The Word in Focus with Dr Larry Taylor

“It is, in the last place, clear that it is in the Passion and death of Christ that the objects of the strongest religious intuition must be sought. If his Incarnation, his mission, and the manner of his life come to be considered as a piece of self-revelation, in which an eternal Will of Love is mirrored, before all else is this Love and Faith seen accomplished in the Passion. The Cross becomes in an absolute sense the mirror of the eternal Father (speculum aeterni Patris); and not of the ‘Father’ alone the highest rational interpretation of the holy but of Holiness as such. For what makes Christ in a special sense the summary and climax of the course of antecedent religious evolution is pre-eminently this that in his life, suffering, and death is repeated in classic and absolute form that most mystical of all the problems of the Old Covenant, the problem of the guiltless suffering of the righteous, which re-echoes again and again so mysteriously from Jeremiah and deutero-Isaiah on through Job and the Psalms. The 38^th chapter of Job is a prophecy of Golgotha. And on Golgotha the solution of the problem, already adumbrated in Job, is repeated and surpassed.”

— The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational by Rudolf Otto