A question has challenged the human conscience for two thousand years: "How are we to explain the presence of Jesus Christ in this world?" Or who, indeed, was Jesus Christ? A man like the rest of men? Or was he a divine Person? Why was it that well-practiced soldiers who failed to fulfill their commission to arrest him said: "Never man spoke like this man?" The early church confirmed the apostles' declaration that Jesus Christ was the eternal Son of God and that he came into the world to fulfill a messianic-redemptive assignment. "Christ Jesus," the apostle to the Gentiles explained, "came into the world to save sinners." In The Cross: Its Meaning and Message in a Postmodern World, Douglas Vickers sees the cross as the watershed of history. The divine objectives that the cross addressed bear vitally on the human condition, vitiated as that is by the entailment of sin. In an age in which postmodernist claims have rejected absolute criteria of truth and validity, the Christ of the cross provides the only refuge for those burdened by the search for meaning. The Cross explores the way of reconciliation between God and man. It affirms the apostolic claim that "In [Christ] are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge."
