Quotes from Fleming Rutledge

What we do know is that followers of Jesus Christ will always want to remember that the true and righteous judgments of the Lord are applicable to every side of every conflict.

Here is what Isaiah says: Verily thou art a God who hidest thyself, 0 God of Israel, the Savior (45:15). God is still active, still living, still in charge, still the subject of the verb: God hides himself.' God is active even when hidden, even when seemingly absent.

Only God can execute a regime change in which the tyrannical Powers are displaced and overthrown. This is the story of the purpose of God, "which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth" (Eph. 1:9-10).

For Paul, it is not God, but the curse of the Law that condemned Jesus.76 In his death, Paul declares, Jesus was giving himself over to the Enemy — to Sin, to its ally the Law, and to its wage, Death (Rom. 6:23; 7:8-11). This was his warfare. That is one of the most important reasons — perhaps the most important — that Jesus was crucified, for no other mode of execution would have been commensurate with the extremity of humanity's condition under Sin.

Furthermore, we are so accustomed to seeing the cross functioning as a decoration that we can scarcely imagine it as an object of shame and scandal unless it is burned on someone's lawn.

Oh villain! Thou art condemned into everlasting redemption. Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing

verse 4 in chapter 14, for instance: "Who are you to judge someone else's servant? To his own kurios (master) he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Kurios (Master or Lord) is able to make him stand" (NIV).

the central idea in the concept of justification (dikaios). The righteousness of God is the same as his power to make righteous — to rectify what is wrong.

It can be argued that Advent, more than any other season of the church year, is immediately relevant to our concrete lives as individuals, to the concrete life of the church under stress, and to the concrete headlines in the newspaper.

the gospel is a message of deliverance from the grip of evil and Death.

Life's darker side: that's Advent.

the entire human race is heir to what John Henry Newman called a "vast primordial catastrophe," and that only a stronger power from outside ourselves can repair the breach.

reflect the new way of seeing: the human situation is so tragic that there is no answer from within history. The Christ event is therefore the invasion of this world by Another, who is retaking for himself the world he created.

the two poles of Christ's exalted divinity and his suffering humanity as explicitly as does Hebrews. The result of this undertaking — the salvation of humanity — from out of the inner being of the Holy Trinity is, incredibly, that the hearts and minds of sinful human beings should be eternally perfected and at rest in the near presence of the heavenly Father.

There is no more important calling for the church in our time than claiming the self-identification of the God who is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.

But at the same time, even as the season outside gets more exuberantly festive, those who observe Advent within the Christian community are convicted more and more each year by the truth of what is going on inside—inside the church as she refuses cheap comfort and sentimental good cheer. Advent begins in the dark.

The unique feature of the Christian proclamation is the shocking claim that God is fully acting, not only in Jesus' resurrected life, but especially in Jesus' death on the cross. To say the same thing in another way, the death of Jesus in and of itself would not be anything remarkable. What is remarkable is that the Creator of the universe is shown forth in this gruesome death.

The Christ event derives its meaning from the fact that the three-personed God is directly acting as one throughout the entire sequence from incarnation to ascension to Last Judgment.

Jesus' public ministry . . . was not a drama played out on an empty stage. . . . Especially in a creation infested with sin, the proclamation and enactment of the kingdom of truth and justice is never an act of pure positing, but always already a transgression into spaces occupied by others.

becomes clear that whereas life in Christ results in obedience, this "obedience of faith" (Rom. 1:5; 16:26) is not accomplished by a human choice of one of two ways.25 There is a decisive difference between a call to obey and a transfer to a new world

As Placher well knew, there is no analogy from the side of the fallen creation that "works." None of the symbols, images, motifs, and themes "work" in any logical way, either as analogies or as theories to explain what God in Christ is doing on the cross.

In the Bible, the term "apocalyptic" (apokalypsis) encompasses a worldview in which the truly significant battle is the ongoing one between the Lord God of Sabaoth2 (Hebrew, meaning armies) and the Enemy, who deploys the principalities and Powers (Eph. 2: 2). This contest on the heavenly level is enacted on the earthly level by struggles large and small in the realm of human affairs —battles waged not with worldly weapons but with the spiritual armor of God (Eph. 6: 11-17). 3

The New Testament is from beginning to end a living witness to the apostolic preaching. The cross was meant to be preached.

We will be best enriched by the meaning of the crucifixion in all its manifold aspects, not just as an intellectual construct, but as dynamic, living truth empowering us for the living of these days.