This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s talk about your magnum opus, The Crucifixion. How has the Cross been central to your own pastoral call and sustaining of ministry for the last 50 years?
Well, I’ve had two ministries. The chief one was preaching, but I also have done pastoral ministry. And in both my roles, I’ve seen the one thing about Christianity that makes it different from everything else—and that calls for a response—is that this man, whom we worship as the Son of God and Lord of the universe, gave himself up deliberately to the worst, most degrading, most torturous, most public sort of death that the human brain has ever come up with.
This is not sufficiently recognized in today’s preaching and teaching about Christianity. We’re all over the place with “spirituality,” whatever that is (you can quote that), but focusing on “Jesus Christ and him crucified,” that’s very specific [1 Cor. 2:2]. It’s specific about a human being. Who was he? Why was he? Why is he even remembered? I’ve been making a statement about this for at least 30 years, and I keep expecting somebody to correct me and give me a contrary fact: If Jesus of Nazareth had not been raised from the dead, we would never have heard of him.
Crucified people disappeared. That was the purpose of crucifixion—to annihilate them, to erase them from the human record with the most degrading mode of public “disappearing” someone that has ever been imagined. And I mean that almost as literally as I can. The Cross and Resurrection are one event—you can’t have one without the other. If Jesus had not been raised from the dead, we never would have heard of him. He would have been eliminated by means of crucifixion. Not by being dead, but by being dead in that particular way invented by the Romans to erase a person’s humanity. So we must ask, What does that mean? Why did God choose this?
As we think about the ways we can minimize the Cross, either by sanitizing it or even overextending it into a spectacle, how can faithful Christian preachers talk about the Cross rightly? In your book, you discuss metaphors building throughout the Old Testament to talk about what is happening during the Crucifixion. How do we begin to give the Cross its due without falling into either of those ditches: minimizing it through sentimentality or sensationalizing its violence?
I think that the nonliturgical churches have a problem, because there is no set time of year which requires the preacher to go deeply into the richness and variety of the word pictures on the Crucifixion. It’s quite possible to go directly to Easter. I don’t know how to change that. Classes could help. I think every serious Christian should be able to go to a class about the Cross, meeting weekly for two or three months. It seems to me that would be almost required for Christian formation.
Christians who are serious about delving into the profoundest heart of our faith need to encourage their pastors—if they’re not pastors themselves—to teach them, to conduct classes and study groups about what the Bible says about the death of
the Messiah.
I don’t know of any book that quite attempts what I attempted in dealing with the large number of themes that we find in the Scriptures. There are so many imaginative attempts by the writers to probe into the depth and heart of what is happening on the cross. We cannot and should not and must not pin down just one meaning, like blood sacrifice for instance, or penal substitutionary atonement. While these meanings are true, narrowing to just one meaning has been a terrible mistake, robbing us of the richness of the biblical witness.
How have American evangelical churches that tend to be nondenominational or nonliturgical missed out on something about the Cross based on some of that history you mention?
It is a profound problem in our culture when there is this triumphalist appropriation of the name of Jesus Christ for political ends. It’s the oversimplification of the meaning of the name of Jesus Christ, so that people can have T-shirts that say “Jesus Christ is my Savior” at the same time that they are violently—or if not violently then with verbal violence—assaulting Christians who have a different way of looking at current issues, like immigration, welcoming the stranger, and offering mercy for those who are in desperate need. These things are central to Christian faith, but they are completely absent in a discussion dominated by Christian nationalism.
I’ve noticed that a number of people, most famously Tom Holland, have written about how until the rise of Christianity, it was the law of the jungle everywhere: The powerful dominate and the weak fare as they must. We’ve just heard recently from a presidential adviser, Stephen Miller, describing there’s only been one rule: the law of the jungle. No mention of the fact that before Jesus Christ’s preaching and teaching, his death and resurrection, and the subsequent transformation of Western civilization, we didn’t know anything else. The Roman Empire did not know anything about mercy to the poor.
Christianity brought something quite new into the human picture: mercy to the downtrodden, to the hopeless, to the powerless, to the forgotten, the despised, the exiled. Those are precisely the people that Jesus made a point of reaching out to (not that he didn’t hesitate confronting the big shots also). Today, we’re just allowing his name to be bandied about on T-shirts and baseball caps without telling people who he really was.
I think people have been seduced by this idea of “being spiritual” as a “religious” way of getting what you desire, or of entering into a “different state of consciousness” or “making the world a better place.” I don’t think the church is doing anywhere near enough to simply teach who Jesus was and bear witness to who he was. There are robust ways to identify Jesus as present in power—and in preaching and teaching and ministry and mission—that are better and more transformative as a society as a whole than just calling his name with a soft voice and singing a song to him.
What can be done for the American Christian church to take Jesus for who he is?
I think that those of us who are concerned about our failure to bear witness to Jesus must all boldly say, one human being to another, “Have you met Jesus? Do you know Jesus? I know him. I want you to meet him. Let me tell you about him.” We need to do that. Being an old-line Episcopalian, I have a lot of trouble with that myself. Thank God I had a Southern Baptist grandmother, so I do it from the pulpit much more easily.
That’s what the growth of the church depends on: that more people should meet Jesus. That more people should come to know Jesus in his fullness—as some of the older evangelicals say, to know him personally. The trouble with that was that it became stylized, reduced into a sort of rite of passage, so that to know Jesus personally meant you had to have a specific wham-bang kind of encounter with Jesus. (I’ve never had one of those, but I’ve known him since I was a tiny child because of my grandmother.)
Knowing Jesus is the work of a lifetime, like getting to know the person you’re married to—except not. Jesus is other. He is one of us, yet he is other than us. He does not have any of our foibles and faults. Was he irritating the way one’s spouse can be irritating? No, he was irritating in another way. He was irritating in a way that got him killed, but at the same time, people who were poor, incurable, and untouchable came to him.
So in our own times of feeling hopeless and helpless and untouchable, we come to him, because he has already come to us. He promised us he would never leave us. He promised he would always be with us, even to the end of the world. And unlike human beings, he’s the only person who can keep his promises.
Everything about Jesus should be about promise. It all rises out of promise, carries through in promise, and will be ultimately confirmed in promise, the only promise that can ever be made, that can be kept: the promises of Jesus.
The Resurrection, the harbinger of the promise, is an event that’s never happened before and until the last days will never happen again. Because it is of God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Resurrection is something out of nowhere. It’s because it comes from the Creator who creates out of nowhere. If God created the universe out of nothing, he can create new believers out of nothing.
I want to go back to what you said about the Resurrection and Crucifixion being one event.
If it hadn’t been for the Resurrection, we would never have heard of the Crucifixion. But also, the Resurrection being a unique event in the history of the world says something definitive and final about God, something that eludes human understanding or ability to replicate, duplicate, or even explain. That’s why it’s so difficult to preach on Easter Day. It’s beyond imagination.
There has never been anything like the Resurrection before, and there is never going to be anything like it again until the last trumpet. And we don’t know how to talk about something like that. The only thing we can do is to try to go in the pulpit and be amazed. Just be amazed.
I want to be a little more clear. We have been so wrapped up in everything from self-help to wellness, spirituality, these modern fads. The very word spirituality is foreign to the Bible. So much of what counts as “spirituality” is a way of talking about faith with language based on the self, the development of the self, and care given to the self. That is not the way that Christianity unfolds. The self must indeed respond to the call of Jesus to be among his friends and disciples—this is not incidental, but the response of the self is not central either. Life changes when you meet Jesus. It changes your life—radically—but it doesn’t change your life just to make you a better you. It changes your life to make you a light going outward to others who are in the darkness (“Let my little light shine”).
So it’s not about you. Emphasis on self-growth, self-attention, self-care—that’s antithetical to Christian faith. Christ shows us the way: that in losing ourselves we find ourselves. Our true self is in relationship with the Lord Jesus. There, we will know our true selves and be freed from the false self that is enslaved by the Enemy. I haven’t talked about the Enemy, but that’s a very important part of the message. Know that there is an enemy. Jesus is the victor over the Enemy. And we are his guerilla fighters.
Fleming Rutledge is a preacher, teacher, and best-selling author. Her book The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ is considered a modern classic.
This article appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Theologian Fleming Rutledge sits down with CT’s Ashley Hales to discuss the crucifixion, Resurrection and how Christianity isn’t self-help.".
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