The article below is not a review of all the theologies that informed the twentieth century, but only one theme really. It tackles the theological starting point for so much of western theology following the horrors of the 1940’s, that is, the ‘Theology of the Cross’ borrowed from Luther but revived after WW2.

A Critical review of The Twethieth Century Theology of the Cross

A contemporary appraisal of twentieth century criticism and its Christological ramifications should not ignore the Theology of the Cross

The Theology of the Cross is, in Jurgen Moltmann’s words, ‘hard core’ theology, by which he means that the ‘hard core’ of the Church is its Christology. This core is nominated even more specifically, further discriminating amongst the accounts of the life and works of Christ and selecting the crucifixion. The Church’s identity consists only ‘in the crucified Christ’. By this is meant that the Church cannot be effective / relevant / prophetic / meaningful simply by adapting to the criticisms against it that contemporary culture offers, even when culture’s criticisms of the Church are meaningful and in some sense useful. The Church must be the Church by proactively bringing the theology of the cross to bear as radical critique of contemporary culture.

The cross of Christ, in its more thoughtful treatments, makes sense of God, interprets God. This interpretation is not unique but is concordant with ‘the Israelite tradition’ instantiated in the writings of the prophets in which God is not apathetic to human passion, but, rather, highly involved and shows himself capable of being injured by his people’s imperviousness to his love —

This ‘Israelite tradition’ evident in both Testaments contrasts radically with later Christianity’s Augustinian and Thomist application of Platonic and Aristotelian suspicion of projections of pathos onto God:

The great integrators of Greek Socratic wisdom and Christian theology suggest that, whereas for the post Socratic philosophers, God’s apathy means being unconcerned with human emotion, too ‘big’ and important to be concerned with the pettiness of human suffering. Like nature itself, the Greek philosophers’ God was impervious to both suffering and ecstasy in the human subject. In contrast, the Christian version as it was applied by Augustine and Aquinas is more like this: God is ‘above’ concern with God’s own suffering, but carefully concerned with ours. Witness John’s Jesus on the cross taking time from his own predicament to consider carefully the predicament of those he was leaving behind: ‘Behold your mother. Woman behold your son’.

In contrast with both these positions, let’s call them the Socratic Greek and then the Christian – Greek positions, Moltmann for one prominent twentieth century example, and before him the Lutheran position worked out through the protestant reformation, both find in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures a particularly empathic picture of God. Her God is presented as being intimately involved in human suffering. God shows himself as being able to ‘be hurt’ by the rejection as his advances of divine love towards his beloved are left unrequited, betrayed, turned against him etc.

The Theology of the Cross’s portrayal of the history of apathetic and pathetic theology in Christian and Jewish theological thought opens directly onto our critical Christological discussion:

“In the ancient world, early Christianity encountered apatheia as a metaphysical axiom and an ethical ideal with irresistible force…the word apatheia has many connotations. It means incapable of being affected by outside influences, incapable of feeling, as in the case of dead things, and the freedom of the spirit from inner needs and external damage…since Plato and Aristotle the metaphysical and ethical perfection of God has been described as apatheia. According to Plato, God is good and therefore cannot be the cause of anything evil, of punishment and sorrow. The poetic conceptions of the gods as capricious, envious, vengeful and punitive, which were meant to arouse the emotions, pathe, among the audience of the tragedy…are rejected as “inappropriate to God”…it is inappropriate to present God as the auctor malorum. As that which is perfect, the Godhead needs nothing… “it would be absurd if anyone were to assert that he loved Zeus.”…As actus purus and pure causality, nothing can happen to God to cause him to suffer….Anger, hate, and envy are alien to him.”

In this way Twentieth Century Theology of the Cross proceeds to abandon speculation about the apatheia of God, even though it has, in the Church’s past, given theology such axioms as ‘envy is far removed from God’. It instead paints a picture that in Jesus there is mainly pathos and that this pathos is the definitive revelation of God to humanity. Interestingly the most pathos inflected moments (and therefore the moments most important in terms of revelation, according to this view) are Jesus’ agonies, the torture that is both physical and psychological that is experienced on the cross.

Much is revealed about the provinence of twentieth century theologies of the cross by Moltmann’s disclosure of the tradition from which he draws:

There is a good deal of support in tradition for the theology of the cross, but it was never much loved. It begins with Paul, to whom its foundation is rightly attributed, and then leaps forward to Luther, in whom it is given explicit expression and is present today in the persecuted churches of the poor and the oppressed.

One possible problem with this theological emphasis, this making suffering the central event, the central revelation of God in Christ, is, perhaps, that it wasn’t always done. Particularly germane to our objections here is this — it wasn’t necessarily the method of the first interpreters, the witnesses we refer to as the speakers, writers and collators of the ‘apostolic witness’. For these interpreters the central event, the event that interpreted all other events in the life and work of Christ, was not the crucifixion but the resurrection. This above all was the inner criterion of all Christian theology. The experience of the resurrection awakened a subsequent interpretation of the life, work and, yes, the deportment in death of Jesus Christ.

James Alison proposes that the starting place for the task of constructing Christology is an encounter with the resurrected Christ; he puts forward a knowing of Jesus through the lens of the resurrection. On the cover of the edition of Alison’s first book Knowing Jesus is a photograph of a dead body lying ignominiously in debris at the bottom of what appears to be a high concrete wall. The back cover includes an explanatory note: ‘photo by Steve Moriarty 1989. A body discovered by children playing near Lake Ilopango, El Salvador. An investigation by journalists failed to determine whether the man was a victim of the left, the right or of common criminals.’

Alison argues, here at the beginning of his published body of work, for the pre-eminence of the apostles’ encounter with the resurrected Christ among the events and dramas of the gospel texts. Perhaps calling to mind the poignant photograph from the cover, he begins: ‘During the last twenty years tens of thousands of Guatemalan Indians have been murdered. It is highly likely that among them was at least one thirty-one-year-old man. Yet we hear of no growing movement to proclaim that Francisco, let us say, is God’.

In the development of his body of work Alison continues to mine this vein, first posing, and then beginning his answer to one of the critical questions about the death of Jesus Christ: What makes it unique? — ‘The answer, as you know’, he writes, ‘is the resurrection’. He immediately begins his project of ‘fleshing out’ the picture of the resurrection as he interprets the received record of the apostolic witness to this event.

What we are interested in exploring is a kind of qualitative difference that re-locating the resurrection at the centre of interpretation makes to Christology which has become, in the recent past, perhaps more ‘cruci-centric’.

The first qualitative thing that might be said is that the twentieth century understandable pre-occupation with suffering may be replaced with a growing consciousness of ‘new life’. It is legitimate to want to bring the same hermeneutical rigour to the resurrection accounts that has been devoted to studies of the cross. ‘What is the quality of Jesus’ resurrection?’ Jesus’ subjective experience of being crucified has been kept in mind, highlighted, projected onto Christology (his ‘God-forsakenness’ etc.). Can we ask, sine ira et studio, ‘what was Jesus’ experience of being resurrected?’ That is, in the same way we are encouraged by the conventions of first century literature to make conclusions about the ethos of a typical ‘hero’ by their deportment at the hour of death, we ought to have the courage of these our reasonable literary-critical convictions and extend them to our interpretation of how Jesus was in his final ‘triumph’, that is, in his resurrection. Let us see; look! does not take the opportunity to gloat, he does not display any desire to exact payment; he shows no appetite for revenge, physical or even moral. There is no sense of Christos Victor that emanates from the victrorious Christ himself. Quite the opposite. He does not behave like a triumphant hero who has just won in a very closely run contest. From his behaviour it looks as though the thing was never in doubt. This irenic personality is, precisely because of his lack of self-concern, this strange and attractive ‘traumatised but not traumatised’ personal bearing — this personality is uniquely able to bless, is concerned with the grief, shame and emotional needs of others but not his own, and bespeaks to us a subjectivity of relaxed plenitude.

Here Nietzsche’s insightfulness about victims is especially helpful because of its inapplicability to the risen Christ: if Jesus is a victim, he certainly does not behave like Nietzsche’s version of ‘the victim’! Consonant with Nietzsche’s dismissal of vindictive victimhood, James Alison proposes that the risen Jesus was experienced by the apostolic group as, among other things, a non-vindictive forgiving presence; that it was this experience of being forgiven that changed them. In other words, the effect of a contemplation of the cross upon them was mostly productive of the subjective experience of fear. It was the experience of the resurrected presence which was capable of dispelling those fears, and the ‘theology of the cross’, if we were to allow this anachronism, that they had was only the proof of the power of the resurrection. To this theology the cross is necessary, along with its demonstration of the God who suffers, but not primarily to encourage other victims with gestures of solidarity in suffering, but in order to convert the disciples who had abandoned Jesus, and had thereby contributed to his suffering. What matters is their abandonment of God, rather than, in Moltmann’s assessment, Jesus’ subjective experience of ‘God forsakenness’. Their abandonment of him is a painful memory, but this fact, mercifully, is not dwelt upon by the risen Jesus.

This magnanimity is then the Christian distinctive, and experiencing it is converting. Magnanimity becomes what is highlighted in subsequent interpretations of Jesus’ life and witness. It is not the sufferings of the cross which the gospel writers showcase — the gratuitous violence that marks such representations as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is absent from the gospel accounts –– but instead the sayings from the cross, the magnanimous response of the sufferer is highlighted. ‘Father forgive them for they don’t know what they are doing’ belongs with the questioning of the subjectivity of the disciples who walk along the road to Emmaus:

‘What were you talking about while you walked along?’

‘Are you the only person who doesn’t know what things have taken place? they say;

‘What things?’ Jesus asks — speciously.

Jesus is not thinking about the events in the way that they are — such a presentation of an alternative subjectivity differentiates the crucifixion and the resurrection from other tragi-heroic scripts for the ‘survival’ of a victim — the obvious miracle of new life itself not-with-standing: To a group whose consciences were afraid, the risen Jesus immediately says, ‘Don’t be afraid! Peace be with you!... Is there anything here for me to eat?’ Small words, but what they left unsaid, and the graciousness of leaving those words unsaid, is what really mattered. A salutary lesson is that to announce forgiveness is to remind of transgression. The good news is apatheia in relation to its own suffering and having once being victimised. Jesus shows himself dead, inured to the terrors of death, apathetic to its power to intimidate, and willing to go anywhere, even to the depths of hell, but still refusing the temptation to gratuitously and selfishly inspire shame in others who abandon him in his intrepidity. In terms of a construction of Christology the silence from the resurrected one about his own so recent experience of trauma and suffering speaks gracious volumes. The witnesses of this wonder are invited to relax and then there is blessing and a light-heartedness about a bite to eat. These small phrases are experienced directly as the most authentic forgiveness possible. They are the words of eternal life, perfect words to banish shame and gather a group together as friends. They are the means of building a truly holy community.

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