Theology of the cross

“For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

— 1 Corinthians 1:18

The theology of the cross (Latin theologia crucis) is the principle that God makes himself known to sinners through the humility and suffering of Christ’s cross, not through speculation about his majesty as displayed in creation and worldly power.¹ It stands against a theology of glory (theologia gloriae), which pursues the “invisible things of God” through visible strength and wisdom and becomes the foolishness Paul warns against (Rom. 1:22; 1 Cor. 1:18-25).¹ Martin Luther introduced the distinction, and the true theologian, on his principle, seeks and finds God hidden in suffering rather than in glory.¹

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession of Faith does not use Luther’s terms and has no chapter devoted to the theology of the cross as such. Its opening chapter makes a structurally similar claim about the limits of natural revelation:

“The light of nature, and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable; yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and his will which is necessary unto salvation.”²

Luther’s target was theological speculation pursued through God’s visible power and glory; the confession’s target is natural revelation generally. Both deny that what creation displays of God, considered on its own, yields the knowledge sinners actually need.

Biblical Basis

Luther anchored the distinction in Paul’s argument that although “what can be known about God” is “plain” in what “has been made” (Rom. 1:19-20), those who perceive it apart from the cross “became fools” rather than truly wise, exchanging God’s glory for something else (Rom. 1:21-23).¹ Paul makes a parallel argument about the gospel itself: the message of a crucified Christ is “folly to those who are perishing” but “the power of God” to those being saved (1 Cor. 1:18), because God “chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise” (1 Cor. 1:27). God’s wisdom, on this reading, is revealed specifically “in the foolishness of the cross,” not merely alongside it.³

Historical Development

The Heidelberg Disputation (1518)

Luther introduced the distinction between a theology of glory and a theology of the cross in the Heidelberg Disputation, a set of theses he defended before his own Augustinian order in 1518, the year after he posted the Ninety-Five Theses.¹ God’s “bare majesty,” on Luther’s account, is incomprehensible to sinners; those who try to know it directly, apart from the cross, are “blinded by a love of power and glory” and become fools in their pursuit of wisdom (Rom. 1:20-23).¹ The theology of the cross, by contrast, seeks to know God in “the crucified Christ”: God has chosen to lead sinners out of sin and hubris by “hiding” himself in the lowliness of the cross.¹ Luther treated this as more than a method: approaching God through the law and human wisdom rather than the cross will not “obtain righteousness and life by that law,” so that pursuing God’s hidden majesty in a theology of glory is finally “an ethical and soteriological problem.”¹

Deus absconditus and the hidden will

Luther pressed the same logic into his account of God’s hidden will. The “hidden God” (Deus absconditus), in his bare majesty, “works life, death and all things in all” and “has not defined himself by his word but has kept himself free over all things,” in contrast to the “preached God” who does not will the death of sinners.⁴ Rather than the Deus absconditus, Luther held, sinners are to seek the Deus revelatus made known under the “wrappings,” “faces,” or “masks” he takes up in redemptive history, “clothed and set forth in his own word, in which he offers himself to us.”⁵ Meeting God under these masks does not remove the believer’s awareness of his hiddenness elsewhere, above all in the “secret will” behind election and reprobation: Luther called it “the highest degree of faith” to believe God merciful and just even while he damns many, since “if I could comprehend by any reason how this God is merciful and just who shows so much wrath and iniquity, there would be no work in faith.”⁵

Opposing Views

Karl Barth kept a positive role for divine hiddenness in his own doctrine of God: because sinners have no innate power to know God, revelation itself functions as both a “veiling,” underscoring God’s hiddenness and the creature’s dependence on him, and an “unveiling,” which grants real, if limited, human knowledge of God.⁶ Barth nonetheless rejected any Deus absconditus that could conflict with the Deus revelatus, worried that Luther’s God of “bare majesty” amounted to a God of “arbitrary power” corresponding only “accidentally to God’s real work,” which he thought would undermine believers’ confidence that God’s revelation can be trusted.⁶ Barth extended the same worry to classical accounts of divine simplicity and to an unconditioned divine decree behind election, on the ground that either could leave God’s revelation in Christ merely provisional rather than identical with who God really is.⁷

Objections and Responses

If God’s revealed word can be contradicted by a deeper, hidden divine will, is God’s revelation actually trustworthy? Even an interpreter sympathetic to Luther raises this concern: Carl R. Trueman calls Luther’s account of God’s hidden will “brutal,” and asks, “If God’s revelation can itself be contradicted and is thus not the final word, then where is assurance to be found?”⁶ Duby answers from within classical theism rather than Luther’s own framework: because God is simple and complete in himself, “God in se and God pro nobis are the same God,” so that “there is no Deus absconditus ontologically distinct from the Deus revelatus.”⁸ On this account, the worry Trueman raises does not arise from any hidden, contrary will in God’s own being behind his revealed word, but at most from creatures’ own incomplete knowledge of that one, simple God.⁸

If the theology of the cross means God himself, in his divine nature, must suffer and die for sinners to be saved, doesn’t that compromise God’s impassibility? This question arises from Luther’s own Christology, not only from later, more radical developments of his theme. Rob Lister argues that Luther’s theologia crucis and his related doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum both mark a deviation from the church’s traditional teaching that God cannot suffer, since Luther held that “if the divine nature did not experience suffering and death for us in Christ, then the plight of sinners would be hopeless.”⁹ The Reformed answer distinguishes what Luther’s view runs together: attributes of Christ’s human and divine natures are communicated only to the one person of the Son, not from one nature to the other, so it is “the person of the Son, who is none other than the divine Son of God,” who suffers at the cross, and he does so specifically “as man” rather than as God.¹⁰ Christ can therefore be confessed as impassible in his deity and passible in his humanity at once, without either compromising the other.¹⁰

Related Doctrines

References

Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), chap. 1, “Theologia Within the Divine Economy,” 44. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God”: “God’s wisdom is especially revealed in the foolishness of the cross (1 Cor. 1:18), in Christ (1 Cor. 1:24), in the church (Eph. 3:10).” ↩
Duby, 43. ↩
Duby, 44-45. ↩ ↩²
Duby, 46. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Duby, 47. ↩
Duby, 48. ↩ ↩²
Alex Charles Tibbott, “Conclusion,” in “De Impassibilitate Et Satisfactione: An Examination of the Methodological Implications of Trinitarian Classical Theism for the Doctrine of the Atonement” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2024), 322, quoting Rob Lister, God Is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), 113. ↩
Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 7, “Does God Have Emotions? Impassibility.” ↩ ↩²