What is manifested in the cross is God’s suffering of a passionate love for his lost creatures, a suffering prepared for sacrifice.

And for me that meant, whatever can stand before the face of the crucified Christ is true Christian theology. What cannot stand there must disappear. This is especially true of what we say about God. Christ died on the cross with a loud cry, which Mark interprets with the words of the twenty-second psalm: ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ This c

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

The process of knowing takes place under the guidance of analogy, and in these circumstances is always recognition. If likeness is taken in the strict sense, knowing is a matter of anamnesis within a closed circle. If it is extended to similarities in what differs, the process of knowing can become an open circle of learning, in which new apprehens

Only someone who finds the courage to be different from others can ultimately exist for ‘others’, for otherwise he exists only with those who are like him.

When the Christian church represents the religion of a society, it also represents in a symbolic and ritual way the functions tending to integration and homogeneity in this society. But if the Christian life of an individual or of a church is identified with the crucified Christ, it becomes alienated from this principle of likeness and similarity i

the cross does not make the world equal by bringing down the night in which everything looks alike, but by enabling people to criticize and stand back from the partial historical realities and movements which they have idolized and made absolute.

But this means that basically the crucified Christ represents the end of the cult. He has died ‘once for all’, as Paul emphasizes. His death is not a sacrifice which can be repeated or transferred. He has finally risen from the death which he died once for all, as Paul emphasizes again, and ‘will never die again’ (Rom. 6.9), in either a bloody or a

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.