Quotes from Fleming Rutledge

Only God can execute a regime change in which the tyrannical Powers are displaced and overthrown. This is the story of the purpose of God, "which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth" (Eph. 1:9-10).

For Paul, it is not God, but the curse of the Law that condemned Jesus. In his death, Paul declares, Jesus was giving himself over to the Enemy — to Sin, to its ally the Law, and to its wage, Death (Rom. 6:23; 7:8-11). This was his warfare. That is one of the most important reasons — perhaps the most important — that Jesus was crucified, for no other mode of execution would have been commensurate with the extremity of humanity's condition under Sin.

Furthermore, we are so accustomed to seeing the cross functioning as a decoration that we can scarcely imagine it as an object of shame and scandal unless it is burned on someone's lawn.

Oh villain! Thou art condemned into everlasting redemption. Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing

"Who are you to judge someone else's servant? To his own kurios (master) he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Kurios (Master or Lord) is able to make him stand" (NIV).

The central idea in the concept of justification (dikaios). The righteousness of God is the same as his power to make righteous — to rectify what is wrong.

It can be argued that Advent, more than any other season of the church year, is immediately relevant to our concrete lives as individuals, to the concrete life of the church under stress, and to the concrete headlines in the newspaper.

The gospel is a message of deliverance from the grip of evil and Death.

Life's darker side: that's Advent.

The entire human race is heir to what John Henry Newman called a "vast primordial catastrophe," and that only a stronger power from outside ourselves can repair the breach.

Reflect the new way of seeing: the human situation is so tragic that there is no answer from within history. The Christ event is therefore the invasion of this world by Another, who is retaking for himself the world he created.

The two poles of Christ's exalted divinity and his suffering humanity as explicitly as does Hebrews. The result of this undertaking — the salvation of humanity — from out of the inner being of the Holy Trinity is, incredibly, that the hearts and minds of sinful human beings should be eternally perfected and at rest in the near presence of the heavenly Father.