3 - Accounting for the cross

Summary

We speak God's wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

I Cor. 2.7–8

A social style characterized by the creation of a new community and the rejection of violence of any kind is the theme of New Testament proclamation from beginning to end.

John Howard Yoder

The story of the crucifixion, I have argued, plays an indisputably important role in shaping the mentalities and sensibilities of Western culture. As such it has also helped shape Western attitudes to the punishment of offenders. The interpretive lens through which Jesus’ execution was understood by the earliest Christian community was provided by the writings of the ‘Old Testament’. In the previous chapter I argued that texts which have been used for centuries to legitimate retributive ideas of punishment can be understood in a very different way. Continuing this argument I shall try to show that the New Testament, far from underscoring retributivism, actually deconstructs it.

For many Christians the ‘meaning of the cross’ is simply selfevident. They do not reflect that they have been taught to understand it through hymns and paintings, and through the way it is described in the liturgy – ‘a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction’. In the narrative I take up in the following chapter it will become clear that there have been majority and minority understandings of the atonement for at least a thousand years of the church's history.