Anti-Climacus

Culled from recent readings:

i. Sam Wells, Power and Passion

"But there is a third sacrifice that derives directly from the contrast of Barabbas and Jesus. And that is the sacrifice of the cross. Jesus went to the cross as one who knew that his embodiment of God's never-ending love meant he was going to have to face death. But the shape of the Old and New Testaments presents Jesus' sacrifice as making sense only as the last sacrifice, the one that finally took away sin and inaugurated the peaceful flourishing of all creation in God's company. The sacrifice of the Son of God is the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. So the war to end all wars was not the First World War; it was the cross. The good news of the cross is fundamentally that the war is over. When we gather at the altar, when we recall the cross by breaking the bread of Christ's body, when we share the banquet of Christ's resurrection in bread and wine, we celebrate the good news that the war, the real war--against sin, death, and the devil--is over."

ii. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (p. 654)

"On the basis of this initiative, the incomprehensible healing power of this suffering, it becomes possible for human suffering, even of the most meaningless type, to become associated with Christ's act, and to become a locus of renewed contact with God, an act which heals the world. The suffering is given transformative effect, by being offered to God.

A catastrophe thus can become part of a providential story, by being responded to in a certain way; its meaning lies not in its antecedents, but in what is drawn out of it; just as the ultimate meaning of the Fall was the Incarnation that was God's response to it (hence its paradoxical description as a 'felix culpa'). Neither the Lisbon earthquake nor the Boxing Day tsunami, neither the second World War nor Hiroshima, can be understood with reference to their antecedents as punishment; but they are given meaning through God's steadfast resolve not to abandon humanity in its worst distress."

iii. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice

"Augustine's ever deeper immersion in Scripture, from the time of his conversion onward, has brought him to the conclusion that our tendency to worry over the physical and mental well-being of family and friends, to weep at funerals for the loss of companionship, and the like is not to be ascribed to our fallenness but to our created human nature. God made us thus. To try to undo this dimension of ourselves is, "with ruthless disregard," to try to undo the work of the Creator."