Labor of God

The Agony of the Cross as the Birth of the Church

Thomas Andrew Bennett

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781481307444
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

It is hard to imagine just how startling the Christian message must have sounded to those who first heard it.The story of a crucified messiah was absurd. The death of Jesus as a ransom, a punishment, or a sacrifice was an offense and an affront. Yet, by making the death of Jesus central to its preaching and worship, Christianity took a scandal, the cross, and called it a gospel. In Labor of God, author Tom Bennett revisits the church's speech about the cross. He recovers an equally shocking, but often overlooked, metaphor from Scripture and tradition: the cross as an act of divine labor, the travail through which God gives birth to the church. This ancient understanding of the cross enables a fresh theology of Christian atonement, one better able to answer questions of sin, suffering, and divine violence. As Bennett argues, this understanding of the cross can also reshape the classical systematic doctrines of creation, election, soteriology, and the church. Developed through close readings of biblical texts and interaction with voices from theology and the sciences, Labor of God shows how the Christian message of the cross can once again prick the ears and trouble the hearts of those who hear it. To a church immune to the radical character of its own message, Bennett resists the temptation to sanitize and relishes the offense—an offense that gives birth to a scandalous gospel for a secular age.

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Retrieving the Forgotten Root

The Scandal of the Cross as the Labor of God

How strange that the career of Jesus of Nazareth, defined as it is by his being tortured to death for blasphemy and sedition, is apparently an offense to no one, especially his followers. This really is extraordinary; Christians have become utterly inured to the cross—an instrument of humiliation and cruelty—as a religious symbol. Having stripped it of any intimation of scandal, having sanitized it, having rendered it inert and anodyne, the language Christians use of the cross as ransom, sacrifice, victory, and so forth has lost much of its essence. To put the problem simply, though we will presently complicate it at length, traditional Christian speech about the cross has become toothless through long repetition, such that it no longer truly points to the thing it is meant to explain. This should be plain: Christianity—a religion whose primary symbol is an offense bordering on grotesquerie—is by turns irrelevant and anesthetizing. The church’s proclamation of the cross has lost the essence of the proclamation of the cross. For the cross’ essence is in part comprised of its radicality, that God has effected ultimate change in lives and in the world in this way and not some other.

How very strange then that familiarity with Christian speech about the cross precludes Christians from thinking the cross radical at all. It is as if making sense of Jesus’ crucifixion—as sacrifice or debt payment or exchange or spiritual victory—itself robs the cross of something of its dark splendor, or masks, hides, or defers something of its sensationalism. For “making sense” is what the atonement metaphors are meant to do. They redescribe a senseless, unjust murder as salvation, hope, and peace. This treads close to paradox: many were crucified by the Roman Empire, but only one man’s crucifixion is taken to have changed the world. And only by redescribing that crucifixion as something that is not simply crucifixion can Christians give substantive content or meaning to that claim. And yet the redescriptions—the very vehicle by which Christian language confronts the world with God’s scandalous rescue-by-cross—were apparently predestined to lose the heart of what they were minted to communicate.

There is a way, however, to seize again the radicality of the message of the cross. A way to reinvigorate the theology of the cross—that is, atonement theology—without resorting to cheap bombast or sloganeering. There is, in fact, a way to deepen our knowledge of the cross’ radicality as never before. A new configuration of the cross that faithfully invites a deeper understanding of God’s nature and of what God was doing with the cross is possible. It is to more faithfully reckon God’s agency in the death of an innocent prophet. It is not only to be awed once again by the visceral nature of liberation-by-execution but to rereckon its violence, to reinvestigate its purpose, to see in it a new logic, even a new telos.

This new way forward is not, however, linguistic or conceptual innovation. Twenty-first-century first-world human ingenuity is doubtless of great value in many of the sciences but not in a theology of the cross. How could it be? What do modern, educated people know of the death of Nazarene peasants at imperial whim? Academic theologians are, if anything, more likely to be brandishing the sword of the empire than pricked on its point. There is therefore a problem of location. To recapture the essence of the cross, one must be close enough to it socially and spiritually to be able to embrace it and become its offense, to perpetuate its scandal. These are not domains within which contemporary scholarship typically wanders. To put it plainly, it is not enough simply to conjure up a new image for Jesus’ crucifixion and place it above the storied metaphors of the tradition. Such an act of hubris could not possibly be adequate to the task of revitalizing the essence of what is, above all else, a humble, humiliating death.

Nor is a fresh theology of the cross to be found by retracing steps in well-worn paths, supposing that surely this time some new nook or cranny will be exposed, some vital stone found that is worth overturning. What has already been said of the cross has already been said of the cross. The cross is a “sacrifice,” yes, but no further consideration of that image will make it any less staid, proper, stale, and dead. And this is not at all to say that the cross is not a sacrifice. It is, rather, to say that a theology of the cross predicated on the centrality of that description will fail to articulate properly its meaning. It may actually fail to expose rightly the nature and character of God, and this not because calling Jesus’ crucifixion a sacrifice is somehow inherently misleading; on the contrary, when first Christians deployed this language, they truly expressed truth and power. We know this because the world was changed by the message they carried. The radical nature of the claim remained intact; the cross’ description was suitably and simultaneously gracious and offensive, and so the world and its inhabitants were altered through the Word of the Lord. But this event cannot be repeated. Or, rather, it has been repeated with such numbing fidelity that the effect—the change—no longer follows the transmission.

The theology of the cross cannot exist without the Bible. Indeed, the atonement and the Bible are inseparable. A fresh iteration of the meaning of the cross is not so much extracted from the Scriptures, however, as found by thinking with them. This is worth fleshing out. Traditionally, theology has made sense of the cross by locating this or that image in the works of, say, Paul and supplying a kind of internal logic by which the image could be mapped onto a narrative or conceptual scheme. So if Paul calls the cross a “ransom,” then the scholar searches high and low in order to detect who was ransomed from whom, with what, and for how much. There is value in this work, but it is, as we have already suggested, tired, bloodless. New insights into the nature of the God of the cross emerge not by textual interrogation as traditionally practiced but instead by a kind of thinking that moves with the grains of texts. Theology can do better than merely appropriating or reappropriating Paul’s argot. But this is not the same thing as saying that it can do without Paul (or James or Ezekiel, etc.). Recapturing the glory and the shame of the cross, being once again jarred and converted by it, does not leave the Bible behind but rather interacts with it in creative and surprising ways.

The teologia crucis that remains true to the essence of the nature of the cross is discovered in the overlooked interstices of the language of the Christian tradition. Christian theology has, like a poplar’s roots, expanded in many directions over the millennia, growing by fits and starts in the ongoing attempt to reckon God, Scripture, the cross, and human life and culture. It is not unreasonable to assume that at least a few of these conceptual tendrils have been unfairly or prematurely abandoned and that a root that should have grown and deepened perhaps did not, leaving the tree unexpectedly fragile as a result.

Among these tendrils and roots, there is one image in particular that has cropped up from time to time, in the thoughts and writings of mystics and anchoresses, church fathers and mothers. It is an image of the cross that burst forth in visions and was then abruptly dropped, left by the wayside in systematic, doctrinal work. Perhaps the implications of this way of framing cross-thought were simply too radical—if such a thing is even possible—for theology to comprehend. Like classical Pauline images of the cross, it is strange and unruly, picturing the cross—surely the paradigmatic expression of despair—as surprisingly hopeful. Like the image of sacrifice it does not shrink from crucifixion’s physical horror, but unlike sacrifice it does not trade in the conceptual economy of victims and perpetrators. It eschews, in fact, notions of economy entirely, radically opposing the cross to the language of exchange, of this for that, him for us. And yet it does so without losing the concept of cost, of the truth that whatever Jesus’ crucifixion accomplished, it did so only at great physical, emotional, and psychological cost to the man Jesus and, possibly, the implicated Godhead. Like the image of victory, this overlooked metaphor, this biblical but not merely exegetical image, this ignored root from the Christian tradition, pictures the cross as embodied, costly exertion that succeeds. But the victory embedded in it is different from classical articulations of Christus Victor, for this fresh vision of the cross does not picture invisible forces or spiritual adversaries as the agents of our oppression. It instead remembers in the best Christian way that it is ultimately the corrupting influence of sin that must be defeated, and it makes sense of how the cross can actually do this.

This image, the one that really can revivify a teologia crucis for the twenty-first century, ultimately draws its power from a deep connection to genesis, that is, origination. It evokes a semantic field that encompasses growth, new life, a fresh start, and the rhythms of the known, observable universe wherein pain and sometimes death are the fertilizers out of which new life springs. And this is how it accounts for the change that Christians confess the cross brings to persons, communities, and even the world itself. It is able to conceptualize coherently an instrument of denigration and torture as the process or mechanism out of which newness comes, new life for people as well as their environs.

In this largely unnoticed strand of Christian theology, the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth is known as the birthing pangs—the labor—of God, who bears renewed, spiritual sons and daughters into the world. The blood and water that poured from Jesus are the blood and water that have accompanied every infant that has entered the world. The scarring harm, unavoidable and intrinsic to birth, marked too the body of the incarnate, laboring God. New life and new hope, long the prize and purpose of labor, spring forth in the Spirit from the mothering Jesus, incarnating into a dying world spiritual sons and daughters, possessors of God’s own inextinguishable life and heritable character. The cross is the labor of God. And in theological reflection drawn from this image, we argue that contemporary Christian atonement theology may once again recover the brazen, dissonant, radically gracious self-giving love of God.

Recovering a Discarded Image: The Cross as the Labor of God

The image of the cross of Christ as God’s labor to bring about spiritual birth emerges from Scripture, specifically the Gospel of John and elsewhere in Johannine literature, and is taken up—usually inchoately—at the edges of the Christian theological tradition. In modern scholarship it surfaces occasionally, often in feminist biblical and theological work. It is certainly not novel, in any case. And yet, because it has lingered outside the major streams of Christian reflection on the theology of the cross, it has retained the theological potential to communicate freshly the harsh beauty of God’s nature and saving character: “theological potential,” because biblical scholars and systematic and constructive theologians have largely neglected to take such imagery seriously as a reliable guide in ongoing theological reflection. So it is that in what follows I will show how the Gospel of John promulgates the image but never examines it, that John instead jumps forward to articulate the end result of labor, namely divine parentage for those born. In the poems and prayers and visions of the primarily medieval tradition, the language of motherhood and labor teases a theology of the cross but never explicates it; salvific renewal and world-generation are in view but, conceptually speaking, out of focus. Modern theology fares a bit better, especially in recent decades, but again, there is little in the way of sustained, rigorous reflection on the question of what it means that the crucifixion at Golgotha is the scene of spiritual birth. Nevertheless, these exegetical and theological insights form the conceptual material out of which a vital—that is, renewed and compelling—teologia crucis is formed.

The Labor of God in Scripture, the Tradition, and Modern Theology

In the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s, a spate of North American studies appeared that paid particular attention to the New Testament’s new or second birth language. Reading between the lines, we get the sense that scholars were finally weighing in on the then recent American phenomenon of “born again” experiences in evangelical lay theology. So Beverly Roberts Gaventa laments that in “contemporary usage, to be ‘born again’ refers most often to the experience of an individual.”1 Gaventa then goes on to demonstrate that in, for example, Johannine usage, being “born from above” involves embeddedness into a conversion community.2 William Orr and William Guy begin their study observing, “From the currency of the term ‘born again,’ and from the reported frequency of ‘born again’ experiences, one would expect to find copious [examples in the New Testament].”3 A subsequent word search subverts this expectation, and in what follows Orr and Guy spend considerable time arguing that the New Testament is more interested in a divine birth or “birth from above” than in being “born again.” One suspects that they are animated by popular usage of the term and have put some stock in the task of altering the diction of public discourse. This is worth noting for two reasons. First, one would be hard-pressed to suggest that “birth from above” is not also a second birth.4 Both phrases are metaphorical, and, as we will see, though “birth from above” language more properly captures the literary and narratival sense of the Fourth Gospel, if γεννηθῇ ἄνωθεν (“born again/anew/from above”; John 3:3, 7) is related theologically to ἀναγεγεννημένοι (“born anew”; 1 Peter 1:23) or παλιγγενεσίας (“renewal,” “rebirth”; Titus 3:5), then differences in articulation might fall by the wayside. Either way, if we have already been physically born, then surely a “birth from above” would indeed constitute being “born again.” The second reason for highlighting the apparent motives behind earlier studies is that doing so helps us avoid mere repetition of others’ hard-won conclusions and, on occasion, helps us steer clear of inferences drawn at least as much from a popular agenda as the sway of the actual evidence.

As has been hinted at already, much exegetical ink has been spilled over the translation of γεννηθῇ ἄνωθεν. The NIV reads the popular “born again,” the NRSV follows the majority of scholars with “born from above,”5 and the CEB, mirroring Gaventa’s suggestion, reads “born anew.” The problem arises out of an ambiguity in Greek that English speakers do not share. The word ἄνωθεν can indicate either something happening a second time (Galatians 4:9) or something coming “from above” (James 1:17).6 As most commentators have noted, understanding John’s telling of the episode depends on recognizing that Nicodemus is mistaken in how he interprets what Jesus is saying. In the first place, he has substituted the meaning “again” for the meaning “from above.” By itself, this mistake only demands clarification to be rectified since being born from above is in fact a species of second birth. Nicodemus’ second mistake, however, is more revealing. He does not intuit that Jesus is speaking metaphorically. It is therefore critical that Jesus’ response to Nicodemus’ quip about entering the womb a second time doubles down on the use of metaphor. Jesus responds to Nicodemus’ misunderstanding by saying, “No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit” (John 3:5). Instead of producing a substitute for the birth metaphor, Jesus reinforces it while also reinscribing its literality. Rather than reducing “born” to something like “sharing in,” “receiving,” or “possessing,” the clarification, as it were, glosses “from above” with “water and Spirit”—heightening rather than diminishing the seriousness of Nicodemus’ reply. Notice that this is not always Jesus’ practice when speaking of the Spirit. When Jesus encourages believers to “drink” him, the metaphor is subsequently replaced with something ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Retrieving the Forgotten Root
• Chapter 2. Speaking the Labor of God
• Chapter 3. Converting the Cross
• Chapter 4. Birthing the Church
• Chapter 5. Transcending Exchange
• Chapter 6. Expanding the Agony of the Cross
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index