The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

the rejection of the concept of martyrdom had brought with it the abandonment of the church’s understanding of suffering, and meant that the gospel of the cross had lost its meaning and ultimately that established Christianity was bound to lose its eschatological hope. The assimilation of Christianity to bourgeois society always means that the cros

The suffering and rejection of Christ on the cross is understood as eschatological suffering and rejection, and is brought by the martyrs into the eschatological public arena, where they are cast out, rejected and publicly executed.

Anyone who in these hymns encounters the passion of Christ, and experiences in them the pain of the love of God for himself, knows that he himself is something different from what sorrow and the fear of death, the yoke of slavery and his masters have made and seek to make of him.

There is no mention in the Gospels of his suffering from nature and fate, and his economic sufferings as a ‘carpenter’s son’. Rather, his sufferings and humiliation came from his actions, from his preaching of the imminence of the kingdom as a kingdom of unconditional grace, from his freedom towards the law, and from his table-fellowship with ‘sinn

Thus the motivation for the call to follow Jesus is eschatological, and must not be understood in a moral sense. It is a call into the future of God which is now beginning in Jesus, and for the sake of this future it is not only necessary but possible to break one’s links with the world which is now passing away and abandon a concern for one’s own

He suffered on account of the liberating word of God, and died on account of his liberating fellowship with those who were not free.

Thus to save all men, and in accordance with the contradiction of the cross, the church of the crucified Christ must take sides in the concrete social and political conflicts going on about it and in which it is involved, and must be prepared to join and form parties. It must not ally itself with the existing parties, but in a partisan fashion inte

Thus we can describe this intangible experience of identity in faith in the cross as the enduring element in the mysticism of the cross, and as the inner reason for the outward expression of misery and the ever recurring protest against it.

it is not the church of those who inwardly are self-righteous and outwardly exercise domination.