Tag: Jurgen Moltmann

A Historical-Theological Understanding of the Resurrection: From Wittgenstein and Hegel to Moltmann and Paul

Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. W. F. Hegel, two figures not normally cited together, concur that the resurrection of Christ is the triumph of love, and has little to do with the miraculous. Focus on the miraculous aspect of the resurrection misses how resurrection is to be integrated into the life and identity of the crucified. Wittgenstein confides to his diary his struggle with the resurrection. He understands it is not simply a matter of believing another miracle, but a comprehensive shift in how the world is perceived – an alternative grammar in apprehending the world. “Just as ‘God’ does not pick out an agent or an individual among others, in the way a proper name does, so ‘resurrection’ does not pick out a specific event in chronicled history to set beside other events.”[1] Proof or evidence or even the factuality of the resurrection is not primary for Wittgenstein, but the shift in the global “reading” of facts entailing the founding of the church and living in faith. Belief in the resurrection is entry into an alternative world of understanding.

The Death and Resurrection as God’s Story

For Hegel also, the resurrection is not about the miraculous but is to be read as key to the story of God: “the full presence of both humanity and divinity, the despair that God himself is dead, and the reversal, the putting to death of death and the resurrection into life” is “a reenactment of the divine history.”[2] This history is Trinitarian in that the “abstractness of the Father is given up in the Son. But the negation of this negation is the unity of Father and Son—love, or the Spirit.”[3] In Christ a difference in God is realized, in that the distant abstract God is made concrete (in the world), such that he is immediately accessible (in Spirit and love). Through incarnation and death, human finitude is “transfigured into the highest love” as God is poured out and made available in human interiority. The resurrection and ascension are an extension of the incarnation, as in this “exaltation Christ has appeared for immediate consciousness in the mode of actuality.”[4] Hegel refers to the resurrection as making God available for “envisagement,” which he equates with the defeat of death (the negative) and the “preservation in death itself” of the “highest love.”[5]

In Hegel’s estimate this story of God in the history of the “teaching, life, death, and resurrection” makes the community of love, the church, a possibility. This goes beyond an intellectual foundation: “This is the crucial point on which everything depends, this is the verification, the absolute proof. This is what is to be understood as the witness of the Spirit.”[6] This is the history of the kenotic outpouring of the Holy Spirit in which the sensible presence is transfigured into his real presence through the Spirit.[7] In the “eternal repetition of the life passion and resurrection of Christ in the members of the church,” lies the creation and preservation of the world.[8] The world is incorporated into the story of God.

Jürgen Moltmann, like Hegel, reads the resurrection as the unfolding story of God: “The union of Jesus with God and of God with Jesus was constituted . . . by ‘the resurrection of Jesus’.”[9] The risen Christ is the truth of the historical Jesus and the truth of God, and this is captured in the earliest formulas of the New Testament: “Jesus Christ crucified and risen” (1 Co 15:3–5). His resurrection, joined to his life course, teachings, and death, serves as the foundation of Jesus’ identity as Son of God, Lord, or simply God, and is the cornerstone of his eschatological kingdom. Resurrection means his entire life is the founding of the eschatological kingdom, and there is no divide between the life of Christ and the founding of the Church. Luke-Acts, the Gospels and the history of the Church are to be read as a singular movement of God pouring out his life for the world.

Resurrection: The Interpretive Key to All Things

Along with Hegel and Wittgenstein, Moltmann recognized resurrection is not just a fortuitous miracle or another historical event. The resurrection is the end of history as previously understood: “it is not a question of establishing the life and death of Jesus as a historical fact, and regarding the resurrection, the appearances of Jesus and the Easter faith as inter-changeable interpretations of that fact. That would not do justice to the rise of the Christian faith at all.”[10] The resurrection is the interpretive key to understand the life of Christ through faith. The resurrection “does not speak the ‘language of facts’, but only the language of faith and hope, that is, the ‘language of promise.”[11] In this world the cross is foolishness and a scandal, and by the same token the resurrection cannot be “proven.” The cross and resurrection can only be grasped through faith as an alternative world-view.

In the Wittgensteinian sense, for Moltmann the resurrection is the deep grammar by which the meaning of Christ is to be read into all things. Referencing I Cor. 15:14 (“If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is vain and your faith is vain”) Moltmann notes, “If one calls the cross of Jesus the ‘nuclear fact’ of Christian faith, one must call his resurrection the primal datum of that faith.”[12] In the early Christian community, there was little dispute about the fact of the resurrection. The issue was how to interpret Christ’s death in light of the resurrection in which light record of his life was preserved. “As a merely historical person he would long have been forgotten, because his message had already been contradicted by his death on the cross. As a person at the heart of an eschatological faith and proclamation, on the other hand, he becomes a mystery and a question for every new age.”[13]

A Reinterpretation of God’s Righteousness

The Easter faith arose among those who fled the crucifixion, as God seemed to have abandoned Christ. However, where faith in Jesus was shattered at the cross, the resurrection expands faith to include a reconstitution of (Jewish) hope. No longer is righteousness on the basis of the law or Jewish eschatology. Jesus was a “lawless man,” a “rebel,” “abandoned by God” according to the law, but declared righteous by the resurrection. The Jewish apocalyptic says all should wait for the resurrection of the dead, but Easter faith is trust in Jesus resurrection from the dead.[14] “Between the eschatological Easter faith and the various forms of late-Jewish apocalyptic stood Jesus himself and his cross.”[15] The future and past of Judaism are made new in light of God’s identification with Christ. In the resurrection “God has identified himself, his judgment and his kingdom with the crucified Jesus, [with] his cross and his helplessness.”[16] God and life are found in the midst of death as the future kingdom of life is made possible: “namely reconciliation in the midst of strife, the law of grace in the midst of judgment, and creative love in the midst of legalism.”[17]

This is not faith that God will damn the unrighteous and save the righteous – a resurrection unto judgement. This is a different conception of God and righteousness – a trust in God’s righteousness. In the midst of suffering, evil, and death, God has made things right. “The Christian belief in the resurrection does not proclaim world-historical tendencies or anthropological hopes, but the nucleus of a new righteousness in a world where dead and living cry out for righteousness.”[18]

Reading the cross in light of the law makes of Christ’s death one more propitiating sacrifice, with the expiation or propitiation meeting the requirements of the law but the resurrection is the end of the law of just deserts, as executioner, betrayer, oppressor and oppressed alike are received into righteousness by grace. “God had answered the evil deed of men in crucifying Jesus in a glorious way by raising him from the dead (Acts 2.24).”[19] The resurrection read into the cross means all that have been delivered over to death due to unrighteousness will find life. “Through his suffering and death, the risen Christ brings righteousness and life to the unrighteous and the dying.”[20] His death on the cross makes the meaning of the resurrection evident for the unrighteous: as their representative in death provides new life in resurrection. There is passage from death to life for all who are subject to death.

Defeat of Death, Evil and Sin

His is “resurrection from the dead” and not a revivification, reanimation or temporary raising, as it directly counters death (with all of its connotations of sin and punishment). It is not life after death, as conceived in many religions, presuming the immortality of the soul or the transmigration of souls. There is an annihilation of death; not mere life after death. The harshness of the crucifixion is an exclamation that death is a reality, and there can be no peace between this reality (a life lived in light of death) and the reality of crucifixion and resurrection (death defeated by life). This is not on the order of the raising up of Lazarus who would die again, but Jesus is no longer controlled by death: “Christ being raised from the dead will never die again” (Rom. 6.9). “Resurrection means ‘life from the dead’ (Rom. 9.15), and is itself connected with the annihilation of the power of death.”[21] One sort of history ends – “evil, death, abandonment by God” with resurrection marking the beginning of the new world of the righteousness of God.”[22]

He is “the first fruits of them that are asleep,” “the “pioneer of life,” the “firstborn from the dead.” He is “Jesus Christ”: “Jesus” binds him to his past, and “Christ” binds him to his future.[23]

‘Easter’ was a prelude to, and a real anticipation of, God’s qualitatively new future and the new creation in the midst of the history of the world’s suffering. . . For the Easter hope shines not only forwards into the unknown newness of the history which it opens up, but also backwards over the graveyards of history, and in their midst first on the grave of a crucified man who appeared in that prelude.[24]

Through the resurrection the death of Christ becomes the defeat of death for the living and the dead: “For to this end has Christ died and come alive again, that he might be Lord of both dead and living” (Rom. 14.9). The resurrection does not relativize the cross (as a past event), but makes it the point of salvation, qualifying the crucified as Lord and Christ, filling the cross with the eschatological and saving significance of God defeating death in dying and being raised.

The Resurrection as Providing Theological Coherence

The resurrection is often tacked on to legal theories of atonement (e.g., a sign of sacrifice accepted), rather than integrating the resurrection into the life and death of Christ to form a theological coherence. The historical and the eschatological are separated, with Jesus life and death as one half of Jesus and the risen Christ as the other half.[25] His death, separated from his resurrection is a repudiation of what he said and did, but joined together the reality of the incarnation (God become man) is made complete and coherent: “his cross is understood in the light of his resurrection, his way to the cross in the light of the saving meaning of his cross, his words and miracles in the light of his Easter exaltation to be Lord.”[26]

Jesus is raised, which means not only that this single individual has overcome death but his life is extended to church and cosmos. As Rowan Williams puts it, “The life that lives in Jesus is the active source of all relations in the finite world; so it is natural that, in its human embodiment, it is creative of unrestricted relation in the human world – and indeed beyond, if we take seriously Paul’s meditations in Romans 8 on the dependence of the entire creation on the reconciling process that occurs in the death and resurrection of Jesus.”[27] The resurrection is not tacked on to history but is the transformative moment for history and the cosmos, as the indestructible life of God is activated from within history and the cosmos so as to become “all in all” (Col 3:11).

[1] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980 (henceforth CV), 64. Cited in Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition) 218.

[2] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, trans. By R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodson and J. M. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 53.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Hegel, 131.

[5] Hegel, 131-2.

[6] Hegel, 145.

[7] Hegel, 149.  As the editor notes, “For Hegel the resurrection of Jesus from the dead indeed entails an Aufhebung—an annulling of his sensible presence, yet a preservation of his real presence and its transfiguration into the modality of spirit.”

[8] Hegel, 152.

[9] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993) 161.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Moltmann, 173.

[12] Moltmann, 161.

[13] Moltmann, 162.

[14] Moltmann, 172.

[15] Moltmann, 166.

[16] Moltmann,169.

[17] Moltmann, 171.

[18] Moltmann, 177.

[19] Moltmann, 179.

[20] Moltmann, 185.

[21] Moltmann, 170.

[22]Moltmann, 169.

[23] Moltmann, 164.

[24] Moltmann, 163.

[25] Moltmann, 160.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Williams, 38.

A Historical Theological Understanding of Christ’s Death: From Hegel to Moltmann back to Maximus and Paul

Why did Jesus die? The inevitable theological response, “For our sins,” does not really explain (either sin or how Christ’s death helps) or deal with the historical circumstance of his death. Historically it is quite obvious Jesus died because of the threat he posed to both Israel and Rome, and yet this historical reality is often left out, which also leaves hanging explanation of how his death pertains to the present human predicament. However, Scripture and the early church understood the death of Christ as simultaneously pertaining to the historical outworking of what killed him.[1] Paul explains the universal appeal and answer found in the death of Christ, as the cross exposes and answers the universal predicament of sin (a death-dealing lie). Maximus the Confessor typifies the belief of the early church that Christ wielded death to defeat the enslaving grip of sin and death: “Thus the curse and death of my sin became the curse of my God, which prevented the transgression from progressing and producing the fruits of unrighteousness, but instead, in accordance with the commandment and divine righteousness, became a blessing and life without end.”[2] The death of Christ in this understanding had an immediate historical and personal impact with the historical explaining the theological.

In the modern period it is G. W. F. Hegel who returns to the historical so as to develop a practical theology, focused on the kenotic love of God poured out on the cross, providing the power to empty the self in love. Hegel sounds similar to the early church fathers, though he employs his own terminology in describing the power of Christ’s death: “The death of God is infinite negation, and God maintains himself in death, so that this process is rather a putting to death of death, a resurrection into life.”[3] Christ provides the race escape from enslavement to death. This practical historical development is most effectively taken up in the theology of Jürgen Moltmann, which I focus on below.

So, rather than leap over the historical events in explaining the theological reason for the death of Christ (as in top-down legal theories), the reason posed in history can serve as the foundation of theological explanation (bottom-up theories). In other words, rather than creating a category in the mind of God requiring the death of Christ, the human necessity due to death (religious, political, psychological, and personal) which brought about his death not only explains his death but what it accomplished. There is a theological tradition grounded in the historical necessity (Christus Victor, Recapitulation, Girardian theory, Liberation Theology, etc.), which begins with the incarnation, and there are theories which begin with the necessities of God to explain the incarnation (legal theories of atonement). I argue that theories grounded in history provide the most thorough development for understanding the reason Christ died, but also for understanding God and the world as revealed in Christ. The most obvious development of this historical understanding in the modern period is through Hegel to Moltmann, and even if one disagrees with the application of this development, Moltmann provides one of the most compelling examples giving shape to a historical theological understanding. In his key work, The Crucified God, he plots the history behind the cross to lay the ground for explaining the real-world liberation found in Christ.[4] In following his argument (in the paragraphs below), I demonstrate the return to the early Christian understanding of the cross implied in Moltmann’s practical Hegelian insight.

At a basic human and historical level, beyond theory and theology, there is little question as to why Jesus died. He was killed due to fear on the part of the Romans and Jews that he threatened their religion and their nation. He threatened the temple, the sacrifices (Roman and Jewish), the hierarchy (Roman and Jewish), and ultimately, he posed a threat to their power. From the cleansing of the temple and Jesus’ intimation of its destruction (somehow connected to him), the Jews began to plot his death. They would kill him because he threatened what was taken as essential and absolute in their religious nationalism. At his trial he was condemned as a “blasphemer,” due to his disregard of the sabbath laws and markers of clean and unclean, and it is this disregard that pertains to his understanding of God. As Moltmann argues, “With arrogant authority Jesus proclaimed God as the one who in his eschatological condescension towards lost men is free from the human observance of the prescriptions of the law, and in prevenient love shows gracious mercy towards men. By so doing, Jesus placed his preaching of God, and therefore himself, above the authority of Moses and the Torah.”[5] Jesus demonstrates God is free, through his actions on the sabbath and in his revisions and reinterpretation of the law (as in the Sermon on the Mount). What was objective and legal is made personally binding in its direct application to the human heart.

Jesus disqualified himself as a traditional rabbi, deriving authority from Moses, in that he placed himself above the law and its limits, specifically in extending grace beyond and in contradiction to the law. He forgives transgressors, he abolishes contemporary distinctions between righteous and unrighteous, devout and sinful, and religious and secular. He set himself in the place of God as judge, which did not fit expectations of the Son of Man, who in the last days would judge sinners and redeem the righteous. Jesus turned toward sinners, which was not how God was expected to establish righteousness. The Jews assumed the Messiah would shame sinners and exalt those who keep the law. “Anyone who preaches the imminent kingdom of God not as judgment, but as the gospel of the justification of sinners by grace, and demonstrates it as such through his life with sinners and tax-collectors, contradicts the hope based upon the law, is deceiving the sinners and tax-collectors and is blaspheming the God of hope.”[6]

Both John and Jesus preach “The kingdom of God is at hand,” but Jesus’ depiction of this kingdom is not one of judgment. “Rather, anticipated by the word of the gospel which Jesus preached and his living offering of himself to the poor, the sinners and the tax-collectors, it comes as the unconditional and free grace of God, by which the lost are sought out and those without rights, and the unrighteous, are accepted.”[7] Jesus is not leading a repentance movement but is offering righteousness through grace. His appeal is not to the law but to himself and he is offering forgiveness and healing on the basis of grace; not an appeal to the authority of the law or Moses but a direct appeal to God. Grace for those outside of the law, beyond the authority of Moses, was by definition against the institutions of Israel. The conflict, resulting in Jesus’ murder, was due to Jesus’ incomprehensible claims of authority in discrepancy with the law.

Rather than a kingdom for the righteous and judgment for the unrighteous, Jesus opens the kingdom to unrighteous sinners. He preaches a different image of God; not the God of conquering power but a God defined through grace. Jesus position as a carpenter from Nazareth, his association with sinners and the poor, his healing of the sick, and drawing in of the outcasts, speaks of God in a novel fashion, identified with the weak rather than the strong or those in control. “For Jesus the ‘radicalization of the Torah’ and the ‘transgression of the Torah’ basically both amount to the same thing, the freedom of God to show grace. Thus the right which he claimed to forgive sins goes beyond the Torah and reveals a new righteousness of God in judgment, which could not be expected according to the traditions of the law.”[8]

The means of refuting this poor, weak carpenter was to relegate him to the place of slaves by destroying him on a cross. The cross was to be refutation of all that he represented, and yet through the resurrection this refutation is defeated, making of the cross God’s full identification with the poor, the lowly, and abandoned. His death is the point of conflict between the god of the law and the God of grace. The cultic god, the guarantor of the law, and his representatives, would eliminate Christ’s challenge to the law by eliminating him. Sinners are destroyed outside of the city gates, outside of the kingdom, and this death identified him as a sinner.

This is made obvious in that even his disciples abandon him, as his death signifies his powerlessness before the law and its guardians. He is seemingly rejected by God, thus even his disciples reject him as the cross destroyed his claims on behalf of God. “He did not die through chance or misfortune, but died by the law as one who was ‘reckoned with transgressors’ (Luke 22.37). He was condemned as a ‘blasphemer’ by the guardians of the law and of faith. As they understood it, his death was the carrying out of the curse of the law.”[9] In this they were not entirely wrong, but the curse is demonstrably not simply objective to the law, but the law itself is accursed (deadly), and yet suspended in its being nailed to the cross. The resurrection confirms or makes this interpretation possible, as for the first time it is realized life is beyond the law, and not in and through the law. “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Ro 10:4).

Recognition that God is on the cross is not simply a message for Jews but is a message for all people; the principalities and powers, forces for death, killing and suffering, are undermined by the power of life beyond death. The kingdoms of Israel and Rome were politically and religiously united in killing Jesus as crucifixion is a Roman execution inflicted upon slaves and insurrectionists. The Pax Romana brings about peace through recognition of Caesar; the sort of peace the Jews submitted themselves to in shouting down Jesus as King. “We have no King but Caesar” was there final pledge of allegiance – politically and religiously. The kingdoms in conflict are not Roman and Jewish, but Jesus Kingdom and the kingdoms of this world.

 It is not a matter of separating out the political and religious but separating out two kinds of kingdom: the violent versus the non-violent, the coercive and militant versus the peaceable, the legal versus the loving, the rich versus the poor, law versus grace, or ultimately, Caesar versus Jesus. Loving enemies and praying for those that persecute you, is a revolution “not of this world.” “God comes not to carry out just revenge upon the evil, but to justify by grace sinners, whether they are Zealots or tax collectors, Pharisees or sinners, Jews or Samaritans, and therefore, also, whether they are Jews or Gentiles.”[10] Jesus opposes both the legalism of Israel and Rome, in promoting the kingdom of righteousness through grace. He set free from the law of vengeance and the power of death, characteristic of this world’s kingdoms. “He denied that human beings, Zealots and Romans, had the right to pass judgment and execute vengeance in their own cause: ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone’ (John 8.7).”[11] Christ reveals God is not a righteous avenger set to judge and destroy. God is a God of mercy and grace, and Jesus’ preaching sets humans free from the legalism of their gods of vengeance so as to establish His different kingdom.

This is why they kill him, as his opponents understood he was attacking their basic religious and political principles. He opposed Israel and Rome alike: “The freedom of Jesus and his proclamation of God’s law of grace affected not only the Pharisees and Zealots, but equally the cultic and political religious foundations of the Pax Romana and the archaic conceptions of righteousness held by all men.”[12]  This is demonstrated in the subsequent persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire. The Christian rejection of emperor worship was simultaneously political and religious: “By their irreligiousness they were introducing revolt into the heavenly world amongst the gods and were therefore bringing revolt into the religious and political world on earth which corresponded to those gods.”[13] Jesus and his followers alienated the anti-Roman Jews and the anti-Jewish Romans, as he challenged their ground rules. A Christianity which begins with some supposed “pure theology,” free of politics and history and aimed at a private sphere between God and self, misses both what Christ opposed and what enslaves nations, empires, and kingdoms and citizens of this world.

This understanding of the death of Christ provides a traceable, universal continuity through history to theology. It also directly connects sin with evil, which strangely tends to be separated in legal theories explaining Christ’s death. Philosophical problems of evil or the notion of radical evil (the lying possibility of evil or its representations having an ontological ground) are often dismissed from theology and thought to pertain only theoretically or philosophically.[14] Yet, it is obvious in the New Testament that the reification of death, hades, and the devil, (the power of nothingness in Hegel’s terminology) as ultimate powers, is the lie exposed by the death and resurrection of Christ. The state exercised power by presuming the absolute nature of death, and Christ overturned this satanic notion.

The presumption of the first Christians is that it is only in the death of Christ that God and world are fully revealed. The hypostatic union of the incarnation reveals God’s relation to the world, but it also reveals the deepest truth about God, that he is a “suffering God” who suffers with and for us. In Paul’s explanation, the sufferings or groanings of the cosmos are taken up into God, through the Son and the Spirit, and the Christian joins in this cosmic, intra-Trinitarian intercession into the world (Rom 8:22-26). The suffering of the Son simultaneously pertains to the identity of God and the world as the uncreated God, who is for us is, revealed in His humanity. “This mystery is for Maximus ‘the ineffable and incomprehensible union according to hypostasis of divinity and humanity’ that brings created and uncreated natures ‘into perfect identity.’ In this very identity—the one wrought in history from conception in Mary’s womb to cross to Resurrection to Ascension—every being (not just the man Jesus) ‘receives its beginning and end.’”[15] The story of God and the world are known only through the particular history revealed in Christ. “This is the mystery that circumscribes all the ages, and which reveals the grand plan of God, a super-infinite plan infinitely pre-existing the ages an infinite number of times. The essential Word of God became a messenger of this plan when He became man, and, if I may rightly say so, revealed Himself as the innermost depth of the Father’s goodness while also displaying in Himself the very goal for which creatures manifestly received the beginning of their existence.”[16]

Maximus describes the defeat of sin and the deliverance of creation as a simultaneous movement: “This mystery brings about the utter destruction of all the properties and movements contrary to nature that were introduced into nature through the primal disobedience. It also produces the perfect restoration of all the properties and movements that were previously in nature, according to which absolutely none of the principles of beings can ever be adulterated.”[17] In Maximus explanation, Christ defeated the Evil One who was holding us captive to death, and he “snatched us away” through the resurrection as he is our rest and healing and grace: “Rest, because through His brief life He abolished the law of our dire slavery to the flesh. Healing, because through His resurrection He healed us from the wound of death and corruption. Grace, because through faith He distributes adoption in the Spirit of God the Father, and the grace of divinization to each who is worthy.”[18] The deliverance from sin is a historical and practical reality, immediately addressing the human predicament, and in and through this rescue, the full reality of God is revealed.

[1] To call this sin becomes confused in modern parlance, as sin is often not connected to either the death dealing predicament that killed Christ or that which infects the human race as a murderous lie.

[2] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, trans. Maximos Constas (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press) 62.8

[3] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, trans. By R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodson and J. M. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 370.

[4] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993)

[5] Moltmann, 128.

[6] Moltmann, 129.

[7] Moltmann, 129-130.

[8] Moltmann, 132.

[9] Moltmann, 133.

[10] Moltmann, 142.

[11] Moltmann, 143.

[12] Moltmann, 143

[13] Moltmann, 144.

[14] As N. T. Wright puts it, “Theologies of the cross, of how God deals with sin through the death of Jesus, have not normally grappled with the larger problem of evil. Conversely, most people who have written about ‘the problem of evil’  within philosophical theology have not grappled sufficiently with the cross as part of both the analysis and the solution of that problem” (N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (Downers Grove: Inter Varsity Press, 2006), 77). Here is the middle way between radical evil and privation theory in that radical evil is an objective possibility as part of the lie of sin but is exposed in the cross of Christ as having no ontological ground.

[15] Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (p. 90). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.

[16] Wood, 90.

[17] Maximus, 63.19.

[18] Maximus, 64.7.

The God of Empire Versus the God of Passion

There is something of an endless debate about God within the major branches of the Christian faith – What role for Greek conceptions of God? Does the Spirit proceed from the Father or from the Father and the Son? How is the Father involved in the work of the Son and how do we conceive their difference, etc. etc.? East, West, Protestant, Lutheran, Calvinist, are largely defined by the perceived differences (real and imagined) in regard to fundamental issues about how and what we know about God. These divisions though, may be shaped by more subtle sociological concerns. Sarah Coakley, following Ernst Troeltsch, divides the sociological contexts between church, sect, and mysticism and sees the sociological as throwing additional light on theological emphasis. She sees certain forms of trinitarianism as cohering with particular types of ecclesiastical organization. For example, focus on pneumatology is unlikely to accompany strong patriarchal social and political contexts – given the individualistic, mystical, and “feminine” role of the Spirit. [1] Throughout the history of the church, the more settled the institution (the church type), the more unmoved, settled, and distant, the conception and perceived experience of God. The focus on the Spirit and the experientialism of mysticism have tended to be segregated from the theology of the church type. The adaptation of the Aristotelian concept of God (the Unmoved Mover), came with adaptation to empire, hierarchy, and institutions meant to endure by dint of their alignment with worldly power.

Giorgio Agamben describes the rise of two orders of church, each consisting of its own conceptual and experiential reality. In the biblical mandate, the church is to dwell on the earth as an exile or sojourner captured in the Greek verb paroikein, as in the description of I Peter 1:17 – “the time of sojourning.” In this imagery truth is discovered along the way – or truth is the way (viatorum). The sojourner church stands in contrast to the settled church, which takes on the look of a city, state, kingdom, or empire – captured in the Greek verb katoikein. The katoikia church is built to last, and as opposed to the paroikein church, is not geared to the parousia or the coming of Christ, as it has put down roots in the world. The parousia, in Agamben’s conception, is not in the future or deferred but speaks of the immediate experience of time (fundamental human experience).  In the true church (Agamben counts the institution as we have it an imposter), every moment bears the possibility of the inbreaking of the Messiah, made impossible by the katoikia church.[2]

Agamben locates the point of departure from the biblical church within early debates about the Trinity. The distinction between the immanent (ad intra – or God’s self-relation) and economic (God’s relation to creation) Trinity accounts for the development of western politics and economics. However, according to Agamben, this secularizes theology even before there is a secular order: “from the beginning theology conceives divine life and the history of humanity as an oikonomia (economy), that is, that theology is itself ‘economic’ and did not simply become so at a later time through secularization.” Where the political order can lay claim to a first order power relation, Christian’s (through this theological maneuvering) only have to do with an economy (a second order of experience).[3] While one may not agree with the sweep of Agamben’s critique, his depiction parallels Coakley’s sociological contextualization of theology.  

In the 20th century there have been a variety of attempts to correct this theological failure precisely where it had the greatest impact. Where the church (at least the church type, with its institutions) failed in Germany with National Socialism, this gave rise to striking theological innovation. Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer turn from the characteristic church type dogmatic speculation to a Christocentric point of departure.

 Bonhoeffer in his lectures on Christology locates the Logos, not in the realm of the transcendent. He claims “this will inevitably constitute that Logos as an object for human logos, locating it within the territory of things about which we can ask ‘how is it possible?’ or ‘how does it work?'” As Bonhoeffer puts it, “the question is no longer ‘how?’ but ‘who?’ Who is it that I confront when I look at Jesus? But also, and equally importantly, ‘Who am I?'”[4]

Bonhoeffer depicts the question of the person of Christ as challenging his self-understanding: “When a human being confronts Jesus, the human being must either die or kill Jesus.”[5] The reality of Jesus creates its own context and terms of engagement. Jesus is not Socrates, reminding us of what we already know, but he creates the conditions for knowing him as these conditions do not otherwise exist. He is what he teaches.

Picturing the Logos as on the order of the Aristotelian difference (the apathetic God) is simply to accommodate divine revelation to the human word. “The divine revealed as overwhelming power or unconstrained agency as we understand those things will not recreate us, re-beget us; it will not require the death of our logos.” This sort of God simply accommodates our instincts about the absolute Other, the humanly conceived difference of divinity. If we do not accept the death of the human logos, we will deploy it in defeat of the divine Logos.[6]

Of course Christ allows for his death. He is not a rival to my will or my word. It is precisely his kenotic humility – “taking the form of a slave” (not just being incarnate) that challenges the foundation (foundationalism) of my selfhood. Though it is not as if there is any actually existing foundation – this is simply the “poisonous fiction” that must die or the pride that must fail.[7]

 One of the sharpest German attempts at a revisionist understanding came from Jurgen Moltmann, who begins his book on the Trinity by recounting how Greek notions of God effectively corrupted the Christian faith. He suggests that where Greek philosophy has been deployed in conceiving of God, “then we have to exclude difference, diversity, movement and suffering from the divine nature.” He names the resultant heresy of nominalism (God cannot be known in his essence) as giving us a God that is so far from us (impassible and immovable in his remoteness), such that apathetic portrayal of God has trumped the importance of the person and work of Christ. He concludes that, “down to the present-day Christian theology has failed to develop a consistent Christian concept of God? And that instead . . . it has rather adopted the metaphysical tradition of Greek philosophy, which it understood as ‘natural theology’ and saw as its own foundation.” By allowing the “apathetic axiom” to prevail over the person and work of Christ, God became “the cold, silent and unloved heavenly power.”[8]

Moltmann poses the following choice: either the apathetic God prevails and the passion of Christ is seen as “the suffering of the good man from Nazareth,” or the passion of Christ prevails and divine apatheia is no longer determinative. Within this second alternative, Moltmann points out that his depiction of suffering entails a two-fold rejection: the Greek depiction of the divine incapacity for suffering, and suffering defined as incapacity or deficiency. “But there is a third form of suffering: active suffering – the voluntary laying oneself open to another and allowing oneself to be intimately affected by him; that is to say, the suffering of passionate love.”

Without passion God would be incapable of love. Moltmann develops the two-fold meaning of passion – inclusive of passionate desire and the suffering passion of Christ. If God were incapable of suffering in every respect, then he would also be incapable of any form of passion or love. As Aristotle puts it, he would at most be capable of loving himself, but not of loving another as himself. But if he is capable of loving something else, then he lays himself open to the suffering which love for another brings; yet, by virtue of his love, he remains master of the pain that love causes him to suffer. “God does not suffer out of deficiency of being, like created beings. To this extent he is ‘apathetic’. But he suffers from the love which is the superabundance and overflowing of his being. In so far he is ‘pathetic’.” [9] God is love and his is not a cold love (as if there is such a thing), but the passionate love revealed in Christ.

Sarah Coakley cites Moltmann as an influence in her turn to desire, sex and gender in conceptualization of the Trinity.[10] However, what Coakley avoids and Moltmann spells out, is the historical and theological challenge to notions of divine apathy entailed in discussions of passion. Moltmann finds in Jewish theology and Origen precedent for his depiction of the suffering of the Father as a necessary part of the love of God.

Origen describes the suffering of God in his exposition of Romans 8:32, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all.”  “In his mercy God suffers with us, for he is not heartless.” In his explanation, Origen equates the love of God with the necessity of suffering:

He (the Redeemer) descended to earth out of sympathy for the human race. He took our sufferings upon Himself before He endured the cross – indeed before He even deigned to take our flesh upon Himself; for if He had not felt these sufferings [beforehand] He would not have come to partake of our human life. First of all He suffered, then He descended and became visible to us. What is this passion which He suffered for us? It is the passion of love {Caritas est passio). And the Father Himself, the God of the universe, ‘slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy’ (Ps. 103.8), does He not also suffer in a certain way? Or know you not that He, when He condescends to men, suffers human suffering? For the Lord thy God has taken thy ways upon Him ‘as a man doth bear his son’ (Deut. 1.31). So God suffers our ways as the Son of God bears our sufferings. Even the Father is not incapable of suffering {Ipse pater non est itnpassibilis). When we call upon him, He is merciful and feels our pain with us. He suffers a suffering of love, becoming something which because of the greatness of his nature He cannot be, and endures human suffering for our sakes.[11]

As Moltmann explains, Origen’s talk of God’s suffering means the suffering of love; the compassion of mercy and pity. The merciful person taking pity on another participates in the suffering of the one he pities, “he takes the other’s sufferings on himself, he suffers for others.” For Origen this is the suffering of God, “the suffering of the Father who in giving up his ‘own Son’ (Rom. 8.32) suffers the pain of redemption.” The Father is not removed from the suffering of the Son, anymore than he can be said to be removed from the passion or desire of God. Origen depicts the divine passion of Christ as inclusive of the divine passion between the Father and the Son in the Trinity. “The suffering of love does not only affect the redeeming acts of God outwards; it also affects the trinitarian fellowship in God himself.”[12]

Origen predates the distinction and Moltmann and Coakley, in varying forms, would equate the economic and immanent Trinity. Moltmann notices in Origen what Coakley notices in Romans 8, that it is precisely in conjunction with suffering that the Trinitarian nature of God is most clearly delineated.  Like Coakley and Paul, Moltmann also locates the apprehension and participation in the suffering of God in prayer.

Moltmann though, references a Jewish mystical tradition in which praying the Shema is the uniting of God: “To acknowledge God’s unity – the Jew calls it uniting God. For this unity is, in that it becomes; it is a Becoming Unity. And this Becoming is laid on the soul of man and in his hands.”

Franz Rosenzweig takes up this notion to describe an Old Testament and Jewish conception of the suffering of God:

Mysticism builds its bridge between ‘the God of our fathers’ and ‘the remnant of Israel’ with the help of the doctrine of the Shekinah. The Shekinah, the descent of God to man and his dwelling among them, is thought of as a divorce which takes place in God himself. God himself cuts himself off from himself, he gives himself away to his people, he suffers with their sufferings, he goes with them into the misery of the foreign land, he wanders with their wanderings . . . God himself, by ‘selling himself to Israel – and what should be more natural for ‘the God of our Fathers’! – and by suffering her fate with her, makes himself in need of redemption. In this way, in this suffering, the relationship between God and the remnant points beyond itself.”[13]

Just as in Romans 8, so too in the Jewish conception, prayer inserts the one praying within the communion of God. The Jewish depiction is an estrangement or suffering into which God enters, and the estrangement is overcome through those reflecting the Shekinah to God through prayer. Moltmann explains, estrangement is also overcome “through the acts of the good, which are directed towards the overcoming of evil and the establishment of the future harmony of the one world. That is the meaning of the Hebrew word tikkun (world repair).”[14]

Theology proper (talk of God) cannot begin in the abstract, which inevitably depends upon the human logos, but in the fact that God has opened himself to human experience and human suffering, becoming human that humans might participate in the divine. But it is the primacy of God’s love and not human suffering that determines the course of God’s suffering love. The passion of Christ as point of departure suspends talk of an economic and immanent Trinity, with the first order (the ontological reality) of God removed from the contingencies of the second order (the economic). The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, though as Coakley notes, this does not mean that God is reduced to what is revealed, as “there must be that which God is which eternally ‘precedes’ God’s manifestation to us.”[15] However, speculation about what “precedes” Christ cannot be given precedent over the revealed truth given in Christ.

[1] Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self (p. 156-157). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, trans. by Leland de la Durantaye (Seagull Books, 2012).

[3] Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) (p. 3). Stanford University Press. Kindle Edition.

[4] The Bonhoeffer Reader, ed. Clifford]. Green and Michael P. Dejonge, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013. Cited in Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation, (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018), 185.

[5] Reader, 268.

[6] Williams, 187-188.

[7] Williams, 190-191.

[8] Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (First Fortress Press edition, 1993) 21-22.

[9] Moltmann, 22-23.

[10] Sarah Coakley, “The Trinity and gender reconsidered,” in God’s Life in Trinity (ed. Miroslav Volf and Michael Welker, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006).

[11] Homilia VI in Ezechielem (MPG XIII, 714 f). Cited in Moltmann, 24.

[12] Moltmann, 24.

[13] F. Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, III, 3rd ed., Heidelberg 1954, pp. 192ff. Cited in Moltmann, 29.

[14] Moltmann, 29.

[15] Coakley