God’s Attack
A selection from On Being a Theologian of the Cross (pp. 3-4):
The word of the cross kills and makes alive. It crucifies the old being in anticipation of the resurrection of the new. “The cross alone is our theology,” Luther could say. And those oft-quoted words are to be taken literally. But we cannot fail to notice what an odd claim it is. how can the cross be a theology? The cross is an event. Theology is reflection on and explanation of the event. Theology is about the event, is it not? However, that is what makes writing some definitive theology of the cross impossible. At best all such theology can do is to clear the way for the proclamation of the cross, to drive us actually to preach the word of the cross as that folly that destroys the wisdom of the wise.
The cross, that is, is not quiescent or dead. The cross is itself in the first instance the attack of God on the old sinner and the sinner’s theology. The cross is the doing of God to us. But that same cross itself, and only the cross, at the same time opens a new and unheard-of possibility over against the sinner’s old self and its theology. The means that a theology of the cross is inevitably quite polemical. It constantly seeks to uncover and expose the ways in which sinners hide their perfidy behind pious facades. The delicate thing about it is that it attacks the best we have to offer, not the worst. This explais why the theology of the cross is generally spoken of in contrast to a theology of glory. The two theologies are always locked in mortal combat. Wherever there is mention of a theology of the cross without indication of this combat, it is not truly the theology of the cross that is being expressed. The preacher-theologian must know this and learn how to use the word of the cross in that combat.
