"We must test this argument, according to which the theology of the cross must be the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Trinity must be the theology of the cross, because otherwise the human, crucified God cannot be fully perceived." Moltman, p. 241
Continuing our review of selections from Jurgen Moltmann's 1974 work The Crucified God.
"Before we consider this question further, we must look at the particular context in which trinitarian thought is necessary at all... The place of the doctrine of the Trinity is not 'thinking of thought', but the cross of Jesus... The theological concept for the perception of the crucified Christ is the doctrine of the Trinity. The material principle of the doctrine of the Trinity is the cross of Christ... Where do first beginnings lie? As is well known, the New Testament does not contain any developed doctrine of the Trinity. That only arose in the controversies of the early church over the unity of Christ with God himself." (240)
"In the passion narratives, which present Jesus' death in the light of the life that he lived, the word for deliver up, paradidomai, has a clearly negative connotation. It means: hand over, give up, deliver, betray, cast out, kill. The word 'deliver up' (Romans 1:18 ff) also appears in Pauline theology as an expression of the wrath and judgment of God and thus of the lostness of man. God's wrath over the godlessness of man is manifest in that he 'delivers them up' to their godlessness and inhumanity. According to Israelite understanding, guilt and punishment lie in one and the same event. So too here: men who abandon God are abandoned by God. Godlessness and godforsakenness are two sides of the same event. The heathen turn the glory of the invisible God into a picture like corruptible being - 'and God surrenders them to the lusts of their heart' (Romans 1:24, 26, 28). Judgment lies in the fact that God delivers men up to the corruption which they themselves have chosen and abandons them in their forsakenness. It is not the case that Paul threatens sinners, whether Jews or Gentiles, with a distant judgment; rather, he sees the wrath of God as now being manifest in the inhuman idolatry of the Gentiles and the inhuman righteousness by works of the Jews. Guilt and punishment are not separated temporally and juristically. In the godforsakenness of the godless idolaters Paul now already sees the revelation of the wrath of God, the judgment that is being accomplished. In this situation (Romans 1:18) he proclaims the saving righteousness of God in the crucified Christ." (241-242)
"Paul introduces a radical change in the sense of 'deliver up' when he recognizes and proclaims the godforsakenness of Jesus in the eschatological context of his resurrection rather than in the historical context of his life. In Romans 8:31ff, we read: 'If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him?' According to this God gave up his own Son, abandoned him, cast him out and delivered him up to an accursed death. Paul says in even stronger terms: 'He made him sin for us' (2 Corinthians 5:21) and 'He became a curse for us' (Galatians 3:13). Thus in the total, inextricable abandonment of Jesus by his God and Father, Paul sees the delivering up of the Son by the Father for godless and godforsaken man. Because God 'does not spare' his Son, all the godless are spared. Though they are godless, they are not godforsaken, precisely because God has abandoned his own Son and has delivered him up for them." (242)
"Thus the delivering up of the Son to the godforsakeneness is the ground for the justification of the godless and the acceptance of enmity by God. It may therefore be said that the Father delivers up his Son on the cross in order to be the Father of those who are delivered up. The Son is delivered up to this death in order to become the Lord of both dead and living. And if Paul speaks emphatically of God's 'own Son', the not-sparing and abandoning also involves the Father himself." (243)
"In the forsakenness of the Son the Father also forsakes himself. In the surrender of the Son the Father also surrenders himself, though not in the same way. For Jesus suffers dying in forsakenness, but not death itself; for men can no longer 'suffer' death, because suffering presupposes life. But the Father who abandons him and delivers him up suffers the death of the Son in the infinite grief of love. We cannot therefore say here in patripassian terms that the Father also suffered and died. The suffering and dying of the Son, forsaken by the Father, is a different kind of suffering from the suffering of the Father in the death of the Son. Nor can the death of Jesus be understood in theopaschite terms as the 'death of God'." (243)
"To understand what happened between Jesus and his God and Father on the cross, it is necessary to talk in trinitarian terms. The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son. The grief of the Father here is just as important as the death of the Son. The fatherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father, and if God has constituted himself as the Father of Jesus Christ, then he also suffers the death of his Fatherhood in the death of the Son." (243)
SURRENDER
"In Galatians 2:20, Paul describes Christ ... 'the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me'. According to this it is not just the Father who delivers Jesus up to die godforsaken on the cross, but the Son who gives himself up. This corresponds to the synoptic account of the passion story according to which Jesus consciously and willingly walked the way of the cross and was not overtaken by death as by an evil, unfortunate fate. It is theologically important to note that the formula in Paul occurs with both Father and Son a subject, since it expresses a deep conformity between the will of the Father and the will of the Son in the event of the cross, as the Gethsemane narrative also records. This deep community of will between Jesus and his God and Father is now expressed precisely at the point of their deepest separation, in the godforsaken and accursed death of Jesus on the cross. If both historical godforsakenness and eschatological surrender can be seen in Christ's death on the cross, then this event contains community between Jesus and his Father in separation, and separation in community." (243)
LOVE
"As Romans 8:32 and Galatians 2:20 show, Paul described the godforsakenness of Jesus as a surrender and his surrender as love. Johannine theology sums up this in the sentence: 'God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life' (John 3:16). And 1 John sees the very existence of God himself in this event of love on the cross of Christ: 'God is love' (4:16). In other words, God does not just love as he is angry, chooses or rejects. He is love, that is he exists in love. He constututes his existence in the event of his love. He exists as love in the event of the cross." (244)
"In the cross, Father and son are most deeply separated in forsakenness and at the same time are most inwardly one in their surrender. What proceeds from this event between Father and Son is the Spirit which justifies the godless, fills the forsaken with love and even brings the dead alive, since even the fact that they are dead cannot exclude them from this event of the cross; the death in God also includes them." (244)
LIFE
"Faith understands the historical event between the Father who forsakes and the Son who is forsaken on the cross in eschatological terms as an event between the Father who loves and the Son who is loved in the present spirit of the love that creates life. If the cross of Jesus is understood as a divine event, i.e. as an event between Jesus and his God and Father, it is necessary to speak in trinitarian terms of the Son and the Father and the Spirit. In that case the doctrine of the Trinity is no longer an exorbitant and impractical speculation about God, but is nothing other than a shorter version of the passion narrative of Christ in its significance for the eschatological freedom of faith and the life of oppressed nature... The content of the doctrine of the Trinity is the real cross of Christ himself." (246)
"The form of the crucified Christ is the Trinity. In that case, what is salvation? Only if all disaster, forsakenness by God, absolute death, the infinite curse of damnation and sinking into nothingness is in God himself, is community with this God eternal salvation, infinite joy, indestructible election and divine life... The cross stands between the Father and the Son in all the harshness of its forsakenness. If one describes the life of God within the Trinity as the 'history of God', this history of God contains within itself the whole abyss of godforsakenness, absolute death and the non-God. Because this death took place in the history between Father and Son on the cross on Golgotha, there proceeds from it the spirit of life, love and election to salvation. The concrete 'history of God' in the death of Jesus on the cross of Golgotha therefore contains within itself all the depths and abysses of human history and therefore can be understood as the history of history... There is no suffering which in this history of God is not God's suffering; no death which has not been God's death in the history on Golgotha. Therefore there is no life, no fortune and no joy which have not been integrated by his history into eternal life, the eternal joy of God." (246)
FREEDOM
"'God is love," says 1 John 4:16. Thus in view of all that has been said, the doctrine of the Trinity can be understood as an interpretation of the ground, the event and the experience of that love in which the one who has been condemned to love finds new possibility for life because he has found in it the grace of the impossibility of the death of rejection. It is not the interpretation of love as an ideal, a heavenly power or as a commandment, but of love as an event in a loveless, legalistic world: the event of an unconditioned and boundless love which comes to meet man, which takes hold of those who are unloved and forsaken, unrighteous or outside the law, and gives them a new identity, liberates them from the norms of social identifications and from the guardians of social norms and idolatrous images. What Jesus commanded in the Sermon on the Mount as love of one's enemy has taken place on the cross through Jesus' dying and the grief of the Father in the power of the Spirit, for the godless and the loveless. Just as the unconditional love of Jesus for the rejected made the Pharisees his enemies and brought him to the cross, so unconditional love also means enmity and persecution in a world in which the life of man is made dependent on particular social norms, conditions and achievements." (247-248)
"Further, this love cannot command love and counterlove. As its purpose is freedom, it is directed towards freedom. So it cannot prohibit slavery and enmity, but must suffer this contradiction, and can only take upon itself grief at this contradiction and the grief of protest against it, and manifest this grief in protest. (Note 1) That is what happened on the cross of Christ. God is unconditional love, because he takes on himself grief at the contradiction in men and odes not angrily suppress this contradiction. God allows himself to be forced out." (248)
"If in the freedom given through experience of (the love of God) 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 .. 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...He is in fact taken 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 he lives in this freedom, he lives in God and God in him. If one conceives of the Trinity as an event of love in the suffering and 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." (249)
Notes:
Note 1: Keeping in mind that Moltmann is using the phrase "cannot prohibit" in the sense of the space of freedom that God has given his created people. This would not "prohibit" or preclude the laws and structures of church, community, and government which we create to bring order and security into our social environments - though it is implied that they should be guided by the principles of love and freedom demonstrated by God.
Quotations from:
The Crucified God. Jurgen Moltmann. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
Continuing our review of selections from Jurgen Moltmann's 1974 work The Crucified God.
"Before we consider this question further, we must look at the particular context in which trinitarian thought is necessary at all... The place of the doctrine of the Trinity is not 'thinking of thought', but the cross of Jesus... The theological concept for the perception of the crucified Christ is the doctrine of the Trinity. The material principle of the doctrine of the Trinity is the cross of Christ... Where do first beginnings lie? As is well known, the New Testament does not contain any developed doctrine of the Trinity. That only arose in the controversies of the early church over the unity of Christ with God himself." (240)
"In the passion narratives, which present Jesus' death in the light of the life that he lived, the word for deliver up, paradidomai, has a clearly negative connotation. It means: hand over, give up, deliver, betray, cast out, kill. The word 'deliver up' (Romans 1:18 ff) also appears in Pauline theology as an expression of the wrath and judgment of God and thus of the lostness of man. God's wrath over the godlessness of man is manifest in that he 'delivers them up' to their godlessness and inhumanity. According to Israelite understanding, guilt and punishment lie in one and the same event. So too here: men who abandon God are abandoned by God. Godlessness and godforsakenness are two sides of the same event. The heathen turn the glory of the invisible God into a picture like corruptible being - 'and God surrenders them to the lusts of their heart' (Romans 1:24, 26, 28). Judgment lies in the fact that God delivers men up to the corruption which they themselves have chosen and abandons them in their forsakenness. It is not the case that Paul threatens sinners, whether Jews or Gentiles, with a distant judgment; rather, he sees the wrath of God as now being manifest in the inhuman idolatry of the Gentiles and the inhuman righteousness by works of the Jews. Guilt and punishment are not separated temporally and juristically. In the godforsakenness of the godless idolaters Paul now already sees the revelation of the wrath of God, the judgment that is being accomplished. In this situation (Romans 1:18) he proclaims the saving righteousness of God in the crucified Christ." (241-242)
"Paul introduces a radical change in the sense of 'deliver up' when he recognizes and proclaims the godforsakenness of Jesus in the eschatological context of his resurrection rather than in the historical context of his life. In Romans 8:31ff, we read: 'If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him?' According to this God gave up his own Son, abandoned him, cast him out and delivered him up to an accursed death. Paul says in even stronger terms: 'He made him sin for us' (2 Corinthians 5:21) and 'He became a curse for us' (Galatians 3:13). Thus in the total, inextricable abandonment of Jesus by his God and Father, Paul sees the delivering up of the Son by the Father for godless and godforsaken man. Because God 'does not spare' his Son, all the godless are spared. Though they are godless, they are not godforsaken, precisely because God has abandoned his own Son and has delivered him up for them." (242)
"Thus the delivering up of the Son to the godforsakeneness is the ground for the justification of the godless and the acceptance of enmity by God. It may therefore be said that the Father delivers up his Son on the cross in order to be the Father of those who are delivered up. The Son is delivered up to this death in order to become the Lord of both dead and living. And if Paul speaks emphatically of God's 'own Son', the not-sparing and abandoning also involves the Father himself." (243)
"In the forsakenness of the Son the Father also forsakes himself. In the surrender of the Son the Father also surrenders himself, though not in the same way. For Jesus suffers dying in forsakenness, but not death itself; for men can no longer 'suffer' death, because suffering presupposes life. But the Father who abandons him and delivers him up suffers the death of the Son in the infinite grief of love. We cannot therefore say here in patripassian terms that the Father also suffered and died. The suffering and dying of the Son, forsaken by the Father, is a different kind of suffering from the suffering of the Father in the death of the Son. Nor can the death of Jesus be understood in theopaschite terms as the 'death of God'." (243)
"To understand what happened between Jesus and his God and Father on the cross, it is necessary to talk in trinitarian terms. The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son. The grief of the Father here is just as important as the death of the Son. The fatherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father, and if God has constituted himself as the Father of Jesus Christ, then he also suffers the death of his Fatherhood in the death of the Son." (243)
SURRENDER
"In Galatians 2:20, Paul describes Christ ... 'the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me'. According to this it is not just the Father who delivers Jesus up to die godforsaken on the cross, but the Son who gives himself up. This corresponds to the synoptic account of the passion story according to which Jesus consciously and willingly walked the way of the cross and was not overtaken by death as by an evil, unfortunate fate. It is theologically important to note that the formula in Paul occurs with both Father and Son a subject, since it expresses a deep conformity between the will of the Father and the will of the Son in the event of the cross, as the Gethsemane narrative also records. This deep community of will between Jesus and his God and Father is now expressed precisely at the point of their deepest separation, in the godforsaken and accursed death of Jesus on the cross. If both historical godforsakenness and eschatological surrender can be seen in Christ's death on the cross, then this event contains community between Jesus and his Father in separation, and separation in community." (243)
LOVE
"As Romans 8:32 and Galatians 2:20 show, Paul described the godforsakenness of Jesus as a surrender and his surrender as love. Johannine theology sums up this in the sentence: 'God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life' (John 3:16). And 1 John sees the very existence of God himself in this event of love on the cross of Christ: 'God is love' (4:16). In other words, God does not just love as he is angry, chooses or rejects. He is love, that is he exists in love. He constututes his existence in the event of his love. He exists as love in the event of the cross." (244)
"In the cross, Father and son are most deeply separated in forsakenness and at the same time are most inwardly one in their surrender. What proceeds from this event between Father and Son is the Spirit which justifies the godless, fills the forsaken with love and even brings the dead alive, since even the fact that they are dead cannot exclude them from this event of the cross; the death in God also includes them." (244)
LIFE
"Faith understands the historical event between the Father who forsakes and the Son who is forsaken on the cross in eschatological terms as an event between the Father who loves and the Son who is loved in the present spirit of the love that creates life. If the cross of Jesus is understood as a divine event, i.e. as an event between Jesus and his God and Father, it is necessary to speak in trinitarian terms of the Son and the Father and the Spirit. In that case the doctrine of the Trinity is no longer an exorbitant and impractical speculation about God, but is nothing other than a shorter version of the passion narrative of Christ in its significance for the eschatological freedom of faith and the life of oppressed nature... The content of the doctrine of the Trinity is the real cross of Christ himself." (246)
"The form of the crucified Christ is the Trinity. In that case, what is salvation? Only if all disaster, forsakenness by God, absolute death, the infinite curse of damnation and sinking into nothingness is in God himself, is community with this God eternal salvation, infinite joy, indestructible election and divine life... The cross stands between the Father and the Son in all the harshness of its forsakenness. If one describes the life of God within the Trinity as the 'history of God', this history of God contains within itself the whole abyss of godforsakenness, absolute death and the non-God. Because this death took place in the history between Father and Son on the cross on Golgotha, there proceeds from it the spirit of life, love and election to salvation. The concrete 'history of God' in the death of Jesus on the cross of Golgotha therefore contains within itself all the depths and abysses of human history and therefore can be understood as the history of history... There is no suffering which in this history of God is not God's suffering; no death which has not been God's death in the history on Golgotha. Therefore there is no life, no fortune and no joy which have not been integrated by his history into eternal life, the eternal joy of God." (246)
FREEDOM
"'God is love," says 1 John 4:16. Thus in view of all that has been said, the doctrine of the Trinity can be understood as an interpretation of the ground, the event and the experience of that love in which the one who has been condemned to love finds new possibility for life because he has found in it the grace of the impossibility of the death of rejection. It is not the interpretation of love as an ideal, a heavenly power or as a commandment, but of love as an event in a loveless, legalistic world: the event of an unconditioned and boundless love which comes to meet man, which takes hold of those who are unloved and forsaken, unrighteous or outside the law, and gives them a new identity, liberates them from the norms of social identifications and from the guardians of social norms and idolatrous images. What Jesus commanded in the Sermon on the Mount as love of one's enemy has taken place on the cross through Jesus' dying and the grief of the Father in the power of the Spirit, for the godless and the loveless. Just as the unconditional love of Jesus for the rejected made the Pharisees his enemies and brought him to the cross, so unconditional love also means enmity and persecution in a world in which the life of man is made dependent on particular social norms, conditions and achievements." (247-248)
"Further, this love cannot command love and counterlove. As its purpose is freedom, it is directed towards freedom. So it cannot prohibit slavery and enmity, but must suffer this contradiction, and can only take upon itself grief at this contradiction and the grief of protest against it, and manifest this grief in protest. (Note 1) That is what happened on the cross of Christ. God is unconditional love, because he takes on himself grief at the contradiction in men and odes not angrily suppress this contradiction. God allows himself to be forced out." (248)
"If in the freedom given through experience of (the love of God) 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 .. 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...He is in fact taken 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 he lives in this freedom, he lives in God and God in him. If one conceives of the Trinity as an event of love in the suffering and 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." (249)
Notes:
Note 1: Keeping in mind that Moltmann is using the phrase "cannot prohibit" in the sense of the space of freedom that God has given his created people. This would not "prohibit" or preclude the laws and structures of church, community, and government which we create to bring order and security into our social environments - though it is implied that they should be guided by the principles of love and freedom demonstrated by God.
Quotations from:
The Crucified God. Jurgen Moltmann. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.