Download The Theology of the Cross

LENT 2013 SERMON SERIES: The Theology of the Cross
This is the first of four in a series on the Theology of the Cross. It includes some basic theology,
but I fear that many or most of our people do not have even a base model to work from. My hope
is to name the issues and then over the next few weeks, unpack and update them so that in the end
we will have a more fully developed THEOLOGIA CRUCIS, and a common language to share in
discussion. Please note that my own thinking is not fully formed yet; we’re all pilgrims on this
journey. If you would like to respond, you are welcome, but please sign your response and tell
me where you are; the Web is not always the best forum for open communication!
Respectfully, Rev John Gregory Smith, at Leaside United Church, LENT 2013.
My grandfather’s favourite hymn: The Old Rugged Cross
( George Bennard, 1912)
1. On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
The emblem of suff’ring and shame;
And I love that old cross where the dearest and best
For a world of lost sinners was slain.
o Refrain:
So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross,
Till my trophies at last I lay down;
I will cling to the old rugged cross,
And exchange it some day for a crown.
2. Oh, that old rugged cross, so despised by the world,
Has a wondrous attraction for me;
For the dear Lamb of God left His glory above
To bear it to dark Calvary.
3. In that old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine,
A wondrous beauty I see,
For ’twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died,
To pardon and sanctify me.
4. To the old rugged cross I will ever be true;
Its shame and reproach gladly bear;
Then He’ll call me some day to my home far away,
Where His glory forever I’ll share.
I can remember him singing this song to himself as he sat in his old chair smoking his
pipe. It was a source of comfort for him for sure.
BUT, my grandfather would be turning 112 this year on his birthday, and it starkly
reminds me that the theology of this particular hymn, full of atonement and the notion of
Christ’s sacrifice for personal sins, is very much that of the early 20th century. (written in
1912). The fact that so many people today still cling to this kind of theology, suggests to
me that theology around the cross changes very slowly, and probably will take a few
generations to pass by before we really notice the difference. For some of you staunch
conservatives, that will be a good thing. But my sense is that much of mainline
Christianity is uncomfortable with atonement theology, but is just too afraid to say so out
loud. So today I am saying so out loud!
1
LENT 2013 SERMON SERIES: The Theology of the Cross
I’m wondering when it was you last heard a sermon preached about the cross. Can you
remember?
It’s rather ironic that such foundational theology is for many, unfamiliar territory. A
wilderness of sorts.
In this wilderness, we find ourselves thirsty and desperate for life-giving signs in the time
in which we live; we look at the cross and without taking time to ask about it or seek
deeper understanding, we discount it. We feel bad about that but we can’t help it! To be
sure, the cross does not offer the same kind of comfort as my grandfather took from it!
I’m going to start with two assertions, just to get us rolling on this very complex topic:
1) Post-Modern people are generally ashamed of and humiliated by the cross,
because they do not understand it and what it means, and don’t want to be
associated with the guilt it induces. Despite the fact that much of our current
understanding of the cross is an 11th century invention, it still has profound
resonance in our culture. Postmodern people, in my view would rather not deal
with it. Some churches display crosses on the front lawn, or on the tops of their
buildings. In others, you have to look hard to find them. Here in our sanctuary, I
put ours away for a whole year, and it was almost the full year before anyone
spoke to me about it.
My personal opinion is that post-moderns like us feel that the cross gives the wrong
message, and seems out of step or counter-productive to our ministry. But frankly, I
think if we were honest: what this really reveals is that we are lazy theologians. To set
something aside just because we don’t understand it anymore is not a good reason to set it
aside. In fact, an undeveloped Christology, and a therefore undeveloped “theologia
crucis” (to use Luther’s famous term) is not just a sign of theological laziness, it also
greatly opens us up to the workings of the secular modern age in which we live, with all
its attendant and inherent manipulations and rationalizations. Depending where you
stand on theological issues, this may be good or it may be bad. The fact that we know
little or nothing about it still leaves us open.
The second assertion:
2) we have a well developed theology of glory (or Empire), but we do not have a
balanced view of the world when we omit the theology of suffering, pain, or
forgiveness. The theology of glory has been around since Constantine, when the
church, itself a fledgling institution, gained the acceptance of the state, and thus
became co-opted by the powers of the world, by empire, by status. Much like the
story we have of Jesus fending off the temptations of power in the desert, only in
reverse, the Church lapped up the power it found in the cross, and the Christian
religion became a tool of power, an effective and reliable way to control the
masses. You know when Constantine accepted Christianity, it was in the early
2
LENT 2013 SERMON SERIES: The Theology of the Cross
300’s, so by then, 300 years of church history and theology had evolved. Much of
THAT was turfed!!!!
(Douglas John Hall presents this theology of glory in his book
The Cross in our Context, 2003. It is primary reading for
understanding this matter from the Reformed tradition of
Christianity.)
What I mean by this second assertion is that our theology in this present day still has its
form and gains its power from the theologies of the Constantinian era. There’s a sense
(and you find this in most fundamental churches, but also very much in the corridors of
power), that God, however construed, is “still in his heaven”, and that the world is still
very much unfolding as it should. This widely-held notion implies however that God is
omnipotent and omnipresent in the world, and is based on the assumption that the world
will eventually be righted, the inherent sinfulness of humanity will eventually be
overcome, and the end point of humanity will be found when the whole world gets it.
And by that we mean, the whole world gets it, the Christian way.
I submit that this is ecclesial theology more than it is Christic theology.
Douglas John Hall calls this triumphalist theology. David Korten: theology of Empire.
Many of us lived through the greatest recent example of this in the 8 years of George W.
Bush’s reign as president of the largest power in the world. While there were oodles of
choice quotes coming from his lips, some of the most absurd ones involved his
invocation of the power of God in the performance of his job as president.
Example: (2005) “I am on a mission from God. God tells me: George, go and fight
those terrorists, so that’s what I do.”
Here’s why this matters:
The THEOLOGY of the greatest superpower on earth flows directly from a view of the
world that promulgates the notion that God vanquished evil and death on the cross, such
that their country’s mission in the world is therefore to vanquish evil and death in the
world, BY THE VIRTUE of Christian righteousness. You may or may not agree with
this claim. But the problem we have in Christianity today is that a large wing of the faith
associates Christian religion with white North American economic, cultural and
military imperialism, which “could in fact be the single most insidious cause of global
peril.” (see Hall, page 4 – 5 for this.)
Once the state decides who its enemies are, then it loads up its guns and exterminates
them. (Think Rwanda).
Some might even argue that the militancy of the Muslim world in our time is a reaction
to this theological notion of power, an extreme reaction of course, but a reaction to its
humiliation by the west, especially as the west is primarily embodied in one large
superpower – which just happens to be the most avowedly Christian of all the nations on
earth. Not to mention the fact that a lot of the theology of Empire was devised during
3
LENT 2013 SERMON SERIES: The Theology of the Cross
and through the 11th century, the time of the Crusades. In those days, the enemy was to
be killed, literally, and the martyrs, those who died in the process, were promised
heavenly paradise as reward.
(see Abelard and others from the 11 century: I
actually just googled Abelard and Anselm and got
reams of material on this)
Douglas Hall makes this hard claim:
A religious community that believes itself to be in possession of the Truth is a
community equipped with the most lethal weapon of any warfare: the sense
of its own superiority and mandate to mastery. (page 5)
My sister lives in South Carolina.
She married a guy there (and he’s nice, I like him!) who is a bona fide Southern Baptist
republican, and proud of it.
I make the above claims confidently, as I have heard these words come straight from his
mouth, echoing these thoughts, just not in theological terms.
Isn’t it fascinating the in our day the institutional church, especially as we know it in
modern North America, is still astonished that it has been so quickly relativized,
marginalized, and silenced??? This is because the church still lives with the worldview
that OUR belief system is inherently superior to all the alternatives. We’ve been forced
into submission by the dominant secular post-modern culture now, which keeps putting
us in our place. We look around to blame someone for this. The Jews have for many
years been targets of this blame, but haven’t we really done it to ourselves? It’s really
unfair to blame another whole religion for our own ills, and I submit, it’s time for us to
grow up!
This, for us, is unfamiliar territory. Wildnerness! That’s why I chose Lent as the time to
raise these issues with you.
The United Church is very much a Protestant denomination. We are Protestant people,
from the Reform tradition.
The Reformation began of course with Martin Luther in 1517 or so. (It was in 1517 that
he nailed the 95 Theses to the cathedral door)
Luther was disgusted with the imperialism and triumphalism of the church, which was
selling salvation to the masses through writs called indulgences, which were basically a
written promise that the soul of the deceased would not go to hell but to heaven and have
eternal life.
This too was based on a theology of the cross. Salvation through the death of Christ on
the cross.
4
LENT 2013 SERMON SERIES: The Theology of the Cross
Later on, reformers like Calvin and in particular some of Calvin’s disciples, would strip
the churches of any sign at all of Christian triumphalism, removing every piece of goldedged furniture, any kind of icon, any pictures depicting the Christ, and most important,
the cross (more specifically, the crucifix).
But what they didn’t jettison was the atonement and sacrificial theology of the medieval
church, and that theology still lives and rests within our faith, even if most modern
people have absolutely no understanding what it means.
Let me tell you:
(Sidenote: Calvin of course didn’t like crucifixes or
the notion of the atonement sacrifice theology, but he
sure did approve of guilt. He thought that we should
revere the cross, and that it should make us feel
guilty for our sins, and lead us to repentance. To a
modern ear, it doesn’t seem all that different to
atonement, but it was for him. These theologies came
after years and years of hotly debated finer points of
the faith. I’m not exactly sure whether his lifting up of
guilt was a better option; that will have to wait for
another sermon.)
On the first Good Friday, when Jesus was crucified on the cross, it was devastating.
No one could have predicted that such a moral, decent, truly spiritual man could be killed
in such a way (though we have many contemporary examples: Ghandi and MLK as two
good examples). But to the Jewish people of the day, this crucifixion story is absolute
nonsense: because no God would ever allow the true Messiah to be killed. Even a God
of vengeance would never allow the Son of Man to die at the hands of the Roman
execution squad.
(the later idea that Jesus was in fact God himself, made even less sense to the Jewish
psyche: how could a God of creation and power, allow himself to be killed?)
And so began 20 centuries of questioning this particular historical fact: that Jesus, the
one we worship as the Christ, the Son of God, could be sacrificed on a cross.
Jesus never suggested this would happen to him, although the later writers of the gospels,
were able to drop hints into their writing. There’s one in our Luke reading from today:
the devil tempts Jesus to build a kingdom, Jesus says he can rebuild the kingdom in 3
days, an illusion to the Good Friday-Easter three day triduum. Jesus never would have
said that, unless of course you believe that he had the power of reading the future, the
power of predestination of his own fate. My problem with that is that if he really did
know what his future entailed, why would he choose it? The traditional answers to that
require a LOT of twisting of fact to make them sensible, the most important being that in
5
LENT 2013 SERMON SERIES: The Theology of the Cross
order to know this, you have to remove Jesus’ humanity from him. Frankly speaking, if
Jesus is portrayed as only a God-man with God powers, then the story of the crucifixion
makes even less sense to us.
Paul was the first to write about the cross, but his theology is only partially formed and
didn’t answer all the questions that would arise in the centuries later. It really wasn’t
until Augustine, the great Catholic theologian, (he was born in 354 so you can see that it was
quite a while, even after Constantine) began to interpret the cross as a payment for sins, that
our current understanding of the cross began to develop. In short, the belief is not
necessarily biblical. The biblical notion of sin does not imply that a ransom blood
sacrifice had to be made in order to set us right with God. Those two notions do not
necessarily have to live together. What is most important is that Jesus did not ever
link the two together!!!! He did not seem to speak of his life as an atonement
sacrifice. I can’t find any evidence of it.
But in the early 11th century a monk by the name Anselm of Canterbury came up with
something called the “satisfaction” theory, the theory of God that goes like this:
God requires justice, and since God is a vengeful God, the horrible sins of
humanity must be paid, or atoned for. Humanity’s sin has piled up and
become so great, that a huge payment is due in order to “satisfy” God.
THAT which was given up was the sacrifice of the SON, as a SUBSTITUTE
for us, the blood sacrifice of the Christ being the requirement of God, in
order to release us from God’s judgment, and free us to live in the grace and
love of God.
This is why Roman Catholic priests must enact the mass every day. Because the ongoing
sacrifice of Christ is required to atone for the sins of the people, especially those of us
born after this notion came into play.
That this theory STILL has us in its grip is kind of shocking, not the least because for
many reasons, which I don’t have time to go into today, it is an abhorrent theology that
makes God out to be a monster; AND it actually denies the validity of the human nature
of Jesus, AND keeps God more distant from Christ, therefore more distant from the rest
of us.
Do you understand what I am saying???
I’ll state it frankly,: this is not the God we believe in.
I also don’t think this is the God of the Bible.
This is a triumphalistic notion, couched in theological terms.
It leaves people out of it.
It absolves us of responsibility for the world in which we live.
It’s not freeing. It’s constricting.
It’s not life-giving. It’s defeating.
6
LENT 2013 SERMON SERIES: The Theology of the Cross
No one can live up to the notion of a guilt sacrifice; it means none of us is worthy to
stand before our Maker, if that makes any sense today.
It doesn’t offer hope. It offers despair.
And at the end of the day, it posits A GOD NO ONE CAN LOVE.
When our kids were growing up, we had a copy of Franco Zeffirelli’s sumptuous but
overly literal take on the story of Jesus of Nazareth. It was a beautiful movie nonetheless,
even though it was 8 hours in total.
I vividly remember the first time our daughter Laura watched it with us, which was in
fact, the last time she ever watched it. The crucifixion scene is graphic. As those nails
were driven into Jesus’ hands and feet, our daughter wept. She couldn’t bear it. I’ll
never forget her saying: “but why did he have to die?” Over and over. The story then,
and now, still makes no sense to her.
How, we still wonder, can the death of one person, in such a cruel and ignoble fashion,
possibly make us love God, or make us right with God, or right with one another?
For me, the test of any theology is this: am I afraid to tell it to my children?
So we’re going to try to find new ways to understand the cross over the next few weeks.
You know, it is Christian to believe torture and war have nothing to do with saving the
world, and they should not be endured by anyone. We should be working to stop them. If
Christians reject the imperial designs of crucifixion, we must break silence whenever
violence is used to shame, instill fear, fragment human community, or suppress our work
for economic justice, health care, and peace. Does the cross as we understand it
traditionally, help us or hinder us in this project? I think it does not.
Crucifixion became a tool of the empire. Without an empire to support anymore, do we
still need the tool? Or are there better ways of teaching our people to be good, to find the
goodness in everyone, and to bring goodness to bear on this dark time?
Is this story of a crucified man, a help or a hindrance, in the lives we lead every day?
Does this story, as it did for my grandfather, provide comfort and hope for a release of
ones’ pain and suffering, in the afterlife?
Or are there better stories? Better images and narratives that can inform our lives, and
provide not just hope, but reason and purpose for the human life of today?
And, what notion of God must we have in order to appropriate these stories for our
modern world?
Once we begin to answer some of these questions for ourselves, then we’ll be able to
walk through some of this unfamiliar territory together,
and come out on the other side with a glimpse of the depth of the heart of the Creator.
I invite you to take this journey with me this Lenten season.
7