Jurgen Moltmann: The Crucified God
The cross of the risen Christ is the other side of the raising of the crucified Christ. This bivalent image is the source and foundation of Christian hope. Theodicy refers to the question: how could a good God allow or cause such suffering, especially of his “son”. Moltmann’s book, Crucified God appeared in 1972 in German and in English translation in 1974. Moltmann develops the thesis that real Christianity must hold on to both sides of the dialectic: cross and resurrection. His thesis is of a suffering God. The cross is not merely the manner in which Jesus died, but God’s identification with the suffering of the world in the suffering of Christ. God and suffering are not contradictions but God’s being is in suffering and the suffering is in God’s being itself, because God is love (Moltmann, p 227). This is why human beings can be open to suffering and love in “sympatheia with the pathos of God” (303). The book is a “theology after Auschwitz”: “Shattered and broken, the survivors of my generation were then returning from camps and hospitals to the lecture room. A theology which did not speak of God in the sight of the one who was abandoned and crucified would have had nothing to say to us then.”
Moltmann asserts that human beings aim their highest order of being according to their perception of God. The church in society is also the derivative group of people whose manner of life is shaped according to Christ. As St. Paul posits numerous times in the Epistles: we are alive “in Christ,” and only to the extent to which we conform our lives to the life of Jesus, are we living in Him. What we believe about Christ also shapes what we believe about God. That is not to say that those whose constructions of God lie outside the testimony of Jesus are wrong, simply to say, for Christians, Jesus is the revelation of God. Behind the political and social crisis of the church in modern society, there stands the Christological crisis: from whom does the church take it’s identity? Who is Jesus the Christ for us today?
The life of Jesus of Nazareth was one of love, acceptance, affirmation, forgiveness, liberating miracles, signs of hope, steadfast reliance on God, and willingness to confront social and religious idolatry. Jesus was sentenced to death by the powers of the empire as a threat to national security, and by the leaders of the church as a blasphemer. From the cross, according to Mark and Matthew, he cried My God why have you abandoned me? (Ps 22).
In our culture we are most interested in action and success. What is next? What shall we do? How are we progressing? How do we measure our progress? We less often reflect on how our progress and success is affecting humanity or nature. God is power and only “successful” faith makes an impression. Those who suffer are sick; the ones who weep and morn shown no stamina. Love is private, solitary within the “nuclear” family, and not a ubiquitous way of seeing every other human being. God of action and success fits an apathetic person, who ignores the conditions of the world and one’s own emotions. Oblivious to the suffering caused by actions and inactions integral to success, we are blind to our sin. This is a long way from the crucified son of God, a loving, forgiving, vulnerable human being. A long, silent, ponderous contemplation of the cross will expose us to our lack of sympathy, sensitivity and love and reveal how genuine those attributes were in Christ.
Apatheia in antiquity was an ethical ideal: to remain unaffected by external influences, to be free to act as a moral agent. Since Plato and Aristotle, God’s perfection as been called apatheia. God is good and cannot be the cause of evil. God is perfect and has no needs. God is sufficient and needs neither love nor hate. God is totally free. Human beings who willingly and knowingly adopt these characteristics are “in the image of God”. Is this our image of God? Free from passions and interests, untouched by pain and happiness, independent of nature, happy in resignation? That cluster of attributes frees the person from mutuality, interdependence, and strips us of our relational nature. What is left is intellect and will.
The church fathers writing in the first two centuries of Christian formation took over this philosophical concept of the apathetic God, calling God’s intellect the “Son” and God’s will the “Holy Spirit”. For them the apathetic and free God was love (agape). True love must arise out of freedom from self-seeking and anxiety, apathy became a precondition of agape. The apatheia ideal leads us to a transcendent freedom over body and the world. Faith in the apathetic God leads to an ethics of human liberation from need and turns us toward a position of dominance over body and nature. The passion of Christ however is different: Jesus’ divine and human nature, always one, never divided, died on a cross. Jesus suffered pain and death. Even if we assert the death was willingly accepted as his “offering” it was painful. The incarnate, crucified and loving man, Jesus of Nazareth invites us to see God in a new way.
In the story of Israel as the chosen people of God, as the liberator of the people from slavery and given freedom in the promised land, for those prophets who spoke passionately about God desiring mercy and justice and righteousness, we find a theology of pathos. God steps outside the eternal heavenly realm and into the sphere of human life, in a relationship of God’s initiation. The all-powerful god enters into a relationship of people of his choosing. God takes seriously the suffering of the people, the injustices perpetrated on them by oppressive empires, and God sends prophets, priests, and kings to lead the people into a better solidarity with God’s way of being in this world. Through sympathy, humans acquire this pathos of God. In solidarity with others and with God, the truly religious man/woman is angry with God’s wrath, loves with God’s love, suffers with God’s suffering. Thus one goes beyond the self, outward toward the other, with interest, compassion, and concern.
This sympathy is also freedom: not a liberation of the mind from the teeters of mind and body, but a freedom of the heart and spirit. It is not freedom to rule over nature and body, but the freedom to love in solidarity with neighbors near and far. God is free as God, but God initiated a covenant with humanity. Therefore, God chose to be in relationship with humanity. God of Gods yet God has a care for widows and orphans. The great Christological hymn of Philippians 2 captures the idea in saying that Jesus, the second person of the Triune God, humbled himself, emptied himself, and became a servant.
In the Christian faith, the pathos of God in the Old Testament underlies the interpretation of the pathos of God revealed in Jesus, the Christ, through death and resurrection. Where for Israel the immediacy of god exists in the covenant, for Christians there is Christ himself, who mediates the fatherhood of God and the power of the Spirit. Through the crucified one, the God-relationship is opened up. Through Christ, God creates the conditions for pathos and sympathy and a new covenant for those who cannot meet the conditions of justification.
God does not become spirit, in which case, we would have to ascend into the vapor to find god. God does not extend the covenant of an expanded elected people, so that we would have to belong to the right community to be “in” the God-group. God humbles Godself and enters the world as a human being, so that human beings can share through that God-human = Christological being and existence. Who first declared that Jesus was indeed the Son of God. According to mark it is the centurion, a heathen. In a strange sense, every person who feels abandoned and cut off from God can find in the crucified one an experience of community with God. The incarnate One is present and accessible to the humanity of every human being. No one needs to play a role, conform to a set of rules or community norms in order to come to his or her humanity in and through Christ.
God not only participates in our suffering but makes our suffering his own, taking death upon himself in Jesus and offering infinite life of God to all men/women. The suffering Jesus bore on the cross is the sense of being abandoned by God. It is not the suffering of death because death itself is not something one “suffers”. We often conflate the terms pain and suffering. Pain is biological and Jesus certainly felt much acute pain in the dying process. The suffering of Christ however is the separation reflected in the quotation of Psalm 22, “My God why hast thou forsaken me?” The Father suffers the death of the son, the pain of love. To understand the sympathy, the suffering of Jesus as the Son of God and of the suffering of the Father in the death of the Son, we need the Trinity.
In the cross of Christ, a tear rips across the fabric of God’s being. It is not just a separation of the persons, Father and Son while the death takes place for a few hours/days, to be restored by the resurrection. The tear is in God; in a sense God rejects God’s self; God cries out to God. The paradox is resolved in a Trinitarian formula. The event at the cross is an event within God. It is an event between the sacrificing Father, the abandoned Son, in the power of the sacrifice, the Spirit. In the cross, the Father and Jesus are separated but held by the Spirit. Thus the Holy Spirit goes forth to uphold the abandoned, justify the despised, and bring to life the dead. The passion of Christ is therefore the story of God.
Moltmann writes: “Whoever suffers without reason always feels at first that he is abandoned by God and all good things. Whoever cries to God in this suffering, however, joins fundamentally in the death-cry of Jesus. But then for him (sic) God is not only a hidden object to whom he cries. In a very personal sense, he is rather the human God who cries with him and in him and who intercedes for him where he in his misery grows silent. The suffering person thus enters into the full situation of God. He cries with the abandoned Son to the Father and the spirit intercedes for him with groanings. The person who suffers does not only protest against his fate. Indeed, he suffers because he lives, and he is full of life because he has an interest in life and because he loves. He who no longer loves becomes apathetic and no longer even suffers. Life and death are for him a matter of indifference. The more one loves, however the more vulnerable one becomes. The more one becomes capable of suffering, the more one becomes capable of happiness. The reverse is also true. The more one is capable of joy, the greater one’s capacity for sorrow. This could be called the dialectic of human life. Love gives vitality to living but it also makes man mortal. The vitality of life and the deadliness of death are experienced at one and the same time through that interest in life we call love.”
Thus the cross of God in Christ and the resurrection of Christ in God teach us that to the extent we love, we live in Christ. It is not a sentimental emotion but a passion that sees in every other human being a dignity for which Jesus would suffer and die. God is not dead. God is not a revolutionary activist. God hands on the tree, there on the cross, expressing love so deep, so high, so broad it reaches out to all. The history of human suffering and separation (a sense of abandonment) is taken up in God, resolved in God’s threefold nature – as Father, Son, and Spirit – ONE. Death is in God. Our future is in God, who is all in all.
The Sonship of Jesus Christ reveals the love of the Father and the indwelling of the Spirit. We enter into the Trinitarian history of God through baptism, with our confession of faith, made by our community when we are yet children, confessing that God designs to confer on us the gift of his redeeming grace. We grow into the faith in a process of knowing Jesus as one with us in his humanity and one with God in the Trinity. What Jesus descends and becomes he takes with him as he rises into the arms of the Godhead. Because Jesus is divine and human through him, in him, and with him, the suffering and death has divine meaning. Resurrection is the sign and evidence that the priestly prayer has become our reality: “In this you may all be one, as the Father is in me and I in him that you may be in us” (John 17:21).