The Cross: Its Meaning and Message in a Postmodern World

The Cross

Its Meaning and Message in a Postmodern World

Douglas Vickers

The Cross

Its Meaning and Message in a Postmodern World

Copyright © 2010 Douglas Vickers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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Scripture quotations, unless otherwise stated, are from the King James Version

Preface

My objective in this book is to suggest a number of aspects from which the cross and the redemptive work of Christ are to be viewed. In the opening chapter I have commented briefly on several questions that provide the context in which the following chapters are developed. A principal question that calls for preliminary comment is what I refer to as the human condition to which the cross is addressed. That is a condition of sin and estrangement from God by reason of the bequest of Adam’s fall. But the human condition, which has taken on particular characteristics under the influence of the history of thought, exhibits at this time the multiform features of what has been referred to as postmodernism. I return to some aspects of that contemporary movement in chapter 5. Chapter 1 reflects also on the being and holiness of God that lies behind the provision of the cross, and on the terms of the Covenant of Grace of which the cross of Christ is the culminating effect.

The meaning of the cross, taking up the important questions of who it was who went to the cross, why the cross was necessary in the divine purpose, and the benefits that accrue to those who were the subjects of the redemption the cross provided, is addressed directly in chapter 3. Prior to that, and to anticipate the principal questions involved, chapter 2 adduces aspects of the biblical revelation that provides the explanation of the cross. The scripturicity of the Scriptures has come under attack in recent times, even within the Reformed-evangelical church, and I have therefore included in the final chapter a slightly fuller discussion of the inspiration and reliability of the biblical data. At that point also I have commented on some of the contemporary deviations from accepted historical positions.

Chapter 4 takes up a central implication of what had to that point been said regarding the efficacy for salvation of the atonement the cross provided. It brings into conjunction, and recognizes their dependence on the Covenant of Grace, the accepting, receiving, and resting on Christ alone as aspects of saving faith and the justification, sanctification, and eternal life that follow from the redemptive achievement of the cross.

In chapter 5 the cross is seen as a refuge for the sinner who, by the regenerating grace of God, is made aware of his perilous state in sin, a refuge for the Christian believer who has again fallen into sin, and, of singular importance, a refuge for the Christian who faces and is tortured by the pressure of temptation to sin. Chapter 6 sees in the cross its absolute sufficiency to accomplish all that was intended in the divine Covenant of Redemption, and it returns to the question of the imperatives that are laid on the Christian believer by reason of his redemption that the Christ of the cross has provided.

A note on terminology is in order. Throughout the book I have followed traditional theological usage and employed the nouns man and men to refer to mankind in general, and my use of the pronoun he and its cognates is intended in a generic sense to refer to people inclusively, in a manner that avoids the alternative repetitive use of his or her.

I acknowledge my heavy indebtedness to a long line of Reformed theologians, to whose work I have endeavored to give credit in the text. Any apparent originality in the arguments I present is due to the impact on my thinking and meditations of those scholars whose insights have had formative influence in the subject areas I have addressed. My professional career has been spent in the professoriate of a non-theological academic discipline. But my understanding of, and appreciation for, Reformed doctrinal and apologetic theology has benefited greatly, as is undoubtedly reflected in this book, from the influence of the scholarship of John Murray and Cornelius Van Til whom I was privileged to know during their tenure at Westminster Theological Seminary, and from the ministry of Martyn Lloyd-Jones at Westminster Chapel while I was completing doctoral studies at the University of London. I acknowledge my indebtedness to them.

I happily record my deep gratitude to the Rev. Al LaValley who read and gave me valuable comments on my draft manuscript, and as has been true for many books and professional papers over the years, to Ann Hopkins for her invaluable editorial assistance. For the blemishes and infelicities that remain in the work I take full responsibility.

1

Preliminary Issues

The question that has challenged the ages remains relentlessly new: How do we explain the presence of Jesus Christ in this world? Souls laden by the search for truth have found relief in the Scriptures’ answer, even as many, like a rich young ruler of old, have turned away in incredulity: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners (1 Tim 1:15). The cross of Christ stands prominently as the watershed of history. All that the providence of God eventuated preceding it finds its explanation and reason for being in the cross. All that has followed in the histories of men and nations has been formed by a divine hand in the realization of the purposes for which the cross occurred. The cross of Christ has been an enigma and offense to those whose assertion of autonomy has stood between them and eternal life, but it has spoken peace and eternal rest to many who, wearied by the burden of sin, have been reconciled to God by the atonement set forth in the cross. All of history, precedent to the cross and following from it, has been eventuated by God in the interests of the church that Christ, by virtue of the cross, redeemed.

Reflect, for a moment, on the apostolic summary of the meaning projected by the death of Christ on the cross: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation [or setting at peace the wrath of God against sin] through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission [or pretermission; that is, ‘passing over’] of sins that are past [or were committed in former times], through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus (Rom 3:25–26 ). The point of the statement is that God had in his patience and restraint passed over, or refrained from punishing, sins committed under the earlier administration of the old covenant, but that now he has set forth Christ to be a propitiation for sin. In doing so, God is showing that he is perfectly righteous, because what he is now doing in Christ has reference to all the sin of all his people, both those in the past and now present and those that are still to come. In other words, the sacrifices under the Old Testament Levitical administration could not definitively take away sin. They achieved only a ceremonial cleansing so that those who brought the sacrifice could approach God in worship. But now that Christ as the antitype of the Old Testament priesthood had come in order that he should himself be the final offering for sin, God’s justice and righteousness would be completely declared and satisfied. God, then, is just, because he has poured out on his Son on the cross the full extent of his wrath against sin. Sin, the sin of all his people of all time, was dealt with once and for all on the cross.

Because God has punished sin in his Son on the cross he can, as the text says, be just and the justifier of those who believe in Jesus. Martyn Lloyd-Jones has observed that in many senses there are no more important verses in the whole range and realm of Scripture than these two verses.¹ Here again is the remarkable reality that in the covenantal design of God Christ died for sinners. The objective was that we to whom the guilt of Adam’s transgression had been imputed, who had inherited the fallen nature that resulted from Adam’s dereliction, might again be reconcile[d] . . . unto God . . . by the cross (Eph 2:16). It was in order that it could then be said that we through him [Christ] . . . have access by one Spirit unto the Father (Eph 2:18). In that entrance to the Father by reason of our union with the Christ of the cross, we have boldness and access with confidence (Eph 3:12).

Before we look in more detail at the meaning and the message of the cross, it will be useful to consider certain preliminary issues and questions that will provide a context and background for further interpretation. The questions present themselves, first, as to what is the character and nature of the human condition that made the cross necessary; second, what, in the light of that, is to be understood as the purpose of God in the redemption the cross provided; and third, what is to be seen as the thought structures of the world that contend for authentication against the scriptural claims we have already adduced?

The human condition

A confluence of cultural and theological concerns engages the Christian mind. In one of its most piercing aspects, the problem of our time is the problem of man himself. The complex pressures of the times have made him unsure of his place in the world and his prospects and destiny. That the entrance of sin has contaminated the whole of life, that it has reduced man to a state of moral inability, and that it alone opens the way to adequate explanation will engage us at length. But what of the condition of man to whom the revivifying word of God comes? On the socio-cultural level the problem is that of modern man enmeshed in a terribly human condition in which the individual has lost a clear view of his status and his place. On the level of theology, or of the doctrinal belief and the relevance of the church, questions press as to what light from Christian perspectives is thrown, or should be thrown, on the issues.

To say, however, that the modern problem is the problem of modern man is to say, in a sense, nothing new. The highly important movement of Renaissance thought in the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries fostered a humanism that was countered and reshaped in its theological dimension by the Reformation. That latter was primarily a theological movement that bequeathed to the subsequent history of Western civilization social, political, and cultural benefits. The importance of Calvin, for example, at the height of the Reformation, derives from both the theological and the socio-cultural influence of his work. On the level of theological doctrine, Calvin’s work was crafted within the context of a consciousness of the sovereignty and covenantal purpose of God. While the genius of his thought derived from his God-consciousness, its significance lay, in an important respect, in the manner in which he responded to the Renaissance recovery of the importance of the individual. For Calvin, that came to expression on two levels. First, he gave to the church not only the importance of the priesthood of Christ within the context of the threefold offices of Christ (as prophet, priest, and king), but in conjunction with that he gave emphasis to the importance of the individual in his doctrine of the universal priesthood of believers.² Second, those closely related aspects of his thought imply that he stood for a divine monergism in salvation, against the human autosoterism of the Pelagians and the synergism in the semi-Pelagianism of Rome.³ That implied, in turn, that Calvin clarified the biblical meaning of sin and moral inability to which the redemptive work of Christ was addressed, and against that he clarified and insisted on the reality of the believer’s union with Christ. Though Calvin’s work spread its influence to the socio-cultural level in its implication, again, of the sanctity of individual freedom, that influence has been tarnished in more modern times by a failure to recognize that sin is abroad in the world and in the hearts of men.

With the birth of modern philosophy in the hands of Descartes in the seventeenth century, his cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, established a decidedly anthropocentric orientation of thought. That orientation was consolidated in the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and at the end of the century the autonomy of man, so far as the philosophy of the possibilities of human thought was concerned, was definitively established by the work of Immanuel Kant. The argument of the ancient Greek philosopher, Protagoras, had come back to vogue, and man was now again the measure of all things. That orientation has persisted. And in the light of more modern developments it is necessary for the church and its theology to respond to what has become the interpretative and diagnostic bankruptcy of contemporary non-Christian humanism. For the inner logic and the gathering momentum of modern thought has fathered a new humanism that has set the stage for a complete devolution of thought away from its earlier and secure moorings.

When it is said that man has made himself the measure of all things, the import of that is expressed on two levels which, taken together, are correlative to each other. First, on the level of behavior or ethics, man is the measure of all things in that he sets his own standards or criteria of goodness, and in doing so he loses himself in a shoreless ocean of relativism in which his structureless norms have lost all grip on an earlier absoluteness. Second, man has become the measure of all things on the level of the possibility and validity of knowledge. His criteria of truth are excogitated from within himself or are discovered in the fashions of thought that exist in the cultural milieu in which he finds himself. Putting together the modern assertion of autonomy in the areas of behavior and knowledge, man has cut himself off completely from earlier and revelatory moorings. What now impresses the reflective mind as the loss of cultural cohesion in the world and the insecurity if not bankruptcy of theology is the result, on the one hand, of a rampantly apostate view, and on the other of at least a sub-biblical view, of man.

Consider for a moment the biblical doctrine. The authors of the Westminster Confession, the outstanding English expression of Reformed theology in the seventeenth century, wrote into their Shorter Catechism: God created man . . . after his own image, in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness.⁴ We note in the conceptual trilogy implicit in the catechism the point at which biblical anthropology begins: first, God created man; second, God created man in his own image; and third, man as he came from the hands of his Creator existed in a state of knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. We shall return to the sequel, to sin and the fall, and to the towering categories of redemption that followed. But the pressing need at present is not only that of a careful examination of what the trilogy of propositions implies. The question presses as to whether the theology of the church has lost its grip on the doctrinal orientation which such propositions as these provide.

It is undoubtedly true that in a pluralistic society the church, in spite of what might have been the case in earlier centuries, has ceased to be an effective and cementing establishment. In what is now the radical pluralism of society, no single force appears capable of functioning universally as an effective and culturally coordinating element. No single force exerts a predominant, determining influence or a cultural hegemony or leadership except the applied forms of the new humanism, particularly in its scientific and its several empirical expressions. But the issue before us is that for all such reasons, the church and its theology confront a crisis of comprehension in which the very explanation of man stands like a riddle at the core.

What are we to say of the church at this time, of the kaleidoscope of its theologies, its movements to doctrinal ecumenicity, and its turmoil in ecclesiastical forms? Has the church not lost the battle, it is time to ask, or are we not perilously in danger of doing so by falling prey to some of the shallowest fallacies of the age: the fallacies of imagining that we could have an evangelism, or an evangelicalism, without the biblical evangel; that we could be effective preachers of the word of life and not be careful to hold the biblical truths in biblical proportion; that we could bend to the behavior norms of the age and become careless in our handling of holy things; or that, to face the issue on the level of every day, we could imagine the Christian ethic and the wholesomeness of life to be supportable without the Christian doctrine?

The biblical response

Against the contemporary scene, and in the context of the cultural forces we have noted as bearing on it, the need of the church is to recapture and maintain the biblical doctrine of man and of his sinful fall. That, we have seen, begins with the statement that God created man. Let us make man in our image (Gen 1:26), God said, addressing the Second and Third Persons of the Trinity, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, and not, as has been suggested by some theologians, the heavenly host that surrounded his throne.⁵ That the act of creation was the action of the Trinity of the Godhead is clarified by the facts that, first, "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" (Gen 1:2); and second, that it was by the Son that all things were made (John 1:3) and by him all things [were] created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible . . . all things were created by him, and for him (Col 1:16).

Our first parent, in coming to self-consciousness, knew that he was the creature of a Creator God. Two implications follow. First, by reason that our first parent was created in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness (Eph 4:24; Col 3:10), two things characterized his initial state. In the first place, for Adam, to be was to know. That is to say, his very being, his consciousness and self-awareness, carried with it the knowledge and awareness of God. He did not discover God by any process of investigation or inquiry. His knowledge of God was not the result of any inductive-evidential process. It did not exist at the end of a logical syllogism. Adam knew God in a respect that was immediate and intrinsic to the very constitution of mind and soul in which he had been established. That knowledge was a derivative knowledge in that Adam, both as to his being and his knowledge, was the analogue of God. He was, that is to say, like God in every respect in which a created and finite person can be like a personal and infinite God. For that reason, Adam’s knowledge, while in his finitude it was not and could not be comprehensive, was true and truly consistent with what it was that God designed for him to know. It was of course the case that further communication of God would expand Adam’s knowledge and understanding. That communication was expansive when God walked with Adam in the garden in the cool of the day (Gen 3:8). Moreover, in man’s initial state there existed a natural harmony between the faculties of soul, the mind or the intellectual faculty by which he knew God and was conscious of the mandated requirements of God, the affective faculty by which he naturally loved and reached out for communion with God, and the will or volitional faculty by which he naturally desired to please God. It is of the essence of the sin that followed that the pristine harmony of the faculties was shattered, and the hegemony of the mind was displaced by the ascendency in fallen man of the passions and the emotions.

In the second place, the condition of holiness in which Adam was created was again intrinsic to his initial state. His holiness, that is, was not a donum superadditum, a gift-added-on, that was in some sense granted to him following his creation. God did not at first create Adam and then communicate to him the gift of holiness.⁶ Adam was, at the beginning, intrinsically and constitutionally holy. We shall see in what follows that the entrance of sin involved the loss of that initial state of holiness. Taking together the darkness