The Word of the Cross and Christian Theology: Paul’s Theological Temperament for Today

Establishing the Problem—the Apocalyptic Imagination and the Time of Christian Theology

In two distinct but interrelated senses, Paul’s word of the cross confronts us with the problem of the time in Christian theology.

First, Pauline apocalyptic challenges us to think about Christian theology in an epochal framework. In his essay on “Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages,” J. Louis Martyn addresses the epochal structure of Paul’s understanding of time by using language that has become ingredient to the vernacular of contemporary apocalyptic theology. According to Martyn, for Paul “there are two ways of knowing, and … what separates the two is the turn of the ages, the apocalyptic event of Christ’s death/resurrection. There is a way of knowing which is characteristic of the old age … there must be a new way of knowing that is proper either to the new age or to that point at which the ages meet.” ⁴ For Martyn’s Paul, that is, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus signify the invasion of the new age into the fabric of the old. In the interruptive and creative power of the word of the cross, the new age dawns over the world, casting its light upon and revealing the oldness of the old age. ⁵ As Martyn demonstrates, for Paul the two ages converging in the cross correspond to “two ways of knowing” and, as he goes on to explain, “two kinds of knowers.” ⁶ The knowledge proper to the old age is knowledge kata sarka; knowledge according to the flesh. Martyn shows that, although the basic idea encapsulated in knowledge kata sarka is knowledge on the basis of sense perception, what Paul actually has in mind is a bit more complicated than empirical judgment. Rather, the one who knows and thinks kata sarka is, for Paul, “the psychikos anthrōpos (‘the unspiritual person’).” ⁷ Unanimated by the Spirit, the unspiritual person is incapable of knowing that the new age has arrived in the crucified Christ. Hence, “it is clear that the implied opposite of knowing by the norm of the flesh is not knowing by the norm of the Spirit, but rather knowing kata stauron (‘by the cross’).” ⁸ In Martyn’s reading, Paul understood the cross as “the absolute epistemological watershed,” a dividing line between knowledge kata sarka and knowledge kata stauron. In the present epoch stretching from the crucifixion to the Parousia, the foolishness of the cross is set alongside the wisdom of the world—that is, knowledge is either according to the flesh or according the “the Spirit of the crucified Christ.” ⁹

Martyn is interested here in elaborating Paul’s two ways of knowing, and not in extending the discussion to theology today. But the “epistemological crisis” Martyn sees at the heart of Paul’s argument in 2 Corinthians does bear important implications for our understanding of the epochal time of Christian theology. For Christian theology takes place between the crucifixion and the Parousia. Insofar as theology endeavors to take the confession of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus seriously and to discharge its intellectual habits and activities under the tutelage of the Spirit of the crucified Christ, theology claims to be knowledge kata stauron and situated eschatologically in the new age. But during this epoch theology must ever resist the temptation to discharge its thinking kata sarka, and does so only when theology is undertaken beneath the shadow of the cross.

There is a second sense in which the apostle’s apocalyptic thought challenges the way we conceive the time of Christian theology. Thinking of any sort just does take time. Human knowledge of any subject of study proceeds discursively and accumulatively, expanding and unfolding as the student advances through curricula. The mastery of a subject or discipline requires concerted effort, the accumulation of analytical skills, the facilitation of intellectual virtues and habits of thought, command over often vast amounts of literature and traditions of discourse, and, not least, the cultivation of knowledge through participation in some pedagogical structure or another. We should not bristle at the suggestion that theological knowledge proceeds accordingly. In this sense, Paul Griffiths is precisely correct when he asserts that “the qualifications necessary to be a theologian are only the necessary know-how (a matter of intellectual skill) coupled with sufficient knowledge-that (a matter of fluency produced by wide and deep reading in the tradition’s archive).” ¹⁰ The acquisition of intellectual skill and the development of fluency are indispensable components of theological knowledge, and the accoutrements of theology we listed above—the theology classroom, the status of theology as a university discipline, academic publishing in the different theological disciplines, and so on—are external expressions of theology’s rational, discursive, and curricular character. The time of theology unwinds according to the pace of this agenda; abstractly and writ-large—the history of theology is the development over time of practices and conventions which support Christian thinking as ordered and reasonable; concretely—the intellectual development of the theologian, a form of the “knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” in which all Christians are called to grow (2 Pet 3:18), is spurred on through listening, discussing, reading, studying, and writing.

The Apostle, however, conceives his encounter with Christ and his proclamation of the crucified and risen Lord as events that cut against the grain of ordinary conventions of thought. In our epigraph from 1 Corinthians, we find him conceding that his message is “foolishness to those who are perishing” (1 Cor 1:18). Alongside the well-thought-out and tried-and-tested philosophies of antiquity, Paul’s theology of God’s intervention in the world in the death and resurrection of Jesus could only appear as the height of ignorance. For Paul, that is, knowledge kata stauron does not assimilate into any then-prevailing systems of thought and belief. Furthermore, when we appraise Paul’s own theological biography, we discover that his advancement within Judaism (Gal 1:14) was dramatically interrupted by the Damascene encounter, and that his subsequent theology was, demonstrably, oriented in its entirety toward comprehending this event and the crucified Lord who had appeared to him. ¹¹ All of this points us to the crux of the tension between Paul’s word of the cross and our own theological labors. The gravitation pull of the cross imposes itself upon Paul’s theological thinking at all points, as it were repeatedly confronting and provoking his understanding of God and the condition of the world. How do we reconcile Paul’s theological temperament with the idea of theology as, unavoidably, a process of thought which proceeds discursively and accumulatively?

Paul’s Theology as a Radical theologia crucis in the Midst of a theologia in via

A closer inspection of Paul’s theological biography intensifies the impression of a sheer difference between Paul and us while also offering clues as to how his word of the cross impacts our own theological journeys. This is not the occasion to exhaustively rehash the ongoing debate among New Testament scholars over the origins and development of Paul’s theology. However, some observations and comments on Paul the theologian are helpful as we seek to test the continuity and discontinuity between Paul’s word of the cross and our own thinking about God. Indeed, as I will suggest here, there is a tension embedded within Paul’s theological journey that is highly important for discerning the character of theological existence today.

Significantly, it was Saul the Pharisee, a violent persecutor of the earliest followers of Jesus who, by his own account, had “advanced in Judaism beyond many among [his] people of the same age, for [he] was far more zealous for the traditions of [his] ancestors” (Gal 1:14), who encountered the risen Lord on the way to Damascus and subsequently became the apostle to the Gentiles and incipient Christianity’s first major theologian. Saul was already a theologian when his journey was suddenly interrupted by the light of heaven and the voice of Jesus (see Acts 9:3–5). As a Pharisee, Saul undoubtedly would have possessed a thorough working knowledge of Torah and also the ancestral laws that comprised the tradition the Pharisees sought to guard and hand down. Additionally, Saul’s thought would have been profoundly shaped by a Pharisaical eschatology that traded upon the prioritization of Jewish distinctiveness through covenantal responsibility and Torah obedience. ¹²

Paul did not transition from having no theology at all to thinking theologically in earnest; far from it, actually, as it was Saul the Jewish theologian who became Paul the Christian theologian upon the occasion of his encounter with Christ. Determining the precise nature of this transition requires careful nuance. On one hand, the discontinuity between Saul and Paul (for such is how Acts encapsulates the theological transition occurring on the road to Damascus) cannot be stated radically enough. The encounter with the risen Lord brought about a decisive break with Paul’s Jewish past and initiated an entirely new theological trajectory in his thinking. According to the account in Acts and his occasional biographical reflections in the letters, Paul’s earliest Christian preaching utterly diverged from the theology that buttressed his career as the church’s vicious arch-nemesis. In the Damascene event, Saul experienced the sudden and astonishing intrusion of the “revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal 1:12), and he discerned this event—immediately, if we follow the Acts account—as the origin of a new apostolic vocation and the basis of his mission to the Gentiles. The Lukan image of scales falling from Saul’s eyes just as the Holy Spirit arrives and fills him (Acts 9:17–18) vividly encapsulates this sense of disruptive newness. We recall here, too, Martyn’s exposition of the theme of knowledge in Paul. In Martyn’s reading, Paul evidently considered his former theological existence in Judaism to be part of the knowledge kata sarka that marks the old age that is passing away in light of Christ. On the other hand, Paul’s new way of thinking kata stauron differs fundamentally in character and orientation from his thought before the turn of the ages, which was interrupted during his trek to Damascus.

In recent New Testament scholarship, the view summarized in the preceding paragraph is countered most notably by proponents of the “New Perspective on Paul.” Krister Stendahl, for instance, claims that the Acts narrative in fact demonstrates a “continuity between ‘before’ and ‘after,’” ¹³ that is, between the Jewish Saul and the Christian Paul. For Stendahl, Paul was “called” rather than “converted,” aroused by the encounter with Christ to commence a new mission in service to the God of Israel. Because this change of course was vocational and developmental rather than drastically transfigurational, Paul is seen to have drawn heavily from his previous Jewish thought in formulating his Christian message, including the word of the cross he preached in Corinth and elsewhere. We do not need to agree completely with Stendahl’s reading of Paul’s transition to appreciate the strong lines of continuity between the “before” and “after,” for Paul did not, as it were, start from scratch when thinking theologically about the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and its significance. Rather, Paul conceives the Jesus events as having meaning only in light of the Jewish Scriptures, in which Saul the Pharisee was so well-versed; and indeed, for Paul the Jewish Scriptures can now be read only in light of Christ. Paul’s new message is imagined within the framework of the Jewish Scriptures, and vice versa—not at all otherwise. Douglas Harink is surely right to observe that “in his (very brief) autobiographical reflections in Galatians, Paul does not depict his own moral and spiritual condition before his call/conversion as anticipating, whether positively or negatively, the world-shattering character of his encounter with the risen Jesus.” ¹⁴ But neither does Paul—whether in Galatians or elsewhere—appear to utterly relinquish his pre-call/conversion Jewish theology and its intellectual furniture. Rather, the tension between before and after is intensified by the fact that Paul reinterprets his Jewish past, his Pharisaical theology, and the Hebrew Scriptures in light of the interruptive appearance of the crucified One.

While there is certainly much more that can be said about Paul’s biography, these comments will yet suffice for our purposes here. The point may sound pedestrian but is, in fact, entirely appropriate and significant: Paul’s theological existence and journey are marked by both continuity and discontinuity. Paul’s is a theologia in via which dramatically changes course during his pilgrimage to Damascus. Demonstrably, after his Damascene encounter, Paul continues to look back to that event as the origin of his theology and of all theological meaning. In this sense, Paul is, as Keck puts it, an “ex post facto thinker,” where “ex post facto thinking occurs not only after an event but because of it, and with continual reference, explicit or implicit, to it. The event’s very ‘happenedness’ requires thinking.” ¹⁵ At the same time—and likewise demonstrably, Paul never completely jettisoned from his mind his pre-encounter Jewish theology, but radically reimagined it in light of the Damascene event and for the sake of the word of the cross he was bound to proclaim.

Crux probat omnia—the Cross as the Crisis and Judge of Christian Theology

Paul was profoundly afflicted by the cross of Jesus Christ. “I have been crucified with Christ,” he writes to the Galatian churches, “and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:19–20). His confession of the resurrected and living crucified One and his conviction that, by virtue of the mystery of God, he participated in Christ’s crucifixion animate his missionary preaching and all of the theologizing which informed his proclamation. If we wish to, parroting Keck’s idiom, think with Paul today so that we can learn to think like him, ¹⁶ the weightiness of the cross in his theology presents to us a significant challenge.

Paul did his theology on the fly, and hardly counts as a systematic theologian. We therefore must be wary of suggesting that Paul, as it were, began his thinking with the cross, deploying a theology of the crucified One as something like a first principle for determining other theological categories and concepts. Nor should we conceive Paul’s word of the cross as an abstract theologia crucis that might be applied categorically to various problems of theological epistemology. I propose, rather, that the cruciform temperament of Paul’s thinking is precisely what must lay claim upon us today. What would it mean for us to recover this temperament for our own theological work?

Luther comes to our aid here. Toward the end of his life and in the preface to Volume One of the Wittenberg Edition, Luther identifies three criteria for the study of theology: oratio (prayer), meditatio (meditation), and tentatio (suffering). ¹⁷ As Oswald Bayer observes, with this trifecta Luther points us to the fundamental passivity that governs theological existence, and precisely as such sheds light upon Luther’s earlier dictum, crux sola nostra theologia—“the cross alone is our theology.” ¹⁸ For Luther, Christian theology unfolds from the “receptive life” (vita passiva). We suffer alongside the suffering servant, and are crushed with Christ beneath the heel of the hidden God who works against us with strange power and unfathomable providence. In just this way we participate in and bear the cross, and our theological existence is fashioned into the image of the cross—theology, that is, becomes cruciform. Prayer and meditation are receptive theological actions flowing out of theology’s originary cruciformity; discursive theological habits and practices such as reading, writing, discussing, teaching, learning, and contemplating emerge from and are animated by our participation in the cross.

We do not need to look hard to find reverberations of this understanding of theology in Paul’s letters. We may limit our exposition to the Corinthian correspondence, which begins with the epigraph at the top of this article. Here Paul reminds the Christians at Corinth that, in their original encounter with the apostle, he had “decided to know nothing among [them] except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). Writing to the Corinthian church a few years later, Paul reiterates his first message to them—the “word of the cross”—boasting in the proclamation of the crucified Jesus as “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1:23–24). The word of the cross abides throughout these “weighty and strong” Corinthian letters (see 2 Cor 10:10) as the wellspring of the apostle’s argument and paraenesis. The correspondence is marked by sophisticated, carefully crafted, and intricately structured theology. At all points, it is Paul’s experience of and participation in the sufferings of the crucified One that enlivens and emboldens him to theologize on behalf of the Corinthians. Even Paul’s apostolic commission and authority, apparently under heavy fire in the period after the first epistle was received by the congregation, is, according to Paul, rooted in his partaking of the abundant sufferings of Christ (2 Cor 1:3–7; cf. 11:23–33).

With Bayer, I view Luther as a quintessential torchbearer for theological existence in a Pauline, cruciform key. Luther certainly theologized about the crucified Christ, and his devotion to a theologia crucis is usually invoked to encapsulate such theologizing. Bayer’s insight, however, is that Luther’s staurocentrism extends beyond his theology of the cross; it marks the mood of his theology and shapes his disposition as a theologian. For Luther, the word of the cross is a message that continues to impose itself upon the one endeavoring to think and speak theologically. Crux probat omnia—the cross puts everything to the test, including (especially!) our thought about God.

Theologia viatorum—the Pilgrimage of Theological Knowledge

The word of the cross is the crisis of Christian theology and the crux of theological existence, insofar as the theologian ought never to break loose from the sense of wonderment that arises when testimony about the crucified One interrupts our existence and ensnares our attention. By contrast, Christian theology becomes domesticated, bourgeois, sterile, deadly boring, and, indeed, dangerous when we cease to be captivated by the cross. What, though, does the idea of the judgment of the cross upon our theology have to with theological existence as a journey of the intellect? Thinking about God takes time and unfolds along a pathway. We are pilgrims on the road toward the everlasting city which is to come (Heb 13:14), and along the way we are commended to leave behind “the basic teaching about Christ” for the sake of theological maturity (Heb 6:1). In what sense to do we take the interruptive word of the cross with us on the road?

We may follow one route to arrive at an answer. In his analysis of Luther’s definition of theology as oratio, meditatio, and tentatio, Bayer comments that “this formula represents a clear alternative to the program of ‘faith seeking understanding’ (fides quarens intellectum) that has dominated theology from Augustine through Anselm to Hegel … and Karl Barth.” ¹⁹ Bayer here is concerned to secure the significance of suffering and temptation for theology, as, in his reading, tentatio tends to go missing in models of theology that follow the fides quarens intellectum trajectory. ²⁰ He seems especially worried that “new experiences”—by which, presumably, he means our experiences of suffering alongside the crucified Christ—disappear if theology is construed as a journey of the intellect. ²¹ But I am not convinced by Bayer’s argument that a theology transfixed on the cross is necessarily inharmonious with theology as faith seeking understanding. In a reflective essay on his own theology, Eberhard Jüngel proposes that “theology is never delivered from astonishment” at “the mystery of God who reveals himself in the precise hiddenness of human life and death.” “In faith in the triune God,” he writes, “the depths of the word of the cross are opened up. I believe, therefore I am astonished at the trinitarian mystery as the sum of the gospel: God from eternity and thus in and of himself is God for us.” ²² In the same essay he describes theology as fides quarens intellectum; insofar as “faith gives itself to be thought … faith is passionately concerned to understand itself and thereby understand God.” ²³ What sets theology’s thinking in motion and continues to impress upon the theologian a sense of astonishment is the very God disclosed in the crucified One. For Jüngel, theology is a pathway which opens up before the humble feet of the theologian as the glory of the Lord revealed in the crucified Christ proceeds along its way, shining its light backwards upon all those in tow. “The being of God goes before all theological questioning in such a way that in its movement it paves the way for questioning, leading the questioning for the first time onto the path of thinking.” ²⁴ At the same time, Jüngel insists that theological existence is originally and persistently cruciform in and as the theologian is elementarily interrupted by the triune mystery spoken in the world in the word of the cross. As I read him, Jüngel’s approach holds in remarkable tension these insights into the character of Christian theology: to be a theologian is to follow the crucified Christ on a journey of the mind that is ever pressing forward toward maturity of thought (theologia viatorum); to be a theologian is to find oneself profoundly interrupted and afflicted, again and again, by the astonishing word of the cross, and thus to be ever reminded of theology’s original message and cruciformity (theologia crucis).

In a slightly different vein, Barth too highlights this tension in his remarks in Evangelical Theology on the object of theology as “God in the history of his deeds.” “In its perception, meditation, and discussion,” he writes, “theology must have the character of a living procession.” ²⁵ For Barth, the God of the gospel is dynamically in motion, the divine procession “comparable to a bird in flight, in contrast to a caged bird,” ²⁶ and theology, which follows in tow behind God “in those unfolding historical events in which he is God,” ²⁷ must remain vigilant, always focusing its thought on the God who acts and the actions of God. And so Barth: “It is just from this point of view that evangelical theology is an eminently critical science, for it is continually exposed to judgment and never relieved of the crisis in which it is placed by its object, or, rather to say, by its living subject.” ²⁸ According to Barth, then, theology is both, on one hand, critical and scientific, and, on the other, always alert to the movement of the God of the gospel and just in this way capable of being surprised and interrupted. Ultimately for Barth, God alone is theology’s Lord. Barth can acknowledge genuine progress in theology “as an ascent from one ratio to an even higher ratio,” as he puts it in his little book on Anselm’s proof. ²⁹ But “this progress which takes place from time to time at particular moments of history is not at the mercy of the theologian’s whim but is conditioned by the wisdom of God who well knows what is good for us to perceive at any given time.” ³⁰

For Jüngel and for Barth, then, theology’s itinerary follows the pattern of fides quarens intellectum. Theology advances from thought to thought, and, precisely in this way, to put it in technical terms, is essentially discursive, curricular, and accumulative in character. Theology progresses by way of courses of thought, its knowledge accruing as building blocks of material are studied and assimilated. In just this sense, theology is acquired knowledge: over time and with effort, theological knowledge grows; otherwise, without attention and exertion, theological growth is stunted or prematurely terminated. This does not necessarily entail that Christian theology is a human work. Rather, as Jüngel and Barth have reminded us, theology moves along its way in pursuit of the God who calls us to seek understanding. The theologian is aroused by this call to follow after God through the passive theological activities of listening, reflecting, studying, teaching, and writing. And this means, too, that theology is neither native to the theologian nor spontaneous, but blossoms or develops over time as we are taught the things of God by the Holy Spirit. Theology is participation in divine pedagogy; the theologian is drafted into the classroom of Christian discipleship, acquiring theological knowledge over time and along the journey as the Spirit leads us to greater understanding.

While we are on the road, we are ever confronted and interrupted by the New Testament witness to the crucified Lord. In our theological work, we do indeed pursue growth in knowledge and understanding. But at the heart of the faith that seeks understanding is the mystery of the cross in the event of which God demonstrates God’s unity with death and nothingness for the sake of conquering it on behalf of overflowing life and revolutionary love. We cease to be astonished by this mystery at our theology’s peril. Moreover, when we are open to and transfixed upon the mystery of the cross, we become vulnerable in our thinking, and our theological work becomes stamped by the Spirit’s fruit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal 5:22–23). Against such a vision of theology there can be no law!

A Brief Conclusion

Paul’s word of the cross has much to say to us today as we endeavor to do Christian theology. The apostle reminds us that we do our thinking about God in the epoch of the new age and in light of the mystery of the crucifixion. As I have argued, to wrestle with Paul’s thought in order to think with and even like him is hardly to abandon the idea of theology as a learned discipline, and does not necessitate that we do away with the scholarly and pedagogical conventions and institutions which characterize academic theological work today. But if we are to think like him, the word of the cross must become the basis, crisis, and judge of our theology. If and when this occurs, our thinking about God will be marked by a new temperament and animated by the virtues of the Spirit of the crucified Christ.