The Word of the Cross
The Corinthian church, made up mostly of Gentiles and some Jews knew they had come to God through Jesus Christ. Paul everywhere insists on that.
It wasn't that they didn't know it and admit it--it was that they didn't have a real understanding of how cutting the cross was. They didn't know (any more than we) how the way God made himself known in the cross of Christ subverted all other approaches to living and self-understanding.
Non-Christian Jews and Greeks rejected the crucified Christ. Their presuppositions became their view of reality and their view of reality led them to conclude something about a message of a crucified Messiah and a human dying on a cross to enable us to know God (or rather be known by God).
Jews sought signs that proved God was with them; the kind of signs they were used to in ancient times, the kind of signs that fitted in with their history and theology. When offered the sign of the crucified Christ they called it an insult.
Greeks looked at the young Jew dying on a tree as the way to knowing God and they called it "dumb".
In coming to Christ the Corinthian Christians said "no" to what the world said "yes" to and "yes" to what the world said "no" to. That should have meant they wouldn't be bringing their pre-Christ ways of judging into their "in Christ" relationships. But they did. In having (essentially) a Jewish (kind of Christ) or a Greek (kind of) Christ they were parceling Christ out; they were dividing him. "He appeals to us all by submitting to our cultural shaping" they seemed to be saying. "No," said Paul, "he appeals to us all by repudiating our cultures with their fixed ways of approaching God. He repudiates our 'wisdon' and 'power' and offers wisdom and power of a different order."
Paul wasn't absolutely opposed to "signs" or "wisdom" because he offered both (1 Cor 2:4,6; 2 Cor 12:12). He was opposed to boxing God in. (C.S. Lewis' The Silver Chair. In it Aslan gives Jill four signs but warns her that they won't look like what she has in mind so she must keep her eyes open.) To say this or that is the only way God will signify his presence, or that this or that wisdom won't compute well--that's to box him in with our presuppositions.
In discussing Liberal Protestantism, Alister McGrath (Mystery of the Cross, page 69) says, "Its exponents had unconsciously turned their cultural presuppositions into a view of reality which dictated what Jesus must have been like-on the basis of which they asserted that this was what Jesus was really like, this is what the real significance of Jesus was."
And their return to the "simple teachings" of Jesus Christ was a return to a Jesus stripped of all the creedal statments about him, it's a Christ stripped of dogma. He is, in some ways, more understandable, less mysterious, but he is less worthy of our trusting ourselves to him, he is less worthy of the trouble it takes to understand him. Forsyth knew the non-theological Christ is more popular, that he gets more applause, but he isn't mighty to save, he doesn't break us down and then recreate us. He gives us a tonic, a bit of inspiration, some assurance that we can truly follow in his steps. In short, he is like us, only very much better in every way. Truth is, Christ is precious to us in the ways he is like us but he in infinitely more precious to us in the ways that he is unlike us.
Jew and Greek judged the cross and found it lacking. Paul claimed the cross judged Jews and Greeks and found them lacking.
Liberal Protestantism's culture judged the cross and found it lacking, found it uncivilized, found it didn't fit into a humane way of looking at things, so they tamed it. They made it into something it wasn't--a straightforward moral pattern. They couldn't dismiss it right off as absurd or as fundamentally offensive (after all it was in the Bible), so they made it into an heroic deed we should all follow. Self-denial, self-sacrifice, heroism--all these "lessons" could be drawn from the cross, and God admired the response of Jesus. He admired it because he saw a gallant and incredibly good man showing us how to live; but it said nothing about the character or purposes of God. It confirmed our already existing views of the kind of God God was. And it wasn't really God's idea. A cross was a human invention, a cross was a symbol of man's capacity to torture another. The cross revealed sick humans; it revealed nothing about God! If anything, the cross repulsed God and wha! t he was able to salvage from the whole affair was Christ's heroic bearing of it. So the liberal view of things told us.
But the message of the cross isn't only a call to moral uprightness, it isn't only a pattern of how to live. To reduce it to that was one of the great errors of Protestant Liberalism and it looks no better on us than on them. We need to allow it its full programme (to the degree that we recognize it), we need to allow it its offence to reason and status quo religion.
We may reduce the word of the cross to: "We are to live humbly, self-sacrificially, keeping our commitments and treating one another with justice and mercy." All this is derivable from the cross, of course; but none of it offends the Jew, none of it appears stupid to a Greek. The OT and Greek moral teaching is filled with instruction and encouragement to live in these ways, but this is not the message of the cross. Paul has something more radical in mind when he addresses the Corinthians about the word of the cross. I'm not suggesting that we can get to the bottom of it but I am saying that reducing the cross to a call to certain forms of moral uprightness is to narrow it and lose its power and wisdom.
The word of the cross is supposed to offend. God meant it to expose as foolishness and disbelief the ways of humankind in their approach (or lack of approach) to him.
The cross is the peculiar, even unique way to "know" God. It's only there we can get a picture of who God is. See how Paul reworks the Shema in 1 Corinthians 8:5-6 which tells us our inherited doctrine of (Jewish) monotheism needed a Christological reframing.
Paul isn't saying that humans had to be agnostics before Jesus came on the scene, so when he claims that it is through the crucified Christ (the cross) that we know the wisdom and power of God he is speaking of a particular depth and kind of knowledge that comes only through that crucified Lord.
1 John 3:16 says, "This is how we know what love is..." How radical is that? Would John have denied the love of God prior to Christ's coming? Obviously not. Would he have said no one knew anything about the love of God prior to Christ's cross? That can't be true. He knew that God loved humanity and that many humans understood that God loved them, but he still wants to say, "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us."
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.