The Crucifixion (Fleming Rutledge)

Fleming Rutledge Preaching the Cross of Christ (Jan 2021). The Crucifixion, Advent and Preaching (2020). 10 Reasons to read Fleming Rutledge’s ‘The Crucifixion’.

1. The Passover lamb, 
2. the goat driven into the wilderness, 
3. the ransom, 
4. the substitute, 
5. the victor on the field of battle, 
6. the representative man—

each and all of these and more have their place, and the cross is diminished if any one of them is omitted. We need to make room for all the biblical images.

• "You have not yet considered the gravity of sin." Anselm. Scandalous Cross of Jesus [Barron on Rutledge, 9 min, 2016].

• "Your sin is the biggest problem in the world. Do you hate it? Do you make war on it?" – 
  @JohnPiper.
• Karl Barth specifically notes that sloth [spiritual laziness which is the prime deadly sin of today] gives rise to
• callous indifference, 
• racism and xenophobia, 
• increasing competitiveness [jealousy], 
• excessive consumption [appetites], 
• the desire for total security from threats [fear], and 
• a willingness to use violence to achieve one's ends [anger].
• Paul Tillich speaks of self-complacent [satisfied] finitude.
• One mark of godly Christians is that you fear sin more than you fear suffering or covid.

• A narrative sermon has a plot. It has
1. a beginning,
2. a destabilizing center,
3. a resolution. The resolution should come as a surprise, as a welcome surprise. Living words for life in the midst of death--every sermon ideally should be that. It should take the hearer from death to life.

• Preach a sermon that summons the congregation to an apocalypse, a revelation, something revealed, something new, something transformative. The purpose of the narrative is to lead the congregation from depression, despair, indifference into an eye-opening new way of understanding what God has done. God is the agent.

• Do sermons as dramas. I believe in that. The sermon is a drama, not a teaching. People say my sermons had beginnings, middles and ends. That's the best way to do it because the gospel itself is a story. The story of Jesus Christ is a story.

• There's a Jesus kerygma [proclamation; announcement; the preaching of the apostles as recorded in the NT] and there's a Christ kerygma. The NT is a Christ kerygma, which we often turn into a Jesus kerygma. That means if we tell enough stories about what Jesus did and summon people to do what Jesus did, that's a Jesus kerygma. But that's not the same as the justification of the ungodly, the phrase Paul uses twice, which is the center of the gospel.
• The justification of the ungodly is NOT a message about how we should try to be like Jesus. It's a message about what Jesus has done and his ongoing life.

• Preach every Sun about the ongoing life of Jesus in the community: "Look what we can do because of this ongoing life of Jesus." NOT "Be like Jesus," but "Listen for his voice, his living voice; listen for the gospel; listen for what God is doing and has done and will do. Even through you, this little Christian church / congregation, God is working even through you, even in the midst of this terrible, demonic plague, God is still working through little bodies of Christians." Look at what is happening through these little bodies of Christians, NOT "go and do likewise," but look at what Jesus is already doing, what God is already doing, what the Holy Spirit, the Trinity is already doing. In other words, not exhorting, but enabling, not just teaching [what 3-point tends to do]. Sermon is not just teaching; it is enabling---and enabling not only belief, but enabling action that arises out of the belief. So when Jesus says, "Go and do likewise," he doesn't mean "Copy me." He means, "Here is my power, living in my vine, my beloved, my chosen."

7 Characteristics of Liberal Theology.

• Liberalism is a diverse, but identifiable approach to Christianity, one that differs significantly from historic orthodoxy, evangelicalism and fundamentalism.  Liberals believe they are making Christianity relevant, credible, beneficial, and humane. Evangelicals like J. Gresham Machen believe they are making something other than Christianity--the dividing line a century ago, and the division persists.

• Lifting Jesus’ teaching above any claims about his person. The true religion is the way of Christ. Asserting that Christianity is essentially a life, not a doctrine. Cf. Traditional Protestant orthodoxies place the substitutionary atonement of Christ at the center of Christianity.

• Liberal theology is defined by its openness to the verdicts of modern intellectual inquiry, especially the nature and social sciences; its commitment to the authority of individual reason and experience; its conception of Christianity as an ethical way of life; its favoring of moral concepts of atonement; and its commitment to make Christianity credible and socially relevant to modern people.

• 
  The idea of liberal theology is nearly three centuries old. In essence, it is the idea that Christian theology can be genuinely Christian without being based upon external authority. Since the 18th century, liberal Christian thinkers argue that religion should be modern and progressive and that the meaning of Christianity should be interpreted from the standpoint of modern knowledge and experience. cf. the view of scripture as an infallible revelation and theology as an explication [vs. explanation] of propositional revelation.

• The movement in modern Protestantism which during the 19th century tried to bring Christian thought into organic unity with the evolutionary world view, the movements from social reconstruction, and the expectations of ‘a better world’ which dominated the general mind. It is that form of Christian faith in which a prophetic-progressive philosophy of history culminates in the expectation of the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth.