The following comes from an old defunct blog of mine. It is simply a passage from Lutheran theologian, Gerhard Forde, on Martin Luther’s theologia crucis, or ‘theology of the cross.’ When I was first confronted with Luther’s dialectic of a theology of the cross versus a theology of glory in my seminary Reformation theology class, it changed my life (not an overstatement). Not so much by focusing on its negative side (i.e., “versus a theology of glory”), but by focusing on the positive implications it provides in regard to a knowledge of God and how that implicates the Christian existence coram Deo. I will always cast myself as a theologian of the cross, which I see as an antecedent, in certain qualified ways, to Karl Barth’s style of a theology of crisis (e.g., with the different pressures, and historical circumstances understood).

What I want to primarily emphasize, after Forde, is how a theology of the cross makes the Christian vulnerable before God, just as God in the grace of Christ, has made Himself vulnerable for us. Not predicated by us, to be clear, but vulnerable in the sense that as TF Torrance would say, “God loves us more than He loves Himself,” in the sense that He freely choose to not be God without us, but with us. Here is Forde:

Thesis 22. That wisdom which perceives the invisible things of God by thinking in terms of works completely puffs up, blinds, and hardens.

Thesis 22 is, in effect, a statement about the religious effect of the theology of glory and the wisdom of law upon which it is based. Religious people in particular seem to have difficulty being theologians of the cross. That is because the theology of the cross is quite devastating for our usual religious aspirations under the wisdom of law. The indignation and resentment against God … is aroused not only — perhaps not even principally! — because of the strenuousness and rigor of the life proposed, but finally because in the cross God has literally taken away from us the possibility of doing anything of religious merit. In Jesus God has cut off all such possibility. God, as St. Paul could put it, has made foolish the wisdom of the wise. We are rendered passive over against God’s action. This is always galling for the old being. We adopt a very pious posture. It is, so the protests go, too easy, too cheap, it has no obvious ethical payoff, and so on and on. Religiously we like to look on ourselves as potential spiritual athletes desperately trying to make God’s team, having perhaps just a little problem or two with the training rules. We have a thirst for glory. We feel a certain uneasiness of conscience or even resentment within when the categorical totality of the action of God begins to dawn on us. We are always tempted to return to the safety and assurance of doing something anyway. Generally, it is to be suspected, that is all we planned to do, a little something. But to surrender the “wisdom” of law and works, or better, to have it taken away, is the first indication of what it means to be crucified with Christ.[1]

[1] Gerhard O. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518, 91-93.