Why we focus on Christ Crucified

A recent essay I'm doing concerns the centrality of Calvary in Christian Evagelicalism - how we often associate the 'saving work' of Christ with his death. It was very interesting to attempt to chart the historical development of our current emphasis on the death (and resurrection) of Christ.

This focus on the can be traced back to the patristic theology of the western Church, in particular that of Augustine. Augustine emphasized that the righteousness of Christ was required in response to the guilt of human sin. In his case, the salvation effected by Christ was primarily one of legal significance, in which the recipient of grace was freed from jurisdiction. This theme was picked up again by Anselm’s Cur Deus homo argument, in which he argued that human sin caused an offense to God's honor, and that this required a satisfication of God only made possible through Christ's death.

However, the modern Evangelical emphasis on the soteriological value of Christ death, was probably cemeted by the reformer John Calvin, as he further developed Anselm’s argument into the Penal Substitution theory. Here, Jesus at his death is seen to be taking the punishment for our sin upon himself, in a substitutive manner. Since then, it would appear that this idea has been central to understanding Christian salvation within Evangelicalism (some even saying that the Penal Substitution theory was the "lens" by which all models of salvation are understood!).