Beyond the Cross

Fleming Rutledge does not present her book as a definitive exposition but as a “series of theological reflections on Scripture and tradition,” written mainly for Christian believers who want to know what the best Christian minds have thought about the meaning of the cross. Even so, I wonder if unbelieving or agnostic readers wouldn’t profit by it as much or more: Rutledge’s prose is winsome and engaging, her learning wide but never flaunted, and her book is a fine introduction to a subject that has puzzled non-Christians since the middle of the first century: Why would anyone worship a man who, by every account, had been publicly disgraced and executed as a criminal?

To be fair, this is a question many Christians today could not readily answer if they tried. Centuries of aesthetically tempered iconography have inclined us to forget that the cross was a shameful and revolting thing: a form of public execution involving the transfixing of a naked man, often already brutalized, to a tree or upraised post. And yet this very form of execution is what the earliest Christians insisted on emphasizing: “We preach Christ crucified,” writes Paul in I Corinthians, and again, “I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” Rutledge does not blink:

Assume, for a moment, that Christianity’s outrageous claim is true and that Jesus really was the eternal son of God and that he really did submit himself to the cross in order to save sinners. What, exactly, did he accomplish? Let me vastly overstate the case by saying that there are two overarching answers to that question, and the best theologians throughout the history of the church have acknowledged both.

The first is that Jesus died a death of penal substitution: By submitting a life of perfect obedience to the cursed death of the cross, he met the demands of God’s law and paid the price we were incapable of paying. As the prophet Isaiah had it,

This understanding of Jesus’ death, often described as substitutionary atonement, was expressed, in various ways, by a few early church fathers, famously by Anselm in the 11th century, more forcefully by the Protestant reformers, and eventually by Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions. Most modern Christians in the West, if they think about the question at all, think of Christ’s work exclusively in these terms.

The other understanding, propounded by a greater number of church fathers, by Martin Luther in various places, and especially by some 20th-century scholars beginning with the Swede Gustaf Aulén in Christus Victor (1931), holds that Jesus in his death and resurrection took on the powers of Satan and death and overcame them. The latter interpretation makes sense of, for instance, the apostle John’s statement in I John 3:8: “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.” (Ask the average American evangelical why Jesus came into the world and you will almost certainly not get the answer, “To destroy the works of the devil.”)

Rutledge rightly insists that both these understandings express different components of the same creed. She does not assume, as too many biblical scholars have and do, that a work as magnificent as God’s redemption of mankind must be reducible to a tidy cohesive interpretation or “theory.” And both these understandings, she rightly contends, find expression in a doctrine often called (rather dryly, to my mind) recapitulation: the doctrine that Christ came to undo what Adam did and to do what Adam failed to do. Hence Paul’s great elucidation in the fifth chapter of Romans: “For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous” (5:19).

She contends, correctly, that “in the mainline Protestant churches of our times, there is no lack of exhortation to . . . be more inclusive, give more generously, embrace the Other, work for peace, minister to the needy, feed the poor, cultivate tolerance, seek justice, show hospitality, and so forth.” What is often missing, she writes, “is the powerful proclamation of the One who is doing the calling, who has ratified our calling in his own blood, who has entered upon the life of ‘Adam’ in order to defeat from inside human nature the work of the Enemy.”

The Crucifixion exhibits a genuine reverence for the Christian Scriptures, and for that reason it may surprise some readers that Rutledge is writing from a robustly “liberal” tradition. That tradition, beginning in earnest in the late 19th century and developing into various forms of theological moralism in the latter half of the 20th, is closely associated with critical, or historical-critical, scholarship. Critical biblical scholars, concerned primarily with the origins and authorship of texts, have generally operated on the premise that these texts are in no sense supernatural or revelatory. Since the supernatural events portrayed in biblical texts—Jesus’ healing of the lame and blind, say, or the resurrection itself—cannot be accurate representations of what happened, they must have been invented at some later date for sectarian or political purposes.

One may approve or disapprove of that premise, and critical scholars themselves have found ways to treat texts as in some sense “sacred” without treating them as inerrant or even as divine revelation. But that has long been the de facto governing assumption behind critical exegesis of biblical texts. The trouble is that, from any point of view, it’s boring. The biblical writings purport to tell us what God is like and how man can know him. All critical scholars are ever going to tell us is who wrote (or didn’t write) which books and what sort of half-baked primitive ideas underlay their composition. That may be fine for desiccated scholarly monographs, but it will not sustain anyone’s faith or motivate anyone to works of mercy.

Fleming Rutledge is one of a growing number of liberal scholars—probably the most well known is N. T. Wright—who insist on interpreting biblical texts on those texts’ own terms. These scholars’ interpretations do not always align with those of more orthodox, or “evangelical,” scholars; but taken together, they signify a more theological turn in mainstream biblical exegesis—and, by extension, a turn away from the kind of lifelessly “scientific” readings that, over the course of the last century, led mainline church leaders to ignore the Bible and, instead, promote various forms of up-to-date moral uplift.

Rutledge, like other liberal but orthodox-leaning biblical scholars, does not openly disavow critical scholarship or its presuppositions; and indeed, she accepts its commonly held conclusions—for example, that Paul likely did not write the Letter to the Ephesians. Instead, she sidesteps the whole tangled problem by observing that “this method of explicating [biblical] texts has probably taken us as far as it can take us.”

Rutledge’s liberalism shows up in other ways, too. Consider her chapter on the justice and judgment of God. Is God, as the Bible claims, angry at man’s sin? A typical 20th-century liberal Protestant would have trouble answering that one, but Rutledge doesn’t. Yes, she says, God is indignant at injustice; and the crucifixion itself only makes sense if he is the sort of God who is sufficiently repulsed by evil to interpose his own Son to provide a way of deliverance from his wrath.

Well, okay. But her description of the sorts of injustice that anger God are all corporate and social injustices, rarely if ever individual ones. That is wholly in keeping with the liberal tradition to which Rutledge belongs, in which the more “individualistic” tendencies of evangelicalism and pietism are frequently thought to encourage a lack of responsibility for collective life. It lets the individual off the hook rather too easily, however. “Why has the gap between rich and poor become so huge?” she asks in her intermittently hortatory style.

An ordinary congregant, listening to a homily along these lines, might legitimately excuse himself from any guilt at all. He hasn’t done anything to perpetrate these injustices.

Certainly there are biblical passages, especially in the Old Testament prophets, that inveigh against social injustices; but the preponderance of biblical writings is concerned with individual sins rather than corporate ones. In the Bible, as Rutledge correctly points out, “justice” and “righteousness” are the same word. What she doesn’t point out is that this justice/righteousness far more often refers to individual conduct and character than it does to cultural customs or government policies.

This difference in outlook has shaped our politics to the present day. Conservatives tend to see individual decisions as more consequential (abortion and sexual license on the negative side, free market decision-making on the positive), whereas liberals, concerned primarily with corporate life, feel that an excessive concern with the individual leads inexorably to lassitude and injustice in the political sphere. There is truth in both outlooks and both critiques, but if we confine ourselves to the biblical worldview, it is not unfair to put it in the form of a question: Was the Son of God immolated on the cross for my sins or for America’s?

The last two decades have seen scores of popular books about Jesus that promote all sorts of theories about who he was and what he was up to. The great majority of these achieved their aims by the simple strategy of discounting contrary evidence: that is, categorizing inconvenient New Testament passages as later inventions. It’s easy to claim that Jesus was married, say, or that he was executed for advocating some proto-socialist utopia, when you can dismiss virtually the whole of the New Testament witness as somehow illegitimate.

Far more difficult, and in the long run infinitely more interesting, is the task of letting writers of the first century tell us what they saw and heard about Jesus’ death without discounting or second-guessing them. That is what Fleming Rutledge has done, and she has done it with insight and skill.

Barton Swaim is the author, most recently, of The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics.