Yes, we all have books on our bookshelves we haven’t read, perhaps even some great books we haven’t touched.

Why do they sit there? Maybe we have “no time”? Maybe we have allowed the superficial matters to push out the crucial matters.

The Crux of our Faith

Let’s get to the “crux” of the issue. Most know that the word “crux” is from the Latin term referring to the instrument of torture of the cross. Yet, in our day, the term focuses on something that is essential to consider.

At the crux of the Christian faith is the Cross itself. It’s hard to imagine any topic has resulted in more ink (or pixels) spilled over the centuries. Yet even today, there seems to be no consensus as to what the Cross is really about.

According to Tom Wright, the question “why the Cross?” is one that we must keep asking.

Unless someone in the church—in each Christian gathering, in each generation—is working on deeper understandings of foundational Christian truth, it is perilously easy for individuals and communities to drift away from the life-giving meaning of the gospel itself. We constantly need to press beyond the one-line summaries and the popular slogans. The powerful love of God is so counterintuitive that we easily scale it down in our imagination and memory and develop ways of making our-selves immune to its ultimate and life-changing challenge. Or, worse, we distort it and twist it until we find ourselves saying more or less the opposite of what we ought to mean. Somebody needs to be asking “Why?” This must of course be done humbly and carefully, not arrogantly or scornfully. But the question must be addressed. (The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion)

It is perilously easy to drift away from the life-giving meaning of the gospel itself.… Click To Tweet

Three Reasons We Need Another Book

The reasons for another book on the crucifixion are many, but here are three that pertain to our church culture today:

Platonized Eschatology

In the present day we have platonized our eschatology. The ancient and influential philosopher Plato taught that all matter is evil, and only the spiritual is good.

We must rediscover our calling to understand the ultimate destined of redeemed humanity: resurrection and reconciled life on the New Earth which God promised to establish at the end of the age. Instead, we have settled for a Platonic final disembodied state of “going to heaven when we die” instead of the fullness of New Creation.

The cross and Jesus’s own bodily resurrection remind us of the importance of resurrection bodies as our own ultimate destiny.

Moralized Anthropology

We have also moralized our anthropology. We limit our understanding of what it mean to human down to our moral framework.

Scripture describes God’s people as a “kingdom of priests”. At the cross, Jesus demolishes our simple moral framework, and brings us back to our priestly responsibility.

When the fullness of embracing the present calling to be a “kingdom of priests” gets into our bones, we are released from the present attempts to achieve acceptable moral status and follow the “right rules” of the Christian game. Every congregation seems to have it’s own “moralized anthropology”. It creates moralistic expectations while missing the at times unexpected movement of the Holy Spirit within the new temple which is God’s redeemed people for the sake of the world.

Paganized Soteriology

We have paganized our soteriology. The Church has always taught that the Cross is central to how we experience salvation. Sadly, we often portray God as needing to be appeased, like the angry Greek pantheon.

We often tell the story of the cross as “how to keep the gods from being angry”. Not enough has been taught about the full covenant justice and love surrounding the events of the crucifixion. With the beauty of a proper view of Jesus’s crucifixion we find God Himself doing what only He can do: be the atoning sacrifice for the world.

Professor Wright explores each of these tendencies to our benefit as we continue to pursue the “renewing our minds”. This time, the mind is focused around the “crux” of the matter: the death of Jesus our King. What could be more important than that?

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David P. Seemuth, PhD

David Seemuth is the Founder and President of the Wisconsin Center for Christian Studies, Inc, which exists to bring transformation to Christian believers through the renewal of the mind. He and Prof. N.T. Wright collaborate in online course development and launched N.T. Wright Online in 2015. David has been an Adjunct Professor at Trinity International University for over 35 years and teaches in the area of Biblical Studies, specializing in the New Testament. He also served as an Associate Pastor at Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, WI, for 30 years.

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