Rutledge's "The Crucifixion" - quotations

  I've been reading Fleming Rutledge's The Crucifixion for a while now, and I continue to benefit. Her earlier section on the irreligious and godless nature of the crucifixion as seen in its original cultural context was really helpful. Following that, her insights on forgiveness and the fact that real forgiveness cannot be easy or automatic is really valuable. Now, her discussion on Anselm has been insightful. I hadn't realized how controversial Anselm is though it makes sense as I read about it. She shows how in many ways Anselm is not understood well across the centuries, for reasons both understandable and not. So I'm including a series of quotations below. They are in three groupings, on three tracks. Each a peak into her thought. I highly recommend the book!

"'Honor' in Anselm's thought stands not for some imagined hypersensitivity by the Creator to his own dignity, but is a metaphor for the deep logic of reality, in which the balance of a universe is disrupted by the fact of death and by human alienation from others and from God, a situation which could only be rectifies by divine action."  ~ Eamon Duffy, as cited in Rutledge

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In an important sense, the Bible is art rather than science or philosophy, and theology is a sort of art too, since it is largely based upon the narrative form of the Scriptures. (pp. 146-147).  

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The wrath of God falls upon God himself, by God’s own choice, out of God’s own love. The “justice connection” may not be clear to those who are accustomed to privilege, but to oppressed and suffering Christians in the troubled places of the earth, there is no need to spell it out. God in Christ on the cross has become one with those who are despised and outcast in the world. (p. 143).

God’s righteousness leads him to all lengths to oppose what will destroy what he loves, and that means declaring enmity against everything that resists his redemptive purpose. This is the aggressive principle in God’s justice.  (p. 136).

The pervasive and monstrous nature of injustice around the world forces us to acknowledge that forgiveness alone does not give a true picture of God’s purpose. (p. 142).

If, when we see an injustice, our blood does not boil at some point, we have not yet understood the depths of God. It depends, though, on what outrages us. To be outraged on behalf of oneself or one’s own group alone is to be human, but it is not to participate in Christ. To be outraged and to take action on behalf of the voiceless and oppressed, however, is to do the work of God. (p. 143).

  From the standpoint of the gospel, however, every single one of us, rich or poor, is a complex mixture; we are all capable of injustice and we are all living on the edge of neediness at any time. (p. 150).

It is in the very nature of God, “the Holy One in your midst,” to step down from the bench and pour himself out in unquenchable compassion. (p. 136).

"Our sense of God is the shape of our wonder"

 

Our sense of God is the shape of our wonder, the yardstick of our values, the spur of our devotion, and the criterion of our adoration. That is why it matters so intensely. Any ‘prophet in history’ is in a vital way the clue to God in His heaven. What the word spoken authorizes, employs, develops, vindicates, and bequeaths, becomes thereby an index to its great commissioning.

~ Kenneth Cragg, pgs 29-30

 

  I recently finished up another class with ISRME in which we considered Kenneth Cragg's book Muhammad and the Christian at length. It was really clarifying. This quote stuck out to me even beyond the context of the book though. It reminds me of the Tozer quote, "What comes to our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us." Cragg, typically, speaks not only poetically but also with erudition.

Cragg's 'Call of the Minaret'

  Early in his classic work, The Call of the Minaret, Kenneth Craig surveys Islam at the current time; I am reading in the third edition published in 2000. In the first section, as he recounts different aspects of the Islamic (and Muslim) encounter with modernity, his thoughts - in many ways - apply to more than just Islam. They speak to the larger encounter of religion with the technological age. (All emphasis added to the quotes below.)

"For these [who see the Shari'ah and tradition as unchanging] there is no option between chronic permissiveness and the strictest literalism. Nor is this simply a male verdit or an authoritarian tyranny. Secreted in the home and behind the veil, Muslim womanhood finds no immolation or feminist restlessness, but devoted fulfillment of authentic Islam in a role positively undertaken. Sociologists may explain the phenomenon as they will. Religion has as great a capacity to resist modernity as to survive it. Only the opinionated would identify which is the truer Islam." (pg 17)

"There are those who cannot find the ancient reality in the new thoughts, others who cannot identify the ancient reality without them. In the strange but indispensable interaction of the faith and the faithful, the structure of belief and the participant believer, Islam and the Muslim, change is absorbed and continuity attained. That it is so is the genius of the partnership." (pg 26)

"Certainly a monotheism so tremendous as that of Muhammed and Islam is through and through a divine-human encounter. As such we must strive to know it. Whenever we study or confess doctrines of God we proceed upon parallel affirmations about humanity. So inseparable are the two realms that every theology is inevitably also a view of the human." (pg 38) 

  This book came highly recommended to me through the classes on Islam and Christianity that I have taken in the last couple years, and indeed this has the same sort of caring insight that Cragg is known for, being himself Christian but an accepted scholar of Islam. (previous post)