On becoming 'theologians of the cross'

As some may have noticed, I’ve been away from the world of blogging and e-mail for a few days break (near the New Forest). I’m grateful to those who submitted comments about my post on Giles Fraser’s ‘Thought for the Day’ and sorry some of them took so long to appear.

I also couldn’t help being struck by the fact that a post put together at the last minute attracted so much comment —indeed it has generated its own thread on the Fulcrum website! Typical when something which took ten minutes gets the attention, whilst other things that take hours sink without trace!

However, it does rather make the point I was basically arguing, that there is a real tension between ‘cross centred’ and ‘resurrection centred’ theologies. Of course, neither is an ‘either-or’ approach, despite the tendency to caricature. The question is one of balance, not of choosing alternatives, and even Giles Fraser’s approach has a place for both.

I do, nevertheless, hold that whichever provides the ‘centre of gravity’ will shape the rest of our theology, and that, furthermore, it is the cross which should rightly take that position. Martin Luther’s dictum, Crux sola est nostra theologia (“The cross alone is our theology”), is, I think, a true summary of the Christian faith.

One of the points I was arguing, therefore, in my four Good Friday meditations is that we cannot think of the cross solely in terms of its salvific effects. We may, for example, have a theology which entirely accepts penal substitutionary atonement (another bone of contention), and yet which is not a ‘theology of the cross’. Without wishing to start a whole new argument (or create a whole new set of enemies!), I think much Charismatic theology falls into this category. Indeed, one could argue that the letters to the Corinthians very much address this problem. Compare Paul’s understanding of Apostleship with the Corinthian understanding of the Way of Christ:

Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Quite apart from us you have become kings! Indeed, I wish that you had become kings, so that we might be kings with you! For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, as though sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to mortals. (1 Cor 4:8-9)

Despite the denial of the resurrection by some in the Corinthian church, it is widely accepted by commentators that a major part of the Corinthian problem was an over-realized eschatology — thinking that the benefits of the world to come could all be experienced in the ‘here and now’. The present application of the cross for these Corinthians was therefore the experience of life rather than death, whereas for the Apostle it was life through death:

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. (2 Cor 4:8-12)

The evangelical (that is to say, gospel) way is therefore not to assert that ‘because Christ has died, we live’. That is at best a mistake and at worst triumphalism. Rather, we must realize that because Christ has died we must die daily, and through that daily experience of death will come life, for us, and for the world.

Now it seems to me that this Apostolic understanding (which stands in contrast with the Corinthian understanding despite their faith in Christ!) relies on the cross being the transformative feature of our theology. As I argued before, there is nothing revolutionary in the belief that God raises the dead, and thus I must disagree with Tom Wright’s analysis which sees the resurrection as the ‘world-view changing’ element of the gospel message.

The Apostle Paul was a believer in the resurrection before he was a believer in Jesus, and presented this belief as an example of Jewish orthodoxy. Again, we might look to the exchange between Jesus and Martha concerning Lazarus:

Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” (Jn 11:23-24)

Of course there are issues here about bringing a future hope into the present in the person of Jesus. To repeat, this is not about choosing between cross and resurrection. But it is clear that Martha already believes (albeit without much present comfort) in the resurrection. The issue for her is that this Jesus is the one who embodies that hope. And of course that understanding will undergo further transformation through the crucifixion.

Indeed, as John presents it, the raising of Lazarus is a trigger for the death of Jesus — a death on which Caiaphas delivers the prophetic verdict, “it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed” (Jn 11:50). Once again, therefore, it is the cross which is the focal, and transformative, element in the gospel.

Once again, though, I would emphasize the need to see that this transformation is not simply in us being saved, nor merely in knowing that we are saved. It is a transformation which comes from experiencing the cross — from being ‘theologians of the cross’ in Luther’s sense of “dying and being damned” and knowing God most intimately in this (the experience of what Luther called anfechtung).

And this, I venture to say, is so alien to most contemporary Christian theology that we all have something to learn.

John Richardson
19 April 2009

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Good Friday: The Transforming Cross (2)

The transformation of suffering

“Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?” (Acts 26:8)

When the Apostle Paul made his defence before King Agrippa, described in Acts 26, he spoke as a Jew to Jews. He was therefore able to make a number of assumptions about things they held in common, prominent amongst which were, first, that the Jews were God’s people, living in expectation of his promises, and, second, that God is supreme, and therefore capable of fulfilling what he promised.

Paul’s argument, therefore, was that he was still living as a faithful Jew, even whilst proclaiming the risen Christ as Lord:

The Jews all know the way I have lived ever since I was a child, from the beginning of my life in my own country, and also in Jerusalem. They have known me for a long time and can testify, if they are willing, that according to the strictest sect of our religion, I lived as a Pharisee. And now it is because of my hope in what God has promised our fathers that I am on trial today. This is the promise our twelve tribes are hoping to see fulfilled as they earnestly serve God day and night. O king, it is because of this hope that the Jews are accusing me. (Acts 26:4-7)

Now it is true that there were differences in Judaism about the expectation of the resurrection. The Sadducees, famously, did not believe in the resurrection, or in angels. Paul was well aware of this, and had exploited that difference in the recent past. But the Sadducees were a minority, and in any case, as Paul pointed out to Agrippa, nothing is impossible to God, so why would anyone be shocked at the message of Jesus’ resurrection?

Yet as Paul knew perfectly well, the message was shocking, and it made many people angry. And Paul knew that because he had once been shocked and angry himself, and had gone about persecuting the Church as a result. But why were people shocked and angry? It was not, as Paul had just observed, at the notion that God raised the dead, but at the notion that God had raised “this Jesus, whom you crucified”, making him Lord and Messiah.

Paul’s view of the world, in other words, was not changed by coming to believe in the resurrection. He already believed in the resurrection, as did most of his fellow-countryman. What really changed his world was realizing that the Messiah was the crucified one. When the risen Jesus appeared to him on the Damascus Road, Paul realized not that he had been wrong about the resurrection, but that he had been wrong about Jesus.

Certainly Paul preached the resurrection, but it was the resurrection of Jesus. And Paul’s message to people was not ‘resurrection’, but the resurrected Christ. Hence this man, whose life was transformed by an encounter with the risen Jesus, could write to the church at Corinth,

When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Now this is important, because there are many today for whom the resurrection of Jesus is becoming the central message, with the cross as a kind of preparation for that. Rowan Williams does it eloquently in his book titled Resurrection. What the resurrection does, according to him, is to present the resurrected Jesus back to those who judged and crucified him as ‘the judge of his judges’ (3). However, the judgement he pronounces is on their judgement:

The exaltation of the condemned Jesus is presented by the disciples not as threat but as promise and hope. (3)

Salvation, then, is found not in the work of Jesus on the cross, but in accepting those we have rejected, just as the rejected Jesus accepted his judges and rejected their rejection of him.

But we find it in far more simple applications than that. Here is a clergyman writing in a recent newsletter:

The significance of Jesus’ resurrection is not just that one man rose from the dead but that the transformation of his cruel and lonely death is a sign of the transformation that is possible for all of us who trust in God as Jesus did. [....] For the first Christians and for Christians now, the resurrection of Jesus captures what God is seeking to do for every human being throughout history, taking the sorrow and suffering and wickedness and turning and changing it to inextinguishable life with him [...].

Of course, it is not wholly wrong to say that God is working to transform us, and indeed to transform the world. But here the work of God is manifested in taking our suffering, as he took the suffering of the cross, and transforming it into something else — as the cross gave way to the resurrection.

In other words, God is seen in the triumph, not the tragedy, and we are back with Luther’s ‘theologian of glory’.

Now the mistake is innocent. There is no malice in what was written, nor is there unbelief. Yet the effect is to change the entire understanding of the Christian life, for God is not seen in the death of Christ on the cross, but in the life of Christ in his resurrection. As he writes,

... this transformation is not a ‘cancelling out of the cross’ but rather the life which is born through it ...

It sounds fine, but it is precisely where the fault lies, for the result is that God will not be seen in sorrow, suffering and wickedness, but only in overcoming sorrow, suffering and wickedness. Now we see Luther was right when he wrote that the theologian of glory prefers “glory to the cross, strength to weakness, wisdom to folly, and, in general, good to evil.” The theologian of glory also prefers resurrection to crucifixion.

And who wouldn’t? But the message of the cross is precisely the message that the cross is God’s work and God’s way. And so the Apostle Paul wrote a very different testimony about God’s answer to prayer from the ones we would like to give:

To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. (2 Cor 12:7-9)

What is transformed here? It is not Paul’s experience but Paul’s understanding of his experience, and therefore Paul's response to his experience. Of course Paul knew God could answer prayer by taking away the cause of his torment, and at first he believed that God would answer this prayer in that way. There is no argument here for giving up prayer.

But the answer he received was not an alternative to God’s gracious goodness, but an expression of that gracious goodness. And the answer was not that Christ’s power would overcome his weakness. It was that the weakness was the power. And this is the message of the cross: the power of God and the wisdom of God.

We must never make the mistake of imagining that the cross is the weakness of God and the resurrection is the power of God. For if we do, then there will be many times in our lives when we will be wondering when we will see God at work instead of seeing precisely that God is at work in the things we are waiting for him to change.

For the great work of God in the first instance is this: that we should be transformed into the likeness of his son; the son who, the writer of Hebrews tells us, was made perfect (which is to say ‘complete’ or ‘finished’) through suffering.

It is indeed not incredible to anyone who believes in any God Almighty that God could raise the dead. What is incredible is that God Almighty would be at work in the sufferings of the righteous one. Yet that being the case, all suffering is transformed.

John Richardson
9 April 2009

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Good Friday: The Transforming Cross (1)

The transformation of glory

Now there were some Greeks among those who went up to worship at the Feast. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, with a request. “Sir,” they said, “we would like to see Jesus.” Philip went to tell Andrew; Andrew and Philip in turn told Jesus. Jesus replied, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” (John 12:20-23)

In April 1518, the Reformer Martin Luther was summoned before a general chapter of his own Augustinian order of monks at Heidelberg, and called to recant the position he had adopted the year before in his 95 Theses.

Luther refused, though he did resign as district vicar of his order. Instead, he put forward a much more lengthy statement of his views, in what became known as the Heidelberg Disputation. This showed how his thinking went far deeper than merely to opposing indulgences, or even to relying on faith rather than good works for salvation.

Rather, Luther’s theology (though ‘theology’ is too dry and clinical a word for it) was, at heart, the theology of the cross — an understanding that the cross transformed all of life. Indeed, for Luther the cross of Christ was not just the means of our salvation, it was an insight into the very heart of God —the point at which the invisible God is truly revealed.

But God is only revealed through the cross to the eye of faith, whereas most people think of God’s unseen character as being revealed through the physical things we see. In Luther’s opinion, this led to a false understanding of God:

That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened.

In other words, we cannot look at the world around us and truly understand God on the basis of surface appearances alone. Our natural inclination is to look at the mountains and say, “Here is the majesty of God,” or look at the stars and say, “Here is the power of God,” or to look at a newborn baby and say, “Here is the love of God.” But the eye of faith looks on the cross and says, “Here, truly, are the majesty of God and the power of God and the love of God.”

So Luther continued,

He deserves to be called a theologian ... who perceives the visible rearward parts of God as seen in suffering and the cross. (Following McGrath, here.)

Luther is alluding to the request of Moses, when he said to God, “Show me your glory” (Ex 33:18). God replied, “When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back ...” (Ex 33:22-23). What Moses saw of God was what a man is able to see and live — “the visible rearward parts”, to use Luther’s phrase.

Therefore the only theologian worthy of the name, according to Luther, is the person who recognizes the cross to be God’s ‘back’ — that is, the place where God’s glory may truly be seen by mortal human beings.

But if this is so, then it overthrows everything that human nature assumes about ‘glory’. So Luther went on to speak with contempt about the ‘theologian of glory’, meaning the person who thinks glory is ‘glorious’. This person’s whole life is based on the assumption that God’s power and love will be manifested in powerful, lovely things. Yet such a life is actually entirely mistaken and entirely un-Christian:

He who does not know Christ does not know God hidden in suffering. Therefore he prefers works to suffering, glory to the cross, strength to weakness, wisdom to folly, and, in general, good to evil.

The last phrase is particularly striking: “he ... prefers good to evil”. Aren’t we supposed to do that? Aren’t we supposed to prefer good to evil? Luther’s point, however, is that what the world means by good and evil stands opposed to what the Bible means.

Thus the world calls suffering ‘evil’. The Bible calls suffering ‘good’. “We rejoice in our sufferings,” says Paul, “because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope” (Rom 5:3-4). The world calls the cross ‘evil’, the Bible calls the cross ‘good’. When Peter rebuked Jesus for saying that the Son of Man must be crucified, Jesus replied, “Get behind me, Satan! You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.” (Mk 5:33)

The false ‘theologian of glory’ may speak of the cross, adore the cross or wear a cross, but they prefer to know nothing of the cross in their own life. They see God’s power only in things everyone would call powerful, God’s miracles only in things everyone would call a miracle, God’s answers to prayer only in things everyone would call answers to prayer. They call themselves Christian, but they lack anything distinctively Christian in their view of life.

By contrast, Luther’s understanding of being a theologian is this:

Living, or rather dying and being damned make a theologian, not understanding, reading or speculating. (Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross London, 1985, 152, quoted from WA 5.163, 28-29)

It is in the experience of what the world calls evil — indeed of what is evil: of ‘death and damnation’ — that, if we are living by faith in Christ, we truly encounter the true God.

Thus the word of the cross is not a momentary call to conversion: “Believe in Jesus and you will be saved.” Nor is it an invitation to escape from the awfulness of daily life: “Be saved and you will know God’s marvellous plan for your life.” The word of the cross calls us to the way of the cross: “Take up your cross and follow me.”

Hence, when Jesus referred to the crucifixion as “the hour ... for the Son of Man to be glorified,” (Jn 12:23), he immediately went on to apply the same principle to his disciples:

The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me ... (John 12:25-26)

There is nothing new or surprising for most of us in what Jesus says here. We know we must follow Jesus, we know we must take up the cross, we know we must deny ourselves. We even know, if we have been to the right sort of meetings or listened to the right sort of talks, that as Romans 3:28 puts it, “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

But we still struggle when God actually does what he has said he would do. We forget that Romans 3:29 goes on,

For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

That is to say, the ‘good’ that ‘all things’ work for in those God loves is the good of being like Jesus. But Jesus, who is the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15), reveals the invisible God’s power, majesty, goodness, love and glory in this world in the cross. Hence the risen Jesus did not just tell Peter to feed his sheep as Jesus had fed them, but told him the manner of his death by which he would glorify God, as Jesus had glorified God (Jn 21:19).

This is the completion of what John says at the start of his gospel:

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

The glory of the Word-become-flesh was seen when he was lifted up from the earth, drawing all men to himself, bearing God’s judgement and casting out the prince of this world (Jn 12:31-32).

This is the kingdom, the power and the glory. And this is the way, and the truth, and the life of those who would glorify God in the likeness of his Son.

John P Richardson
8 April 2009

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