The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ by Fleming Rutledge
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The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ
Fleming Rutledge
Bibliographic Information
Author: Rutledge, Fleming Full Title: The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Year of Publication: 2015 Pages: xxv + 669 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8028-4732-4 Series (if applicable): N/A
Author Background
Fleming Rutledge is an Episcopal priest and one of the first women ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church, a distinction that shapes both the institutional commitments and the polemical energy of this book, which is in part a sustained argument that the mainline Protestant denominations — her own tradition prominently included — have abandoned the cross as the center of their proclamation. She holds the M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary in New York, where she studied under J. Louis Martyn, Paul L. Lehmann, Raymond E. Brown, and Christopher Morse — a formation that accounts for the apocalyptic Pauline framework governing the book's most original theological claims. She served twenty-two years in parish ministry, fourteen of them at Grace Episcopal Church in New York City, and held two residential fellowships as a pastor-theologian at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton (1997–98 and 2002), which gave the project its decisive intellectual deepening. Her previous books are primarily sermon collections — including The Undoing of Death (2002), Not Ashamed of the Gospel (2007), and And God Spoke to Abraham (2011) — and they establish her reputation as a preacher of uncommon theological seriousness. The Crucifixion is her magnum opus, nearly two decades in the making, and it represents the convergence of pastoral experience, homiletical craft, and sustained theological reflection in a way that no other living preacher-theologian has attempted at this scale.
Rutledge's background bears on this volume in ways that reviewers should name precisely. She is best categorized within the Anglican/Episcopal tradition of the Theological Traditions Reference Guide, with a heavy theological overlay from the broadly Reformed-Barthian stream of continental Protestantism: Barth, Bonhoeffer, and the apocalyptic Paulinists trained at Union Seminary (Martyn, Käsemann, J. Christiaan Beker) form the intellectual center of gravity. This is not the Wesleyan-Anglican synthesis of much Episcopal theology, nor is it the via media of classical Anglicanism — it is a distinctly Barthian, theocentric, cross-centered Protestantism worn in Episcopal vestments. Reviewers should note that this background predisposes Rutledge against several positions popular in mainline Protestantism (moral exemplarism, creation-centered spirituality, kingdom-as-social-program theology) and generates an argument that is, in certain respects, more congenial to Reformed and Lutheran readers than to much of her own denomination's contemporary theological culture.
Thesis and Central Argument
Rutledge's governing thesis is that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ — in all its historical horror, its first-century social shame, and its theological immensity — is the irreplaceable center of Christian proclamation, and that no account of the gospel is adequate that does not reckon fully with the two interlocking categories that together explain why the cross was necessary and what it accomplished: atonement for Sin (understood as both personal transgression and cosmic Power), and God's apocalyptic invasion of the fallen order through Christ's death and resurrection to defeat the Powers of Sin, Death, and the Law that hold humanity captive. The book responds to a pastoral crisis: the progressive disappearance of cross-centered preaching from the mainline churches, driven by discomfort with the cross's scandal, with the apparent "violence" of atonement, and with the robust doctrine of Sin that a theology of the cross requires. Rutledge's proposed contribution is threefold — to show preachers that the cross must be preached; to demonstrate that the biblical witness to the cross is not reducible to any single "theory" but offers a multitude of mutually enriching motifs; and to argue that the deepest unity of those motifs is found in the concept of rectification — the making-right of a world radically disordered by Sin — which Rutledge proposes as the best rendering of the Greek dikaiosyne (usually translated "justification" or "righteousness") in the Pauline corpus.
Overview of Contents
The book divides into two major parts preceded by a substantial Introduction: Part 1 provides a broad theological overview of the cross and introduces the two governing interpretive categories; Part 2 works through eight biblical motifs of the crucifixion in sustained, chapter-length treatments. A "bridge chapter" on Anselm of Canterbury stands between chapters 3 and 4, and a Conclusion titled "Condemned into Redemption: The Rectification of the Ungodly" draws the whole together.
Introduction: The Introduction establishes the book's diagnostic premise and methodological vocabulary. Rutledge argues that the church's embarrassment about the cross is both historically novel and theologically catastrophic, and she frames the cross as an offense (skandalon) to be proclaimed rather than a problem to be managed. She introduces the language of "motifs" over against "theories," explaining that the NT writers do not present systematic arguments about the atonement but a rich, overlapping, and narratively embedded cluster of images, each of which bears genuine theological weight. She also introduces the two governing thought-categories — atonement for sin and the apocalyptic conquest of the Powers — and stipulates that Sin and Death will be capitalized throughout when they designate cosmic Powers in the Pauline sense, not merely individual transgressions. This typographical convention, drawn from the Martyn tradition, is one of the book's most productive conceptual moves: it signals to readers that something more radical than moral failure is in view, that the human situation requires deliverance, not merely improvement.
Part 1, Chapters 1–4 and the Anselm Bridge: Chapter 1, "The Primacy of the Cross," establishes the cross as the "touchstone of Christian authenticity" against which all other theological claims are tested, including — crucially — the resurrection. Rutledge argues that the resurrection does not supersede or relativize the cross but depends upon it for its full significance; taken alone, resurrection could be just another story of a god who cheated death. Chapter 2, "The Godlessness of the Cross," is among the most striking in the volume. Drawing on historical and archaeological research into Roman crucifixion practice — the scourging, the public nudity, the physiological mechanics of asphyxiation, the deliberate ritual of humiliation — Rutledge argues that the cross was designed not merely to kill but to dehumanize, to place the crucified definitively outside the bounds of human community. The "cry of dereliction" — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Ps. 22:1; Mark 15:34) — is given sustained attention here as the theological hinge of the crucifixion: Jesus takes upon himself the full weight of abandonment and godlessness that is the deepest consequence of human Sin, making him the ultimate Other and the site of God's definitive self-identification.
Chapter 3, "The Question of Justice," is perhaps the book's most ambitious single chapter — a sustained meditation on the relationship between human injustice and the cross, ranging across the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Václav Havel's essays on the collapse of Communism, the Holocaust, and the problem of horrendous evil in the tradition of Marilyn McCord Adams. Rutledge argues that the deep human hunger for justice that is never fully satisfied by any human institution — the impossibility of adequate reparation for the worst evils — is itself an anticipation of and pointer toward the divine justice accomplished at the cross. The chapter is long, digressive, and sometimes repetitive, but it performs its argument rhetorically as well as propositionally: the accumulation of unredressed evil creates the experiential pressure that makes "rectification" not merely a theological concept but a creaturely necessity.
The Bridge Chapter on Anselm is a distinctive contribution and deserves particular attention. Anselm's Cur Deus Homo? is routinely dismissed in contemporary theology as the origin of a "divine child abuse" model of the atonement, a charge Rutledge refutes with precision and considerable historical learning. She demonstrates that Anselm's "satisfaction" concept — the idea that human offense against God cannot simply be "passed by undischarged," that something commensurate with the offense must be rendered — is not a theory of punitive suffering inflicted by the Father on the Son, but an account of the disrupted moral order of the universe that requires repair from within. Rutledge's recovery of Anselm is one of the volume's most genuinely revisionary contributions: she reads him through Trinitarian eyes (the whole Godhead acts in concert throughout the atoning work) and positions his "satisfaction" as a complement to rather than competitor with the apocalyptic conquest of the Powers. Chapter 4, "The Gravity of Sin," introduces the Pauline category of Sin as Power — drawing centrally on Romans 5–8 — and argues that the cross is unintelligible if sin is understood merely as individual transgression rather than as a cosmic enslaving force from which humanity requires deliverance. The Carnegie/Carnegie episode — the industrial mogul's memoir progressing from evolutionary optimism to the stunned silence of the Great War — and the Lord of the Flies passage stand among the book's most memorable literary illustrations of the irreducibility of human depravity.
Part 2, Chapters 5–12: The eight motif chapters form the book's most expansive section and are the portion Rutledge most directly addresses to preachers. Each chapter takes up a biblical image, traces it through the OT background and NT development, situates it in the history of interpretation, and draws out its contemporary preaching significance. Chapter 5, "The Passover and the Exodus," establishes the Exodus as the controlling narrative matrix for understanding divine deliverance — God acts as the one who rescues the enslaved, not the one who rewards the deserving, and this grace-structure shapes the NT understanding of the cross at its deepest level. Chapter 6, "The Blood Sacrifice," is a careful treatment of the Levitical sacrificial system as the conceptual background for NT atonement language, including a nuanced engagement with recent anthropological and religio-historical scholarship on sacrifice that avoids both naive ritualism and the Girardian deconstruction that Rutledge regards as theologically inadequate. Chapter 7, "Ransom and Redemption," and Chapter 8, "The Great Assize," develop the forensic and redemptive-commercial imagery of the NT — ransom, lutron, the language of purchase and liberation — and the judicial imagery of the divine law court with considerable care, situating both within the larger apocalyptic narrative.
Chapters 9 and 10 are, as Rutledge herself signals, the most important and original sections of Part 2. Chapter 9, "The Apocalyptic War: Christus Victor," is the fullest expression of the book's governing theological framework. Drawing on Gustav Aulén's classic recovery of the Christus Victor motif, Barth's Church Dogmatics, Käsemann's radical apocalyptic reading of Paul, and Martyn's commentary on Galatians, Rutledge argues that the cross is above all the decisive battle in God's cosmic war against the enslaving Powers of Sin, Death, and the Law. The chapter situates Christus Victor not as an alternative to substitutionary atonement but as its essential presupposition: the question of why the Son of God had to die can only be answered by reference to the Enemy he came to defeat. Chapter 10, "The Descent into Hell," is by the author's own testimony the chapter that cost her the most — more than two years in composition — and it reads as an extended meditation on theodicy, on the problem of horrendous evil, and on the meaning of Christ's solidarity with the most abandoned and most victimized human beings. The chapter draws on patristic, medieval, and Reformed treatments of the descensus ad inferos (Calvin's reading in the Institutes is given extended attention), as well as Holocaust testimony and the work of Marilyn McCord Adams, and it moves toward a carefully qualified suggestion — more hope than doctrine — that no realm of human experience or human history, however saturated with evil, lies beyond the reach of the saving power of God.
Chapter 11, "The Substitution," is the book's most theologically contested section, a defense of substitutionary atonement against both its critics and its shallow defenders. Rutledge works through fourteen objections to penal substitution in ascending order of importance and concludes with a position that affirms substitution while significantly qualifying its forensic framing: Christ stands in our place, bears our condition, takes our death — but the wrath of God is understood primarily as God's eschatological judgment on the Powers of Sin and Death rather than as retributive punishment inflicted by the Father upon the Son. This reading draws heavily on Barth's account of the Judge judged in our place (CD IV/1) and on T. F. Torrance's account of the vicarious humanity of Christ, and it represents a genuine attempt at constructive synthesis rather than mere evasion of the penal question. Chapter 12, "Recapitulation," treats Irenaeus's doctrine of anakephalaiōsis — the recapitulation or summing-up of the whole human story in Christ, who lives our life again from within and transforms it from within — as the motif that most fully integrates the anthropological and cosmic dimensions of the atonement, connecting substitution, participation, and new creation.
The Conclusion, "Condemned into Redemption: The Rectification of the Ungodly," is the book's theological climax. Rutledge argues that "rectification" — dikaiōsis, the making-right or setting-right of what is radically disordered — is the most adequate single term for what God accomplishes at the cross, precisely because it is simultaneously forensic (it pronounces right those who are not right) and transformative (it makes right what was wrong), and because it corresponds to the cosmic scope of the problem: not merely individual guilt, but the entire fallen order, must be set right by the action of God in Christ.
Theological Evaluation and Critique
Exegetical and Hermeneutical Method
Rutledge is a preacher before she is an exegete, and her handling of Scripture reflects that priority in both its strengths and its limits. The strengths are considerable: she reads the biblical texts with genuine attentiveness to their narrative and imagistic texture, resists the reductionism that flattens rich metaphorical language into systematic propositions, and sustains throughout a commitment to the whole canon — OT and NT together — as the necessary framework for understanding the cross. Her treatment of Psalm 22 as the contextual background for the cry of dereliction, her engagement with the Levitical sacrificial system in Chapter 6, and her reading of Romans 5–8 as an integrated argument about Sin as Power rather than a collection of proof-texts for individual doctrines are all models of the kind of theologically informed, literarily sensitive exegesis she advocates.
The hermeneutical commitments that govern the exegesis are, however, not always rendered with sufficient transparency. The apocalyptic Paulinism of the Martyn-Käsemann school — with its emphasis on the radical discontinuity between the old age and the new, the priority of God's invasive action over human response, and the personification of Sin and Death as quasi-independent cosmic agents — functions less as a named and defended interpretive choice than as the assumed theological air of the book. Readers familiar with the internal debates of NT scholarship will recognize immediately that this represents one significant school of Pauline interpretation, not a neutral description of Paul's gospel, and that it stands in genuine tension with the New Perspective on Paul associated with N. T. Wright, James D. G. Dunn, and E. P. Sanders. Rutledge engages Wright occasionally and critically — her footnotes contain sharp pushback on his account of the atonement — but the engagement is insufficiently developed given the scale of the disagreement, and readers who find Wright's covenantal-historical framework compelling will not receive here the serious engagement they deserve.
The most significant hermeneutical limitation is the relative underengagement with the Synoptic Gospels as independent witnesses to the theological meaning of the cross. Rutledge's framework is overwhelmingly Pauline, and while the Gospels appear regularly as illustrative material, the specific ways in which Matthew, Mark, and Luke present the theological meaning of Jesus' death — through the narrative structure of the passion accounts, the servant songs of Isaiah as interpretive keys, the institution narratives of the Last Supper — receive less sustained attention than their canonical importance warrants. The Fourth Gospel fares better, particularly in the treatment of the high-priestly prayer and the "hour" passages, but even here the treatment is impressionistic rather than exegetically disciplined.
Doctrinal Analysis
Measured against the ecumenical creeds, The Crucifixion is robustly orthodox. Rutledge explicitly invokes the Chalcedonian Definition as the indispensable test of any adequate Christology: "Jesus was both fully divine and fully human, but if the fully human Jesus is not God incarnate, then salvation is not from God after all." The Nicene affirmation of the triune God who acts as one throughout the sequence from incarnation to ascension is operative throughout, and Rutledge is particularly vigilant against any reading that separates the Father from the Son at the cross in a way that implies divine child abuse or inter-Trinitarian conflict. Her treatment of divine wrath is carefully Trinitarian: the wrath of God is not the Father's anger directed against the Son but God's own eschatological judgment on the Powers of Sin and Death, executed in and through the Son's willing self-offering.
From a Reformed perspective, the most significant doctrinal question is whether Rutledge's account of substitution adequately preserves the penal dimension. The Westminster Confession of Faith (Chapter VIII) affirms that Christ "made a proper, real and full satisfaction to his Father's justice" and that "by the obedience and death of Jesus Christ" the elect are "justified before God." Reformed readers will notice that Rutledge's careful refusal to speak of the Father's punitive wrath directed personally at the Son — while theologically motivated and not intrinsically unfaithful to the tradition — tends to shift the forensic weight of the atonement away from the specific satisfaction of divine justice and toward the more comprehensive category of rectification. This is not an abandonment of substitution, as some critics have charged; it is a genuine constructive proposal, drawing on Barth's CD IV/1 and Torrance's vicarious humanity framework, that Reformed readers should engage seriously rather than dismissing as mere mainline reticence. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is not directly relevant here, but readers attentive to the Reformed inerrancy tradition will notice that Rutledge's hermeneutical practice — drawing freely on critical scholarship while remaining committed to the gospel — operates in a broadly evangelical mode that does not foreground inerrancy as a doctrinal concern.
From a Wesleyan-Arminian perspective, the book's strong emphasis on divine agency, the enslaving power of Sin, and the human incapacity for self-rescue will create predictable friction. Rutledge is not quite Calvinist — she does not develop a doctrine of election — but her consistent insistence that "salvation depends not on human beings getting it right but on God's action" and her resistance to any moralistic reading of the gospel reflect a broadly Augustinian theological horizon that sits uneasily with Wesleyan prevenient grace and the conditional election based on foreknown faith. Wesleyan readers will find much to appreciate in her care for the universal scope of the atonement — her cautiously hopeful universalism is, if anything, more inclusive than the Arminian tradition's insistence on human response — but they will want to press her on the relationship between divine rectification and human cooperation in sanctification, a question the book does not resolve.
From a Roman Catholic perspective, the book is more congenial than its Protestant formation might suggest. Rutledge's consistent engagement with Anselm, Aquinas, and the patristic tradition — including her sensitive treatment of the descensus, her engagement with Lumen Gentium's affirmation of the cross as the center of history, and her use of Hans Urs von Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale in the descent into hell chapter — signals a genuine Catholic conversation partner rather than the usual Protestant habit of treating tradition as merely illustrative. The Catholic tradition's broad framework for understanding atonement — which has never been conciliaristically defined in the way that specific Christological doctrines were — is, if anything, more hospitable to Rutledge's motif-pluralism than are the more sharply defined Protestant confessional standards. Catholic readers will appreciate the depth of the patristic engagement, though they will notice that the Magisterium and the documents of Vatican II appear only occasionally, and the specifically Catholic account of the Eucharist as the ongoing representation of the sacrifice of Christ — directly relevant to the book's central concerns — receives no sustained attention.
From an Eastern Orthodox perspective, Rutledge's book is the most naturally congenial of any Western atonement theology likely to be encountered by Orthodox readers in recent decades. Her robust theology of the descent into hell, her use of the Christus Victor motif and the imagery of Christ's harrowing of Hades, her engagement with the Byzantine iconographic tradition of the anastasis icon, and her preference for participatory and cosmic categories over purely forensic ones all resonate with the Orthodox soteriological framework. The Orthodox tradition's consistent emphasis on theosis — the participation of human persons in the divine life as the telos of salvation — is not explicitly engaged, but the recapitulation chapter (ch. 12) and the conclusion's account of "becoming the righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5:21) gesture toward participatory categories that Orthodox readers will find recognizable. The notable absence is any sustained engagement with the Greek Fathers other than Irenaeus (who is a Western/Eastern figure) and brief citations from Cyril of Alexandria in the descent chapter; Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Cappadocians — who developed the most sophisticated patristic accounts of participation and cosmic redemption — do not appear as substantive dialogue partners.
Engagement with Secondary Literature
The secondary literature engagement is one of the book's most impressive and most uneven features. At its best, the footnotes — more than 1,500 of them — constitute a running seminar on the history of atonement theology, and the bibliography, while designated a "select" list, covers the major voices in the field with genuine breadth. Rutledge's engagement with Aulén, Barth, Käsemann, Martyn, Bonhoeffer, P. T. Forsyth, and the Lutheran tradition is consistently substantive; her treatment of Irenaeus is the most careful engagement with a patristic source in the book and demonstrates that she can do technical historical theology when she chooses to. The use of literary sources — Dostoevsky, Flannery O'Connor, William Golding, Joseph Conrad, Primo Levi, Jean Améry — is a genuine scholarly contribution to the field of constructive theology, not mere ornamentation: these voices illuminate the doctrine by demonstrating it as a live question in the wider culture.
The most consequential omission is the near-complete absence of serious feminist and womanist theologies of the atonement. Delores Williams's Sisters in the Wilderness (1993), JoAnne Terrell's Power in the Blood? (1998), and the broader womanist critique of substitutionary atonement as theologically authorizing suffering and self-erasure are mentioned only in footnotes and never engaged at the argumentative level the critique deserves. Given that the book is written by a woman who was herself a trailblazer in a male-dominated institution, and given that the feminist and womanist critiques of the atonement are among the most searching theological objections to the positions Rutledge defends, this omission is a significant failure of the book's stated aspiration to serve the entire church.
N. T. Wright is engaged, but insufficiently. Wright's The Day the Revolution Began (2016) had not yet appeared when The Crucifixion was completed, but his earlier work on Paul, the atonement, and the new exodus in The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003) and his contributions to Atonement Today (ed. Goldingay, 1995) were available and deserved more than the pointed footnote critiques they receive. The internal debate between the apocalyptic school (Martyn) and the new perspective (Wright) on the meaning of Paul's gospel is one of the most consequential in contemporary Pauline studies, and a book of this ambition should have engaged it more directly. Similarly, Jeremy Treat's The Crucified King: Atonement and Kingdom in Biblical and Systematic Theology (2014) — which appeared just before Rutledge's volume and addresses the same synthetic project of integrating Christus Victor with substitution in a more explicitly covenant-theological framework — is not engaged at all, a gap that will be noticed by readers approaching the question from a Reformed direction.
Strengths
The recovery of the multi-motif approach as genuine theological pluralism. The Crucifixion does not merely assert that multiple atonement motifs are valid and then treat them as equal and interchangeable. Rutledge makes an argument — sustained across nearly seven hundred pages — that the motifs are genuinely distinct, that each illuminates something the others cannot, and that the church's tendency to reduce the cross to a single "theory" (whether penal substitution in conservative evangelical culture or moral exemplarism in mainline culture) is a theological impoverishment with pastoral consequences. The eight motif chapters of Part 2 demonstrate this claim rather than merely stating it: each chapter makes the assigned motif live in ways that would serve a preacher preparing a series of sermons on the cross, and the cumulative effect of reading all eight together is to persuade the reader that the cross is genuinely inexhaustible — that no single framework, however powerful, is adequate to the event. This is the book's most practically useful contribution and the one most likely to outlast its more contested theoretical positions.
The Descent into Hell chapter as theological achievement. Chapter 10 is unlike anything else in contemporary atonement theology in English, and it earns the two years Rutledge says it cost her. The chapter does four things simultaneously: it traces the history of the descensus doctrine from the Apostles' Creed through Rufinus, Aquinas, Calvin, and Barth; it engages the iconographic tradition of the Byzantine harrowing of hell with genuine theological attention; it develops the chapter's most philosophically demanding claim — that there are horrendous evils (Marilyn McCord Adams's term) that no human justice can redress, and that the cross must mean something sufficient to address them — with integrity rather than false comfort; and it holds open, with appropriate theological caution, the possibility that "there is no realm anywhere in the universe, including the domain of Death and the devil, where anyone can go to be cut off from the saving power of God." The refusal to make this a dogma while insisting on it as a hope is precisely the kind of theological discernment that distinguishes careful constructive theology from either soft universalism or retributive rigidity.
The Anselm bridge chapter as corrective scholarship. The rehabilitation of Anselm as a serious theological interlocutor rather than the originator of "divine child abuse" theology represents the book's most important single correction to the contemporary theological consensus. Rutledge demonstrates with textual care that Anselm's argument is Trinitarian throughout — the Son's satisfaction is not coerced by the Father but freely offered by the Godhead acting in concert — and that his central concern, that the disrupted moral order of the universe cannot simply be "passed by undischarged," is not a provincial medieval notion but a permanent theological insight into the connection between divine holiness, human sin, and the necessity of the cross. For the many pastors and seminary students who have been taught to dismiss Anselm as discredited, this chapter offers a corrective that is both historically fair and theologically constructive.
The prose as theological performance. Rutledge writes as a preacher, and the quality of the prose is itself a theological argument: that the cross can be spoken about with clarity, passion, beauty, and intellectual honesty simultaneously, and that a theology of the cross need not choose between academic rigor and doxological wonder. The use of literary illustration — from Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov to Flannery O'Connor's Mrs. Turpin to the Andrew Carnegie memoir that breaks off in mid-sentence as the Great War unmasks the illusion of progress — is consistently illuminating rather than merely decorative, demonstrating that the doctrine of Sin is confirmed in the witness of the world's greatest writers with a persuasive power that no systematic argument alone could achieve.
Weaknesses and Limitations
The underengagement with penal substitution's strongest defenders. Rutledge's treatment of penal substitution in Chapter 11 is thorough in identifying the objections the doctrine has attracted and in defending the indispensability of substitution as a category. What it does not do, with sufficient rigor, is engage the strongest contemporary defenses of penal substitution as a specifically penal doctrine — not the shallow caricatures she rightfully dismantles, but the careful accounts of atonement in John Owen's Death of Death in the Death of Christ, Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach's Pierced for Our Transgressions (2007), or Henri Blocher's In He Came (1994/2005). Readers from the Reformed tradition who hold to penal substitution for reasons more developed than the ones Rutledge addresses will finish the chapter feeling that their position was engaged at less than its strongest form. The result is that the book, which clearly aims for a genuinely cross-traditional audience, achieves an easier victory over penal substitution than the position warrants, and misses the opportunity to model the kind of fair-minded engagement with positions one ultimately qualifies that the best ecumenical theology requires.
The apocalyptic framework's internal tensions. Rutledge deploys the Martyn school's apocalyptic Paulinism as the structuring framework for the book's central argument, and this choice generates genuine illumination. But the framework also creates tensions that the book does not fully resolve. Most significantly: the apocalyptic school's emphasis on the radical discontinuity between the old age and the new — on the cross as invasion and new creation rather than as fulfillment of a prior covenant — sits uneasily with Rutledge's simultaneous insistence on the OT as the necessary background for understanding the cross and her deep engagement with Anselm's satisfaction framework, which requires the kind of continuity between divine holiness and the atoning work of Christ that the apocalyptic tradition tends to resist. Critics from the Reformed tradition (Derek Rishmawy and others) have noted that the result is a certain atomism in the treatment of motifs — a richness of individual images without the synthetic redemptive-historical integration that covenantal theology provides. Rutledge is aware of the tension and makes constructive gestures toward resolution, but the integration is not as complete as the book's ambition requires.
The problem of repetition and structural diffuseness. The Crucifixion was, by Rutledge's own account, originally 150 pages longer before editorial intervention. The published version, at 669 pages, retains significant repetition: certain key themes — the cry of dereliction, the Carnegie memoir, Václav Havel's essay on the lie, the TRC — reappear in multiple chapters in ways that add rhetorical reinforcement but occasionally work against the intellectual momentum of the argument. The structure — four introductory chapters, a bridge chapter, eight motif chapters, and a conclusion — serves the book's encyclopedic ambition, but the logic of the argument does not always require that each motif receive a full chapter, and readers approaching the book sequentially rather than as a reference tool will occasionally feel the strain of the format. A tighter, more explicitly argumentative organization — closer in structure to John Stott's The Cross of Christ or Sinclair Ferguson's The Whole Christ — would have made the book's central argument more forcefully cumulative and less impressionistically accumulative.
Engagement with the Broader Scholarly Conversation
The Crucifixion enters a conversation whose most important recent landmarks are John Stott's The Cross of Christ (1986) — which Rutledge explicitly positions as her predecessor and, in some ways, her target audience's previous standard reference — and Colin Gunton's The Actuality of Atonement (1988), which pioneered the multi-metaphor approach to atonement theology that Rutledge extends with greater pastoral application and literary breadth. P. T. Forsyth's The Cruciality of the Cross (1909/1948), whose "holy love" theology of the atonement anticipates many of Rutledge's central moves, is engaged appreciatively but more cursorily than his importance warrants; Rutledge's failure to develop the comparison between her project and Forsyth's is the book's most significant missed opportunity for situating itself within the Protestant theological tradition. Against the contemporary context of the "atonement controversies" of the 2000s — sparked by Steve Chalke and Alan Mann's The Lost Message of Jesus (2003) and the ensuing evangelical debates over penal substitution — Rutledge's book represents a sophisticated via media: defending the indispensability of substitution while refusing the reduction of atonement to a single forensic model. In this it bears comparison with Mark Baker and Joel Green's Recovering the Scandal of the Cross (2nd ed., 2011), which pursues a similar multi-perspectival strategy from a more explicitly Anabaptist and missiological angle, and with the more recent work of Jeremy Treat (The Crucified King, 2014), whose Kuyperian-Reformed synthesis offers a constructive counterpoint to Rutledge's Barthian-apocalyptic framework.
Conclusion and Recommendation
The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ is the most important contribution to atonement theology written for the church's preachers and teachers in the English language since John Stott's The Cross of Christ — a comparison that names both its achievement and its intended audience. Its strengths — the multi-motif approach to the cross, the rehabilitation of Anselm, the extraordinary chapter on the descent into hell, and prose that models the possibility of theological writing that is both rigorous and doxological — make it required reading for any pastor serious about preaching the cross with depth and honesty. Its limitations — the underengagement with penal substitution's best defenders, the structural tensions generated by its apocalyptic framework, and the notable absence of feminist and womanist theologies of the atonement — are real but do not undermine the book's central argument or diminish its pastoral usefulness. Read generously and critically, with Stott's Cross of Christ and, for those in Reformed contexts, Jeremy Treat's Crucified King as companion volumes, The Crucifixion is a gift to the church.
Recommended for: Pastors preparing extended series or Good Friday meditations on the cross; M.Div. students in systematic theology, homiletics, or Pauline studies; any Christian reader who has found the cross theologically embarrassing or pastorally inert; readers shaped by Barth, Bonhoeffer, and the apocalyptic Pauline tradition who want to see those resources applied to preaching; Catholic and Orthodox readers looking for a Protestant theology of the atonement that takes the patristic tradition seriously.
Not recommended for: Readers seeking a systematic or covenant-theological account of atonement; those committed to penal substitution as the primary atonement model who require sustained engagement with the doctrine's strongest defenders; readers without comfort in extended prose and a preference for tightly structured argument; anyone who requires their atonement theology to resolve rather than hold in tension the questions of universalism, divine wrath, and the fate of the worst human beings in history.
Overall Assessment: ☑ Highly Recommended | ☐ Recommended | ☐ Recommended with Reservations | ☐ Not Recommended
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