The Cross Reveals the God Who is Killed

Ah, the Cross, the epitome of the Christian faith. Much has been said about the Cross by theologians, preachers, hymn writers, and authors. It is the place of much contemplation and prayer. It is worn as jewellry by those who profess faith as well as those who have only the vaguest sense of its significance.

I have a cross tattoo on my wrist. I’ve been asked about it by strangers and coworkers. Those who have a background in church or are believers themselves find a point of connection with me, but those who are unfamiliar with the Christian faith are puzzled. My response to the question of its significance is that it reminds me of the most important thing in my life—my faith in Jesus Christ.

That’s not to say that it is my faith that is most important. What I mean is that it is a symbol that pulls my eyes back to Jesus and the reason for which I live and breathe. It is a reminder of the cost of faith, the depths of my deconstruction of Western Evangelicalism, and the gritty effort of reconstructing faith around the person and work of Jesus Christ. It grounds me in my daily choice to follow Jesus no matter where he calls me.

It’s a symbol of my journey with Jesus.

For many Catholics and Protestants alike, the Cross is the starting and stopping point of Christianity. All evangelism is rooted in messages of “You must turn to the cross (or else you’ll burn in hell forever)!” Its status as a weapon of torture is often highlighted in gruesome detail. We are enamoured with the great physical suffering of Jesus Christ, declaring that Christ suffered much so that we would not need to suffer it ourselves. It is the Great Substitution that exempts us from the wrath of God’s judgment.

Parts of this are true, though I hesitate to support the tone of this message. It’s fear-based, which has been unfortunately used by the Church and Empires to control the masses. The fear of hell is a great motivator to pay more taxes.

I love N.T. Wright’s work around the Cross (note: I capitalize the Cross when I speak of it as a doctrine, while the lower-case cross refers to the physical Roman execution device). Wright is careful to place the cross of Jesus within an accurate historical context.

We in the modern West, who wear jewelled crosses around our necks, stamp them on Bibles and prayer books, and carry them in cheerful processions, need regularly to be reminded that the very word “cross” was a word you would most likely not utter in polite society. (The Day the Revolution Began, 54)

It’s like wearing an electric chair around our necks. Awkward at the very least, and repulsive at worst, for who would glorify such an instrument of death?

Ahem, Christians, it appears.

The suffering of Jesus was not unique. This is little known to many Christians, who elevate his cross over the millions of crosses that were erected during Roman rule. The Gospel of Luke tells us that Jesus hung between two criminals who may well have been political revolutionaries (Lk. 23:32-33). Rome liked to remind the public of the folly of rebelling against the empire, as empires like to do. The Jewish revolt in AD 70 resulted in thousands of Jewish deaths by crucifixion.

However, the Gospels take pains to tell us that Jesus was innocent of wrongdoing; his punishment did not fit his crime, for no crime had been committed (Lk. 23:1-5, 13-22). If blasphemy was the true charge, then stoning would have been appropriate as per Jewish Law (Lev. 24:13-16). Crucifixion was reserved for rebels, bandits, and revolutionaries and required an official Roman judgment to enact.

In order to appease the crowd, Pontius Pilate, ever the politician, released a known revolutionary and murderer and condemned Jesus of Nazareth to execution by hanging on a cross, despite his own profession of Jesus’ innocence (Lk. 23:23-25).

Justice is not done here. Humans failed to steward the land with justice and mercy on every account, against their creation mandate given to them by God (c.f. Gen. 1:28, Mic. 6:8). And who paid the price? An innocent man, Jesus.

“Ah,” you say. “But he wasn’t just a man!”

This is true, and it is the great paradox of the Christian faith. Hundreds of years after Jesus lived, died, and rose again, the early church fathers argued the nature of Christ—was he God or was he man? How could God, Creator and Sustainer of all, become human? How could a human baby contain God?

Thus, we come to the six great heresies of the early Church.

Six Christological Heresies of the Early Church

Arianism: Named after an Alexandrian priest, Arius, who suggested that Jesus was created by the Father and was therefore not equal to the Father. Jehovah’s Witnesses are an example of modern-day Arians.
Nestorianism: Named after Nestorius, the archbishop of Constantinople, who claimed that there were essentially two natures within the human body of Christ—the human and the divine. Thus, the human Jesus died on the cross and the divine lived on.
Monophysitism: In a reaction against Nestorianism, Monophysites argued that Jesus had only one divine nature rather than a divided human and divine nature. Thus, the incarnation is diminished as Christ’s deity is over-emphasized.
Docetism: Named after the Greek word dokein, meaning, “to seem,” this heresy argued that Jesus only seemed to have a physical body and suffer on a cross, thus denying Jesus’ humanity entirely.
Gnostism: An Ancient Greek philosophy, Gnostics separated the material and spiritual, stating that Jesus’ human body was evil and was shed on the cross so that the true self of Jesus was released to the Father.
Marcionism: Named after Marcion, who rejected the God of the Old Testament entirely, stating that this God is inferior to the Christ of the New Testament.

There are others, but I will leave it there for now. The overwhelming point is that early Christians didn’t know how to reconcile the deity and humanity of Christ. The truth is, many Christians or faith seekers today still don’t know how to reconcile it.

The orthodox view of the global Church (I use orthodox in its original definition of “right belief,” not referring to the institution of the Eastern Orthodox Church) was proclaimed in a series of creeds through the fourth to fifth centuries. The elders and bishops bickered and dithered, but eventually the Nicene Creed and Chalcedonian Creed (among others) emerged.

The Response to Heresy: Creeds

The Nicene Creed, which arose in AD 325 in response to the Arian heresy, states,

We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father; God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God; begotten not made, one in being with the Father. (1)

The Chalcedonian Creed, written over 100 years later in AD 451, is a lengthy exposition on the dual nature of Christ as both God and man. Part of it is quoted here:

Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creed of the fathers has handed down to us.(2, emphasis mine)

Thus, the church fathers, as they wrestled with the nature of Christ, determined that Christ must be both God and man. He cannot be only one or the other. The very status of salvation was at risk, for if Christ was not God then he could not bear the weight of the Father’s divine judgment, and if he was not human, then he could not fully identify with his creation whom he saved.

These heresies and responding creeds highlight just how complicated is our theologizing of the Cross. It is millennia later, and I’ve heard several of these heresies spouted by professing Christians today (and some by Christian off-shoots like Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses). It’s reassuring to me that these arguments are not new, but have been hashed out for centuries by the most brilliant theologians in the world… and even they could not come to an agreement.

Salvation is Rooted in the Biblical Narrative

Let’s return to our original thesis of this series: Salvation is rooted in the entire biblical narrative.

The error of the brilliant theologians is that they isolated the Cross from the rest of the biblical narrative—Marcionism in particular, but the other heresies and even the creeds themselves are guilty of this as well. It’s as if the story starts with the birth of Christ, climaxes in the Cross, and then everyone who believes in him lives happily ever after.

We’ve just spent several weeks walking through the biblical story of salvation. We’ve discussed how salvation was present at Creation through the gift of life, the Exodus through liberation from captivity, in sacrifices and atonement as an emerging people learned to worship the God who draws near, in Exile as God judges and gives grace to his rebellious people and provides a way back to himself; and then, in the New Testament, through the proclaimed and promised kingdom of God and the Cross of Christ.

The Cross cannot be separated from the rest of the story.

Rather than discussing specifically what Jesus was doing on the cross (we discussed that in our exploration of atonement theories), let’s talk about how it fits with the rest of the story.

Remember Creation, that beautiful place of union with God and others? That Eden—which literally means place of delight—that humans decided they no longer wished to be part of and rebelled against their Creator?

Yeah, that one.

God pronounces the consequences of sin—humans would now live in hostility with the earth and each other. He says to the snake, who represents all rebellion against God,

“I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.” (Gen. 3:15)

And then he says to the woman,

“Your desire will be for your husband, yet he will rule over you.” (Gen. 3:16)

And to the man,

“The ground is cursed because of you. You will eat from it by means of painful labor all the days of your life.” (Gen. 3:17)

The consequences of sin are broken relationships with God, others, and creation itself. How devastating.

Now, many evangelists will skip from this moment of the Fall to the redemption of the Cross. However, let’s consider for a moment the other in-between movements of this story:

God redeems Israel from their captivity in Egypt—this is salvation!
God draws near in the worship at the tabernacle—this is salvation!
God provides a way to come home to him in repentance in the Exile—this is salvation!
God brings his Kingdom to earth through his Son, the True Human, Jesus of Nazareth—this is salvation!

So then, the Cross is a continuation of that grand story. The Cross is where the God of the Universe submitted to humans and was killed—this is salvation.

It’s the culminating act of everything we’ve learned about God through Scripture. Having revealed himself gently and slowly in the pages of the Bible, he now reveals himself fully as a God who enters time and space to reconcile his creation to himself.

The Exodus was redemption to a clueless, lost, enslaved people who did not know YHWH, the LORD God (Ex. 3:7-15).

The sacrificial system reconciled the people in part, but not the whole if their hearts were not repentant (Ps. 51:16-17).

The Exile demonstrated God’s judgment and mercy to all, but only a remnant responded in faith and returned to the land. The rest still remained in exile (Is. 10:20-22).

The kingdom of God reveals the God who mingles with outcasts, eating with sinners and celebrating with the lepers and blind (Lk. 14:1-24).

Jesus came to earth, God and human, and how did his created humanity respond? They killed him. The rebellion rises up in full and destroys its good Creator… or so it seems. N.T. Wright describes it like this:

“Israel’s sins needed to be dealt with so that “exile” could be undone. Paul has now shown… how this joins up with the larger expectation of the “new Exodus.” At the heart of this conjoined double story, he has told the story of the Messiah, the one who represents Israel and who therefore becomes the “place” where Sin does its worst… It gathered itself together and finally unleashed its full fury on him.” (The Day the Revolution Began, 287-288)

The Cross is the Full Revelation of God

All of Scripture has been progressively revealing God to humanity; now, at the Cross, God is fully revealed.

Jesus is enthroned as King upon this Cross by humbling himself to the ruling powers to the point of a humiliating death (Phil. 2:5-8).

This Cross, then, is redemption, atonement, victory over sin, and liberation for the slaves—not only for me, but for the entire created universe! The Cross is a return to Eden for those who, like the centurion, would gaze upon it and say, “Surely this is the Son of God!” (Mk. 15:38)

The Cross opens up a Way of Life so very contrary to the seduction of the powers and principalities. It’s a servant Way, a humble Way, a surrendered Way. It is foolishness to the world.

For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ will not be emptied of its effect. For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but it is the power of God to us who are being saved… Yet to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, because God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Cor. 1:17-18, 24-25)

So then, what is salvation? It is humbling oneself to the powers who may do their worst and kill the Source of Life itself. The Cross reveals the God who is Killed.

The Cross and the Quill is all about diving deep into various theological topics and considering how the biblical and historical context informs how we think about these things. If you liked this article, consider sharing it with your friends or subscribing to the newsletter below!

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

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