WHAT THE CROSS IS ALL ABOUT

The Great Paradox of the Cross; the Deep Magic of the Universe

It is impossible to understand the full nature and extent of Christ's atoning work on the cross unless one grasps the great paradox inherent in this event.

'A Paradoxical Event'

A paradoxical event is one which contains two seemingly opposing truths. Truths that cannot easily, if at all, be logically reconciled. Truths that, when explained on their own, sound completely true, but when put side by side seem to contradict each other. Truths that appear to cancel each other out to the extent that 'logic' would say that both of them cannot be right, you must choose one or the other. Yet your every instinct and deepest intuition tells you that, if you are to extract the fullest possible meaning from the event, both truths have to be grasped and held in tension, despite the fact that they seemingly contradict each other.

It is impossible to ever 'understand' who Christ is without accepting the power of paradox. How else can we grasp the contradiction of Christ’s being somehow both human and Divine, or fully human yet without sin. So it is a vain hope to imagine that we can comprehend the events of the crucifixion without encountering great paradox. To imagine that the meaning of the Cross is contained within some simple mono-layered truth is to fly in the face of everything we know about Christ in every other area of his life and mission.

Yet it is precisely this very mistake that the evangelical church has made in its doctrine of the Cross, and resulting doctrine of salvation. Evangelicals have interpreted Christ's atoning work as having no paradoxical meaning. Lacking any appreciation of its vast paradoxical nature, they have perceived the crucifixion to be simply a single layered event stuck in time and space. As a result they have seen only one side of the paradox while imagining they have the whole truth! They have then arrived at their doctrines by making logical deductions from this one part of the truth only. Inevitably, they have ended up seriously skewing key aspects of their doctrines - not least their understanding of the nature of the ‘good news’, the 'new covenant’ or the ‘Kingdom of God’ – and, as a result, the whole issue of the nature of and the broadness or otherwise of salvation.

What Part of the Paradox do Evangelicals Understand and Accept?
Evangelicals rightly understand the fact that, through a real man, in real time and at a real place, Christ's death and resurrection accomplished atonement for the sin of the world. They rightly declare that on the cross on that particular day in Palestine "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself and not counting their sins against them."

What Part of the Paradox do Evangelicals Not Understand?
Evangelicals have failed to grasp the hugely important second strand of truth within the paradox - namely the fact that, on the cross, God was in Christ acting out in time and place on the stage of world history the great cosmic drama of grace. They fail to grasp that the Cross was God’s way of telling the world that this ‘way of amazing grace' by which men and women come to and are lovingly welcomed by him, is the way it has always been since the dawn of time and the way it will always be. They fail to grasp that the work on the Cross is a timeless eternal work, outside the limitations of our world of time.

It must be said here that some evangelicals will acknowledge this fact. But even when they do, they do not comprehend that if this is indeed true then it changes at a most profound level many of the doctrinal presuppositions of exclusivist evangelical salvation understandings.

I can remember, in my own sermons, saying on several occasions that Christ's work on the cross extended back in time, as God was outside our restriction of human time and space and saw the entire world from beginning to end in the light of Christ's work on the cross. This is, of course, at least part of what I am arguing for now. However, I at no point sat down and thought through its implications for doctrines such as the New Covenant, Good News, Kingdom of God and ‘the nature of salvation’. All I took from the insight was a vaguely understood and somewhat comforting explanation of how God could have forgiven sin in the Old Testament when no actual sacrifice of animals took place.

Let us now look in greater detail at the two great strands of truth contained within the paradox of the Cross, beginning with the timeless nature of grace.