems humanity, his death on the cross.


"The definitive thing to be said about God's character is found here: God dies for sinners on a God-forsaken cross. The definitive thing to be said about God's power is found here: God allows himself to be crucified on a cross for sinners. And the definitive thing to be said about God's glory is found here: God dies a horrifying, God-forsaken death upon the cross. God's character, power, and glory are decisively revealed on the cross.

How God's power and glory look

How worldly power and glory look

"...Every thought about God, every mental picture we entertain about God, every single emotion that is 'raised up against the knowledge of God' must be taken 'captive to obey Christ' (2 Cor. 10:5)...for our natural expectations are influenced by our experiences in a fallen world that is permeated with the foundational lie (about God) of the serpent. We create a god of our own designs by magnifying our own conceptions of character, power, and glory. Consequently, sometimes God's character, power, and glory are presented in ways that don't even resemble Jesus Christ, even within the Christian tradition. We project onto the screen of heaven a cosmic Caesar, controlling the world through coercive power and intimidation rather than accepting God's definition of himself in the crucified Jesus Christ...


"The only hope we have of getting out  of this fallen condition and walking in the ecstatic love of the triune God is to resolve that God's revelation in Christ is true, however much it may contradict our fallen, worldly expectations. When the deceptive veil over our mind is removed and we see the glory of God shining in the face of Jesus Christ, and when we fix our eyes on Jesus, we find a picture of God that could not possibly be more loving and beautiful..."