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A review by davehershey
The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ by Fleming Rutledge
5.0
This is the second theology book that pushed me to tears this year (the first being David Bentley Hart's The Hidden and the Manifest). Why tears? The picture Rutledge paints of who God is and what God has done in Jesus is simply beautiful and amazing. I've been a Christian my whole life and nearing age 40, I feel like I am just beginning to understand how beautiful and amazing the love is.
First though, a negative. In the beginning of the book, Rutledge discusses the awfulness of the crucifixion. We cannot understand what the crucifixion means, without reckoning with how evil and shameful the actual event was. She mostly does a great job arguing that nothing in history is quite like the shame of the crucifixion. Yet, her total ignorance of lynching during the Jim Crow era in American history stands out starkly. Admittedly, if I hadn't just read James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree about a year ago, and if I wasn't rereading his God of the Oppressed with some friends right now, I probably wouldn't have noticed it. But with Cone's work in mind, all i could think about was the absence of even a mention of lynching. It doesn't take away from her overall point, other than to make me wonder if her book could have been enriched by quoting a few less white theologians and preachers, and perhaps adding in more people of color. For instance, later on when she referred to a few preachers from the 1800s and their powerful words about the crucifixion, I couldn't help but wonder if they merely had good theology or if it flowed into how they treated oppressed people around them?
Second then, the meat of the book is dedicated to analyzing 8 different motifs in scripture. Often when the atonement is spoken of, we hear about a few theories of atonement. She breaks these out into eight, and prefers motif rather than theory. There is a lot here. What most stuck out to me was how she tied these motifs together. She notes that penal substitution is attacked nowadays and a good many writers question the morality of substitution. In its place, they prefer Christus Victor. Rutledge agrees that Christus Victor provides an over-arching schema and she agrees that some make penal substitution too all-encompassing or explain it poorly. But she warns against tossing it out.
I agree wholeheartedly. Christus Victor is basically the idea that Jesus defeats Satan on the cross, freeing humanity from bondage. Was this a battle we could win? Was not Jesus fighting for us, as our substitute? I think the brilliance of Rutledge's work is that she breaks out these eight motifs, but then shows how they all work together.
I do wonder if the problem people have is not with substitution itself, but with the idea of a God who tortures people in hell for all eternity. The idea of hell - what it is, how long it lasts - comes up throughout the book. Rutledge essentially says our options with hell are either that it (and any who are in it) cease to exist or all who are in it are redeemed. In other words, either annihilation or universalism:
"At stake in this chapter is a concept of hell tha tis adequate to the horrors of the twentieth century and the looming terrors of the twenty-first. The argument here is that it is necessary to posit the existence of a metaphorical hell in order to acknowledge the reality and power of radical evil - evil that does not yield to education, reason, or good intentions. Evil has an existence independent of the total of human misdeeds. The concept of hell takes seriously the nature and scale of evil. Without a concept of hell, Christian faith is sentimental and evasive, unable to stand up to reality in this world. Without an unflinching grasp of the radical nature of evil, Christian faith would be little more than wishful thinking.
Hell is a dominion. It is the dominion of evil, of Death, the sphere where wickedness rules...What then is the final destination of this realm?
J. Christiaan Beker provocatively writes: 'The final apocalyptic triumph of God does not permit a permanent pocket of evil or resistance to God in his creation.' If Beker is right about this, then neither the devil nor hell can be allowed to continue indefinitely as a parallel (or even subordinate) domain. The reign of Satan will not be permitted to keep its territory as a permanent realm alongside the kingdom of God. It must be finally and completely obliterated, and will pass out of memory. It is toward this conclusion that our study has been pointing all along. Whether this means the redemption of the Hitlers and the Pol Pots or their annihilation we cannot say. What we can say for sure, proleptically, in faith, is that 'the kingdom of the world has become to the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever."
I agree 100% Growing up, the idea of an eternal unending hell was taken for granted, and I've spent much of my adult life wrestling with the negative side of the afterlife. For me, and any questions about substitution, it was not a problem with God punishing evil. Clearly, for God to be good requires God to name evil for what it is and expel it from creation. Punishment, even wrath, seems necessary. Or as Rutledge says, God's justice is righteousness; love and wrath are two sides of the same coin. The problem is when this justice becomes injustice, when people are tortured, suffering in pain, that never ends, for finite sin. Rutledge, in that quote above, says we need hell but we also need either annihilation or universal redemption.
This is what brought me to tears. What if any after-life punishment is not just vindictive and unending, but for the purpose of something better? Any decent parent doesn't punish their kids just because. The punishment always has a purpose. The purpose is to restore the child, to help them become better. What if God's love is so great that somehow, someway, all people experience the love (and perhaps punishment) they need to enable them to eventually be redeemed?
Rutledge does not come out and endorse universalism (as DB Hart does). But she implies it. Its this possibility that God's love never ends that moves me. What if God pursues the lost sheep not just for a while, before closing the door and burning those on the outside? What if God pursues the lost sheep forever?
I hear the objections now. Yet Rutledge emphasizes that we're all sinners. Who are we to judge? In this she pokes at her progressive mainline friends who claim to be inclusive. She points out no church is as inclusive as it claims. We all exclude someone. Its human nature.
Human nature.
But the God revealed in Jesus is so much better.
There's certainly more I could say. Overall, this book is highly readable - she writes as a pastor and not a theologian. Its both intellectually challenging and emotionally moving. Its so Good!
First though, a negative. In the beginning of the book, Rutledge discusses the awfulness of the crucifixion. We cannot understand what the crucifixion means, without reckoning with how evil and shameful the actual event was. She mostly does a great job arguing that nothing in history is quite like the shame of the crucifixion. Yet, her total ignorance of lynching during the Jim Crow era in American history stands out starkly. Admittedly, if I hadn't just read James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree about a year ago, and if I wasn't rereading his God of the Oppressed with some friends right now, I probably wouldn't have noticed it. But with Cone's work in mind, all i could think about was the absence of even a mention of lynching. It doesn't take away from her overall point, other than to make me wonder if her book could have been enriched by quoting a few less white theologians and preachers, and perhaps adding in more people of color. For instance, later on when she referred to a few preachers from the 1800s and their powerful words about the crucifixion, I couldn't help but wonder if they merely had good theology or if it flowed into how they treated oppressed people around them?
Second then, the meat of the book is dedicated to analyzing 8 different motifs in scripture. Often when the atonement is spoken of, we hear about a few theories of atonement. She breaks these out into eight, and prefers motif rather than theory. There is a lot here. What most stuck out to me was how she tied these motifs together. She notes that penal substitution is attacked nowadays and a good many writers question the morality of substitution. In its place, they prefer Christus Victor. Rutledge agrees that Christus Victor provides an over-arching schema and she agrees that some make penal substitution too all-encompassing or explain it poorly. But she warns against tossing it out.
I agree wholeheartedly. Christus Victor is basically the idea that Jesus defeats Satan on the cross, freeing humanity from bondage. Was this a battle we could win? Was not Jesus fighting for us, as our substitute? I think the brilliance of Rutledge's work is that she breaks out these eight motifs, but then shows how they all work together.
I do wonder if the problem people have is not with substitution itself, but with the idea of a God who tortures people in hell for all eternity. The idea of hell - what it is, how long it lasts - comes up throughout the book. Rutledge essentially says our options with hell are either that it (and any who are in it) cease to exist or all who are in it are redeemed. In other words, either annihilation or universalism:
"At stake in this chapter is a concept of hell tha tis adequate to the horrors of the twentieth century and the looming terrors of the twenty-first. The argument here is that it is necessary to posit the existence of a metaphorical hell in order to acknowledge the reality and power of radical evil - evil that does not yield to education, reason, or good intentions. Evil has an existence independent of the total of human misdeeds. The concept of hell takes seriously the nature and scale of evil. Without a concept of hell, Christian faith is sentimental and evasive, unable to stand up to reality in this world. Without an unflinching grasp of the radical nature of evil, Christian faith would be little more than wishful thinking.
Hell is a dominion. It is the dominion of evil, of Death, the sphere where wickedness rules...What then is the final destination of this realm?
J. Christiaan Beker provocatively writes: 'The final apocalyptic triumph of God does not permit a permanent pocket of evil or resistance to God in his creation.' If Beker is right about this, then neither the devil nor hell can be allowed to continue indefinitely as a parallel (or even subordinate) domain. The reign of Satan will not be permitted to keep its territory as a permanent realm alongside the kingdom of God. It must be finally and completely obliterated, and will pass out of memory. It is toward this conclusion that our study has been pointing all along. Whether this means the redemption of the Hitlers and the Pol Pots or their annihilation we cannot say. What we can say for sure, proleptically, in faith, is that 'the kingdom of the world has become to the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever."
I agree 100% Growing up, the idea of an eternal unending hell was taken for granted, and I've spent much of my adult life wrestling with the negative side of the afterlife. For me, and any questions about substitution, it was not a problem with God punishing evil. Clearly, for God to be good requires God to name evil for what it is and expel it from creation. Punishment, even wrath, seems necessary. Or as Rutledge says, God's justice is righteousness; love and wrath are two sides of the same coin. The problem is when this justice becomes injustice, when people are tortured, suffering in pain, that never ends, for finite sin. Rutledge, in that quote above, says we need hell but we also need either annihilation or universal redemption.
This is what brought me to tears. What if any after-life punishment is not just vindictive and unending, but for the purpose of something better? Any decent parent doesn't punish their kids just because. The punishment always has a purpose. The purpose is to restore the child, to help them become better. What if God's love is so great that somehow, someway, all people experience the love (and perhaps punishment) they need to enable them to eventually be redeemed?
Rutledge does not come out and endorse universalism (as DB Hart does). But she implies it. Its this possibility that God's love never ends that moves me. What if God pursues the lost sheep not just for a while, before closing the door and burning those on the outside? What if God pursues the lost sheep forever?
I hear the objections now. Yet Rutledge emphasizes that we're all sinners. Who are we to judge? In this she pokes at her progressive mainline friends who claim to be inclusive. She points out no church is as inclusive as it claims. We all exclude someone. Its human nature.
Human nature.
But the God revealed in Jesus is so much better.
There's certainly more I could say. Overall, this book is highly readable - she writes as a pastor and not a theologian. Its both intellectually challenging and emotionally moving. Its so Good!