Caught in the Act: Reflections on the Work of Christ

Gerhard O. Forde

Article Type: Article

Publication Date: 1/1/1983

Issue: The Work of Christ (Vol. 3, No 1, Winter, 1983)

The contention of this essay is that our thinking about the work of Christ today, like Abelard’s remark, must become more concrete, more in accord with the “brute reality” as it is disclosed to us in the actual events. We need something more like a “smoking gun” approach to the matter, the consciousness of being “caught in the act.” We need to be grasped more than heretofore by the realization that Christ’s work is and remains always an act in which we are involved and implicated, which cannot be translated into convenient and quiescent ideas. Indeed, the fatal flaw in most thinking about the atoning work of Christ is the tendency to look away from the actual events, translate them into “eternal truths,” and thus to ignore or obscure what actually happened and our part in it.

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