We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Nothing but Christ Crucified
One of the most remarkable expressions of the all-encompassing nature of the cross is reflected in an incidental, but extremely important, comment that Paul made in his First Letter to the Corinthians. He noted that when he brought “the testimony of God” to Corinth, he hadn’t come “with eloquence or human wisdom”. He instead “resolved to know nothing…except Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (I Cor. 1:1-2).
While this statement may be somewhat hyperbolic (did Paul really resolve to know absolutely nothing except Christ crucified?), it clearly implies that, for Paul, the entire gospel was found in the message of the cross. It implies that, when we understand what took place through the “foolishness of the cross,” we understand all that we need to know about God and about other humans. When you know the character of God revealed on the cross and what he thinks about us, as revealed on the cross, you’ve got the essence of all you need to know about anyone.
Excerpt from Benefit of the Doubt, pages 233-234
Photo credit: jean louis mazieres via Visualhunt / CC BY-NC-SA
Category: General
Tags: Cross, Good News, Identity in Christ, Jesus
Related Reading
A Christ-Follower’s Alternative to New Year’s Goals
tomo tang via Compfight Richard Dahlstrom over at Fibonacci Faith offered an alternative to setting New Year’s goals that can steal peace in our lives. What if we committed to attending to all the little revelations God gives us and made space to absorb these God-moments in order to respond well? Let’s all make this…
Re-Thinking Divine Sovereignty
Many people in the church have been taught that divine sovereignty is synonymous with unilateral control. Some have even argued that if God is not in control of everything, then something must be in control of him. Still others have proposed that if God is not sovereign over all, then he has no sovereignty at…
Part 3: Disarming Flood’s Inadequate Conception of Biblical Authority
Image by Ex-InTransit via Flickr In this third part of my review of Derek Flood’s Disarming Scripture I will offer a critique of his redefined conception of biblical inspiration and authority. I will begin by having us recall from Part I that Flood holds up “faithful questioning” over “unquestioning obedience” as the kind of faith that Jesus…
Did Jesus Have Two Minds?
As I laid out in the previous post, I believe Jesus is fully God and fully human. The question is: How is this possible? How do we talk about the way that Jesus was fully God and fully man? The Creed of Chalcedon (451) tries to answer the question this way: We, then, following the…
What Jesus Revealed About Being Human
According to the creation story, when Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they essentially ceased being the wonderful, God-centered, God-dependent human beings the Creator intended them to be. They became less than fully human. Instead, they began using everything and everyone in the world as surrogate gods, trying to get from people, deeds, and things…
Religion that Blinds Us to God
For a variety of reasons, many Jews at the time of Jesus had come to believe that heaven had been closed since the writing of the last book of the Old Testament. God was distant and no longer active among his people. Their religion focused on holding fast to the law God had given in…