Passion Week Songs (4) – The Wonder of Your Cross

Our collection of eight songs continues. The artist today is Robin Mark.

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Passion Week Songs (3) – At the Foot of the Cross

For Holy Week, each day we’re posting songs appropriate to focus on Christ’s suffering, death, atonement, resurrection. 

The artist today is Kathryn Scott.

 

Passion Week Songs (2) – Lead Me to the Cross

This year, we’re doing something different for Holy Week. Each day this week, we’re posting songs appropriate to focus on Christ’s suffering, death, atonement, resurrection.

Subscribers: This means you’ll get two posts from us this week only. One in the morning, and one at 5:30 PM EST. If you’re also a subscriber to Christianity 201, it means you’ll get two items each day at 5:30 PM EST. 

The songwriter today is Graham Kendrick.

 

 

 

Passion Week Songs (1) – Remembrance

This year, we’re doing something different for Holy Week. Each day this week, we’re posting songs appropriate to focus on Christ’s suffering, death, atonement, resurrection.

Subscribers: This means you’ll get two posts from us this week only. One in the morning, and one at 5:30 PM EST. If you’re also a subscriber to Christianity 201, it means you’ll get two each day at 5:30 PM EST. 

Today’s artist is Matt Redman.

Book Review: Did God Kill Jesus?

There was something almost eerie about reading this book over the Easter season. I took a rather slow, almost plodding pace in order to absorb the material and then have a day to digest it before moving on, some of the events described paralleling narratives being brought to mind at Holy Week.

In Did God Kill Jesus? Searching for Love in History’s Most Famous Execution, author Tony Jones looks at the central element of the Christian faith — the death and resurrection of Jesus — though his focus is clearly on the crucifixion and all of its ramifications for doctrine and theology. Over the years, writers and teachers have processed a handful of dominant models of what all is taking place — what we call atonement — as Christ yields his life to the religious and political powers of Jewish authorities and Roman soldiers; and Jones considers these as well as a few of the lesser-known theories.

At the very core of his analysis is Jesus’ cry from the cross, “My God, my God; why have you forsaken me?” He veers strongly toward the view that at that moment Jesus sees the Father as absent and dares to suggest that right then, right there, Jesus experiences something akin to atheism; life in a world without God. This is presented alongside the notion that while positionally God’s omniscience is a given, there are things that could only be known incarnationally.

This is a book for people willing to risk actually doing some thinking. Many of us have grown up in environments where we were taught that “Jesus died on the cross for our sins;” but would be lacking clarity in explaining exactly how the violent, death of this One accomplished this. He notes that if a sacrifice were all that was required, a child sacrifice at the Bethlehem manger would have sufficed. He also forces the reader to consider why a violent death was necessary.

I had been aware of Tony Jones through his blogging activity at Theoblogy, and knew that because of his co-authorship of The Emergent Manifesto, some readers here might question his orthodoxy. My thoughts ran somewhat the other way; reading through I asked myself if the book could not have appeared under HarperCollins’ more Evangelical imprints such as Zondervan, instead of HarperOne. (There were a couple of language issues early on, which are, in balance, unfortunate.) Jones is simply a nice guy, charitable to people whose views on Calvary are different because they are Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic, Progressive or even Pentecostal. By this I mean, the book accounts for all tastes.

Perhaps it is my own perspective, but my takeaway — and I mean this as high praise — is that I found myself thinking about Jesus and what would be going through his mind throughout all aspects of his final words to his disciples, his betrayal, his beating, his trial before Pilate and the agony of the crucifixion itself. Could there be any higher benefit to the reader of a Christian book?

Click here to read sample pages of Did God Kill Jesus?.

Classic Christian Music Song

While assembling things for my own little YouTube upload project, we discovered one of the songs I most wanted to include was already online, and we’d determined only to do songs that didn’t exist anywhere else.  I might still make an exception for this one, but I wanted to share it with you today in this tribute video form.  The band is Scarlet Red; the song is simply titled Why.

It wasn’t long before I saw the painful truth before my eyes
All my sin had brought a price to pay,
and I knew it was for me that Jesus died.

I truly love this song, and I hope you enjoy listening to it, perhaps even more than once.