The Cross not a Cosmic Symphathy Card

Christopher Wright:

"The extent of God's love is not only that he has entered with compassion into our suffering and proved (from the exodus to Galilee) that he is the God who stands with the weak and the oppressed--all this is gloriously and gratefully true. God has identified himself with our suffering and knows what it is to bear the pain of human injustice and violence. Yes, but the even greater extent of God's love is that he also took our sin and rebellion--of the oppresed and the oppressor--and bore all its just consequences on himself, in the mysterious unity of the Trinity at the cross...

...there is a twisted version of penal substitution that is rightly to be rejected--the idea of an angry God making a victim Son the whipping boy for his brutality. Such a picture of 'cosmic child abuse' is indeed a gross caricature. But it is equally a grossly deficient caricature to reduce the cross to nothing more than a cosmic symphathy card, in God's handwriting shaying, 'I share your pain.' God did more than merely share our pain. God in Christ bore the pain of the just consequences of our sin, bore them 'for us', such that we need never have to bear them ourselves, for all eternity." The God I Don't Understand, 153-154

Substitution Essential to God's Work at the Cross

Christopher Wright:

"...the Bible uses different metaphors as ways of conveying the multifaceted truth about what God accomplished through the cross of Christ and what that accomplishment can mean for us when we put our faith in him. This basic affirmation, however, at the heart of the Bible's interpretation of the cross, namely, that it was an act of God in which God in Christ put himself in our place is an act of substitution for our benefit, is not really a metaphor...

the act of substitution seems not to be a 'something else' that we can use as one way of talking about a different reality--namely, what God did at the cross. Rather, there is something inescapably essential about this. Substitution is not a metaphor for what God did; it is what he actually did. God actually did choose to put himself in a place where we should be, to do for us what we could not do for ourselves...[this] is not one metaphor among others, but the core reality that then presents itself to our understanding through the variety of metaphors and analogies that the Bible uses to appreciate the vast rich reality of all that God achieved by that self-giving, self-substituting act." The God I Don't Understand, 125.

Not Just the Fact but the Meaning

Again, I hand this blog over to the voice of P.T. Forsyth:

"The only Cross you can preach to the whole world is a theological one. It is not the fact of the Cross, it is the interpretation of the Cross, the prime theology of the Cross, what God meant by the Cross, that is everything. That is what the New Testament came to give. That is the only kind of Cross that can make or keep a Church."

Source.

A Past Address, A Present Need

A piece of an address given by P.T. Forsyth in 1908:

"The grace of God cannot return to our preaching or to our faith till we recover what has almost clean gone from our general, familiar, and current religion, what liberalism has quite lost--I mean a due sense of the holiness of God. This sense has much gone from our public worship, with its frequent irreverence; from our sentimental piety, to which an ethical piety with its implicates is simply obscure; from our rational religion, which banishes the idea of God's wrath; from our public morals, to which the invasion of property is more dreadful then the damnation of men...This holiness of God is the real foundation of religion--it is certainly the ruling interest of Christian religion. In front of all our prayer or work stands 'Hallowed be Thy name.' If we take the Lord's Prayer alone, God's holiness is the interest which all the rest of it serves. Neither love, grace, faith, nor sin have any but a passing meaning except as they rest on the holiness of God, except as they arise from it, and return to it, except as they satisfy it show it forth, set it up, and secure it everywhere and for ever. Love is but its outgoing; sin is but its defiance; grace is but its action on sin; the cross is but its victory; faith is but its worship. The preacher preaches to the divinest purpose only when his lips are touched with the red coal from the altar of the thrice holy in the innermost place. We must rise beyond social righteousness and universal justice to the holiness of an infinite God."

Source: p. 22, 23. The Cruciality of the Cross.