Third on David Wells’ list of realities rising from the holiness of God, is that There Is a Cross. When we lose sight of God as the “outside God,” we lose the cross.

Third, without the holiness of God the cross would be emptied of all meaning. Christ was not a social reformer, of a do-gooder for whom things got out of hand. These are the old liberal ideas, but they are not biblical thoughts. The cross was not an accident. It was planned in eternity, and it was for this, Jesus said, that he had come. He had come to die. And in his moment of death the holiness of God and our sin collided. This in what called forth his cry of dereliction. It is an impertinence, at the very least, to say, as Steve Chalke and Alan Mann do in The Lost Message of Jesus, that this view makes God guilty of “cosmic child abuse,” that the cross needsto be purified of its violent images. This may appeal to a postmodern constituency, and to its Arminian counterpart, but it is remote from the way the Bible thinks about Christ’s death and distant from the way the church, down through the ages, has thought about it. The truth is that Christ’s death is simply incomprehensible if we do not start with the demands of God’s holiness, which cannot tolerate sin’s violations.
   Without the holiness of God, then, there is no cross. Without the cross there is no gospel. Without the gospel there is no Christianity. Without Christianity there is no church. And without echoes of the holiness of God in those who are Christ’s, there is no recognizable church. What is it about this chain of connections that the evangelical church today is not understanding that is leading it to soft-pedal, overlook, or ignore the holiness of God?

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 129.