Three strikes and you're out!

Andrew - thank you for stepping in as the honest broker seeking to provide the via media between mutually conflicting and erroneous interpretations of the cross of Jesus! So far I haven’t heard Graham’s view of the cross, and would be keen to find out what it is.

It is very disturbing that when I will have completed this comment, there will be three of my comments in a row in the ‘latest comments’ box, added to one at the top of ‘Other recent posts’. This is a sure sign of the obsessiveness which I so deplore in other contributors, and strongly suggestive that I should take a break - for quite a long time. Famous last words.

Anyway, I just wanted to respond to your threefold breakdown of prior requisites to the understanding of the cross.

The reason why the cross must be central to our view of Jesus reaches into the purposes of the new covenant itself, and the means whereby that covenant was to take effect. That the cross was the means of the new covenant is clear from Jesus’s reinterpretation of the Passover to provide its fulfiment in himself, which was to be accomplished in his shortly forthcoming death.

The new covenant addressed the failures of the old, but the old was in itself only part of a much broader scheme to address the failure of creation. There was therefore really only one covenant, of which the old and the new were different but progressive aspects, which was God’s determination to address sin and at the same time be faithful to his creation. This he did through the cross. Hence its centrality.

i) the formation of a new community was of course the focus of Jesus’s efforts with the disciples. Just as in the Torah there is the divine initiative in rescuing Israel from Egypt and bringing them into the promised land, followed by the requirements which were to be their grateful response to that initiative, so the new Moses sets out the requirements for his followers which were to be their willing response to his corresponding act which took place on the cross - hence Matthew 28:19-20.

ii) the resurrection more than represented the new creation life of the community - it was that new creation life, which became available to the community insofar as they participated in Christ himself by faith.

iii) Jesus was vindicated through his resurrection and ascension - not in some conjectured subsequent eschatological event. Jesus’s prophecy of the fall of Jerusalem and its temple was vindicated in AD 70 - but that’s all.

Actually, there is no must about the centrality of the cross. Anyone is free to interpret things however they want, provided there is some reasonable ground for that interpretation. I am as interested in where interpretations take us as what the interpretations are. The significance attached to a fully realised parousia has, to my mind, all kinds of (posssibly unintended) consequences - which become ever more evident the more I ponder the proposal.

But there we are. Maybe I should stick to playing the Larry Norman L.P.s for a while, as a kind of displacement therapy.