Christ’s regal and sacerdotal activity find their ultimate fulfillment in his prophetic office. Christ’s prophetic office does not merely encompass his teachings prior to his crucifixion, but is finally and most supremely fulfilled in his actualization of the testament of the gospel. The saving testament of the gospel is the message of his salvific cross and empty tomb. The cross and the empty tomb are the supreme act of revelation of the Triune God. St. Paul tells us that the omega-point of God’s revelatory activity, and the center of all proper Christian teaching, is the death and resurrection of Christ: “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). Martin Luther echoed this in his slogan: “The cross alone is our theology” (crux sola est nostra theologia).1 In his Epistle to the Romans, the Apostle summarized the content of the revelation of the cross as: “[Christ] was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25).
Although the message of the cross’s ultimate telos is salvation, in Scripture salvation never comes apart from a corresponding act of judgment. Hence, the cross is not only a revelation of grace, but it is the means by which “[God] will destroy the wisdom of the wise [and] the intelligence of the intelligent” (1 Cor. 1:19). Jesus is “The stone that the builders rejected [that] has become the cornerstone” (Matt. 21:42). Hence, the crucifixion and empty tomb not only reveal the hidden plan of redemption, but also expose the true depths of human sin. The New Testament emphasizes that the exposure of the true depths of human sin in the cross occurs on two horizons: coram Deo (i.e., the divine-human relationship) and coram mundo (i.e., the human-human relationship).
Coram Deo, the cross reveals the full depth of God’s wrath against sin, as well as the total fallenness of humanity. In a word, if Christ had to die as a necessary condition of our salvation, then it follows that our sin is so terrible that the price of reconciliation could only be wrought by the death of the infinite Son of God. Likewise, hanging on the cross, we see the whole of our human nature crushed under the wrath of God. In accordance with Gregory of Nazianzus’s maxim “For that which He has not assumed He has not healed,”2 if the totality of human nature is assumed to bear the redemptive condemnation of the cross, then all of human nature is in need of redemption. In a word, Chalcedonian Christology’s logical corollary is the Augustinian doctrine of the totalizing nature of sin.
Coram mundo, the crucifixion and the empty tomb also expose human sin by revealing human rejection of God. In the Gentile world, we see the rejection of God and his grace prefigured by the Pagan propensity to generate theogonies wherein the younger gods kill the father-god to assert their sovereignty and independence against higher authorities (i.e., Titanism).3 In the Old Testament, we can see this murderous rejection of God prefigured in Israel’s rejection of God as king in favor of a human king in 1 Samuel: “. . . they [Israel] have not rejected you [Samuel], but they have rejected me [God] from being king over them” (1 Sam 8:7). Although Israel rejected YHWH as king, he nevertheless succeeded in putting himself on Israel’s throne by making David a “house” (2 Sam. 7:11), that is, the promise in future generations to make his very flesh a Tabernacle/Temple wherein he will dwell with his people (Jn. 1:14). Nevertheless, the union of God with his people in the person of Jesus Christ was even more radical manner than the Tabernacle/Temple: “But I tell you that something greater than the temple is here” (Matt. 12:6). In Christ, God is rejected as king as he was under the old covenant, albeit in an even more extreme fashion. In his crucifixion, Jesus is not only rejected by Israel, but also the Gentiles as represented by Pilate and the Roman soldiers, as well as the nascent Church who flee in terror and deny him. Again, the depth of human depravity is revealed by the simple fact that when God came in person to save, the representatives of all humanity (Jew, Gentile, Church) either abandoned him or actively sought his death.4
- In XV Psalmos graduum (1532/1533); WA 40.III: 193. ↩︎
- Gregory of Nazianzus, “Epistle 101,” in The Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. Edward Hardy and Cyril Richardson (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1954), 218-219. ↩︎
- Frank Moore Cross, From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 77. ↩︎
- See Barth’s observations in: CD 1.2:110. See Pannenberg’s comments in: Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 2:425-426. ↩︎
From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).
Images Pavias Andreas, The Crucifixion, 2nd half of 15th century; Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD-Old-100; and Pinterest, accessed May 28, 2024, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/doctors-of-the-church–207447126578146909/.