Show Notes
With Ash Wednesday approaching, Derek begins a special seven-week journey focused on the cross by introducing what he considers the most important contemporary book written on the death of Jesus: The Crucifixion by Fleming Rutledge.
In a religious culture often drawn toward inspiration, self-help, or relevance at all costs, Rutledge refuses to soften the offense of the gospel. She insists that Christianity does not begin with moral improvement or spiritual techniques, but with an event no one would have invented—the public execution of the Son of God.
In this episode, Derek explores why Rutledge’s work matters so deeply, how her life as a parish priest shaped her theology, and why the cross remains the central, unsettling, and hope-filled truth of the Christian faith. This episode sets the stage for a slow, careful walk through a book that refuses easy answers and instead invites us to live within the tensions of judgment and mercy, suffering and hope, cross and resurrection.
Key Takeaways
- The Crucifixion is the fruit of over twenty years of pastoral preaching and theological reflection.
- Christianity begins with an event that looks like failure: the execution of a crucified man.
- Rutledge writes as a preacher and pastor, not as a detached academic or system-builder.
- The cross is not a metaphor or symbol, but God’s decisive confrontation with sin, death, and evil.
- The gospel resists being reduced to self-help, moral uplift, or religious technique.
- Christian faith is learned by living within tension, not resolving it prematurely.
- The crucifixion reveals who God truly is—and redefines how God rules and reigns.
Books Mentioned Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross by Hans Boersma The Day the Revolution Began by N. T. Wright N.T. Wright and the Revolutionary Cross by Derek Vreeland The Crucifixion by Fleming Rutledge
Scriptures Mentioned John 1:29 John 18:33–37 1 Corinthians 2:2
Resource Mentioned Russell Moore interview with Fleming Rutledge (2023): https://www.russellmoore.com/2023/03/29/fleming-rutledge-on-the-cross/ Has Peaceable and Kind been meaningful to you? Support the show by:
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Order Derek’s new Bible Study Series, God in the Neighborhood: Book 1: Incarnation: 8 Lessons on How God Meets Us || https://amzn.to/42jSZAs Book 2: Crucifixion: 8 Lessons on How God Saves Us || https://amzn.to/459bNUk Book 3: Resurrection: 8 Lessons on How God Restores Us || https://amzn.to/40T0sp0
Learn more about Derek’s work as a pastor and author: https://derekvreeland.com
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Transcript
Welcome back.
To another episode of Peaceable and Kind.
I’m your host, Derek Vreeland, and we are going to start a great journey together on this episode.
So I’m glad that you’ve joined me.
If you haven’t already, go ahead and subscribe to Peaceable and Kind wherever you listen to these podcasts right here.
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Go ahead and subscribe to Peaceable and Kind.
and leave a rating or a review.
That helps out a bunch.
And if you don’t know, you can listen to any previous episodes by going to my website, Derek Vreeland.
com.
Click the podcast link and you can go back and listen to previous episodes.
But we’re beginning a new journey because Lent.
is on the way.
Next Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of the Lenten season.
Lent is all about joining Jesus on his journey to his crucifixion and death.
So Lent is a 40-day period from Ash Wednesday, next Wednesday, all the way to Holy Saturday, which is the day before Easter.
And over the years I have told people that if you want to get the most out of Easter, if you want to enter into the joy
of the Easter season, the joy of Jesus resurrection, then you need to contrast Easter joy with Linton sorrow
And I understand, maybe not the most popular thing to do.
For some people, they feel like I live in Lent every day.
And I understand that.
But for many of us, we need that contrast
for our own spiritual formation to become more like Jesus, to identify more with Jesus, we need this season of Lent to reflect on Jesus and his suffering and death.
And when we do that, when we get just a taste of the sorrow that Jesus experienced, then Easter Sunday will pop.
So to help you in your Lenten journey, I want to take the next few episodes through the season of Lent.
To walk through an important book that explores the cross, the meaning of Jesus’ death.
And I could have chosen a number of books.
Some of my favorite books, some of the most influential books.
To understand the meaning of the death of Jesus for me would include Hans Borsma’s violence, hospitality, and the cross.
A very important book.
He leans heavily on Athanasius and N.
T.
Wright, two theologians, one historical, one contemporary.
that have influenced me.
I recommend Borisma’s book.
I recommend everything Borisma writes.
His entire sacramental ontology and all those
themes um have deeply influenced me.
But his book on the cross is really, really good.
He takes this metaphor of hospitality
as a metaphor for what was happening on the cross, that God in Jesus was opening up God’s self to welcome in the stranger.
to welcome the sinner into a process of redemption and salvation.
A great book, but that’s not the book we’re going to walk through.
Another great book is N.
T.
Wright’s The Day the Revolution Began.
Of course, I’ve just said that of all the modern theologians, Tom Wright has
probably had more of an influence on me than anyone else.
The Day the Revolution began is a wonderful book I’ve written.
A reader’s guide in T.
Wright and the Revolutionary Cross, a 90-page reader’s guide that will help you through that book.
And maybe one day.
On the podcast during the season of Lent, we’ll walk through Tom’s book, but that’s not the book I have selected for this year.
I want to walk through
What I consider to be the most important book written on the cross.
As much as I love Tom Wright, it’s not the day the revolution began.
What I have found to be the most important book on understanding what the crucifixion means is Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion.
Now it is a massive book.
It is over 600 pages
I heard Rutledge in an interview say this was the primary academic and theological work of her career.
As a pastor, preacher, and theologian, she took twenty years writing it.
And I think that’s why it’s so long, because she kept adding and adding and adding to it.
But it is an important book
And I understand at 600 pages, most people are not going to read it.
And so through the season of Lent this year, I want to walk you through this important book.
Now, if you don’t know anything about Fleming Rutledge, one, I would encourage you to follow her on social media, wherever she is.
Uh she is retired now.
I don’t know how old she is, probably late 70s, early 80s by now.
But Rutledge through her work, particularly in the crucifixion,
She has just stubbornly refused to soften the offense of the gospel, the stumbling block.
of the cross.
And she does so in an American context where she has seen so many churches
that claim to be gospel-centered or quote unquote evangelical, they have drifted, many, not all, but many have drifted
into a preaching of the cross that’s much more about self help and how it’s relevant to our lives.
But Rutledge reminds us that the Christian life
is not about simply moral improvement and spiritual techniques.
Um
Our faith is rooted in the public execution of the Son of God.
Rutledge is ordained in the Episcopal Church.
And she served as a parish priest for many, many years, preaching week after week to thoughtful, skeptical, and sometimes weary congregations.
And that pastoral perspective has shaped her theology.
Um, she is not someone who has written and is building
a theology of the cross as a detached academic.
She is first and foremost a preacher
A preacher who believes that theology is important, but that theology exists for proclamation.
Theology exists for the church.
And I tend to have a whole lot more trust in theologians who spend their lives close to the church.
I think theologians that just spend all their time in the academy with no consideration for congregations and Christian people, I’m just a little skeptical.
As a pastor, I want to read theologians who have done substantial work, like Fleming Rutledge, but do so for the sake of the church, for the building up of the church.
And so as we’ll see in Rutledge’s book, The Crucifixion, she remains faithful to the scriptures.
She is an exegete, that would be the technical term.
In other words, she spends a lot of time understanding the scriptures, particularly Paul, and she insists
That the victory of God accomplished through Jesus comes through what looks like a defeat.
So for Rutledge, the cross, the crucifixion of Jesus, exposes the weaknesses of human reason
And our ability to solve all of our own problems on our own.
One of the things I love about Rutledge is that she is bold.
She is provocative.
In reading her book, and I read through it a couple of years ago, and in preparing for this podcast episode, I was just reviewing the section we’re going to look at together in this episode.
And I was I was checking out the notes I made in the margin, how often I would put a ha or a smiley face, because she can be quite provocative.
But to me, provocative in the right way.
Because in reading Rutledge, she doesn’t treat theology as something cold or harsh
Even when some of her writing is is barbed and it it pokes and prods us.
I I I hear her pastoral heart coming through that.
So when she is poking and prodding, she’s doing it in the right way.
She shows us that the cross is a slap in the face to our self-sufficiency
So she writes uh broadly, she has done the academic research, and she helps us remember that the Christian faith isn’t about
Coming up with all the answers, resolving all tensions, but rather living in the tension
And so if you want to get a bit of a taste of her personality, I highly recommend the interview she did with Russell Moore on his podcast, The Russell Moore Show.
back in 2023 and I’ll leave a link to that in the show notes.
But make sure that you you check that out because you can you can hear her voice.
And often I think it’s helpful if I’m reading a book.
To hear an interview with the author, to hear their voice, to get their sort of pastoral theological perspective, but to also understand the person behind the writing,
So today begins a seven-week journey exploring her book, The Crucifixion.
Again, 600 pages is gonna take us seven weeks to get through it, but let’s get started.
On this episode, I simply want to introduce you to the book by exploring her introduction and just chapter one.
So we’re not going to get very far into the book on this episode, but there will be more episodes coming.
So maybe we should begin like this.
Let me read to you the opening lines of the introduction
I have to pause this episode for just a moment to tell you that the next two Bible studies in the God and the Neighborhood Bible study series are available for pre-order.
Crucifixion: 8 lessons on how God
God Saves Us and Resurrection.
Eight lessons on how God restores us.
Both release on February 17th, just in time for Lent and Easter.
Pre-order now.
Links are in the
Show notes She writes Christianity is unique.
The world’s religions have certain traits in common, but until the gospel of Jesus Christ burst upon the Mediterranean world,
No one in the history of human imagination had conceived of such a thing as the worship of a crucified man.
The early Christian preaching announced the entrance of God upon the stage of history in the person of an itinerant Jewish teacher
who had been ingloriously pinned up alongside two of society’s cast offs, to die horribly
rejected and condemned by religious and secular authorities alike, discarded onto the garbage heap of humanity
Scornfully forsaken by both elites and common folk, leaving behind only a discredited
demoralized handful of scruffy disciples who had no status whatsoever in the eyes of anyone
The peculiarity of this beginning for a world-transforming faith is not significantly acknowledged
Too often today’s Christians are lulled into thinking of their own faith as one of the religions without realizing.
That the central claim of Christianity is oddly irreligious at its core
Now, I wanted to read that opening because it’s beautifully written, and you can hear the voice of the preacher in these words.
Rutledge wants to avoid oversanitizing the cross and simply putting it as a variable
in a theological equation, or placing it within pop religion
And I appreciate that she is writing from this perspective as a pastor and a preacher.
I I love the the pastoral and the preaching tones that that come through in her book.
And so if you’re not a preacher or a pastor, don’t worry.
Um there’s still a lot that you can learn.
Because though she writes this book as an academic, she is writing to you.
She’s writing to a follower of Jesus who attends church every Sunday, who wants to enter into the mystery and the power of the cross.
Rutledge is really writing for the benefits of all of us.
She she says in the the very beginning in her introduction, she writes,
This volume is designed to honor the complexity of the New Testament witness, while at the same time encouraging the reader to trust that the message of the crucified Lord
is directed straight to every heart with the enabling and liberating power of the Holy Spirit
And I want to try to draw out those themes.
I’m going to skip over some of the academic and theological argumentation and really just get to some of her conclusions.
Because as a pastor and preacher, she wants this work of theology to transform our hearts.
And it certainly has for me.
So she wants to reclaim what she calls the scandal of the cross against churches that want to skip over the hideousness.
And as she says, the irreligious nature of the cross.
And she wants to put our
thinking about the cross into the big story that the Bible is telling.
So instead of rushing towards
Atonement theories, that is, the speculation upon what the death of Jesus means, she really wants to ground our understanding
And our redemptive transformation of the cross using the language
of the scriptures, primarily the New Testament, but drawing upon the Old Testament as well.
And so she writes in the introduction that the cross
undercuts our tendency to smooth over the tension we have in the Christian faith.
Some Christians are happy with ignoring the tensions
Some Christians, they just want the Christian faith to be packaged in a nice, simple, step-by-step list of principles, but that’s not the real Christian faith.
Our faith is filled with lots of tension that cause us to wrestle.
I mean, is God one or is God three?
You know, the mystery of the Trinity.
That’s one of our central tensions.
How can God be one in God’s essence and nature, and yet God revealed in three persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
There’s a tension there
I mean, is God high and lifted up, ruling over everything?
Or is God close and near?
and found in moments of suffering and in the secret place of prayer.
Theologians would say, is God
imminent is that in that is God close or is God transcendent?
Well there’s a tension there because God is both.
What about God’s actions with us?
Does God forgive sinners or punish sinners?
What do we see in the scriptures?
We see attention because we see both.
Is Jesus human or is Jesus God?
Is the Bible humanly written or divinely inspired?
There’s all of these tensions, and the cross becomes a way for us to realize that we are not called to solve these quote-unquote problems.
We’re not to eliminate the tension, but we are to live in it.
And the cross itself
Is the ultimate tension in our faith because in Jesus God comes to rule and reign and save and rescue.
But he does that through suffering and death.
So Rodrich is going to take us through the scripture
She’s going to take us through all these different biblical images, she calls them motifs
Because there’s lots of imagination used by biblical writers to describe the death of Jesus
And there’s not just one image or one motif or one way of looking at the cross
She invites us to join her in a journey of exploring the scripture to see all of the different kinds of images.
Okay, so that’s uh some of the highlights from the introduction.
Let’s jump into to chapter one, and that’s all we’re going to look at today.
And she opens and closes chapter one with an important statement.
She writes, The crucifixion as the touchstone of Christian authenticity
The unique feature by which everything else, including the resurrection, is given its true significance.
It is in the crucifixion that the nature of God is truly revealed
So if we think about the cross in the big story the Bible is telling, the cross is in some sense the climax.
The Bible is slowly revealing to us who the God of creation is.
And the climax of that revelation is the crucifixion.
This is what God is like.
God is like Jesus in co-suffering love upon the cross
And in chapter one, she identifies Gnosticism as a challenge to understanding the cross.
Gnosticism was the first Christian heresy
The Gnostics believed that Jesus did not have a physical body, that Jesus appeared to be human.
but was a divine being without human flesh and blood, which would then mean he did not die on the cross and he did not rise on the third day
The Gnostics taught that salvation was obtained by learning secret knowledge from Jesus
Gnostic comes from the Greek word gnosis, which means knowledge.
And while it was rejected as a heresy by the apostles
I mean you can read John saying, anyone who says Jesus didn’t come in a human body, let him be accursed.
So from the very, very beginning, we’ve rejected Gnosticism.
But this idea that all we need is knowledge for salvation and that Jesus, eh, maybe he was human, maybe not, that error, it continues to stick around
Rutledge says virtually all human religion is Gnostic.
Most human religion around the world
is focused on knowledge and principles, learning reality in a certain way so that one can receive
uh salvation in in whatever form offered in those religions.
But the cross
Helps us to keep those false ideas about the Christian faith at bay
Gnosticism causes us to ignore what is really, really true.
And that is, God came to rescue and save in a human life in Jesus Christ.
Through his death on the cross.
And so after her discussion of Gnosticism in chapter one, then she turns to talk a little bit about
the crucifixion in the Gospels.
I find this helpful at the very, very start.
She is going to spend a lot of time.
in the passages of Scripture in Paul’s writings in particular.
But I appreciate that she begins by talking about the Gospels, because there is a poor way of thinking and reflecting on the cross.
By simply reading Paul’s reflections on the meaning of the cross in 1 Corinthians and Romans and Galatians and on and on and on.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s good to do that, and Rutledge is going to do that.
I’ve done that in my Bible study on the crucifixion.
I’ve taken passages from Paul, and we spend time with that.
That’s good
But there is a wrong thinking that says, well, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they tell us what happened, but then Paul tells us how to understand the meaning.
I agree with Rutledge that it’s important to read about the death of Jesus straight from the gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
I did this a couple of years ago in my Bible reading.
That was maybe three or four years ago.
And I’m I’m reading, as you know, I use the Daily Office Lectionary, a two-year Bible reading plan.
And during the season of Lent, I was in the Gospel of John, and the lectionary gives us small little snippets, but I begin to notice a recurring theme in John 18 and 19.
And so after reading one morning, I kind of went back and I began to see something in John’s portrayal, in John’s account of the death of Jesus.
And what stood out to me was how often the language of king or kingdom was mentioned
It’s interesting in John’s Gospel, in John 1.
29, we have the witness of John the Baptist saying, Behold the Lamb of God.
Who takes away the sin of the world.
In the opening of John’s Gospel, in the very, very first chapter, we see that Jesus is the sacrificial lamb.
Rutledge is going to talk about blood sacrifice.
We’ll spend lots of time in that.
But for ancient Jewish readers
And listeners to hear John the Baptist say, this is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, is to draw back to the Exodus, to Passover.
where the ancient people of God would bring a lamb, an unblemished lamb, into their home, they would kill the lamb, and then they would apply blood from the lamb on the doorposts and the lentil.
So over the the framing of the door they would apply blood.
And so when death came
in the form of judgment of Israel, the death angel would pass over where it saw the blood.
So John opens his gospel with a reference back to Exodus, that Jesus is the sacrificial lamb.
But here’s what I saw in John 18 and 19, and that is Jesus dies as a king.
And so I encourage you to do that.
Go through John chapter 18 and 19 and just circle or underline.
Highlight every time you see the word king or kingdom.
Now, I’ll give you just a quick snippet.
In John 18, 33 through 37.
Uh, here’s what John writes.
Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, Are you the king of the Jews?
Jesus answered, Do you ask this of your own accord, or did others tell you about me?
Pilate replied,
I am not a Jew, am I?
Your own nation and the chief priest have handed you over to me.
What have you done
Jesus answered, My kingdom is not from this world.
If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.
But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.
Pilate asked him, So you are a king?
Jesus answered, You said that I am a king
For this I was born, and for this I came into the world to testify to the truth.
Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to me
So just in that small little bit of scripture, just those four verses, did you notice how often king and kingdom is talked about?
This is what happens in Jesus’ trial with Pontius Pilate before his crucifixion and death.
Because remember the words of the Creed
In the Creed, we say that we believe that Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate.
Why is Pilate’s name mentioned in our creeds?
I think it’s to highlight what we see in John’s Gospel, that Jesus dies, yes, as the sacrificial lamb, but Jesus also dies as a king.
So we get both of those images or motifs just in John’s Gospel.
Jesus dying as a sacrificial lamb and Jesus dying as our king.
And sadly for me, many Christians have missed the king image in the death of Jesus.
And I don’t know how we missed it.
Perhaps we missed it because we were skipping over John’s gospel if we wanted to understand the cross and run right to Paul’s letters.
But if we stop and give Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John the opportunity
To show us what was happening as Jesus was dying, we began to see important elements of the gospel.
And a part of that is Jesus is dying as a king.
He was executed because he was a king, a rival king to Caesar.
And in the Roman Empire, Caesar would have no rival.
Again, it’s surprising that we’ve missed this because there was a sign affixed to the cross above Jesus’ head
And do you remember what that sign said?
It said, This is the king of the Jews
So Rutledge here in chapter one is talking about the value of reading the Gospels, and I completely agree.
In doing so, I’ve learned so much.
Uh she also connects crucifixion with the incarnation, that Jesus became human.
to suffer as a human for all humanity, which is so good and so important.
When I wrote my Bible study series, God in the Neighborhood,
I wanted to write three Bible studies that would pull together the incarnation of Jesus, that is Jesus becoming human.
His crucifixion, his dying as a human for humanity, and then his resurrection.
And I’ve said over the years that the resurrection is the linchpin of our faith.
In other words, if Jesus did not rise from the dead, then everything else falls apart.
If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then his crucifixion was a defeat.
And so the resurrection helps us to rightly understand the cross, that the cross is not a defeat.
The cross is actually a victory.
It’s the victory of God over sin and death and Satan and hell.
And so we rejoice with resurrection and Easter tide.
But we’re getting ready for Lent.
So let’s don’t jump too soon into Resurrection Joy.
Let’s join Fleming Rutledge through her book.
To reflect and to meditate on how important the death of Jesus is.
So I call the resurrection the linchpin
And Rutledge calls the crucifixion the touchstone of Christian authenticity
So she ends chapter one the way she begins it by stating, and I love this line.
The crucifixion is the touchstone of Christian authenticity, the unique feature.
by which everything else, including the resurrection, is given its true significance.
And to that I say amen
So in the episodes that will follow, we’re going to walk through this massive 600-page book.
She spins four chapters
First, just setting things up.
She’s going to talk about the awfulness of sin.
There is a little excursion into Anselm.
We’ll talk a little bit about that.
And then the bulk of the book is exploring the images of Jesus’ death throughout the scripture.
And she’s going to sum up all those images in two categories.
uh substitutionary sacrifice is one category and then victory and triumph is another category.
And so we’re going to have many, many episodes to come exploring that.
So I do hope that you subscribe and that you take time in your week to listen to each of these.
What I’m doing is I’m reading Rutledge for you so you don’t have to read a 600-page book.
But I think in doing so, it will cause you during the season of Lent
To draw near to Christ crucified.
And that I believe is central for our spiritual formation.
Well, thank you for joining me for this episode.
That’s all I have for you today.
Go in peace.
And be kind
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.