The Crucifixion

Welcome to the second season of Queen of the Sciences! We begin our conversations in 2020 with a deep dive into the foolishness and stumbling block that is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Overfamiliar today as a religious symbol, the cross was once the supreme declaration that the person thereon was trash, subhuman, and beyond redemption—certainly not capable of redeeming others. We try to imagine ourselves back into the shame of crucifixion, examine its uses in Roman political control, and explore how the death of God upon it can possibly become the source of eternal life.

 

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Notes:

1. Ernst Käsemann, “The Saving Significance of the Death of Jesus,” in Perspectives on Paul

2. Martin Hengel, Crucifixion

3. Philip Freeman, Julius Caesar (both the quote from Cicero and the description of Caesar’s use of crucifixions)

4. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion

5. Maasai Creed (“the hyenas did not touch him”)

6. Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906–1945

7. Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

8. Plato, The Phaedo

9. “Alexamenos worships his god”

10. Deuteronomy 21:22–23, “And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance.”

11. Galatians 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.’”

12. “Propitiation” = reconciliation to God by satisfying his wrath. “Expiation” = reconciliation to God by removal of the cause of offense, namely sin.

13. Gerhard O. Forde, “The Work of Christ: Atonement as Actual Event,” in Christian Dogmatics vol. 2

14. Philip Melanchthon, Apology to the Augsburg Confession, Art. 4 on “why Christ is necessary”

15. Calvin, Institutes vol. 1, Book One, Chapter I: “The Knowledge of God and That of Ourselves Are Connected. How They Are Interrelated”

16. Luther, Galatians commentary, Luther’s Works vol. 26, pp. 276–291, on Christ’s taking the world’s sin into himself

17. Romans 3:25b, “This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.”

18. John Newton, “Amazing Grace”

19. Nietzsche, “God on a cross is the transvaluation of all values,” in The Antichrist

20. George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine

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