“For Christ sent me to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.”

 

In his 1990 book, Theology is for Proclamation, the late Gerhard Forde insisted that the entire task of theology is to clear the ground for a very specific message: Jesus Christ crucified for the forgiveness of sins.

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Forde’s verdict sits very poorly with much contemporary theology, which prefers to discreetly edit the offense of the cross from the Christian proclamation. The cross is left standing, but it is draped with a garland of reassuring words: grace, love, acceptance, belonging, compassion, empathy, inclusion, and affirmation. Language that talks down to people, manages behavior, signals moral superiority, and keeps the institution humming with polite religious platitudes rather than unleashing the raw, disruptive power of the Word.

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Preachers congratulate themselves, convinced they have finally rescued the cross from its ancient severity and rendered it safe for modern sensibilities. Congregations nod their approval.

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This is theology for patronization.

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But the cross tells a different story. 

 

Humanity did not misunderstand Jesus, ignore Him, or politely decline His message. We killed Him. This creates a considerable difficulty for progressive, reasonable, therapeutic religion, which prefers to imagine us as wounded, misunderstood or put upon rather than hostile. The solution has been ingenious: the crucified Christ is steadily reintroduced to the public not as the one we executed, but as the ultimate symbol of empathetic solidarity, the divine figure who understands our pain. 

 

It is precisely the sort of theological rearrangement one would expect from the moral imagination of modern people, where the gravest sin is thought to result from a lack of affirmation and every problem is assumed to yield to sufficient understanding, sensitivity, and emotional validation. In such an environment, the cross cannot remain an execution; it must be remodeled into therapy or an example to follow, however imperfectly. Humanity, we are assured, is not hostile to God but merely wounded, misunderstood, or insufficiently affirmed. Under such an assumption, the cross becomes unnecessary as a verdict and can be safely repurposed as inspiration. 

 

Once the grim instrument of torture and state terror, which was the price of our redemption, has been hauled away, the vocabulary of the gospel can be ladled out with perfect safety as a soothing syrup of self-improvement, social justice, and moral betterment. Everyone emerges with self-regard quite unscathed, the conscience agreeably massaged, and most reassuringly, all comfortable illusions intact.

 

There is, of course, nothing new about this maneuver.  We humans instinctively reach for reinterpretation in order to preserve ourselves. The Apostle Paul spotted it instantly. The human race will tolerate the cross quite comfortably once it has been sufficiently softened, explained away, contextualized, and domesticated. Then the performance of rebranding the cross from foolish, scandalous offense to “eloquent wisdom” can begin. Words multiply, insights abound, and the message grows increasingly clever, nuanced, urbane, and psychologically perceptive. 

 

The result is that the message of Christ crucified for sinners never offends by actually naming and exposing the sinners for whom Christ was crucified. The cross is “emptied of its power.” Not rejected. Gutted. The shell remains; the substance is gone.

 

And yet, for all our cleverness, God refuses to cooperate with our self-serving editing process. Even as the church “spins” the nails, wood, and blood into palatable forms, the Son of God stands before us not with accusation but with mercy. Which is precisely why the Christian message of Christ crucified cannot be rehabilitated by softening it, but only by returning it to the cross itself. For it is there, and only there, that the words of God’s mercy recover their power: 

 

Grace: God’s decision to forgive the very people who crucified Him.

Love: the Son of God refusing to abandon the world to the sin that rejects God and consumes us.

Forgiveness: the astonishing declaration that the verdict pronounced against us at the cross is followed by another word entirely: “Father, forgive them.”

 

That is why Paul was “determined” to preach only Christ crucified. He knew the foolishness of the cross is not a mere preface to Christianity but its whole content. The offense we want to hide is the very thing we must proclaim because there is no message more honest, no message more merciful. It refuses every comforting lie we tell ourselves; it exposes the depth of our lostness without a trace of sentimentality. Yet precisely in that merciless honesty, it becomes the deepest mercy: it relieves us of the illusion that we can save ourselves, setting us free to be found by the only One who can.

 

That is the divine, offensive, foolish, scandal of the Gospel. Christ was crucified for the crucifiers. And when these words, sin, grace, love, forgiveness, and all the rest of the Christian vocabulary, are placed back in the service of that scandalous death, they cease to be decorative garlands and become once again what they were meant to be: the living, powerful language of God’s mercy proclaimed for the ungodly. 

 

For you and me.