The Crucified God

In preparation for Holy Week, I am giving a presentation tomorrow at First Presbyterian Church in Bellingham, Washington on Jürgen Moltmann’s classic: The Crucified God. For a few years now, re-reading this book has been a Lenten practice of mine. In it Moltmann conceives of a revolution in our thinking about God. In this revolution the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the central and guiding act in the person of God.

Instead of beginning with a god of metaphysics or even a disconnected Jesusology, Christian theology is confronted with Jesus’ derelict cry of godforsakeness: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The cross of the risen Christ becomes the starting point of Christian thought and practice in that in God’s on being God suffers death. The Son suffers in the godforsakeness of death as our representative and the Father suffers the infinite grief of the loss and surrender of the Son. And in the words of Bonhoeffer, “only the suffering God can help” us in our violence, grief, and godless living. But death is not the final word, in the resurrection of the crucified Christ we experience forgiveness, liberation, life, and hope.

In regards to this revolution in our thinking about God, he believes we must be thoroughly Trinitarian. He concludes (note: the paragraph breaks are my own. I added them to aid in readability):

If in the freedom given through the experience of it the believer understands the crucifixion as an event of the love of the Son and the grief of the Father, that is, as an event between God and God, as an event within the Trinity, he perceives the liberating word of love which creates new life. 

By the death of the Son he is taken up into the grief of the Father and experiences a liberation which is a new element in this de-divinized and legalistic world, which is itself even a new element over against the original creation of the word. He is in fact take up into the inner life of God, if in the cross of Christ he experiences the love of God for the godless, the enemies, in so far as the history of Christ is the inner life of God himself. 

In that case, if he lives in this love, he lives in God and God in him. If one conceives the Trinity as an event of love in the suffering and the death of Jesus—and that is something which faith must do—then the Trinity is no self-contained group in heaven, but an eschatological process open for men on earth, which stems from the cross of Christ. By the secular cross on Golgotha, understood as open vulnerability and as the love of God for loveless and unloved, dehumanized men, God’s being and God’s life is open to true man. There is no ‘outside the gate’ with God (W. Borchert), if God himself is the one who died outside the gate on Golgotha for those who are outside.