The cross

September 12th, 2006

Just thinking vaguely about the cross. We just had a conversation about Fusion in our house (I’ve spend probably about half of my waking hours since returning to brum sitting in the same chair in my living room with my laptop on my lap with my housemates in the room, chatting about stuff and watching TV and me and screech playing with our blogs), and it made me think about the centrality of the cross.

Luther said “the cross is our theology”, and it seems clear that it belongs at the absolute center of our understanding of God (and thus the whole realm of creation). One cannot understand anything without understanding who God is; God reveals himself primarily through Jesus, and the key to understanding Jesus is to understand his death on the cross - that’s what the New Testament keeps on talking about all the time.

A lot of Christian organisations tend to have the culture that the cross is for non-Christians, even if they wouldn’t say that. That’s wrong, and very damaging… but I wonder whether it’s partly a reaction against an oversimplistic approach to teaching the cross in some churches.

My feeling in some churches is that they simply try to get across simply the fact that “God propitiated his wrath on the cross” again and again, rather than apply more deeply the cross in the way the New Testament does. Instead of just repeating that fact (though I do think it’s so important we need to remember it and the wonder of the grace revealed there etc all the time), I think we ought to regularly preach how the cross fits into the Christian life and the world - “Jesus died out of love to propitiate God’s wrath - that shows us how much God loves us, and completely deals with our sin and makes us worthy of God by God’s grace, which should be the source of our self esteem” or “Jesus died to propitiate God’s wrath against sin - this should help us realise how terrible sin is and help us resist temptation” or “Jesus died to propitiate God’s wrath, remake humanity, and restore the whole creation to it’s pre-fall state and indeed a greater state - therefore we should work on climate change.”

There’s a few examples of how that kind of teaching might work in practise. It obviously was limited by the single sentence nature - it didn’t offer me much chance to work through how our theology of the cross might be more complex and than a single sentence, or the theology of other stuff might be more complex, but you get what I mean.

It’s a whole lot harder for people to take seriously as helpful constant cross-preaching when it doesn’t make connections with the whole of reality - so perhaps at least part of the solution to people dis-emphasising the cross is simply to talk more about the cross in a better way. Leading aside that the kind of teaching about is all through the bible - say Paul using the cross as an illustration for all sorts of topics of his teaching.