The Crucifixion

The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ
by Fleming Rutledge
669 pages.

A significant theological help & a step toward Black Lives Matter: 

This is a powerful and thorough book. Not having grown up with animal sacrifice as the first (Jewish) Christians, I often have difficulty understanding the language and meaning of sacrifice as an explanation of Jesus' crucifixion. This book helps. It also makes a good effort to connect Christ with historic suffering of oppressed people in the world and United States. The books cover is photo of a stain-glass window in Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The window was given by people of Wales to commemorate the bombing of the church where four girls were murdered and fourteen others injured. In the photo one hand of Jesus is stretched out to put off Satan's oppressive powers, the other is open to embrace the victims of oppression. This is one of the stretched which killed Jesus and the book marvelously explores this tension and other significant biblical and historic discussions of the crucifixion of Jesus. With the late James Cone's book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, this books makes progress to understand and connect the meaning of the crucifixion with the history of black people in the United States. More work is needed to connect crucifixion with the death of Michael Brown and the Black Lives Matter movement.