May I make a prediction? Before this article ends, you will for the first time in your life of faith become something of the mind of God new to you, if I can successfully convince you that the Cross means is nothing less than your death or your life in a way that is miraculous. You have not heard of this before, because it’s unconsciously a closely guarded secret of the Christian consciousness. In normal consciousness, and even in normal evangelism, its a truth not entertained and uttered openly as an article of faith. You are not supposed to be fed the answer to a question that God wants you to discover on your own, but only by the motivation of your love of truth. Nevertheless, how you handle this truth, whether aware or unaware, whether by agreement in words or practice, will determine your end. How you respond will decide whether or not you are playing around in mundane world religion or a simple manifestation of divine Truth, because this is the very function of the theological significance of the scene of Christ dying on a Cross.
Its the one truth of the faith that you could say is universally hated and actively shunned, but also the one truth about he faith, and about the Bible, that is the least deniable.
I do this because there will come a day, which I believe will come shortly when we will have nothing left to inform our faith than the recollection of this real miracle of theological formation of which I speak. After the withering assaults from more carnally seductive alternatives, we will want to go back to the real fundamentals of our faith, and it’s not what we think they are.
Let me reiterate the preceding in a variety of ways.
Now, I’m jumping into my early twenties in my quest to solve something about Christianity and its message confusing to me. I was not capable of this kind of question early on. Why is it that the act of dying on the Cross is a less powerful revelatory element to faith than the empty tomb when they are both supposed to be supremely revelatory? This question bears not on the initial place and route of the miraculous into the spirit, but the final one. Some of the considerations toward an answer to which I deal will seem pedantic, and I apologize for that. But go with it. It’s necessary because when this subject opens up, it touches upon so much of what and how we think by cultural Christianity that, as powerful as this truth is, that firewall is constructed as its sufficient counter at every turn.
Where do miracles occur? I mean miracles that are demonstrably and rationally exposable and examinable to all. Not only personal subjective experiences. Is there today a change in emphasis from the time of the 1st century? If Christ as a sacrifice for world sin is important, and supremely so, and is the most important miracle, this question we have to confront this hard and early.
Must our most essential and objective demonstration of God for which our spirits are responsible only be in an overt miracle, whether seen or reported? Is a miracle not also an alien knowledge? Do wonders that show an impossible exception to the laws of nature has a more important counterpart in those that only occur in the spirit as a response to divine knowledge? Can’t this abstract miracle, just as examinable and open to scrutiny as to its validity, which occurs in the spirit and processes in the spirit to the spirit, not carry the same epistemic weight as an objective miracle which occurs within the physical world, processed within the spirit and to the spirit? Can you then call it a Christian belief which asks one to believe in a sacrifice for sins which is no more remarkable than any other religious concept? A belief thought not having a miraculous and intrinsically transformative signification for which any sincere seeker would be responsible? Finally, it is not a symbol, which appears not as a miracle but a common act or word, which is hidden by God as to its intended meaning, that which becomes a miraculous instance of God’s power and nature in the spirit after it we know the knowledge it carries? This symbol essentially becoming within that space every bit a theophany of God to the spirit as if God appeared to the eye, which secures a substantive relationship with God that we can profess but can never have otherwise?
It may seem like I’m saying that experience of faith within your heart and mind is just as valid a proof of God as a miracle within space/time, but this is far from what I’m saying. You will think this because we are trained to think, as I said, of faith as not necessarily grounded in facts and the “spirit” as emotion.
I ask again, must the Christian message not be that there must be an appearance of God to the mind and heart with as much epistemic weight as that which occurs to the five senses? A presentation, in the form of knowledge, which has just as much power to influence the people around you to God’s reality after being reported by you? It would seem that what happens in space/time, brought into the spirit for processing, which is a demonstration of the presence and power of God, will be powerless and puerile until this miracle of its meaning occurs.
I say that Jesus on the Cross is one of them and the greatest of them all. Not that it is a miracle in the material world. An exception to the laws of nature. But a miracle in the spiritual world, through thought, that is every bit as palpable there.
I think we have to keep in mind that if you repent of your sin, your sin first needs representation and a solution by the sacrifice of Jesus before forgiveness. Or else you are repenting for your sin for the same reason a person repents who knows nothing about or does not believe in Messiah’s work on the Cross. And your sin is found, and its cure rendered, not by a creative religious idea for which you believe and repent, or by no spiritual knowledge at all. By a miracle within which is fundamentally a revelation of his Person. An indispensable miraculous predicate. One which all religious ideas are to sign and represent in an inferior but essential capacity, but in an unbreakable relationship. What you believe and the reason you believe it has to be the equal of God’s revelation, and that revelation of Messiah on the Cross should be every bit as much of one as your kind of understanding and belief in it.
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