Jurgen Moltmann – The Crucified God

Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God is an attempt to come at Christian theology in a manner different to his previous work Theology of Hope, with the accent now on the cross of the risen Christ rather than the resurrection of the crucified Messiah. This is not a regressive step, he says, but an examination of the reverse side of the theology of hope (p.5). Methodologically he appeals to Adorno and Horkheimer's 'negative dialectic' because "[U]nless it apprehends the pain of the negative, Christian hope cannot be realistic and liberating" (p.5). The perspective of the problem of theodicy is thus prominent, together with the motif of the loving solidarity of God with the suffering of the world. His trinitarianism is a dominant strand of the work, and central to his explanation of the cross. The voluntary fellow-suffering of God on the cross with those who suffer godforsakeness is the key to Moltmann's theologia crucis. Everywhere is his admirable concern to articulate the faith in terms that make practical sense in the bloody twentieth century. As he says of his own experience of returning to the lecture halls after three years as a POW: "[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" (p. 1)

Chapter Six of The Crucified God is explained as an attempt to develop the consequences of the theology of the crucified Christ for the concept of God - that is to say, an attempt to understand God in light of the godforsakeness of Jesus on the cross (p. 200). In particular, Moltmann wishes to chart a course between modern existentialist atheism on the one hand, and traditional Christian theism on the other. Moltmann argues that traditional explanations of the cross have been restricted to soteriological questions, and have not pushed forward to ask the explicitly theo-logical question, "What does the cross of Jesus mean for God himself?" (p.201). He critiques the tendency to speak of a "death of God" even in Rahner and Barth, and insists that the answer to this question must be trinitarian - Jesus' death must be understood rather as a death in God (p.207).

The tradition of philosophical theism is then subjected to a thorough examination with Martin Luther enlisted as an ally. The theologia crucis means a new epistemology, a "crucifying form of knowledge", contrary to human pride. Metaphysics of the Greek strain cannot stand in the face of this cross of Christ - the theistic concept of the God who cannot suffer, the God who is pure causality, is incompatible with a Christian understanding of reality. In fact, it is necessary to speak of a "history of God" which the cross reveals. Atheism, too, has been an unbelief of the theists' God, not the crucified God. Moltmann hopes that if metaphysical theism disappears, then protest atheism will also die. This is because the crucial problem for the protest atheist is not God's existence, but his righteousness. Thus Moltmann's key strategy contra atheism is a theodicy. God must be understood as the suffering God in the suffering of Christ and the one who utters the cry of dereliction.

Moltmann now examines traditional christology and finds in the doctrine of Christ's two natures a possible docetism. He carefully examines the early church statements against Arianism, monophysitism and the via negativa. What is needed is a christological doctrine of the trinity (p.235), and western Christianity, as Rahner has noted, has been more monotheistic than truly trinitarian. Importantly, God's being and God's acts cannot be separated. The cross - God's act - is essential to who God is - trinity. But further, on the cross the Father delivered up the willing Son, and so suffers the death of the Son. This voluntary act on the part of God is solidarity with the godforsaken world. Even in this point of separation the Son and the Father are united in their love for the world. The trinity is not a closed circle, but an open embrace of the world in its godforsakeness. God becomes not other-worldly, but this-worldly (p.252). The problem of suffering is not "solved"; rather it is met by God's voluntary and loving suffering in identification with the world. This is to be the praxis of the church also. Moltmann also wants to speak of a trinitarian history of God, rooted in his exegesis of 1 Corinthians 15:28. Further, he wishes to propose that Christ does not face redundancy in the eschaton. In fact, the Sonship of the Son is consummated in the handing over of the kingdom.

One can see how Moltmann develops his Christian panentheism from such beginnings. The suffering of God means that man is taken up, whole and entire, into the life of God. Not only is God in the world: his embrace is so strong that the world is in God. Ultimately, God is in Auschwitz and Auschwitz is taken up into God, and this is grounds for an extraordinary hope.

Moltmann's theodicy is the great strength of this work, in that it directly engages the protest atheism of the mid twentieth century without negating the powerful emotional impact of its claims. We are returned to the cross as the heart of the Christian message repeatedly - it is no accident that Luther features so strongly and so positively in these pages. Further, the rigour of his penetrating search for the implications of the cross for God himself has led him rightly to the trinity, and stands as a rebuke to the western tradition for neglecting this understanding of God for so long. The atonement is necessarily a trinitarian event/process. The sense of God identifying with human beings in Christ is also very strong. Moltmann develops a theology of the atonement with a cosmic scope, and does not fall into the trap of individualising the work of the cross.

We might complain that Moltmann's doctrine of God suffers from an overdose of Hegelianism, by presenting the history of the world as God's history, the process by which he realizes himself. By rejecting impassiblity and divine aseity, does he allow a compromise of God's freedom? This having been said, is God still as impersonal as he ever was under the scholastics? Further, the God presented here seems almost dependent on, or at least intrinsically tied to, the world. His is a vulnerable God. Moltmann's trinitarian reflection leaves him open to the charge of tritheism - however, he more than responds to such a charge in The Trinity and the Kingdom of God; and he is recapturing a biblical emphasis, after all.

While the cosmic vision of Moltmann's theologia crucis is admirable, it says almost nothing about individual salvation - in fact, it almost non-soteriological. He describes God's judgement in the terms of the "giving up" of human beings to their godlessness, as in Rom 1 (p.242). The atonement is achieved not by any substitutionary work of Christ but by his identifying with human beings in their lostness, by solidarity with them. In the end, his panentheism leads him to a universalist model; and the preaching of the cross becomes a following of God's example in identifying with the lost and godforsaken.

One last quibble is with his lack of exegetical foundation at points, and a tendency (that I have noted in Moltmann's other writings) to recycle a few favourite passages (such as I Cor 15 and Rom 8, crucial though they may be).