“WHY SHOULD I GAIN FROM HIS REWARD?”

The logic of the answer lies in the superabundant overcompensation bestowed on the Son by the Father because of justice. SUCH GRACIOUSNESS IS SUPREMELY RIGHT…BECAUSE JESUS’ SUFFERING OF ABUSE WAS…WORTH IT! (Referring to the beloved modern hymn, “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us,” lyrics by  Stuart Townend.) [4/29/07]

The Jews of Jesus’ day—both leaders and crowds—misused their authority from God and, by crucifying the only-born Son of God, CURSED THE UNCURSABLE. This wicked deed was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back—stringing up their own appointed and fully qualified Savior! And it won them the gruesome “abomination” that desolated their precious capital city and vaunted temple, utterly. [4/29/07]

“Repentance” (metanoia—“change of thinking”) goes hand in hand, functionally, with “conciliation” (katallage—“change against” or “alteration vis a vis”) and both are effected by God’s historic actions, alike in Jesus (the Son’s self-sacrificial surrender to his enemies) and to Jesus (the Father’s raising the Son from the dead instead of destroying his enemies), for only this solution could bring true and lasting peace. [5/01/07]

MORAL INFLUENCE WITHOUT MIRACULOUS EFFLUENCE

Why didn’t Horace Bushnell’s (1802-76) view of Messiah’s self-sacrifice really catch hold? Because it did not include the absolutely critical factor of proper justice. Bushnell correctly saw that the Anselmian version of God’s justice was very far off the mark. But he did not yet see the contours of God’s hyper-transcending justice in raising Jesus up from his submissively-obedient-but-viciously-malevolent crucifixion. It was on the cross that virtuous subordination and vicious insubordination met and clashed, accompanied by a mega-ton flash of Truth so gigantic that the gracious fallout is still coming down to this day!

This may not be fair to the later Bushnell (after the publication of his Forgiveness and Law Grounded in Principles Interpreted by Human Analogies in 1874, two years before he died). But it is still worth engaging the recurrent problem of his sentiment in his sermon, “The Power of God in Self-Sacrifice,” published in Sermons for the New Life, 7^th ed. (NY: Charles Scribner & Co., 1868), pp. 346-63. There he writes,

Just here, then, we begin to open upon the true meaning of my text—Christ the power of God. There is no so great power even among men, as this of which I now speak. It conquers evil by enduring evil. It takes the rage of its enemy and lets him break his malignity across the enduring meekness of its violated love. Just here it is that evil becomes insupportable to itself. It can argue against every thing but suffering patience, this disarms it. Looking in the face of suffering patience it sinks exhausted. All its fire is spent. (p355)

Not by a long shot! For there is no justifying resurrection in sight within a country mile of this paragraph! And without God’s historically vigorous vindication of Messiah’s virtuous disposition this exposition falls limp, ineffectual, feckless!

Yet Bushnell somehow picks up and trudges dutifully onward:

In this view it is that Christ crucified is the power of God. It is because he shows God in self-sacrifice, because he brings out and makes historical in the world God’s passive virtue, which is, in fact, the culminating head of power in his character. By this it is that he opens our human feeling, bad and blind as it is, pouring himself into its deepest recesses and bathing it with his cleansing, new creating influence. There is even a kind of efficiency in it and that the highest, viz., moral efficiency; for it is moral power, not physical, not force. It is that kind of power which feeling has to impregnate feeling; that which one person has in good to melt himself into and assimilate another in evil. Hence it is that so much is said of Christ as a new-discovered power—the power of God unto salvation; the Son of God with power; the power of Christ[;] Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. The power spoken of here is conceived to be such that Christ is really our new creator. We are his workmanship created unto good works; new creatures therefore in him, transformed radically by our faith in him, passed from death unto life, born of God, renewed in the spirit of our mind, created after God in righteousness and true holiness. All the figures of cleansing, sprinkling, washing, healing, purging, terminate in the same thing, the new creating efficacy of Christ, the power of God. It is the power of character, feeling, a right passivity, a culminating grace of sacrifice in God (pp. 355-56; emphasis added).

Is that so? Is that all? The bathos of it all! Where’s the power for our weakness in this “power”? This salt lacks savor, flavor—it’s insipid! Here is moral influence without miraculous effluence! Messiah’s own moral influence could not have won the day—did not win the war—until the God of heaven answered the blood with the Spirit of resurrection power! [1/19/06]  In this passage, Bushnell eloquently extolled the power of God at work in the Lord Jesus, but did not apprehend the indispensable mechanism by which, alone, God was able (because justified) to transfer it to us in our desperate need.  So close…yet so far away.

The “power of the Cross” (which is not, incidentally, a biblical phrase at all!) is precisely that it called forth by ineluctable divine justice the supervening power of the Resurrection (which is liberally and exuberantly taught all over the New Testament)! The compounding of divine and human elements in Jesus rendered him ultimately “unstable” in the presence of “normal” injustices of worldly equilibria. He was a volatile mixture whose crucifixion triggered a timing mechanism that, in three days, detonated a planetary explosion. And that released unearthly magnitudes of radiated energy of wholesomeness, which can vivify, in turn, what was dead. [4/19/06; 12/24/25]

The death-dealing violence of the Cross is overmatched by the life-giving vigor, vibrancy, vivacity, vitality, victory, and vindication of the Resurrection! [4/19/06]