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The Burial of God: Rupture and Resumption as the Story of Salvation⋆
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Extract
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’.
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1987
References
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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
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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).
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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.