How Central is the Cross in Your View of Christ?

Last updated on: May 3, 2017 at 12:08 am by Scot McKnight

How Central is the Cross in Your View of Christ? 2017-04-26T19:21:17-05:00 Scot McKnight

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If Christ is the incarnation of God, and if that means Who Christ is should shape our view of Who God is, what’s next? Greg Boyd, in The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, contends that the center of the center is the cross. So the question becomes How central is the cross to your view of Christ? And if the cross is central, the implication is clear: the cross determines our understanding of Who God is. Which means, we need a cruci-centric understanding of God, what God is doing, and on how to read the Bible.

This is the deep logic of Boyd’s book. God is seen in Christ, and Christ is seen in the Cross, so therefore God is seen in the Cross. So the message of the Bible is cruciform.

Therefore, what to do with the violent images of God in the Old Testament when we take the crucicentric vision of God in the New Testament as our norm for theology.

God is love, that’s the first point.

What makes the good news proclaimed in the NT good is not merely that Jesus is the definitive revelation of God; it is that the God Jesus reveals has a breathtakingly beautiful character. This character is succinctly captured by John when he proclaims, “God is love [agape]1 (l John 4:8, cf. 4:16). 143

Some want to know how God’s wrath is understood then. Is it denied? Hardly. What needs to be seen is that many who are quick to affirm God’s wrath want to connect it to God’s holiness and — this can’t be denied — divorce it from God’s love. Carl Henry in a car once called this God’s split personality, and he was breathing wrath against his fellow Christians for splitting God into two personalities. Boyd: if God is love, wrath must be about his love.

The fury of God’s “wrath” against sin, injustice, violence and everything else that destroys people is nothing other than the fury of his love for people. 146

Again, we are back to Boyd’s big problem, and we have to answer these questions. No ask, no answer. No answer, no answers.

The all-important question, of course, is this: what does it mean to confess that “God is love” and that we are called to “live in love” (Eph 5:2)? Most significantly for our purposes, does God’s love allow for the sort of violence that some OT authors ascribe to him? Is it conceivable that we could interpret portraits of God judging people by having unborn babies ripped out of their mother’s wombs (Hos 13:16) or instigating mothers to cannibalize their children (Jer 19:9; Lam 2:20; Ezek 5:9-10) to be expressions of God’s love? At least since the fifth century, and up until very recent times, theologians within the historic-orthodox church have almost uniformly assumed the answer was “yes. 146-7

Augustine was a theologian of love, though many fail to see this, but Boyd thinks Augustine got love wrong:

Augustine thus concluded that when a passage of Scripture attributes wickedness “to God or to people whose holiness is commended to us,” we should consider it “entirely figurative. Such mysteries,” he adds, “are to be elucidated in terms of the need to nourish love.’ 148

One major reason why Augustine seemed to see little incongruity between affirming that God’s eternal essence is love, on the one hand, and affirming the literal interpretation of violent portraits of God, on the other, is that he defined love as an inner disposition that had no necessary behavioral implications. 149 Augustine thus argued that one could love one s enemy while nevertheless treating them with “benevolent severity. 149

But if God’s “perfect love” does not contrast with an apparent evil of this magnitude, it seems it contrasts with nothing. And since concepts only have meaning insofar as they contrast with something meaningful, one now has to_wonder if Augustine’s conception of “perfect love” possesses any coherent meaning at all. 151

Augustine’s been updated according to Boyd:

The resurgence in Christocentric thinking over the last century has provided a much-needed Christocentric sharpening of Augustine’s ambiguous “rule of love.” In some quarters, Augustine’s rule has been reformulated to stipulate that Scripture must be understood to be ‘breathed” by God for the ultimate purpose of bearing witness to God’s Christ-like love. 152

Back to defining love and I have to say here that for Boyd love is not a difficult doctrine. It is eminently clear. How so?

To begin, it is important for us to realize that the NT goes beyond providing an abstract conceptual definition of “love”: it points us to Jove’s supreme illustration. “This is how we know what love is,” John says, “Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.’ From this he concludes, ‘we ought to lay down our lives for one another” (l John 3:16…). When John proclaims that “God is love” (l John 4:8), this is the kind of love he is referring to. 153

The cross does not just happen to be the place where God decided to concretely illustrate the kind of love he eternally is. The cross rather contains within itself a logic that necessitates that we embrace it as the definitive, unsurpassable revelation of God’s loving nature. 154

So, God is love. Love is the cross of Christ. God is cross-defined. That’s the logic.

I trust it is clear why, by definition, God could not have possibly gone to a further extreme, could not have possibly stooped further, and could not have possibly sacrificed more than God did on the cross. And it is the unsurpassable extremity to which God condescended for our undeserving race that reveals the unsurpassable perfection of the love that God eternally is, and therefore the love that God has for us. 155

And since God’s love is not merely an attribute of God but the very essence of God, Bauckham is hardly overstating the matter when he bluntly says that for the authors of the NT, “God’s identity is as God crucified.’ 157

Here it is all summed up

I have thus far argued for the cross as the definitive revelation of God and the thematic center of Jesus’s life and ministry, including his resurrection, primarily on the basis of the logic that is inherent in this revelation. To redeem us and reveal his true character to us, the all-holy God went to the infinite extremity of becoming our sin, and the triune God who is perfectly united in love went to the infinite extremity of experiencing our God-forsaken curse. And it is precisely the unsurpassable extremity to which God went—becoming his own antithesis—that reveals the unsurpassable perfection of the other-oriented, self-sacrificial agape- love that the triune God eternally is and thus that defines the kind of love that is, in various ways, reflected in every aspect of Jesus’s identity and mission. Hence, I have argued, the cross must be considered the thematic center of everything Jesus was about. 170-171

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