Cross Friday - Stott on the Cross and Evil

One of my Christmas presents from my parents was John Stott's "Why I am a Christian" from my parents. Like pretty much anything by Stott, this is an absolute gem. In his chapter on the cross, he comments rightly that "In any balanced understanding of the cross, we shall confess Christ as saviour (atoning for our sins), as teacher (disclosig the character of God) and as victor (overcoming the powers of evil)", thereby disarming those who would seek to make those three facts about the cross stand against each other as opposing theories rather than complimenting facts.

After this, he comments on the fact that the cross has something to say about the problem of evil.

"Why am I a Christian? One reason is the cross of Christ. Indeed, I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the cross. It is the cross that gives God his credibility. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche (the nineteenth-century German philosopher) ridiculed as 'God on the cross'. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?

In the course of my travels I have entered a number of Buddhist temples in different Asian countries. I have stood respectedfully before a statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, serene and silent, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each tim after a while I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged into God-forsaken darkness.

The crucified one is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us, duing in our place in order that we might be forgiven. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question-mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross, which symbolizes divine suffering.

'The cross of Christ ... is God's only self-justification in such a world' as ours."
- John Stott, Why I am a Christian, pages 63-64

(The final line quotes P.T. Forsyth's "The Justification of God.")

Christmas and a learning disability home

I work with adults with severe learning disabilities, to the point where none of them can talk and only one of them can even speak vaguely (and even then doesn't really understand what she's saying). As you'll no doubt expect, this has been a very interesting experience. It's been quite thought provoking being around people who are a lot less powerful than me, who have relatively little that they can contribute to the world economically, and whose minds frankly just don't work properly. Several of them have been abandoned by their parents, and spent many of their years in a disabled home, meaning that they've also been significantly deprived relationally. They're as much people as you or I - but they don't seem to understand some things that to me seem very basic facts.

In fact, this experience led me to think about a number of things about what it means to be human, and what grace means, as I am around some of the most obvious examples of the brokenness of humanity. Although I don't think all of the residents are particularly unhappy (though a couple are), I would really hate to be like them. I would find it an enormous affront to my dignity to be fed by other people, to be showered by other people, and simply to be unable to think and learn in the way I can now. And that has a rather obvious application to Christmas.

In the incarnation, Jesus took on almost all of the weaknesses that my residents have, as he became a baby. Babies are something we have a category of how to relate to in our head, so we don't necessarily realise quite what that would have been like to experience. It would have been no less a weakness and an indignity than becoming one of my residents. Jesus chose not to use his attributes of omnipotence and onniscience - and instead chose to live out life with the limits not just of humanity, but of a human baby.

Not only did he live with the limits of a human baby, but of a broken human baby. The residents at my work are broken by the consequences of the fall and of sin in a rather obvious way - their learning disability. But while from our perspective that seems a particularly broken humanity, all human beings are very deeply broken. The effects of sin have gone deep into our minds and our souls. The fact that this has happened to all of us may immunise us from realising its severity, but it does not mean that it is not severe from God's point of view. Jesus did not sin, so he did not become a sinner, but he did become a human being that had been broken by sin - just by other people's sins, rather than His own. While for us, this might not seem like a huge thing, Jesus knew what humanity was really supposed to look like, and therefore saw our humanity was broken.

Jesus did more than this, though. He not only became a weak and limited baby, broken by human sin. He also did so from a position of unparalled greatness. Even if he had chosen to become greater than the greatest human being ever - think Superman-turned-immortal-world-emperor (without the Kryptonite weakness) - that would still be an enormous step downwards, something like me becoming a slug or a spider. Think what becoming a broken and weak human baby would be like.

People (includng myself) sometimes look upon a baby in a manger as something tame and cute. In fact, it is something at once quite disgusting, and quite amazing.

It shows how truly humble Jesus is to suffer such an indignity - as well as how passionate he was about the love of the glory of the Father who He did this for. It also shows us how greatly he loved human beings, that he would do this that they could become a church that lived in a peaceful and glorious loving relationship with Him.

And above all, it points towards the cross, where all of this is seen even more profoundly. Jesus' identification with our broken humanity reaches its greatest point and greatest awfulness and awesomeness, displaying the brokenness of humanity and the greatness of God all at once.

The Cross is our Theology

In an attempt to get this blog going again, I'm resolving to try to post every friday (I will call it "Cross Friday" in my keywords section) on some theological topic related to the cross. This may consist of my own reflection, or it may simply be a quote from someone else. I believe this will help me keep a focus upon the cross, which I believe will be helpful for me spiritually. I also believe that if I'm regularly posting anyway, I will be more likely to post at other times.

Since this is the first week, let us look at the importance of the cross.

In 1 Corinthians 2:1-5, we read:

And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

In this passage, we see knowing only "Jesus Christ and him crucified" contrasted with "lofty speech or wisdom." People sometimes misinterpret this passage to mean that we should not think about what we believe - asserting, for example, that irrational ideas are better than rational ones, or that it's better not to care about doctrinal issues other than ideas about salvation, or that it's saying that we should trust our experience over thought and wisdom...

On the contrary, this passage is not attacking thinking. It is making a statement about how and what we ought to think.

In the hellenistic culture the corinthians lived in, phrases like "lofty speech or wisdom" would have made people think immediately of greek philosophers. Philosophy literally means "love of wisdom," and by "wisdom" the corinthians would have automatically think (in a way that's lost on most 21st century readers) "the philosophers" - the specific philosophical schools that are popular at the time. This is also evident from the fact that it specifies "lofty speech or wisdom" - the philosophical schools taught "Rhetoric" as not just a subject, but often the most respected subject. So they were interested not just in specific ideas, but in how one argues those ideas. "Lofty speech" means more (or less) than just saying the right things - it means saying things in the right way. There were people in the ancient world who earnt a living by impressing audiences by wowing people by arguing powerfully for something one day, and then wowing them by arguing powerfully for the opposite thing the next day.

Paul, here, was defending the fact that he didn't look like these philosophers. He wasn't really trying to impress them with "lofty speech" or an appearance of "wisdom". He wasn't following the pagan "high-culture" that was around him, in order to gain a following. Instead, he was preaching "Jesus Christ and Him crucified."

That doesn't mean that all he was saying was "there was this bloke called Jesus, he was the Christ [ie the Messiah], and he was crucified." Rather, he's saying that his understanding of God - and thus of the whole of reality - is centered around and dependent upon God's revelation in Jesus Christ. All through the Pauline letters, we find Paul applying the truth about Jesus and the cross to all sorts of situations and questions. Indeed, we find that all through the New Testament. Paul goes on, straight after these verses, to insist that he does preach wisdom to those who are mature (not a wisdom of this age, but rather a wisdom of God.)

Paul isn't meaning that there's two separate things "Jesus Christ", as well as "him crucified" that he preaches - the two things are one. We can't see Jesus properly without the cross, because it was at the very heart of what Jesus was doing on earth - what Jesus was about - thus explaining its prominence in the New Testament. Equally, just "someone died and rose again" is pretty insignificant unless you know the person.

And out from this truth about Jesus Christ and Him Crucified, we learn all about God. We learn who God is, we learn how we relate to Him, and we learn how we ought to live as a result.

And that's why I've decided to begin "Cross Friday".