The Cross: Crucified with Christ, and Christ Alive in Me
“Without Christ crucified in her pulpits, a church is little better than a cumberer of the ground, a dead carcase, a well without water, a barren fig tree, a sleeping watchman, a silent trumpet, a dumb witness, an ambassador without terms of peace, a messenger without tidings, a lighthouse without fire, a stumbling-block to weak believers, a comfort to infidels, a hot-bed for formalism, a joy to the devil, and an offence to God.” — J.C. Ryle, The Cross
John Charles Ryle (1816–1900) — the first Bishop of Liverpool, the most prominent evangelical clergyman in Victorian England — published this tract in 1851 under its original title, The Cross: A Tract for the Times. The subtitle was a deliberate counter-punch: the Oxford Movement had launched its own Tracts for the Times in 1833, and Ryle was writing an evangelical response using the same genre name. Where the Tractarians were relocating salvation from the cross to the church and its sacraments, Ryle drove his readers past church, clergy, and ritual directly to Christ crucified. The tract was later included in the 1853 collection Startling Questions. The 2019 Aneko Press edition, lightly updated and annotated by S. Wilkinson, makes the text accessible to modern readers. At forty-seven pages, it is one of the shortest books on this site — and one of the most unsparing.
Ryle takes as his text Paul’s single boast in Galatians 6:14 — “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” — and asks a deceptively simple question: if the greatest Christian who ever lived refused to glory in anything but the cross, what does that say about what we should and should not glory in?
Major Themes
The stripping of false grounds. Ryle opens by cataloguing what Paul explicitly refused to glory in: national privilege, personal works, spiritual graces, theological knowledge, churchmanship. The inventory is specific and sharp, because Ryle knows these are exactly the things religious people lean on. The man who boasts of his church membership, his years of service, his spiritual experiences, his doctrinal precision — Paul, says Ryle, would have had more claim to each of these than anyone. He renounced them all as grounds for confidence before God.
If Paul’s credentials do not stand before the cross, neither do yours.
The definition of the cross. The cross is not the wooden instrument — not a symbol, not a sentiment:
“Take away the cross of Christ, and the Bible is a dark book.” — J.C. Ryle, The Cross
The cross, for Ryle, means the doctrine — that Christ died for sinners, that he bore the punishment we deserved, that the atonement he made is complete and sufficient and requires nothing added to it. Strip the cross of this substitutionary content and you have a decorative object, not a saving truth. “A man must be right on this subject, or he is lost for ever.”
The two killers.
“Open sin kills its thousands of souls. Self-righteousness kills its tens of thousands.” — J.C. Ryle, The Cross
Ryle’s target is not the obvious sinner but the religious person who has substituted a good conscience for a crucified Savior. Self-righteousness is the greater danger precisely because it feels like faith. The person who trusts their spiritual history, their doctrinal correctness, their church standing — this person has more to unlearn than the one who never pretended to be religious at all.
Why the cross must be central — six reasons. The book’s middle section offers six reasons Christians should glory in nothing but Christ crucified: it displays the Father’s love in its fullest measure; it shows the abominable nature of sin more clearly than anything else; it demonstrates that salvation is wholly God’s work and not ours; it provides the only ground for genuine holiness; it is the source of contentment under suffering; and it is the believer’s only certain anchor at death. “There is nothing so sanctifying as a clear view of the cross of Christ!” Ryle drives each reason toward a verdict: the cross is not a supplement to Christianity; it is Christianity.
The church without the cross. The passage quoted at the opening of this profile is Ryle at his most rhetorical — and his most diagnostic. The sustained list of metaphors (“a well without water, a barren fig tree, a sleeping watchman, a silent trumpet”) is not ornament. It is a clinical description of what happens to any church that loses the cross at its center. The preaching may continue; the services may be full; the community may be warm. But where Christ crucified is not preached, all of that becomes performance — “a joy to the devil, and an offence to God.”
This is Ryle’s hardest word for the reader navigating high-control church environments. The structure of a church, its authority, its community cohesion, its spiritual intensity — none of these are the cross. A church can have all of them and have displaced the one thing that makes it a church at all.
Where This Book Sits
Ryle wrote this tract into a specific Victorian crisis. The Oxford Movement had been pulling the Church of England toward Rome and high sacramentalism since 1833 — Newman’s 1845 conversion to Rome had validated every evangelical fear. Courts in the early 1850s were debating Real Presence in the Eucharist. Baptismal regeneration, sacerdotalism, ritualism: these were live ecclesiastical fights, not academic ones. Ryle’s response was not nuance — it was clarity. He stood in the line of Reformation evangelicalism: Luther, Calvin, the Puritan divines, Whitefield and the eighteenth-century revival.
“Give me the cross of Christ! This is the only lever which has ever turned the world upside down hitherto, and made men forsake their sins.” — J.C. Ryle, The Cross
His Holiness (1877) would later press these same convictions into sanctification. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote a foreword in 1952 commending Ryle’s work, which prompted the Banner of Truth Trust to reissue Holiness and keep it continuously in print. Since then Ryle has found readers across Reformed, Presbyterian, and evangelical Anglican traditions.
No direct connection between Ryle and the ministry of Brother Watchman Nee or Brother Witness Lee has been found. The theological traditions are distinct: Ryle’s Reformed-Calvinist framework emphasizes imputed righteousness and justification by faith; the Lord’s Recovery’s primary concerns center on the organic union of the believer with the indwelling Christ. The emphases are not contradictory, but they are differently placed.
Honest Assessment
Ryle writes with Victorian clarity — plain sentences, concrete examples, pastoral warmth beneath the bluntness. Nothing in this tract is there to impress; everything is there to persuade. The three-part structure (what Paul didn’t glory in, what he did, why you should too) is so clean it feels inevitable. The catalogue of what a church without the cross becomes remains one of the most arresting passages in Victorian evangelical writing.
The limitation is the tract’s brevity. The substitutionary atonement is stated more than argued here — Ryle expects you to accept the Reformed framework, and readers who don’t will find little engagement with their doubts. The Victorian prose, even in the updated Wilkinson edition, retains a formality that takes some adjustment.
There is also a temptation the book doesn’t fully address: the danger of glorying in the doctrine of the cross while its transforming power remains abstract. Ryle knows this — his whole body of work pushes toward holy living. But this short tract ends before it gets there. For the full picture, read it alongside Holiness.
Read This If…
Read this if you have spent time in a religious community where the community itself — its authority, its distinctiveness, its vision — has quietly become the center, and you need someone to show you clearly what should be there instead.
This is not the book for sustained theological inquiry into the atonement. For that, read John Stott’s The Cross of Christ. But for a short, sharp reminder of what the cross actually is and why nothing else will do, Ryle is more than enough.
What Ryle leaves with you is a question: when you think about your faith, your church, your Christian life, what is at the center? If the answer is anything other than Christ crucified — his substitutionary death, his completed atonement, his risen life given to you — then something has gone wrong, however religious everything else looks. He said it in 1851. It has not dated.