The Polemics of the Cross
By Matthew J. Dodrill
Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what’s fragile and what suffers – there lies sanity. And salvation – John Jeremiah Sullivan
A few years ago, my wife gave me a Christmas mug with the words “Bah Humbug” inscribed across its curved ceramic. She knows me well.
It’s not that I dislike Christmas. It’s just that I prefer Advent for its penitential zeal and imperviousness to cultural elitism. There’s a part of me that revels in the irony of watching rich people recite the Magnificat, what with its stern indictments against wealth and imperial clout.
But Christmas seldom eludes the snares of bourgeois spirituality, not because of anything inherent in Christmas itself, but because of our tendency to associate triumphant church seasons with triumphant systems. Advent and Lent belong to the poor and lowly, the reasoning goes, but Christmas and Easter are readily mapped onto the narratives of victory and conquest. The logic here is almost never overt, yet it’s not hard to detect: An executive at Goldman Sachs naturally gravitates away from the uncivil rhetoric of John the Baptist (the quintessential Advent figure), and the petition to “ransom captive Israel” is unlikely to tug at his heartstrings. But whereas Mary’s pronouncement against the rich makes the executive shudder, the words of “Away in a Manger” tickle his ears as much as the belligerent appeal to put Christ back in Christmas.
How do we account for this unfortunate correlation between high festivals and socio-economic triumphalism? I suspect that a strictly linear understanding of the church calendar has something to do with it. That is to say, when we treat each liturgical season like a single link in a chain of events, we start imagining that Christmas and Easter supersede or “cancel out” the struggles of Advent and Lent. Could anything be more consoling to the opulent Wall Street banker? If the resurrection “moves beyond” the cross, we become detached from the moorings of creation and its travails, free to float 30 thousand feet above the ground in a gnostic paradise full of mansions and golden chifforobes. Indeed, such an over-realized, pie-in-the-sky eschatology insulates us from the poor, the wretched, and the outcast.
So, rather than separating the cross and resurrection into respective compartments on a linear time spectrum, I suggest we recover the interplay between these two movements: The cross doesn’t just lead to resurrection. The resurrection vindicates the cross.
Ernst Käsemann, the late German theologian who had much to say about the Apostle Paul, addressed this issue in an essay titled “For and Against a Theology of Resurrection.” There he provides commentary on Paul’s contest with the hyper-spiritual “enthusiasts” of the Corinthian church, a rival group with whom the Apostle disagrees sharply on what it means to possess “spiritual knowledge” verses “unspiritual knowledge” (1 Cor. 2:6-16). For the enthusiasts, spiritual knowledge is attained by those who live totally in the new age, whereas for Paul spiritual knowledge is manifested at the juncture of two ages, namely the age that’s passing away and the age that’s dawning in Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 2:14-17).
According to Käsemann, the enthusiasts were deluded by a linear understanding of the cross and resurrection, reducing the former to a single “historical event” that’s traversed by the forward movement of time into the future. This way of framing Christ’s passion renders the cross a purely transitional stage on the path to resurrection, an instrument of atonement that becomes expendable as a model of discipleship once the stone is rolled away.
To the enthusiasts, therefore, the cross had nothing to do with “spiritual knowledge,” for in their estimation, the cross is a mere artifact of salvation history, a diminishing speck in the rearview mirror. Indeed, they saw themselves standing at the terminus of history with the risen Lord, their faces shining with the radiance of the sun (2 Cor. 5:12 ) while their earthbound, smudgy-faced interlocutor Paul – bless his heart – claimed to embody the glory of Christ in his weakness (1 Cor. 1:18-2:5). One might imagine the enthusiasts scoffing at Paul’s unapologetic theology of the cross: “Why does this fool persist in weakness and lowliness? Doesn’t he understand that the cross was overcome by the resurrection of our Lord, and that he can abide with us in the fullness of God’s new creation? What does it profit a man to live in the past?”
What Paul understood, however, is that the new creation had not yet reached its culmination. This mysterious delay was the impetus for thinking about a second coming, and Paul’s entire missional program was anchored to a vision of what occurs between the two advents. Bernard of Clairvaux, the 12th century Benedictine monk, referred to this intermediate space as the site of God’s adventus medius, the “middle (and third) advent” of Christ, where, for Paul, the Spirit of resurrection is manifested in the mode of cruciform witness. In other words, we inhabit a threshold space where the two ages overlap and the powers of darkness are put on notice, heightening their anxiety and hunger for dominion. The Spirit of the risen One is therefore met with resistance, and disciples of Jesus are called upon to embody resurrection life by engaging in the struggle. At the juncture of the ages, then, bearing the cross is nothing less than the spiritual manifestation of the resurrection (1 Cor. 4:9-13; 2 Cor. 6:3-10; 13:4).
This is precisely what the enthusiasts failed to grasp. For Paul, knowledge “according to the Spirit” and knowledge “according to the cross” are not mutually exclusive categories separated on a linear time spectrum. On the contrary, knowledge according to the Spirit is knowledge according to the cross; so, despite their ostensibly holy lifestyle, these enthusiasts proved to possess unspiritual, “fleshy” knowledge when they rejected the cross as the primary mode of knowing (2 Cor. 5:16 ).
William Stringfellow, the radical attorney and lay theologian who sheltered Daniel Berrigan when he was on the run for destroying Vietnam draft files, was like a modern-day Paul railing against America’s hyper-spiritualized Christianity. He lived his faith by defending the legal rights of poor people in Harlem, as well as defending the first women priests of the Episcopal Church. He participated in the first Conference on Religion and Race in Chicago (’63), where he stirred controversy for identifying racism with demonic power and excoriating the assembly as “too little, too late, and too lily white.” And of course, he was a harsh critic of the war in Vietnam.
Stringfellow never divorced his political activity from his spiritual formation. In his small volume The Politics of Spirituality, he reiterates Paul’s argument against the enthusiasts:
Commercialized or religious or other ersatz forms of spirituality typically require conformity to the world and avail no freedom from conformity to the regime of the world, even though they boast their own spiritual jargon or assert transcendental goals.
Indeed, just as Paul exposed the unspiritual nature of the enthusiasts’ faith, Stringfellow bristled at The 700 Club’s euphoric gnosticism, which betrayed its conformity to the world. Both groups were awed to heaven but hardly rooted in earth, presenting a flimsy gospel that eschewed the politics of the cross.
And that’s exactly what was at stake for Käsemann and Stringfellow. Their cultural moment, much like ours today, called for nothing less than the polemical message of the cross.
Far from being a mere symbol of devotion, the cross is the one and only mode of Christian discipleship at the turn of the ages. A theology of the cross grounds us firmly in the muck and mire of creation gone awry, where the birth pangs of resurrection are felt most vividly at the sites of crucifixion (Mt. 24:3-9). The point bears repeating: These are the birth pangs of resurrection, not just in the sense of coming before the end, but in the sense of manifesting the end. We must proceed with caution, however, if we wish to avoid the enthusiast error. The end has not arrived in its totality, so we must disillusion ourselves of the notion that we presently share in Christ’s glorification, a view that lends itself to all manner of gross projections: Maybe ostentatious wealth inheres in God’s glory; maybe upward mobility is a sign of faithfulness; perhaps military dominance is a mark of divine favor. This is not how resurrection life is manifested.
Indeed, a doctrine of resurrection that isolates us from the cross – and from the people most likely to bear it – is a doctrine that maintains the current order of things. By contrast, a proper doctrine of resurrection throws us back onto the cross, thereby demonstrating God’s commitment to rectifying what is wrong in this world. This gospel is polemical because it’s unapologetically this-worldly, delegitimizing the sentimentality and ethereal moralism that pervade evangelical and mainline Christianity today.
It’s polemical because it calls us away from triumphalism and back to justice.
Going back to my “bah humbug” moment, this is exactly what worries me about presuming that Christmas and Easter transcend Advent and Lent. Neither of them should eclipse the “middle advent” of cruciform witness and leave us floating in the clouds among the rich and powerful (1 Cor. 4:8). As Stringfellow puts it: “Instead of being transported ‘out of this world,’ the irony in being holy is that one is plunged more fully into the practical existence of this world, as it is, than in any other way.” It involves sinking our feet into the soil of injustice where practicing resurrection among the poor and destitute might get us nailed to a cross. The Dominican priest Herbert McCabe said it best:
The Gospels insist upon two antithetical truths which express the tragedy of the human condition: the first is that if you do not love you will not be alive; the second is that if you do love you will be killed. If you cannot love you remain self-enclosed and sterile, unable to create a future for yourself and others, unable to live. If, however, you do effectively love you will be a threat to the structures of domination upon which our human society rests and you will be killed.
To love is to risk death. To practice resurrection is to embody the cross.
Stringfellow understood this well. He, like the Apostle Paul, knew that Christian spirituality is inherently cross-shaped and political. That’s how the Lord appears in his adventus medius. For the cross, as Käsemann famously put it, is the signature of the risen One.
Matthew J. Dodrill is a Pastoral Resident at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas.
