Ernst Kasemann, "the choice between gospel and religious ideology disguising itself as Christian."

I'm like C S Lewis at least in this. I struggle to make much of "devotional reading", and don't want other people to put words in my mouth and manufacture appropriate but second hand feelings, emotions and devotional responses. Lewis felt closest to God wrestling with a piece of tough theology, a pipe gripped in his teeth. I know exactly what he means.

One of those whose thought and writing speaks with authoritative bluntness and prophetic clarity is the German New Testament theologian and exegete, Ernst Kasemann. Forget safe and sound theology of a conservative persuasion; Kasemann is entirely impatient with those who want the Gospel reduced to this and that truth nicely connected, packaged and predictable. The Gospel is subversive, counter intuitive and counter cultural, a mystery and a scandal, a cosmic earthquake that shakes the very foundations of metaphysical certainties. 

Forget too, pious and devotional reveries about the love of God, whether conditional or unconditional, whether judgement's essential complement or its polar opposite. God is most fully known in Jesus Christ and him crucified; and God's vistory is not the annihilation of enemies but the resurrection of the Son in triumph over every impulse to annihilate - whether from vengeance, anger, hate, despair and all those other inner drives of the human heart which impel us towards our own inhumane strategies for domination and self and other-destructive behaviours.

On the cross, at Golgotha, on Calvary, God finally and fully dismantled the engines that drive the powers, the authorities and the agents of sin; which is to say, the love and justice and and power and creative pruposes of God found their fulfilment and final expression in the self-surrender of Jesus to the worst the world could do, and to the strategies and ambitions of those powers whose raison d'etre was the death of God and uncreation. God's answer was resurrection and new creation, through a love that remains and must ever remain mystery hidden in the ages, a plan eternal in construction and intersecting in our human history in a way that makes it eternally decisive and infinitely fruitful of the purposes of God. And such a God.

Here is Kasemann's way of saying all this:

At Golgotha, along with the idols and demons, our imaginings about ourselves are driven out. Where the heathen and pious are involved in the murder of Jesus, humanity as such is unmasked and given reality, and only forgiving grace can have the last word. At the same time it is there that the true God is at work, who does not rul unchallenged in glory according to our metaphysics but descends to the suffering, the outcast, and the damned. The depths now become the dwelling of God and his elct, of the festival of the redemption broken in, in which the Beatitudes no longer invite the high, wise and pious but the lost children, all in need of love and mercy. This alone is the salvation of the Gospel, which throughout the course of history was continually despised and slandered by the heathen precisely from out of their religiosity, and by Christian theology and piety unabatedly obscured and betrayed. Every generation stands before the alternative of the first commendment. And after Golgotha this means standing before the choice between gospel and religious ideology disguising itself as Christian.

Ernst Kasemann, On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene, pages 143-4.

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Comments

[Kathleen Long]

"The Gospel is subversive, counter intuitive and counter cultural, a mystery and a scandal, a cosmic earthquake that shakes the very foundations of metaphysical certainties."

Thanks! I needed that.