LOOKING THROUGH THE CROSS
By Graham Tomlin
Bloomsbury. 240 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978 1 408 188 477
This book is advertised as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s book for Lent.
Graham Tomlin writes well and is easy to read. There are nine chapters exploring the way the cross of Christ impacts our understanding of life and the world we live in. For example, the first chapter is called ‘The Cross and Wisdom’ and looks at the way we find God works in unexpected ways because our view of him is so small. Indeed the author says (p.29) that his book is all about ‘learning to look at the world through different eyes’. In areas such as identity, suffering, ambition and so on he succeeds in doing this through reflection that is thought-provoking and useful. I enjoyed this material.
God’s wrath played down
However, if this book is about looking at the world through different eyes, then I have to say that it appears to have a rather large blind spot. The perspective of God’s revelation in Scripture portrays the cross of Christ as above all a substitutionary death in which a propitiation is made to deal with the terrible issue of God’s proper anger against human sin. There is little attention paid to this in this book.
Thus it is surprising in the chapters on evil (ch.2) and life (ch.9) not find a focus on the way death is seen in the Bible as God’s curse which originates in the Fall. This means that the author can speak of evil being overcome by love (p.56) but there is no real exposition of the Bible’s profound explanation of how this is achieved through the cross. This attention to the way in which the cross works is also lacking in the chapter on reconciliation and dealing with division (ch.8).
In sum, I cannot recommend this book as getting to the heart of what the cross is really all about. For that I must continue to recommend John Stott’s The Cross of Christ. Nevertheless, a mature Christian who knows that propitiation lies as the heart of the biblical understanding of the cross will still gain much from this book in its exploration of the way the cross relates to significant themes in everyday life.
