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A review by moreteamorecats
The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ by Fleming Rutledge
4.0
The best new theological devotion I've read in years, with caveats. First, the praise.
1) Audience. Popularizing nonfiction often turns out pandering, glib, or underhanded, while the downside of specialized insight and specificity is jargon or idiosyncrasy. Rutledge takes the hard but honest way through the dilemma. She believes the words she needs are worth taking the trouble to teach, and she teaches them well. The result is a rare (but not unprecedented) combination of accessibility and substance in theology.
2) Substance. A commenter at the old-school anonymous blog Unfogged once pointed out that Prince was one of the top ten rock guitarists of all time, and yet lead guitar was maybe the fourth- or fifth-most important thing about Prince's artistry. Likewise Rutledge here. She offers here the most luminous exposition of Barth's Church Dogmatics IV.2 I have ever read, and it's maybe her book's third-most-important substantive contribution for scholars. Second is her image of impunity as a factor in horrendous evil, as a corrective to mushy liberalism-- a retrieval from Anselm, better presented and (to me) persuasive; and first, her demolition of right-wing heresies that read the cross and the Trinity through subordination.
The caveats all have to do with her arms-length approach to liberation theology. Some of her critiques are well-informed and well-taken, but three points rankled for me:
--Her argument about the Trinity and the cross would be even stronger if she foregrounded its anti-patriarchal implications. She wants neither to distance herself from the feminists nor quite to call herself one, so she undermines herself instead.
--Womanists don't get their due here. Rutledge believes that the influential critique of substitution in [b: Sisters in the Wilderness|781774|Sisters in the Wilderness|Delores S. Williams|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387715957s/781774.jpg|767795] gets the cross and the gospel badly wrong, but I'm disappointed that the more traditional approaches of [a: Kelly Brown Douglas|343855|Kelly Brown Douglas|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] or [a: Shawn Copeland|140916|M. Shawn Copeland|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/f_50x66-6a03a5c12233c941481992b82eea8d23.png] don't show up. It never hurts a White orthodox woman theologian to show what she's learned from Black orthodox women theologians.
--She takes a wait-and-see approach to queer people's place in the church. That galls, especially since she reads AIDS literature with such pastoral and moral sensitivity.
1) Audience. Popularizing nonfiction often turns out pandering, glib, or underhanded, while the downside of specialized insight and specificity is jargon or idiosyncrasy. Rutledge takes the hard but honest way through the dilemma. She believes the words she needs are worth taking the trouble to teach, and she teaches them well. The result is a rare (but not unprecedented) combination of accessibility and substance in theology.
2) Substance. A commenter at the old-school anonymous blog Unfogged once pointed out that Prince was one of the top ten rock guitarists of all time, and yet lead guitar was maybe the fourth- or fifth-most important thing about Prince's artistry. Likewise Rutledge here. She offers here the most luminous exposition of Barth's Church Dogmatics IV.2 I have ever read, and it's maybe her book's third-most-important substantive contribution for scholars. Second is her image of impunity as a factor in horrendous evil, as a corrective to mushy liberalism-- a retrieval from Anselm, better presented and (to me) persuasive; and first, her demolition of right-wing heresies that read the cross and the Trinity through subordination.
The caveats all have to do with her arms-length approach to liberation theology. Some of her critiques are well-informed and well-taken, but three points rankled for me:
--Her argument about the Trinity and the cross would be even stronger if she foregrounded its anti-patriarchal implications. She wants neither to distance herself from the feminists nor quite to call herself one, so she undermines herself instead.
--Womanists don't get their due here. Rutledge believes that the influential critique of substitution in [b: Sisters in the Wilderness|781774|Sisters in the Wilderness|Delores S. Williams|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387715957s/781774.jpg|767795] gets the cross and the gospel badly wrong, but I'm disappointed that the more traditional approaches of [a: Kelly Brown Douglas|343855|Kelly Brown Douglas|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] or [a: Shawn Copeland|140916|M. Shawn Copeland|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/f_50x66-6a03a5c12233c941481992b82eea8d23.png] don't show up. It never hurts a White orthodox woman theologian to show what she's learned from Black orthodox women theologians.
--She takes a wait-and-see approach to queer people's place in the church. That galls, especially since she reads AIDS literature with such pastoral and moral sensitivity.