The world is saved by Christ’s death on the cross, not demagogues or superheroes

Jan 31, 2016 by Jill

By Julian Mann, The Conservative Woman:

How would the world save the world? Or, to put the question another way, how does the non-Christian culture around us think about the salvation of the world, when it does think about it?

There would seem to be two particular schemes of salvation the world tends to come up with and we can see these in contemporary films.

There’s the superhero model, a person like Superman, Spiderman or Batman who has supernatural powers to all intents and purposes and uses his special powers to sort out the bad guys.

Then there is the superleader model – he or she motivates a movement of people through the power of their personality and centrally their powerful communication to bring about democratic change, to overcome a perceived injustice and bring about change for the better and we see this in films about Gandhi or Nelson Mandela or the Suffragettes.

Do we honestly think the world without the inspiration of the New Testament would ever come up with the idea of a man dying in weakness and in humiliating shame nailed to a Roman cross to save the world? Surely the world would never dream of that as a way of saving the world.

We’ve seen so far in our series in the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians how the Christian church in this wealthy city-port in southern Greece was a rather worldly church. There was too much of the non-Christian culture around them in the church at Corinth and not enough of the Word of God or, more specifically, not enough of the divine message of the saving death of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross.

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