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Started reading
August 31, 2019
It is the living significance of the death of Jesus, not the factual details concerning it as a historical event, that matters.
The preaching of the cross is an announcement of a living reality that continues to transform human existence and human destiny more than two thousand years after it originally occurred.
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.
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.
As Placher well knew, there is no analogy from the side of the fallen creation that “works.” None of the symbols, images, motifs, and themes “work” in any logical way, either as analogies or as theories to explain what God in Christ is doing on the cross.
The truest way to receive the gospel of Christ crucified is to cultivate a deep appreciation of the way the biblical motifs interact with each other and enlarge one another.
The New Testament is from beginning to end a living witness to the apostolic preaching. The cross was meant to be preached.
We will be best enriched by the meaning of the crucifixion in all its manifold aspects, not just as an intellectual construct, but as dynamic, living truth empowering us for the living of these days.
The work of theology is the process by which the church continually rethinks its message.17
There is no more important calling for the church in our time than claiming the self-identification of the God who is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The unique feature of the Christian proclamation is the shocking claim that God is fully acting, not only in Jesus’ resurrected life, but especially in Jesus’ death on the cross. To say the same thing in another way, the death of Jesus in and of itself would not be anything remarkable. What is remarkable is that the Creator of the universe is shown forth in this gruesome death.
The Christ event derives its meaning from the fact that the three-personed God is directly acting as one throughout the entire sequence from incarnation to ascension to Last Judgment.
The deeds of Christians in this present time — however insignificant they may seem, however “vain” they may appear to those who value worldly success — are already being built into God’s advancing kingdom. In other words, Christians do not simply look to the cross of Christ with prayerful reverence. 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).
