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The Cross of Christ

If the first essential of evangelical Christianity is the revelation of God in the Bible, the second is the cross of Christ, together with all the glorious benefits he achieved by it.

I invite you to reflect with me in this chapter on one of the most extraordinary statements which the apostle Paul ever made – which is to claim a great deal, since he made a good many astonishing statements. The one I am referring to is Galatians 6:14 (REB):

God forbid that I should boast of anything but the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world is crucified to me and I to the world!

There is no exact equivalent in English, or I believe in many other languages, to the Greek verb kauchasthai. It may be translated ‘to boast in’, ‘to glory in’, ‘to take pride in’, ‘to revel in’, even ‘to live for’. In a word, our kauchēma is our obsession. It engrosses our attention, it fills our horizons, it dominates our mind. For Paul this was the cross. The cross of Christ was the centre of his faith, of his life and of his ministry; it should equally be the centre of ours. Let others be obsessed with money, success, fame, sex or power; those who follow Christ should be obsessed with him and with his cross.

This was not, however, a peculiarity of Paul’s. On the contrary, the cross was central to his mind, because it had been central to the mind of Christ. Did Jesus not repeatedly predict the necessity of his suffering, saying that ‘the Son of man must suffer many things and be rejected . . . and be killed’ (Mark 8:31; cf. 9:12, 31; 10:34, 45)? Did he not speak of his death as the ‘hour’ for which he had come into the world (e.g. John 12:23, 27)? Did he not give instructions for his own memorial service, telling his disciples to eat bread and drink wine in memory of him? Further, since he called the bread his body ‘given’ for them, and the wine his blood ‘shed’ for them, it is evident that he intended death, not life, to speak from both the elements. It was therefore by his death that he wished above all to be remembered.

So the church was right in its choice of symbol for Christianity. There were many options. It could have chosen the crib in which the baby Jesus was cradled (emblem of the incarnation), or the carpenter’s bench at which he worked in Nazareth (emblem of the dignity of manual labour), or the boat on the lake of Galilee which he used as a pulpit (emblem of his teaching ministry), or the towel which he tied round him when he washed and wiped his disciples’ feet (emblem of humble servitude), or the tomb in which his body was laid and from which he rose (emblem of his resurrection), or the throne which he occupies today at the Father’s right hand (emblem of his supreme sovereignty), or the dove, the wind or the fire (emblems of the Holy Spirit). Any one of these could have been an appropriate symbol for the religion of Jesus Christ.

But the church passed them by and chose the cross instead. We see it everywhere – in the great cathedrals of medieval Europe, whose nave and chancel deliberately display a cruciform ground plan, on the necklaces of Christian women and on the lapels of Christian men.

For the Christian faith is the faith of Christ crucified. In this faith we were baptized, and in some traditions signed with the sign of the cross, traced with water on our forehead. In this faith we are called to live, to serve and to die, and after our death our family and friends may well erect a cross over our grave.

Of course we must never separate the crucifixion from the incarnation and the resurrection of Jesus. His death would have had no efficacy if it had not been preceded by his unique birth and followed by his unique resurrection. Only the God-man could die for our sins, and only the resurrection could validate his death. Paul notably bears witness to this by bringing the three great events together. ‘There is one God’, he wrote to Timothy, ‘and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all men’ (1 Tim. 2:5–6). In this one short sentence Jesus is named ‘mediator’, ‘man’ and ‘ransom’, for he was incarnate as man, he died as a ransom, and he has been exalted as our heavenly mediator. The three are linked together inextricably.

Nevertheless, although none is effective without the others, it is the death which is central. For the birth looks forward to it and prepares for it, while the resurrection looks back to it and validates it. Consider some of the great apostolic pronouncements about the death of Jesus Christ:

While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Rom. 5:8)

Christ died for our sins. (1 Cor. 15:3)

[He] gave himself for our sins. (Gal. 1:4)

In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins. (Eph. 1:7)

Since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus . . . let us draw near to God. (Heb. 10:19–22)

Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. (1 Pet. 3:18)

God . . . loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4:10)

You are worthy . . .

because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God.

(Rev. 5:9)

This is only a selection of texts. But here are the principal writers of the New Testament (Paul, Peter, John, the writer to the Hebrews and the author of the Revelation) all bearing witness to the same central truth, namely that it was by the shedding of his blood, that is, by his sacrificial and violent death on the cross, that Jesus dealt with our sins and won our salvation.

Moreover, the centrality of the cross has been widely recognized during the last hundred years or so. I share a few striking statements with my readers.

Here is J. C. Ryle, the great evangelical Bishop of Liverpool from 1880 to 1900:

If you have not yet found out that Christ crucified is the foundation of the whole volume, you have read your Bible hitherto to very little profit. Your religion is a heaven without a sun, an arch without a keystone, a compass without a needle, a clock without spring or weights, a lamp without oil . . . Beware, I say again, of a religion without the cross . . .1

P. T. Forsyth, the Congregationalist theologian, who died in 1921, wrote three perceptive books on the cross. Here are two quotations – a statement and a warning:

Christ is to us just what his cross is. All that Christ was in heaven or on earth was put into what he did there . . . You do not understand Christ till you understand his cross.2

On this interpretation of the work of Christ [sc. Paul’s doctrine of reconciliation] the whole church rests. If you move faith from that centre, you have driven the nail into the church’s coffin. The church is then doomed to death, and it is only a matter of time when she shall expire.3

We owe much to Dr Leon Morris of Melbourne, Australia, for his three or four characteristically comprehensive books on different aspects of the cross. In one he gave his carefully considered opinion: ‘the cross dominates the New Testament’.4

But why is the cross central? In particular, why did Paul glory only in the cross? In the Graeco-Roman world of the first century the cross was regarded as an object of distaste, even of disgust. How could Paul glory in this symbol of shame? Can we elaborate what he meant? Yes, we can. It is a basic hermeneutical principle that we must allow the context to determine the meaning of the text. And since Galatians 6:14 belongs to the conclusion of his letter to the Galatians, the rest of it, and specially its references to the cross, will help us to understand Paul’s meaning.

Our acceptance with God

First, we glory in the cross for our acceptance with God. Indeed, there is no other way of acceptance with him.

Some years ago, when I was in Durham, in the north of England, I worshipped on Sunday morning in the massive Norman cathedral which dominates the city and university. The preacher during that service was Professor H. E. W. Turner, a well-known New Testament scholar at that time. I was arrested when in the middle of his sermon he asked himself a personal question (for it is not the custom in Britain for university professors to ask themselves embarrassing questions in public!). This was what he asked himself: ‘How can I, a lost and guilty sinner, stand before a just and holy God?’

Good question! It is arguably the most important of all questions which confront human beings. If we have never asked ourselves this question, we must be very short-sighted indeed. For one thing is certain: we can never enter the holy presence of God, either in this life or in the next, in the tattered rags of our own morality. We are unfit even to approach him. All those who have been granted even a momentary glimpse of his majesty have not been able to bear the sight. They have either shrunk from him in shame like Moses at the burning bush (Exod. 3:6) or fallen prostrate at his feet like Ezekiel in the Old Testament and John in the New (Ezek. 1:28; Rev. 1:17). If we were to penetrate his presence, unbidden and unprepared, we would shrivel up and be consumed.

This sense of our sinfulness, of the blinding holiness of God, and of the absolute incompatibility of the one with the other, is an essential evangelical characteristic, without which our understanding of the necessity and the nature of the cross is bound to be skewed. It is why Bishop Ryle gave as the second leading feature of evangelical religion (the first being the supremacy of Scripture) ‘the depth and prominence it assigns to the doctrine of human sinfulness and corruption’. ‘We hold’, he continued, ‘that a mighty spiritual disease like this requires a mighty spiritual medicine for its cure.’5

Yet it is precisely here that our detractors criticize us. In 1945 Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, commissioned a group of Anglican Catholics to examine the causes of Catholic–Protestant deadlock and to consider whether synthesis, or at least coexistence, might be possible. Two years later their report Catholicity was published.6 They accused evangelicals of ‘grievous distortion’, ‘radical error’ and ‘a catastrophic pessimism concerning the results of the Fall, formulated in the doctrine of man’s “total depravity”, and the complete destruction of the imago Dei in human nature’.7

It was an extraordinarily inept and inaccurate criticism, however, as a group of Anglican evangelicals, commissioned by Geoffrey Fisher in 1947, had no difficulty in showing. It is true, they agreed, that ‘by sin man’s whole nature is perverted, and infected with self-will and self-love’, but the divine image in us, though defaced, has certainly not been destroyed (see Gen. 9:6; Jas. 3:9). Further, ‘ “total depravity” means not that there is no good in man but that even his best acts and characteristics are subtly and deeply tainted with pride’.8 Evangelicals insist on this, and one hopes that Catholics do too.

This debate is of the utmost importance. I will not mince my words. To make light of sin is inevitably to make light of salvation and so of the cross. To deny the just judgment of God is a characteristic of false prophets, ‘who say “peace, peace” when there is no peace’. They are like bad builders whose remedy for a flimsy wall about to collapse is to apply a coat of whitewash. They are like bad doctors who dress a deep wound superficially, as though it were not serious.9

But our human condition without Christ is extremely serious. We are ‘lost and guilty sinners’, as Professor Turner rightly said. This is why we set ourselves resolutely against the human potential movement, which has become so widespread and done such damage, especially in the United States. It accuses us of a morbid obsession with guilt. In fact, it deplores all mention of sin, guilt, judgment, atonement and repentance as inimical to our mental and spiritual health. It then tries to reinterpret salvation in terms of a recovery of our self-esteem.

In response, although we acknowledge that there are such things as false guilt and inferiority feelings, and although we should never attempt to induce these in people artificially, yet guilt for objective wrongdoing must be acknowledged as a reality, and confessed. Otherwise we will never flee to Christ crucified for forgiveness and a new start. To wallow in guilt is pathological; to cry to God for mercy is the beginning of health.

Do not let us be deceived, then, by those false teachers who minimize the sinfulness of sin. Biography and autobiography often reveal unsuspected corruption beneath the surface of respectability. Many historical examples could be given. I content myself with two. The first is Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations, a deeply committed public servant, described by W. H. Auden as ‘a great, good and lovable man’. But he had a very different opinion of himself. He bemoaned what he called ‘that dark counter-centre of evil in our nature’, and in particular the perversity which ‘makes our unselfish service of others the foundation of our own self-esteem’.10

My second example is Cyril Garbett, who was Archbishop of York from 1942 to 1955. Writing in his diary on his eightieth birthday, he felt the need to distinguish between the public persona and the private reality:

People have been undeservedly kind, they have formed an ideal picture of myself – the devoted pastor, the kindly old gentleman, and the courageous prophet!! They don’t see me as I really am, selfish, self-centred, seeking and enjoying the praise of men, lazy, possessive, and timid.11

Which of us, if given the chance to write an autobiography, would not express the same paradox? Sin is self, and Luther was on target when he described fallen and unregenerate man as homo in se incurvatus (‘man curved in on himself ’). In his lectures on Romans, he wrote that ‘our nature has been so deeply curved in upon itself ’, that ‘it even uses God himself to achieve’ its own ends. Again, ‘this curved-ness is now natural for us’.12 Emil Brunner, the Swiss theologian, was not exaggerating when he dubbed ‘a superficial person’ anybody who ‘has not yet perceived that evil is entwined with the very roots of his personality’.13 As Jesus said, it comes out of the heart (Mark 7:20–23).

Not yet, however, have we plumbed the depths of human evil. There is worse to come. It is not just that our fallen nature is crookedly bent, twisted, self-absorbed and self-obsessed. It is also, as perceptive theologians like Emil Brunner have observed, that we have risen up in active rebellion against a holy God. We have certainly not loved him with all our being. Instead, as Brunner wrote in his Christian anthropology Man in Revolt, we have been guilty of ‘defiance, arrogance, the desire to be equal with God’.14

Even more outspoken was Brunner’s definition of sin: ‘Sin is the desire for the autonomy of man; therefore, in the last resort, it is the denial of God and self-deification: it is getting rid of the Lord God, and the proclamation of self-sovereignty.’15

When sin is stripped of all its disguises, and is seen in its ugly nakedness as the attempt to dethrone God and enthrone self, it is evident that we are incapable of doing anything to gain acceptance with God. To be sure, the ethnic religions assure us with one voice that it is perfectly possible to do so, to accumulate merit, and to commend ourselves to God. For example, in a lecture during the first Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, Swami Vivekananda, the Hindu reformer and founder of the Ramakrishna Mission, said:

The Hindu refuses to call you sinners. Ye are the children of God; the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth, sinners? It is a sin to call a man a sinner. It is a standing libel on human nature.16

In another essay he wrote, ‘Silly fools tell you, you are sinners . . . You are all God.’17

So there is the stark alternative. Either we are God or we are rebels against God. Only the Bible, of all the world’s holy books, insists not just that we are sinners, but that in consequence we are under the judgment of God, that self-salvation is impossible, and that our only hope is in the cross.

At last now, after this long but necessary excursus on the reality and horror of sin, we are ready to return to Galatians, and to the cross as the only way of acceptance with God:

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.’ (Gal. 3:13)

These words have been described as ‘startling, almost shocking’. They declare that the only way by which we can be redeemed from the curse of the law (that is, from the judgment which God’s law pronounces on those who disobey it) is that Christ bore it in our place; that he became a curse instead of us; that he endured in his own innocent person the condemnation we had deserved. This is called ‘penal substitution’. Dr J. I. Packer has justly called it ‘a distinguishing mark of the world-wide evangelical fraternity’.18 Only because Christ bore the curse can we inherit the blessing (Gal. 3:6–14).

Of course we must protect this doctrine from misunderstanding and hedge it round with every possible safeguard. We must never suggest, for example, that God the Father was reluctant to come to our rescue, and that Jesus Christ was a third party who intervened between God and us. No, no! It was God himself who took the initiative in his holy love for us. ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself ’ (2 Cor. 5:19, REB). Yet what God did in and through Christ was to take our place, to bear our sin, to endure our curse, and to die our death, so that we might be forgiven.

Moreover, the Christian life continues where it begins, at the foot of the cross of Jesus. The cross is not an elementary stage which we later grow out of. We never graduate from the school of Calvary. And the Lord’s Supper continuously brings us back to it.

For several pages now we have been reflecting on human depravity and the centrality of the cross. We are hell-deserving sinners. The expression is archaic but accurate. Do we really think that in ourselves we are fit to be admitted into God’s holy presence? Of course not! The very idea is preposterous. In this case we are fit only to be excluded. Yet in spite of what we are, God loves us. Indeed, he has proved his own unique love for us in that, while we were sinful, ungodly, helpless and even the enemies of God, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:6–10). It is all but unbelievable. Yet it is true. To deny it is to constitute ourselves ‘enemies of the cross of Christ’ (Phil. 3:18); to confess it is to join the company of those who will spend eternity worshipping ‘the Lamb, who was slain’ (Rev. 5:12).

Justification by faith

The cross was a multifaceted achievement, and has many different meanings. It is the ultimate revelation of God’s love and justice. It is the decisive conquest of evil. It is the ground of our salvation. It is the supreme example of self-sacrifice. It is the most powerful inspiration to Christian devotion. Moreover, the salvation won by the cross is illustrated in the New Testament by a variety of metaphors like propitiation, redemption and reconciliation. But evangelical Christians have always insisted that the richest model is justification.

‘Justification by faith’ was the watchword of the Protestant Reformation. Luther called it ‘the principal article of all Christian doctrine, which maketh true Christians indeed’.19 And Cranmer wrote in his eloquent Homily ‘of the Salvation of Mankind’:

This faith the holy Scripture teacheth: this is the strong rock and foundation of Christian religion: this doctrine all old and ancient authors of Christ’s church do approve: this doctrine advanceth and setteth forth the true glory of Christ, and beateth down the vain glory of man: this whosoever denieth is not to be counted for a true Christian man, nor for a setter forth of Christ’s glory, but for an adversary of Christ and his gospel, and for a setter forth of men’s vainglory.20

To these sixteenth-century statements I add a statement of some contemporary Anglican evangelicals:

Justification by Faith appears to us, as it does to all evangelicals, to be the heart and hub, the paradigm and essence, of the whole economy of God’s saving grace. Like Atlas, it bears a world on its shoulders, the entire evangelical knowledge of God’s love in Christ towards sinners.21

So what is justification? It is of course a legal word, borrowed from the law courts, and the opposite of condemnation. When God justifies sinners, he declares a verdict, in anticipation of the last day, that he has not only forgiven all their sins but has also granted them a righteous standing of acceptance in his sight.

There are five aspects of justification in the New Testament which we need to keep clear in our minds.

First, its source. We are ‘justified freely by his grace’ (Rom. 3:24). God’s grace is his free and spontaneous love, undeserved, undesired and unsolicited. So what grace gives it gives gratis, ‘for nothing’, as Augustine often repeated. Grace-gifts are gratis-gifts.

Secondly, its ground. We have been ‘justified by his blood’ (Rom. 5:9), that is, on account of his sacrificial death. The reason why ‘there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’ (Rom. 8:1) is that God ‘condemned sin’ in Jesus (Rom. 8:3). We are justified because he was condemned. The law has no claims on us because they were all met at the cross.

Thirdly, its sphere. We are ‘justified in Christ’ (Gal. 2:17). This is a neglected phrase. It means that we are justified only when we are united to Christ, and of course when we are united to Christ we are part of his new community and committed to living a new life.

Fourthly, its means. We are ‘justified by faith’. This is the most frequently repeated of the expressions about justification in Paul’s letters.22 It was a sure instinct of Luther’s to add the word ‘alone’ to his translation of the Greek of Romans 3:28, as several early church fathers had done before him. Since our justification is altogether ‘apart from observing the law’, it must be by faith alone. In saying so, however, we must be careful not to turn our faith into another work. We are indeed justified by God’s grace and by Christ’s blood, but only through faith. To say ‘justification by faith alone’ is another way of saying ‘justification by Christ alone’. Faith has no function but to receive what grace freely offers. As the judicious Hooker put it with his usual precision, ‘God doth justify the believing man, yet not for the worthiness of his belief, but for his worthiness who is believed.’23 Faith is nothing but the hand which takes the gift, the eye which beholds the giver, and the mouth which drinks the water of life.

Fifthly, its fruit. We are saved unto good works. ‘For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith . . . not by works, so that no-one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works . . .’ (Eph. 2:8–10). These verses make abundantly plain the place of good works in justification. Justification is not by works but unto good works. Put differently, salvation is through faith, but faith works through love (Gal 5:6).

Here then is the grand doctrine of justification. Its origin is God’s grace and its ground Christ’s blood. The sphere of its enjoyment is Christ, its means is faith, and its fruit good works. It was of such central importance to Paul that he was prepared even to suffer the acute embarrassment of a public showdown with his brother apostle Peter rather than compromise what he called ‘the truth of the gospel’, which we might call ‘the evangelical faith’ (Gal. 2:11–17).

If justification by faith was one of the watchwords of the Reformation, it was also one of its chief points of debate with Rome. Roman Catholics were (and still are) disturbed by the Reformers’ teaching. In particular, they disagreed with the Reformers’ insistence that justification denoted a legal pronouncement and not a moral change. This seemed to them a legal fiction, which left the sinner unchanged, and which therefore was antinomian in tendency. So the Council of Trent, summarizing the Counter-Reformation, taught that justification includes both forgiveness and renewal, and that the baptized person is cleansed from all sins (both original and actual) and is simultaneously infused with a new and supernatural righteousness.

The controversy continues. Evangelicals maintain that their doctrine is not antinomian but the opposite. It generates righteousness. While still insisting that ‘to justify’ means ‘to declare’ and not ‘to make’ righteous, evangelicals emphasize that justification is always accompanied by regeneration. Everybody whom God justifies he simultaneously regenerates. Moreover, this new birth leads inevitably to a new life, this justification to sanctification. It would certainly make for clarity if we remembered five fundamental differences between justification and sanctification, which the Puritans used to emphasize.

First, justification is God’s judicial verdict, declaring a sinner righteous; sanctification is his moral activity, making a sinner righteous.

Secondly, God justifies sinners through the death of his Son, but sanctifies them through the regeneration and indwelling of his Holy Spirit.

Thirdly, justification is instantaneous. It takes place immediately God pronounces the sinner righteous. Sanctification, however, is gradual. It begins the moment we are justified, but then it grows as the Holy Spirit transforms us into the image of Christ (2 Cor. 3:18).

Fourthly, justification is complete. It has no degrees. We shall not be more justified on the day of our death than we were on the day of our conversion. Sanctification, however, is incomplete. Although it begins when we are converted and regenerated, it continues throughout our life on earth and will be complete when Christ appears. Only then ‘we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (1 John 3:2).

Fifthly, justification is by faith only without works. It is entirely the work of Christ. But sanctification is by faith and works. In addition to trusting God, we are told to watch and pray, to sanctify and purify ourselves.

To sum up, God declares us righteous through the death of his, Son, by faith only, so that our justification is both instantaneous and complete. But God makes us righteous through the indwelling of his Spirit, by faith and works, so that our sanctification is both gradual and incomplete.

Our daily discipleship

We now return to our text (Gal. 6:14, REB) ‘God forbid that I should boast of anything but the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world is crucified to me and I to the world!’

It is evident that we glory in the cross not only for our acceptance with God, but also for our daily discipleship. For the cross is the way of holiness as well as the way of forgiveness.

Notice that, although Paul mentions only one cross, he refers to three crucifixions on it. First, there is of course the crucifixion of Jesus. Secondly, ‘the world has been crucified to me’. Thirdly, ‘I [have been crucified] to the world’. Thus Jesus Christ, the godless world and we ourselves have all been crucified on the same cross.

Paul has already introduced us to this notion in earlier verses of his letter. In Galatians 2:20 he has written, ‘I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.’ Then in Galatians 5:24 he has written, ‘Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the [that is, their] sinful nature with its passions and desires.’ Although there are different nuances between these statements, they express the same fundamental truth. I would express it like this: Christ died as our substitute, instead of us, so that we might not have to die for our sins (as the New Testament obliges us to affirm), but he also died as our representative, so that when he died we died with him.

This is Paul’s elaboration of the call of Jesus to take up our cross and follow him (e.g. Mark 8:34). If we had lived in those days in Palestine, when the country was occupied by Roman soldiers, and if we had seen a man walking down the road carrying a cross, or at least the patibulum or cross-bar, we would not have needed to run up to him, tap him on the shoulder, and say, ‘Excuse me, Sir, but what on earth are you doing?’ No, we would have recognized him at once as a condemned criminal on his way to execution. For the Romans compelled any man they condemned to the cross to carry it to the scene of crucifixion.

Now Christ calls us to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him. If then we are carrying a cross and following Christ, there is only one place to which we can be going, namely to death. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor, who himself died in a concentration camp in April 1945, wrote in his justly famous book The Cost of Discipleship, ‘When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.’24

Thus cross-bearing and crucifixion were Jesus’ dramatic images of self-denial. They come into direct collision with the human potential movement, to which I have already referred, with its teaching about self-actualization and self-esteem, and indeed with every form of self-centredness. To be sure, Jesus did teach that his followers would find themselves and fulfil themselves. But he added that the only road to self-discovery is self-denial, the only way to find ourselves is to lose ourselves, and the only way to live is to die to our own self-centrednesss.

This teaching is extremely important today, because the church has a constant tendency to trivialize Christian discipleship. People think of it as if it means nothing more than becoming a bit religious, and adding a thin layer of piety to an otherwise secular life. Then scratch the surface or prick the veneer, and underneath there is the same old pagan. Nothing fundamental has changed.

But no! Becoming and being a Christian involves a change so radical that no imagery can do it justice but death and resurrection with Christ, namely dying to the old life of self-indulgence and self-will, and rising to a new life of self-control and self-giving, in which the world has been crucified to us and we have been crucified to the world.

We glory in the cross for our discipleship.

Our mission and message

The Christian church is called to mission, but there can be no mission without a message. So what is our message for the world? It centres on the cross, on the fantastic truth of a God who loves us, and who gave himself for us in Christ on the cross.

Consider what Paul has written earlier. He has described his earlier ministry in Galatia in these terms: ‘Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified’ (Gal. 3:1). That is, the cross had been the focus of his message. He had placarded Christ crucified before their eyes as if on a public billboard. The Galatians had not of course seen Christ die. They lived about a thousand miles by land from Jerusalem. So far as we know, Paul had not seen him die either. But through the preaching of the cross the apostle had brought the past into the present and made the historical event of the cross a contemporary reality to them. This is also what the Lord’s Supper or the Eucharist does. The technical word for it is anamnēsis, or remembrance, as word and sacrament together dramatize verbally and visually the unique, epoch-making event of the cross.

In consequence of his striking presentation, Paul had enabled the Galatians to see the cross in their imagination, to understand that he had died for their sins, to kneel before the cross in great humility, and to receive from the hands of the crucified Saviour the gift of eternal life, which was absolutely free and utterly undeserved.

But this preaching of the cross, as Paul was later to elaborate in 1 Corinthians, is a stumbling-block to human pride. It undermines our self-righteousness. It insists that we cannot achieve our salvation by anything that we do. Indeed, we cannot even contribute to it. How we would love to be able to do so! How we would enjoy strutting round heaven like peacocks, displaying our gorgeous plumage! If only we could claim salvation as a well-deserved prize! But no, salvation is a totally non-contributory gift. As William Temple put it, ‘All is of God; the only thing of my very own which I can contribute to my own redemption is the sin from which I need to be redeemed.’25 We find the cross humiliating, as it strips us naked and declares us bankrupt before God.

It is in this connection that Paul contrasts himself with those false teachers we call the Judaizers. They ‘preached circumcision’ (which is apostolic shorthand for self-salvation by obedience to the law), and so they escaped persecution for the cross of Christ. He, on the other hand, preached Christ crucified (that is, salvation through the cross alone), and so was always being persecuted (5:11; 6:12).

The same choice confronts all Christian communicators today. On the one hand, we can flatter people and tell them what they want to hear, namely that they are fine people and can win salvation by their own effort. We develop what could be called a pussycat ministry, for we stroke them until they purr with pleasure. Or, on the other hand, we can tell them the truth which they don’t want to hear, about sin, guilt, judgment and the cross, and so arouse their hostility. In other words, either we are unfaithful in order to be popular, or we are willing to be unpopular in our determination to be faithful. I doubt very much if it is possible to be faithful and popular at the same time. I fear that we have to choose.

It is extraordinary how much hostility there is to the gospel of the cross. One example is the late Professor Sir Alfred Ayer, Oxford philosopher, exponent of logical positivism, author of Language, Truth and Logic, and outspoken critic of the Christian faith. He wrote in 1979 that there was quite a strong case for considering Christianity the worst of the religions of historical importance. Why? Because it rests ‘on the allied doctrines of original sin and vicarious atonement, which are intellectually contemptible and morally outrageous’.26

My thesis has been that for our acceptance with God, for our daily discipleship, and for our mission and message to the world, we like Paul should glory in nothing but the cross.

We human beings are born boasters. There seems to be something in our inherited constitution which inclines us to boasting. We seem to need to glory in something, in order to inflate our ego. In consequence, we boast of our education, our possessions, our success, our reputation, even our piety. We find it hard to learn C. H. Spurgeon’s dictum ‘Be not proud of race, face, place or grace.’

But in the last resort there is only one alternative before us. Either we glory in ourselves and in our own achievements, or we glory in Christ and in his achievement on the cross. There is no possibility of compromise. A hallmark of authentic evangelical Christianity is that we glory only in the cross.