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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 November 2008
A key feature of Jürgen Moltmann's doctrine of God is his dismissal of divine impassibility as a heretical importation of Hellenistic metaphysics. This argument is a broader one assumed among many detractors of this theological tenet that is illegitimate given its rushed historical judgements. By dismissing the important features divine impassibility provided by past articulations, Moltmann offers a doctrine of God that in many ways repeats or avoids problems within the (im)passibility debates. Rather than dismissing divine impassibility from the onset, Moltmann would have benefited from a more careful appraisal of this axiom, one that would have chastened and enlivened his project within the ongoing conversation of God's relationship to suffering.
1 As has often been noted, Moltmann converted to Christianity as a prisoner of war in the Second World War; such a context cannot be overlooked when one moves to consider Moltmann's theological inclinations. For a summary, see Moltmann's ‘My Theological Career’ in History and the Triune God, trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1992), pp. 165–82.
2 One can easily find Moltmann making such broad brush statements as, ‘It is in suffering that the whole human question about God arises’ (The Trinity and the Kingdom, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 47; hereafter, TK).
3 See Ignatius's delineations in his epistles, especially To Polycarp and To the Ephesians.
4 The Suffering of the Impassible God (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 5.
5 As David Bentley Hart notes, ‘It is nonetheless striking that, in the course, say, of the great disputes of the fourth and fifth centuries concerning trinitarian dogma and Christology, divine impassibility was a principle that all parties concerned accepted without serious reservations, even though it was a principle that, on the face of it, better served the causes of what came to be viewed as the heterodox schools of thought’ (‘No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility’, Pro Ecclesia 11/2 (2002), p. 186).
6 John O'Keefe goes so far as to state that ‘concerns about impassibility go to the heart of the [christological] controversy itself’ (‘Kenosis or Impassibility: Cyril of Alexandria and Theodoret of Cyrus on the Problem of Divine Pathos’, Studia Patristica 32 (1997), p. 359).
7 The Crucified God, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 214; hereafter, CG.
8 CG, p. 270.
9 TK, p. 23.
10 CG, pp. 214–15.
11 Marc Steen remarks, ‘“Apathy” as it used to be understood, is not necessarily identical to what is understood by it now’: ‘The Theme of the “Suffering” God’, in Jan Lambrecht and Raymond F. Collins (eds.), God and Human Suffering (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), p. 86.
12 Gavrilyuk, Suffering of Impassible God, p. 2.
13 ‘Greek or some other philosophy might provide the conceptual tools for developing the doctrine of divine impassibility, but it does not follow that what doctrine results is derived not from Scripture but from philosophy’ (Helm, Paul, ‘The Impossibility of Divine Passibility’, in Cameron, Nigel M. de S. (ed.), The Power and Weakness of God (Edinburgh: Rutherford House Books, 1990Google Scholar), p. 135). In other words, Christian theology has always had a relationship with prominent philosophical currents in the era in which it is attempted, but these negotiations need not imply capitulation in every instance.
14 TK, p. 22.
15 CG, p. 230.
16 This move leads George Hunsinger to call Moltmann's project in part the development of a ‘Christian atheism’ in that ‘the experience of atrocity [and so evil] defies explanation’: ‘The Crucified God and the Political Theology of Violence: A Critical Survey of Jürgen Moltmann's Recent Thought: I’, The Heythrop Journal 14/3 (1973), p. 273. Because of this fundamental principle, Hunsinger sees Moltmann suggesting that ‘atheists and Christians exist together in a solidarity of suffering’ (p. 274).
17 CG, p. 201.
18 Terms such as ‘godforsakenness’ and ‘solidarity’ retain a marked presence in Moltmann's work when in fact they are theologically tenuous. Their usage points to Moltmann's resistance to using traditional atonement language, an aversion that is perhaps best explained by what Moltmann believes to have been the abuses of soteriological categories as rationales for diminishing the importance of embodied suffering. The absence of atonement language is nevertheless a weakness in Moltmann's account since the theme of the ‘crucified God’ beckons such language.
19 Moltmann does not do away with the immanent Trinity, but he does recast it to fit his project; therefore, one finds him saying that the economic Trinity is the ground for the immanent Trinity and that the latter is to be thought in terms of the future. See CG, pp. 238–9 and TK, pp. 158–61. For a helpful discussion of these themes, see Roger Olson, ‘Trinity and Eschatology: The Historical Being of God in Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg’, Scottish Journal of Theology 36/2 (1983), pp. 213–27.
20 Dennis W. Jowers suggests that, in emphasising God's passion as a starting point for one's doctrine of God, Moltmann can invoke greater agony and resistance on the Son's part as he faces the crucifixion, leading one to assume a direct relationship between the force of Moltmann's appeal to God's passion and the space one is allowed for introducing negativity/antagonism within the godhead. See ‘The Theology of the Cross as Theology of the Trinity: A Critique of Jürgen Moltmann's Staurocentric Trinitarianism’, Tyndale Bulletin 52/2 (2001), pp. 245–66.
21 Paul D. Molnar's work on the immanent Trinity is helpful here; see his Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2002).
22 For Moltmann, as for others who espouse a doctrine of God which attempts to be shaped by ‘dynamic ontological tendencies’, it is a self-evident axiom to say that one must suffer if one loves. The move is drawn from the example of human relationality, as Moltmann deems it the ‘dialectic of human life’ (CG, p. 253); however, this dialectic is much more troublesome when it is considered as the ‘dialectic of divine life’. One has to conclude that when Moltmann makes such a strong link between suffering and love for both human and divine relationality that he is falling helplessly into the Feuerbachian critique of religion.
23 As it has often been noted, Moltmann demonstrates apparently Hegelian themes when he speaks of the meaning of Jesus' death; what is sometimes less often stated is that Moltmann appears to use Hegelian themes in similar ways to the Frankfurt school, especially Max Horkheimer. For a suggestive work on the latter's views on religion, see Ott, Michael R., Max Horkheimer's Critical Theory of Religion (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001)Google Scholar.
24 CG, p. 4.
25 CG, p. 230.
26 In these discussions, the figure of Job is to be expected. Moltmann pushes the link when he asks: ‘Does Job have any real theological friend except the crucified Jesus on Golgotha?’ (TK, p. 48). Surprisingly, Moltmann can also relate Job to the protest atheist at another point: ‘There is a protest atheism which wrestles with God as Job did, and for the sake of the suffering of created beings which cries out to high heaven denies that there is a just God who rules the world in love’ (Experiences in Theology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), p. 16). Despite this kind of rhetoric, Job is not a protest atheist on hermeneutical and theological grounds and not simply anachronistic ones.
27 The critiques offered by Dorothee Sölle are important in this regard; see Suffering, trans. Everett R. Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), pp. 26–7, and ‘Gott und das Leiden’, in Michael Welker (ed.), Diskussion über Jürgen Moltmanns Buch ‘Der gekreuzigte Gott’ (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1979), pp. 111–17.
28 CG, p. 243.
29 After CG and TK, Moltmann corrected his misnamed trinitarian project by taking more seriously the role of the Spirit in The Spirit of Life. Nevertheless, the addition of a text in pneumatology adds little to change Moltmann's considerations of divine (im)passibility since he can speak of the Spirit in similar ways to the Son through the links he makes between christology and pneumatology.
30 As odd as it sounds to attribute suffering to the Father, Moltmann's project has no other recourse since he has dismissed securing God's transcendence, given suffering a non negotiable value and suggested that God assumes or envelops suffering rather than redeems it.
31 In speaking of Moltmann's project, von Balthasar remarks, ‘Interpretations of this kind, like all talk of God's suffering, become inevitable wherever the internal divine process, “procession”, is lumped together with the process of salvation history. Thus God is entangled in the world process and becomes a tragic, mythological God.’ Theo-Drama, vol. 4, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), p. 322.
32 CG, pp. 240–1.
33 ‘Jürgen Moltmann: Trinity and Suffering’, Evangel (Summer 1985), p. 6.
34 I take this phrase from Reinhard Hütter's Suffering Divine Things, trans. Doug Stott (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), p. 23.
35 ‘“This Weakness of God's is Stronger” (1 Cor. 1:25): An Inquiry Beyond the Power of Being’, Toronto Journal of Theology 9/1 (1993), p. 20.
36 I am indebted to Gavrilyuk, Suffering of Impassible God, ch. 3, for this insight, one that is both faithful to the fathers of the early church as well as biblically grounded in such passages as Philippians 2:6–11 and Hebrews 1:3–4.
37 CG, p. 269.
38 The need to preserve a ‘proper sense of direction’ is important (Helm, ‘Impossibility of Divine Passibility’, p. 132), i.e. affectional language is humanly accessible imagery that when made in reference to God must take on different qualities given the different natures in question. Tertullian and his reflections in Against Marcion is helpful at this point in that he suggests the viability of a category of ‘theopathy’ that is the source and perfection of limited and corrupted anthropopathy.
39 Douglas B. Farrow makes this point in his helpful article, ‘In the End is the Beginning: A Review of Jürgen Moltmann's Systematic Contributions’, Modern Theology 14/3 (1998), pp. 436–7.
40 Moltmann suggests this opinion no clearer than in TK: ‘We cannot say, “if there were no sin, there would be no suffering”. Experience of suffering goes far beyond the experience of guilt and the experience of grace. It has its roots in the limitations of created reality itself. If creation-in-the-beginning is open for the history of good and evil, then that initial creation is also a creation capable of suffering, and capable of producing suffering’ (pp. 50–1).
41 Pressing the relationship between sin and suffering need not imply that a cause–effect relationship is at work in which all individuals who suffer do so because they have sinned. At issue here is that Moltmann fails to mark thoroughly how suffering is ultimately alien to the human condition as originally conceived and evaluated by God.
42 Prestige, G. L., God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1952), p. 6Google Scholar.
