catapult magazine

I believe it to be a great mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense in it. … We cannot blink at the fact that gentle Jesus meek and mild was so stiff in his opinions and so inflammatory in his language that he was thrown out of church, stoned, hunted from place to place, and finally gibbeted as a firebrand and a public danger.? Whatever his peace was, it was not the peace of an amiable indifference.

- Dorothy Sayers

Great quote! It’s about time that Christians reclaim a theology of the cross once again. We need to start looking at the cross as something more than just a decoration that we hang around our necks and begin to understand it as something we carry on our backs, and sometimes even get nailed to.

I’ve been very interested in a robust theology of the cross lately, and I’m really looking forward to reading Jurgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology after I graduate.

: I only linked to Amazon because they’ve got that “Look inside this book” feature; I’d recommend purchasing from your local bookstore or Powell’s.[/i:58eba5f04d]

I think one of the more radical words bandied about in the Reformational tradition is the word “antithesis”. It doesn’t have the right sound or feel for what it stands for, but its meaning is scandalous. The Gospels show that Jesus comes to cut the world in two so that the antithesis between good and evil, the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of this world could be more clearly revealed to us. When John says that only that which is in Christ is true and everything else is deadly false, his words make it easier to see the difference between the two.

If the Spirit is present, conflict is more likely bound to spring up than peace and harmony as we understand it. Christ’s sacrifice is not just a passive gesture. It’s a battleaxe, a sharp blow in the bloody war between good and evil here on earth. And the cross continues to divide today.