According to Fleming Rutledge, that is. From her stellar collection of reflections on Christ’s Passion, The Undoing of Death, pgs 142-144:
“Religious figures are not usually associated with disgrace and rejection. We want our objects of worship to be radiant, dazzling avatars offering the potential of transcendent happiness. The most compelling argument for the truth of Christianity is the Cross at its center. Humankind’s religious imagination could never have produced such an image. Wishful thinking never projected a despised and rejected Messiah. There is a contradiction at the very heart of our faith that demands our attention. We need to put a sign on it, though, like the signs on trucks carrying chemicals: Hazardous material, highly inflammatory cargo. Handle at your own risk.”
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3 responses to “The Most Compelling Argument for the Truth of Christianity”
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YES!
Yes. The peculiarity of Christianity as a religion is that it is anti-religious in nature. Anti-religious; contradicting normal religion. Christians discovered God not in heaven or in thunderous command but in and as a mere man. A severely unlikely thing. This upset the religious people of the day so much that they rejected him and murdered him. The despised Christ must be understood in this way, as an intolerable thing to human religious conception. Later the Cross was understood as another contradiction wherein God sacrifices his Own for us, a reversal of all earlier religious teaching that stressed humans must always make sacrifices to God. It’s true–the founding story of Christ is one that opposes, reverses the normal religious blueprint.
Absolutely YES.