Fall 2017 Semester Highlight: Jürgen Moltman's The Crucified God
DTS offers students from Bible colleges the opportunity to
test into an advanced standing program. Instead of merely skipping classes, I
take accelerated courses that are 3 credits each but cover 6-9 program credits.
The net result for me is that my program’s total length is 27 credits
shorter—nearly a full year. So instead of taking 120 credits, I’ll take 93—18
of which are “advanced standing” courses.
This semester’s advanced standing class was the first of two
covering systematic theology. The assumption is that we have already had
significant education in this area, so it is a chance to dive into a specific
area much deeper. We were to choose a book on a topic of interest to us and
read it deeply and thoroughly and present an extensive outline and
presentation.
My list of books and authors to read is long. The difficulty
was narrowing my choices. Because I want to go onto to get a PhD, I have
several incredibly influential thinkers who I am itching to read (indeed, whom
I must read to become conversant with
theology at the doctoral level). I have thoroughly read, cited, written on, and
used the major Evangelical systematic theologians. So, naturally I already feel
comfortable with these.
This means for such an open-ended class I was not going to
read Grudem, Erickson, Chafer, etc. No, I have my eye on those who have shaped
the field, and yet those with whom conservatives are timid about interacting:
Barth, Hauerwas, and my choice for this semester: Jürgen Moltmann. My goal is
to read, understand, and interact with these theologians by reading whatever is
quintessential for that particular person. Moltmann’s The Crucified God was the natural choice due to the range of
systematic categories allowed this semester (soteriology, Christology,
Trinitarianism) and the ability to present on a single topic from a single
book. Barth’s quintessential work is his Church
Dogmatics, a huge set of volumes with too many topics per volume to be
realistically analyzed and presented on in a single semester. Hauerwas’ most
significant work is in ethics and ecclesiology, which both fit better with next
semester’s allowed topics.
So yes, I willingly chose to read Moltmann. The result is a 10-page
single-spaced full sentence outline. I’ll summarize my favorite parts.
Jürgen Moltmann and The Crucified God
One thing that makes Moltmann so interesting to me is the period
during which he did his most important theological reflection. He grew up as a
German in WWII. His school boy class was conscripted to help with the war in
Hamburg. He lived through the famous British attack on Hamburg, Project
Gomorrah. Here as a boy he had to go through broken buildings and crawl over
charred corpses. As a young man he was drafted as a German soldier and ended up
stumbling into a British camp and surrendering. He was a POW in Scotland for
three years, and it was during this time that he was shown pictures of German
concentration camps, “through the eyes of the Nazi victims…For me, every
patriotic feeling for Germany—‘holy fatherland’—collapsed and died…Depression
over the wartime destruction and captivity with no end in sight was compounded
by a feeling of profound shame at the having to share in shouldering the
disgrace of one’s own people…the weight of it has never left me.”[1]
Consider the trauma both of having survived and witnessed
profound destruction as a school boy and of realizing that one’s own people had
acted so thoroughly evil. This pain along with living years as a POW led
Moltmann not to despair, but to hope.
His first book was Theology of Hope
and put eschatology squarely in the realm not of apocalyptic dread, but of hope.[2]
A future where God would ensure no more pain, a place where tears are wiped
away. And central to this is the resurrection because it is the proof of the
hope.
This is why he is so interesting to me: Moltmann does his
theology in a context where love of country has died. In his ethics, the way of
Jesus is the answer, not the way of any political party—refreshing! In the U.S.
we argue over the existence of such a thing as American exceptionalism, and
where we land can color our theology—Moltmann is clean of this.
Fast forward a few years and we come to his second book, The Crucified God. This is the other
side of the same coin. His first book was eschatological (where Christ’s
resurrection is the first fruit), his second is about the whole cross event.
This book asks questions about the crucifixion of Jesus that our standard
conservative texts don’t ask, and it makes many controversial assertions, yet
they are still helpful.
Did God Suffer at the Cross?
One consistent theme in this book is that God suffered in the
cross event. In the not-too-distant past most theologians would have denied
this and said that Jesus suffered and died in his humanity, but not in his
deity—thus making a distinction and separation of his person that Moltmann,
rightly in my opinion, says there is no biblical basis for doing. Why does God
suffering and dying make us so uncomfortable?
Because of the doctrine of the impassibility of God—which
means that God does not have emotion, which means he does not suffer or feel
anguish or regret. My sense is that now, even most conservatives reject
impassibility (as defined above) and those who don’t will define it in a way
that is not entirely consistent with the historical meaning. This is because
the historical meaning can be traced back to Greek philosophy where the Unmoved
Mover is a being of pure rationality, pure logic—any emotion would make this
ultimate being less. (As a side note, this is why early church fathers did not
believe women were made in the image of God, because women were considered too
emotional to bear the imago dei. Maybe
we have, historically speaking, been wrong at least twice).
Did God Die at the Cross?
The crucifixion forces a divine paradox (and not the only
paradox of our faith). One way to explain the tension has been to place the
paradox in the person of Christ (appealing
to Christ’s dual natures) by saying that he can simultaneously die (in the
flesh) and not die (in his divinity). Moltmann kicks the paradox up a level,
from the person of Christ, to the members of the Trinity by saying that Jesus
in his whole person died which means that God died—one member of the
Trinity—and God did not die—the other members did not die. The question is,
does the Bible ever present Jesus’ as anything other than a whole person? Can
one justify the claim that one nature can experience what another cannot?
Now, for anyone aware of so-called “death of God” theology,
Moltmann explicitly separates himself from this by saying (even after
emphasizing that God was crucified) that simply saying, “God died” is too
simplistic and not Trinitarian enough. God did not die, Jesus who is God, died, but the Father and
Spirit who are God did not die. Essentially, you have to pick your paradox and
Moltmann simply sends it up to where we are already comfortable with paradox:
the Trinity.
Human Suffering and God’s Response
This brings us back a key theme of the book, namely,
suffering. And truly, I believe this is beautiful. Think of Moltmann’s
experience as a youth, what area of theology stares him dead in the face?
Theodicy, or, the problem of evil. Nazi German demands a response to the
problem of evil. Here Moltmann interacts with “protest atheism,” which says, “The
only excuse for God would be for him not to exist.”[3]
Moltmann offers no overly involved philosophical reason why God can exist in
the face of evil, or theological reasons saying why it is actually good and
part of God’s plan, because neither of these addresses the true issue that
‘protest atheism’ has. Instead, Moltmann points to suffering and says, look at
all the gods of the world (money, power, Allah, et al), which God do you want?
Who can one draw on in times of intense despair? How about the God who suffered
more than we can imagine? How about the one who, because He loves us so dearly,
subjected Himself to even greater anguish than we can imagine? Moltmann chooses
the suffering God—the one who is present with those who suffer.
Why have you forsaken me?
We worship a God who knows suffering because he experienced
human suffering—and more than this, our God experienced abandonment by God—another
significant theme in the book. Jesus was abandoned by the Father (another
controversial point but based on his cry, “My God my God, why have you forsaken
me?”). Jesus’ suffering can be shown to be more intense that others’ suffering
because of his death rattle, whereas many martyrs afterward would die “noble
deaths” with calm acceptance. What made Jesus’ death different? Many
conservatives say it was different because Jesus suffered the wrath of
God—Moltmann, even though he is technically a liberal theologian, agrees![4]
More than mere physical and mental anguish, Jesus suffered profound spiritual
pain. And it pained the Father to do so, therefore, it was a reciprocal (not patripassianism) suffering. The son
suffered the loss of his father, the Father suffered the loss of his son.
I must stop myself here. To conclude, I disagree with
Moltmann frequently, but I believe he is very helpful, especially today. I
think his response to evil is refreshing—not excusing God, not explaining it
away, but instead pointing out how in a world filled with suffering, we can
have a God who has suffered himself and is present in our sufferings.
[1] Moltmann, A
Broad Place, 29.
[2] This hopeful view of the future is not at all
incompatible with dispensationalism. After all, dispensationalists take
Revelation 21:3b-4 as an accurate description of the age to come, “Look! The
residence of God is among human beings. He will live among them, and they will
be his people, and God himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear
from their eyes, and death will not exist any more—or mourning, or crying, or
pain, for the former things have ceased to exist” (NET).
[4] Though, this is because he takes the wrath of God to
be his pulling back and allowing sin to take its course (Rom. 1).