Sunday, December 25, 2022

N. T. Wright on John 19:30

  

. . . the work of Jesus on behalf of his people is not “finished” on the cross, as in the famous Protestant slogan “the finished work of Christ.” Of course, Jesus died once and only once. He does not need to die again; he has done so once for all time (Heb. 9:26). Something really was “finished” with his death, as John makes clear in Jesus’s dying words (John 19:30). That is the point emphasized by traditional Protestant polemic, warding off any suggestion that Jesus might be crucified again and again with every Mass. But if the “sacrifice” to which Hebrews refers is the larger sequence of events, not just Jesus’s death, then his ongoing work of covenant maintenance continues to the present time and beyond to the ultimate future . . . (N. T. Wright, “Foreword,” in David M. Moffitt, Rethinking the Atonement: New Perspectives on Jesus’s Death, Resurrection, and Ascension [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2022], xix)

 

 Further Reading:


Full Refutation of the Protestant Interpretation of John 19:30,