Abstract
This latest contribution to ‘Cult Books Revisited’ summarizes and sets into context one of the most important theological books of the twentieth century – Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God (1974).
Jürgen Moltmann is rightly placed among the most eminent and influential theologians of the twentieth century. He rose to international theological attention with his significant opus Theology of Hope in 1964, but it was Moltmann’s sequel to Theology of Hope, published in 1974 as The Crucified God, that most forcefully demonstrated Moltmann’s radical break with classically defined borders of Christian theism in favour of a theology of the cross. The heart of Moltmann’s work is his adaptation of Luther’s ‘theology of the cross’, which informs his unique methodology: that the cross-dead Christ is the criterion by which all Christian theology is to face criticism. Moltmann argues that Christian theology has traditionally allowed existing assumptions about God inherited from philosophy to interpret the crucifixion event instead of making the ‘crucified God’ the sole standard by which any and all talk about God is judged.
Moltmann is distinct among German academic theologians in that he purposefully and publicly allows his biographical experience to shape his theology. Thus, it is necessary to draw a brief biological sketch of Moltmann in order to develop a proper contextual understanding of his work. The Crucified God is written as the dialectical partner of Theology of Hope, in which Moltmann, through his sordid experiences and an eclectic group of philosophical conversation partners, explores how the cross of Christ is the ‘foundation and criticism of Christian theology’ over and against the utterly unhelpful classical monotheism of Western Christianity.
Moltmann was born in 1926 in Hamburg, Germany. While the young Jürgen grew up in a socialist commune free of much nationalist control, by 1940 Nazi influence began to pervade Moltmann’s life, forcing him into the Hitler youth programme, which was designed to physically and ideologically prepare young boys like Moltmann to become scrupulously faithful German soldiers. That same year, Jürgen’s mentally ill older brother was euthanized in the first wave of the Nazi euthanasia programme, Aktion T4, increasingly antagonizing the Third Reich in the Moltmann home. 1
In 1943, Moltmann was called up into the war at age 16 with the rest of his Hitler Youth classmates. Moltmann reflects sombrely on this time in the German military, as it was the time in which nearly all of his friends met their death at the hands of war. In July of the same year, the Royal Air Force executed the infamous Operation Gomorrah, in which Hamburg was razed to the ground by over a thousand aircraft bombers for nine nights in a row. More than 40,000 Germans, mostly women and children, were annihilated by firestorms and bomb blasts. 2
Moltmann found himself in the midst of this fiery decimation of his home town, functioning more as a firefighter than a soldier. Notably, he considers these experiences to be what catalysed him to seek God as a young irreligious man, because, as he notes, his question was not ‘Why does God allow this to happen?’ but rather ‘My God, where are you?’ 3
Exactly a year after Operation Gomorrah, Moltmann was unfortunate enough to participate in a great deal of fighting once again. He darkly recalls this day-to-day experience of war as one of filthy, lice-ridden anxiety, sleeping exclusively in dirty bunkers he had to dig for himself. In his autobiography, he recounts the miserable circumstances that led to his surrender to a group of generous British soldiers in a forest on 15 February 1945. 4
Moltmann spent the next three years in POW camps, and although he was treated well by his captors, he tortured himself for the atrocities committed by his countrymen, of which the world was becoming increasingly aware. It was in a Scottish POW camp that Moltmann first received a Bible, although he has admitted that he would have rather been given a few cigarettes. Moltmann developed what he calls a ‘companionship’ with Jesus Christ while reading his new Bible every day. He notes that in Jesus’ cry of abandonment in Mark 15, the countryless, homeless, ruined Moltmann found a brother in suffering who understood his pain.
Moltmann uniquely begins his Christology from neither of the two standard Christological starting points. Starting from above, according to Moltmann, leads to speculation and Docetism. 5 On the other hand, starting from below leads to the one-sided anthropology found by the historical Jesus scholars. Instead of starting from above or below, Moltmann starts en media res on the cross, at the moment of Jesus’ death. Moltmann cites both of these traditional Christological starting points as becoming inadequate and problematic as they inevitably lead to unhelpful ontological debates centring on whether Jesus was truly man and/or truly divine. This theological move appropriately allows Moltmann to hone his concentration on exploring the implications of the death of Christ for the internal Trinitarian experience of God, passability, and the question of theodicy.
Moltmann begins by positing that the formulation of uniquely ‘Christian’ theology – not only Christology – must find its point of origination in the moment of the ‘death of God’ on the cross, as this moment is when the invisible Christian God is made most visible.
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Moltmann insists that, since the cross is Christianity’s primary epistemological informant, it must also be the chief criterion of Christian theology: its foundation and its criticism.
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Moltmann employs Luther’s theology of the cross as a radical criticism of contemporary metaphysical theisms, associating them with the theologies of glory that Luther so heavily disputed. Moltmann sees the attempts of theologians to define God according to metaphysical categories rather than according to the criterion of the cross-dead Christ as syncretistic, speculative theologies of glory that speak of a different God than the Christian God. In order for theology to be Christian, Moltmann demands that it be passion-centred all the way down. He argues: The cross is the test of everything which deserves to be called Christian … since the cross refutes everything, and excludes the syncretistic elements in Christianity.
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When German theologians began addressing the horrors of the First World War in the late 1960s and early 1970s, after a period of wise and necessary reticence catalysed by Jewish theological confrontation of the Shoah, it seems extraordinarily apposite that Moltmann chose a number of Jewish philosophers as dialogue partners in doing theology after Auschwitz. 11 For Moltmann, the most significant of these philosophers is unquestionably Ernst Bloch, whose experimental Marxist utopianism in The Principle of Hope gave substantial shape to Moltmann’s future-oriented conception of God and the eschatological meaning of history.
Moltmann recalls asking Bloch, with whom he taught in Tübingen, whether he was an atheist, to which Bloch replied: ‘I am an atheist for God’s sake.’ 12 Moltmann adopts this type of protest atheism found in Bloch, as well as in the works of Albert Camus, Elie Wiesel and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and argues that it is actually the most appropriate response to the question of theodicy. He even submits that it is this same protest atheism that was found on the lips of Christ as he cried, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’, and, of course, in Moltmann’s own soul during his experience of war. Moltmann leaves classical Christian theism behind by suggesting that both traditional monotheism and atheism are inadequate in facing the problem of existential evil and suffering in the world. 13
By radicalizing Luther, Moltmann arrives at an either/or dichotomy between a theology of the cross and traditional Western monotheism. The cross of Christ, Moltmann asserts, is an iconoclast to classical theistic assumptions. Indeed, Christ is the true icon, the image of the invisible God, who exposes syncretistic elements of Greek and modern philosophy as unchristian in light of his suffering and death on a Roman execution device. 14
Against the backdrop of the popular 1960s Death of God theology of Altizer and others, Moltmann stands his confessional ground with a theology of the cross and suggests that their radical theology is ‘not radical enough’. Moltmann is certainly comfortable with the phrase ‘death of God’ – he even claims that the death of God is the point of origin for all authentically Christian theology. 15 It is God’s experience of death at Golgotha that inspires Moltmann to take his stand against the notion of divine impassibility. Moltmann’s primary argument is that a ‘God incapable of suffering … would also be incapable of love’. 16
He insists that the God of Christianity is not Aristotle’s apathetic unmoved Mover, but reminds us of the shekinah of the involved YHWH in the Hebrew Bible, the emotive Christ of the New Testament evangelists, and the Holy Spirit present in the sufferings of the Church.
In contrast to the classical conception of God, Moltmann posits that God is voluntarily connected with God’s creation and in such a deeply loving relationship with it that God is subject to suffering because of the existence of suffering in God’s creation. 17
Moltmann asserts that God the Father is also capable of suffering and has suffered throughout the course of human history. However, because Moltmann is very careful to draw a sharp distinction between the Father and the Son in the event of Christ’s death, he cannot rightly be accused of Patripassionism but rather, according to Moltmann, Patricompassionism. 18
In this model, Jesus – as the eternal Son – experiences the abandonment of the Father, as well as dying as a condemned criminal, while God the Father experiences the mournful loss of the Son to death. In other words, God knows what it is like to be on both sides of death, as both the one who dies and, in the case of the Father suffering the death of the Son, the one who mourns a death within oneself. For Moltmann, this is the meaning of the crucifixion within the Trinitarian life. In this way, while it is proper to say ‘death of God’, it is better put as ‘death in God’. 19
After the nineteenth century, several wartime theologians such as Abraham Heschel, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Kazoh Kitamori and even Barth himself began challenging the classical notion of divine impassibility. Moltmann arguably became the most prominent among these voices calling for the pathos of God with this cult classic. Further, he sees The Crucified God as a partial solution to the critical threat of irrelevance that Christian theology faces in the modern era.
Moltmann’s theory of self-limitation in the God–world relationship, in which God allows Godself to be affected immanently by God’s creation without losing lordship over it, offers a new alternative between a non-object wholly other God and the overly vulnerable God of process thought. According to Moltmann, God suffers in Godself because God suffers with creation in history.
Moltmann claims that all history occurs within God, all suffering is God’s suffering, all death is God’s death and all life is God’s life, because, through the event of the cross, God makes the entire experience of creation God’s own. 20 Moltmann is unsatisfied with the way in which Chalcedonian Christology communicates God’s suffering and death because it merely speaks of God’s suffering and death in relationship to the world. Instead, Moltmann insists that if God is Trinity, theology must be able to speak of the event on Golgotha as affecting the inner relational life of God. 21 Thus, without leaving the ‘two natures’ Christology completely, Moltmann applies his theologia crucis as a critique, arguing that Christ is truly God and truly human.
The incarnation is realized completely by the Son, who takes on himself the full judgement for the guilt of humanity, at the moment of abandonment and death of Christ. It is in this moment of godforsaken-ness and mortality that the Son is in full solidarity with humanity and that ‘at-one-ment’ between God and humankind is achieved. Likewise, Jesus proves himself to be at one with the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, which brings us to the point of Moltmann’s Christology that has been widely appropriated by Liberation theologians worldwide: it is precisely where God seems to be most absent that God is most present. As Elie Wiesel contended that God himself hung on the gallows of Auschwitz, so Moltmann avers that God himself hangs on the cross outside Jerusalem: the crucified God is in solidarity with God’s crucified people. 22
Moltmann has received much criticism for his habit of narrowly focusing on a single aspect of theology at the expense of others. For example, The Crucified God, in which Moltmann hardly mentions the life and resurrection of Jesus, comes after Theology of Hope, in which he concentrates almost exclusively on the resurrection. As some have said, he moved backwards from Easter Sunday to Good Friday. 23 However, we must note the political events between the two publications: Vatican II, the rise of the Christian right in America, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, the demise of socialism in Czechoslovakia and the sufferings of the global South – all of which had massive implications for the German political theologian. While Moltmann was politically motivated to provide the suffering world with a suffering God, like Kazoh Kitamori had done for Japan decades earlier, it is clear that Moltmann upholds an integrity between the crucifixion and the resurrection. Rather than considering them two mutually exclusive events, he calls them a single, unified ‘God event’. This event holds all of the celebratory implications of Easter’s resurrection and eschatological hope in tension with the antithesis of God’s suffering and death through Christ on Good Friday. 24
Finally, Moltmann allows the question of soteriology to be posed: ‘How is a God who is available to suffering, change and death able to achieve a secure salvation for humanity?’ His answer is the resurrection, claiming that Christ’s future is humanity’s future. While God cannot guarantee a life free of pain, suffering and death, the God of the future who raises Christ to life does promise a future of universal hope. Certainly, believing in a God who understands the plight of humanity so well is a positive, but what is it that Christians lose in having a self-limiting God who is passible and bound to the historical process with creation? For Moltmann, what is lost is the ability to ignore the pain and suffering, oppression and death that occur in our world. When we recognize that the suffering of humanity is the suffering of God, we must act decisively and immediately. Theology must be political.
Ultimately, Moltmann’s answer to the question of how one can possibly believe in God after Auschwitz is that one should not believe in God after Auschwitz, unless that God is the suffering Christ who was abandoned on the cross. The God of classical theism is foreign to Christian theology in light of the Christ event. For Moltmann, the two are at odds and only the crucified God is able to speak to the sufferings of a deeply fragmented and godforsaken world.