When I was at uni I used to tutor people in maths and physics and I found this fairly easy. There were foundations to the knowledge that were necessary and once these foundations were understood, then more advanced knowledge can be derived and understood. Over time, you develop in your knowledge and these foundations seem so elementary that you can too easily dismiss them as simple and easy. Your application of formulae, the language and symbols that you learn back then are now as common to you as the air you breathe.
Although the cross is foundational and fundamental to Christian faith, I’m unable to dismiss it as understood, simple and easy to teach. It’s elementary and advanced.
I’m reading ‘The Crucified God’ by Moltmann with friends at college and I’m amazed at the powerful way that it’s speaking into my life. Here’s an excerpt.
Faith in the cross distinguishes Christian faith from the world of religions… A Christianity which does not measure itself in theology and practice by this criterion loses its identity and becomes confused with the surrounding world; it becomes the religious fulfillment of the prevailing social interests, or of the interests of those who dominate society. It becomes a chameleon which can no longer be distinguished from the leaves of the tree in which it sits.
But a Christianity which applies to its theology and practice the criterion of its own fundamental origin cannot remain what it is at the present moment in social, political and psychological terms. It experiences an outward crisis of identity, in which its inherited identification with the desires and interests of the world around it is broken down. It becomes something other than what it imagined itself to be, and what was expected of it.
To be radical of course, means to seize a matter at its roots. More radical Christian faith can only mean committing oneself without reserve to the ‘crucified God’. This  is dangerous. It does not promise the confirmation of one’s own conceptions, hopes and good intentions. It promises first of all the pain of repentence and fundamental change. It offers no recipe for success. But it brings a confrontation with the truth. It is not positive and constructive, but is in the first instance critical and destructive. It does not bring man into a better harmony with himself and his environment. It does not create a home for him and integrate him into society, but makes him ‘homeless’ and ‘rootless’, and liberates him in following Christ who was homeless and rootless… And yet this faith, with its consequences, is capable of setting men free…” (38-39).
