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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Jon Sobrino has suggested that those who stand in the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment tend to interpret suffering and disaster as ‘crises of meaning’, by which we seek to explain and accommodate alienating experiences within preconceived models of reality. Our question is how evil may be understood. But that search for meaning is a luxury denied those who can barely hold to existence itself. Theirs is a ‘crisis of reality’; and their question is less how to understand evil than how to withstand it, to overcome suffering or at least survive it. ‘The interpretative models become relevant [only] to the extent that they arise out of the experienced reality and aim at eliminating the wretched state of the real world’.
1 Sobrino, J., The True Church and the Poor, London, SCM Press, 1985, p. 17.Google Scholar
2 See Lasch, C., The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, London, Picador, 1985Google Scholar; ch. III, and Schell, J., The Fate of the Earth, London, Picador, 1982, e.g., pp. 145ff.Google Scholar
3 Notably in The Holocaust as Interruption, edd. Fiorenza, E. Schüssler and Tracy, D., Concilium, no. 175 (1984), Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark.Google Scholar
4 See Garrison, J., The Darkness of God: Theology after Hiroshima, London, SCM Press, 1982, e.g., pp. 68ff.Google Scholar
5 The Holocaust as Interruption, e.g., pp. 5, 30, 85f.
6 Lasch, op. cit., pp. 128f.; cf. his The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, New York, Warner Books, 1979.Google Scholar
7 See Arendt, H., The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1951Google Scholar; cf. Newbigin, L., The Other Side of 1984, Geneva, W.C.C., esp. ch. I.Google Scholar
8 Becker, C., The Heavenly City of the 18th Century Philosophers, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1932, pp. 119–168.Google Scholar
9 Löwith, K., Meaning in History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1949, esp. pp. 160–173.Google Scholar
10 Esp. Cullmann, O., Christ and Time, London, SCM Press, 1951 and 1962Google Scholar; cf. McIntyre, J., The Christian Doctrine of History, Edinburgh, Oliver & Boyd, 1957, pp. 42f.Google Scholar
11 See Barth's, K. criticism of the doctrine of providence in Calvin and Reformed orthodoxy, in Church Dogmatics, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1936–1969, vols. II/2, 76ff. and III/3, 30ff.Google Scholar
12 See Zahrnt, H., What Kind of God?, London, SCM Press, 1971.Google Scholar
13 See Ebeling, G., Introduction to the Theological Theory of Language, London, Collins, 1973Google Scholar; The Crisis in the Language of Faith, edd. Metz, J. B. and Jossua, J.-P., Concilium, vol. 5, no. 9 (1973)Google Scholar; and the profound analysis of the demonisation of contemporary language, by Steiner, George, in for example his play The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., London, Faber & Faber, 1981.Google Scholar
14 See The Holocaust as Interruption, esp. pp. 3–10, 75–79; cf. too the corpus of autobiography and oral history in the literature on Hiroshima, notably John Hersey, Hiroshima, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1946 and 1972.
15 On the need for Christians to let Auschwitz ‘breathe life’ into the original Good Friday story, see Frei, H., The Identity of Jesus Christ, Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1975, p. 170.Google Scholar
16 On the continuity between Deut. 26.5fT. and I Cor. 15.3f., see Stroup, G. W., The Promise of Narrative Theology, London, SCM Press, p. 146 and ch. IV passim.Google Scholar
17 E.g., Bultmann, R., in Kerygma and Myth, vol. I, ed. Bartsch, H. W., London, SPCK, 1964, pp. 35–43.Google Scholar
18 Frei, H., The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974Google Scholar, and The Identity of Jesus Christ. For a lucid recent discussion of these issues see Fergusson, D., ‘Interpreting the Resurrection’, Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 38, 3 (1985), pp. 287–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Jantzen, G., ‘Christian Hope and Jesus' Despair’, King's Theological Review, V, i (1982), pp. 1–7.Google Scholar
19 See as one example Don Cupitt's description of his book The World To Come: ‘encountering modern nihilism, and experiencing it as Holy Saturday and the end of the world, it enacts the pattern of death and resurrection…. It was an attempt to Christianize modern nihilism by incorporating it into, and making of it an episode within, the classic mythic dramas of death and rebirth’; in, ‘A Reply to Rowan Williams’, Modern Theology, 1:1 (1984), p. 27. Cf. Frei, Identity of Jesus Christ, pp. 139–52.
20 MacKinnon, D. M., ‘Atonement and Tragedy’, Borderlands of Theology, London, Lutterworth Press, 1968, ch. 5, pp. 102f.Google Scholar; cf. his introductory essay in von Balthasar, H. U., Engagement with God, London, SPCK, 1975, p. 8.Google Scholar
21 Note too the emphasis in Reformed confessions on the temporal extension of Christ's death; e.g., The Shorter Catechism, A. 27: ‘being buried, and continuing under the power of death for a time’; cf. The Scots Confession, ch. IX, and The Westminster Confession of Faith, ch. VIII.
22 Even when interpreted as a prolepsis of the resurrection, universalising the victory of the cross, the doxological and dogmatic tradition of the descensus ad infernos contributes to the role of the ‘second day’ as a boundary which separates Good Friday and Easter as much as it unites them. Nicolas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, Luther (though not Melanchthon), Calvin and Barth all represent a tradition which secures that boundary as a barrier, by interpreting the descent into hell negatively, as the nadir of humiliation, judgment and godforsakenness. See Pannenberg, W., Jesus God and Man, London, SCM Press, 1968, pp. 269–274Google Scholar, and Weber, O., Foundations of Dogmatics, vol. II, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1983, pp. 102–104.Google Scholar
23 Hengel, M., The Atonement, London, SCM Press, 1981, p. 67. See Mark 14.17–15.32.Google Scholar
24 Moltmann, J., The Crucified God, London, SCM Press, 1974, ch. 4Google Scholar; cf. MacKinnon, D. M., ‘The Relation of the Doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity’, in Creation Christ and Culture, ed. McKinney, R. W. A., Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1976, p. 98.Google Scholar
25 On the exegesis of Mark 15.34 and Matt. 27.46, see e.g., Rasper, W., Jesus the Christ, London, Burns & Oates, 1976, p. 118Google Scholar; Schillebeeckx, E.,Jesus, London, Collins, 1979, pp. 289ff.Google Scholar; and Moltmann, Crucified God, pp. 149ff.
26 Pannenberg, , Jesus God and Man, e.g., pp. 135ff., 251ff.Google Scholar; cf. Gunton, C., Yesterday and Today, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1983, pp. 18–32.Google Scholar
27 Moltmann, , Crucified God, pp. 151 ff.Google Scholar
28 von Balthasar, H. U., Man in History, London, Sheed & Ward, p. 283.Google Scholar
29 See Barth, , Church Dogmatics, IV/1, 299ff.Google Scholar; Schillebeeckx, , Jesus, p. 525Google Scholar; and Frei, Identity of Jesus Christ, p. 120.
30 See Jüngel, E., God as the Mystery of the World, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1983, pp. 299–314.Google Scholar
31 Cf. Jüngel, op. cit., pp. 307ff, 362ff, and Moltmann, Theology of Hope, London, SCM Press, 1967, pp. 167ff. and Crucified God, pp. 168ff. By contrast, in his excellent recent study Being as Communion (London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1985), J. Zizioulas seems reluctant to acknowledge the death of Jesus as significant for God's being. For him the movement back from resurrection to incarnation indicates that, though no stranger ‘to the conditions of biological existence’, ‘Christ escaped the necessity and the passions of nature’. When he rose from the dead ‘the real hypostasis of Christ was proved to be not the biological one but the eschatological or trinitarian hypostasis’ (p. 55). But how real is the incarnation if Christ is held to have escaped biological necessity or ‘the tragic aspect of the human person’ because of his trinitarian personhood? A similar flirtation with docetism seems to affect Zizioulas' interpretation of the resurrection as ‘the persistance, the survival of being’, which makes the cross a failed attempt to suppress being’ (p. 108). This surely evades the finality and reality of the death of Jesus, presupposing an ontology in which God swamps non-being with the power of being, rather than receiving non-being into himself and thus going beyond it.
32 Among many examples: ‘…; the Word remaining quiescent, that He might be capable of being tempted, dishonoured, crucified, and of suffering death …’, Irenaeus, Adv. Haer., 3.19, 3; and ‘we must hold that it was according to His human nature that He was in … extremity: and that in order to allow this, His Deity held itself back a little, as if concealed’, Calvin's Geneva Catechism, 1541, Q. 68.
33 Moltmann, so enlightening on the cross as the event of God's suffering with us, cavalierly dismisses the notion that he was also suffering at our hands, the victim of our sin (cf. Crucified God, pp. 181 ff.). Sin does not cause the suffering of the cross, nor the suffering reveal God's ‘wrath’. Yet this rejection of atonement, and hence of much Pauline and Johannine thought, surely excludes the element of guilt from the problem of suffering and jettisons reconciliation as the theme of soteriology. See, by contrast, Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/1, sections 59 and 61. Jüngel, with his emphasis on law, and substitution (e.g. God as the Mystery, pp. 225, 345f., 358–68), seems much less open than Moltmann to the charge of neglecting atonement, pace Webster, J., in Evangel, Spring, 1984, p. 6Google Scholar, and his Eberhard Jüngel, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 91f.Google Scholar
34 ‘The difference between God and man, which is constitutive of the essence of the Christian faith, is … not the difference of a still greater dissimilarity, but rather, conversely, the difference of a still greater similarity between God and man in the midst of a great dissimilarity’, Jüngel, God as the Mystery, p. 288. At this point my general indebtedness to Jüngel becomes most obvious and determinative, not least for his highly stimulating argument that the analogia entis is weak not because it understands the unknowable God too well, on the basis of his ordering of creation, but because it leaves God's unknowability intact, untransformed by the event of his drawing near to creation. See esp. pp. 261–98.
35 See Gunton, C., Yesterday and Today, esp. pp. 92ff, 100f., 119.Google Scholar
36 See Barth, , Church Dogmatics, IV/1, 179ff.Google Scholar; cf. e.g., von Balthasar, Engagement with God, pp. 36ff., and Gorodetzky, N., The Humiliation of Christ in Modern Russian Thought, London, SPCK, 1938, esp. ch. 5.Google Scholar
37 Jüngel, , God as the Mystery, pp. 288ff., 314ff., 350ff.Google Scholar
38 Ibid., e.g., pp. 296, 358.
39 Ibid., pp. 361–68; cf. Moltmann, Crucified God, pp. 242f.
40 The trinitarian hermeneutic of the cross, much expounded in recent theology, is not to be rehearsed in detail here, but is presupposed throughout. See esp. Moltmann, Crucified God, pp. 200–90, and Jüngel, God as the Mystery, pp. 343–96 and The Doctrine of the Trinity: God's Being is in Becoming, Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1976. It is worth emphasising, however, that only a doctrine of the Trinity in which the Spirit is a distinct ‘hypostasis’ can function as a conceptualisation of the gospel narrative of ‘the death of God’. When God's identity with the terminated is taken seriously, as an event which corresponds to his immanent life (Jüngel, Doctrine of the Trinity, pp. 96f.), then only by reference to the Spirit, as clearly differentiated from the Son, yet wholly one with him, can theology speak of God's movement through rupture to resumption. The Spirit is God's life, enduring, surpassing, but not cancelling, the reception of death into his being in the person of the crucified and buried Son. And it is by the Spirit's distinct energies that the Father's ruptured union with the Son is held lovingly intact, so that the perished Son is not allowed ‘to see corruption’, and the imperilled Father is vindicated. See Zizioulas, Being as Communion, for an illuminating discussion of the Trinity as a ‘new idea’ in ontology, with which ‘the ancient world heard for the first time that it is communion which makes being “be”: nothing exists without it, not even God’ (p. 17).
41 Jüngel, , God as the Mystery, p. 351.Google Scholar
42 Jüngel, , Doctrine of the Trinity, pp. 96ffGoogle Scholar, and MacKinnon, in McKinney, op. cit., pp. 103f.; cf. also Olson, R., ‘Trinity and Eschatology’, Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 36, 2 (1983), pp. 213–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
43 Zizioulas, op. cit., pp. 70ff., 98.
44 Ibid., pp. 67–72. Zizioulas thus characterises the Hebraic concept of history, to which the Christian is a challenge just as much as to Platonism's ‘rounded’ cosmology.