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Imagining The Scandal Of The Cross With Graphic/Novel Reading, Elizabeth Rae Coody
Imagining The Scandal Of The Cross With Graphic/Novel Reading, Elizabeth Rae Coody
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
For countless adherents to the Christian tradition, the Cross functions as a symbol of divine power. For the earliest Christians, however, this overwhelmingly positive valuation of crosses would have been unintelligible. Living under Roman rule, their immediate understanding of crosses would have been as instruments of execution and thus symbols of the power and victory belonging to a foreign empire rather than to the Lord they worshipped. For them, the crucifixion was a traumatic event in which the Messiah died shamefully. It is for these reasons that the scandal of the Cross is a prominent theme in the New Testament, …