Matthew Henry John Bartlett

George MacLeod, who founded the Iona Community is quoted by Vinoth Ramachandra in a lecture about the Gospel of John, the cross and public theology [streaming/downloadable 17MB MP3] as saying:

“I simply argue that the cross should be raised at the center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the Church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town’s garbage heap; at a crossroads so cosmopolitan they had to write His title in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek… at the kind of place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He died, and that is what He died for, and that is what He died about… that is where churchmen ought to be and what churchmen ought to be about.”