Jonny's Reviews > The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

“All for sin could not atone, thou must save, and thou alone.” This is what is happening on Golgotha. All the manifold biblical images with their richness, complexity, and depth come together as one to say: the righteousness of God is revealed in the cross of Christ. The ‘precious blood’ of the Son of God is the perfect sacrifice for sin; the ransom is paid to deliver the captives; the gates of hell are stormed; the Red Sea is crossed and the enemy drowned; God’s judgment has been executed upon Sin; the disobedience of Adam is recapitulated in the obedience of Christ; a new creation is coming into being; those who put their trust in Christ are incorporated into his life; the kingdoms of ‘the present evil age’ are passing away and the promised kingdom of God is manifest not in triumphalist crusades, but in the cruciform witness of the church.” – Fleming Rutledge

Perhaps more than anything in the her authoritative text on the crucifixion, nothing is more convincing to me than Rutledge’s passion and joy about her subject material. She speaks with personal conviction and that far exceeds the impact of her thorough researched and massive citations. She is a gifted writer, but a better pastor. And she pastors you through the biggest questions about the most important historical event of all time. Though I found myself in disagreement with her in many cases , I was moved in many areas. In particular, her argument in defense of the crucifixion itself as the center of Christianity. Her linguistic skills are remarkable, especially her use of “rectification” for dikaiosis. Her defense of Anselm is convincing (and convinced me).

She was generous with almost everyone she parted ways with, including N.T. Wright and Delores Williams, two of my favorite writers. She embraces all atonement views and writes about them with eloquence and detail, but parts ways with Gustav Aulen. She straddles the line between individual and corporate sin, and generally views the substitutionary model (though her defense of it is the weakest portion of the book, for my taste), but indirectly addresses her critics (whom she accuses of having too literalist of a reading). Her lack of contextual theology and contextual understanding of atonement, though it would weaken her thesis, was a notably missing element. But she was generous with Anabaptists like J. Denny Weaver and even John Howard Yoder.

She remains orthodox through, but generous with the universality of the Gospel, but never dismissive of doctrine. She never strays from orthodoxy, but is committed in her Reformed tradition, nearly called Arminians (though she never names them) Pelagianists. I can hardly hold her Reformed views against her merely because I come from a different vantage point, but read with a Reformed lens, this book is definitive. Apart from that though, it is a life’s work, that is well-worth reading.