Dogmatic When It Matters

The Apostle Paul’s consuming passion was the Cross of Christ

If ever there was a dogmatic statement, this is it: “I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). It is dogmatic in personal resolve, and it is dogmatic in expression. In some ways it might be considered the life-long theme of the Apostle Paul. Certainly it is the theme of the First Epistle to the Corinthians; it runs as a leitmotiv from beginning to end.

These Christians, among whom there was strife, were reminded that “other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (3:11). If they were to account to Paul for what they had become, it was because they had “not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel” (4:15). If there seemed to be urgency in the way Paul went about his task, it was because the time for doing the Lord’s work was short (7:29). If there was a readiness on his part to sacrifice everything, it was because he did not want to put any obstacle in the way of the Gospel (9:12). If it seemed to them that he was blowing only one note on his trumpet, it was because he desired that the trumpet yield a certain sound, a note that would come through loud and clear (14:8). If they wanted to know what gave him confidence, they should remember that the risen Lord had also appeared to him, last of all, as one born out of due time (15:8).

This was an ordered preoccupation. It did not mean that the Apostle Paul was unconcerned with the other articles of faith or other issues in life. But all other matters were subordinate to and oriented toward this central truth.

Then as now, a church without this coherence in its gospel preaching could not be a cohesive church, let alone a Christian church. Yet in the Church today, doctrine or any dogmatic utterance, if not denigrated, is at least greatly de-emphasized. Recently, in a sermon by one of today’s angry young churchmen, the Lutherans were compared to the Pharisees of Jesus’ day because of their concern for doctrine. The not very subtle jibe was meant to charge the church with failing to reach modern man because it is coming to him with doctrines that are “irrelevant” to the issues he faces.

Paul would not buy that criticism. He reminds the Corinthians that “when I came to you, [I] came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (2:1, 2).

The Apostle had one consuming passion in life, a compelling dogmatic urgency. Need we ask where the cross stood in Paul’s life? He’ll tell us: front and center! “We preach Christ crucified,” he told these Corinthians (1:23a). “God forbid,” he wrote to the Galatians, “that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (6:14a). After a life of taking beachheads under fire, the Apostle said in his farewell to the elders of Ephesus: “But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24). And in a similar vein he wrote to the Philippians: “Yea, doubtless, I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord [objective genitive!]; for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ” (3:8).

Just what did Paul see in the Cross? The religion of Jesus? Jesus as the first real Christian? The ideal or the spirit of Christ? Something to be inspired by? A faith to live by? A martyr who conquers his enemies, even in defeat? A symbol of human potential who gives the world fresh hope? Each of these possibilities smacks of the theology of glory (theologia gloriae), or ascent theology, which seeks by human power and prowess—through reverence, devotion, self-denial, self-sacrifice, and a host of other qualities—to make the ascent to God via a self-chosen “celestial ladder.”

To preach the cross in that way is to obscure it, and Paul would condemn the attempt. “God forbid!” Christ sent him, he says, “to preach the gospel: not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect” (1 Cor. 1:17). He had not been assigned to decorate the cross, to modify it, to beautify it, to make it more acceptable. Christ crucified meant blood, death, deepest humiliation and degradation. It also meant expiation, substitution, atonement, ransom, reconciliation, and justification—all stirring realities that are not irrelevant even today when preached in connection with the cross.

Jesus on the cross achieved something we could not, the “blotting out” of “the handwriting of ordinances that was against us” (Col. 2:14a). The cross became through him, by his death, the instrument whereby God reconciled the sinful world unto himself (Rom. 5:10 and 2 Cor. 5:19). It became the instrument whereby we draw near to God by the blood of his Son, as he told the Ephesians (2:13), whereby we have peace by the blood of the cross, as he wrote to the Colossians (1:20). “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Cor. 5:7b). Now “we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins” (Eph. 1:7a).

Christianity without this positive, dogmatic teaching and content, preached without this sublime dogmatic conviction, is not Christianity, no matter how spiritually or joyfully we go about religion. Luther charged Christendom with the solemn task under God: “Unum praedica, sapientiam crucis!” “Preach one thing, the wisdom of the cross!” This alone is genuine Gospel. And this Gospel, of which the Apostle Paul speaks and which human wisdom always rejects, alone is genuine Christian theology, theologia crucis, theology of the cross.

Some years ago, in the hills of California, an outdoor theater was dedicated with this inscription: “Amongst our eternal hills we build a shrine, sans creed, sans dogma, inspiring all mankind.” There were such places in Paul’s day too, and such formless and supposedly creedless theologies. But Paul had an answer for them all: “foolishness!” These made him all the more determined. “I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” No other resolve should more move Christian believers today—to grasp firmly the reality of the Gospel and to be dogmatic when it matters.

BEYOND THE NIGHT AND THE SLOUGH

When I had passed through

The mystic dark night,

The pilgrim’s slough—

Immersed into

A dizzying and overreaching Light,

“Make, Divine Spirit,”

I cried, “Holy Breath,

Thy Breathing mine

And my breath Thine

That I breathe wholly now, and beyond death.”

All past is bygone—

Expired—and the night

Lighted by One

By whom a sun

Seems black in the contrasting: Light of light.

HENRY HUTTO

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