Jurgen Moltmann focuses on a basic theme from his own Lutheran tradition, namely, the theology of the cross, and elucidates its many aspects in typical German style and thoroughness. Like Luther, he recognizes that our natural inclinations would be to find God in a palace as a royal king in all power and splendor instead of as a baby in a cow stall or a convict hanging on a cross. However, the paradox of the Christian faith is that the deity of God is revealed in the cross, in suffering and shame. Though many accuse Moltmann of faddism in extracting liberation theology from the motif of the cross, I feel this book represents a masterpiece in analyzing a theme in its historical and theological context at the same time its radical contemporary applications are set forth.
Moltmann believes one can marshall a great deal of support for the theology of the cross, but it never has been much loved or readily accepted in its biblical form. As one known as the foremost theologian of hope, the author maintains that Christian hope cannot be realistic and liberating unless it apprehends the pain of the negative. The ordinary social values have to be rejected. The glory of God does not shine on the crowns of the mighty but on the face of the crucified Christ. Consequently, Christians must adopt a critical attitude towards all political religions. The idols erected to state and society must be demythologized. Only someone who finds the courage to be different from others can ultimately really exist for others. The way of the cross is still foolishness and scandalous in our type of world. Nevertheless, God’s nature was revealed there in the death on the cross.
In tracing varying historical interpretations Moltmann refers to the humanism beginning with Rome which regards the cross to be unaesthetic, unrespectable, and perverse. In the same tradition Nietzsche decried the pitiful child and slave morality of the way of the cross. In a more major way Moltmann dialogues with central traditional interpretations. He labels the sacrifice of the mass as the cult of the cross, in which His sacrifice is repeated as a substitute for us instead of the Word of the cross becoming alive in us through following the Way. The mysticism of the cross is applied to the historical stream in which mystical suffering and resignation is seen as the way to God. The crucified God is seen as the God of the abandoned, the suffering, the poor. The truth of this view is that the suffering of abandonment is only overcome by the suffering of love. The danger is that this attitude can be an opiate in which the mysticism of suffering is perverted into a justification of suffering. Christ’s suffering came not from fate but because of his protest. At the same time Moltmann echoes a Lutheran critique of too close of an identification of patterns of celibacy and poverty with the way of the cross, he criticizes Luther for too much delimiting the cross to an epistemological defense for the freedom of God. Since epistemology refers to the problems of knowledge, Moltmann agrees with Luther’s stress that God is free to reveal himself even as an affront to our reason in the most unexpected way. But Moltmann departs from Luther in adding more of Abelard’s view of the atonement, namely, the implications for us of the way of the cross as a supreme example of God’s suffering love.
Moltmann is very much aware that a theology of the cross never stands by itself. The cross must be related to other fundamental doctrines. The way Jesus died is intimately related to the way he lived and to his proclamation of the kingdom. Therefore, the memory of the crucified anticipator of the kingdom makes impossible any complete individualization of salvation. The political hopes of Jesus Christ were similar to John the Baptist and the Zealots. The main difference was that he who was powerless should anticipate the power of God as grace. It was the resurrection which resolved the paradox of the powerless being truly powerful by its affirmation that this is the way which will be ultimately victorious. The new element in the Easter message was not that someone was raised from the dead but that the One who was raised was the condemned, executed and forsaken man. We have to have the cross for the resurrection to really be hope for the hopeless and we have to have the resurrection to point to the way of suffering as a prelude to a new creation in the midst of the history of the world’s suffering.
Over against the Greek understanding of God as unchangeable and insensitive, Moltmann develops a theology of the cross consistent with the unique Hebraic theme of the pathos of God. God is affected by human suffering. He initiates a covenant relationship in order to bring justice to widows and orphans. Protest atheism as named by Moltmann sets God and suffering against one another and thereby loses faith when experiencing suffering and evil. Faith which springs from the event on the cross, however, does not give an easy theistic answer to the problem of suffering, but leads despairing love back to its origin in the heart of God. Anyone who enters into suffering enters into the history of God. In this way ethical questions such as nonviolence are not questions of strategy as much as the righteousness of God. Nonviolence comes from a revolutionary concept of God, in which God comes to justify sinners by grace. Since God is merciful, he denies the right of human beings to execute vengeance.
Instead of defining the Trinity as the closed circle of God, Moltmann places the Trinity in the eschatological frame work of faith. We participate in the trinitarian process of God’s history. We participate in God’s joy, His suffering, and His future. In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus we know an event which is the incarnation of the promise of the transcendence, the manifestation of the immanence of the Son of God, and the anticipator of the future as the Spirit.
The book closes with chapters in which the liberation of faith is compared with psychological and political liberation. For the first of these the dialogue is primarily with Freud. Since for Freud, God is little more than an exalted father, all religions represent a desire to work through the Oedipus complex, producing the desire to kill the symbolic Father. The death of Christ, then, becomes the way to relieve the guilt which comes from this. The theology of the cross does not fit Freud’s scheme. The caring, loving, suffering God is neither despotic or a paternal tyrant. Christianity is not a father religion but a brotherly (and sisterly) community.
In the last chapter Moltmann returns to earlier accents which point to the freedom of faith as the basis of participation in the freedom movements of God’s history. Since He who was crucified is exalted as the Christ of God, the kingdom of God is no longer reflected in political rule and world kingdoms but in the service of Christ. But this does not mean that the Christian is apolitical. The faith has always had to struggle with Christian state religions and popular religion. To easily identify with popular political religions which identify Christianity with the cause of the powerful and the state is to suppress the recollection of the political trial of Christ. The early church rejected the cult of the emperor and replaced it with prayer for the emperor, which represented a limitation of his power at the same time it indicated a political concern. The crucified God is the God of the poor, oppressed, and humiliated.
Moltmann’s treatment of The Crucified God is one of the penetrating, in-depth theological treatises of the last several years. It is heavy but worth the time and effort. Some who are picked up by these themes will want to digest the entire book thoroughly, in some cases even more than once.
When this article appeared, Dale Brown was professor of Christian theology at Bethany Theological Seminary, a former moderator of the Church of the Brethren, and a contributing editor to the Post-American.
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