Moltmann's "The Crucified God"

Jürgen Moltmann, born 1926 in the Weimar Republic, was drafted into the German military in 1944, surrendered to an Allied soldier in Belgium in 1945, and spent the next three years in POW camps, before returning to his now-ruined native town on Hamburg when released.

During his time as a POW he converted to Christianity; and, when he began theological studies after the war, he was influenced first by reading Karl Barth ("Reading every form of outspokenly secular literature -- the newspaper above all -- is urgently recommended for understanding the Epistle to the Romans&quot and later by the martyr Dietrich Bonhoffer (“If we speak of Jesus Christ as God, we must speak of his weakness, his manger, his cross: this man is no abstract God”)

The multivolume "Principle of Hope" written by Marxist atheist Ernst Bloch -- in which Bloch wrote

It is a question of learning hope. Its work does not renounce; it is in love with success rather than failure. Hope, superior to fear, is neither passive like the latter, nor locked into nothingness. The emotion of hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them, cannot know nearly enough of what it is that makes them inwardly aimed, of what may be allied to them outwardly. The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong.

-- inspired Moltmann's first influential work of theology, "The Theology of Hope," and Bloch remained influential in Moltmann's thinking. Later, when Bloch gave his own "Atheism in Christianity" the subtitle "Only an atheist can be a good Christian," Moltmann retorted that maybe the subtitle should be "Only a Christian can be a good atheist," and Bloch liked the retort well enough to add it as a second subtitle to the next edition. Moltmann later said he and Bloch were very near to each other in their thinking.

In an introduction to the paperback version of "The Crucified God," Moltmann relates that in the wake of the 1989 massacre of Jesuits in San Salvador, he received a letter relating how the killers, dragging bodies from one room to another, had knocked over a bookcase, leaving a blood-soaked copy of "The Crucified God" to be found at the scene: "even more than The Theology of Hope, this book brought me into a great company."

Reading Barth's commentary on the letter to the Romans, it is almost possible to hear the thunder of shells from the Great War, still echoing their denial of all things human, in the portions discussing the death-dealing ways of the Law, before Barth reaches any commentary on grace. Moltmann, writing later in the wake of the cataclysms and genocides of WWII, at a time when "civilized" societies had once again engaged in industrial scale murder and realized they faced a potential nuclear showdown between superpowers, even as humanity was wiping out polio and smallpox and landing on the moon, is similarly a child of his own time and experience. Like Niebuhr's thinking, Moltmann's is informed enough by Marxist traditions not to degenerate into vacuous bourgeois idealism.

The cross (writes Moltmann) 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. In his time the crucified Christ was regarded as a scandal and as foolishness. Today, too, it is considered old-fashioned to put him at the center of Christian faith ... Jesus died crying out ... 'My God, why hast thou forsaken me?' All Christian theology and all Christian life is basically an answer to the question ... The atheism of protests and of metaphysical rebellions against God are also answers to this question. Either Jesus who was abandoned by God is the end of all theology, or he is the beginning of a specifically Christian, and therefore critical and liberating, theology and life ... In Christianity, the cross is the test of everything that deserves to be called Christian. One may add that the cross alone, and nothing else, is its test, since the cross refutes everything and excludes the syncretistic elements of Christianity. This is a hard saying ... The early Christians had constantly to defend themselves against the charge of irreligiositas and sacrilegium. Insofar as they refused to make the obligatory sacrifices to the gods of the Roman state they drew on themselves the charge of 'atheism.' This was not meant merely as an abusive description of Christians, but was a formal accusation which resulted in exclusion from society as 'enemies of the human race.' Justin readily admitted his Christian atheism, which consisted in a denial of the gods of the state ... It is the suffering of God in Christ, rejected and killed in the absence of God, which qualifies Chistian faith as faith, and as something different from the projection of man's desire ... There is no pattern for religious projections in the cross ... Christians who do not have the feeling they must flee the crucified Christ have probably not yet understood him in a sufficiently radical way ... More radical Christian faith can only mean committing onself without reserve to the 'crucified God.' This is dangerous ... It offers no recipe for success. But it brings a confrontation with the truth ... It alienates alienated men who have come to terms with alienation ... In this pain we experience reality outside ourselves, which we have not made or thought out for ourselves ... 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 outcasts belong, outside the gates of the city. It does not invite thought but a change of mind ... Jesus did not suffer passively from the world in which he lived but incited it against himself by his message and the life he lived ... For the crucified Messiah to become a present reality among slaves is therefore as dangerous to their masters as their reading of the Bible in general ...