But its not a pilgrimage

The Christian life of obedience is, therefore, not a pilgrimage toward a goal, as is commonly supposed. It is a witness or signpost to that telos (end, goal) that has already been achieved by Christ the Kurios and will be consummated in the last day by the action of God (the parousia, or second coming). The righteous, justifying action of God and the faith that is engendered by its powerful activity are the two effective agents that call forth the obedience.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 555

Twice! And in one verse, too!

[In Rom 8:11] Paul puts all three persons of the Trinity into one verse not once but twice, saying in essence that the Spirit of the Father who raised the Son from the dead now indwells the baptized believer and “will also quicken your mortal bodies by [the same] Spirit” (KJV). In a cursory reading, it is easy to miss the repetition with which Paul intends to convey the mighty action of God, who, in Christ, by the Spirit, has brought into being a new Adam, a new humanity. This is the great set of events that bestows upon us nothing less than the righteousness of God for the living of our lives.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 554 (emphasis original)

How is that possible?

The righteous requirements of the Law have been met in him in order that the righteous requirements of the Law might be met fully in us. This declaration by Paul is breathtaking in its precise correspondence with the idea of recapitulation and its outcome. But there is more. We have emphasized that Paul’s gospel is not about human potential or human possibility but about the power of God. Here in Romans 8:4 is a clear illustration. Our own “recapitulation,” the new life in Christ, is only possible through the power of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 553 (emphasis original)

What about the scandal?

In the theology of the cross, the theme of recapitulation ranks high in value. However, there is one problem. Recapitulation alone cannot fully account for the nature of crucifixion. Compelling as Irenaeus’s account is, it does not incorporate and make sense of the factor of Christ’s gruesome death. This is the lacuna — the blank space begging to be filled — in much of what has been written in church history about the cross. The scandal, the hideousness, the obscenity, and above all the shame and dereliction inherent in the manner of Jesus’ death have been passed over in silence more often than not.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 549

Reckon it so!

In the New Testament cosmology, the life of Jesus culminating in his crucifixion and resurrection is the inaugural event of the age to come, the reign of God to which all newly-begotten baptized believers belong by adoption and grace. It is only out of this completely new arrangement that obedience is engendered, by the power of the Holy Spirit. It was this sort of obedience that Abraham was able to pursue “ahead of time” (or “beforehand” — Gal. 3:8) according to the promise of God (Rom. 4:1—22). It is this obedience that is ours through the reckoning (logizomai) of God to us (Rom. 7:23-25).—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 547

It's not just getting wet!

Baptism is not a simple bestowing of blessing. It signifies a radical shift of aeons, a snatching of the baptized person out of the Enemy’s clutches, and a transferinto the age to come.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 542

The case for substitution

The theme of substitution allows full scope for us to understand the depth and completeness of Christ’s involvement in the human condition. From this perspective, it is truly hard to understand why there is so much resistance to it. How does it make the self-sacrifice of Christ more palatable to say that he gave himself only for our benefit, rather than in our place? Even if it is construed exclusively as a victory over the Powers — as in the Christus Victor motif — does that explain why the Son of God had to under go crucifixion to defeat Sin, Death, and the devil? Does it not require some suspension of disbelief in any case? Why should we resist the most obvious sense of the words “for us” and “for me” in the case of Jesus on the cross? Since he clearly did not deserve what happened to him, why is it not right to conclude that we should have been there instead of him? Is that not the most basic sort of human reaction? We have all heard of people saying, “It should have been me instead of him.” Why should we want ruthlessly to eliminate such thoughts concerning Christ on the cross? The plain sense of the New Testament taken as a whole gives the strong impression that Jesus gave himself up to shame, spitting, scourging, and a degrading public death before the eyes of the whole world, not only for our sake but also in our place.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 529 (emphasis original)

All this is from God…

The four passion narratives in the Gospels are designed, through extensive use of citations from the Old Testament, to show that God is at work at every turn to carry out his plan. Paul makes the narrative explicit: “If any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself . . . that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not reckoning their trespasses against them” (11 Cor. 5:17-19).—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 523

Tozer for Tuesday

“The just shall live by faith,” not the just shall live by his feelings. Faith here is complete confidence. It is not an act of believing once done. It is not something you do and settle it. It is a complete confidence that remains with you all the time. Faith is a complete confidence. It is a state of confidence maintained—a state of confidence first in God. We must believe in God, then we must believe in His Son, Jesus Christ, in the work He did for us and the work He is now doing for us at the right hand of God. We must maintain a state of confidence in the promises of God and the certainty that God will come to our aid.—A.W. Tozer, Experiencing the Presence of God, 194

Bad theology and self-help

Almost from the beginning of this volume, we have been guided by the biblical picture of human nature, so well understood by the great literary writers and so much resisted by today’s purveyors of self-help. The biblical figure of “Adam” personifies the ubiquitous human fixation on the idea of its own innocence and the refusal of God’s right to be our Judge. Consequently we live with a delusion, insatiable in its demands and demonstrably false: the delusion that we can live free of the deeply lodged power of Sin in our lives. This is less a failure of anthropology than of theology — it is a tragically insuflicient grasp of who theos (God) is in relation to the creation.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 521 (emphasis original)

The buck stops … over there!

This is a compelling diagnosis of the human condition and our resistance to the whole concept of substitution. We do not want to give up our place as judge. Barth specifically defines the primal human sin as making ourselves judges in order to exculpate ourselves and condemn others. This is pictured in the instantaneous response of Adam and Eve, who, after eating the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, begin blaming each other and the serpent in order to hang on to the illusion of innocence — an innocence irreparably lost. We have usurped God’s place as the only true Judge, and therefore the substitution must happen at that particular juncture. An invasive, displacing movement on God’s part is clearly indicated, but paradoxically, it is the invasion that liberates even as it humiliates.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 519

Displaced!

Barth’s originality is also shown in his concept of displacement, or deposition. As the story of the primordial couple in Genesis 2-3 makes clear, our “original sin” was to set ourselves up as judges, that is, capable of determining good and evil on our own. In this presumption of ours we are radically in error. The usurpation of the role that belongs to God alone has led to the bondage of all creation (Rom. 8:20-23). Therefore the invasion of creation by God in Christ means that we have been radically displaced, deposed from our self-made throne or bench where we sit and judge others in order to shore up our restless need to prove our own righteousness. We want to “pronounce ourselves free and righteous and others more or less guilty.” We enjoy this role. But in the cross we see that we have been “displaced” by the one who is truly the Judge and is at the same time “radically and totally for us, in our place” (231-32). “For where does our own judgment always lead? To the place where we pronounce ourselves innocent . . . that is how we live. And that is how we can no longer live in the humiliating power of what took place in Jesus Christ. We are threatened by it because there is a complete turning of the tables. He who has acted there as Judge will also judge me, and He and not I will judge others” (233).—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 518

Judged, not just forgiven

In the crucifixion and its vindication in the resurrection, we see how every Power that wars against God has been and will be overcome and ultimately annihilated. It does not take a great stretch of the imagination to grasp how this may be linked with the cry of dereliction. In this sense, we may say that Jesus Christ absorbs into himself the divine sentence against Sin and Death. When Paul says “God made him to be sin,” he can be understood to say that in the tormented, crucified body of the Son, the entire universe of Sin and every kind of evil are concentrated and judged — not just forgiven, but definitively, finally, and permanently judged and separated from God and his creation.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 505 (emphasis original)

God doesn't change…

We have sought repeatedly to explain that any model requiring us to split the Father from the Son violates the fundamental Trinitarian theology of God and must be renounced. Equally central is the assertion that God does not change; least of all does he change as a result of the self-giving of the Son. This is a central affirmation. The event of the cross is the enactment in history of an eternal decision within the being of God. God is not changed by the historical event but has always been going out from God’s self in sacrificial love.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 500 (emphasis original)

Justification of the ungodly

Particularly noticeable in the construal of substitution as the action of a sadistic Father is the absence of any perception that the torturing to death of the only Son is related to the fall of Adam. In these critiques, there is no suggestion that the torturers themselves might be playing a part here, even if “they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Anyone seeking to caricature the crucifixion as the hateful action of a vindictive father does not understand what is happening: namely, the justification of the ungodly (Rom. 4:5; 5:6—9). In these critiques there is always more than a hint that the critic does not include himself or herself among the perpetrators.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 497n82 (emphasis original)