“It is unlikely that anything good or just will come about, unless it flows from an abundance of joy and the passion of love.”
– Jurgen Moltmann, writing in The Theology of Play

Christian theology is spoken in a language of metaphors, and it always has been. These metaphors have always been enculturated, revealing just as much about the people engaging with the gospel as they reveal about the gospel itself. Throughout the history of religion, people have used ideas that they already understand to begin to fathom the unfathomable. Rabbi Elijah, a 10th century Palestianian thinker, records a midrash about the Oral Torah and the Written Torah:

What is the difference between the Written and the Oral Law? To what can it be compared? To a king of flesh and blood who had two servants and loved them both with a perfect love. He gave each of them a measure of wheat and each a bundle of flax. What did the wise servant do? He took the flax and spun a cloth. He took the wheat and made flour. He cleaned the flour and ground, kneaded, and baked it, and set it on top of the table. Then he spread the cloth over it and left it until the king would come.

The foolish servant, however, did nothing at all. After some time, the king returned from a journey and came into his house. He said to his servants: my sons, bring me what I gave you. One servant showed the wheat still in the box with the bundle of flax upon it. Alas for his shame, alas for his disgrace!

When the Holy One, blessed be He, gave the Torah to Israel, he gave it only in the form of wheat for us to make flour from it, and flax, to make a garment from it.

Seder Eliyahu Zuta, Chapter 2

Rabbi Elijah suggests that God has given to the Jewish people the text, and it is the responsibility of the people to make something useful out of it. For the Jews, this is what it means to be “Israel,” to be those who struggle and wrestle with God. I can resonate with this aspect of Judaism. I think that Christians should also struggle over the text and theologies that are handed down to us, making them our own. It isn’t possible for us to conceive of God without creating idols. This is particularly true for Christians, who worship a crucified, embodied God. To describe the paradox of this crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann quotes H. J. Iwand:

The cross is the utterly incommensurable factor in the revelation of God. We have become far too used to it. We have surrounded the scandal of the cross with roses. We have made a theory of salvation out of it. But that is not the cross. That is not the bleakness inherent in it, placed in it by God. Hegel defined the cross: ‘God is dead’ —and he no doubt rightly saw that here we are faced by the night of the real, ultimate and inexplicable absence of God, and that before the ‘Word of the cross’ we are dependent upon the principle of sola fide; dependent upon it as nowhere else… Here God is non-God. Here is the triumph of death, the enemy, the non-church, the lawless state, the blasphemer, the soldiers. Here Satan triumphs over God. Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation and doubt about everything that exists! Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of nothingness, it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way that no philosophy of nihilism can imagine.[1]

Metaphors are our only hope for speaking of the unspeakable. Moltmann goes on to say: “If faith in the crucified Christ is in contradiction to all conceptions of righteousness, beauty and morality of man, faith in the ‘crucified God’ is also a contradiction of everything men have ever conceived, desired and sought to be assured of by the term ‘God.’”[2] A theology of the cross, on which the idea of God dies, is the event that demands constant re-consideration, particularly for Moltmann, of the “idols of the Christian West.”[3]

There has been a debate in recent Christianity over the metaphors for justification (which I have mentioned on this blog before). Even though saying so has caused some minor drama in my personal life, I’ll say again that I prefer the metaphor of Christus Victor over the metaphor of penal substitutionary atonement. This is, in large part, because of the context in which we live — capitalism, individualism, etc. — as a hindrance to justifiable living by means of promoting only a self-affirming kind of justification. A friend and I were recently discussing this idea. I said, “we ought to look at what theology creates,” by which I meant that the value of a theology is in its ability to replicate the model of Jesus. When I think of penal substitutionary atonement and its effects in my own life, I just don’t see the gospel. I see competition, self-promotion, and legalism. I don’t intend to discredit the penal metaphor for justification entirely but only to insist that it doesn’t work for me.

There are certain parts of the ideas of René Girard’s christology — as I understand it — that appeal to me. For Girard, “humankind is subjected to the power of violence.”[4] “[T]he Gospels,” then, “do not offer a sacrificial interpretation of Jesus’ death on the cross (in the sense that God would need a bloody sacrifice to satisfy his offended honor), the Apocalypse , of which Jesus holds out the prospect, does not concern God’s violence and Jesus does not ascribe any violence to God in his parables.”[5] Girard understands the Gospel to be the only possible escape from the systems of evil that so often define human behavior. “So what must be given up,” Girard says, “is the right to reprisals and even the right to what passes, in a number of cases, for legitimate defence.”[6]

I think that there are certain things about Girard that are problematic (re-reading anachronistically the entire Hebrew Bible with a distinct distaste for the sacrificial system or the fact that his theory is bit of a grand narrative, for example). At the same time, Girard’s understanding of Christ serves as a metaphor that helps me understand what it means to follow Jesus. For me, it gives the gospel a certain demand for embodiment; the good news opens the way for us and requires of us that we live very differently. In this way, Girard’s theory of the cross does not justify us (if by justification we mean the certain declaration that things are settled), but it unnerves and disturbs us. It allows us to see the violence within us and leads us out into a new kind of life.

———
[1]Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 36.
[2]Ibid., 37.
[3]Ibid., 36.
[4]Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard, and Slavoj Žižek (New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 47.
[5]Ibid.
[6]Ibid., 48.

Thanks to all who participated in our latest Who Said It? competition here at Per Crucem ad Lucem. There were definately some intriguing suggestions. The correct answer, however, is Richard Bauckham, and the quote comes from his book Moltmann: Messianic Theology in the Making (Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering, 1987), 100. While there were no winners this time, those who guessed Moltmann deserve an extra chocolate.

We shall play again soon.

• St John’s Nottingham are developing a very exciting project – Interactive Multimedia Timeline: Exploring Christian theology and intellectual history.
• Rick Floyd offers a good defence of blogging in response to Stefan McDaniel’s case against it.
• A new journal to keep an eye on.
• A new must-have from Moltmann’s pen.
• Robert Fisk on America performing its familiar role of propping up a dictator.
• And check out the amazing Liu Bolin … The Invisible Man.
• Any apostrophe problems?
• Halden Doerge is on[to] something about the divine attributes.
• Ben Myers shares two splendid excerpts from his forthcoming AAR paper on J. Louis Martyn’s Galatians Commentary.
• Finally, a few years back I posted 12 wee reflections for Advent. I [probably] won’t be repeating this practice again this year but these Advent Reflections are still available online for those who might like to use them.
• And yeah, don’t forget to cast your vote in our Who said it? competition.
  

Many thanks to my blogging friend, John Anderson, who informs us:

See HERE.  You can hear a whole host of lectures from scholars such as Walter Brueggemann, Ben Witherington, Richard Hays, Dale Allison, John Barclay, Charles Talbert, Eugene Petersen, Bruce Longenecker, NT Wright, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Jurgen Moltmann.  These are a wonderful resource for students and scholars alike.  I am, as you may suspect, listening to my friend Brueggemann at present.

Fantastic! Thanks for the heads up, John!

See HERE.  You can hear a whole host of lectures from scholars such as Walter Brueggemann, Ben Witherington, Richard Hays, Dale Allison, John Barclay, Charles Talbert, Eugene Petersen, Bruce Longenecker, NT Wright, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Jurgen Moltmann.  These are a wonderful resource for students and scholars alike.  I am, as you may suspect, listening to my friend Brueggemann at present.

Today is Reformation Day that is right sports fans, Reformation Day.  Now most people, unless they are Lutheran or a really “reformed” Presbyterian or Reformed Church kind of Christian have no clue about this. However when a young Priest and Theology Professor at the University of Wittenberg named Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses on the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg it changed the course of Western as well as Church history.

Martin Luther

Luther posted his “theses” which was basically points of theological debate on the door of the Schlosskirche it broke the hold of the Roman Catholic Church of Europe, brought about what would become an increasingly fractured and diverse church in the west and established the primacy of the State over the Church in Western nations.  Luther intended nothing more than reforming and curtailing abuses in the Catholic Church and how the Church saw grace, faith and scripture.  His act and subsequent actions when put under the “ban” by the Pope drew to him the support of German nobility who desired to be free of the Holy Roman Empire and rapidly engulfed Europe in religious, political and military conflict.

The theology that Luther developed based upon the Three Solas; Sola fides by faith alone, Sola Gratia by grace alone and Sola Scriptura by scripture alone became the hallmarks of the Reformation and without getting into the weeds to dissect all the ramifications for the Church and the world impact the way that many Christians practice and express their faith to the current day.

For me Martin Luther was along with Fr Hans Kung, Jurgen Moltmann, and Alistair McGrath a key figure in the development of my faith.  At some point I will probably get deeper into this on this blog, but right now it suffices to say that it was Martin Luther who confirmed to my the essential nature of the Eucharist to the Christian faith and which helping bring me to a catholic understanding of the faith versus a truly reformed Protestant understanding of it.  I do not agree with all of Luther’s points or ideas but his Theology of the Cross brought me to a much more incarnational understanding of the Christian faith especially in regards to understanding that it is only through the Cross that we come to know God in a truly Christian sense of understanding.  For Luther the Cross was central to understanding the humanity’s relationship to the Trinity, not as Calvin would enunciate God’s will and predestination from before time began.  Kung from the Catholic side is a big Luther supporter (see On Being a Christian) and Moltmann has brought Luther’s thought to the 21^st Century in Theology of Hope and The Crucified God as has Anglican Theologian and Luther scholar Alistair McGrath (The Mystery of the Cross.) All of these men helped me in my transition following seminary to a moderate Anglo-Catholic expression of faith that places a high place to Scripture, Apostolic Tradition and Reason in interpreting and living out the faith.

Luther at the Diet of Worms

I did a lot of study on the Lutheran Reformation in and after seminary and in 1996 while stationed in Germany as a mobilized Army Reserve Chaplain had the privilege of organizing a series of Reformation tours to Wittenberg on Reformation day where we attended the Reformationstag service at the Schlosskirche and I led a walking tour of the town.  One of the parishioners from the chapel asked me if I had been to Wittenberg before because I seemed like I knew every place in the town.  I had to tell her that I had not been there in person but because of my study felt like I had from the time we stepped off of our tour bus.  I also directed a tour to Worms where Luther on trial before Charles V was told to recant his writings and made his timeless statement:

“Unless I am convicted by scripture and plain reason – I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other – my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.” It is legend that Luther said the words “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me, Amen!” These words were probably only added later by someone else to make the story more interesting as they do not appear in the council notes.  Not that Luther would have objected.  The film version is linked here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0tk_EvWXQQ&feature=player_embedded

Zwingli and Luther at Marburg

Likewise his debate with Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli at the Marburg colloquy regarding points of doctrine was significant for me. It was held that they might unify their movements. They agreed on all points except the Eucharist where Luther enunciated a very catholic understanding of the “Real Presence” and Zwingli held to be a symbolic memorial though might have some spiritual component.   Luther would not budge and to each of Zwingli’s arguments pulled back the tablecloth to reveal the words “This is my body, this is my blood” which he had carved on the table.  They departed without achieving unity, something that has plagued Protestants to this day and when Zwingli was killed in battle when leading the militia from Zurich to fight the approaching Catholic Army.  When Luther heard about the Zwingli’s death he commented Zwingli drew his sword. Therefore he has received the reward that Christ spoke of, ‘All who take the sword will perish by the sword’ [Matt. 26:52]. If God has saved him, he has done so above and beyond the rule.” (Table Talk #1451)

I have always had a special place in my heart for Luther even with all of his flaws which were many; he was earthy, spoke his mind, and had no problem with having fun or good beer.  Additionally he had a bit of an anger problem, suffered from clinical depression and had issues with his father.  Luther could be an ass, but then I can be an ass too.

Well the “unhappy few” at the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton North Carolina are moving right along in their book and Bible burning crusade led by their Grand Master Pastor Marc Grizzard. In the past few days he has gotten into a pissing contest with a very conservative and should I even say “Fundamentalist” theologian named James White.  Evidently Mr. White is on the opposite end of the Fundamental spectrum according to Grand Master Pastor Marc along with “the agnostics, liberals, New Evangelicals, and Bible doubters.”  I did find it fascinating to see how Grand Master Pastor Marc’s little brain works in the text of their terrible translation tiff which is linked here: http://amazinggracebaptistchurchkjv.com/subpage570.html

I especially enjoyed this comment from his most recent webpage update where he castigates Mr. White:

“I had rather be uneducated and irrational and know that I have God’s preserved, inspired, infallible, inerrant Word of God, than to be a scholar who doesn’t know where God’s Word is. One person said, “I’d rather be an fool on fire, than a scholar on ice.” Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying a person should not better themselves or study. They should! But if study and education is going to rob you of your unwavering faith in the KJB, than leave the education to the Bible doubters. I will never be open to anything but the KJV, call me what you want. I don’t care!” Pastor Marc Grizzard

Profiles in Stupidity Pastor Marc Grizzard

Since he has invited people to call him anything they want I think idiot works well. Have no fear he is already talking about next year’s event:

“God has showed me why this years event went around the world. Check back in a couple of weeks as we begin to “Turn this world upside down.” Acts 17:6 ”…These that have turned the world upside down” “Coming to a town near you!!!!” Please not my town.

Make arrangements now, if it gets popular you might have to book through Ticketmaster or the Amazing Grace Baptist Church Box Office.  By the way the start time is 7PM and Marc has said if you are not a member or have an invitation from him you are not welcome, and that includes law enforcement who promise to be there, kind of reminds me of the concert in the Blues Brothers. Of course he will have to compete with the folks at the fictional Landover Baptist Church to have the world’s greatest book and Bible burning. http://www.landoverbaptist.org/news1002/bookburning.html

Of course I wonder about a group of separatist Baptists staking their faith not on Jesus but the King James Version. It seems absurd for a group that descends from people who valued religious liberty to be burning book or Bibles of any kind.  The fact that they have set an Anglican translation, authorized by a flaming homosexual who hated, persecuted and killed the early English Baptists and which is actually a later version than the 1611 that has multiple versions, the Oxford and the Cambridge and is based on a text that was not the most common text used by the early or “ante-Nicene” church is beyond me.  The fact that King James onlyism is only about 100 years old and comes from a unusual 7^th Day Adventist preacher and was advanced by the founder of the Pensacola Bible Institute who experimented with Zen Buddhism, thought about becoming a Jesuit and believed in a bunch of stuff including UFO;s that most Fundamentalists would deride only adds to my mystification.  But then to quote Forrest Gump “stupid is as stupid does.”  Congratulations Pastor Marc you win the Gump award for 2009. Congratulations, your 1973 orange Ford Pinto is waiting in the A-1 Auto Salvage in Fayetteville.

Tonight the Abbess and I will go to a Halloween party at our favorite restaurant the Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant in Virginia Beach.  I went as a baseball player from a scary team, the Orioles and the Abbess is going as a Hippy Chick.  It was fun, nice people, good music and 70’s and 80’s music videos and great beer.

Alex Rodriguez Broke out of His Slump

Now I sit watching game three of the World Series. For once replay was used to overturn a bad call, Alex Rodriguez getting his first hit, a 2 run home run that hit the lens of the right field television camera that was initially ruled a double.  Cole Hammels was hit hard as I predicted giving up five runs before he was pulled in the 5^th, one of the runs coning off the bat of Andy Pettitte who drove in Nick Swisher and then later scored.  The Yankees bats began to come alive, Nick Swisher who had had a miserable post season hit a home run and a double, and Alex Rodriguez broke out of his slump with his 2 run homer. Hideki Matsui hit his second home run of the series with 2 outs in the 8^th as a pinch hitter against Brett Myers.  For the Phillies the hot hitting Ryan Howard has continued to slump striking out 3 more times tonight to make him 2 for 13 with 9 strike outs in the first three games.  On the other hand Jayson Wirth continues to hammer the ball hitting two solo shots tonight.

Tomorrow should be nice, Church in the morning after an extra hour sleep, followed by some study for my exams and game four of the series tomorrow with C.C. Sabathia coming back against Joel Blanton.  Advantage has to go to the Yankees with Sabathia on the hill and thier bats starting to come to life. Should be another great game.

Peace,

Padre Steve+

Por Prof. Dr. Pe. Eduardo da Silva Santos (PUCRS)
Texto Extraído do artigo: A escatologia em alguns teólogos protestantes do século XX, Rev. Trim., Nº 149,  Set. 2005, p. 546-551, Porto Alegre

Como muitos outros teólogos protestantes da sua geração, Moltmann⁶⁴ edificou o seu pensamento teológico tomando como base o diálogo crítico com Barth e Bultmann⁶⁵. Defronta-se com eles, através da ótica que sempre lhe foi própria: a históricoprática ou social⁶⁶.

Sua obra principal, Teologia da Esperança⁶⁷, situa-se cronológica e ideologicamente, na época pós-bultmanniana da Teologia protestante. Segundo Cándido Pozo, o título expressa claramente o seu núcleo: Teologia da esperança, que não é somente o título de um tratado concreto, mas quer representar a concentração de toda a Teologia⁶⁸. 

Moltmann parte de uma intuição de que o grande problema, senão o único, que preocupa o homem contemporâneo, é o problema do futuro. A civilização de hoje, em oposição à maioria das civilizações que a precederam, é uma civilização inquieta e orientada para o futuro. Dessa intuição surge a esperança. Para ele, o futuro, desenvolvido como esperança, não é um tema entre outros, no pensamento cristão, mas o tema central, o tema único. Constitui o princípio e a chave do único problema para o homem atual⁶⁹. Para um teólogo, o fato de realizar uma concentração de toda a Teologia em torno à questão da esperança é sinônimo de fazer uma concentração de toda a Teologia em torno à escatologia. A escatologia, apromessa, é o horizonte futuro ao qual se dirige a esperança⁷⁰.

O povo de Israel encontrou a verdade de Deus em forma de promessa. Por isso, a escatologia se torna uma dimensão constitutiva da fé. Não se reduz a uma simples relação instantânea com o Deus que domina o tempo. A pregação de Jesus e o testemunho do cristianismo primitivo se expressam também no plano horizontal do tempo humano. Para Moltmann, a Teologia, que tem a tarefa de interpretar a estrutura escatológica da fé, é ao mesmo tempo “ciência da esperança” e “saber da história e da historicidade da verdade”. Isso acontece em um “apocalipse” e não em uma “epifania”.

Para Moltmann, a diferença essencial entre a fé bíblica, em relação a outros tipos de religiões, não consiste somente no fato de que aquela se relaciona com o Deus da revelação e não com os deuses da natureza. A diferença consiste na oposição entre o Deus da promessa e os deuses da epifania⁷¹. A escatologia não é, para Moltmann, um tratado das realidades últimas, um tratado que encerra o conjunto dos outros tratados teológicos. Para ele, toda a Teologia, e o cristianismo todo, é escatologia. Desse modo toda a Teologia é Teologia da esperança, pois já desde o seu início se encontra presente a esperança escatológica na realidade criada⁷².

Cándido Pozo salienta que o fato de haver colocado a problemática do futuro como o único que interessa ao homem de hoje distancia Moltmann do “presentismo” de Bultmann⁷³.

No entanto, a esperança necessita um ponto de apoio, um fundamento, para não converter-se numa utopia. É a Sagrada Escritura, concretamente a Epístola aos Hebreus, que assinala a fé como esse ponto de apoio⁷⁴. Mas a fé somente pode ser apoio da esperança, se possui um conteúdo real e objetivo. Essa é a preocupação de Moltmann, sobretudo a propósito da ressurreição de Cristo⁷⁵.

Nesse ponto é onde se dá a superação de Bultmann. A mensagem pascal transmitida pelos Apóstolos não tem o sentido de um convencimento subjetivo da ressurreição, ou seja, não se trata somente de os Apóstolos estarem persuadidos, em seu interior, da ressurreição, como pretendia Bultmann, mas que o fato da ressurreição é objetivamente certo. As convicções subjetivas, ainda que sejam dos Apóstolos, não bastam para evitar a possível utopia da nossa esperança. Somente a realidade dos fatos que a fé afirma pode oferecer-lhe um sólido fundamento. A única coisa que pode alicerçá-la com segurança é a certeza do fato⁷⁶.

Nesse sentido, Moltmann vai defender com muita insistência a historicidade da ressurreição de Jesus Cristo. Entende essa historicidade no sentido de que a ressurreição é um fato ao qual se pode atribuir um datação, ou seja, podemos

localizá-la em um determindado momento temporal. Com essa concepção da historicidade aplicada à ressurreição de Cristo, Moltmann aproxima-se notavelmente da concepção de historicidade de Pannenberg⁷⁷.

Considerando a historicidade da ressurreição de Cristo, Moltmann vai renunciar a toda e qualquer interpretação teológica do fato da ressurreição. Sem dúvida, afirmou a ressurreição de Jesus Cristo como o fato fundamental sobre o qual se apóia toda a fé cristã e, conseqüentemente, toda a esperança cristã. Entretanto, não tentará realizar nenhuma construção teológica em torno a ela, e nem pretenderá analisá-la, pois o fato da ressurreição resiste à análise, é profundamente opaco. Sendo assim, a ressurreição de Cristo já não pode ser apresentada como analogia do que é experimentável sempre e em qualquer lugar, mas sim como analogia daquilo que sobrevirá a todos⁷⁸.

O sentido da ressurreição de Cristo é remetido por Moltmann ao futuro. No presente, é um fato puramente afirmado, mas que não pode ser examinado teologicamente. A ressurreição somente guarda analogia com o que esperamos, com o que a esperança nos promete. Moltmann acredita que o teólogo tem que renunciar a qualquer tentativa de interpretação sobre o fato da ressurreição de Cristo e remetê-la ao futuro que espera, ao futuro no qual nós estamos implicados. Somente quando tenhamos experimentado nossa própria ressurreição poderemos entender o que significa que Cristo tenha ressuscitado⁷⁹.

_______________________________________
Notas Bibliográficas
64 Jürgen Moltmann, teólogo luterano, nascido em 1926 em Hamburgo, Alemanha. Estudou em Gotinga, foi professor em Wuppertal e Bonn, até que em 1968 acedeu à cátedra de Teologia sistemática na Universidade de Tubinga. Suas obras principais são: Theologie der Hoffnung (1964); Umkehr zur Zukunft (1970); Der gekreuzigte Gott (1972); Kirche in der Kraft des Geistes, ein Beitrag zur messianischen Ekklesiologie (1975); Zukunft der Schöpfung (1977); Trinität und Reich Gottes. Zur Gotteslehre (1980); Gott in der Schöpfung (1986) e Der Weg Jesu Christi. Christologie in messianischen Dimensionen (1990).
65 Cf. J. L. ILLANES; J. I. SARANYANA, op. cit., p. 377. E. VILANOVA, op. cit., p. 771. Cándido Pozo acrescenta, que, além do debate com Bultmann, Moltmann tinha a preocupação de manter um diálogo com o marxismo, e que esses são os dois pontos de referência indispensáveis para entender a sua obra (cf. C. POZO, op. cit., p. 64).
66 Seu pensamento parte dessa concepção da história como movimento orientado para o futuro, que Hegel, e sobretudo Marx contribuíram a potenciar e que o filósofo Ernst Bloch realçou ao publicar, durante a segunda metade da década de 1950, seu estudo sobre “o princípio esperança” (cf. J. L. ILLANES; J. I. SARANYANA, op. cit., p. 377).
67 O título original em alemão é: Theologie der Hoffnung.
68 Normalmente, na Teologia clássica, tanto católica como protestante, a esperança era objeto de um capítulo da Teologia. Para Moltmann, pelo contrário, sua obra não pretende escrever um capítulo teológico, nem tampouco um tratado teológico particular, mas estabelecer uma concentração de toda a Teologia dentro do tema da esperança (cf. C. POZO, op. cit., p. 65).
69 Cf. E. VILANOVA, op. cit., p. 772. C. POZO, op. cit., p. 65.
70 A dimensão escatológica, a tensão à consumação e, em consequência, à esperança, não são um elemento a mais da compreensão cristã das coisas, mas o elemento fundamental e decisivo (cf. J. L. ILLANES; J. I. SARANYANA, op. cit., p. 377).
71 Cf. E. VILANOVA, op. cit., p. 772.
72 Cf. J. MOLTMANN, El Futuro de la Creación. Salamanca, 1979, Prólogo.
73 Cf. C. POZO, op. cit., p. 66.
74 “A fé é a garantia do que se espera…” (Hb 11,1). Moltmann afirma que à fé lhe corresponde, sem dúvida, a prioridade, porém à esperança lhe corresponde a primazia. A fé sem esperança permanece inerte e vazia, carente de vitalidade. É a esperança quem impulsiona e move, e é ela quem permite ao crente situar-se de maneira plena frente à realidade. Essa afirmação da primazia da esperança se une, nos escritos de Moltmann, à apresentação da religião cristã como religião da promessa: o Deus que se manifesta a Israel é um Deus que atua e promete e que, em conseqüência, se abre ao futuro. Esta estrutura da religião entre Deus e Israel se mantém e é reforçada em Cristo: Cristo não é a culminação das promessas, mas sua confirmação definitiva. Na ressurreição de Cristo as promessas divinas não culminam, como se com ela a história se clausurasse, mas recebem uma suprema confirmação e, em conseqüência, se tornam universais, potenciando assim até ao extremo a orientação para o futuro” (cf. J. L. ILLANES; J. I. SARANYANA, op. cit., p. 377).
75 Moltmann faz a sua Teologia da esperança descansar na ressurreição de Cristo: é um acontecimento que parte do tempo e não cessa de orientar-nos para o futuro. As primeiras testemunhas da fé manifestam perfeitamente que, ao mesmo tempo que afirmam a ressurreição de Cristo já realizada, expressam também a espera ardente do seu “retorno” (cf. E. VILANOVA, op. cit., p. 772).
76 Cf. C. POZO, op. cit., p. 67.
77 Wolfhart Pannenberg é um teólogo protestante alemão. Segundo ele, é histórico todo acontecimento que pode ser colocado dentro de umas coordenadas de tempo e espaço. Desse modo, afirma que a ressurreição de Jesus é histórica, pois, ainda que, em seu conjunto, implique outros acontecimentos, cuja determinação local e temporal resista a ser situada numa sucessão contínua, pode ela mesma ser objeto de datação, ao menos aproximada, e podemos localizá-la geograficamente na Palestina, em Jerusalém e, pressupondo a historicidade do sepulcro vazio, neste mesmo sepulcro (cf. ENCICLOPEDIA DE LA FILOSOFIA GARZANTI, p. 735).
78 Moltmann nega que a ressurreição de Cristo tenha analogia com qualquer coisa que possamos experimentar. Essa afirmação é julgada por Cándido Pozo como estranha a um teólogo, pois toda a tentativa de inteligência de fatos sobrenaturais está fundamentada na existência de analogia com as realidades que nos são direta e naturalmente perceptíveis. Sem analogia não há possibilidade, nem de revelação e nem de conhecimento de Deus. Por sua parte, Moltmann afirma que a ressurreição de Cristo carece de qualquer paralelo na história que conhecemos (cf. C. POZO, op. cit., p. 71).
79 Cf. Id., ibid., p. 72.

Click for Part 1, Part 2, or Part 3.

Part 4: Our Larger Community: The Unity of All Creation

Other books enlarge our community perspective to encompass the earth and all creation. In 1959, Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man cast the cosmic Christ in evolutionary terms as the hyper-personal Omega Point, in whom an all-enveloping noosphere of human relationships culminates. A later disciple, Thomas Berry, dreams of a time when we abandon our assault against the conditions of our earthly existence and renew our participation in the grand liturgy of the universe. Jurgen Moltmann applies his theology of the Trinity to promulgate an ecological doctrine of creation, in which the creation is embedded within the community relationship of the Triune God.  In the seventh of eight essays, Wendell Berry critiques Christianity’s negative influence on the survival of creation. Norman Wirzba proffers a biblical correction in The Paradise of God that calls upon humanity to be servants of God’s creation.

Berry, Thomas. The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Club Books, 1988.

Berry, Wendell. Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community: Eight Essays, Pantheon Books, 1993 (chap. 7).

Moltmann, Jurgen. God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, Fortress Press, 1993.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man, Harper & Row, 1959.

Wirzba, Norman. The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age, Oxford University Press, 2003.

I’m watching The Shawshank Redemption. There’s this great dialogue between Andy & Red, with two conflicting ideas about hope.

Andy: ‘There are places in this world that aren’t made out of stone. That there’s something inside… that they can’t get to, that they can’t touch. That’s yours.’

Red: ‘What’re you talking about?’

Andy: ‘Hope.’

Red: ‘Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.’

It stood out to me because I’m also busily reading German theologian Jurgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope. It explores the hope we can have in Yahweh, the God of the bible. Hope in Yahweh is real hope. Andy and Red’s versions of hope both fall woefully short of the mark. The promises of Yahweh, the one true God, are made of stone. They are made of stone in that they are certain. They are sure. Yahweh is the one who promises, and he is faithful to his promise. Real hope is not waiting for some undefinable, invisible future. Such hope is baseless and powerless. Real hope is in the promise of Yahweh, a certain promise for a certain future, a new reality which God will bring about. Real hope anticipates the future promised by the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Real. Physical. Yes, real hope is within us; but only because of the God who is outside of us, outside of the world, who has come into th world in Jesus to reconcile all things to himself.

Real hope does not drive insane. But it may be dangerous. Whether or not it is dangerous depends on your perspective. Real hope opens our sight to the future reality that God has made possible through Jesus. It gives us strength to persevere. It also gives us a programme. Because real hope looks towards the sure and certain future of Jesus the Christ, we can begin to live in the present in light of that future. Real hope gives us strength to change the present, shaping things that they might also point towards that certain future. As Moltmann says, echoing Psalm 104, real hope sees us as part of God’s work to ‘change the face of the face of the world.’

Dangerous hope? Maybe. There will always be those who want the world to remain as it is. For them, real hope stands as an obstacle to their desire for power and authority which does not rightly belong to them. I, for one, look forward to the return of Jesus the Christ, who will make all things new. In the meantime, I can’t wait to keep enjoying the ways in which God chooses to use my brothers and sisters and I to put real hope into practice.

Halden muses about the independent relationship between theological study and personal piety and virtue:

Its hard to find a more scandalizing bunch of people than theologians, and not in the good way. One would think that among a guild of professionals dedicated to getting to know God as well as possible you’d see less infidelity, churlishness, affluence, and apathy towards injustice than in other professions.

You’d think that only if you bought religion’s own propaganda that religion and virtue were naturally specially correlated.  Or if you were generally naive enough to think abstract knowledge of ethics itself had any necessary effect on one’s personal inclination to be moral.

However this hardly seems to be the case. As I look at my own shelves of favorite theologians, I see at least a few adulterers, more than a couple of which were rather predatory towards the women they pursued. Likewise I’m hard pressed to find very many theologians who took the intentional practice of the Christian faith with much seriousness. Indeed, even going to church seems too much to ask from many theologians. Here a story comes to mind about how Jürgen Moltmann lies in a hammock every Sunday and thinks about ecclesiology — I don’t know if its true or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

I won’t even touch the degree to which most theologians do everything they can to avoid contact with, exposure to, or even having to see the poor.

Halden then wants to credit all the theologians’ good ideas to their being seized by the Holy Spirit despite their lack of virtue.  That makes much more sense I guess than taking their lack of virtue as a sign they’re no more specially and divinely guided into truths than any other human beings and that their clever and noble ideas are attributable simply to their natural intelligence just like any one else’s are.

Your Thoughts?

Why We Need The Apostles’ Creed:
I Believe In Jesus Christ and Him Crucified
I Corinthians 2:1-2

¹When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. ²For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

The Cross in Today’s World

We have come today to the third statement out of six about Jesus in the Apostles’ Creed.  Here’s what we have affirmed so far:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
the Maker of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:

Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the virgin Mary,

And today we sum up our belief in the passion of the Christ — his suffering, crucifxion, death, burial, and descent into hell during the three days his body was in the grave.  We believe in Jesus Christ, who…

suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried;

He descended into hell.

You may remember Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of The Christ, which hit movie theaters in 2004.  Because of the controversial nature of the film, Gibson distributed it himself, turning a $30-million investment into the highest grossing English language film ever, and the most profitable R-rated film in the United States.  The movie was rated R for its horrific and graphic violence, done mostly to the character of Jesus himself.

But despite the film’s success in America, Christians in the United States have a very different view of the cross of Jesus Christ.  We wear delicate crosses made of precious gold and silver around our necks, and dangling from our ears.  Hip hop artists wear gigantic caricatures of the cross dangling from outlandish chains, and pop artists like Madonna use the cross as a background prop in their music videos.

The cross itself has become the international symbol of the Christian religion, and of the humanitarian organization, The Red Cross.  It is an iconic symbol, but for much of the Christian community, the cross is strangely absent in our worship, devotion, or Bible study.  Seeker-sensitive churches intentionally leave all the signs and symbols of Christianity, which might be confusing to non-Christians, out of their buildings, including the cross.

As those who came from the Radical Reformer stream of the Protestant Reformation, we Baptists were offended by the crucifixes of our Roman Catholic friends, which graphically depict the Christ in agony on the cross.  Our theological position is that Christ is no longer on the cross, but is risen; therefore, Jesus should not be depicted as the suffering Christ, but as the risen Christ.

So opposed were the radical reformers to the crucifix, and the statuary and iconography of Roman and Orthodox churches, that they banned all images and statues of religious figures, including Jesus, as a form of idol worship.  Church buildings were constructed simply, and called meeting houses, to avoid the confusion with the Catholic church buildings from which they were separating themselves.

Rather than a high altar with a crucifix above it, the pulpit took center stage in the meeting houses of these radical reformers. Catholic churches were constructed with a center aisle so that worshippers entering the sanctuary could have an unobstructed view of the altar and the crucified Christ hanging above or behind it.  Baptist meeting houses were intentionally constructed without a center aisle, in contrast to the Roman Catholic church buildings.  Even in our architecture, our theology finds physical expression in the ways we configure and appoint our spaces for worship.

What About The Cross in the New Testament Church?

Paul explains his time with the fledgling church at Corinth in this way –

Why did Paul make a statement like this — “…to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

Why not Jesus Christ and his miracles?  Surely Paul would want to tell these non-Jewish believers about the miracles of Christ.

Why not Jesus Christ and his ethical teaching?  In the brutal world of the Roman empire, where power dominated, and military power held an iron grip on the civilized world, why not tell the Corinthians about turning the other cheek, going the second mile, and loving your neighbor as yourself?

Why not Jesus Christ and him risen?  The resurrection is the hinge-pin of the story of Jesus, for if we leave Jesus on the cross or in the tomb, his story becomes the sad story of another failed revolutionary, a Don Quixote figure tilting at the windmills of the Roman empire’s strength.

But Paul says, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

Leon Morris, in his massive volume titled, The Cross in the New Testament, begins his introduction with these words:

“This is principally a book about the cross, since in the New Testament salvation centres [sic] on the cross.”  He goes on to say, “The atonement is the crucial doctrine of the faith.  Unless we are right here it matters little, or so it seems to me, what we are like elsewhere.”

The gospel writers are not in agreement on all the details of the life of Christ.  Matthew and Luke are the only gospels that describe the conception and birth of Jesus.  So, even the event in the Apostles’ Creed that we examined last week — “conceived of the Holy Spirit, and born of the Virgin Mary” — is not included in two out of four of the Gospel accounts.

The gospel writers include different miracles, different parables, and different events in the life of Jesus.  Even those dramatic times of healing, feeding the five thousand, raising the dead, and walking on water are not included in all four of the Gospel accounts.

But when it comes to the cross, each of the Gospels includes the story of the cross and the crucifxion of Jesus.

Why did the apostles consider the cross central to the story of Jesus, and why are we so ambivalent about the cross today?

The History of the Cross

Why is it then, that in our 21st century sophistication, we’re so uncomfortable with the cross?  I grew up singing hymns like The Old Rugged Cross, At the Cross, Lead Me To Calvary, Power in the Blood, Nothing But The Blood of Jesus, and Are You Washed in the Blood, and other old-time hymns which reminded the singers of the cross, and the shed blood of Christ. But, today’s praise songs seldom refer to the cross or its result, the bruised body and shed blood of Jesus.  We sing about he awesome God, the glory of God, the wonder of God, the friendship of Jesus, and the majesty of heaven — anything but the cross and the blood.  The history and setting of the punishment known as crucifixion will help us understand some of the difficulty we have with it.

Paul introduced the centrality of the cross in the first chapter of I Corinthians with these words –

Corinth was an outpost of the Roman empire.  It was an immoral, corrupt city even by the standards of the first century.  The reputation of Corinth was so bad, that to be called a “Corinthian” was to be insulted and slandered.  Corinth was home to the temple of Aphrodite, where over 1,000 temple prostitutes performed the rituals of the temple.  It was a wild and wooly town, but Paul visits there, Aquila and Priscilla, and plants a church.

Upon Paul’s departure, the Corinthians quickly stray both theologically and morally.  We know more about worship in the Corinthian church than any other church in the New Testament because the Corinthians were doing just about everything wrong in worship that they could do.  They were trying to out-do one another in the practice of their spiritual gifts — speaking in tongues, interrupting each other with prophecies, shouting out words of supernatural knowledge, and letting worship degenerate into a frenzy of one-upmanship.  Even when taking the Lord’s Supper, the Corinthians turned communion into a drunken, gluttonous affair.  The well-to-do brought their own food, which they refused to share with those who had none.  In short, they were a train wreck of a church.

Paul’s letter calls them back to the center, and he reminds them that when he came to Corinth, he preached the cross of Christ.  That was his central message.

If they were such an immoral people, why not the ethical teaching of Jesus?  The Corinthians knew the great philosophers.  They knew the arguments for a kind of detached morality, even in the midst of their immorality.  They lived in the shadow of one of the great temples of the civilized world, the temple to Aphrodite.  A simple appeal to “live better” would have been totally lost on them.

But, if they wouldn’t listen to the call to live life according to God’s instruction found in the Ten Commandments and in the teaching of Jesus, what about the miracles of Jesus?  Surely, they would be impressed with those?  But Roman culture had its own mystical experiences.  The oracles, mystical figures who seemed to speak the words of the gods themselves, were located throughout the Roman world.  The most famous was the oracle at Delphi, but others existed as well.  Demon-possession, magic, the dark arts, and other forms of the supernatural were as common in the first century as they are in our world today.  Just as Pharaoh’s sorcerers and wisemen counterfeited the miraculous staff of Aaron with their own, the magicians and pagan practicioners of the first century also practiced the equivalent of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.  Ecstatic speech, foretelling the future, speaking as the voice of a god, healing, and other dark practices were well-known in the ancient world.

But the cross of Christ was the center for the Corinthian church, and for the Christian faith Paul knew.  Why?  And why did Paul refer to the cross as foolishness, and in another passage as a stumbling block or scandal to the Jews?

From the Roman perspective, crucifixion as capital punishment was borrowed from the Persians and others.  Crucifixion was reserved for criminals, rebels, slaves and the lower-class.  Seldom were Roman citizens or the upperclass foreigners executed by crucifxion.  Slaves and robbers particularly were crucified as a deterrent to those who might either try to escape their masters, or steal from others.

Crucifixion was gruesome business.  It was one of three methods of capital punishment used in the empire.  Crucifixion, being torn to death by wild beasts, and burning were the three methods of capital punishments.  Being torn by wild beasts required a public festival and an arena, so that was more difficult and involved.   But anyone could be crucified at anytime, and in a variety of methods.

Sometimes the stake was a single straight piece of wood.  At other times, cross pieces were used either in the form of a “T” with the crosspiece on top, or in the form most familiar to us — two pieces of wood that intersected with space above the victim’s head for some type of placard identifying his or her crime.  Limbs were either lashed to the cross, or fastened with nails.  Flogging and torture most often preceded the actual crucifxion, and the condemned was required to carry his cross, if able, to the public place of execution.

Public humiliation was as much as part of the punishment as was the victim’s actual death.  Stripped totally naked, the nude body was beaten, nailed to the cross, and lifted up for all to see as they passed by.  Jeers and taunts would greet those who had been robbers particularly, because the rural Judeans were often victimized by roving bands of robbers and criminals.

Bodies were often left on crosses to decompose, or be picked apart by wild animals and birds of prey.  The denial of burial was a further humiliation, particularly to the Jews.

As if all of that were not enough, the Jews had a special aversion to crucifxion and wooden crosses because of Deuteronomy 21 –

The Jews had a special aversion to crucifixion and crosses because they equated it with the Old Testament curse of being hung on a tree.  So, the offense of the cross, the scandal of the cross, the revulsion of the cross is that the Jews could not imagine that the Messiah of God, the Anointed One, would ever be hung on a tree. How could he, for anyone hung on a tree was cursed by God.  It becomes impossible for Jews to reconcile Jesus’ manner of death with his claim to Messiahship.

What of the Cross For Us Today?

But we are just as scandalized by the cross, just as offended by the gore, the brutality, the blood, and the stench.  Just as offended by the nakedness of Jesus, the taunts of the bystanders, the ridicule of the placard over Jesus head saying, “This is the King of the Jews.”  Like passing a bad car wreck on the highway, we don’t like the cross, and we turn our eyes from it as quickly as we can, and move on to other more pleasant aspects of our faith.

I have done that myself because the cross and Jesus’ death on it seems so barbaric, so crude, so primitive, and so messy.  My sensibilities are offended, and my sophistication and education rail against this as the central story of Jesus.  I like the Sermon on the Mount, or the feeding of the 5,000, or the raising of Lazarus, or even the resurrection of Christ himself as the central story of our faith.  But, none of those are, nor can they be.

We do not follow just an ethical teacher who gave us startling instructions on how we are to treat our neighbors.  We do not follow a mystic who could somehow gather the forces of the unseen world to make blind eyes sees, lame legs walk, and diseased bodies whole.  We do not follow a rebel, or an insurrectonist, as some would have us believe, who only sought to overthrow the unjust systems of society.

No, we follow the crucified Son of God.  And, Jesus himself was well-aware of the horror, the humiliation, and the inhumanity of the cross.  And yet, all the gospel writers tell us that at the end of his ministry, Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem, not for the praise of Palm Sunday, but for his death on the cross.

Mythology is full of stories of gods who were punished. Prometheus was nailed between two rocks in the ancient fable of the anger of Zeus. But Prometheus was freed and resumed his place in the pantheon of Roman gods.  Even in the popular literature of the day, the equivalent of our pulp novels, the hero of the story could be threatened with crucifixion, but just in the nick of time always escaped it.

But in Jesus, we have God who dies.  Jurgen Moltmann calls him “the crucifed God” — a story unlike any that has ever been told in literature or fable.  Gods don’t die, and certainly are not killed by mere mortals.  But in Jesus, God dies.  God provides a sacrifice for Himself of his only Son, who is himself God.  It is an event so radical, so impossible, so unlikely that those who think they know the One, True God best, cannot get past it.

In the cross, Jesus identifies with the slaves caught seeking freedom.  At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus takes the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue of his own hometown, Nazareth.  He unrolls the scroll and reads from Isaiah 61 –

¹ The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,
because the LORD has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners

Freedom for the captives, the slaves, can only be bought with a price.  Release from darkness for the prisoners can only come from the one who holds the keys.  By the way, and we don’t have time to dig deeply into this, the phrase in the Apostles’ Creed –

is meant to reflect Jesus preaching to the “spirits in prison.”  Peter writes in 1 Peter 3:18 — “For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit, ¹⁹through whom also he went and preached to the spirits in prison ²⁰who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built.”

Scholars disagree on exactly what that verse means, but I believe it means Jesus did what he said he would do, what he proclaimed his mission to be — to release from darkness those imprisoned, even if they’re imprisoned in world of the dead.  That is what Jesus meant when he said “the gates of hell” will not prevail, will not stand, against the onslaught of the Kingdom of God.

Paul, in my favorite passage about Jesus says –

⁵Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
⁶Who, being in very nature^[a] God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
⁷but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature^[b] of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
⁸And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
⁹Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
¹⁰that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

It’s all there in these seven verses –

• Jesus willingly choosing to set aside all that is rightfully his;
• Jesus taking the nature of a servant, a slave;
• Jesus making himself nothing, becoming a human being;
• Jesus humbling himself in obedience to God:
• Jesus obedience even extends to his death on a cross — the worst, most heinous death one could die;
• But Jesus being exalted to the highest place;
• And Jesus being given a name above all names;
• That at the name of Jesus every knee bows — every angel knee in heaven, every human knee on earth, every demonic knee in hell — every knee bows regardless of location or previous allegiance;
• And every tongue belonging to the hosts of heaven, the citizens of earth, and the condemned to hell, confesses that Jesus The Messiah is Lord;
• And God the Father is glorified.

Mel Gibson, who was both producer and director of The Passion of the Christ, used his own hands in the camera close-up of the Roman centurion nailing Jesus to the cross.  Gibson did that he said, because, “It was me that put Him on the cross. It was my sins [that put Jesus there].” — Wikipedia

But that’s not right.  Our sins did not put Jesus on the cross.  He put himself there.  He walked straight to Jerusalem knowing the death that awaited him.  He put himself on the cross to die for us, for the world, and for God’s creation.  He put himself on the cross to say to the slaves both living and dead, “I know your suffering, I endured your pain, I took your place.”

He put himself on the cross to suffer for us, to share our sorrow, our despair, our misfortune.  He put himself on the cross as though he were the people of God, the Temple and the sacrifice — as though he were the last hope of a sacrificial system that no longer worked.

He put himself on the cross as the Lamb led to the slaughter, as the scapegoat, as the fulfillment and final chapter in the broken religious imagination of God’s people.

Jesus put himself on the cross so that we would not be hung there.  He put himself on the cross so that we would not be abandoned by God as he was.  He put himself on the cross as example and embodiment of God’s love.

No, we did not put Jesus on the cross, and neither did the Jews or the Romans.  Jesus put himself there, suffered unspeakable torture, endured the ridicule of Romans and Jews alike, humiliated between two thieves.  His last act of redemption was to save a condemned thief, and ask his Father to forgive those who did not know what they were doing.

We need the cross.  Without it we are doomed.  Without it the incarnation is meaningless.  Without the cross we do not see the love of God, the suffering of God, and the sacrifice of God.  All for us.  All because of our sin.  All because we couldn’t do it for ourselves.  For even our death would not have brought us into fellowship with God, nor paid the penalty for our sin.

We need the cross, the scandal of our intellect, the offense to our sensibilities, the foolishness of preaching.  We need the cross because it stands at the center of Jesus’ story.  If all we know of theology and the Bible is that Jesus died for us on an old rugged cross, then we know enough.

Paul said, “I resolved to know nothing…except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

When a right-wing death squad broke into the living quarters of Jesuit priests in San Salvador in 1989, they killed six priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter.  Father Ignacio Ellacuria, rector of the university, was one of the priests killed.  The killers then drug the bodies of their murdered victims back into the house.  As they did so, they bumped into a bookcase, knocking a book to the floor.

When their bodies were found the next morning, lying in a pool of innocent blood was the fallen book — Jurgen Moltmann’s book titled The Crucified God.  Thousands around the world wept for those slain.  And I am sure God must have wept that day, too, for He knew the suffering and death of the cross.

I wish to follow up on my previous post on A Liturgy for a Miscarried Child with some words from the ‘Introduction’ to Moltmann’s groundbreaking thesis, Theology of Hope:

To believe means to cross in hope and anticipation the bounds that have been penetrated by the raising of the crucified. If we bear that in mind, then this faith can have nothing to do with fleeing the world, with resignation and with escapism. In this hope the soul does not soar above our vale of tears to some imagined heavenly bliss, nor does it sever itself from the earth. For, in the words of Ludwig Feuerbach, it puts ‘in place of the beyond that lies above our grave in heaven the beyond that lies above our grave on earth, the historic future, the future of mankind’. It sees in the resurrection of Christ not the eternity of heaven, but the future of the very earth on which his cross stands. It sees in him the future of the very humanity for which he died. That is why it finds the cross the hope of the earth. This hope struggles for the obedience of the body, because it awaits the quickening of the body. It espouses in all meekness the cause of the devastated earth and of harassed humanity, because it is promised possession of the earth. Ave crux – unica spes!

But on the other hand, all this must inevitably mean that the man who thus hopes will never be able to reconcile himself with the laws and constraints of this earth, neither with the inevitability of death nor with the evil that constantly bears further evil. The raising of Christ is not merely a consolation to him in a life that is full of distress and doomed to die, but it is also God’s contradiction of suffering and death, of humiliation and offence, and of the wickedness of evil. Hope finds in Christ not only a consolation in suffering, but also the protest of the divine promise against suffering. If Paul calls death the ‘last enemy’ (I Cor. 15.26), then the opposite is also true: that the risen Christ, and with him the resurrection hope, must be declared to be the enemy of death and of a world that puts up with death. Faith takes up this contradiction and thus becomes itself a contradiction to the world of death. That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present. If we had before our eyes only what we see, then we should cheerfully or reluctantly reconcile ourselves with things as they happen to be. That we do not reconcile ourselves, that there is no pleasant harmony between us and reality, is due to our unquenchable hope. This hope keeps man unreconciled, until the great day of the fulfilment of all the promises of God. It keeps him in statu viatoris, in that unresolved openness to world questions which has its origin in the promise of God in the resurrection of Christ and can therefore be resolved only when the same God fulfils his promise. This hope makes the Christian Church a constant disturbance in human society, seeking as the latter does to stabilize itself into a ‘continuing city’. It makes the Church the source of continual new impulses towards the realization of righteousness, freedom and humanity here in the light of the promised future that is to come. This Church is committed to ‘answer for the hope’ that is in it (I Peter 3.15). It is called in question ‘on account of the hope and resurrection of the dead’ (Acts 23.6). Wherever that happens, Christianity embraces its true nature and becomes a witness of the future of Christ’. – Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology‎ (New York/Evanston: Harper & Row, 1967), 20–22.

The Cross calls us to a justice that moves us beyond the law of retribution: “An eye for an eye.” As Moltmann observes, “If evil is recompensed with evil, then the one evil is always oriented on the other evil, because only in that way is it justified.” While scoffed at by many, there is a lot of truth to the ole saying that “an eye for an eye eventually leaves everyone blind.” The law of retribution has served—and continues to serve—an important role in the legislating sinful people amidst a fallen world. Yet it was never designed to eliminate injustice, only to legislate it.

What is needed is a fresh creative act of God. The Cross and Resurrection inaugurated the in-breaking of God’s inverted kingdom and with it a radically different law: the law of grace and reconciliation. This law manifests itself in the hearts of believers as they are embraced by the grace and forgiveness of God—“we love because he first loved us.” According to Bader-Saye:

“For Christians, then, reconciliation names that central concern that unites all justice issues. The classical definition of justice as “giving to each his due” simply fails as a Christian formulation…We worship a God who does not count our trespasses against us, who gives us not what is due to us but rather what is good for us, and this, not as entitlement, but as grace. And so we understand that whatever else we say about justice it must serve this central good, this central goal, of the reconciliation of all things. For Christians, then, all justice must be restorative justice” (“Violence, Reconciliation, and the Justice of God,” Crosscurrents (Winter 2003): 539).

The law of grace and forgiveness and the call for restorative justice is the particular calling of the church. The systems of the world do not understand it nor can they without the empowerment of the Spirit. They are still called to wield the sword (Rom 13:1-7). Let it be clearly stated that we, however, are searching here specifically for an appropriate Christian response to the world’s injustice. This is no critique of or prescription for worldly politics.  Or, to put it more provocatively, Jesus would not do well in the White House. He said himself, “My kingdom is not of this world.” 

The first task then is for the church to be a unique sign to the world that there is another way to be human, a new way to live life together. We have an alternative to the self-centered system of striving and competing with one another for goods that cannot fulfill our deepest longings. The only law we have is the law to love one another. “Whoever does this has obeyed the Law” (Rom 13:8). The Uppsala Assembly refers to the church’s task of being a “sign of the future unity of mankind”:

“The church is called to be a visible sign of the presence of Christ, who is both hidden and revealed to faith, reconciled and healing human alienation in the worshipping community. The church’s calling to be such a sign includes struggle and conflict for the sake of the just inter-dependence of mankind.”

Paul understood the church’s communal responsibility to be a visible symbol of God’s reconciling love and forgiveness:

“If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ… We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that I him we might become the dikiaosu;nh (justice/righteousness) of God” (2 Cor 5:17-21).

God has already poured out the new wine of the coming Messianic Banquet onto a dry and thirsty world, and new wineskins are needed to preserve it while we await the completion of the new heavens and earth. The church is called to become the new container for a new social ethic, the showcase of God’s dikaiosune, his restorative justice and forgiveness. We are the community where “eucharistic fellowship” invites others into a way of life not bent on securing one’s own existence at the expense of others. The church is set free from what Hauerwas describes as the “fevered search to gain security through deception, coercion and violence” (Community of Character, 51). For Christians ought to know who is really directing the course of history.

If Christians really believe God is wisely guiding the future of His world, and they accept the peculiar cross-shaped way He is going about it, then they can rest peacefully even while working diligently to faithfully bear witness to their crucified Lord.  This involves learning to live out of control.  More on that topic next time.

Know Hope

In an earlier post (Development and the Church Part I) I talked about my experience building houses in a village in rural Cambodia as part of a church ‘mission trip’, and posed the question: as a Christian, was it worth it?

My answer is a pretty simple ‘yes’. The reason is the particular shape of Christian hope.

Christian hope is based on Jesus’ resurrection: a real, physical resurrection to a new kind of life. The resurrection means that the new creation Christians are looking forward to has already begun in the present. As such, our hope is not simply for the future; it is a hope which makes a difference in the present. Tom Wright explores this idea and its implications much more eloquently than I:

“The message of Easter is that God’s new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you’re now invited to belong to it. And precisely because the resurrection was and is bodily, albeit with a transformed body, the power of Easter to transform and heal the present world must be put into effect both at the macro-level, in applying the gospel to the major problems of the world.”

Because of this truth, the Church is called to get to work in the present, to give signs of this hope to the world:

“It [Easter] is the story of God’s kingdom being launched on earth as in heaven, generating a new state of affairs in which the power of evil has been decisively defeated, the new creation has been decisively launched, and Jesus’ followers have been commissioned and equipped to put that victory, and that inaugurated new world, into practice.”

-Tom Wright, Surprised By Hope

Building in a Cambodian village

Don’t misunderstand what Wright is saying: the new creation that Christians hope for will not come in fullness until Jesus returns. Nevertheless, in and through Jesus, Christians have overcome the powers of darkness, and so have the freedom to work for the good of the world. This isn’t an option for some Christians who are interested in development, social renewal, medical aid; it’s part of the calling of the Church. Wright goes on to say that the Church should pursue justice, beauty and evangelism as an anticipation of the future we wait for; tangible signs of what is to come as we wait for it. They are part of our proclamation, so that the world might know hope, as found in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It is also, I think, worth pointing out that the works of hope we undertake in the present aren’t simply a sketch of something for the future. Rather, as with Jesus’ resurrection, what we do in the present will last into the new creation. Revelation 21, speaking about the city of the new creation, announces that “The nations will walk in its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Each day its gates will never close because it will never be night there. They will bring the glory and honour of the nations into it” (21.24-26). What happens in this world is not nothing. Christians know what future is in store, and it guides our actions in the present, while we wait. On Christan hope, theologian Jürgen Moltmann says this:

“In its eyes the world is full of all kinds of possibilities, namely all the possibilities of the God of hope. It sees reality and mankind in the hand of him whose voice calls into history from its end, saying, ‘Behold, I make all things new’, and from hearing this word of promise it acquires the freedom to renew life here and to change the face of the world.”

-Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope

What precisely will last into the new creation from this one, I do not know. I’m open to suggestions! But one thing seems clear: the mission of the Church is to bring hope to the world, doing so always in the name of Jesus Christ.

‘At the end of the war, both seminaries [established by the Confessing Church] were reopened in order to make it possible to study theology both at state universities and in independent faculties. I still think this double strategy was a wise one, for one never knows from which quarter the freedom of theology may be threatened’. – Jürgen Moltmann, A Broad Place: An Autobiography (trans. Margaret Kohl; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 71.

Then Joseph bought a linen cloth, and taking down the body, wrapped it in the linen cloth, and laid it in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock. He then rolled a stone against the door of the tomb.  Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where the body was laid (Mark 15.46-47 NRSV).

Holy Saturday is a day of total bleakness, there is no future, only pain and broken hopes. Israel, it would appear, is not going to be redeemed. The Christ has been nailed to a tree and now buried under the earth, Joseph, who had been expecting the Kingdom, gathered the body of his messiah and laid him in his tomb. Right here is a problem. The problem of suffering and broken promises.We can learn much about the problem of suffering by pausing and reflecting on that dark day, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Here resurrection is not permitted to verge upon the cross, instantaneously converting its death into life, still less to trespass death’s own borders and thus to identify the cross with glory. Instead, death is given time and space to be itself, in all its coldness and helplessness. (Lewis: 2001, 37)

Too often Christian theology makes light of suffering by immediately jumping to the future glory, or by looking for the ‘greater good’ that can be seen in the present. The problem of suffering remains a problem, and it must remain a problem. It is inevitable and indiscriminate, it disturbs our existence, invades our peace and destroys hopes. What is needed is a worldview that doesn’t pretend this isn’t the case. Rather, we need a worldview that acknowledges the inevitability of suffering and darkness.

God and suffering belong together, just as in this life the cry for God and the suffering experienced in pain belong together. The question about God and the question about suffering are a joint, common question… It is not really a question at all, in the sense of something we can ask or not ask, like other questions. It is the open wound of life in this world. It is the real task of faith and theology to make it possible for us to survive, to go on living, with this open wound. (Moltmann: 1981, 49)

By pausing and feeling the darkness of Holy Saturday much can be achieved in helping us to survive ‘with this open wound.’ How such a task will help form such a worldview is the goal of the next post.

The Way of the Moltmann

In June of 2006, I made the decision to read up on the best contemporary works on the doctrine of the Trinity.  I took the advice of a theology professor and checked out Jürgen Moltmann’s The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. I learned a new language, and the gift to speak another tongue with such terms as Kenosis and Theosis, Perichoresis and Hypostasis, mutuality and self-giving, as well as solidarity and liberation.  As I have studied Moltmann’s work in my free time (I have never been assigned any of his books for my course work), I have learned more about God, myself, and the world.  His approach to theology opened up a new way of thinking about the Christian life for me.  Moltmann’s theology cannot be fit into a box: we can hear the sounds of a process theist in his work one moment, and the next, he comes off looking like a radical Lutheran.  The nature of his work is very ecumenical, and that is the appeal for me.  Moltmann does not just have conversations with people that look and think like him; which is what we often see in liberal Protestant theology as well as conservative Evangelical folds.  In Moltmann’s works, what we witness is a tapestry of a faithfulness to Christian tradition, critical inquiries of questionable doctrine, as well as a generous dose of biblical proof-texting.  Given that Moltmann’s Theology of Hopeis the preeminent work of his scholarly career, I must warn the reader who finds the time to read and enjoy ToH that this post may be full of SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT!

Personally, I wish that I had read Theology of Hope seven years ago when I was an undergrad.  In those days, I had a large concern for the social injustices taking place in the world but at the same, I was more of an Arminian and soft Preterist in my Christian thinking.  I was completely unable to integrate my political concerns with my theology.  Dispensationalists, to their credit, brought back eschatology (the Last Days), as a concern for Christianity as opposed to the German and American liberal Protestant tradition’s complete rejection of Jesus of Nazareth’s as well as the apostle Paul’s Second Temple Jewish apocalypticisms.  Like a young teenaged boy who falls in love with a girl at the first sign of hello, I was won over when Moltmann said, “From the first to last, and not merely in the epilogue,  Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present.  The eschatological is not one element of Christianity, but it is the medium of Christian faith as such, the key in which everything in it is set, the glow that suffuses everything in the dawn of an expected new day,”[1]

A lot of persons who do systematic theology just assume that Christians can afford to discuss the “Last Things” last as something of an afterthought, sort of like running backs in football (with the exception of Barry Sanders) can give themselves all the glory without thinking about the offensive linemen’s hardwork.  We can just open up those theology textbooks, and first hear about either the ontological, cosmological, and/or existential evidential cases for the existence of God, and then from there, we go to the story of creation, the fall, Christology, the Church, the Holy Spirit (albeit always the shortest chapter), and then maybe the last things at the very end right before we reach the index.  That has to be a reason why the book of Revelation is placed last in the New Testament, right?

The Story of Israel’s God

The beauty of ToH is that Moltmann starts with the First Testament as the beginning point of his conversation while avoiding both the history of religions approach as well as the “reading Jesus into every Old Testament passage” method.  The chapter entitled “Promise and History” presents a theology of history and revelation which maintains hope as its center.  Taking his cue from Hebrew Bible scholar Walt Zimmerli, Moltmann argues that the word of God primarily comes in the form of promise.[2] With the word of promise, comes the freedom of human beings to obey or disobey, to live in hope or despair.  Despair, for Jürgen Moltmann, is a sinful state human beings suffer from in which due to our fail to strive to become divine on our own terms, we fall into resignation and fear.[3] The religion of Israel, as God of Scripture’s way of curing human despair, is, in Moltmann’s words ‘the religion of expectation.’  Promise gives human beings something to live for; it provides purpose for our lives, and human trust in the promises of God pre-supposes God’s faithfulness.[4] History, then, is redefined as the history of events in which God has acted to fulfill God’s promises.  God’s self-disclosure, then, is an act of God’s faithfulness to the covenant made between God and humanity.[5] Knowing God means re-cognizing God in the midst of God’s history of promises; God is present with us in God’s promises and God will be present with us in the fulfillment of those promises.  Truth, then is a reality, that we can know only in the future, and not something we can prove in the here and now.

The Resurrected Messiah

If the Truth of God is something that is part of a future reality, that which we are unable to receive in our present existence, then the Resurrection of Jesus the Messiah serves as the revelation of who God really is, as well as a “sneak peek’ into who humanity and creation will become.  The God of promise in the First Testament, according to Moltmann, is the deity responsible for the raising of Jesus the Messiah from death.  The God who gave the law to Moses, that same law which is bound up with the promises of God from God to Abraham, is the God who inspires the apostle Paul to declare that Jesus the Messiah to be the end (telos) of the Torah.[6] Far from being just another Hellenistic cult in its early days, Christianity is the religion where God has given Christ-followers the very same Spirit who raised the Savior and who quickens the dead according to Romans 8:11.[7] Because of Moltmann’s theology of history, historical/scientific proofs for the raising of Christ from death fall into the errors of modernist biases and into irrelevancy.  Rather, the resurrection is a history-making event because it is a hopeful-remembrance responsible for the transformation of human social existence; it also provides us hope for the history of the world.[8] This proposition is only binding on the part of the Christian who wishes to remain faithful to the God of promise and of Jesus Christ.  The Easter narratives take the Church beyond history and into the future that God has promised.

Ministry and Mission

Moltmann’s Theology of Hope would be meaningless for me if his notion that “Christianity is eschatology” did not have any practical application.  As I was reading the final chapter, “Exodus Church,” I kept thinking back to my call to ministry, my favorite Bible passage Judges 6:12, as well as my current job situation as the director of Children’s Ministries at a local church.  Normally, when one reads a book on constructive or systematic theology, these texts have nothing to do with day-to-day church life.  ToH is one of the exceptions for me, particularly as I reflect on God’s call on my life.  One of the modern ideas that Moltmann objects to is the notion that the Church remain an institution that promotes stability and order in the broader society, relegating church leaders to nothing more than the apologists of fixed traditions.[9] Existence is never questioned because security and certainty are valued above all else.  Moltmann calls the Church to reject this mode of being in favor of a community which raises the question of meaning in each generation:

“If Christianity, according to the will of him in whom it believes and in whom it hopes, is to be different and to serve a different purpose, then it must address itself to no less a task than that of breaking out of its socially fixed roles.  It must display a kind of conduct which is not in accordance with these.  That is the conflict imposed on every Christian and every Christian minister.  If the God who called them to life should expect of them something other than what modern industrial society expects and requires of them, then Christians must venture into an exodus and regard their social roles as a new Babylonian exhile.”[10]

Like Gideon in Judges 6, God calls Christians to reject our social roles imposed on us by the powers that be (in Gideon’s case, the son of the least ranked family in the least ranked clan in the least ranked tribe).  The God who joins us in and as well as who stakes God’s claim in our future at the crucifixion of Jesus the Messiah is the same God who calls that which is what it is not yet; Gideon was hiding in terror from the Midianites when the Angel of YHWH called him a “mighty warrior.”  Gideon refused to accept the marginalization that his culture had placed on him and became a great judge.  The church, defined by the American government is nothing more than another 501c3 charity organization which provides stability for American society; if the church steps outside that role, it is punished through taxation for not knowing its role so to speak.  Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope provides North American Christianity with a good starting point, to break away from Constantinian, imperialist churchianity and into practicing and living out the hope of the resurrection as well as the politics of the cross!

Truth and Peace,

Rod

Works Cited.

Moltmann, Jürgen. Theology of Hope : On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology. 1st Fortress Press ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.

[2] Ibid. page 104.

[3] Ibid. page 24.

[4] Ibid. pages 103-106.

[5] Ibid. page 116.

[6] Ibid. page 146.

[7] Ibid. page 162.

[8] Ibid. page 180.

[9] Ibid. page 322.

[10] Ibid. page 324.

Like many Evangelicals, I place a high importance on the historical Jesus. My hope in a future resurrection is anchored in the real historical events of the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus. During the end of the 19th century, conservative Christians began to address several attacks against the historicity of Jesus. This was the beginning of several debates which still persist today. The result of this movement was an apologia that focused on outward historical events rather than the Inner Light.  While it is important to recognize the events in the New Testament as historical, it is  the work of Christ within us that compels us to believe.  During that time (and for the most part today), the Fundamentalists and Evangelicals focused almost exclusively on proving that Jesus’ life was a real historical event. Likewise, liberalism spent a lot of time and resources attempting to prove that the events of the Bible were not historical. Perhaps the truth lies in Jurgen Moltmann’s statement that the incarnation did not happen in history but rather to history. From this perspective, Jesus actively invaded the space-time continuum rather than simply being a byproduct of it.

Regardless, this is my heritage and for better or for worse, has shaped who I am today.  However, something happened a couple of years ago when I first began to show symptoms of what I now know to be Primary Lateral Sclerosis. Prior to my sickness, when I thought of Jesus, I thought of the historical Jesus. To me, Jesus happened 2000 years ago. He lived 2000 years ago, died 2000 years ago and rose 2000 years ago. While these events were important to me (they provided a way for me to be saved from my sin) they were not subjectively attached to me. They were merely objective historical facts. Facts for which I was grateful to be sure… but still just historical facts.

What I have discovered in the past two years is that Jesus did not merely happen, He is still happening. Rather than seeing Jesus hanging on the cross from afar, I began to see the crucified Jesus right here next to me in every contemporaneous moment of my life. He didn’t merely live 2000 years ago, He  lives today. When he bids me to come and follow Him, it is not a call to just follow the historical Jesus, but to also follow the contemporary Jesus. When I face temptation, I no longer look to the historical Jesus, but to the Jesus who is alive and who is within me right in the midst of the temptation. In my suffering, I am strengthened by the historical suffering of Christ, but I endure because of the Christ who is right here beside me in my suffering. The historical Jesus is past tense. . . the contemporaneous Jesus is my ever present help in need.

This discovery has transformed my relationship with Christ from a static propositional agreement between two people to a dynamic relationship between a man and his Creator. It has moved me from contract to covenant. From the desert to the land of milk and honey. I still place a good deal of importance on the historical Jesus. After all, it was the event of God invading history which has made this great salvation possible. However, I no longer observe the historical Jesus… I commune with the contemporaneous Christ in me- my hope of glory and the hope of the world. My invitation to you is to join me in this quest for the contemporaneous Jesus. Hold fast to the historical foundation of our faith but seek also the Christ who is right here, right now forever present with you in every moment of your life.

How long, O LORD,
must I call for help before you listen,
before you save us from violence?
(Habakkuk 1:2-4)

He came closer to the city,
and when he saw it, he wept over it, saying,
“If you only knew today what is needed for peace!
But now you cannot see it!
(Luke 19:41-42)

There is no place worldwide where Habakkuk’s cry is not heard; and Jesus’ tears still wet our cities’ streets today. The world’s pain and suffering cries out for justice and peace. Yet what does it look like when they finally prevail? And, more importantly, when and by what means will it actually come to pass?  

So we ask, “What is needed for peace?” These perennial questions have had many proposed solutions. Yet, in a world where injustice still reigns supreme, it appears all human attempts to establish a global kingdom of peace and foster universal prosperity have so far ultimately failed.

Christians have taken different sides on this issue. Some quarters of “Christendom” have allied themselves with the political powers and socio-economic systems of the day, attempting to Christianize the worldly systems and use them as God’s instrument for peace and justice. Other Christians have separated themselves from society altogether, placing upon it the stamp of divine condemnation, and simply awaiting the rapture from this hopeless world.

Political and social activism is advocated by the former, while the latter focus solely on ‘soul-winning,’ shrugging off social involvement saying ‘it makes little sense rearranging the deck furniture on a sinking Titanic.’ Both of these approaches fail on biblical grounds. What then is the church’s appropriate response to the world’s injustice and suffering? And what ecclesial action (if any) is expected of us by God while we await the new creation — the kingdom “wherein justice dwells”?

Drawing significantly from the works of John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas and Jurgen Moltmann, the forthcoming series of posts will argue that the popular definitions of justice used in mainstream political and theological debate need to become more Jesus-shaped and our values more cruciform if the church is going to be faithful in its task of following the way of Jesus, i.e., the way of the cross, in the world today.  (Note: This is the unique call of the church, not the world, secular governments, etc.)

Join me on my search for a more Jesus-shaped, cruciform understanding of justice.  Stay tuned.

‘God will Transform: Destructive Judgement is a Godless Picture’

By Jürgen Moltmann

Since the Middle Ages, a conception of death and resurrection became fixed in Christian thinking that is deeply unchristian: the pictorial world of heaven and hell, the conception of a Last Judgement that rewards good works and punishes bad deeds to order the transition to the world to come. According to this notion, God’s judgement only knows two sentences: either eternal life or eternal death, either heaven or hell. If one asks what will come of the good visible creation, the earth and God’s other earthly creatures, the answer is everything will be burnt to ashes. This world will not be needed any more when the blessed will see directly in heaven without mediation by other creatures.

This idea of judgement is incomprehensible and hostile to creation. Are God the Judge and God the Creator different gods? Does the judging God destroy the faithfulness of the Creator to his creatures? This would be God’s self-contradiction or different gods. The Biblical trust in God is destroyed as well as trust in Jesus. The judging Christ with the two-edged sword has nothing to do with the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus of Nazareth healing the sick and forgiving sins. The idea of destructive punishment is an extremely godless picture.

However, there is another conception of world judgement. Injustice is a scandal. Victims do not die away. All the murderers do not find any rest. The hunger for justice remains as a torment in a world of violent crying. The powerless and oppressed hope for a world judge “who creates justice for those suffering injustice.” Israel’s psalms of lamentation are an eloquent example of true creative justice. God’s righteousness will “create” justice for victims, raising them from the dust and healing wounded life.

Later and under foreign influences, a universal criminal judge was made out of this saving Liberator in the biblical scriptures who judges good and evil and does not ask about the victims any more. A deed-oriented moral judgement according to the standard of retributive justice came out of a victim-oriented expectation of saving justice. Correcting this aberration means christianizing the idea of judgement so it is oriented in Israel’s original experience of God’s creative, saving and healing justice.

The New Testament offers staring-points. The New Testament understands Judgement Day as the “day of the Son of man” on which the crucified and resurrected Christ will be revealed and all the world before him. Both will appear out of their concealment in the light of truth, the Christ now hidden in God and the person hidden from him/herself. The eternal light will be revealed to them. What is now hidden in nature will be transparent because persons are physical and natural beings connected with the nature of the earth. We cannot be separated from the nature of the earth, neither in the resurrection nor in the end-time judgement.

Christ will be revealed as the crucified and resurrected victor over sin, death and hell, not as the avenger or retaliator. Christ will be revealed as the Everlasting One and leader of life. He will judge according to the justice he proclaimed and practiced through his community with sinners and tax collectors. Otherwise no one could recognize him.

God’s justice is a creative justice. The victims of sin and violence are supported, healed and brought to life by God’s righteousness. The perpetrators of sin and violence will experience a rectifying transformative justice. They will change by being redeemed together with their victims. The crucified Christ who encounters them together with their victims will save them. They will “die off” in their atrocities to be “reborn” to a new life.

Helping and supporting the victims and straightening the perpetrators as the victory of God’s creative justice over everything godless, not the great reckoning with rewards and punishments. This victory of divine justice leads to God’s great day of reconciliation on this earth, not to the division into blessed and damned.

Seen this way, the Last Judgement is not the end of God’s works. It is only the first step of a transformation out of transitoriness into intransitoriness. The new eternal creation will be created on the foundation of justice. Because the judgement serves this new creation of all things, its future-oriented justice is creative and not only a requiting justice referring to the past. It was the mistake of Christian tradition in picture and concept, piety and teaching to only see the judgement over the past of this world and not God’s new world through the judgement.

If a social judging occurs in the Last Judgement, it is in truth a cosmic judgement because the coming Christ is also the cosmic Christ. Already in the psalms, YHWH is called “to judge the earth.” All shattered relations in creation must be straightened out so the new creation can stand on the solid ground of justice and abide in eternity. All creatures should share in eternal being and in God’s eternal vitality. That will be a fundamental change of the cosmos and life. “God will indwell all things and be present in all things.” Then the nothingness will be destroyed and death annihilated. The power of evil will be broken and separated from all creatures. The misery of separation from the living God – sin – will end. Hell will be destroyed. Then the reign of glory will begin.

[Source: Publik-Forum; HT: Marc Batko, via Jürgen Moltmann group]