In Quest of
Protestant Faithfulness in Postmodern America:
A Boomer’s Engagement with the Faith of Our Elders—Packer, Bloesch,
Fackre, Brueggemann, Moltmann
The current posting is based on a recent discussion on the Confessing Christ discussiuon list which can be accessed here http://confessingchrist.net/Discussion/tabid/92/Default.aspx
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Moltmann’s Trinitarian
Theology: Preliminaries
At the core of Moltmann’s
vision is an intercommunicative model of the Trinity based on the radical
concept of the crucified God. As
discussed in the previous chapter, Brueggemann touches upon the God whose reach
extends beyond covenantal legalism, a God capable of embracing pain, including
the capacity to suffer. However, unlike
Moltmann, Brueggemann neither developed a theology based upon the Isaian vision
of the Suffering Servant (Isa 52:13-53:12), nor, given his Old Testament focus,
a formal theology of the triune God. Moltmann
is in line here with the broad stream of Christian theology in turning to the
centrality of the Incarnation depicted most fully in the Gospel of John as the
basis of a fully-fledged Trinitarian interpretation of God. In this respect the challenge of all
Christian orthodox theology is the search for congruence with the fundamental
Israelite Shema of the ultimate singularity of the Lord God (Deut 6:4).
A basic difference
from a great stream of traditional Trinitarian reflection is Moltmann’s
rejection of the portrayal of God, in his terms, as supreme substance in
singularity of identity, “immovable, infinite, unconditional, immortal, and
impassible.”[i] For Moltmann the concern is not “the divine
essence” of God which he maintains is “presupposed by the existence of the
cosmos” based on God as creator and sustainer.[ii] The question rather is “Who is God?” What is his character? Even what is his nature? On these critical concerns, unless there are
ways of moving beyond a traditional Christian perspective of God as
substantive, uniform identity, Trinitarian theology becomes subsumed within the
notion of the singularity of God’s overarching being, making the Christian claim
a monotheistic redundancy without viable triune content. So Moltmann argues.
What he posits in
its stead “is a concept of the divine unity as the union of tri-unity, a
concept which is differentiated and is therefore [because of the
differentiation] capable of being thought first of all.”[iii] More concretely, Moltmann’s
intercommunicative interpretation of the social Trinity serves “as the
testimony to the history of the Trinity’s relations of fellowship” within the
character and nature of God, which becomes, in turn “open to men and women, and
open to the world.” It is consequently
this “open Trinity” which Moltmann seeks to illuminate as both “a fellowship with God” and “a fellowship in God” (italics in original).[iv] This unity of the Trinity on his account is
“at heart…a soteriological one” in terms of the movement of creation through
the red thread of God’s persisting prompting in bringing the creation to
fulfillment in God in new heaven and new earth.
It is also a doctrinal one on the essential nature and character of God
to whom “the whole creation can be united” into perpetuity even as Moltmann
does not pursue the eternal significance of his Trinitarian view of God beyond
the eschatological apotheosis to any significant degree.[v]
Moltmann places a
great deal of attention in probing into this Trinitarian vision in which “[t]he
person who…owes his freedom to Christ’s representation…believes in God for
Christ’s sake.”[vi] In starting with Christ as the very “image of
the invisible God” (Col 1:15), Moltmann maintains that “God himself,” as a
crucified deity is intimately and in some sense eternally “involved in the
history of Christ’s passion.”[vii] On this revelation of God through the cross of Christ, any notion of God as impassible and
incapable of suffering is nothing other than an incredible contradiction on its
most fundamental face. In pushing this
theme Moltmann challenges any notion of a bifurcated deity in terms of a God
who suffers and one that cannot suffer.[viii]
Rejecting any theological
dualism of “either [God’s] essential incapacity for suffering or a fateful
subjection to suffering,” Moltmann lays out a third option of God’s “active
suffering—the voluntary laying oneself open to another and allowing oneself to
be intimately affected by him; that is to say, the suffering of the passionate God.” Moltmann’s proviso is that God’s suffering is
not the result of some “deficiency of being.”
In his absolute being, a perspective most underdeveloped in Moltmann,
God is “‘apathetic.” However, he does
experience suffering at some profound level, to his depths “from the love which
is the superabundance and overflowing of his being” as it encounters the
reality of the suffering in the world.
It is in this respect that God is “‘pathetic’” in his inexhaustible empathy
to the pathos of the human condition and the entire created order in its
“groaning” for restoration in God’s consummatory glory. In this respect, too, it is not only the
created order, but God, also, who groans because he loved the world so much that
he gave his only begotten Son for the world’s restoration. It is just because of this that he “remains
master of the pain that love causes him to suffer.”[ix] It is precisely in this respect that his triune
sovereignty—God himself as suffering servant—remains intact. In this respect, too, there is no sharp
bifurcation even with a clear differentiation between God the Father who
suffers with the Son and the obedient Son willing to embrace the cross for the
sake of his Father and the world as laid out hymn-like fashion in Philippians
2:5-11.
In starting from
“the pathos of God,” through the ultimate symbol of the cross, Moltmann is able
to grapple with God “in his passion and in his interest in history.” This he juxtaposes from any inaccessible,
“absolute nature” as would be reflected through a more disinterested
philosophical speculation. [x] For
it is this “pathetic” God that undergoes the humiliations, tortures, exiles,
and in some profound sense the deaths experienced by human beings; both those
faithful and not so faithful to his prompting them to a life of faith and
obedience. Healing comes from prayer and
by the acknowledgment and embrace of God’s loving presence in the midst of the
pain of the One who in his “self-differentiated” compassion so loved the world
by taking its pain, sin, suffering, and alienation on as the basis ultimately
of its transcendence through unrequited agape love.[xi]
Moltmann accepts
the reality that the fullness of God’s being, character, and will are beyond
comprehension. Nonetheless, he
identifies love as God’s most central characteristic, a “loving God [that
shows] he is a loving God through his suffering” as his most enduring trait without
which he, in the most fundamental sense would not be God in any way that
Moltmann can comprehend.[xii] God’s “universal sorrow” has as its
counterpart, the eschatological hope for which even God hopes, and for which he
strives, as Moltmann might put it, with all his might for the “redeeming joy”
that his fulfillment will be enacted in some sense beyond history as well as
incarnated within as the first-fruits of God’s divine glory. For it is this hope within history “which overcomes the world.”[xiii]
As Moltmann more formally states it:
The fellowship of
the God who is love has these two sides: it leads us into God’s sufferings and
into his infinite sorrow; but it will only be consummated in the feast of God’s
eternal joy and in the dance of those that have been redeemed from sorrow. For true love bears all things, endures all
things and hopes all things in order to make the other happy, and thereby to
find bliss itself.[xiv]
At the more
fundamental level the issue of God’s passionate suffering is grounded in the
mystery of theodicy wherein on Moltmann’s interpretation, not only the
consequences of sin, but suffering, particularly innocent suffering, requires not
only some sort of what can only be perceived as inadequate explanation. It also necessitates a deep rooted catharsis that
goes to the core of the relationship and pathos between God and humanity. As Moltmann puts it, “[i]t is in suffering
that the whole human question about God arises; for incomprehensible suffering
calls the God of men and women in question.”[xv] On this the biblical prototype is Job whose
only real “theological friend” is “the crucified Jesus on Golgotha.”[xvi]
As someone who
has witnessed the most brutal evil in the 20th century, Moltmann
does not so much provide an answer to the question of why a just and loving God
allows suffering. Instead, he identifies
God’s most intimate characteristic as that of taking on suffering into his own
social being and in the process bearing it with and for the world, struggling
with creation in the promised search for “God’s [own] eschatological
deliverance” and also the world’s. In
this respect both Job and Jesus are Moltmann’s foremost biblical theological
friends. Given the reality of suffering,
unjust or otherwise, in which God suffers with, from, and for the world, any
theology which does not rise to the level of somehow accounting for the full
reality of human experience, including that of profound suffering and
inexpressible joy, is not worthy, on Moltmann’s account, of serious
consideration.[xvii]
[i]
Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of
God, p. 11.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.,
p. 19.
[iv] Ibid.,
p. 20.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid.,
21.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii]
Ibid., p. 22.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] Ibid. p.
26.
[xi] Ibid.,
p. 30.
[xii] Ibid.,
p. 38.
[xiii]
Ibid., p. 42.
[xiv] Ibid.
[xv] Ibid.,
p.47.
[xvi] Ibid.,
p. 48.
[xvii]
Ibid., p. 60.
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