Only the crucified God can redeem our suffering
by Mark Burton
After surviving a bomb blast, and despair as a POW, Jürgen Moltmann confronted the great theological problem of the existence of suffering. Mark Burton, who himself has witnessed terrible suffering when he was a nurse and a naval chaplain, here profiles one of the 20th Century’s greatest theologians, in the first in our new series, ‘Heroes of the Faith’.
On his own telling of it, the question that has haunted Professor Jürgen Moltmann through most of his adult life is, ‘Why am I not dead too?’ The carrier of the question was a high explosive device delivered by a Royal Air Force bomber and dropped on the eastern part of Hamburg in July, 1943.
Moltmann (then 17 years old, and pressed into service in an anti-aircraft battery) ‘barely survived the firestorm’ that was Operation Gomorrah. His friend, standing at his side, was obliterated – ‘torn to pieces’ – by the bomb, yet the young Moltmann survived unscathed. It was the first of many occasions on which Moltmann asked the question, ‘My God, where are you?’ The following year Moltmann was drafted into the Wehrmacht, and was taken prisoner in Belgium in 1945; he languished in prisoner-of-war camps in Belgium, Scotland, and northern England until 1948, and more than once considered suicide as an attractive alternative to the endless despair in which he found himself. Encounters with army chaplains, and his reading of the New Testament and Psalms, gave him a new perspective, and led him to faith in Christ.
My choice of Jürgen Moltmann, Emeritus Professor of Systematic Theology in the University of Tübingen, Germany, as a ‘hero’ of the Christian faith would (and I am guessing, of course) make him wince: after all, his military ‘career’ was, like so many others on both sides of the fight, distinguished only by fear and survival (and a measure of survivor guilt). I am confident even from this distance that Moltmann would not consider himself ein Held, a hero, for any number of reasons – not least of which was the dragooning of Old Norse figures and the heroic concept (der Heldenmut) into the service of National Socialism throughout the dark years of the Reich.
Yet derring-do aside, I am convinced that Moltmann rescued me from two great evils: the first, idolatry; and the second, despair. Allow me to sketch out my reasons.
At the end of my first year of theological study – during which, with little modesty at all! – I had more or less distinguished myself academically, and managed to construct a very satisfying theological/philosophical response to the so-called ‘problem of evil’. Specifically, I had responded to the great pillars of twentieth century slaughter, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and emerged with a Teflon-coated image of God, a god with whom Aristotle and friends would have been comfortable. This god (not worthy of a big-G) was (more or less) unaffected by the gratuitous and indiscriminate murder that was the Shoah (the Holocaust), and the atomising of Hiroshima: thanks to my exertions, this godlet escaped the Age of the Technological Barbarian (Rubenstein) without taint. I had constructed a worthy theodicy, a means by which the goodness and power of God are (rationally) preserved in the face of innocent suffering. (A sobering theological maxim, arising from responses to the Shoah, I learned years later from Rabbi Richard Rubenstein: ‘No statement, theological or otherwise, must be made that cannot be made in the presence of the burning children.’) The god of my theodicy (and so often our theodicies betray our understanding of the divine, and over time require that the deity conform and play by the rules) could not feel too much, either; this, I discovered, was a characteristic of the god of classic theism, whose very perfection made him impassible, incapable of suffering. This, I suggest, is the essence of idolatry, the not-so-subtle casting of God in our own, convenient, and agreeable image, a responsive complier with our systems.
Then I stumbled over Jürgen Moltmann’s book, The Crucified God (1972), and was left with nothing much at all except a profound realisation of what God-on-the-cross means for everything and for all. The god I was unwittingly crafting by conceit was, it seems, the god of that which Moltmann styles ‘philosophical and political monotheism’ [CG, 216], a crushing structure from which we must be liberated.
In this re-capturing of a sometimes-lost, sometimes-neglected truth of the suffering God (it is present, after all, in the New Testament, and in different forms, in the Old), Moltmann confronted me with the challenge that somehow the cross is at the very heart of the Trinity; that the cross is a Trinitarian event, and the foundation of all Christian theology. ‘In the face of Jesus’ death-cry to God [“My God, my God – why have you forsaken me?” Mark 15:34], theology either becomes impossible or becomes possible only as specifically Christian theology.’ [CG, 153]
Further, ‘Between “God in Christ” and the gods outside and in other representations there stands the cross of that God, and with it the alternative “aut Christus – aut Caesar”, just as Elijah once posed the alternatives, “either Yahweh or the Baals”…The cross of Jesus marks a divide between the human God who is freedom and love and the “counter-God” who keeps men [sic] under his sway and dominated by fear, like demons, and sucks them up into nothingness.’ [CG, 196] The effects in the here-and-now are breath-taking; Moltmann again: ‘Anyone who suffers without cause first thinks that he [sic] has been forsaken by God. God seems to him to be the mysterious, incomprehensible God who destroys the good fortune that he gave. But anyone who cries out to God in this suffering echoes the death-cry of the dying Christ, the Son of God.’ [CG, 252] Here there is a catching up of the whole human condition in Christ, the taking-up of suffering and death at the cross; not the death of God, but death in God, where it is overwhelmed at the resurrection of Jesus by the life of God.
By embracing everything that is negative in love, and in the cross, God thereby reaches sinners and all who suffer. With regard to our understanding God (such as we are able), the effects are revolutionary when read back ‘into God’: ‘The cross stands at the heart of the Trinitarian being of God; it divides and conjoins the persons in their relationships to each other… Anyone who really talks of the Trinity talks of the cross of Jesus, and does not speculate in heavenly riddles.’ [CG, 207; emphasis mine] And more boldly still, ‘When the crucified Jesus is called the “image of the invisible God”, the meaning is that this is God, and God is like this. God is not greater than he is in this humiliation. God is not more glorious than he is in this self-surrender. God is not more powerful than he is in this helplessness. God is not more divine than he is in this humanity.’ [CG, 205]
But the cross is no easy thing for God, or for us; it is both costly and demanding. In the ‘Explanation of the Theme’ (effectively the Foreword to The Crucified God), Moltmann wrote, ‘The cross is not and cannot be loved. Yet only the crucified Christ can bring the freedom which changes the world because it is no longer afraid of death.’ It is as Martin Luther described it: crux probat omnia, the cross tests all things, most especially, perhaps, our essential understanding of God. Appropriately, these first words of The Crucified God were written on Good Friday, 1972.
So, to attach a crude (yet contemporary) question to Moltmann’s approach: does it work? Because I can answer only for my self in any meaningful way, I give a resounding Yes! When I stood in an operating theatre (in a so-called ‘former life’), debriding the wounds of a hideously burned child, the crucified God was all that held me together in one of those almost epiphanic moments; when I stood waist-deep in the mud and filth of Banda Aceh after the tsunami, shovelling through human and animal remains, and was asked the ‘where is your God now?’ question by a sailor, the crucified God was all I could offer before I was reduced to silence.
Likewise when one of our ship’s helicopters crashed while attempting to aid others, and nine of our own were killed, this death-in-God beacon was a light in a very dark place.
I emphasise that Moltmann’s re-discovery of the crucified God carried me across the abyss; its truth and power must come to an individual from outside, so just how it ‘helped’ the desperately burned child, or any other sufferer, is beyond my gaze for now, though I am quietly convinced that God was present, even in these ‘small’ disasters, and that death will not have the last word.
Hence, the second point of rescue: from despair.
By its very nature, life is possessed of a power to overwhelm us by dint of its fragility and contingency: the inescapable fact of my coming death, and of the ‘bondage to decay’ experienced by all things (see Romans 8, for example), are reasons enough to slide quietly into despair. Add to these the daily reporting of the sufferings of the innocent (the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti this last week – on which we seem to have gone strangely theologically silent), which likewise threatens to overwhelm all our defences and plausibility structures; and it is not hard to see why we so often lack a collective confidence when faced with questions from those outside the Church. In the face of such brutal realities, Moltmann does not shy away from speaking out loud those things that others think in the dark and private places of the mind: ‘Thus, as the world has really been made, belief in the devil is much more plausible than belief in God’, to the extent that the world may be experienced by some as a univers concentrationairre, rather than the ‘good earth under the gracious heaven of a righteous God.’ [CG, 220]
But Jürgen Moltmann has written extensively on the theme of hope: there is his justifiably well-known Theology of Hope (1964); The Trinity and the Kingdom of God (1980); Theology of Hope: On the Ground and Implications of a Christian Eschatology (1993); The Coming God (1995); and In the End – the Beginning: the Life of Hope (2004). His favourite verse of scripture betrays the shape of his hope – 1 Corinthians 15:28 – ‘…so that God may be all in all.’
He is, in my view, a flesh and blood example of those whom the prophet Zechariah styled, ‘prisoners of hope’ (9:12), and he cannot, it seems, but speak of hope. Why? The crucified God is also the resurrected God, who is the coming God, the God who comes to us. For Jürgen Moltmann, the resurrection is no ‘mere metaphor’, but a new reality, the shape of the future for all creation. And because Jesus, the crucified God, is ‘of us’, our future is thus embedded in Jesus’ future: in receiving the resurrected Jesus ‘into his future’, God receives us: ‘Because in cross and resurrection Christ’s identity is preserved… No other Christ takes the place of Jesus. The one exalted is the same as the one humiliated, the one raised the same as the one crucified.’ The Holy Spirit is (as Augustine said) the vinculum amoris, the unbreakable bond of love [God will be all in all; 82]. If despair is marked by inaction and inertia – or worse, by destructive behaviour directed towards the self and others – then hope in the crucified and risen God is marked by a shaking-off and a dusting-down, and a return to life for which, perhaps, Jesus’ empty grave clothes are a useful sign.
In Moltmann’s terms, being a prisoner of hope has consequences – not least of which is our becoming restless (akin to John Donne’s ‘godly discontent’) – and it may very likely have political consequences: ‘Hope does not only give the power to break out of oppression like Israel entering the promised land… Hope also alienates people from their native land, their friendships and their homes, and makes them ready to let these go and to seek something new. By this I mean that hope for an alternative future brings us into contradiction with the existing present and puts us against the people who cling to it. [Hope keeps us] restless and open to God’s great day.’ [J. Moltmann, A Broad Place: An Autobiography, 103-4; emphasis mine] This hope in the coming, Triune God is both in and for this world, and not a fleeing from it: ‘the world will find space in God in a worldly way when God indwells the world in a divine way.’ [God will be all in all: the eschatology of Jürgen Moltmann ed. R. Bauckham; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999; 41]
‘Why am I not dead too?’ has been the question that has stalked and haunted Jürgen Moltmann for most of his life. For my part, I am quietly grateful that it has, for it seems to have driven him into the arms of the crucified God, to have handed him over as a prisoner of hope, and to have pressed the questions of our time that may otherwise have gone begging.
The Right Revd Dr Mark Burton is the Dean of Melbourne.
Note: A very useful summary of Professor Jürgen Moltmann’s theology may be found in Richard Bauckham’s, Moltmann: messianic theology in the making (Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering, 1987). Moltmann’s A Broad Place: An Autobiography (trans. M. Kohl; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008) gives further insight into his thinking and the forces that have shaped his theology.