Favorite Quotes: Christus Victor and the Making New of All Things
He who hung the earth is hanging.
He who fixed the heavens in place has been fixed in place.
He who laid the foundations of the universe has been laid on a tree.
The master has been profaned.
God has been murdered…But He rose up from the dead
and mounted up to the heights of heaven.
When the Lord hath clothed Himself with humanity,
and had suffered for the sake of the sufferer,
and had been bound for the sake of the imprisoned,
and had been judged for the sake of the condemned,
and had been buried for the sake of the one who had been buried,
He rose up from the dead,
and cried with a loud voice,
“Who is it that contends with me?
Let him stand in opposition to me.
I set the condemned man free;
I gave the dead man life;
I raised up one who had been entombed.
Who is my opponent?
I am the Christ
I am the one who destroyed death,
and triumphed over the enemy,
and trampled Hades underfoot,
and bound the strong one,
and carried off humanity
to the heights of heaven.”
“It is I,” says the Christ.
This Easter finds me at the happy convergence of three memorable texts (my life’s story could pretty much be told in terms of what I read). The first is this one, Melito of Sardis’ (ca. A.D. 195) remarkable Easter sermon (I’ve extracted lines from near the end of the sermon) — a text that Bob Webber often extolled for its so-called “Christus Victor” theme.
God is crucified so that humanity can rise, Melito practically sings. This death of God and resurrection of man is the means by which “the One who sits on the throne’ says, ‘I make all things new’” (Revelation 21:5). This “all things” is, well, “all things.” Praise be. Art is new. Science is new. As are gardening, cooking, playing, singing.
It was with Melito’s sermon dancing around in my brain that I serendipitously came upon this thought from sociologist Werner Stark:
The truths of religion can be much more easily and much less inadequately expressed in artistic than in linguistic terms — or better, in the language of art than in the language of science. St. Thomas Aquinas’s hymns are much more convincing, so far as live faith is concerned, than even his best arguments. … Max Weber coined a more remarkable phrase than he knew when he called himself on one occasion “religiously deaf.” But those who can hear will find, for instance, in Anton Bruckner’s Te Deum a statement of faith, which is not only supremely moving but also experientially satisfying and convincing. The rationalistic demotion of art to something ‘merely sentimental’ is not the least disservice which the discursive intellect has done to religion, and, indeed, to all humanity. The fact is and remains that the rationalist as such has no ear for the divine call (Werner Stark, Sociology of Religion, Vol IV [ Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969], p. 72).
The third text is complement to the second: R.R. Reno’s commendation in First Things (Mar. 27, 2009) of David Hart’s new book Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale, 2009) — a book that is an attempt to get the “religiously deaf” to listen to their own folly. From Reno’s remarks I extract but this thought:
“The revolutions that genuinely alter human reality at the deepest levels,” Hart writes, “are those that first convert the minds and wills, that reshape the imagination and reorient desire, that overthrow tyrannies within the soul.” Christianity caused such a revolution, and it did so, Hart claims, with its fundamental claim about Christ: In him each one of us can join our humble humanity to the glory and holiness of God.
Honor, laud, and glory to our crucified and risen Christus Victor.
And fivefold thanks.
Thanks, first, for the utter graciousness by which Jesus came.
Thanks, second, for the loving faithfulness that brought Jesus back from death to life.
Thanks, third, for the Spirit’s kiss by which I find myself astonishingly not “religiously deaf.”
Thanks, fourth, for the host of gifted saints and fellow-travelers (from all times and all places) who have given us such stunning musical and artistic expressions of the glory of Holy Week’s story.
Thanks, fifth, for the fact that ours is a faith that satisfies the itch to compose hymns and that prompts us to make our best arguments as well.





He who hung the earth is hanging.
TV doctor Gregory House is one of the most cleverly written characters going. You want to crown the boor with his own cane, then you see a flash of humanity and illumination. There’s more than meets the eye. The tiny hand of an unborn child grasps his finger during neonatal surgery (Season 3, “Fetal Position”). House’s eyes unmask him: his own aspirations for relationship mock his pretense at believing we are nothing more than parts that have somehow been randomly, if complicatedly, assembled. House will never admit it, but he doesn’t have to. You know he now knows what Dylan (and then Hendrix) knows:
In John’s gospel Nicodemus also takes up a Dylanesque watchtower song. Liberal commentators treat Nicodemus, “a man of the Pharisees … a ruler of the Jews” (John 3:1) as a figment of the gospel writer’s imagination. Conservatives dismiss him as a dull blade (as if any of us would have been a fig more astute ourselves in theological dialogue with Jesus).
BACH, BUBBA, AND THE BLUES BROTHERS: THE SINGING SAVIOR’S MANY VOICES
Call me Rodney King, but I continually ask myself, “Why can’t we all just get along?” In the Spring 1998 Reformed Quarterly, RTS/Orlando Professor Mike Glodo wrote eloquently of the beauty of the Singing Savior of Psalm 22, of the fact that Jesus sang once and for all Israel’s lament of abandonment (the first half of Psalm 22), so we could sing the victory chant of redemption (the second half of Psalm 22).
Reason No. 7: Two Rouault museums in downtown Tokyo.
In downtown Tokyo there are not one but two museums given to the art of Georges Rouault, the
Both museums, of course, were between major showings of Rouault’s works, so between the two museums there were but twelve paintings on display (which is exactly twelve more than I had ever been able to see except in art books). And naturally, “Christ with Arms Raised” will be “prominently displayed,” so we were assured, in the Idemitsu’s Rouault Retrospective which was to begin eleven days after we left Japan. Asked if there was any way we could see it anyway, we were politely rebuffed (everybody in Japan is exquisitely polite), “Sorry, it’s not even in the museum. It’s in our warehouse being prepped for the exhibition.”
But, my goodness, were the colors and the textures and the composition of the paintings we did get to see magnificent! I had no idea Rouault laid the paint on as thickly as he did. Or that his colors are really as vivid and as evocative as they are. Or that his clown faces could be as sad as they are up close. Or that his biblical landscapes could draw you in as effectively as they do.
“We Cretans are (religious) liars,” confesses the prophet. “God’s grace became incarnate to teach us godliness,” counters Paul.
I wrote all that up in more scholarly form some time ago in
The writing comes on the heels of three lectures and some valuable interchange with University of Florida students at the
In a word, Paul says that Christians should not only be passively obedient, say, in praying for government (1Tm 2) and in paying taxes (Rom 13), but beyond those duties we should be ready “for every good work” (Titus 3:1). He’s talking about works done in the public square, not in the Christian ghetto.
But before I stop keyboarding, I also have to recommend a sobering article by David Brooks of the New York Times, 
I’m grateful to Thomas Howard for Dove Descending, his commentary on T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” But why must Eliot be so pointedly obtuse as to need line-by-line decoding? (Though I suspect some of my students would think I find in Eliot a kindred spirit.) Having forced my way through “Prufrock” and “Hollow Men” and “Wasteland” last week, I’m ready for some words of redemption. I’m just getting started on “Four Quartets” — I love the notion of there being “a way up that is at one and the same time a way down,” but this poetry is tough going. (I hope I can get some help from Charlie Kidd when he returns from abroad.)
Last week while grading exams (almost done), I listened several times (and am doing so even now) to Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. The Alpine Symphony, a tribute to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, makes Nietzsche’s atheism (or at least his quest for a “nobler god”) feel so, I dunno, so what? Brave?
Then again, if your best hope is to have your ashes parked on the top of the Himalayas in a Chock Full o’Nuts can (per The Bucket List, which movie Shari sat me down to watch this weekend, and which movie felt to me like an extended commentary on how to make Nietzsche work for you — even if the main characters do make non-Nietzschean moves toward relationships), you move past bravery into, well, again, what?
My head still hurts (that good hurt when your head feels like it’s taken in more than it’s able) from how rich the
Like I said, random thoughts … but, hey, it’s my blog.
61 years ago today (thanks, John Muether), life changed for people in this country, when Jackie Robinson first took the field for Branch Rickey’s Brooklyn Dodgers.
Praise be to God for Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ, the book that gave Rickey the words with which to couch the challenge to Robinson.
Plus, on reflection, it was great to be reminded that, recent setbacks notwithstanding, I am still able to afford a few simple pleasures, like the music of John Tavener and the prose of Wendell Berry. More, paying off reimbursements from preaching and worship leading at Lookout Mtn. Pres. two weekends ago brought refreshing memories of a healing time with old and new friends.
Reliving last weekend’s sword tournament gave me one more opportunity to give thanks that Randy has found something he does remarkably well … as well as one more opportunity to give thanks that, as event registrar, I’m learning to serve outside my area of gifting.