“THE VICTORY OF THE CROSS”?

“The victory of the cross is not assured without the enlightening revelation of the Spirit of God” (Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition [Baker Academic, 2004] p. 150).  That dogmatic assertion, I submit to you, is passing strange indeed!  It shows how very far the mind of the Protestant Reformation (and Western atonement theology more generally) stands apart from the mind of Christ and his Spirit—the spirit of the New Covenant.  The victory of “the Cross” did not happen, properly speaking, at the Cross itself at all, but at the Resurrection!  Touché.

The Cross was a manifest failure since it did not save the Savior from death and the Unseen in the least.  Jesus’ ‘Saviorhood’ was deliberately unmanifest during his enigmatic crucifixion.  By no stretch of a hallowed imagination can that tragic violence be construed as ‘saving’, barring theological legerdemain. Yet because it is ineluctably linked to previous and subsequent events by a molecular logic of cosmic chemistry, therefore the product was predetermined:  VICTORIOUS RESURRECTION FROM AMONG THE DEAD!  Messiah’s getting crucified was an act of submissive obedience by the divine Son to his divine Father; it could only have a divine outcome—the vindication of that obedience by Resurrection, enthronement, and the outpouring of Wholesome Spirit to seal the adoption of future heirs.  But then we should speak of “the victory of The Obedience”!  Yet where, in theology, in sermon, in devotion, or in prayer, have you ever beheld that ‘odd’ conjunction of words or meditated that profoundly Biblical concept?  When and how did we start wandering off into the tangled underbrush of dessicated doctrines?

Therefore, properly speaking, Messiah’s cross manifested no victory that could be “assured,” as Boersma supposes, by so-called “enlightening revelation of the Spirit of God” or by any other means whatsoever.  We may better speak of the justification of the Cross becoming apparent in Messiah’s resurrectionary victory over death, Satan, sin, and every petty enemy.  But that victory has been attested and proclaimed by his well-instructed apostles long since.  This is our assurance and this has already long ago been corroborated and certified by “the enlightening revelation of the Spirit of God” that two millennia past inspired wholesome men to write it all down in detail in the wholesome Scriptures of the New Covenant for all the wholesome ones (“saints”) who come to believe the Message throughout remaining history until the Return.  What am I missing?  Didn’t Boersma get the memo?

The impulse that moved Hans Boersma to frame that opening sentence was, to be sure, the impossibility of seeing any victory in the Cross by any normal, rational means.  But that fact should have told him something and counseled his reticence before invoking a ‘supernatural’ crowbar to bust the lock on this ‘mystery’.  In point of fact, there is no longer any fundamental mystery about the proclamation of God’s Kingdom!  It was intended for secrecy only until Satan showed his vicious, violent hand against the Son of Mankind, which he would by no means have done if he had known God would reverse his murder by irreversible resurrection to communicable immortality!

God’s righteous anger against incorrigible sin cannot be averted from it.  Sins, rather, must be broken off us so that we do not die in their chokehold.  For unless this release from sins takes place, our wrongdoings will suck us down a black hole to God only knows where.

There is no ‘redeeming power’ in the Cross.  There is only liberating power in the heart of a strictly righteous God whose resurrectionary “avenging” the cross of Messiah evoked!  The power all belongs to, and issues from, the God of unremitting justice who did not let the sentence of crucifixion stand without virtually immediate reversal and colossal super-compensation!  HOORAY!!!

If the intolerable injustice of the Cross evoked the Resurrection of the Son by the Father, shouldn’t this fundamental evangelical pattern also get reflected in the case of diseases no less than sins?  The application of the innocent blood of God’s Lamb to our sinful hearts effects the ‘avenging’ of his wrongful death by the outpouring of new life into our hearts, thus giving us expectancy of agelong life in the impending age.  Why wouldn’t the application of his blood (figured in anointing the sick with oil, which likewise symbolizes the Wholesome Spirit poured out on or “paid out” to us in compensation for Satan’s pouring out the blood of God’s own Son) also effect restoration of health as well?  It follows so naturally.

VIOLENCE OR ASSERTIVENESS?

I’d like to reflect for a moment on Boersma’s category of ‘violence’.  When Jesus spoke of the so-called “violence” of those whom he commended for wanting to enter God’s Kingdom, he hardly meant violence in the Old Testament sense, and which God abhors in no uncertain terms and decisively condemns.  Rather, a comparison with the usage of this Greek family of words in the Septuagint Old Testament strongly (forcefully!) suggests that Jesus meant assertiveness, i.e., forcefulness.  This translation makes profound sense in light of the string of assertive people whose stories are narrated in the preceding chapters, following the ‘Sermon on the Mount’.

Today we even hear about assertiveness training to help the timid become more bold, outgoing, outspoken, and courageous in public and forceful in interpersonal relations.  ‘Violence’?  I don’t think so.  [4/4/06]

God’s ‘hospitality’ is reserved especially for those within the Covenants He made throughout history—that is, if we understand hospitality as God’s graciousness. But Boersma’s Calvinism, as expressed in his noteworthy book, has tied up this graciousness in endless litigation, speculating unjustifiably about its ‘supralapsarian’ reservation for only a few ‘sovereignly’, ‘irresistibly’, and ‘irreversibly’ elect individuals, as if this is graciousness at all!  Much rather, God’s true graciousness (‘sovereign’ is not even a biblical adjective!) allows all people onto the train of His Covenant so long as they trust Him (as manifested by their enduring repentance and obedience).  Otherwise they get thrown out of the train somewhere on route to the Kingdom, into outer darkness where there is no graciousness, but only anger—divine indignation.  This is well illustrated by God’s “drowning Pharaoh and his army because His lovingkindness [to Pharaoh’s would-be victims!] endures for the age” Psalm 136:15.  God exercises patience, toleration, longsuffering, kindness, and mercy even to Pharaoh and others outside His Covenant, including the sad case of defectors.  But His lovingkindness, covenantal troth, and graciousness are ours, alone, who keep trusting.

WHERE’S THE BLOOD?

Curiously, Boersma’s book does not have an index entry for “blood”!  This is some measure of how far from the metaphors of Scripture one can stray even in painstaking scholarly elaborations.  “Blood” is simply the most pivotal and pervasive word associated with every category of salvation in the New Testament.  Ponder that!  Better yet, prove me wrong, if you dare.  [4/4/06]