“For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.”
1 Corinthians 2:2
Whenever we use the words crux or crucial as in, “This next point is the crux [or crucial],” we’re implicitly invoking the Cross. The meaning is: just as the Cross is central to the Christian Faith, so a particular point is central to the broader issue being discussed.1
To Paul, the Cross was indeed crucial — crucial to everything else. It was at the heart of the apostolic kerygma, that is, the apostles’ first proclamation of our Lord‘s death, resurrection, ascension, reign and return. These redemptive events — three past, one present, and the final one future — constitute the crux of the preaching of the early church and, therefore, of the Christian Faith.
Paul uses the term Cross as shorthand for this redemptive complex. When he said to the Corinthians that he preached nothing but the Cross, he did not mean he preached only the crucifixion and not (for example) the resurrection. Clearly, he preached both — and more. But his and the other apostles’ proclamation centered on the indissoluble unity of Christ’s atoning death and glorious resurrection by which alone sinners and the world are redeemed.
Gospel Preachers Are Cross Preachers
While all Christians are called to preach (or declare) the kerygma, the gospel, those particularly committed to the office of proclamation are known as preachers. This is why historically they’ve been referred to as “gospel preachers.” There’s no Christian Faith without the gospel, and there is no gospel without preachers: “How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher?” (Rom. 10:14). For 2000 years the church of Jesus Christ has been blessed with these gospel preachers. And like Paul, the Cross was crucial to their ministry.
Ministerial Younglings Who Know Not the Cross
But there arose a generation that knew not the Cross. Because the current apostasy of the West is exhibited most graphically in sexual autonomy and perversion, in the reversal of the man-woman creational order, and in a war against family and even moral hierarchies, a cadre of younger ministers has emerged to take the fight to the cultural apostates. For these perpetually online undereducated firebrands, the Cross is peripheral, perhaps not even necessary. What is necessary is a social media bullhorn villainizing in the loudest and most obnoxious ways feminism and effeminacy; higher education, especially for women; sexual egalitarianism in church and culture; corpulent boomers; “the Jews,” responsible for the worst world depravity; and anybody who disagrees with them, whom they routinely label “gaye.”
They valorize young white bearded obnoxious iron-pumping males and eschew logical argumentation in favor of meme masquerades ridiculing Christians (and particularly their elders) who disagree with them. In this trait (and others) they seem to have ripped off a few pages from the Bronze Age Pervert, who has obviously influenced them without their knowledge.
The fact that some of their sociocultural targets should in fact be targeted seems to give them a free pass among too many conservatives when they target entirely biblical beliefs and behavior. This strategy of studied muteness now goes under the acronym NETTR: No Enemies To the Right, which in application means NODTTR: No Opposing Depravity to the Right. This is not merely an egregious error. It is a potential catastrophe for sociopolitical conservatism — at least to Christians who grasp the cruciality of the Cross and therefore refuse to follow the strategy of ignoring depravity as long as the depraved are fellow tribalists.
Crossless Non-Christianity
Not a single one of the preacher-influencers majors on the Cross. At least I’ve never heard it from a single one, and I’ve seen many of their posts and tweets and memes over the last 3-5 years. The message is the development and triumph of biceps-bursting white males and the degradation of dark-skinned humans and overweight Boomers and “the Jews.” Some of them are fully committed to the Reformed Hitlerization Project.
Because the Cross is marginalized or absent, there’s nothing whatever Christian about their ministry. Not surprisingly, most of them strongly prefer “natural law” to the Bible, because nature is a wax nose that can support their perverted views, just as it did for Adolf Hitler, an unswerving proponent of natural law.
The Cross and Pietism
In radical contrast the apostolic ministry, that is, the genuine Christian ministry, declares the entire counsel of God (Ac. 20:27) yet growing out of the message of creation’s Mediator and the world’s Redeemer, Jesus Christ (Col. 1:15–29; Heb. 1:1–3).
The crossless preachers justifiably hate pietism, the reduction of the Faith to a private relationship with Jesus and a refusal to press that Faith in culture. It has catastrophically failed to understand, however, that the only Faith worth pressing in culture is one grounded in the transformational gospel of Jesus Christ, which is not merely a perpendicular relationship with the Triune God but also a vertical relationship moving out to shape all areas of life and thought by gospel-preaching and biblical-law-living.
It seems the youthful crossless preachers want a coercive state to enforce their racist society. Apparently, they can’t quite trust the Holy Spirit and the gospel to accomplish global gospelization and Christianization.
The Cross and Politics
The Pauline message of the Cross, alternatively, recognizes the storyline of the Bible as creation-fall-redemption. Man has polluted God‘s very good created order, but sin does not get the last word. Jesus Christ and his atoning death and victorious resurrection get the final word.
Christians should be involved in politics to get politics out of most of society — and particularly the family and church. We should pray and work for a politics that provides us a quiet and peaceful life, so we can go about our business of perpetuating the gospel kingdom (1 Tim. 2:2–3). This gospel kingdom restoration enhances God’s good creation and is not hell-escaping fire insurance (Rushdoony) or a private devotional hobby (Perks). The gospel transforms sinners, and in transforming sinners, it transforms sinful societies.
The Cross reorients everything.
And neglecting, sidestepping, or dismissing the Cross only accelerates the apostasy.
The cross is the only hope. Always was, always will be.✞
Would you like to know one of the principal reasons the church is so weak, emaciated, and defeated today? Because she expects to be weak, emaciated, and defeated. The church revels in an eschatology of defeat. This is because the church revels in a protology of defeat. Right from the beginning, the church sees defeat.
Friends, I urge you to stand on the promises of the word of God. Live in victory. We’re soldiers not just of the cross but also the resurrection. Satan’s victory is not predestined before the second advent.
Christ’s victory is predestined before the Second Advent. We’re called to faithfulness and zeal and expectation, even in the face of hardship, persecution, martyrdom, and death. Yes, we might end up dying for the Faith, but the Faith will not die. The faith will grow and grow — the small stone flung by the sovereign God at the kingdoms of this world is becoming a mountain that fills the entire earth.
The wicked are not the inheritors of God’s good world. We are the inheritors.
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Leon Morris, The Cross of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 1.
Joel Webbon..cough, cough