Preaching the incongruity of grace.

Jonathan Linebaugh and the divine twist in Paul’s theology.

Photo by Liana S on Unsplash

I have thoroughly benefited from Jonathan A. Linebaugh’s collection of essays entitled The Word of the Cross, in which he engages with a kaleidoscope of theologians and thinkers alongside the Pauline Scriptures in order to shed further light on the absurdity of the gospel, which, in the apostle’s vernacular, is “the foolishness of God” (1 Cor. 1:25). Each discourse presents the reader with a fresh vantage point from which to scrutinize and, eventually, be thoroughly surprised by the announcement of grace, which is the “word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). Despite one’s doctrinal familiarity with the gospel, Linebaugh’s inquiries are a vehicle by which the seeming contradiction of a holy and just God justifying the ungodly (Rom. 4:5) is decisively articulated. Accordingly, the wisdom with which we intuit justice is turned on its head by the folly of the cross, which not only designates our wisdom and righteousness as filthy rags but also declares our nothingness and sin as the precise point at which grace works. “Grace,” Linebaugh attests, “is the incongruous gift God gives at the site of sin and death that creates out of the opposite: righteousness and life” (93).

This is what Linebaugh calls “the merciful surprise” of the gospel. The guilty party awaiting a condemnatory verdict is stunned by another proclamation — namely, “the word of Christ” by whose death and resurrection absolution is secured. Grace is the divine twist of fate that rests on the person of God’s Son, whose vicarious obedience amnesties the disobedient. “Righteousness and grace, as descriptions of the history of Jesus Christ,” Linebaugh continues, “announce the event in which God both judges ungodliness and thereby justifies the ungodly in Christ — the ‘one who loved me and gave himself for me’ (Gal. 2:20), the one who ‘died for us while we were sinners’ (Rom. 5:8), the one who is ‘our righteousness’ (1 Cor. 1:30)” (94). Consequently, we can, likewise, affirm, along with Paul, that we have “decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2).

The gospel, therefore, is a coherent incongruity since it announces the gift of God’s righteousness is precisely given in the vanquished body of God’s Son. “According to ‘the word of the cross,’” Linebaugh says, “God acts in and at the nothingness of ‘Christ crucified’ to contradict and overcome the conditions of the possible” (xv). Whereas righteousness according to God’s word of law was impossible, in and of ourselves, this impossibility is incongruously accomplished on our behalf by Christ himself. To “preach Christ crucified,” Linebaugh continues, “weak and foolish though it seems,” is to preach “a wisdom beyond the world, a power beyond the possible, and a miracle whose name is Jesus Christ” (xvi). The grammar that ought to emanate from the lips of every preacher is the announcement of “the righteousness of God” that is expressed in a “calculus of incongruity,” Linebaugh says (95), which is embodied in Christ and gifted to sinners by faith alone.

Grace and peace.

Works cited:

Jonathan A. Linebaugh, The Word of the Cross: Reading Paul (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2022).