Tag Archives: The Cross

The offense of the Cross

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The Cross offends the world – and an increasing number of church denominations – for a number of reasons. The Church of Sweden has found a new one.

The Swedish Church’s head of communications, Gunnar Sjoberg, thinks it is offensive to wear a cross in support of persecuted Christians; he makes no mention of whether he finds persecuting Christians to be offensive.

Coincidentally, around the same time Sjoberg made his pronouncement, membership in his church plummeted.

From here:

“Provocative and un-‎Christian”: ‎That is how Gunnar Sjoberg, the head of communications for the Swedish Church, chose to ‎comment on the August social media campaign #MittKors (“MyCross”), which urged Christians and ‎others to wear a cross in support of the world’s persecuted Christians. ‎

The campaign was a reaction to Christians being murdered or kidnapped and enslaved by the Islamic State group, the Islamic terrorists pillaging village after village throughout the ‎Middle East, and one would think this campaign would be given unanimous support.

But ‎then, one would be mistaken. ‎

[….]

Sjoberg says, “The ‎cross of Christ may end up being used as a weapon against another faith and not as a ‎symbol of support for Christians,” thus choosing not to engage with the issue. This is cowardly and unjust, although it is in line with the Swedish Church’s documented lack of moral compass. Sweden’s ‎largest daily newspaper, Aftonbladet, has a similar and equally offensive reaction, ‎comparing the cross to the swastika and the #MyCross campaign to that of Nazi ‎propaganda, thus playing shamelessly into the hands of the extremists who have made ‎Christians into the world’s most persecuted group. ‎

No Cross, no Christianity

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Giles Fraser is an Anglican clergyman who doesn’t much like evangelicals or Holy Trinity Brompton or any church that is large and successful or Alpha. He thinks that people who have “a personal relationship” with Jesus are creepy.

He reserves a particular dislike, though, for those who believe that Jesus’ death on the cross was a moment of triumph:

Which is why, for the worst sort of Cheesus-loving evangelicals, the cross of Good Friday is actually celebrated as a moment of triumph. This is theologically illiterate. Next week, in the run up to Easter, Christianity goes into existential crisis. It fails.

The disciples run away, unable to cope with the impossible demands placed upon them. The hero they gave up everything to follow is exposed to public ridicule and handed over to Roman execution. And the broken man on the cross begins to fear that God is no longer present.

I suspect what is really rubbing him up the wrong way is that evangelicals believe that, in his time of suffering on the cross, Jesus took upon himself the sins of the whole world – even those of Giles Fraser. He bore the wrath of God the Father for those sins so that we wouldn’t have to, thereby reconciling us to the Father once and for all. How can such a Redemption not be a triumph?

Theological liberals like Giles Fraser don’t like to think about the wrath of God, the innate sinfulness of man and the fact that a holy, just God must punish sin. Theirs is a sub-Christian faith, empty, meaningless, incoherent and worthy of derision.

Without the triumph of the Cross, there is no Christianity.

1,400 year old grave contains remains wearing a cross

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From here:

Laid to rest in her best clothes and lying on an ornamental bed, she was probably of noble blood.

Quite how the 16-year-old Anglo Saxon girl died and who she was remain a mystery.

But she was buried wearing a gold cross – suggesting she was one of Britain’s earliest Christians.

[…..]

It was probably sewn into her clothing around the neck and may have been worn in her daily life.

It’s taken 1,400 years for the British government to decide that the cross is not something that it will tolerate being worn “in daily life” and for an Archbishop of Canterbury to declare that a cross is something “religious people make and hang on to as a substitute for true faith”

Such is the march of progress.

A new reason to ban crosses

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And this one is even more farfetched than most:

A taxi boss has hit out after one of her drivers was told to remove a religious cross from his vehicle’s dashboard – because it looked ‘very phallic’.

Clair Cook was told by her local council that her driver’s symbol should be removed because they had had a complaint from a 15-year-old schoolboy that the cross was a ‘fake penis’.

It didn’t seem occur to anyone that to a 15-year-old schoolboy almost everything looks ‘very phallic’.