Article

Theology Today
2018, Vol. 75(1) 64–76
The Word of the Cross ! The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0040573618763572

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Temperament for Today

R. David Nelson
Baker Academic and Brazos Press, USA

Abstract
In this article I explore the uneasy relationship between Paul’s word of the cross and the
work of Christian theology today. I show that Paul’s understanding of the cross chal-
lenges the way we conceive the time of Christian theology. Paul’s own biography illus-
trates the sense in which theological existence is an intellectual journey that is
fundamentally interrupted and radically shaped by the encounter with the crucified
Christ. What we learn from Paul’s word of the cross, I argue, is that the cross stands
over against our theological work as crisis and judge. Paul’s witness urges us to advance
in theological knowledge while never moving our gaze from the cross as the original
mystery of faith.

Keywords
Paul, cross, theologia crucis, theologia viatorum, apocalyptic, Luther, Jüngel, Barth, fides
quarens intellectum

Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent
wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power. For the word of
the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is
the power of God.

—1 Cor 1:17–181

1. NRSV. I have adjusted Paul’s o& ógo& o* o~u sauro~u to ‘‘the word of the cross,’’ and will use this
locution throughout the present article.

Corresponding author:
R. David Nelson, Baker Academic and Brazos Press, 6030 E Fulton, Ada, MI 49301, USA.
Email: dnelson@bakerpublishinggroup.com
Nelson 65

In this passage, the apostle Paul reminds the Corinthian Christians of the singu-
larity of the message he originally preached to them—shorthanded as ‘‘the word of
the cross’’—by drawing a sharp contrast between that message and human wisdom
and power. Paul’s ‘‘wise’’ opponents in Corinth had rejected his teaching and
apostolic authority on two grounds; first, Paul’s message of God’s apocalyptic
incursion into the world in the crucified One scarcely smacked of the esoteric
knowledge fashionable among some of the cliques in the Corinthian church;
second, Paul came without ‘‘lofty words or wisdom’’ (2:1), appearing before the
fledgling congregation as meek, even neutered and powerless. ‘‘His letters are
weighty and strong,’’ one of his interlocutors put it, ‘‘but his bodily presence is
weak, and his speech contemptable’’ (2 Cor 10:10). And yet, in our passage and
throughout the Corinthian correspondence, Paul defends the foolishness of his
message and the weakness of his flesh as signs of the wisdom and power of God.
For Paul, God has militantly defied worldly wisdom and power in the event of the
cross of Christ, and continues to intrude upon the world with wisdom and power
from on high in the proclamation of the word of the cross.
For those who have been seized by this apocalyptic word (and I count myself
among the apprehended), the radical strangeness and newness of the cross and the
message about it never dwindles. The turn toward apocalyptic in contemporary
theology is alluring to us, not at all because it promises keys for unlocking the
sequence of the eschaton or an ascetical ethic for Christians in retreat from the
world—hardly, for these are marks of the false apocalypticism huckstered by tele-
vangelists and revival preachers—but because it calls the theologian back to faith’s
original and deepest mystery; the ‘‘genuine novum, a first-order reversal of all pre-
vious arrangements, an altogether new creation ex nihilo, out of nothing’’2 which
occurred in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the resurrection of the crucified One.
Against the bourgeois trappings of the liberal Protestant project and the abject
interiorization and individualization of Christian experience in certain streams of
modern evangelicalism, apocalyptic theology summons us to take with dead ser-
iousness Paul’s unworldly word of the cross and its implications for Christian
thought, speech, and practice.
But what has Golgotha and the streets and shops and synagogues of antiquity,
where Paul first went preaching the word of the cross, to do with the theology
classroom, the university lectern, the conference podium, the theological blogo-
sphere, peer-review journals, and academic publishing houses? We have grown
accustomed to theologizing in contexts and by way of certain intellectual practices
and for the sake of particular ends, all of which differ considerably from the gritty
theological labor that marks Paul’s missionary proclamation and his letters.
The apostle’s word of the cross, and the apocalyptic theological persuasion it
reflects, speak to us from a bygone era. In the centuries that have transpired
since the period of incipient Christianity, theology has become something rather

2. So Fleming Rutledge, summarizing J. Louis Martyn, in The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of
Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 355.
66 Theology Today 75(1)

different than what it was in Paul’s day. One can only speculate what Paul might
think of theology today. He almost certainly would be surprised, perhaps even
alarmed, by what theologians through the centuries have done with his own literary
estate; his private mail the wellspring of an ever-expanding flood of writings—
commentaries, sermons, apologetic texts, tracts, little theological statements, big
theological systems, articles, essays, published conference proceedings, blogs,
tweets, and so on. What was, in Paul’s own time, a matter of urgent evangelical
and pastoral obligation, has evolved—or perhaps devolved!—into a vast and var-
iegated pedagogical and literary phenomenon financed by the vocational currency
of church and academe.
At stake in such musings is the question of continuity and discontinuity between
Paul and us; specifically, between Paul’s apocalyptic, staurocentric thought and
Christian theology today. What has Paul’s word of the cross to do with the indus-
try of Christian theology? In phrasing the question this way, I do not intend to
altogether disparage our own theological milieu and its accessories too quickly and
without nuance. After all, even the present meditation, such as it is, and the enter-
prise of apocalyptic theology to which it contributes, are instances of Christian
theology’s contemporary labor. Unavoidably so, to explore today Paul’s apoca-
lyptic word of the cross in order to highlight its challenge to contemporary the-
ology is to do so according to scholarly conventions and by virtue of intellectual
habits acquired though participation in academic theological work. And yet, to
read Paul and ‘‘to think with him today’’ so that we can ‘‘learn to think like him’’3
is to be confronted by the stark difference between Paul’s thinking and our own
theological pursuits.
The following reflections explore this uneasy relationship between Paul’s word
of the cross and our theology. Here I am interested neither in developing a con-
temporary theology of the cross, nor in setting forth, in some programmatic way, a
mandate for theological thinking. Instead, below I consider what Christian the-
ology might look like when Paul’s message about the crucified One interrupts,
challenges, and incites our thought of God.

Establishing the Problem—the Apocalyptic Imagination

and the Time of Christian Theology
In two distinct but interrelated senses, Paul’s word of the cross confronts us with
the problem of the time in Christian theology.
First, Pauline apocalyptic challenges us to think about Christian theology in an
epochal framework. In his essay on ‘‘Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages,’’
J. Louis Martyn addresses the epochal structure of Paul’s understanding of time
by using language that has become ingredient to the vernacular of contemporary
apocalyptic theology. According to Martyn, for Paul ‘‘there are two ways of

3. Leander Keck, ‘‘Paul as Thinker,’’ in Christ’s First Theologian: The Shape of Paul’s Thought (Waco,
TX: Baylor, 2015), 101.
Nelson 67

knowing, and . . . what separates the two is the turn of the ages, the apocalyptic
event of Christ’s death/resurrection. There is a way of knowing which is charac-
teristic of the old age . . . there must be a new way of knowing that is proper either
to the new age or to that point at which the ages meet.’’4 For Martyn’s Paul, that is,
the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus signify the invasion of the new age into the
fabric of the old. In the interruptive and creative power of the word of the cross, the
new age dawns over the world, casting its light upon and revealing the oldness of
the old age.5 As Martyn demonstrates, for Paul the two ages converging in the
cross correspond to ‘‘two ways of knowing’’ and, as he goes on to explain, ‘‘two
kinds of knowers.’’6 The knowledge proper to the old age is knowledge kata sarka;
knowledge according to the flesh. Martyn shows that, although the basic idea
encapsulated in knowledge kata sarka is knowledge on the basis of sense percep-
tion, what Paul actually has in mind is a bit more complicated than empirical
judgment. Rather, the one who knows and thinks kata sarka is, for Paul,

‘‘the psychikos anthropos (‘the unspiritual person’).’’7 Unanimated by the Spirit,
the unspiritual person is incapable of knowing that the new age has arrived in the
crucified Christ. Hence, ‘‘it is clear that the implied opposite of knowing by the
norm of the flesh is not knowing by the norm of the Spirit, but rather knowing kata
stauron (‘by the cross’).’’8 In Martyn’s reading, Paul understood the cross as
‘‘the absolute epistemological watershed,’’ a dividing line between knowledge
kata sarka and knowledge kata stauron. In the present epoch stretching from the
crucifixion to the Parousia, the foolishness of the cross is set alongside the wisdom
of the world—that is, knowledge is either according to the flesh or according the
‘‘the Spirit of the crucified Christ.’’9
Martyn is interested here in elaborating Paul’s two ways of knowing, and not in
extending the discussion to theology today. But the ‘‘epistemological crisis’’
Martyn sees at the heart of Paul’s argument in 2 Corinthians does bear important
implications for our understanding of the epochal time of Christian theology.
For Christian theology takes place between the crucifixion and the Parousia.
Insofar as theology endeavors to take the confession of the crucifixion and resur-
rection of Jesus seriously and to discharge its intellectual habits and activities under
the tutelage of the Spirit of the crucified Christ, theology claims to be knowledge
kata stauron and situated eschatologically in the new age. But during this epoch

4. J. Louis Martyn, ‘‘Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages,’’ in Theological Issues in the Letters of
Paul (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 95.
5. Eberhard Jüngel is especially insightful on this point. See Jüngel, ‘‘New–Old–New: Theological
Aphorisms,’’ trans. R. David Nelson, in Theological Theology: Essays in Honour of John Webster,
ed. R. David Nelson, Darren Sarisky, and Justin Stratis (London & New York: Bloomsbury T&T
Clark, 2015), 131–35.
6. Martyn, ‘‘Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages,’’ 99.
7. Ibid.
8. Martyn, 108.
9. Ibid.
68 Theology Today 75(1)

theology must ever resist the temptation to discharge its thinking kata sarka, and
does so only when theology is undertaken beneath the shadow of the cross.
There is a second sense in which the apostle’s apocalyptic thought challenges the
way we conceive the time of Christian theology. Thinking of any sort just does take
time. Human knowledge of any subject of study proceeds discursively and accu-
mulatively, expanding and unfolding as the student advances through curricula.
The mastery of a subject or discipline requires concerted effort, the accumulation of
analytical skills, the facilitation of intellectual virtues and habits of thought, com-
mand over often vast amounts of literature and traditions of discourse, and, not
least, the cultivation of knowledge through participation in some pedagogical
structure or another. We should not bristle at the suggestion that theological know-
ledge proceeds accordingly. In this sense, Paul Griffiths is precisely correct when he
asserts that ‘‘the qualifications necessary to be a theologian are only the necessary
know-how (a matter of intellectual skill) coupled with sufficient knowledge-
that (a matter of fluency produced by wide and deep reading in the tradition’s
archive).’’10 The acquisition of intellectual skill and the development of fluency are
indispensable components of theological knowledge, and the accoutrements of
theology we listed above—the theology classroom, the status of theology as a
university discipline, academic publishing in the different theological disciplines,
and so on—are external expressions of theology’s rational, discursive, and curricu-
lar character. The time of theology unwinds according to the pace of this agenda;
abstractly and writ-large—the history of theology is the development over time
of practices and conventions which support Christian thinking as ordered and
reasonable; concretely—the intellectual development of the theologian, a form of
the ‘‘knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ’’ in which all Christians are
called to grow (2 Pet 3:18), is spurred on through listening, discussing, reading,
studying, and writing.
The Apostle, however, conceives his encounter with Christ and his proclamation
of the crucified and risen Lord as events that cut against the grain of ordinary
conventions of thought. In our epigraph from 1 Corinthians, we find him conced-
ing that his message is ‘‘foolishness to those who are perishing’’ (1 Cor 1:18).
Alongside the well-thought-out and tried-and-tested philosophies of antiquity,
Paul’s theology of God’s intervention in the world in the death and resurrection
of Jesus could only appear as the height of ignorance. For Paul, that is, knowledge
kata stauron does not assimilate into any then-prevailing systems of thought
and belief. Furthermore, when we appraise Paul’s own theological biography,

10. Paul Griffiths, The Practice of Catholic Theology: A Modest Proposal (Washington, DC: The
Catholic University of America, 2016), 41. Griffiths’s entire essay can be read as a defense of
the notion that theology just is ‘‘know-how . . . coupled with sufficient knowledge-that.’’ While I
concede that know-how and knowledge-that are necessarily ingredient to Christian theology, for
reasons that will become clear in this article I am uneasy about Griffiths’s contention that ‘‘this
understanding of theology and theologians is neutral with respect to attitude and affection’’; that
is, that the theologian’s posture toward the God of the gospel is inessential for carrying out the
tasks and discharging the responsibilities of Christian theology.
Nelson 69

we discover that his advancement within Judaism (Gal 1:14) was dramatically
interrupted by the Damascene encounter, and that his subsequent theology was,
demonstrably, oriented in its entirety toward comprehending this event and the
crucified Lord who had appeared to him.11 All of this points us to the crux of
the tension between Paul’s word of the cross and our own theological labors.
The gravitation pull of the cross imposes itself upon Paul’s theological thinking
at all points, as it were repeatedly confronting and provoking his understanding
of God and the condition of the world. How do we reconcile Paul’s theological
temperament with the idea of theology as, unavoidably, a process of thought which
proceeds discursively and accumulatively?

Paul’s Theology as a Radical theologia crucis

in the Midst of a theologia in via
A closer inspection of Paul’s theological biography intensifies the impression of a
sheer difference between Paul and us while also offering clues as to how his word of
the cross impacts our own theological journeys. This is not the occasion to exhaust-
ively rehash the ongoing debate among New Testament scholars over the origins
and development of Paul’s theology. However, some observations and comments
on Paul the theologian are helpful as we seek to test the continuity and discon-
tinuity between Paul’s word of the cross and our own thinking about God. Indeed,
as I will suggest here, there is a tension embedded within Paul’s theological journey
that is highly important for discerning the character of theological existence today.
Significantly, it was Saul the Pharisee, a violent persecutor of the earliest fol-
lowers of Jesus who, by his own account, had ‘‘advanced in Judaism beyond many
among [his] people of the same age, for [he] was far more zealous for the traditions
of [his] ancestors’’ (Gal 1:14), who encountered the risen Lord on the way to
Damascus and subsequently became the apostle to the Gentiles and incipient
Christianity’s first major theologian. Saul was already a theologian when his jour-
ney was suddenly interrupted by the light of heaven and the voice of Jesus (see Acts
9:3–5). As a Pharisee, Saul undoubtedly would have possessed a thorough working
knowledge of Torah and also the ancestral laws that comprised the tradition the
Pharisees sought to guard and hand down. Additionally, Saul’s thought would
have been profoundly shaped by a Pharisaical eschatology that traded upon the
prioritization of Jewish distinctiveness through covenantal responsibility and
Torah obedience.12
Paul did not transition from having no theology at all to thinking theologically
in earnest; far from it, actually, as it was Saul the Jewish theologian who became
11. On the orientation of Paul’s Christian theology around the Damascene encounter, see the entirety
of Keck’s argument in ‘‘Paul as Thinker.’’
12. On the politics and theology of the Pharisees in the late Second Temple period, see Stephen
Westerholm’s succinct presentation in ‘‘Pharisees,’’ in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, ed.
Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, and I. Howard Marshall (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity,
1992), 609–14.
70 Theology Today 75(1)

Paul the Christian theologian upon the occasion of his encounter with Christ.
Determining the precise nature of this transition requires careful nuance. On one
hand, the discontinuity between Saul and Paul (for such is how Acts encapsulates
the theological transition occurring on the road to Damascus) cannot be stated
radically enough. The encounter with the risen Lord brought about a decisive
break with Paul’s Jewish past and initiated an entirely new theological trajectory
in his thinking. According to the account in Acts and his occasional biographical
reflections in the letters, Paul’s earliest Christian preaching utterly diverged from
the theology that buttressed his career as the church’s vicious arch-nemesis. In the
Damascene event, Saul experienced the sudden and astonishing intrusion of the
‘‘revelation of Jesus Christ’’ (Gal 1:12), and he discerned this event—immediately,
if we follow the Acts account—as the origin of a new apostolic vocation and the
basis of his mission to the Gentiles. The Lukan image of scales falling from Saul’s
eyes just as the Holy Spirit arrives and fills him (Acts 9:17–18) vividly encapsulates
this sense of disruptive newness. We recall here, too, Martyn’s exposition of the
theme of knowledge in Paul. In Martyn’s reading, Paul evidently considered his
former theological existence in Judaism to be part of the knowledge kata sarka that
marks the old age that is passing away in light of Christ. On the other hand, Paul’s
new way of thinking kata stauron differs fundamentally in character and orienta-
tion from his thought before the turn of the ages, which was interrupted during his
trek to Damascus.
In recent New Testament scholarship, the view summarized in the preceding
paragraph is countered most notably by proponents of the ‘‘New Perspective on
Paul.’’ Krister Stendahl, for instance, claims that the Acts narrative in fact dem-
onstrates a ‘‘continuity between ‘before’ and ‘after,’’’13 that is, between the Jewish
Saul and the Christian Paul. For Stendahl, Paul was ‘‘called’’ rather than ‘‘con-
verted,’’ aroused by the encounter with Christ to commence a new mission in
service to the God of Israel. Because this change of course was vocational and
developmental rather than drastically transfigurational, Paul is seen to have drawn
heavily from his previous Jewish thought in formulating his Christian message,
including the word of the cross he preached in Corinth and elsewhere. We do not
need to agree completely with Stendahl’s reading of Paul’s transition to appreciate
the strong lines of continuity between the ‘‘before’’ and ‘‘after,’’ for Paul did not,
as it were, start from scratch when thinking theologically about the crucifixion and
resurrection of Jesus and its significance. Rather, Paul conceives the Jesus events as
having meaning only in light of the Jewish Scriptures, in which Saul the Pharisee
was so well-versed; and indeed, for Paul the Jewish Scriptures can now be read only
in light of Christ. Paul’s new message is imagined within the framework of the

13. Krister Stendahl, Paul among Jews and Gentiles (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 7. See the entirety
of his argument on pages 1–22 for a defense of the view that Paul was ‘‘called’’ rather than
‘‘converted’’ in the Damascene encounter. See also Roy A. Harrisville’s helpful summary of the
debate between the ‘‘calling’’ and ‘‘conversion’’ interpretations in Fracture: The Cross as
Irreconcilable in the Language and Thought of the Biblical Writers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2006), 39–54.
Nelson 71

Jewish Scriptures, and vice versa—not at all otherwise. Douglas Harink is surely
right to observe that ‘‘in his (very brief) autobiographical reflections in Galatians,
Paul does not depict his own moral and spiritual condition before his call/conver-
sion as anticipating, whether positively or negatively, the world-shattering charac-
ter of his encounter with the risen Jesus.’’14 But neither does Paul—whether in
Galatians or elsewhere—appear to utterly relinquish his pre-call/conversion Jewish
theology and its intellectual furniture. Rather, the tension between before and after
is intensified by the fact that Paul reinterprets his Jewish past, his Pharisaical the-
ology, and the Hebrew Scriptures in light of the interruptive appearance of the
crucified One.
While there is certainly much more that can be said about Paul’s biography,
these comments will yet suffice for our purposes here. The point may sound pedes-
trian but is, in fact, entirely appropriate and significant: Paul’s theological existence
and journey are marked by both continuity and discontinuity. Paul’s is a theologia in
via which dramatically changes course during his pilgrimage to Damascus.
Demonstrably, after his Damascene encounter, Paul continues to look back to
that event as the origin of his theology and of all theological meaning. In this
sense, Paul is, as Keck puts it, an ‘‘ex post facto thinker,’’ where ‘‘ex post facto
thinking occurs not only after an event but because of it, and with continual ref-
erence, explicit or implicit, to it. The event’s very ‘happenedness’ requires think-
ing.’’15 At the same time—and likewise demonstrably, Paul never completely
jettisoned from his mind his pre-encounter Jewish theology, but radically reima-
gined it in light of the Damascene event and for the sake of the word of the cross he
was bound to proclaim.

Crux probat omnia—the Cross as the Crisis and Judge

of Christian Theology
Paul was profoundly afflicted by the cross of Jesus Christ. ‘‘I have been crucified
with Christ,’’ he writes to the Galatian churches, ‘‘and it is no longer I who live, but
it is Christ who lives in me’’ (Gal 2:19–20). His confession of the resurrected and
living crucified One and his conviction that, by virtue of the mystery of God, he
participated in Christ’s crucifixion animate his missionary preaching and all of the
theologizing which informed his proclamation. If we wish to, parroting Keck’s
idiom, think with Paul today so that we can learn to think like him,16 the weighti-
ness of the cross in his theology presents to us a significant challenge.
Paul did his theology on the fly, and hardly counts as a systematic theologian.
We therefore must be wary of suggesting that Paul, as it were, began his thinking
with the cross, deploying a theology of the crucified One as something like a first

14. Douglas Harink, Paul among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology Beyond Christendom and
Modernity (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2003), 30–31.
15. Keck, ‘‘Paul as Thinker,’’ 91.
16. See ibid., 101.
72 Theology Today 75(1)

principle for determining other theological categories and concepts. Nor should we
conceive Paul’s word of the cross as an abstract theologia crucis that might be
applied categorically to various problems of theological epistemology. I propose,
rather, that the cruciform temperament of Paul’s thinking is precisely what must
lay claim upon us today. What would it mean for us to recover this temperament
for our own theological work?
Luther comes to our aid here. Toward the end of his life and in the preface to
Volume One of the Wittenberg Edition, Luther identifies three criteria for the study
of theology: oratio (prayer), meditatio (meditation), and tentatio (suffering).17
As Oswald Bayer observes, with this trifecta Luther points us to the fundamental
passivity that governs theological existence, and precisely as such sheds light upon
Luther’s earlier dictum, crux sola nostra theologia—‘‘the cross alone is our the-
ology.’’18 For Luther, Christian theology unfolds from the ‘‘receptive life’’ (vita
passiva). We suffer alongside the suffering servant, and are crushed with Christ
beneath the heel of the hidden God who works against us with strange power and
unfathomable providence. In just this way we participate in and bear the cross, and
our theological existence is fashioned into the image of the cross—theology, that is,
becomes cruciform. Prayer and meditation are receptive theological actions flowing
out of theology’s originary cruciformity; discursive theological habits and practices
such as reading, writing, discussing, teaching, learning, and contemplating emerge
from and are animated by our participation in the cross.
We do not need to look hard to find reverberations of this understanding of
theology in Paul’s letters. We may limit our exposition to the Corinthian corres-
pondence, which begins with the epigraph at the top of this article. Here Paul
reminds the Christians at Corinth that, in their original encounter with the apostle,
he had ‘‘decided to know nothing among [them] except Jesus Christ, and him
crucified’’ (1 Cor 2:2). Writing to the Corinthian church a few years later, Paul
reiterates his first message to them—the ‘‘word of the cross’’—boasting in the
proclamation of the crucified Jesus as ‘‘a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness
to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the
power of God and the wisdom of God’’ (1:23–24). The word of the cross abides
throughout these ‘‘weighty and strong’’ Corinthian letters (see 2 Cor 10:10) as the
wellspring of the apostle’s argument and paraenesis. The correspondence is marked
by sophisticated, carefully crafted, and intricately structured theology. At all
points, it is Paul’s experience of and participation in the sufferings of the crucified
One that enlivens and emboldens him to theologize on behalf of the Corinthians.
Even Paul’s apostolic commission and authority, apparently under heavy fire in the
period after the first epistle was received by the congregation, is, according to Paul,

17. Martin Luther, ‘‘Preface to the Wittenberg Edition of Luther’s German Writings,’’ in LW 34,
285–87.
18. Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way, ed. and trans. Jeffrey G. Silcock and Mark C. Mattes
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 23.
Nelson 73

rooted in his partaking of the abundant sufferings of Christ (2 Cor 1:3–7; cf.
11:23–33).
With Bayer, I view Luther as a quintessential torchbearer for theological exist-
ence in a Pauline, cruciform key. Luther certainly theologized about the crucified
Christ, and his devotion to a theologia crucis is usually invoked to encapsulate such
theologizing. Bayer’s insight, however, is that Luther’s staurocentrism extends
beyond his theology of the cross; it marks the mood of his theology and shapes
his disposition as a theologian. For Luther, the word of the cross is a message that
continues to impose itself upon the one endeavoring to think and speak theologic-
ally. Crux probat omnia—the cross puts everything to the test, including (espe-
cially!) our thought about God.

Theologia viatorum—the Pilgrimage of Theological Knowledge

The word of the cross is the crisis of Christian theology and the crux of theological
existence, insofar as the theologian ought never to break loose from the sense of
wonderment that arises when testimony about the crucified One interrupts our
existence and ensnares our attention. By contrast, Christian theology becomes
domesticated, bourgeois, sterile, deadly boring, and, indeed, dangerous when we
cease to be captivated by the cross. What, though, does the idea of the judgment of
the cross upon our theology have to with theological existence as a journey of the
intellect? Thinking about God takes time and unfolds along a pathway. We are
pilgrims on the road toward the everlasting city which is to come (Heb 13:14), and
along the way we are commended to leave behind ‘‘the basic teaching about
Christ’’ for the sake of theological maturity (Heb 6:1). In what sense to do we
take the interruptive word of the cross with us on the road?
We may follow one route to arrive at an answer. In his analysis of Luther’s
definition of theology as oratio, meditatio, and tentatio, Bayer comments that ‘‘this
formula represents a clear alternative to the program of ‘faith seeking understand-
ing’ (fides quarens intellectum) that has dominated theology from Augustine
through Anselm to Hegel . . . and Karl Barth.’’19 Bayer here is concerned to
secure the significance of suffering and temptation for theology, as, in his reading,
tentatio tends to go missing in models of theology that follow the fides quarens
intellectum trajectory.20 He seems especially worried that ‘‘new experiences’’—by
which, presumably, he means our experiences of suffering alongside the crucified
Christ—disappear if theology is construed as a journey of the intellect.21 But I am
not convinced by Bayer’s argument that a theology transfixed on the cross is

19. Ibid., 34.

20. See the entirety of Bayer’s argument in Theology the Lutheran Way, 33–36; also footnote 212 on
pp. 233–34, where he encapsulates Luther’s alternative to Anselm’s fides quarens intellectum (faith
seeking understanding) as ‘‘tentatus quarens certitudinem (the person under attack seeking
certainty).’’
21. Ibid., 34.
74 Theology Today 75(1)

necessarily inharmonious with theology as faith seeking understanding. In a reflect-

ive essay on his own theology, Eberhard Jüngel proposes that ‘‘theology is never
delivered from astonishment’’ at ‘‘the mystery of God who reveals himself in the
precise hiddenness of human life and death.’’ ‘‘In faith in the triune God,’’ he
writes, ‘‘the depths of the word of the cross are opened up. I believe, therefore
I am astonished at the trinitarian mystery as the sum of the gospel: God from
eternity and thus in and of himself is God for us.’’22 In the same essay he describes
theology as fides quarens intellectum; insofar as ‘‘faith gives itself to be
thought . . . faith is passionately concerned to understand itself and thereby under-
stand God.’’23 What sets theology’s thinking in motion and continues to impress
upon the theologian a sense of astonishment is the very God disclosed in the
crucified One. For Jüngel, theology is a pathway which opens up before the
humble feet of the theologian as the glory of the Lord revealed in the crucified
Christ proceeds along its way, shining its light backwards upon all those in tow.
‘‘The being of God goes before all theological questioning in such a way that in its
movement it paves the way for questioning, leading the questioning for the first
time onto the path of thinking.’’24 At the same time, Jüngel insists that theological
existence is originally and persistently cruciform in and as the theologian is elem-
entarily interrupted by the triune mystery spoken in the world in the word of the
cross. As I read him, Jüngel’s approach holds in remarkable tension these insights
into the character of Christian theology: to be a theologian is to follow the crucified
Christ on a journey of the mind that is ever pressing forward toward maturity of
thought (theologia viatorum); to be a theologian is to find oneself profoundly inter-
rupted and afflicted, again and again, by the astonishing word of the cross, and
thus to be ever reminded of theology’s original message and cruciformity (theologia
crucis).
In a slightly different vein, Barth too highlights this tension in his remarks in
Evangelical Theology on the object of theology as ‘‘God in the history of his deeds.’’
‘‘In its perception, meditation, and discussion,’’ he writes, ‘‘theology must have the
character of a living procession.’’25 For Barth, the God of the gospel is dynamically
in motion, the divine procession ‘‘comparable to a bird in flight, in contrast to a
caged bird,’’26 and theology, which follows in tow behind God ‘‘in those unfolding
historical events in which he is God,’’27 must remain vigilant, always focusing its
thought on the God who acts and the actions of God. And so Barth: ‘‘It is just

22. Eberhard Jüngel, ‘‘‘My Theology’—A Short Summary,’’ in Theological Essays II, ed. J.B.
Webster, trans. Arnold Neufeldt-Fast (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 8.
23. Ibid., 9.
24. Jüngel, God’s Being is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth. A
Paraphrase, trans. John B. Webster (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 9.
25. Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, trans. Grover Foley (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1963), 9.
26. Ibid., 10.
27. Ibid., 9.
Nelson 75

from this point of view that evangelical theology is an eminently critical science, for
it is continually exposed to judgment and never relieved of the crisis in which it is
placed by its object, or, rather to say, by its living subject.’’28 According to Barth,
then, theology is both, on one hand, critical and scientific, and, on the other, always
alert to the movement of the God of the gospel and just in this way capable of being
surprised and interrupted. Ultimately for Barth, God alone is theology’s Lord.
Barth can acknowledge genuine progress in theology ‘‘as an ascent from one
ratio to an even higher ratio,’’ as he puts it in his little book on Anselm’s
proof.29 But ‘‘this progress which takes place from time to time at particular
moments of history is not at the mercy of the theologian’s whim but is conditioned
by the wisdom of God who well knows what is good for us to perceive at any given
time.’’30
For Jüngel and for Barth, then, theology’s itinerary follows the pattern of fides
quarens intellectum. Theology advances from thought to thought, and, precisely in
this way, to put it in technical terms, is essentially discursive, curricular, and accu-
mulative in character. Theology progresses by way of courses of thought, its know-
ledge accruing as building blocks of material are studied and assimilated. In just
this sense, theology is acquired knowledge: over time and with effort, theological
knowledge grows; otherwise, without attention and exertion, theological growth is
stunted or prematurely terminated. This does not necessarily entail that Christian
theology is a human work. Rather, as Jüngel and Barth have reminded us, theology
moves along its way in pursuit of the God who calls us to seek understanding. The
theologian is aroused by this call to follow after God through the passive theo-
logical activities of listening, reflecting, studying, teaching, and writing. And this
means, too, that theology is neither native to the theologian nor spontaneous, but
blossoms or develops over time as we are taught the things of God by the Holy
Spirit. Theology is participation in divine pedagogy; the theologian is drafted into
the classroom of Christian discipleship, acquiring theological knowledge over time
and along the journey as the Spirit leads us to greater understanding.
While we are on the road, we are ever confronted and interrupted by the New
Testament witness to the crucified Lord. In our theological work, we do indeed
pursue growth in knowledge and understanding. But at the heart of the faith that
seeks understanding is the mystery of the cross in the event of which God demon-
strates God’s unity with death and nothingness for the sake of conquering it on
behalf of overflowing life and revolutionary love. We cease to be astonished by this
mystery at our theology’s peril. Moreover, when we are open to and transfixed
upon the mystery of the cross, we become vulnerable in our thinking, and our
theological work becomes stamped by the Spirit’s fruit: ‘‘love, joy, peace, patience,

28. Ibid., 10.

29. Barth, Anselm: Fides Quarens Intellectum—Anselm’s Proof of the Existence of God in the Context
of his Theological Scheme (London: SCM, 1960), 32.
30. Ibid.
76 Theology Today 75(1)

kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control’’ (Gal 5:22–23).

Against such a vision of theology there can be no law!

A Brief Conclusion
Paul’s word of the cross has much to say to us today as we endeavor to do
Christian theology. The apostle reminds us that we do our thinking about God
in the epoch of the new age and in light of the mystery of the crucifixion. As I have
argued, to wrestle with Paul’s thought in order to think with and even like him is
hardly to abandon the idea of theology as a learned discipline, and does not neces-
sitate that we do away with the scholarly and pedagogical conventions and insti-
tutions which characterize academic theological work today. But if we are to think
like him, the word of the cross must become the basis, crisis, and judge of our
theology. If and when this occurs, our thinking about God will be marked by a new
temperament and animated by the virtues of the Spirit of the crucified Christ.

Author biography
R. David Nelson is acquisitions editor at Baker Academic and Brazos Press. He is
the author of The Interruptive Word: Eberhard Jüngel on the Sacramental Structure
of God’s Relationship to the World (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), and, with
Charles Raith II, Ecumenism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury T&T
Clark, 2017).