It is only on the Cross that Jesus can be the bearer of the final revelation and the embodiment of God's decisive act: it is 'Christ crucified' who is 'the power of God and the wisdom of God'. For it is in this ultimate surrender of self, in love 'to uttermost', that Jesus is so completely united in the Ground of his being that he can say, 'I and the Father are one...The Father is in me and I am in the Father'.
Faith is participation in this Being of Jesus (incarnation, cross and resurrection). Our relation to God not a religious relationship to a supreme Being, absolute in power and goodness, which is a spurious conception of transcendence, but a new life for others, through participation in the Being of God.
Jesus is 'the man for others', the one in whom Love has completely taken over, the one who is utterly open to, and united with, the Ground of his being. And this 'life for others, through participation in the Being of God', is transcendence.
In the man Christ Jesus stands revealed, exposed at the surface level of 'flesh', the depth and ground of all our being as Love.
The whole schema of a supranatural Being coming down from heaven to 'save' mankind from sin, in the way that a man might put his finger into a glass of water to rescue a struggling insect, is frankly incredible to man 'come of age', who no longer believes in such a deus ex machina.
The state of our whole life is estrangement from others and ourselves, because we are estranged from the Ground of our being, because we are estranged from the origin and aim of our life...We cannot escape, however. If that something is the Ground of our being, we are bound to it for all eternity, just as we are bound to ourselves and to all other life. We always remain in the power of that from which we are estranged.
It is this union-in-estrangement with the Ground of our being - what Paul Althaus once described as 'inescapable godlessness in inescapable relationship to God' - that we mean by hell. But equally it is the union-in-love with the Ground of our being, such as we see in Jesus Christ, that is the meaning of heaven. And it is the offer of that life, in all its divine depth, to overcome the estrangement and alienation of existence as we know it that the New Testament speaks of as the 'new creation'.
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