Roy Harrisville’s Fracture has been on my ‘things-to-read’ pile for over a year. Today, it made the big leap to my ‘currently reading’ pile, joining Donald Bloesch, Adolf Schlatter, Oliver Crisp, Thomas Langford and James Livingston. I don’t plan on writing a review of Harrisville’s study but I did want to share just one thought from it that’s stuck with me as I’ve been reading on:

‘There has always been impatience with the death of Jesus as basis for a hard-and-fast, enclosed theological system, to say nothing of concentration on his death as such. Few things irritated Goethe (1749-1832) more than poison, snakes, tobacco smoke, bugs, garlic, and the cross’.

– Roy A. Harrisville, Fracture: The Cross as Irreconcilable in the Language and Thought of the Biblical Writers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), x.