Jack W.'s Reviews > The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Christ by the Rev’d Fleming Rutledge is the guidebook on how to remain nominally conservative, clinging on to the last memory of an orthodox denomination now pervaded by theological extremists and academic terrorists. Gone is the Episcopal Church of Cranmer, Hooker, or Jewel, Ryle or Whitefield, Wesley or Donne. Less than a century after the death of William Meade, the austere defender of Calvinism within the Episcopal fold and reviver of the Episcopal Church, a prominent Episcopal book introducing her doctrines to a cold war America could confidently assert, “it is not to be thought that the Bible is accepted uncritically or literally…there are no ‘Fundamentalists’ in the Episcopal Church.’”

In case the situation is thought to have improved after the charismatic revivals and Jesus people movement of the 1970s, let the priestess Rutledge show otherwise. What confuses the reviewer most profoundly is how Christianity Today awarded this their Book of the Year! There is almost no interaction with any Evangelical scholars or thinkers, and her audience is certainly not Evangelical. If anything, it represents a mid-20th century leftward lurch that elite-adjacent Evangelicals desire to emulate by proximity. At least Tom Wright believes St. Paul was inspired by the Holy Spirit, for the same cannot be meaningfully said of the author unless “inspiration” is redefined in the most unevangelical and Scriptural way possible.

There are shining moments for Rutledge, such as when she defends “rectification” as an alternative to “justification,” and tries to unify diverging theories of the atonement; but there is little to commend seriously to a lover of Scripture that might not elsewhere be found. I feel that she wants an eye cocked when she says that, yes, we should still use masculine pronouns for the Godhead, and that the atonement is, in fact, important!

Lest you think her neo-Lutheran Tübingen school theology give her the spine of an old German Reformer or her sometimes quoted and oft imitated Dean Dr. Paul Zahl, who flew the black flag against the consecration of Gene Robinson, Chapter 7 illustrates her lack of grounding and placement perfectly. Upon hearing a professor’s blasphemous words “we’re moving away from that (substitutionary) idea of atonement,” she recalls her mopey sentiment, “I was hurt; I did not understand who this ‘we’ was, and he did not seem to care ‘that idea of atonement’ had been a word of life to many.”

While merely a footnote in the text, it reveals her soul’s disposition throughout. The higher critics have won the linguistic battle, they have won the theological war, they deserve to control the seminaries, but just, by darn, be nice about it, and remember that the atonement helped a lot of people feel better.

Rutledge’s crucifixion is not theological dogma. It is therapeutic narrative that soothes the soul.

Lest I be accused a curmudgeon for finding a single objectionable page, she elsewhere handwaves away the historicity of Adam and Eve. Here she has more in common with some parts of Evangelicalism, but those parts which would have been anathema to the movement thirty years ago, and still are to the apostle Paul. Here again we see why this book won such high praise, even by the Gospel Coalition; it progresses Evangelicalism towards a slated goal, that goal being acceptability by the academy and the secular world, even at the cost of erudition and truth.

In another place, Rutledge acknowledges that Scripture is not an entire narrative, and that sin moves from individual guilt to collective power over the course of the Old Testament as the authors begin to “realize” the power of sin. Christianity is different than Judaism, she argues, because sin is collective, not individualistic. Not only does the plainly conflict with top Biblical Theologians like NT Wright’s understanding of how first century Judaism thought, it also again shows her inability to grasp with the hard realities of historic Christian doctrine. Claiming to make them more weighty, she expiates all guilt. In expiating guilt, she damns.

In trying to defend the gruesomeness of the crucifixion, a worthy goal that excited me for its relative novelty at the outset, I was left increasingly disappointed as each chapter elapsed. Like much of the existentialist school from Barth to Tillich to David Toole’s Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, the insistence on suffering inadvertently only trivializes it. The heavy lifting of The Crucifixion is not a penetrating insight into the themes of Scripture, but a literary style that is supposed to sweep the reader away without reading into any of her points. She seriously points to Michael Jackson as a picture of the beatific vision, and then tries to compare it to Lewis’ idea of the dance of God in Perelandra, a disservice to all.

I hate to criticize a book like this, especially in so completely, but the outcome of the book is truly devastating for me. It is simply not truth. It avoids all the difficult doctrines, or makes them lay easy by saying that sin can only be noticed and repented of after we are safely saved. She does no justice by not defining justice in her entire chapter on the topic, and she pays us no reparation (a key theme for her) in the remainder.

I cannot recommend for any serious believer or someone who wants to know Jesus. Jesus died for our sins, and the bible shows many ways in which that is shown and pictured or us, but they are not adequately or sharply laid out here. It’s disappointing to think that the church which once boasted such erudite and scholarly men now brings forward this as their acclaimed book on the crucifixion. This is supposed to be a follow up to John Stott’s tome on the Crucifixion in the 80s. This is supposed to guide the twenty first century Christian. The book unfortunately fails.

Again, I am a normal guy, who reads theology and history for fun. I wanted to be edified and have this book do the same for my small group. I don’t think my church is the only way to heaven, and I don’t think that she’s going to hell. But that’s about as much as I can say positively for the book. I’m not a raging Calvinist, Trad Catholic, or J6 truther, and I don’t want more books on hellfire or subjugation of women. But I do want books that are faithful to the Scriptures about our God, and this just ain’t it.