The Cross

“the message of the crucifixion is not accessible from outside the

living event. For those who are unconcerned about its inner
significance, it will remain a “stumbling block” and
“foolishness,” as Paul wrote. The cross reveals its meaning as it
takes shape in the experience of believers.”

Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:

Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.
“The world’s religions have certain traits in common, but until
the gospel of Jesus Christ burst upon the Mediterranean world,
no one in the history of human imagination had conceived of
such a thing as the worship of a crucified man. The early
Christian preaching announced the entrance of God upon the
stage of history in the person of an itinerant Jewish teacher who
had been ingloriously pinned up alongside two of society’s
castoffs to die horribly, rejected and condemned by religious and
secular authorities alike, discarded onto the garbage heap of
humanity, scornfully forsaken by both elites and common folk,
leaving behind only a discredited, demoralized handful of
scruffy disciples who had no status whatsoever in the eyes of
anyone. ”
“The peculiarity of this beginning for a world-transforming faith
is not sufficiently acknowledged. Too often, today’s Christians
are lulled into thinking of their own faith as one of the religions,
without realizing that the central claim of Christianity is oddly
irreligious at its core.1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that the
weakness and suffering of Christ was and remains “a reversal of
what the religious man expects from God.”

Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:

Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.

“The utter uniqueness of the New Testament gospel is not the

foolishness itself, but the linkage of holy foolishness to an actual
historical event of government-sponsored torture and public
execution — a happening, it must be emphasized, without any
spiritual overtones or redeeming religious features. It is not easy
to gain a hearing for this crucial point, because so much
American Christianity today comes packaged as inspirational
uplift — sunlit, backlit, or candlelit. Furthermore, we are so
accustomed to seeing the cross functioning as a decoration that
we can scarcely imagine it as an object of shame and scandal
unless it is burned on someone’s lawn. It requires a considerable
effort of the imagination to enter into the first-century world of
the Roman Empire so as to understand the degree of
offensiveness attached to crucifixion as a method of execution.”
Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:
Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.

“It will help us to understand the uniqueness of Jesus’ death if

we can grasp the idiosyncrasy of this manner of speaking. There
have been many famous deaths in world history; we might think
of John F. Kennedy, or Marie Antoinette, or Cleopatra, but we
do not refer to “the assassination,” “the guillotining,” or “the
poisoning.” Such references would be incomprehensible. The
use of the term “the crucifixion” for the execution of Jesus
shows that it still retains a privileged status. When we speak of
“the crucifixion,” even in this secular age, many people will
know what is meant. There is something in the strange death of
the man identified as Son of God that continues to command
special attention. This death, this execution, above and beyond
all others, continues to have universal reverberations. Of no
other death in human history can this be said. ”

Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:

Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.

“The particularity of this God is startling; the God of Israel

aligns himself with specific mortals with individual names who
live in identifiable places on the map. They have life stories
unique to themselves, by no means always edifying. This God,
unlike the gods of the religions, has chosen of his own sovereign
free will to elect a discrete group of people simply because he
wills to do so. ”

“The irreligiousness of this election is that it has nothing to do

with any spiritual attainments by the chosen ones. The opposite
is true — they are selected, we might say, in spite of themselves,
for if there is one thing certain about the children of Israel, it is
that they did not deserve their election.”

Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:

Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.

“We are set in motion by its power, energized by it, upheld by it,
guaranteed by it, secured by it for the promised future because it
is the power of the creating Word that “gives life to the dead and
calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17).
Our labor is not only “not in vain” but also has eternal
significance because it is being built into God’s future in ways
that we presently see “through a glass, darkly,” but in the
fullness of time, “face to face” (I”
Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:
Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.
“Why should portrayals of the death of Jesus have more
resonance than depictions of the deaths of others? Ultimately no
painting, no movie, no television program can explain the saving
significance to us; we must hear the words of the Bible in faith.”

Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:

Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.

It is God’s new creative act, his great reclamation project that is

even greater than the creation itself, because whereas we are
“wonderfully created,” we are “yet more wonderfully
restored.”30

Understanding the cross and resurrection as a single event,

undertaken from within the Trinity itself, is of utmost
importance

The scandalous “word of the cross” is not a human word. It is

the Spirit-empowered presence of God in the preaching of the
crucified One. The Holy Spirit, so central to New Testament
writings as diverse as those of Paul, John, and the author of
Acts, inhabits the message and empowers the speaker, so that
the proclamation of God’s act in Christ is the new occasion of
creation, issuing from the Trinitarian power of the originating
Word itself.”
“This proclamation of Jesus as Lord, as we hope to make clear
in chapter 1, arose not out of Jesus’ ministry, which after all can
be compared to the ministry of other holy men, but out of the
unique apostolic kerygma (proclamation) of the crucified and
risen One. As Luke Timothy Johnson writes,

Christian faith has never — either at the start or now — been

based on historical reconstructions of Jesus, even though
Christian faith has always involved some historical claims
concerning Jesus. Rather, Christian faith (then and now) is based
on religious claims concerning the present power of Jesus. . . .
Christian faith is not directed toward a human construction
about the past; that would be a form of idolatry. Authentic
Christian faith is a response to the living God, whom Christians
declare is powerfully at work among them through the
resurrected Jesus.55”

Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:

Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.
“ if Jesus had not been raised from the dead, we would never
have heard of him.”
Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:
Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.
“The myth of the dying and rising god under various names —
Attis, Tammuz, Osiris — was one of the most prominent
features of the numerous mystery religions of antiquity. The all-
important difference between these deaths and Jesus’ is that his
happened as a certifiable event within history. The gods of the
Near Eastern religions “died” and “rose” repeatedly as part of
the natural cycle of nature. The death of the god was never
presented as a historical event. This is a widely researched
phenomenon in studies of the ancient Near East; a recent study
is Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying
and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East”

Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:

Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.
“ “Jesus Christ is . . . present in the kerygmatic occasion . . . not
as an empirical object, but as the saving power of the gospel
known only to faith in and through the humanity and temporality
of preaching. He is present not simply as a figure who is
proclaimed but as the abiding agent of Christian
proclamation” (James F. Kay, Christus Praesens”

Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:

Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.
“Jürgen Moltmann writes in the very first sentence of The
Crucified God, “The cross is not and cannot be loved.” As a
general rule, the theologia gloriae (theology of glory) will drive
out the theologia crucis (theology of the cross) every time in a
comfortable society. We will often observe that this is
particularly true in America, where optimism and positive
thinking reign side by side.6”

Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:

Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.“. It is in the
crucifixion that the nature of God is truly revealed. Since the
resurrection is God’s mighty transhistorical Yes to the
historically crucified Son, we can assert that the crucifixion is
the most important historical event that has ever happened. The
resurrection, being a transhistorical event planted within history,
does not cancel out the contradiction and shame of the cross in
this present life; rather, the resurrection ratifies the cross as the
way “until he comes.”

Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:

“. Sentimental, overly “spiritualized” love is not capable of the

sustained, unconditional agape of Christ shown on the cross.
Only from the perspective of the crucifixion can the true nature
of Christian love be seen, over against all that the world calls
“love.”

Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:

Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.

“The Corinthians have apparently sent a message to the apostle

that “all of us possess gnosis.” Yes, Paul replies, but there are
limits to gnosis (knowledge). “ ‘Knowledge’ puffs up, but love
builds up. If any one imagines that he knows something, he does
not yet know as he ought to know. But if one loves God, one is
known by him” (8:1-3). In just these three sentences, Paul does
two things: (1) he shifts the emphasis from knowledge to agape,
and (2) he reverses the direction of knowing. It is God who has
knowledge of us, through love. ”

Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:

Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.
“Virtually all human religion is gnostic. The eclectic religiosity
of America today emphasizes individual spiritual experiences”

“The great Eastern faiths have many gnostic tendencies, with

rigorous spiritual disciplines for the elite and popular,
undemanding rituals like prayer wheels, amulets, and idols for
the masses.”

“The Dalai Lama continues to attract adoring crowds wherever

he goes, but there are many points of difference between what
he has to say and the theology of the cross. In an interview with
Gustav Niebuhr of the New York Times, he sought to explain his
appeal with this observation: “We all desire happiness and wish
to avoid suffering.” How many American Christians, hearing
this, would realize how different it is from (for example) Martin
Luther King’s often-repeated summons to “redemptive
suffering”? ”

“God as a working hypothesis in morals, politics, or science has

been surmounted and abolished; and the same thing has
happened in philosophy and religion. . . . God would have us
know that we must live as men who manage our lives without
him. . . . The God who lets us live in the world without the
working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand
continually.”
“God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross.”

Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:

Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.
Bonhoeffer”

“In the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the only word used in
connection with the entire span of Jesus’ life is “suffered.”
“Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was
crucified, dead, and buried.” Who, today, notices how
extraordinary this is? What a way to describe the life and
ministry of a man so famous for his “teachings, parables,
healings, exorcisms, and other works! None of these things are
even mentioned in the creeds, and very little is said of them in
the various New Testament epistles.”

Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:

Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.

“Douglas John Hall.36 He speaks of the crucifixion as a

“conquest from within” the human condition, particularly
emphasizing the human condition of pain, limitation,
abandonment, and despair. He insists that the Christian
community is identified by the theologia crucis as by nothing
else. If we are to claim our true identity, we need to renounce
our relentlessly upbeat orientation.37 He calls for the church to
understand itself as the community of the cross, the community
that suffers-with (com-passion), the community that willingly
bears the stigma of the passion in service to others. He declares
that “the basic distinction between religion and [Christian]
faith is the propensity of religions to avoid, precisely,
suffering: to have light without darkness, vision without
trust and risk, hope without an ongoing dialogue with
despair — in short, Easter without Good Friday.”38”

“It is essential to remember that it was the preaching (kerygma)

of the apostles and early Christians that created the church in the
first place. Men and women did not forsake their former ways of
life because they were offered spiritual direction or instructed in
righteous living; they became converts because of the explosive
news that they heard.”

Excerpt From: Fleming Rutledge. “The Crucifixion:

Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.” iBooks.