Fleming Rutledge, Episcopal priest and noted preacher, seeks to liberate the American pulpit from a therapeutic captivity that restricts it to ministering to the religious needs of a culture of determinedly autonomous individuals. Echoing Karl Barth, she pits authentic Christianity against “religion,” the product of human striving that finds expression in gnosticisms ancient and new (Celtic spirituality, Richard Rohr). What distinguishes Christianity and renders it unique is the meaning borne by the cross of Jesus Christ.
To appreciate that meaning she would have us dwell on the horror of crucifixion as a savage instrument of total humiliation and degradation. Such utter abjection can lead us to ponder, as Saint Anselm urged, the weight of sin as a power that holds us all in thrall, a suprahuman power manifest in the overwhelming atrocities with which history is rife and in which, given the right circumstances, any of us might easily become complicit. The power of sin dwells within us, and no merely human effort can hope to extirpate it.
What we cannot achieve for ourselves, however, God has achieved for us. Rutledge looks to Saint Paul for the master narrative in which the crucifixion of Jesus Christ finds its meaning, and devotes herself to explicating and amplifying Paul's apocalyptic vision, guided especially by the exegesis of Ernst Käsemann and the Reformed theologies of John Calvin and Karl Barth. In Paul's narrative the cross stands at the center of human history. It marks the turning point at which the triune God invaded and overcame the dominion of the powers of sin and death and liberated humankind for a life of freedom in Christ to be consummated at the Second Coming. How did God accomplish this on the cross? The New Testament offers an array of motifs, and Rutledge adamantly refuses to move beyond these into the realm of theory, judging that any theory would only impoverish the wealth of the apostolic witness.
Barth famously commended that a preacher prepare by attending to both the Bible and the daily newspaper, and in proceeding through a series of chapters devoted to the biblical motifs of Passover/Exodus, blood sacrifice, ransom/redemption, the “great assize,” Christus Victor, the descent into hell, substitution, and recapitulation, Rutledge weaves exegesis, classical and modern theology, and favored contemporary sources like the New York Times and the New York Review of Books into a rich, leisurely meditation on each. Notable among these are the extended treatment she offers of the descent, in which she ponders the nature and destiny of radical evil, and of substitution, in which she systematically lists and refutes objections to the penal substitution model while touting Barth's narrative, nontheoretic treatment of the theme.
Rutledge's erudite and insightful ruminations come into focus around a message of justification, understood as God's powerful, purely gracious action to rectify the human condition, an action that extends into the gift of faith. At various points she raises speculative questions—whether God is immutable, whether hell is eternal, whether annihilation is the fate of some—that may indicate the limits of the dialectical imagination to which she so skillfully appeals.
