One of my persistent vocations is answering the critics of the cross. See for example, my The Cross and Violence, Is the Word of the Cross Good News, or is it Bad News?, a paper I gave at last summer's Craigville Colloquy on Cape Cod.
So I was gratified to find this piece by N.T Wright, Bishop of Durham, in Fulcrum, from 2007, The Cross and the Caricatures. Here's a sample:
“We must of course grant that many Christians have spoken, in effect, of the angry God upstairs and the suffering Jesus placating him. Spoken? They've painted it: many a mediaeval altarpiece, many a devotional artwork, have sketched exactly that. And of course for some late mediaeval theologians this was the point of the Mass: God was angry, but by performing this propitiatory sacrifice once more, the priest could make it all right. And it was at least in part in reaction against this understanding of the Eucharist that the Reformers rightly insisted that what happened on the cross happened once for all. They did not invent, they merely adapted and relocated, the idea of the propitiation of God's wrath through the death of Jesus. We must of course acknowledge that many, alas, have since then offered more caricatures of the biblical doctrine. It is all too possible to take elements from the biblical witness and present them within a controlling narrative gleaned from somewhere else, like a child doing a follow-the-dots puzzle without paying attention to the numbers and producing a dog instead of a rabbit.
This is what happens when people present over-simple stories with an angry God and a loving Jesus, with a God who demands blood and doesn't much mind whose it is as long as it's innocent. You'd have thought people would notice that this flies in the face of John's and Paul's deep-rooted theology of the love of the triune God: not 'God was so angry with the world that he gave us his son' but 'God so loved the world that he gave us his son'.”
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