The Cross and its Meaninglessness: A Prayer of Final Obsolescence

by Timothy John Tracy

Overview

Forget everything you’ve ever thought (or been taught) about the Crucifixion.

Most Christians believe we know all there is to know about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and its symbolism. We’ve learned about it in Sunday schools, catechism classes, church services, and even in our exposure to religious painting and sculpture. But what you don’t know is going to surprise you. In The Cross and Its Meaninglessness, Timothy John Tracy has taken thousands of years of Christian religious doctrine surrounding the Crucifixion and turned it on its head.

Tracy questions the accepted meaning of Jesus Christ’s death and dares to suggest that the traditional explanation of God’s sacrifice of his only son is misguided. He rejects the notion that mankind’s salvation could only be earned by appeasing a violent God’s blood lust. Tracy proclaims that a true understanding of God’s all-loving nature negates the need for Jesus’s murder. His unique, eloquent “prayer” will make you wonder about and question your suppositions. In this powerful meditation, Tracy asks us to open our heart and listen to his plea.

Doing so may inspire a faith deeper than you’ve ever known.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632991317
Publisher:	Greenleaf Book Group, LLC
Publication date:	07/14/2017
Pages:	186
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.43(d)

About the Author

Timothy John Tracy is a corporate transactional lawyer with a career of more than thirty years at the firm of Balch & Bingham LLP in Birmingham, Alabama. Although he has no formal theological education or training, his hidden passion, cultivated for decades, has been to explore, question, and understand the character of God in a different but sensible manner. Tim lives in the Birmingham community with his wife and daughters.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Beginning

My God, my God, into thy hands I commit this prayer. Its fate will be determined in heaven as the wheat and waste on earth were gently winnowed within the open palm of perfect love — the incarnate breath of your son.

From the moment you spoke creation into existence and your timelessness began to shed time, until this moment, no event has encircled the forces of contradiction or distended the powers of paradox as much as when the blood of your only son was shed on a Roman cross. Jesus Christ, the perfect union of divinity and humanity, ended up as a crucified criminal. Why?

Your church has steadfastly proclaimed that there is no discrepancy between the eternal truth of his divinity and the historical fact of his crucifixion. In the fullness of time after the second person of the Trinity had emptied himself by becoming flesh and blood, he went to Golgotha to shed between two other criminals the very blood he had assumed. There, he paid the price of your justice and obtained forgiveness for the world. The place where every sinner should have been was the place where Christ, in obedience to you and in love for us, died. The divine exchange was accomplished. According to the church, my sinful predilections and the actuality of my every sin had been erased from your mind because of what had happened to your son. This is what I believed for most of my life.

Not long ago, however, I began to question the traditional meanings of the cross. Why do you, in order to be merciful, need the violent suffering and death of the only innocent man? You create from pleasure, not from need. You love the world. You are love. You are sovereign over all. You are the father of everything beautiful. You are beautiful. You reign in a peaceful and perfect harmony within the Trinitarian Godhead.

Much of Christianity would agree with this description, but would insist that it is incomplete because it neglects to mention your holiness and justice. Some would contend that the description also fails to mention your wrath. With a more adequate description of your nature in hand, Christianity implores us to believe that the crucifixion of your son, together with all of his terror, suffering, and forsakenness, was a reflection of your holy and just character, the fulfillment of your righteous demands. Was it really?

I am not alone with these questions. There are Christians who would never consider a public announcement of their doubt about one of the few explicative cornerstones of Christian belief, would never dream of breaking with a tradition of such monumental proportions, but yet silently struggle with the meaning of the cross. They may nod in agreement as the clergy declares the necessity for the broken body and shed blood of your son, but their consciences recoil and tremble at the thought that you require suffering as the gateway to your eternal forgiving presence. Whether they go public or stay private with their sentiments is of no consequence to me. I understand how they feel. But I hope those Christians, as few as they may be, will come to see that their intuition of tremulous hesitancy about the purpose of the crucifixion is divine.

Speaking of gateways, the resurrection is not a corridor to a deeper understanding of your character. That corridor is lined with the dark shadows cast by the cross of Christ. The resurrection is all light. It projects no aphotic qualities. You are the God of the living as the Scriptures testify. No one within your mind can die. I see you clearly in the resurrection. But it's not what I see that interests me. It's what I can't see. In that sense, therefore, the resurrection is almost a distraction, a deflection from the opportunity to get beneath the perplexity of the crucifixion and a move toward a narcissistic reverie of endless existence.

On the other hand, the event of the cross is full of contradiction and conflict, characteristics that mobilize and invite the heart and mind to comprehend your nature in deeper ways. It is within the darkness of the crucifixion that I desire to understand the truth of who you are. I hope this prayer encourages others to do the same, to set aside the captivation of the traditional theologies of the cross, if only for a spell, and to consider whether the truth of your character reveals a different meaning of the cross or no meaning at all.

I am familiar with those visceral objections to anyone who questions the entrenched meanings of the cross that would characterize this oblation as a reactionary invective, an insulting irreverence, or the deplorable incantations of a defector. More calculatingly perceptive reactions would see this prayer as a psychoneurotic betrayal of Christianity where sinusoidal feelings of deep insecurity have inseminated their customary defensive technique of radical articulations to obtain noticeability and to soothe the pain of the unnoticed child, or as a fervid philosophical predisposition where a sedulous application of Ockham's razor has so denuded the notion of explanation that only the banalities of austere appearances survive. But I suppose many, if not most, within the church will, if not must, without a whisper of hesitancy but with a predatory inflexibility, interpret this petition as a psychological accommodation to placate an exceedingly postmodern conscience where atheistic predilections have lodged and metastasized within the soul's interior chambers, where inherent and cultivated affections for truth, belief, tradition, certainty, and ultimacy have all but evaporated within the advance of faithlessness. Other Christians who possess a more precise theological pathology will mark this prayer as the carnal logic of an apostate mind where divine dichotomies of love and wrath, grace and law, and good and evil have dissolved into meaningless oppositions, and where divine holiness, majesty, and honor, in all of their radiant glory, have become nothing more than the vermicular movements of a dead superstition. I remain undeterred. Without a doubt, humility is needed on my part, but I will let these words take me where my heart has longed to go. I want to see your character for myself.

Even as Job, while at the axial point in his spiritual life, encumbered with profound perplexity and contradiction of why you, whom he believed to be infinitely fair, would cripple an upright man with unspeakable affliction and suffering, sought an explanation from you, I too, unashamed but not hardened and unafraid but not arrogant, seek a hearing with the creator. Even no callous and conceited soul should be considered as an eternal obstruction to a God utterly apathetic to the worst of human disposition. Unlike human apathy — a lethal unresponsiveness or detachment — your kind of apatheia is a beautiful passionate move that creates, surrounds, penetrates, and assumes our existence out of indestructible love that eclipses our cold indifference as though it were nothing at all. But not an eclipse that leaves us behind in our pathetic passivity, but an eclipse that transfigures our very being into a defectless, dynamic reflection of yourself, a flawless cadence of the divine heartbeat. Neither the metaphoric imagery of the potter and the clay nor the Apostle Paul's authoritarian interdiction against his hypothetical interlocutors who raised legitimate questions concerning your inscrutable architecture of human affairs is of any impediment to me.

As with Job, question me, Lord, and I will answer you. Where was I when you laid the earth's foundation? I was in your heart. I am still there. It is because of this indissoluble connection that I desire to understand you for myself.

As you know, I come with no pretense of intellectual objectivity or penetrating perspicacity. Moreover, I have had no adornments of rapturous spiritual encounters. I have been shaped largely by my own choices and by the uncontrollable forces of nature, culture, people, and the plasticity of neural chemistry, along with the innumerable gradations and constant flux of human experience. My approach to you is simplistic, and my questions are tolerable and reasonable.

Two thousand years ago, the cross changed the course of history, and its effects remain powerfully present in every continent, community, church, and Christian home. At first only a few pedestrian and otherwise unremarkable men took notice. And yet, the cross has made an epochal claim on our reality, one fundamentally different from other historical developments like tools, agriculture, and social organization. This is because we must interpret the cross when we confront it. Each person who engages the cross must ask, "What does the death of your son mean?"

I realize, Father, that the basic meaning of the cross originates with the apostles and must have taken form and been crystalized by their post-resurrectional experience. This makes perfect sense. If a friend of mine, who I thought might change the world, dies and then returns fully alive to share some fish cooked over an open fire on a beach, then the meaning of his death becomes an inescapable question to me. I must understand why. The nature of this quest for early Christians surely became more imperative when the young church began to recognize that the one who died on the cross was as divine as you are, that he was in truth your only son.

To explain the divine reason for Jesus's death, theology has advanced three theories or themes of the cross over the course of history: substitutionary atonement, victorious subjugation, and moral exemplarity. These themes are not so much distinct from each other as they are complementary. They share common elements to account for the work of Christ on the cross. Each is a generative framework that helps us to interpret the nature of Christ's work as a person, from his divine conception, virgin birth, sinless life, and innocent death, while looking beyond the cross to see the resurrection, life of the church, and finality, all of which comprise your reconciliation of us to yourself.

I think Karl Barth's phrase "God against us and God for us" apprehends the texture of substitutionary atonement. As the theme goes, there is no opposition as massive or monstrous as the one poised between you, a holy God, and sinful man. The enormity of this hostile aversion is an unfathomable repulsion beyond the greatest of human comprehension. The purity and strength of divine holiness, also immeasurable, can face neither this antinomic state nor the sinful creatures that created it. Divine wrath and judgment, therefore, are unavoidable necessities. Not even your holy love may eliminate the holy inevitability. Judgment necessitates punishment, an eternally irreversible retribution required by the very nature of goodness — your character. Evil has no lasting abode within your universes. Holiness demands evil's total eradication, and unfortunately for humanity, which hosts the parasitic corruption, holiness demands infinite punishment for our evil.

There's more. According to the theme, you also require restitution, an atonement for each evil thought we have had or deed we have committed, whether deliberate or accidental, isolated or habitual. Every transgression must be offset by reparation. You cannot simply ignore sin. You cannot look the other way because there's no other way for you to look. Your holiness and judgment are forever irremissible. This is the "God against us."

But, as the doctrine holds, "thanks be to God," for you have taken the judgment upon yourself and made restitution for all through the cross of Christ. Your perfect, only son willingly and lovingly stepped out of eternity and into time, took the form of a humble servant, laid his spent earthly life on the cross, shed his blood, absorbed an endless ocean of divine wrath, extinguished raging rivers of human guilt, paid a mountainous penalty, and permanently atoned for the sin of the world. With these divine and human acts of vicarious sacrifice and substitution, your judgment, mercy, and forgiveness stood victorious and rejoicing. But more significantly, the crucifixion was the event where you, in the fullness of Trinitarian power, infinity, eminence, holiness, glory, and life, hung in our place and on our behalf in weakness, temporality, humility, accusation, shame, and death, and overcame the reign of sin. This is the "God for us."

For the theme of victorious subjugation, the personification of evil in the form of Satan becomes the arrestive point of defeat through the crucifixion and resurrection. The theme implies that the world is too wicked for humanity to be the source of evil. The root of evil must reside in a being more formidable than man. Its eradication, therefore, must require divine measures beyond our tenuous abilities. It is a battle between heavenly beings fought within the venue of earthly beings where the ultimate destiny of man was at stake and where the father of lies, sin, and death had invaded creation. But the victorious cross and resurrection had destroyed the source of all sin and each of its integrals and derivatives. The calculus of sheer evil had been subdued and shattered. On that account, the opportunity for humanity to be liberated from the bondage of the echoes of a conquered but still living principality of darkness had been procured, but with a payment to Satan himself. The Gospel of Mark has Jesus saying that "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

Over the centuries, the victory of Christ theme seems to have wavered in its appeal and popularity. At the crest of the wave, early Christianity saw evil as demonic powers embodied within the devil, whose dethroning was the only way to defeat those powers. The cross represented an almost monetary transaction where you paid Satan off with the sacrifice of your son in exchange for Satan's relinquishment of his serpentine forces. The imagery and method of Christ's victory became more sophisticated as the cross was seen by some Christians like a duplicitous pretext designed to trick Satan into exceeding his authority and control over humanity by engaging the perfection of Christ on the cross. With the human nature of Jesus as the bait and his divine nature as the hook, the devil had been caught.

At the trough of the wave where the rationality of man had taken center stage, the popularity of the devil and this creative imagery began to dissipate, as they were perceived to be superstitious nonsense. The theme later reawakened when the brutality of man and his inner darkness became so globally and acutely visible that the promise of human reason began to relent. Putting aside the dynamics of this history, the heart of victorious subjugation is the idea that the crucifixion was necessary for the ascendancy of Christ over the dominion of evil, whether evil was viewed more traditionally as incarnate iniquity or more modernly as inauthentic existence.

The theme that the cross should be understood as an example of the highest morality, a selfless, sacrificial practice of life with a principled goodness directing every move and a relentless, unconditional obedience, without regard to where it may lead, even death, is one of individual subjectivity. Conceptualizing the crucifixion in this way provides an invocation and inspiration for us to love as you love and to give as you gave up the life of your son.

To see with the eyes of the soul the broken, bloody, and breathless Christ as he hung nailed to a cross is to see an exquisite exposition of your love for humanity. It is also a glimpse of humanity's own fractures, wounds, and convulsions that each person faces when choosing between a love for you and others and a love only for themselves. We must decide either to entomb our love within the secretions of selfishness or to spend it for you and creation until there's nothing left, just as Christ spent his love for you and your offspring until the darkness of death had overcome, but only to be resurrected for an endless divestiture of love for all things made through Christ our God. This is the poignancy of the exemplary theme of the cross. Christians, too, must take up their cross and follow Christ. The theme also neutralizes some of the juridical overtones of substitutionary atonement.

All of these themes, which have shaped Christian thought and practice for nearly two thousand years, have changed throughout different historical contexts. But, while superstition yields to rationalism, tradition yields to liberalism, and exclusivity yields to pluralism, the defining contours of each theme have remained essentially the same. Your immutable character endures. To see that character displayed in the cross of your son, to understand it, is my beginning, my passion, and my obsession.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Cross and its Meaninglessness"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Timothy Tracy.
Excerpted by permission of River Grove Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface, vii,
The Beginning, 1,
The Inquisition, 17,
The Unbelief, 27,
The Scripture, 77,
The Meaning, 99,
The Testimony, 115,
The Finish, 135,
Glossary, 161,
Acknowledgments, 169,
About the Author, 171,