The crucified god

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The book The Crucified God by Jürgen Moltmann , published in 1972, no longer deals with the old theological question of what the death of Christ means for humanity , but rather with what it means for God. To put it less theologically, it is about a theology after Auschwitz .

The book is a complementary addition to Moltmann's main work Theology of Hope , published eight years earlier . If the starting point there was the Resurrection (Easter), here it is Good Friday and the Cross. Both are dialectically connected, because the resurrection stands for God's promise, the cross for God's love.

The work has been translated into several languages, including a. into Dutch, English, French, Spanish and Croatian. Seven editions of the German edition were published by 2002.

Main thought

The basic experience that led Moltmann to deepened faith was that of being abandoned by God. He had made it in the firestorm in Hamburg and relived it when he felt responsible for what happened in Auschwitz. The only consolation in this situation was that Christ had had the same experience of being forsaken by God.

From the fact that Jesus was forsaken by God, he comes to the following main statements about God:

God is capable of suffering, because otherwise the story of Christ's passion would not be a revelation from God. God loves his people and justice. Therefore he suffers with all those who suffer, because he shares in their fate. But he suffers differently than she does. He does not suffer dying, he suffers from the death of his son. Only when God suffers can the resurrection gain salvific significance for the world.

criticism

This view of God has been criticized from various positions:

God must not suffer

Karl Rahner emphasizes: We are cemented in suffering. God is above it.

Johann Baptist Metz argues: God must not suffer so that the theodicy question remains open. We must be able to ask: Why is there so much suffering in the world?

Hans Küng emphasizes: God is beyond understanding. In the face of suffering, people are left with only silence.

God cannot be sadistic

Dorothee Sölle sees in the God, who does not understand Jesus' death from the beginning as a redemption event, a sadistic God because he kills his own son. Later, however, she takes a similar position to Moltmann in connection with the interpretation of Auschwitz.

Similar positions

Hans Urs von Balthasar's theology is seen by some as the Catholic counterpart to Moltmann's position, and the theology of the older halls also approaches his point of view.

Bibliographical information

Jürgen Moltmann: The crucified God. The cross of Christ as the basis and critique of Christian theology , Christian Kaiser Verlag Munich 1972.

literature

  • Michael Welker (Hrsg.): Discussion about Jürgen Moltmann's book “The Crucified God” . Munich 1979

Footnotes

  1. ↑ “Was God present in the inferno of those burning nights of my memories, or was He untouched by it in the heaven of a self-satisfied bliss? Where is God was my existential question [...]. I was not interested in any theodicy question. ”(Jürgen Moltmann: Weiter Raum , Gütersloh 2006, 1st edition, p. 186)
  2. ↑ My God, why did you leave me? "The whole book can be understood as a theological examination of this death cry." (Moltmann, p. 186)
  3. ↑ "Jesus suffers dying on the cross, but the father suffers the death of his son because he has to survive it." (Moltmann, p. 189)
  4. ^ "Only the suffering God can help." ( Dietrich Bonhoeffer : Resistance and Surrender , Munich 1951, p. 242)

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