Too offensive!

The central event of Christianity is too offensive and too much against the grain of religious thought as we know it ever to have emerged out of human religious imagination, no matter how philosophically subtle or humanly moving that religion might be. I personally find parts of the Qur’an and the Bhagavad-Gita quite stirring, but no one has been able to persuade me that there is anything in them equal to “the word of the cross.” Islam teaches that Jesus was not really crucified at all (Qur’an 4:157). John Stott has written, “I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth. . . . But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross . . . plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. . . . There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering” (The Cross of Christ [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986], 335–36).—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 57–58 n. 40