From today’s YDN

Volf’s upbringing on the cultural margins helped him develop the ability to find points of convergence in conflicting viewpoints, making Volf the unconventional and creative scholar he is widely considered today, research assistant Neil Arner DIV ’07 said. With a professional portfolio that includes over 150 editorials and articles and 11 books, Volf has been called “one of the most celebrated theologians of our day” by Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams.

“I was a total outsider,” Volf said of his childhood during the 1960s in Communist-controlled Yugoslavia, where his father was a pastor.

As a religious person in Communist Yugoslavia as well as a practitioner of a marginal religion, Pentecostalism, within Croatia’s small religious community of Roman Catholics, Volf was actually an outsider twice over, Arner said.

Volf, now a member of the Episcopal Church, said he formally affirmed his Christian faith at the age of 16. From then on, Volf recalls being sent to the principal’s office multiple times during high school for wearing a cross or openly discussing his religious beliefs.

“For me, it was matter of personal religious faith,” Volf said, “but it was perceived by the totalitarian state as a subversive act.”

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Read the whole thing but come back to the pull quote. Miroslav is a serious Christian and a fine theologian. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him that while wearing the cross was “for [him] a matter of personal religious faith”, the totalitarian state’s perception is accurate that his doing so was “a subversive act.” But witting or not, the article gives the impression that for Miroslav the cross is a matter merely of personal religious faith and not subversive at all. That mistakes him and it mistakes the cross.

The cross has never been a personal objet d’ art. It was a capital punishment Rome reserved not for everyday brigands but for insurrectionists, thus it has always been associated with political subversion. It wasn’t Dali or Rubens who inspired the Roman governor Varius to execute two thousand men at once on separate crosses a few years before the angel of the Lord appeared to the shepherds in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night. The Roman general Titus wasn’t moved by Georgia O’Keefe or David Yurman to crucify 500 Jews daily outside the walls in plain view of the citizens of Jerusalem. The cross was to Rome a public service announcement. Six thousand men crucified every 130 feet on the Appian Way from Rome to ancient Capua advertises WHO’S IN CHARGE on a linear scale that even Madison Avenue couldn’t dream up. It is not for his aesthetics—his taste for clean lines—that the name Pilate has been on the lips of Christians every Sunday for nearly two millenia.

Ever since Rome crucified him people who’ve trusted Jesus with their lives have said JESUS IS LORD. They haven’t shut up about it even when the state persecuted and killed them for it. No one ever responds to the cross tout court.