The Crucified God

by Matthew Sitman

Wesley Hill struggles with the German theologian Jurgen Moltmann’s approach to “the death of God”:

Moltmann drew on Elie Wiesel’s story (found in Night) of the dying boy in Auschwitz, hanging from a gallows. Someone in the crowd witnessing the execution said, “Where is God?” And another voice replied, “He is there, hanging on that gallows.” God is dead, in other words. Or if God is not dead, he deserves to be. Moltmann takes that story and says, in effect, “Yes, that is exactly right. God has come to Auschwitz, through his death in Jesus Christ. God has suffered with us. God has died with us.” Only such a God—only a God who suffers—can be believed in.

If you wish to read the Gospel of Mark that way, then many people, Moltmann included, think that you need to marginalize Luke’s Gospel. Hans Urs von Balthasar, while, in my view, treating these issues far more subtly than Moltmann, saw this clearly. Luke’s Gospel has no cry of dereliction. Instead of screaming out in agony, Luke’s account has Jesus’ final words as: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” And therefore, it seems, Luke’s Gospel isn’t as well suited as Mark’s is for meeting the challenge of protest atheism. Here’s von Balthasar: “Christ’s cross… must not be rendered innocuous as though the Crucified, in undisturbed union with God, had prayed the Psalms and died in the peace of God.” In other words, we cannot continue to allow Luke’s version of the story to be read alongside Mark’s as though a harmonization were possible. At least, not anymore. Not after the Holocaust.

This passage from Walter Moberly helped Hill see the problem differently:

[O]ne should not so romanticize the process of moral and spiritual struggle that the Lukan depiction of Jesus as one who maintains apparent serenity and trust amidst suffering is downgraded; as though an anguished and in some ways vacillating struggle for faith is intrinsically superior to a steadily trusting faith; or as though a steadily trusting faith did not involve its own kind of moral and spiritual struggle.