What is cross theology / theology of the cross?

This brings us to verses 18 to 24, a great passage wherein the real force and bearing of the cross of Christ is revealed to us: the cross, that is, as passing the sentence of condemnation upon man, and of destruction upon his wisdom; while at the same time it brings in the power and wisdom of God for the salvation of those who believe. The cross of Christ is the point at which in supreme measure the world took upon itself to join issue with God. It put the Son of God to death, a death of extremes" contempt and shame. God accepted the challenge, and in result the cross also became the supreme proof of the folly of human wisdom, of the disqualification and repudiation by God of even the greatest and wisest of men. Because of this, Paul was sent to preach the Gospel in a way that gave no quarter to human wisdom.

Because of this, also, the cross stands as "the great divide" amongst men whenever it is faithfully preached. On the one side of it stand "them that perish," on the other "us which are saved." To which class any individual belongs may be discerned by observing that individual's attitude toward the preaching of the cross. To the one it is but foolishness, for they adhere to the world and its wisdom. To the other it is the power of God, and that to salvation. God saves by the foolishness of the preaching. The point of this remark in verse 21 is not that preaching appears a foolish method — as compared with working, for instance — but that the actual message preached — the word of the cross — is foolishness according to human notions, but is wisdom and power according to God.

By the cross of Christ is meant much more than the means of pardon for the sinner. To treat it only as the great remedy for man's need, however true as far as it goes, is to rob it of an immense deal of its importance as well as to obscure the truth and shut out God's glory. For in that most stupendous of all facts, what has not come to issue? God's holy hatred and judgment of sin; His amazing love of the sinner; the infinite grace, humiliation, and suffering of the Saviour; the audacity and craft of Satan; the abominable wickedness of man, under the best possible circumstances and, spite of the greatest benefits, without cause to justify or excuse to palliate: all met, as nowhere else, in the cross. There are the pretensions of man crushed; sin condemned and put away; Satan defeated and vanquished; judgment borne; and God glorified in Christ who knew no sin made sin for us, that we might become God's righteousness in Him. There only indeed divine attributes and ways, which our sin had otherwise seemed to set aside or at variance, are now conciliated for ever on behalf of those that believe, and a firm basis laid for the ruined creation, as well as the people of God, to be made new and shine unto eternal ages to the glory of God. Yet all this would be rendered vain by that wisdom of speech which some in the Corinthian church were ignorantly affecting and blaming Paul because it was far from him.

But the Corinthians were in danger who shrank from the facts of the gospel and desired to hear the philosophy of the christian scheme. "For the word of the cross is to those that perish foolishness, but to us that are to be saved it is God's power." (Ver. 18.) The cross bespeaks the lowest extreme of human shame and suffering. It was the severest penalty for a slave. That the Son of God should stoop not merely to the nature of man but to the death of the cross, and this in atonement for man to God as well as in rejection of God by man, seems the depth of folly to those who, ignorant of their own sinfulness and of the holiness of God, must needs perish, living and dying as they are. That He must suffer in order to save supposes the hopeless ruin of the race.

But it is also irreconcilable with every feeling of the natural heart that He would stoop so low to suffer for His enemies, and that God would give Him up to do so. For philosophy knows nothing truly of love in God, any more than of total ruin in man: the cross proclaims both, and that He who hung there in grace, suffering for our sin, that God might deliver us righteously, was Himself God over all as surely as He was man without sin. For the gospel was no effort or device of man's wit. Yea, the word of the cross is the deepest offence and the sheerest foolishness to him; but it is God's power, not wisdom only, to believers, "to us that are to be saved," for here, to bring it the more home, the apostle treats it as a personal fact instead of continuing his abstract statement. Salvation here, as elsewhere in this Epistle, is regarded as not complete till the Lord comes; it takes in the whole work of bringing us through till we are conformed to Christ in resurrection glory.

(Vv. 18-25). Philosophers prefer their learned dissertations; therefore the preaching of the Cross is to them that perish foolishness. The wise of this world do not see the glory of the Person Who was nailed to the Cross, and hence they do not see the love of God that gave Him to suffer, nor the holiness of God that demanded such a sacrifice, nor the utter ruin of man set forth in the Cross. All they see is a Man nailed to a Cross between two thieves; so the preaching of salvation through the Cross appears to them utter folly. Those who think thus are those who perish. To those who are saved the Cross is the power of God to save, for thereby God can righteously save the vilest sinner.

This obstinacy or levity of unbelief did not dishearten the apostle, but rather stimulated him in the work near to his heart. "But we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling-block and to Gentiles foolishness." It is not here simply the blood shed that makes atonement; and it is more to say "crucified" than dead; for though both declare the end of man in the flesh, there is the extreme of shame and weakness in the cross beyond elsewhere. That God then should save by virtue of the cross, where the world saw the worst of human suffering and humiliation, was to silence that wisdom, proving it to be folly which dared so to think and speak of His wisdom. Over the stone of stumbling fell the Jews who would only have a Messiah in power and glory. So will He come shortly, but where then will those Jews find themselves who were offended by His stooping to the cross in order to save those that believe? Where the Gentiles who preferred their own ideas and vaunted reasonings to the mighty work then wrought at infinite cost? Like the lightning shall the Son of man shine in His day; but first must He suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. For it was morally impossible for God's kingdom to be till sin was judged in the cross. How senseless and slow of heart were even disciples to see that so it must be if God was to be glorified and man righteously blessed and saved! But "to the called Christ," and Christ thus crucified, "is God's power and God's wisdom; because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men." (Vers. 24, 25) Any other way had compromised sin or made salvation impossible. The cross of Christ is the fullest display of God's judgment of sin and of His love to the sinner. What men taunted as foolishness and weakness, the incarnate Word suffering on a gibbet, equally proves man's utter ruin and God's saving mercy. So did the Saviour endure the judgment of sin that the believer might be saved. Is it not then wiser and stronger than men? Did not the resurrection prove, does not the gospel proclaim, it to be so?

As may be seen in the note in the New Translation, "the foolishness of preaching" does not refer to the act of preaching, but to its subject-matter. The apostle thus says in verse 23, "We preach Christ crucified … unto the Greeks foolishness." To those cultured intellectual men it savoured of complete folly to proclaim salvation through One who had been ignominiously put to death on a cross. It offended their pride, because it made nothing of man, and was the means by which God made foolish the wisdom of this world. Alas! the offence of the cross has not yet ceased; and hence every effort is being made to obscure, or to undermine, the character of the work which was wrought out in the death of Christ. That He died as a martyr all will gladly concede; but that He died under the hand of God, and therefore glorified Him on account of our sin, even many of the professed advocates of Christianity absolutely refuse. But "the foolishness of God" is "wiser than men," and the divinely-taught soul rejoices to know that the only foundation on which it can peacefully repose before God is that finished work, which was accomplished on Calvary, and which was testified to by the resurrection of Christ from among the dead.

(Vv. 1, 2). When Paul came to Corinth he made no appeal to the natural man by attempting to use excellency of speech or by a display of human wisdom. He came to announce the testimony of God concerning Jesus Christ and Him crucified. The great subject of his preaching was a Person — Jesus Christ — but that Person on a Cross, the lowest and most degraded position in which a man can be found. Paul tells these intellectual Corinthians that, in order that sinners be saved, Christ must go to the Cross. To give believers His place before God, He had to take their place before God. The Cross sets forth our true place before God as sinners. There is nothing dignified, or heroic, or noble about a cross. It is a place of shame and reproach, of judgment and death. To tell a man that this is his true place before God makes nothing of all his wisdom and greatness and grandeur. However wise, however rich, however well-born a man may be, the Cross tells him that, in spite of all that he may be before his fellow-men, in the sight of God he is a guilty sinner under the sentence of death and judgment. The preaching of the Cross thus makes nothing of all man's pride.

When Paul came to Corinth to preach the Gospel he did not endeavour to present his message in such a way as would naturally appeal to the learned Greeks. He preached Jesus Christ and Him crucified, telling them that the only way of procuring eternal salvation for their souls was to accept that Jesus died for their sins on the cross, and that He rose from the dead. It was foolishness to the learned of this world, asking them to believe in a Man who died upon a malefactor's cross, crucified in weakness. But what was foolishness to man was the wisdom and the power of God; for the cross was the fruit of God's wisdom, the means whereby His glory in regard to sin was secured and it was the power that brought salvation to ruined sinners.

It is not, then, ordinances, duties, self-denial, outward zeal, however proper these things may be in their place, but Christ and Him crucified that meets the sinner's need. He alone has triumphed over death. He only is the life, the truth, the way to the Father. He is the only Mediator between God and men. His blood the only fountain for sill and uncleanness. His death alone satisfied Divine justice. On Jesus, on the cross, God's fierce wrath was poured out, and His infinite holiness and truth vindicated. It is the death of Jesus on the cross that fully manifests man's ungodliness, and fully reveals God's abounding grace. Nowhere is sin's foul blackness so seen as in the cross, and nowhere else is sin condemned and put away. Without the death of the cross, Jesus taught there could be no salvation; and it was to the cross alone that He directed Nicodemus for eternal life. The apostles preached "Christ crucified;" and Paul said, "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world." "The cross, its burthen — oh, how great! No strength but His could bear its weight; No love but His would undertake To bear it for the sinner's sake."

The cross of Christ is the witness of the utter folly of man’s boasted wisdom, and though to the mind of man it may appear both weakness and foolishness on the part of God, it is really the demonstration of His power and wisdom. It is His power, for by it He has paralysed the forces of the devil, annulled death, glorified Himself in His attributes and nature, made salvation righteously possible for the human race, laid a firm foundation upon which can be, and shall be, built up a moral universe immune from the power of evil; and it is the place where, not only has His condemnation of sin been expressed in the sight of every intelligent creature, but where also has come to light the unspeakable love of His heart. And it is His wisdom, for where the creature would have supposed everything to be lost, it was just there that everything was gained. It was the only way by which His eternal counsels could have been fulfilled, the only way by which our severance from the old order could have been effected, the only way by which we could have been placed “holy and without blame before Him in love,” and on the ground of which we could have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.”

And the Greeks, they may say it is foolishness; but when death strikes, where is all human wisdom? Indeed, often before death, many of the wisest intellects are reduced to utter inability to reason, or to even remember. But here is death, the violent death of the curse, proclaimed as the means of eternal blessing to mankind. And it cuts down everything that is merely of man, everything that would tend to exalt man's pride, levelling Jews and Gentiles practically to the dust of the earth, but with the precious object of lifting them out of it. Actually, the wonder of it is worthy of the utmost admiration, and it is nothing but the pride of man that refuses it; whether religious pride, as with the Jew, or intellectual pride, as with Gentiles. But to those who are called, Christ is seen as the power of God, power manifested through such weakness as the Jews despised; and the wisdom of God, far above and beyond all that Greek philosophy could imagine.