Death by Love: Letters from the Cross Book

It's not often I refuse to finish a book. Regardless of worth I tend to trudge through and finish what I started. I could only finish half this book. I just didn't see the point of continuing.

On the one hand I appreciate the aims of the book. It was clear to me that Driscoll and Breshears sought to make their pastoral ministry theological. For this I applaud them. This was written by a pastor and a theologian with a pastoral purpose. This is a worthwhile development and I greatly admire this movement. It would have been easier for them to do one or the other, but they did not. Further, they are serious about their reflections on the cross. They seek to move beyond a simple understand of it but pull together a breadth of significance for the power and scandal of the cross. Kudos. Further I can see how Driscoll is such compelling and polarizing figure. He's to the point. He pulls no punches. He writes tersely and one reads him easily. He comes across as a "you're either with him or against him" type of guy.

On the other hand there was much that I could not swallow. Although they added a paragraph to the introduction stating they purposefully decided to forgo discussion of the resurrection even though it was necessary for understanding the death of Jesus to focus exclusively on his cross. This was an unfortunate decision on their part. Understandable from a literary standpoint. Disaster from a theological standpoint. I for one cannot make sense of the cross apart from the empty tomb. Closely related to this criticism is the reduction of all of Jesus' work to the cross. This move seemed to empty his life of messianic purpose. As far as I could tell, Jesus may as well have been incarnated on the cross. It seems to me that the healing Jesus might have something to say in some of these pastoral situations. Sadly this was not considered. Again it makes sense from a literary standpoint but has troubles holistically. Third I grew tired of reducing anyone who opposed their presentation of the cross as either limp-wristed men or straw-man "liberals". Fourth I found it strange that most (all?) of the scenarios I read involved persons with some sort of church background. Strangely not all of the churches were criticized. Makes me wonder if their own church was given a free pass. I'm sure if we looked hard enough any church would have its own successes and failures of call. Finally, I could not get past his treatment of men and women. All the troubles of men stemmed from bad fathers in their lives or weakness on the man in questions part. Women, however, were only victims. Any blame was passed onto the male who failed to protect them. This lead to a strange fixation on appearances. The most appalling case (and what finally forced my hand in putting the book down) was this:

"She was ashamed that she had been raped and controlled by a guy who was not handsome, smart, successful, or kind--in short, a loser. To make matters worse, the loser boyfriend had ended up cheating on her with another, less attractive girl, which added to her shame. Eventually she got out of the relationship with the loser cheating boyfriend, thanks in part to the intervention of the new boyfriend, her future husband, who cared for her."

No doubt this is a horrific and heartbreaking lot in life. I fail to see how looks or success has anything to do with it though.

Finally as I read I was reminded of Moltmann's words on the cross in light of the resurrection in his own work on the subject:

"The Cross is not and cannot be loved. Yet only the crucified Christ can bring the freedom which changes the world because it is no longer afraid of death."