The Cross and the Christian Story

The ‘theology of the cross’ provides the Christian with a story to live in and die for. ‘The Christian story’, Stanley Hauerwas notes, ‘will not remove the challenges [of living in the world], but it holds the possibility of helping us to understand, accept, and imaginatively transform the unmanageable, ambiguous aspects of our existence’[i] as they live by cruciform faith, hope and love.

This story contains the power of God to save the world, and the power of God to change the church. Paul applies this story to the dysfunctional congregation in Corinth. They had begun to construct their own narratives, which according to Thistleton, ‘imbibed secular Corinthian culture’.[ii] These narratives became irreconcilable, and so divisions arose. The loss of the Christ narrative led not only to disunity but also sexual immorality and idolatry. With the marginalisation of Christ’s story the foundation of Christian love was demolished resulting in selfishness. In reaction Paul reminds them of the gospel he preached to them. This story should narrate their lives and produce: faith in Christ—not local narratives of power and glory; hope in the resurrection enabling them to live according to the wisdom of the cross—not the wisdom of this age; and love that builds up the church—not insistent on its own way.

Paul’s application of this story to the problems at Corinth is vastly relevant to our postmodern age which rejects the possibility of a universal story. Far from being a tool to legitimize power, Tomlin argues, the story of Christ ‘presents a vision of community life which resists claims to power by modelling itself on the self-giving and powerlessness of Christ.’[iii] Tomlin continues,

The cross operates as a counter-ideology to the uses of power current within the church, fostering a regard for love rather than knowledge, the poor rather than the wealthy, their trembling apostle rather than the rhetorical ability of any ‘rival’, mutual up-building rather than spiritual showing-off. Theology that begins at the cross is for Paul the radical antidote to any religion that is a thinly veiled copy of a power- seeking culture.[iv]

The story of the cross is The Story our church needs to live in and The Story our world needs to hear. This story ‘does not offer a resolution of life’s difficulties but it offers us something better—an adventure and struggle as together we live faithful to the reality that he is Lord of this world.’[v] In this story, ‘even death can be faced, if it is seen as an event in God’s story, rather than as the end of one’s own.’[vi] The Christian who follows Paul’s as he follows Christ’s story (11:1), will die every day. In this way the ‘theology of the cross’ stands as the image of the Christian life, or as Luther put it, ‘the Christianus must be crucianus.’^[vii]

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[i] Stanley Hauerwas, Growing Old in Christ (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003), 69.

[ii] Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: a Commentary on the Greek Text (NIGTC; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000), 33.

[iii] Graham Tomlin, The Power of the Cross: Theology and the Death of Christ in Paul, Luther and Pascal (Carlisle, Cumbria, U.K.: Paternoster, 1999), 99.

[iv] Ibid., 101.

[v] Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame, 1981), 149.

[vi] Samuel Wells and Mark Nation, Faithfulness and Fortitude: Conversations with the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000), 128.

[vii] Cited in Alister E. McGrath, ‘Theology of the Cross’, DPL, 197. Christianus est crucianus: a Christian is a cross bearer.