Taking Up the Cross

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By F.F. Bruce on May 21, 2009 ,

Taking Up the Cross

‘If any one would come after me, let him deny himself
and take up his cross and follow me' (Mark 8:34)

As commonly applied, this is not a very hard saying. As originally intended, it is very hard indeed; no saying could be harder.

As commonly applied, the expression is used of some bodily disability, some unwelcome experience, some uncongenial companion or relative that one is stuck with: ‘This is the cross I have to bear*, people say. It can be used in this watered-down way because its literal sense is remote from our experience. In a country where capital punishment is a thing of the past it is difficult even to paraphrase it in terms of ordinary experience. . .

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F.F. Bruce

Theologian

F.F. Bruce, Theologian, (1910-1990) was known worldwide as the “Dean of Evangelical Scholarship,” He was a Scottish biblical scholar who supported the historical reliability of the New Testament. Trained in classics at the University of Aberdeen and Cambridge University, he taught at the universities of Edinburgh, Leeds, and Sheffield, and was for almost twenty years the Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester. His first book, New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?, was voted by the American evangelical periodical Christianity Today in 2006 as one of the top 50 books "which had shaped evangelicals".

 

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