Christ at the Crux

How can Christian theology confess God as both other than the world and also related to it in a way that compromises neither of these? Most modern thought has offered a simple reply: it cannot. Christ at the Crux analyzes one element of the roots of this denial and charts a route toward rapprochement. The Christologies of eight theologians offer various attempts to relate the Creator and the creature in Christ: Irenaeus of Lyon, Cyril of Alexandria, John Philoponus, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Zizioulas, Robert Jenson, and Colin Gunton. Within the patristic era the question is grounded in theology about the incarnation; with the Reformers the focus is on the mediation between creation and Creator; and with the three modern theologians the breadth of the issue is completed with theology proper. Together, these eight offer a grand-scale perspective on much of the christological possibilities for conceiving the relation between God and everything else.
In the end Paul Cumin shows how the doctrine of the Trinity appears to open new possibilities for Christology and in particular for the way theology about the Spirit enables a reimagining of those items of Christian thought most likely at the roots of our modern rejection of God-as-other.


Christ at the Crux offers a lively and ambitious analysis of how God's relation to the world has been conceived by a number of thinkers from across the Christian tradition. It is a book full of ideas, and both its historical and its constructive elements will provoke debate.
--John Webster, St. Mary's College, The School of Divinity, The University of St. Andrews, Scotland

There are many ways of cutting a path through the forest of theological history. Paul Cumin takes us by way of thinkers who worried about the relation of a Creator to his creatures and encountered its crux in Christology. It proves an illuminating journey. And Cumin is a splendid guide, incisive and theologically insightful.
--Robert W. Jenson, The Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology, New Jersey

In a series of lively, highly original, and deeply probing conversations with the theological tradition from Irenaeus to Colin Gunton, Paul Cumin explores the possibilities of a genuinely Christian theology of mediation. He shows critically and constructively what happens to theological reflection if we take the Trinitarian mediation of God seriously . . . . What appears as the critical crux of Christian faith becomes the cornerstone of theological reconstruction.
--Christoph Schwobel, Systematic Theology and Philosophy of Religion, University of Tubingen, Germany


Paul Cumin (PhD, King's College London) is the pastor at Pemberton Community Church (British Columbia, Canada) and Adjunct Professor of Theology at the Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary (Canada).