all, Protestants. Our cross is empty. Our Jesus won. We do not need to look at him dying on the cross.
In fact, we are not sure we need to look on the cross at all. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” Here we are not told to look but to believe. We believe, moreover, if we believe hard enough that we will not have to worry about the snakes. We assume God has done for us what God did not do for Israel. He got rid of the snakes.
That our cross is empty, therefore, tempts us to believe that we are a people no longer in danger. After all, when it is all said and done, as John 3:16 makes clear, it is all about love. God so loved the world that we might love one another. Accordingly we find it rather hard to understand the dramatic tension in the Gospel of John between those who choose to remain in the dark and those who love the light. Indeed we are told that those who love the darkness will hate those who are the light. Why should anyone hate a people who just want to be lovers?
It is all about love—and death. The light has come into the world, but the light that illumines from the cross does not rid the world of snakes. Eternal life does not mean that we escape death, but that even in death we will not be abandoned by Jesus. Like the people of Israel who had been bitten by the poisonous snakes, we must learn to trust God by looking on the cross of Christ. We are to look on the cross of Christ and see there the goodness of our God. He has taken into his life our love of the darkness so that we might live in the light of his cross.
To believe that God so loved the world he gave his only Son requires, therefore, that we look on the cross. To look and to believe are inseparable. We must see, moreover, that the cross is not empty. Jesus died on the cross. When we try to avoid that reality, when we believe without looking at our crucified God, I fear the ever-present temptation to Gnosticism is irresistible. Gnosticism, as Gillian Rose reminds us, is the normal spiritual condition, a condition almost unavoidable in modernity, for those who assume that salvation is to know without looking.
We must look, therefore, on the cross through which our salvation comes. But to look, to see, to really see, is never easy. We are tempted, particularly when we think we are no longer threatened by poisonous snakes, to stare at rather than to see Jesus on the cross. The empty cross has its own peculiar problems, but neither can a crucifix ensure we will avoid looking on the cross as a spectator; that is, even in looking at his crucified body we face the temptation to think the cross is God’s attempt to resolve a problem peculiar to being God.
The temptation to become a spectator at the crucifixion is a particular problem around a divinity school. Here you learn that you need an atonement theory. Unable to decide which theory does justice to the scriptural witness or your experience, you will probably pick and choose depending on circumstance. Such theories may have their uses, but I fear too often they tempt us to stare rather than to look at the cross. Thus the presumption by some that our salvation demands we believe that the cross is the Father’s infliction of violence upon the Son, who receives it on our behalf.
Such a view, I fear, leads many who say they believe “God so loved the world” to use that claim as a weapon against those they assume do not believe that God has so loved the world. They want the cross to be the sign through which their enemies are defeated rather than that which makes possible our love of the enemy. They refuse to acknowledge, as Augustine suggests, that on the cross Christ forgave those who reviled him “because he accepted the cross not as a test of power but as an example of patience. There he healed our wounds by bearing his own. There he healed us of an eternal death because he deigned to die a temporal death.”
In his Letter to the Ephesians, Paul names the conditions necessary for us to see, to really see, the crucifixion. If we are to look on the cross and live we must recognize that we “were dead through the trespasses and sins in which [we] once lived.” To look on the cross of Christ means we are able to see that we have been ruled by the power of sin making us “by nature children of wrath.” Like the people of Israel we have been bitten by the snake, and it is not at all clear we will survive. When life itself is at stake we cannot be disinterested observers.
But notice Paul does not leave the matter there. To look on the cross is not an invitation to wallow in our sinfulness. Rather to look on the cross means the end of our fascination with sin. By grace we have been saved, made alive with Christ. And this means we have been raised up with him—even to being seated in heavenly places with Christ Jesus. Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness so the Son of Man has been lifted up that we might also be for the world a light, a witness, of God’s love for the world. To be raised with Christ means the end of any attempt to passively stare at the crucifixion. You cannot stare at that in which you participate.
An extraordinary claim to be sure but one I think to be true. For it turns out that in the process of learning to see, to really see, the life we are given through Jesus’ death we become a people bronzed and lifted up by God so that the world may see there is an alternative to being captives of death. We are invited, therefore, not only to look on the cross and live, but to eat this bread and drink this wine which becomes for us Christ’s body and blood. In this meal we are consumed by what we consume, and, therefore, we participate in the mystery of God’s salvation of the world. How odd of God to save the world this way, that is, by making us his church. But then it is best not to second-guess God.
2
Seeing Darkness, Hearing Silence:
Augustine’s Account of Evil1
The question of why evil exists is not a theological question, for it assumes that it is possible to go behind the existence forced upon us as sinners. If we could answer it then we would not be sinners. We could make something else responsible. Therefore the “question of why” can always only be answered with the “that,” which burdens man completely.
The theological question does not arise about the origin of evil but about the real overcoming of evil on the Cross; it asks for the forgiveness of guilt, for the reconciliation of the fallen world.2
—DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
The Attraction of Evil
“After one of my many presentations following my return from Rwanda, a Canadian Forces padre asked me how, after all I had seen and experienced, I could still believe in God. I answered that I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know that the devil exists, and therefore I know there is a God. Peux ce que veux. Allons-y.”3 Lt. General Romeo Dallaire, a French-Canadian Catholic who was the force commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda, discovered the significance of his faith in Rwanda. Prior to Rwanda he was a conventional Catholic, but in Rwanda he found that without his Catholicism he could not comprehend the evil he saw there.
General Dallaire’s story of his attempt to contain the genocide in Rwanda is a sad and tragic tale. That he thinks he “shook hands with the devil” in Rwanda is understandable, but theologically a mistake. Christians do not believe in God because we think God is necessary if we are to comprehend the reality of evil. Rather the Christian belief in God requires that we do not believe in the reality of evil or the devil.4 Robert Jenson observes that Karl Barth, the theologian in modernity who is usually credited with restoring Christian “orthodoxy,” puzzled ordinary minds by saying the devil was a myth. Jenson notes that “Barth’s point was that not believing in the devil is the appropriate relation to the devil’s mode of existence. That the devil is a myth does not mean, in Barth’s thinking, that the devil does not exist; it means that he exists in a particular way, as the ordained object of denial.”5
That many, Christian and non-Christian alike, find the traditional Christian denial of the existence of evil unintelligible is but an indication of the pathos of Christianity in modernity. Many, like General Dallaire, think if Christianity is intelligible it is so because it helps us name what has gone wrong with our world. Christian and non-Christian now believe that even if we do not share a common belief in God we can at least agree about actions that are evil.6 Accordingly modern accounts of morality are