Fleming Rutledge on the Crucifixion

Fleming Rutledge is one of the great preachers of our time. Check out her "Generous Orthodoxy" website here--and get a hold of any (or all) of her sermon collections on Paul, or Romans, or the Old Testament, or Easter, or The Bible and the New York Times. She confounds both conservatives and liberals by preaching universal themes--original sin, amazing grace, and their social and cultural implications--that undercut all our more partial political perspectives. She was also one of the first dozen or so women ordained in the Episcopal Church.

Now she's released The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, her "magnum opus" as The Christian Century's reviewer calls it. A bit of the review:

Don’t conservative and evangelical churches regularly preach the cross and the crucifixion? Yes, they do. But they often reduce these themes to formulaic, even mechanistic interpretations of their meaning, related only to individuals and their fate after death. Moreover, as Rutledge argues persuasively, such proclamations are often theologically incoherent, doing violence to the trinitarian nature of God and rendering the God now separated from Jesus Christ into a monster.

Perhaps partly in reaction to the predominance of such reductive and misleading interpretations of the crucifixion by conservatives and evangelicals, other parts of the church—mainline, liberal, and progressive congregations and their preachers—have had less and less that is substantive to say about the crucifixion. Pelagianism, ever knocking at the mainline door, sidesteps the cross to emphasize Jesus’ good works and his role as a moral exemplar and spiritual guide. Then proclamation tends to become telling stories about Jesus rather than preaching Christ crucified. In some mainline church settings, the crucified One is portrayed as just another innocent victim of the empire, not as the One whose death constituted God’s redemptive disruption of the world.

Protestantism has had a particular problem handling this problem of sin and redemption, reducing it either to "fire insurance" for the afterlife or confident prescriptions about social reform today. But as I see it, Catholic thinkers have to deal with the same issues. 

I'm running to the store (well, to Amazon) to get Rutledge's book.