How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God

Part VI: The Crucified God

In April 8, 1966, just in time for Easter, Time Magazine published its first non-pictorial cover, with only words in the form of a question: “Is God Dead?” What a stir that created in the church! As is typical with new theological ideas, people reacted before they even tried to understand. I was only 16 years old, but I remember at that time hearing in a sermon this: “God is not dead. He just seems to be silent to those who refuse to listen.” Well, there is truth in that statement, but that was not what this was all about.

 

There were many different theologians with many different ideas in this movement, but I believe it is fair to say that at heart this was theologians saying that the God of Supernatural Theism [see Post III] is dead in the sense that in the modern and postmodern world it is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that there is a God who is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-controlling of whatever happens in the world. I remember hearing someone say about that time that either that view is not true, or, if it is true, then God must be incompetent. In a world that now knew Auschwitz and Dachau, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, how do you square those events with the view that an all-powerful, loving, caring God is in charge in any meaningful sense?.

 

This now takes us deeper into the theology of the cross discussed in the last post. If the cross is the most important event in the Christian journey, what happened in and through the crucifixion of Jesus? Where was God? Was God there? If God was there, what did God do or not do? Most importantly, is there any sense in which what happened is that God died on that cross? Was God crucified? To consider these ideas, we turn to Jurgen Moltmann’s seminal work on this topic, The Crucified God.

 

Moltmann clarifies the task before us in light of the atrocities of the modern world:

 

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? And rooted in the christological question about Jesus is ultimately the question of God. Which God motivates Christian faith: the crucified God or the gods of religion, race and class. [Crucified, 201]

 

He then takes on Supernatural Theism, much in the same way that Process Theology does (which will be discussed in the next post).

 

For a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved. Suffering and injustice do not affect him. And because he is so completely insensitive, he cannot be affected or shaken by anything. He cannot weep, for he has no tears. But the one who cannot suffer cannot love either.

 

Finally, a God who is only omnipotent is in himself an incomplete being. What sort of being, then, would be a God who was only ‘almighty?’ He would be a being without experience, a being without destiny and a being who is loved by no one. A man who experiences helplessness, a man who suffers because he loves, a man who can die, is therefore a richer being than an omnipotent God who cannot suffer, cannot love and cannot die. [Crucified, 222, 223]

 

Moltmann then describes the relationship of God the Father to Jesus as the Christ on the Cross:

 

In spite of all the ‘roses’ which the needs of religion and theological interpretation have draped around the cross, the cross is the really irreligious thing in Christian faith. It is the suffering of God in Christ, rejected and killed in the absence of God, which qualifies Christian faith as faith, and as something different from the projection of human desire. . . Even the disciples of Jesus all fled from their master’s cross. Christians who do not have the feeling that they must flee the crucified Christ have probably not yet understood him in a sufficiently radical way. [Crucified God, 37-38]

 

God was not silent and uninvolved in the cross of Jesus. Nor was he absent in the godforsakenness of Jesus. . . . In the passion of the Son, the Father himself suffers the pains of abandonment. In the death of the Son, death comes upon God, and the Father suffers the death of his Son, in his love for forsaken humans. [Crucified God, 192]

 

What is so powerful about this understanding of the death of Jesus, and its effect on God, whom he called Father, is that it goes against the traditional views of redemption (the saving work of Christ), which view his death as a substitute for our death, or as a ransom for our sin, or any approach that pictures God as a distant power that somehow needs to be appeased in order that we humans can be forgiven and “saved.” Rather, God, whose love is greater than God’s power, is fully involved in the crucifixion, experiencing the pain and loss of God’s son, and the death of God’s hopes and dreams for us and our world. The tomb is not only the death of God’s Son, but also the death of God’s plans for our world. In that, we as humans are truly lost and abandoned, having decided to kill the very one who came to show us the way, the truth and the life.

 

And yet, in nearly every culture and religion, there is something redemptive about one person giving his/her life for another. In a later post we will discuss the resurrection of the Christ, which is the rebirth of God’s vision for the world, and the hope that sustains us as we move into every future.

 

For the moment, we stay with the crucifixion, and what it means for us today. First, we realize what I had been longing to experience, that suffering is not God’s judgment upon us, but the place where we realize at the deepest level God’s tears and presence with us in our suffering. Moltmann puts it this way:

 

Anyone who suffers without cause first thinks that he has been forsaken by God. God seems to him to be the mysterious, incomprehensible God who destroys the good fortune that he gave.  But anyone who cries out to God in this suffering echoes the death-cry of the dying Christ, the Son of God. In that case God is not just a hidden someone set over against him, to whom he cries, but in a profound sense the human God, who cries with him and intercedes for him with his cross. [Crucified God, 252]

 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer also affirms this understanding:

 

Mark 8:35 reads not that the disciple should take up “his,” that is Christ’s cross, but “your” cross. Jesus suffered and died alone. But those who follow him suffer and die in fellowship with him. . . Within the fellowship of Christ’s suffering, suffering is overcome by suffering, and becomes the way to communion with God. And, therefore, to follow Jesus is joyful. [Crucified God, 55-56; quote from Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 81]

 

Indeed, in her dying journal entries Pauline wrote about feeling the presence of God through God’s tears and, as she put it, that “was enough.” This did not take away my, at times, debilitating fear of Pauline dying, but a seed was being planted that, if she did, I would not feel alone, distant from God, as had been the case after my parents’ deaths.

 

Secondly, building theology and church around the focal point of “the crucified God” gives us a path forward in our broken world built upon mercy, love, reconciliation and hope. Moltmann puts it this way:

 

God in Auschwitz and Auschwitz in the crucified God—that is the basis for a real hope which both embraces and overcomes the world, and the ground for a love which is stronger than death and can sustain death. It is the ground for living with the terror of history and the end of history, and nevertheless, remaining in love and meeting what comes in the openness for God’s future. [Crucified God, 278]

 

“Is God dead?” Yes, the omnipotent and omniscient God of Supernatural Theism is dead. But the always loving, crucified God is alive, showing us the path forward to abundant and eternal life.

 

The death of the Son is not the ‘death of God,’ but the beginning of that God event in which the life-giving spirit of love emerges from the death of the Son and the grief of the Father. [Crucified God, 252]