The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion

by N.T. Wright

Notice that, in all these cases, the disagreement between the New Testament view I am expounding and the “usual” range of views is oblique. Nor am I suggesting that nobody has said all this before, only that the point of view I have been putting forward, rooted in the New Testament, is a long way from what most Western Christians, and Western non-Christians for that matter, imagine to be the meaning of the cross. I am not saying—the New Testament is not saying—that “life after death” doesn’t matter or that human behavior doesn’t matter. Nor am I saying that the cross has nothing to do with Jesus “dying for my sins” or that Christian mission is not about explaining this to people so that they may come to believe. Far from it. What I am saying, based on the revolutionary meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion, is that “life after death” is a quite different thing from what most Western Christians have imagined, since the ultimate future is a life after “life after death,” in other words, the life of the resurrection and the ultimate new creation; that “human behavior” from a biblical point of view is quite a different thing from the normal view of codes of either morality or self-discovery, because what matters is not “works” (whether ours or Jesus’s), but vocation, the human calling to worship God and reflect him into his world. And I am therefore saying, in the present chapter, that through the cross Jesus won the Passover victory over the “powers,” that he did this precisely by d...

Great summary of tthe book