The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

Christian identity can be understood only as an act of identification with the crucified Christ, to the extent to which one has accepted the proclamation that in him God has identified himself with the godless and those abandoned by God, to whom one belongs oneself.

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.

Wherever Christian hope makes people active and leads them into the ‘creative discipleship’ of Christ, the contradictions and confutations of the world are painfully experienced.

To be radical, of course, means to seize a matter at its roots. More radical Christian faith can only mean committing oneself without reserve to the ‘crucified God’. This is dangerous. It does not promise the confirmation of one’s own conceptions, hopes and good intentions. It promises first of all the pain of repentance and fundamental change. It

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.

Otherwise a church which, seeking for an identity and not preserving its distinctiveness, plunges into a social and political movement, once again becomes the ‘religion of society’.

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

To return today to the theology of the cross means avoiding one-sided presentations of it in tradition, and comprehending the crucified Christ in the light and context of his resurrection, and therefore of freedom and hope.

But nowhere in the New Testament does the ‘end of the world’ bring about the second coming of Christ. The New Testament looks forward to the very reverse, that the second coming of Christ will bring the end of destruction and persecution in the world. Anyone who reads the ‘signs of the time’ with the eyes of his own existential anxiety reads them f