A doctrine of God’s saving action in the Crucifixion can be created with no other premises than that the Crucifixion indeed brings Jesus’ life to its end and that it is God who ordains that particular end. As we have earlier noted, until the moving finger writes a conclusion, it is not settled whose story will have been written: the Father of His Country might still at the last have become its Great Betrayer. Until he died as he did, the Man for Others – to adduce a celebrated characterization of Jesus – might yet have proven a monster of ambition. «Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe, » was the last temptation; what if he had fallen to it and tried to summon those legions of angels? That the Man for Others died rather than seek his own kingdom settles that he is the Man for Others and so determines the salvific import of the message that he lives as Lord.
Martin Luther once constructed a compact doctrine of atonement just in this fashion. Jesus died, said Luther in a celebrated tract [De capticitate Babylonica ecclesiae praeludium], in order to tranform his promises into a testament; the distinguishing feature of a testament is that it has become irrevocable because the promise-maker has died. What by Luther’s exegesis came to word with the Jesus of history was the «promise of forgiveness», in which «all God’s promises» were comprehended. What Jesus’ death did was to remove the promise from the possibility of retraction or qualification. The risen Christ then executes the testament, at the Eucharist and throughout the life of the church; and that is our salvation.
We may devise such a doctrine, for one more instance, using the previous chapter’s somewhat fuller sketch of Jesus’ narrative identity. What Jesus’ death did was to pit the implicit claim made by his life and teaching to a final test. He followed his Father’s mandate to a fatal clash with the authorities. The high priest perfectly grasped what was at stake: «Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?» Was the Kingdom indeed at hand as this man? Jesus said, although still enigmatically, «I am.» Thereupon the priests sought and obtainde his condemnation, and so posed the issue to the Blessed One himself, which is of course where it belonged: Would he act to acknowledge this Son? Those who challkenged Jesus to come down from the cross and rule were wrong only in their timing and their adressee; so long as he could «come down» the issue was not posed at its extremety, and shen it was, it would not be Jesus but his Father who would act.
The Father did act. He let the issue go to extremety by abandoning Jesus to death, and then raised him to be Christ and Son. The kingdom is at hand wherever this crucified Son is present. And that is our salvation.
(Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1: The Triune God (Oxford University Press: 1997), s. 181.)
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