The Crucified God

Jurgen Moltmann, Jurgen Moltmann

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781506402956
• eBook ISBN: 9781506402963
• Edition: 40
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

From its English publication in 1973, Jrgen Moltmanns The Crucified God garnered much attention, and it has become one of the seminal texts of twentieth-century theology. Following up on his groundbreaking Theology of Hope, The Crucified God established the cross as the foundation for Christian hope. Moltmanns dramatic innovation was to see the cross not as a problem of theodicy but instead as an act of ultimate solidarity between God and humanity. In this, he drew on liberation theology, and he was among the first to bring third-world theologies into a first-world context.

Moltmann proposes that suffering is not a problem to be solved but instead that suffering is an aspect of Gods very being: God is love, and love invariably involves suffering. In this view, the crucifixion of Jesus is an event that affects the entirety of the Trinity, showing that The Crucified God is more than an arresting titleit is a theological breakthrough.

6

The 'Crucified God'

The three christological chapters above are now to be followed by three systematic chapters which will develop the consequences of this theology of the crucified Christ for the concept of God (Chapter 6), for anthropology (Chapter 7) and for a critical theory of church and society (Chapter 8). From this point we shall proceed in reverse order, beginning with the concept of God which seeks to understand ‘the godforsakenness of Jesus’ on the cross. After that we shall attempt to arrive at an understanding of man which does justice to the crucified ‘blasphemer’, and finally we shall look for a ‘political theology’ in which the significance of the political dimension of his crucifixion for church and society is explored.

1. The ‘Death of God’ as the Origin of Christian Theology?

Over recent years, many Christians and theologians have been made uneasy by the controversy over the existence of God and belief in God. Long-familiar religious notions have been shattered, and many people feel disoriented when faced with the slogans ‘God is dead’ and ‘God cannot die’.^[1] Nevertheless, within these public controversies, new converging trends in theological thinking have begun to emerge, which may lead us to expect a consistent Christian doctrine of God. As this new development is happening in both Catholic and Protestant theology, we may speak of an ecumenical task and hope. It is true that in the struggle for a new church and a humane society there are those who have excluded the question of God from current discussion. It is true that others have turned only to Jesus, his example and his human features in a neo-Protestant fashion, following the poetical ‘death of God’ in modern times. But such superficialities do not resolve the crisis. Behind the political and social crisis of the church, behind the growing crisis over the credibility of its public declarations and its institutional form, there lurks the christological question: Who really is Christ for us today? With this christological crisis we have already entered into the political crisis of the church. And rooted in the christological question about Jesus is ultimately the question about God. Which God motivates Christian faith: the crucified God or the gods of religion, race and class?

Without new certainty and new insight in Christian faith itself, Christianity will not achieve any public credibility in the human and social problems of the divided world.

The new converging trends in theological thought today concentrate the question and the knowledge of God on the death of Christ on the cross and attempt to understand God’s being from the death of Jesus. The rather solemn-sounding ‘death of God theology’ has at least been successful in compelling theologians to begin with Christology and thus to speak of God for Jesus’ sake, in other words to develop a particular theology within earshot of the dying cry of Jesus.^[2] The theological traditions have always considered the cross and the resurrection of Jesus within the horizon of soteriology. Even the studies produced by the Protestant Church Union, to which we have referred in previous chapters, only examine the cross of Jesus in the context of a search for the ‘ground of salvation’.^[3]

This is by no means false, but it is not radical enough. We must go on to ask: ‘What does the cross of Jesus mean for God himself?’ ‘Jesus died for God before he died for us’, said Althaus in an ambiguous way, meaning that a serious fault of earlier Protestant theology was that it did not look at the cross in the context of the relationship of the Son to the Father, but related it directly to mankind as an expiatory death for sin. Later Protestant Jesuology was even worse, as it saw his death only as exemplary obedience in suffering and the proof of his faithfulness to his calling.^[4] But how can the ‘death of Jesus’ be a statement about God? Does that not amount to a revolution in the concept of God?

In Catholic theology, since 1960 Karl Rahner has understood the death of Jesus as the death of God in the sense that through his death ‘our death (becomes) the death of the immortal God himself’. This statement appears in his ‘On the Theology of the Incarnation’,^[5] and is meaningful only in a Trinitarian context. Here Rahner issues an invitation to consider the death of Jesus not only in its saving efficacy but also in its very nature. As we may not assume that this death ‘does not affect’ God, ‘this death itself expresses God’. ‘The death of Jesus is a statement of God about himself’.^[6] But to what degree is God himself ‘concerned in’ or ‘affected by’ the fate of Jesus on the cross? Did he suffer there in himself or only in someone else? Does the involvement go so far that the death of Jesus can be identified as the death of God? And in that case, who is God: the one who lets Jesus die or at the same time the Jesus who dies? What dichotomy does this presuppose in God? Hans Urs von Balthasar has similarly taken up the ominous formula ‘the death of God’ and developed the ‘paschal mystery’ under the title ‘The Death of God as the Source of Salvation, Revelation and Theology’.^[7] He too derives knowledge of God and receiving salvation from the crucified Christ, understands the church as the church ‘under the cross’ and ‘from the cross’, and develops the doctrine of God as a Trinitarian theology of the cross. This leads him repeatedly, for all his precautions, to Luther’s theologia crucis, to Hegel and Kierkegaard, to the German, English and Russian kenotic theologians of the nineteenth century, and to Karl Barth. With a more profound theology than that of Rahner, he traces the self-surrender, the grief and the death of the crucified Christ back to the inner mystery in God himself and conversely finds in this death of Jesus the fullness of the Trinitarian relationships of God himself. The fundamental questions of the mutability of God, his passibility and his ‘death’ are not, however, made the subject of thematic discussion in this book.

This attempt has been made by H. Mühlen in a short work on ‘The Mutability of God as the Horizon of a Future Christology’^[8] and by Hans Küng in excursuses to his book on Hegel entitled ‘Incarnation of God. An Introduction to Hegel’s Theological Thought as Prolegomena to a Future Christology’, dealing with the questions ‘Can God Suffer?’ and ‘Does God Change?’^[9]

On the Protestant side, after Adolf Schlatter^[10] and Paul Althaus, Karl Barth has developed a theologia crucis in the sections of his Church Dogmatics on predestination and reconciliation.^[11] The ‘crucified Jesus is the “image of the invisible God”’.^[12] His well-known christological concentration of theology, which never became ‘Christomonism’, led him in his doctrine of reconciliation to combine the traditional doctrines of the two natures of Christ, the divine and the human, and the two states of Christ, those of humiliation and exaltation. Accordingly, the divinity of Jesus is revealed precisely in his humiliation and his manhood in his exaltation. In this way Barth has consistently drawn the harshness of the cross into his concept of God.^[13] His criticism of a one-sided Lutheran theologia crucis itself leads him to take up the theology of the cross and make it more profound, for only in connection with the resurrection of Jesus can the theology of the cross be theology and at the same time a radical recognition of the forsakenness of the crucified Christ. Because Barth thought consistently of ‘God in Christ’, he could think historically of God’s being, speak almost in theopaschite terms of God’s suffering and being involved in the cross of the Son, and finally talk of the ‘death of God’, de facto, if not in those very words. ‘In God’s eternal purpose it is God Himself who is rejected in His Son’, for ‘God wills to lose that man may win’.^[14] Remarkably, I see the critical limitation of Barth in the fact that he still thinks too theologically, and that his approach is not sufficiently Trinitarian.^[15] In stressing constantly and rightly that ‘God was in Christ’, God humbled himself, God himself was on the cross, he uses a simple concept of God which is not sufficiently developed in a Trinitarian direction. For this reason, like Karl Rahner he has to make a distinction in the ‘God was in Christ’ between the God who proceeds from himself in his primal decision and the God who is previously in himself, beyond contact with evil.^[16] For all his polemic against Luther’s distinction between the deus revelatus and the deus absconditus, Barth himself comes very close to the same sort of thing. It can, however, be avoided at this point if one makes a Trinitarian differentiation over the event on the cross. The Son suffers and dies on the cross. The Father suffers with him, but not in the same way. There is a Trinitarian solution to the paradox that God is ‘dead’ on the cross and yet is not dead, once one abandons the simple concept of God. Theopaschite talk of the ‘death of God’ can be a general metaphor, but on closer inspection it will not hold.

Eberhard Jüngel has followed Barth in developing the fundamental notion of ‘the death of the living God’, largely as a result of the ‘death of God theology’.^[17] He has been followed by H.-G. Geyer, who takes issue with both theism and atheism.^[18] Further Trinitarian criticism of Barth’s way of talking about God in connection with the cross of Jesus would also affect them. When one considers the significance of the death of Jesus for God himself, one must enter into the inner-Trinitarian tensions and relationships of God and speak of the Father, the Son and the Spirit. But if that is the case, it is inappropriate to talk simply of ‘God’ in connection with the Christ event. When one uses the phrase ‘God in Christ’, does it refer only to the Father, who abandons him and gives him up, or does it also refer to the Son who is abandoned and forsaken? The more one understands the whole event of the cross as an event of God, the more any simple concept of God falls apart. In epistemological terms it takes so to speak Trinitarian form. One moves from the exterior of the mystery which is called ‘God’ to the interior, which is Trinitarian. This is the ‘revolution in the concept of God’ which is manifested by the crucified Christ. But in that case, who or what is meant by ‘God’?

The death of Jesus on the cross is the centre of all Christian theology. It is not the only theme of theology, but it is in effect the entry to its problems and answers on earth. All Christian statements about God, about creation, about sin and death have their focal point in the crucified Christ. All Christian statements about history, about the church, about faith and sanctification, about the future and about hope stem from the crucified Christ. The multiplicity of the New Testament comes together in the event of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and flows out again from it. It is one event and one person. The addition of ‘cross and resurrection’ represents only the inevitable temporality which is a part of language; it is not a sequence of facts. For cross and resurrection are not facts on the same level; the first expression denotes a historical happening to Jesus, the second an eschatological event. Thus the centre is occupied not by ‘cross and resurrection’, but by the resurrectionof the crucified Christ, which qualifies his death as something that has happened for us, and the cross of the risen Christ, which reveals and makes accessible to those who are dying his resurrection from the dead.

In coming to terms with this Christ event, the christological tradition closely followed the Christ hymn in Phil. 2. It therefore understood the incarnation of the Son of God as his course towards the humiliation on the cross. The incarnation of the Logos is completed on the cross. Jesus is born to face his passion. His mission is fulfilled once he has been abandoned on the cross. So it is impossible to speak of an incarnation of God without keeping this conclusion in view. There can be no theology of the incarnation which does not become a theology of the cross. ‘As soon as you say incarnation, you say cross’.^[19] God did not become man a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• In Explanation of the Theme
• The Identity and Relevance of Faith
• The Resistance of the Cross against Its Interpretations
• Questions about Jesus
• The Historical Trial of Jesus
• The Eschatological Trial of Jesus Christ
• The 'Crucified God'
• Ways towards the Psychological Liberation of Man
• Ways towards the Political Liberation of Mankind
• Abbreviations
• Index of Names