"When archaeologists dig up a place of worship in the desert sand and find in it the sign of the cross, they can be virtually certain that it is a Christian church. Today, too, we find the cross in Christian churches as the central symbol. ... Thus Christianity has rightly been described as 'the religion of the cross.' Goethe describes Christianity as 'the ultimate religion', because it was the ultimate and final thing which mankind could and had to achieve; for not until Christianity was the 'divine depth of suffering' revealed to us. But what does this actually mean? It is often better recognized by non-Christians and atheists than by religious Christians, because it astonishes and offends them. They see the profane horror and godlessness of the cross, because they do not believe the religious interpretations which have given a meaning to the senselessness of this death... From the very first the Christian faith was distinguished from the religions which surrounded it by its worship of the crucified Christ." (32-33)
Continuing our examination of Jurgen Moltmann's work The Crucified God, with selected quotes and occasional interpretive commentary.
"To the humanism of antiquity the crucified Christ and the veneration of him were seen also an embarrassment. Crucifixion, as the punishment of escaped slaves or rebels against the Roman empire, was regarded as 'the most degrading kind of punishment'... In the human search for the good, the true and the beautiful, the crucified Christ was not a valuable aesthetic symbol. He possessed 'no form or comeliness' (Isaiah 53:2). The idea of a 'crucified God' to whom veneration and worship were due was regarded in the ancient world as totally inappropriate to God, just as for Israel the assertion that a condemned blasphemer had risen from the dead was bound to conflict with the righteousness of God revealed in the law. Thus Christian belief in the crucified Christ was bound to produce on Jews and Romans the effect of continued blasphemy... At that time, the cross was not the sign in which one conquered, a sign of triumph on churches, or an adornment on the Imperial Throne, nor was it the sign of orders and honors; it was a sign of contradiction and scandal, which quite often brought expulsion and death." (33-34)
"Modern, post-Christian humanism has done a great service by bringing to the fore once again this original and natural dislike of the cross. In this way it has reminded Christianity, which has made itself so much at home in European civilization, of its original and fundamental alienation... At the end of the last century, the 'roses' of humanity from the Western Christian tradition were no longer visible to Nietzsche on the cross of Christianity. He saw Christianity as standing alone beside the crucified Christ, and therefore decried it in The Antichrist as a 'religion of decadence', as a religious hatred for everything proud, for freedom, for sensual joy, and as the hostility of the weak and lowly against the lords of the earth and the noble." (34-35)
"(Moltmann quoting J.J. Iwand, unpublished) The cross is the utterly incommensurable factor in the revelation of God. We have become far too used to it. We have surrounded the scandal of the cross with roses. We have made a theory of salvation out of it. But that is not the cross. That is not the bleakness inherent in it, placed in it by God... Here God is non-God. Here is the triumph of death, the enemy, the non-church, the lawless state, the blasphemer, the soldiers. Here Satan triumphs over God. Our faith begins at the point where athiests suppose that it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation and doubt about everything that exists! Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of nothingness, it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way that no philosophy of nihilism can imagine." (36)
"For Christian faith this means that it can no longer understand itself only in the context of its place in world history, and of the history and success of Christianity, but must recall the event in which it originated. 'The primary existent for faith, revealed only to faith, and, as revelation, the fist thing to bring faith into being, is, as far as 'Christian" faith is concerned, Christ, the crucified God.' (quoting Heidegger) If any one of the historical forms in which it has expressed itself grows out of date, as its educational process is completed, it is not sufficient simply to distill out the idea inherent in that form of Christianity. Instead, the Christian faith which once 'conquered the world' must also learn to conquer its own forms when they have become worldly. It can do so only when it breaks down the idols of the Christian West, and, in a reforming and revolutionary way, remembers the 'crucified God'... A radical return to the origin of Christian faith in the night of the cross makes this faith homeless not only in an alien, religious world, but also in the syncretistic world of present-day bourgeois Christianity. The task of theology is then no longer that of presenting itself as the self-awareness of Christianity as one of the phenomena of world history, but that of committing itself radically to the event which is the origin of faith in the cross; that is, of becoming a theology of the cross." (36-37)
"In spite of all the 'roses' which the needs of religion and theological interpretation have draped around the cross, the cross is the really irreligious thing in Christian faith. It is the suffering of God in Christ, rejected and killed in the absence of God, which qualifies Christian faith as faith, and as something different from the projection of man's desire. The modern criticism of religion can attack the whole world of religious Christianity, but not this unreligious cross... For he who was crucified represents the fundamental and total crucifixion of all religion: the deification of the human heart, the sacralization of certain localities in nature and certain sacred dates and times, the worship of those who hold political power, and their power politics." (37)
"Faith in the cross distinguishes Christian faith from the world of religions and from secular ideologies and utopias, in so far as they seek to replace these religions or to inherit their legacy and bring them into realization. But faith in the cross also distinguishes Christian faith from its own superstitious manifestations. The recollection of the crucified Christ obliges Christian faith permanently to distinguish itself from its own religious and secular forms. In Western civilization, this means, in concrete terms, distinguishing itself from the 'Christian-bourgeois world' and from Christianity as the 'religion of contemporary society'." (38)
"A Christianity which does not measure itself in theology and practice by this criterion loses its identity and (a) becomes confused with the surrounding world; (b) it becomes the religious fulfillment of the prevailing social interests; (c) or of the interests of those who dominate society. It becomes (d) a chameleon which can no longer be distinguished from the leaves of the tree in which it sits. But a Christianity which applies to its theology and practice the criterion of its own fundamental origin cannot remain what it is at the present moment in the social, political and psychological terms. It experiences an outward crisis of identity, in which its inherited identification with the desires and interests of the world around it is broken down." (38)
"To be radical means to seize a matter at its roots. More radical Christian faith can only mean committing oneself without reserve to the 'crucified God.' This is dangerous. It does not promise the confirmation of one's own conceptions, hopes and good intentions. It promises first of all the pain of repentance and fundamental change. It offers no recipe for success. But it brings a confrontation with the truth. It is not positive and constructive, but is in the first instance critical and destructive. The 'religion of the cross' does not elevate and edify in the usual sense, but scandalizes... But by this scandal, it brings liberation into a world which is not free. For ultimately, in a civilization which is constructed on the principle of achievement and enjoyment, and therefore makes pain and death a private matter, excluded from its public life... there is nothing so unpopular as for the crucified God to be made a present reality through faith... and yet this faith, with its consequences, is capable of setting men free from their cultural illusions, releasing them from the involvements which blind them, and confronting them with the truth of their existence and their society. Before there can be correspondence and agreements between faith and the surrounding world, there must first be the painful demonstration of truth in the midst of untruth. In this pain we experience reality outside ourselves, which we have not made or thought out for ourselves." (39)
"The symbol of the cross in the church points to the God who was crucified not between two candles on an altar, but between two thieves in the place of the skull, where the outcasts belong, outside the gates of the city. It is a symbol which therefore leads out of the church and out of religious longing into the fellowship of the oppressed and abandoned. On the other hand, it is a symbol which calls the oppressed and godless into the church and through the church into the fellowship of the crucified God. Where this contradiction in the cross and its revolution in religious values is forgotten, the cross ceases to be a symbol and becomes an idol, and no longer invites a revolution in thought, but the end of thought in self-affirmation." (40)
"To make the cross a present reality in our civilization means to put into practice the experience one has received of being liberated from fear for oneself; no longer to adapt oneself to this society, its idols and taboos, its imaginary enemies and fetishes; and in the name of him who was once the victim of religion, society and the state to enter into solidarity with the victims of religion, society and the state at the present day, in the same way as he who was crucified became their brother and their liberator." (40)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jurgen Moltmann. The Crucified God. 1974. Harper & Rowe, Publishers. (First Fortress Press edition published in 1993.)