Theology—Descent into the Vicious Circles of Death

On the Fortieth Anniversary of Jürgen Moltmann's The Crucified God

Grozdanov

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498232760
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In this succinct, inviting volume, four Balkan theologians probe their contextual ways with the theology of Jurgen Moltmann, whose classic The Crucified God influenced novel theological approaches around the globe, most recently the emerging postwar Christian theology in the Balkans. The authors engage with the prevailing culture of ethnic and religious exclusivism within their context and present us with a range of theologically pertinent issues resulting from a wider discussion on religion and politics. The book offers a fresh and provocative reading of Christian faith that pins its hopes on the person and work of the Crucified and sets the ground for possible contextual contribution of Balkan theology to a World Church.Following Moltmann's invitation to see the Cross, and the crucified Christ, as an inner criterion of all theology, this book sheds theological light on the situation in the Balkans. The Cross of that region can be described as a "Cross of the crossroads," since different religions, ethnic and national communities, memories, and cultures have always been sources of profound contact but also of deep division and violence. On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of The Crucified God, this collection can be read as a continuation of Moltmann's theological project, which calls for a courageous descent into "circles of death"--places of spiritual and physical imprisonment, without false comforts and premature hopes.

1

The Crucified God in Context

—Jürgen Moltmann

When The Crucified God was published in 1972, it sparked an intense and very controversial international theological discussion about this radical theory of the cross. Michael Welker edited a collection of first reactions in Diskussion über Jürgen Moltmanns Buch “Der gekreuzigte Gott” (Munich, 1979). Later, numerous dissertations, articles, and books followed, dealing with various theological questions that The Crucified God had raised. Today, forty years later, instead of discussing the theological contents, I would like to present the hermeneutical contexts that may give a better understanding of the book. I will do this by putting myself back, as best I can, into my own situation that led me to write the book, as well as understanding the situations of those who received it because of their own personal experiences. I will begin with my personal, original context and will then discuss the contexts within which the book has had an impact. Every text’s context also has its kairos and its community. These are the three basic elements of any realistic hermeneutic.

What are the personal life-and-death experiences that influenced the writing of The Crucified God?

Since I first studied theology, I have been concerned with the theology of the cross. . . . This no doubt goes back to the period of my first concern with questions of Christian faith and theology in actual life, as a prisoner of war behind barbed wire. . . . 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.1

So I wrote in the book’s introduction.

In discussions, I have easily admitted that I poured my heart and soul into writing this book. My personal experiences of death and forsakenness led me to the divine mystery of the forsaken, suffering, and dying Jesus. The burdens and traumas of my “generation of 1945” in wartime Germany and Auschwitz were the broader context for this theology of the cross, which goes beyond a doctrine of salvation and reaches the apocalyptic horizons of the world.

The picture I had on my desk as I was thinking about and writing the book was Marc Chagall’s Crucifixion in Yellow.

It shows the figure of the crucified Christ in an apocalyptic situation: people sinking into the sea, people homeless and in flight, and yellow fire blazing in the background. And with the crucified Christ there appears the angel with the trumpet and the open roll of the book of life. This picture has accompanied me for a long time. It symbolizes the cross on the horizon of the world, and can be thought of as a symbolic expression of the studies which follow.2

This is what I wrote at the end of the introduction.

My Personal Context

My Lost Youth

More than five years of my youth, from the age of sixteen to twenty-two, from 1943 to 1948, were senselessly wasted—from an outsider’s perspective. I survived bomb attacks, endured among the dying and the dead, doing forced labor in prison camps. These experiences with death had a profound impact on me. Just as I was discovering the sciences and poetry, I was drafted into the Wehr­macht, in 1943; in the English POW camps I was considered a “baby prisoner.” Even after I was physically released from captivity in April 1948, my soul remained in bondage for a long time. Even today, I still feel the scars of my wounded soul. When I remember these things that are locked away, hidden deeply in the abysses of my memories, they are still so very present, as if they were happening now.

The Betrayed Generation

At the end of July 1943, the English Royal Air Force bombed my hometown, Hamburg. The devastation of the first German city was called Operation Gomorrah. Forty thousand people died in the firestorm, mostly women and children because the men were fighting on the front. I miraculously survived the inferno. We were convinced that the war was over since the Luftwaffe had already been almost completely destroyed. Even though Germany had already lost the war it had started, Hitler and the Nazis wanted to take the German people down with them. In the senseless battles from 1943 to 1945, millions more died, millions were murdered, and a campaign of indescribable destruction was carried out. Paul Celan wrote, “Death is a master from Germany.” To continue to wage a war that was already lost was nothing less than mass murder, an orgy of death, and a perverse desire to destroy life. In the prison camps I had three years to mentally and emotionally process all these experiences of death, and to find the desire to live once again. I was not able to simply throw myself into rebuilding the country, oblivious to everything that had happened, as the people in postwar Germany did. Night after night, the horrors overcame and tortured me until, reading the Bible, I found the crucified Christ who carried my fears and anguish with me. This faith had saved me.

The Generation of Perpetrators

I belong to the “generation of 1945” in Germany. When, in 1945, while in a prison camp in Scotland, we were shown pictures of the concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz, I understood that fate had—against my will—made me a member of the generation of perpetrators. I had to bear the shame of the mass murder of the Jews. I had not participated personally, but we were collectively responsible for the thousands of starving Russian prisoners in German prison camps, for the hostage executions in the partisan war, for the “scorched earth” policy, and many more war crimes. In 1961 I walked through what was left of the death camp Majdanek, near Lublin. I saw the children’s shoes, the cut off hair, and I was overwhelmed by shame. And as I walked alone through one of the camp’s streets I had a vision: I saw the murdered children walking toward me in the fog. Since then, I have been convinced that there is a resurrection of the dead.

I know what it means to belong to the “nation of perpetrators.” For me, the “sacred fatherland” of the Germans ceased to exist and any feelings of patriotism had died. I was ready to bear the shame of my people, to admit the guilt of my people, as proclaimed in the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt (Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis) issued in 1945 by the Council of the Evagelical Church in Germany; I was prepared to work toward repentance among the people by admitting the truth, converting hearts, and making reparations, as far as this is even possible. However, I felt at home as a Christian in the worldwide Christian church. Germany was merely the place where providence had placed me; it had not been my choice. At that time, I could not get the phrase from the early Letter to Diognetus out of my mind: “Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland is foreign.”

The following generations do not have to bear the shame anymore. Yet they must understand their responsibility based on their relationship with the war generation. The “mercy of a late birth,” as Chancellor Helmut Kohl claimed for himself, does not exist.

What had I experienced? Were these the crimes of an “unjust war”? Were they deplorable war crimes? I struggled to find moral terms and theological concepts: Was it the power of sin? Was it radical evil? Was it the iniquity of the godless? Was it the curse of God in the abyss of death? Was it the hell of the condemned? Surely it was all of these. However, I still could not find a concept that made it possible to comprehend that which was so horrendous and unfathomable. Elie Wiesel once said, “One cannot understand Auschwitz either without God or with God.”

The dying Christ was a “comfort” to me because he himself had died with open, unanswered questions. “My God, why have you forsaken me?” When he died on the cross, according to the gospels, darkness came over the whole land and the curtain in the temple was torn in two (Luke 23:44–45). This is a symbolic expression of the “eclipse of God,” as Martin Buber describes this apocalyptic hour. This helped me to recognize my own experiences in the situation of the dying Christ, to endure the incomprehensible, and live with the unanswered questions. The key experience for being able to understand—no, for being able to bear—the horrors I had survived was Christ being forsaken by God. For me, this is the apocalyptic dimension of the passion of Christ. For this reason, the renewed discussions about the interpretation of the death of Christ as the atonement for “our sins” seems petty and ignorant to me. No traditional concept of sin, not even the seven mortal sins, can adequately deal with these horrors. Paul even says that Christ was cursed by God: “He became a curse for us” (Gal 3:13). Only someone who has suffered the curse of God—whether as a victim or as a perpetrator—can understand this. This is one of the reasons why The Crucified God has been labeled the first German book of theology “after Auschwitz”: Jesus was murdered in Auschwitz. He died in the gas chambers. Jesus was tortured in Argentina. Jesus died on the lynching tree in the United States. Jesus was shot in Srebrenica. Wherever people are murdered, gassed, tortured, or shot, the Crucified is among them. He belongs to them; they are his brothers and sisters. They are his people. They partake in his passion.

Shattered Hopes

While I was writing Theology of Hope, deep down inside I already felt compelled by the theology of the cross. But I was not yet ready to deal with these difficult questions. In the book Diskussion über die “Theologie der Hoffnung,” which Wolf-Dieter Marsch published in 1967, I had already written something about the God of the future and the crucified Christ in answer to the “unusually intense and varied responses”3 the book had provoked. However, I did not make the decision to write this book and to give it its harsh title until th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Permissions
• Contributors
• Foreword to the U.S. Edition
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Crucified God in Context
• Chapter 2: Theology Out of Concrete Events
• Chapter 3: The Development of Democratic Political Culture
• Chapter 4: Theological Discourse in the Vicious Circle of Apathy
• Chapter 5: The Pretense Veil of Christian Vulgarism