FROM FEAR TO FAITH

'...the life of a Christian is lived in the tension between "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" and "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."'
Fleming Rutledge, Three Hours, p77.

CHRIST-LIKE EMPATHY

'Trying to understand someone else's predicament lies at the very heart of what it means to be a Christian.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.107. 

THE CENTRALITY OF THE CROSS

'There is a centrifugal force at work in human nature; we want to spin out and away from the offense of the cross.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.61. 

EXPLAINING GOD'S JUDGEMENT TODAY

'Perhaps the best way of constructing the idea of punishment in our time is in terms of exclusion or rejection. If God is to exclude violence and injustice from his coming kingdom, something has to be done about violence and injustice and every form of enmity that seek to thwart God's good purposes. These are manifestations of the reign of Sin and Death, and they cannot be overlooked or ignored - although many construals of salvation attempt to do so.'

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.504. 

PENAL SUBSTITUTION ONLY MAKES SENSE IN A STORY

'The difficulty with "necessity" in the context of the cross is the idea that God is subject to external logic rather than love for his fallen creation. When presented in narrative form, the motif of substitution has unparalleled warmth.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.496. 

CONTEMPORARY RESPONSES TO SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT

'It is not an exaggeration to say that in some circles there has been something resembling a campaign of intimidation, so that those who cherish the idea that Jesus offered himself in our place have been made to feel that they are neo-Crusaders, prone to violence, oppressors of women, and enablers of child abuse.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.464. 

OUR INSTINCTIVE SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS

'There is nothing more characteristic of humanity than the universal tendency of one portion of that humanity to justify itself as deserving and some other portion as undeserving. Nothing is more foundational in Christian faith than the recognition that we can never be justified in that way. To speak of "deserving" is to divide up the world in a fashion that is utterly alien to the gospel.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.451. 

THE PROBLEM WITH JUST TALKING ABOUT RECONCILIATION

'It is not uncommon, both in and out of the church, for the people who do the most talking about reconciliation to be the ones who find it easier to smooth things over than struggle through them.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.344. 

JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH NOT WORKS

'The reason we can speak of justification/ rectification by faith, not by works, is that faith is not a work.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.331.

JUSTIFICATION

'...when we say that God will "justify" rather than merely "acquit," the action has a reconstituting force - hence the insufficiency of the courtroom metaphor "to acquit," God's righteousness is the same thing as his justice, and his justice is powerfully at work justifying, which does not mean excusing, passing over, or even "forgiving and forgetting," but actively making right that which is wrong.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.329. 

TALKING ABOUT THE WRATH OF GOD

'The challenge for pastors and preachers is to show that, given the nature of God, it can be said without qualification that the wrath of God is always exercised in the service of God's good purposes. It is the unconditional love of God manifested against anything that would frustrate or destroy the designs of his love.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.323. 

TRUE POWER

'True power is best seen in a life willingly offered as sacrifice for the sake of others. There is unexcelled strength in such sacrifice when it is embraced - not simply imposed or inflicted - as a way of aligning oneself with the good kind of power.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.274. 

ALIENS & STRANGERS

'The church should always have a sense of being in a strange land, and if we are not feeling this tension, we are not really being the church.'  

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.241. 

TOTAL CARE

'Imagine a person totally committed to your best interests, devoted to seeing you flourish, fighting for you against all enemies, determined to eliminate everything destructive from your life, attentive to every detail of who you are, never thinking of himself at all but only of you. That is Jesus in relation to us all - sacrificial in his life, sacrificial in his death.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.238. 

OLD & NEW TESTAMENTS

'The Old Testament is not just a source of further information for the New Testament, or an interesting sideshow attached to it, or even the indispensable prelude to it. The New Testament will not work without the Old Testament.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.214. 

DEFINING SIN

'Sin, then, is an exclusively biblical concept. The word is used, of course, in various nonbiblical contexts by people who know nothing of the Bible, but outside its biblical matrix it simply comes to mean wrongdoing of some sort, defined by whoever happens to be using it - almost without reference to someone other than themselves. To be in sin, biblically speaking, means something very much more consequential than wrongdoing; it means being catastrophically separated from the eternal love of God. It means to be on the other side of an impassable barrier of exclusion from God's heavenly banquet. It means to be helplessly trapped inside one's own worst self, miserably aware of the chasm between the way we are and the way God intends us to be. It means the continuation of the reign of greed, cruelty, rapacity, and violence throughout the world.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.174. 

GRACE BEFORE SIN

'...there is use talking about sin to anyone who does not already understand himself or herself to be upheld by grace.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.151. 

A CHRISTIAN APPROACH TO VICTIM STATUS

'To be outraged on behalf of oneself or one's own group alone is to be human, but it is not to participate in Christ. To be outraged and to take action on behalf of the voiceless and oppressed, however, is to do the work of God.'

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.143. 

THE CROSS NEEDS TO BRING JUSTICE

'The wrath of God falls upon God himself, by God's own choice, out of God's own love. The "justice connection" may not be clear to those who are accustomed to privilege, but to oppressed and suffering Christians in the troubled places of the earth, there is no need to spell it out. God in Christ on the cross has become one with those who are despised and outcast in the world. No other method of execution that the world has ever know could have established this so conclusively.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.143. 

GOD'S GRACE

'...the crucifixion of Christ for the sin of the world reveals that it is not only the victims of oppression and injustice who are in need of God's deliverance, but also the victimizers.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.141.