God's Wounds: Hermeneutic of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering, Volume One

Divine Vulnerability and Creation

Pool

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781498275842
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book constitutes the first volume of a three-volume study of Christian testimonies to divine suffering: God's Wounds: Hermeneutic of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering, Divine Vulnerability and Creation. This study first develops an approach to interpreting the contested claims about the suffering of God. Thus, the larger study focuses its inquiry into the testimonies to divine suffering themselves, seeking to allow the voices that attest to divine suffering to speak freely, to discover and elucidate the internal logic or rationality of this family of testimonies, rather than defending these attestations against the dominant claims of classical Christian theism that have historically sought to eliminate such language altogether from Christian discourse about the nature and life of God. Through this approach this volume of studies into the Christian symbol of divine suffering then investigates the two major presuppositions that the larger family of testimonies to divine suffering normally hold: an understanding of God through the primary metaphor of love ("God is love"); and an understanding of the human as created in the image of God, with a life (though finite) analogous to the divine life--the imago Dei as love. When fully elaborated, these presuppositions reveal the conditions of possibility for divine suffering and divine vulnerability with respect to creation.

part one

Orientations for Encounter with the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering

Introduction to Part One:

Approaching the Symbol

In an encounter with the Christian symbol of divine suffering, a maze of problems opens before the inquirer, beckoning, with promises of both disclosure and transformation, the seeker to enter into its mysteries. The interpreter of this symbol must enter its maze carefully, always keenly aware of every clue, in order wisely to discern the next most favorable move to make through the ever more complex difficulties in an encounter with this religious symbol.

I intend carefully to follow this caution in my own journey through this maze of problems. To fulfill this aim, I have assigned two tasks to Part One of this book: (1) display the broad range of concerns and difficulties that any encounter with the Christian symbol of divine suffering entails; and (2) develop a relatively-more-adequate approach by which to engage this religious symbol. Part One accomplishes this dual task through a threefold orientation.

In order to provide the proper conditions for an intelligible and a fruitful encounter with the Christian symbol of divine suffering, Part One orients these studies in three chapters. Chapter 1 delimits the problem that constitutes the object of my studies. Chapter 2 describes the method by which I have engaged the problem. Chapter 3 identifies and develops the hypothetical threefold structure of this Christian symbol.

In my studies of the Christian symbol of divine suffering, this first part contains a series of orientations to my entire study of this symbol, while Part Two contains interpretations of the symbol’s two principal presuppositions. The preliminary character of the studies in this book, therefore, requires a brief explanation of their relationship to one another. I have written Part One of this book only to prepare for a study of the Christian symbol of divine suffering, with a disciplined line of questioning and delimitations. Nonetheless, various portions from the chapters of Part One, but especially chapters 2 and 3, begin actively to engage in the study of this symbol despite the methodological constraints upon those chapters. I have developed the five chapters of Part Two as studies to commence my explorations into the Christian symbol of divine suffering. Again, nonetheless, the chapters of Part Two also display a peculiar quality in that respect: they do not actually begin to examine this symbol’s theology of suffering. As the implicit structural components in the Christian symbol of divine suffering, however, I have derived the analyses and conclusions in chapters 4–8 from Christian attestations to divine suffering. Hence, I allow the concrete aspects of this symbol into the interpretations of Part Two, as well as into specific portions of Part One, but principally for epistemological reasons.

In the two major parts of this book, then, a process comes into view that also characterizes the movement between the three volumes of my larger work: the movement from the more abstract to the more concrete. Any successful phenomenological hermeneutic of the structure and dynamism in the Christian symbol of divine suffering will depend to a great degree upon the ability with which I have consistently maintained as well as rhythmically both released and restored a complex series of brackets around this symbol’s various components and features. The first two parts of this larger study, which constitute this first volume, display the most abstract features of this symbol, as its eight chapters first orient an approach to this symbol, while taking clues from the symbol itself, that most adequately allow this symbol to exhibit its distinctive features. The five chapters in Part Two of this volume, then, initiate explicit studies into this symbol with an elaboration of its implicit fundamental presuppositions, presuppositions that the symbol construes as the conditions of possibility for divine suffering—divine vulnerability.

My studies in the two parts of this first volume, then, disclose essential structures and dynamics in the Christian symbol of divine suffering, elements that Edward Farley has described as “perduring features that constitute the being of something in its region or situation,” “. . . not a static or timeless essence in contrast to process or change but its characteristic powers or ways of existing in the typical and extended situation of that thing.”1 In the second volume of studies, then, I will release one set of brackets, in order to study this symbol’s construal of evil and the effect of evil upon the various essential structures and dynamics of this symbol. With Volume Three of the larger work, I will reintroduce the previous set of brackets, thereby withholding from consideration this symbol’s attestation to the reality of evil in these essential structures (as in the studies of Volume Two); yet, at the same time, I will remove a second pair of brackets to allow the perduring characteristics of the tragic region of reality and experience to appear within the essential dimensions of the symbol that Part Two of this first volume will disclose.

Thus, the first two parts that constitute this first volume of the larger work contain the most abstract studies in this project. Because of this feature in the two parts of this first volume of studies, their analyses differ from the series of studies that will follow in volumes Two and Three. In my expositions of this symbol’s two major presuppositions, I have described their essential features as dimensions, material and formal. Whereas, in the latter two volumes of this study, although I also will follow the pattern of examining both formal and material features of those moments in this symbol, I have described those features as characteristics. I distinguish dimensions from characteristics to emphasize the highly abstract quality of the studies that appear in the second part of this first volume of studies.

Although the orientations and interpretations in the two major parts of this book remain more abstract than the studies that will follow in the remaining two volumes of studies, even the studies of this first volume display both the practical and the emancipatory cognitive interests within the Christian symbol of divine suffering.2 The methodological abstractions operate to allow the full disclosure of this symbol; the operations of these abstractions, however, also liberate this symbol from a history of its theological, philosophical, and even socio-political suppression. Just as importantly, though, through the rhythm of the application, removal, and restoration of these abstractions, these studies also disclose both the symbol’s critique of its own suppression and the symbol’s self-critical capacity or tendency. This disclosive process begins with these first sorties into the Christian symbol of divine suffering.

1. E. Farley, Good and Evil, xix.

2. I borrow these distinctions between practical cognitive and emancipatory cognitive interests from Jürgen Habermas (Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 301–17). Most pointedly, Habermas supplies a fifth thesis on knowledge and human interests: “. . . the unity of knowledge and interest proves itself in a dialectic that takes the historical traces of suppressed dialogue and reconstructs what has been suppressed” (Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 315; cf. Campbell, “Critical Theory and Liberation Theology”). Farley locates his own anthropological studies on the map of Habermas, but only in terms of practical cognitive interests (E. Farley, Good and Evil, xix–xx).

1

Delimitation of the Problem

Introduction

By delimiting the problem for investigation, this chapter provides the first orientation that an encounter with the Christian symbol of divine suffering requires. I will delimit the problem for inquiry in a series of steps. (1) In the first step, I will circumscribe the question with which to approach this symbol. (2) Second, I will specify the meaning of this symbol as a Christian symbol. (3) My third step will describe the concept of symbol that I have employed to formulate the problem that this larger study addresses. (4) In a fourth step, I will clarify the nature and extent of this problem’s theocentric posture. (5) The fifth step will display the symbol’s various structural levels, and their inter-relationships, as examined through these studies. (6) Sixth, I will contextualize this particular interaction with the symbol, as conceived in the particular problem that this larger study investigates. (7) Finally, my last delimitation will formulate the aim for this particular encounter with the Christian symbol of divine suffering.

Circumscription of Inquiry

In order to initiate delimitation of the problem for consideration, I must answer a first question. With what sort of inquiry does one begin through which to commence an encounter with the Christian symbol of divine suffering, in order to understand this symbol most completely on its own terms and with respect to the questions that it attempts to answer? One might assume that the first and most fundamental question to articulate, by which to circumscribe this problem, logically should take the following form: Can God suffer?1 Following an affirmative answer to that first question, one might need to ask another series of questions prior to considering actual characteristics of divine suffering, such as the following questions. Does God suffer, if God can suffer? If God can suffer, does God have a choice of whether or not to suffer? An inquirer might extend this line of questioning almost indefinitely, thus postponing the even more pressing discussion about the characteristics of this symbol. Only after securing affirmative answers to the previous questions, at least according to that particular line of thought, can the inquirer begin to describe the characteristics of that divine suffering. Unfortunately, however, beginning with the question of divine suffering’s possibility often elicits a negative and dogmatic answer, thereby at least inhibiting, if not entirely preventing, any thought about characteristics of divine suffering: in other words, one may already have identified such a concept as an impossibility.

More importantly, however, the previous questions fail to reach the foundation of this problem. Those questions already imply a presupposition of their very inquiries—the attestation of piety itself: “God suffers!” This attestation elicits the previous questions, rather than following them as an affirmative conclusion to the question that initiated the previous series of inquiries. Attestations to God’s suffering certainly remain confessional, devotional, even liturgical, religious language of a first order. Precisely for that reason, however, language that testifies to divine suffering precedes all reflection or speculation about whether or not God can or does actually suffer.2

Notwithstanding any validity in the previous claim, in a very important historical respect, such a claim requires qualification. In the intellectual world that received Christian communities at their births, an entire universe of philosophical reflection upon the nature of God had flourished for centuries, p...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Prologue: Terrible Sublimity of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering
• Part One: Orientations for Encounter with the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering
• Part Two: Presuppositions of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering
• Bibliography