Where to look for God

Would it be possible to have the cross of Christ plastered all over your church, talked about often, celebrated in festivals, sung about weekly... but still to have a church that was essentially ignorant of the cross and its power?

Martin Luther’s vigorous "yes!" to this question was at the heart of the Reformation and of his theology. And in Mark Thompson’s 2015 Nexus talk on Luther’s ’theology of the cross’ we heard why.

Luther’s re-discovery of the meaning of the cross revolved around two simple questions:

• How do know what God is really like?


• How do we recognise his work in our world?

Medieval Catholicism had one set of answers to those questions (and, to be frank, much of contemporary Christianity is the same). Luther came to see that the New Testament had completely different and contradictory answers that changed everything. He expressed these answers in his characteristically forceful and provocative way by saying (at the Heidelberg Disputation in 1518):

That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened (Rom. 1:20; cf. 1 Cor 1:21-25).

He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.

A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.

Luther wanted to insist that the weak, foolish, confounding cross was the only way to knowledge of the Father, and the only lens through which we should view everything. Rather than constructing knowledge of himself and his works in ways that made sense to us, or built upon what we already knew to be true, the cross is how God actually chooses to reveal himself, in defiance of all worldly wisdom and expectation.

Mark’s explanation of what Luther was getting at, why it is important, and what it means in multiple areas for us today was one of the real highlights of the 2015 Nexus Conference.

Watch it below.