The Way of Cruciformity is a Christian concept referring to a life shaped in the way of the cross (crucifixion + conformity) and entering into the pattern of Jesus' suffering, death, and resurrection, so as to participate in, and share, God's love as one learns to live-out selfless sacrificial love, forgiveness, and compassion for others, the world, and creation itself. It embodies Jesus' humility, solidarity with the oppressed, and willingness to die to self for the sake of life in God, transforming daily actions, leadership, and engagement into Sacred identity and uplift with a suffering world.
Preface
Not the Jesus abstracted into formulistic and static doctrine.
Not the Jesus absorbed into the Western-Christian empire of imperialism.
But the Jesus that served, sacrificed, was tortured, crucified, and died by humanity's hands.
This essay asks why Christianity, when it remains faithful to its center in Christ, becomes unlike any other religion... and why that difference matters, not as triumph, but as provocation and goad towards the Sacred divine.
This essay then will explore the strangeness of the Sacred through Christ Jesus.
Introduction: The Oddity No Theology Can Fully Tame
Christianity does not merely participate in the religious evolution of humankind. It is UNLIKE any previous religion before its day or at its start. When Christianity remains faithful to Jesus, it introduces a rupture within the evolution of religion - an unsettling inversion of what religion itself had largely come to expect from its man-like comprehension of the divine. This rupture is not primarily doctrinal, metaphysical, or even philosophical. It is deeply moral and existential.
At the center of Christianity stands not a cosmic vision; not a sacred law; nor an enlightened teacher; but an executed God - and that God's audacious claim that his execution will reveal the heart and soul and willingness of a sovereign God to not seek mere comfort, security, worship, adulation, or empire:
The Temptation of Jesus (Mt 4.1ff)
4 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit (sic, Sacred divine) into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3 And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” 4 But he answered, “It is written, “ ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ”
5 Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple 6 and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, “ ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and “ ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’ ” 7 Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ”
8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 9 And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” 10 Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! (the one who does not follow the Sacred divine) For it is written, “ ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’ ” 11 Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.
Jesus Begins His Ministry
12 Now when he (Jesus) heard that John (the baptizer) had been arrested, he withdrew into Galilee. 13 And leaving Nazareth he went and lived in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, 14 so that what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled...
Christianity then does not begin with a sacrosanct order of worship or overpowering divine victory. It begins with a condemned God executed by the state, abandoned by followers, and silenced by violence. The central symbol of the faith is not a throne, a crown, a book, or a vision of power - but a wooden cross ushered in by leaven bread and a common chalice on the eve of God's death:
Luke 22:19-20: "And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, 'This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, 'This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.' "
These acts and events alone makes Christianity odd.
Across the ancient world, gods ruled by strength. They secured order through dominance, demanded sacrifice to maintain cosmic stability, and mirrored the hierarchies of empire and kingship. Even when compassionate, they remained distant, aloof, far away - above the mortal fray of human suffering rather than to participate directly within it.
This makes Christianity unique. Singular. Alone. That it dares to say something else entirely: that the Sacred is revealed not by a God or godly pantheon escaping suffering, but by entering within it without retaliation, without judgement, without wrath.
This is not a metaphysical claim - it is a moral one. And it has consequences that no theology has ever fully contained. Including later Christian theologies that tacked on doctrines of hell and deadly apocalypse (such as found in the book of Revelation or the teachings of 2 Peter) by Christian congregations actively refusing to acknowledge a lovingly divine act of unretributive sacredness contextualized in pure, unconditional offering by the Sacred for the life and welfare of all creation.
Christianity, then, begins not in triumph but in apparent failure. Not in other-wordly revelation safely received, but in flesh-and-blood, and bodily-revelation, rejected. The foundational event of the incarnational Jesus-faith is not divine ascent, but divine descent - a descent into social and political humiliation, communal abandonment, and a cruel, violent death. God came to earth and rejecting religion killed this God.
No amount of theological sophistication can remove this fact that Christianity’s central symbol is a God that died on an instrument of torture. That this God, its redeeming-founder, did not escape human suffering. That this God entered into humanity's suffering fully and completely and without any heavenly retaliation. In consequence, Christianity insists on remembering the passion, ministry, life, and death of its Saviour-God. To celebrate Jesus' birth. To honor his teachings. To mourn his death. And celebrate his bodily resurrection:
And Jesus said to Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die." (John 11.25-26)
This sacred event makes Christianity not merely distinctive, but awkward, strange, uneasily held. It does not fit neatly into divine categories of religious power and success. And it is precisely this awkwardness, this oddity - this refusal to resolve itself into the power structures of the world - that constitutes Christianity's enduring provocation not only to the world, but to its own errant followers and congregants who, when gaining power, misuse and abuse Love's sacrifice.
This has been the way of the church historically whenever it gains power even as it has been the way of bad religion generally across the millennia. The Christian church's past is no different from it's beliefs and actions in the 21st century. We see it all too clearly in Trump's Maga-church followers as they commit crimes of hatred upon those they despise, oppress, and do not want.
This was never the way of Jesus who rejected power for love, rule for sacrifice, enthronement for living a cruciformed life. Jesus did not speak death into people, he spoke life... the sacred life of the loving divine of creational life. This is the real Christian message, its gospel not of holiness but of love (or loving holiness, or holy lovingness). The Sacred is Love. To love is to be in the Sacred.
I. The Crucifixion as Theological Axis, Not Historical Accident
The crucifixion of Jesus is not an accident appended to an otherwise noble life. It is the point at which Jesus' way of being collides decisively with the world as it is, and always seems to be.
Jesus proclaims a vision of God radically unlike all prevailing religious expectations. God is not aligned with the powerful but attentive to the powerless. God’s reign is not secured through violence or exclusion but through mercy, forgiveness, and restorative justice. Authority is exercised not through domination but through service.
Such a vision is not merely inspiring; it is socially, politically, personally, and religiously destabilizing.
- Rome crucified Jesus not because he preached spirituality, but because his message threatened the political imagination that underwrote its empire.
- Jewish religious authorities oppose Jesus not because he lacked piety, but because he relativizes sacred boundaries that elevated and sustained institutional control.
- Even the later Christian church confused power with love, administrating its supposed, or inferred, divine decree in non-sacrificial, non-loving, modes and means.
Christianity’s daring claim is that it is at this very moment of Jesus' crucifixion which reveals the Sacred God more truthfully than any religious vision of the Sacred or divine invincibility could ever evidence, witness, attest, or demonstrate.
II. Cruciformity and the Inversion of the Sacred
Across ancient pantheons, divinity is associated with elevation: gods rise above humanity, ruling from distance, radiating power, demanding sacrifice. Even benevolent gods rarely relinquish supremacy. The Sacred is imagined as that which stands over the world even as mankind imagines itself set-apart from the creation world and one-another.
But Jesus reverses this gravitational pull of mind and heart...
- In him, the sacred moves downward - into vulnerability, risk, and exposure.
- God does not demand blood; God bleeds.
- God does not secure order through fear; God absorbs chaos without returning it.
- The cross is not divine cruelty but divine self-emptying.
Cruciformity refuses the logic of domination. It insists that the deepest truths about reality is not divine coercion but relational fidelity - a love willing to suffer rather than violate the freedom of the beloved.
This is not weakness. It is a redefinition of strength.
In process terms, this aligns with a God who persuades rather than coerces, who works within history rather than overriding it, who risks rejection for the sake of genuine relationship.
III. Imagining the Death of God as the Death of Violent Theology
When Jesus is crucified, Jesus-Christianity dares to say something extraordinary: that the image of God as violent ruler, cosmic enforcer, and imperial guarantor is exposed - and judged. Not mankind. But mankind's imagined gods and pantheons!
What dies on the cross is not divinity itself, but particular theological imaginations.
The cross marks the end of the god who sanctifies domination, who demands suffering for stability, who rules through fear.
This is why the crucifixion is so threatening. It unmasks sacred violence as idolatry.
Christianity’s most radical claim is not simply that God suffers, but that God refuses to be God in the way the religions and empires of men expect.
The cross then, is not only redemptive; it is iconoclastic. It shatters false images of divine power.
This is why later Christianity has struggled so deeply with its own symbol. A crucified God cannot easily be reconciled with empire, supremacy, or authoritarian certainty.
IV. Resurrection: Love’s Persistence, Not Power’s Return
The resurrection does not undo the cross. It does not turn humiliation into domination nor suffering into revenge. Jesus does not rise as a conqueror reclaiming authority through force. He rises as forgiving Lord and Savior to all - both enemy and friend.
To understand that Jesus rises bearing wounds:
Isaiah 53. 1 "Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?"
2 For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
3 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.
8 He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken.
9 And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.
10 Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
11 He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.
This matters profoundly. Resurrection is not the negation of cruciformity but its vindication. It declares that self-giving love is not ultimately defeated by violence, even when violence appears victorious.
In process theology, resurrection can be understood not as divine interruption of history, but as creative persistence - the affirmation that love, once embodied, cannot be erased from the fabric of becoming. God does not cancel the risk of love; God carries it forward.
Resurrection is not triumph over enemies. It is the future opened by forgiveness.
V. Prophetic Aftershocks: Why the Cross Generates Resistance
Because Christianity remembers a crucified God, it carries within itself a permanent tension with systems of domination. When it is faithful, it aligns instinctively with the oppressed, the marginalized, and the victims of power.
This is why Christianity, when it is at its best, has generated prophetic movements:
- resistance to slavery,
- struggles for civil rights,
- advocacy for the poor,
- critiques of empire and militarism,
- care for the sick, imprisoned, and forgotten.
These are not accidental byproducts. They flow directly from the cruciform imagination: "A God revealed in suffering love cannot be comfortably allied with systems that produce suffering."
When Christianity forgets this, it becomes indistinguishable from other religions of power. When it remembers, it becomes disruptive - even dangerous to state and religious systems.
Jesus does not found a religion designed to rule. He ignites a moral disturbance that refuses to settle within the profane, the destitute, the wicked.
VI. Christianity’s Betrayal - and Its Inescapable Memory
Christian history is filled with betrayals of the cross.
- In seeking certainty, Christianity has often fled vulnerability.
- In seeking power, it has embraced coercion.
- In seeking supremacy, it has silenced the very voices Jesus elevated.
Yet Christianity is never able to fully escape its founder:
- The cross remains, judging every attempt to make the faith safe, respectable, or dominant.
- Jesus does not belong to Christianity; Christianity is accountable to Jesus.
- This is both the Christian faith’s tragedy and its hope.
Conclusion: The God Who Would Rather Suffer Than Rule
Christianity is not unique because it claims exclusive truth. Many religions have done so, and history bears the scars of those claims. Christianity is unique because it dares to confess that truth allowed itself to be killed rather than to kill in return, that ...
This confession does not elevate Christianity above other traditions. It unsettles it - as well as itself.
It renders this kind of Christian faith perpetually uncomfortable with-and-within itself:
- Christianity is unable to rest easily in domination, violence, or certainty without contradicting its own center.
- That a crucified God cannot be neatly aligned with empire, coercion, or religious control.
- That the Cross stands as a standing judgment against every attempt to make God useful, manageable, or safe.
When Christianity remains faithful to Jesus - when it resists temptations to move beyond the cross - it offers humanity something very rare and fragile: a vision of the Sacred ...
- Not as Controller of history, but as Companion within it;
- Not as distant ruler, but as Co-Sufferer;
- Not as enforcer of order, but as Love willing to be wounded rather than withdraw.
In this vision of the Sacred, divine power is not the ability to dominate outcomes, but the capacity to remain present, faithful, and creative even in the face of rejection and death.
- Such a faith does not conquer the world. It interrogates it. It unsettles it. It displaces it.
- It does not silence other traditions, but listens for truth wherever-and-whenever love bends toward justice, mercy, and healing... as it can within every religion.
- It does not promise certainty, but calls forth responsibility.
- The cross does not resolve the problem of suffering; it refuses to abandon those who suffer.
That is why this vision still matters - not as conquest, not as supremacy, but as conscience. It matters because it reminds humanity that holiness without love is hollow, that power without compassion is idolatry, and that any religion worthy of the Sacred must be willing to lose itself rather than betray love.
- that love is more truthful than power,
- that solidarity is more divine than control,
- and that God - if God is to mean anything at all
- is found not above the world, but with it,
- faithfully bearing wounds,
- faithfully calling creation forward,
- faithfully abiding with all who seek.
After the Cross...
- Part I - Foundations: The Birth of the Sacred
- Essay 1 - Animism and the Living Cosmos
- Essay 2 - From Tribe to Totem
- Part II - The Age of Gods
- Essay 3 - The Mesopotamian Fertile Crescent
- Essay 4 - Egypt, Indus, and Minoa Sacred Cultures
- Essay 5 - From Polytheism to Henotheism
- Part III - Axial Awakenings
- Essay 6 - Ancient Israel, Persia, and Monotheism
- Essay 7 - India's Axial Age
- Essay 8 - Greece and the Birth of Reason
- Part IV - The Sacred Made Universal
- Essay 9 - The Age of Universal Religions
- Essay 10 - Modernity and the Eclipse of the Sacred
- Essay 11 - The Rebirth of the Sacred
- Part V - Conclusion of Series
- Part VI - Supplementary Materials
- 1 - The Ancient History of Mesopotamia
- 2 - The History of Language in Ancient Mesopotamia
- 3 - The Ancient History of the Hebrew Language
- 4 - How the Ancient Near East Gave Shape to Israel's God:
- Why the ANE is Essential for Israel's Received Theology (I-II)
- Affecting Cultic Syncretism Across the Ancient Near East (III-V)
- Cultural Identity Formation & the Rejection of Syncretism (VI-IX)
- 5 - The History & Compilation of the Hebrew Bible:
- From Oral Memory to Proto-Canon (I-II)
- Exile, Redaction, and the Birth of Scripture (III)
- Second Temple Scribalization to Canonization (IV-V)
- 6 - The Unhelpful Oxymorons of "Biblical Authority" & "Inerrancy"
- 7 - The Evolution of Inerrancy: From Ancient Plurality to Modern Certainty
- 8 - A Historical-Theological Study of "Son of Man" vs "Son of God"
- 9 - The Song of Gilgamesh & Other Ancient Flood Stories
- 10 - Isaiah as a Living Textual Tradition: Manuscripts, Variants & Transmission
- 11 - From Scroll to Scripture: Bible Versions, Variants & their Histories
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. Jesus, Crucifixion, and Historical Context
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Moltmann, Jürgen. God in Creation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.
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Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
Girard, René. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.
Wink, Walter. Engaging the Powers. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992.
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Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship. New York: Touchstone, 1995.
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Hauerwas, Stanley. The Peaceable Kingdom. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.
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Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making. New York: Fordham University Press, 1996.
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Keller, Catherine. On the Mystery. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008.
Oord, Thomas Jay. The Uncontrolling Love of God. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2015.
Cobb, John B., Jr. Christ in a Pluralistic Age. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1975.
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Dunn, James D. G. Christology in the Making. London: SCM Press, 1980.
McFague, Sallie. Metaphorical Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1982.
Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Vattimo, Gianni. After Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
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