Category: No Right to Forgive

No Right to Forgive, Part Five: To Endure the Cross

Growing up, my family attended a Lutheran church, of the Missouri Synod branch. I went through confirmation in this church, and got my first memorable church experiences there. My love for Scripture and theology was first kindled there, I think, even as in later years I rejected the faith and church. One thing I remember hearing – I don’t know from who, perhaps our pastor, or a youth leader – was that one of the ways we were different from the dreaded Roman Catholics was that our crosses at the front of the sanctuary didn’t include a replica of Jesus’ broken, bleeding body. The Catholic practice of this was morbid, and frankly not really very appropriate for a church. Our unadorned cross was much more acceptable, and was the proper way to represent the faith. Crucifixes were idols, in a sense.

I always found this to be odd, and yet also right in some way. I mean, we talked about the crucifixion a lot, and a lot of illustrated Bibles had some image of Jesus on the cross, so it couldn’t be that weird to have a crucifix in the church. But it did seem a little morbid, to have a replica of a dead body, even if it was the body of our Lord about to be resurrected. I filed the thought away, but it stuck with me enough that I still get a little niggle in my head anytime I see a crucifix. Is death really how we want to present our faith, the little voice whispers? It’s not exactly the best marketing strategy.

“The death of Jesus on the cross is the centre of all Christian theology”, writes Jurgen Moltmann in chapter 6 of The Crucified God. Evangelicals want to run past it to the glory of Easter morning. Progressives want to roll the clock back and center the life of Jesus. Both are understandable. But life, while vitally important, was always leading to this moment. And Easter morning doesn’t come without noon on Friday. Christianity is neither a mere set of ethical rules for life, or a gospel of prosperity and joy. Christianity is Christ crucified. The ethics are fulfilled in the willing and suffering death of the Servant. The glory is made manifest in the weakness and the godforsakenness. As Karl Barth reminds us, all of history points to the cross.

We’ve spent this week thinking about the reality of human suffering, and what that reality means for our understanding of who God is and what God is like. We cannot begin to answer those questions without the cross. I’ve told you multiple times this week that I won’t be giving you any firm answers or resolution to the problem of theodicy. I’m sticking to that promise. But, in Christian theology, everything points to the cross, as the measure of reality and the fulfillment of history. We can’t really answer the question of why suffering exists. But we can look at the cross to help us see what it means for God.

Moltmann also writes, quoting the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, “The death of Jesus is a statement of God about himself.” Read that sentence again, and make sure you get all the words in the right order. The grammar is crucial. It’s easy to skim over such a sentence, reading it as “the death of Jesus is a statement about God himself,” as if we are using the death of Jesus on the cross to explain the nature of God. While we do that later on, the starting point of our work is to recognize what is really being said here: before we can make inferences about God from our meditation on the Crucifixion, we must recognize that God is making a statement first about God’s own self in the death of Jesus on the cross. Before we can speak, God must speak first, and our response must take this speaking into account. The cross isn’t just something that happened to God; the cross is God speaking to us, revealing God’s own self.

Remember what the protest atheist taught us yesterday? A god who cannot suffer and cannot even die is a very poor being. It’s a powerful condemnation of classical theism, the concept of an all-knowing, all-powerful, immutable God. But what God tells us on the cross is that God is not immutable or immovable. God on the cross is telling us, to quote Paul, that God in the form of Christ “emptied himself…humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” In that moment – and always – God was and is willing to empty God’s self of power and glory, and to suffer and to die, to experience how it feels to be abandoned and to not know what the next moment will bring. This is what God tells us through the cross. God is far from an unmoved mover, and loveless beloved. God doesn’t cherish omniscience and omnipotence above all else. No, far from it.

More from Moltmann: 

“When the crucified Jesus is called the ‘image of the invisible God’, the meaning is that this is God, and God is like this. God is not greater than he is in this humiliation. God is not more glorious than he is in this self-surrender. God is not more powerful than he is in this helplessness. God is not more divine than he is in this humanity.”

In the face of the theist and the atheist, we must point to that morbid and foolish and shocking crucifix, and insist, this is what God is like. You all are worshiping and arguing with a god that is no god at all, but is instead a dim facsimile of humanity itself. The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob is the still, small voice of Elijah. Blessed are the meek, said Jesus, for they shall inherit God’s earth. 

This week, we have contemplated the krisis of the church, and the anguish of Ivan Karamazov. Why do we suffer, we ask again and again? It’s the question I bump up against all the time. Why is Gaza happening? Where was God in Auschwitz? What kind of justice is a justice that just allows these things to happen, only ever reacting, never proactive?

The church isn’t completely empty of answers about this. We are the hands and feet of Christ, we are reminded. We see injustice in the world, and we are called to respond. But that doesn’t get at the root of the problem. Why is it on us to solve God’s mess? God set this all in motion. Why are we on the hook? To go back to our protest atheism, why should we put up with this? Why stick around? Can we not turn in our ticket and say no, thank you?

I have some thoughts about the why questions. One day I’ll write more about those things here. I want to explore very soon the story we tell about God and the theological concept of justification, as laid out by Paul. Both of those series will touch on the whys. And I also want to spend some time grappling with process theology, a strand of thinking that I have a love-hate relationship with. There, too, we will approach the whys. But for now, because it is Good Friday, and the darkness overcomes us at the noon hour, as we prepare to hold vigil before the tomb, I don’t think this is really the time to be looking for that kind of hope. We must sit in the darkness and anguish of Friday before we can get to Easter morning.

I named this series after a line from that Dostoevsky quote we started the series with. “She has no right to forgive him,” Ivan declares of the mother who lost her child. This violence, and her suffering, deserve anguish and anger and hate. We cannot forgive such acts. We very rarely do.

We should say those words to Jesus on the cross too. You have no right to forgive your murderers. We have a share in this moment on this cross, and what an utter betrayal it is to be deprived of you, O Lord, and yet you still extend forgiveness. What right do you have?

We don’t comprehend the shocking nature of this act of forgiveness, I think. We are two thousand years on from it, and it is such a common part of the story, it has lost its ability to scandalize our sense of justice. Jesus has just been subjected to the most cruel torture and mockery, and is now being killed in the one of the most humiliating and painful ways humanity has come up with. Who in their right mind forgives in that moment? Could you? 

We have no right to forgive these things we’ve had done to us. We have no right to be forgiven.. But we do have an obligation. Forgiveness is a non-negotiable. Those aren’t comforting words to whisper to the grieving mother. Ivan is right to nurture her anger and her hurt. But as a people, we Christians are called to find forgiveness, especially in the hardest moments. Not forgetfulness. Not without repentance. Not with a requirement of immediate and full reconciliation. But we do have to figure out this forgiving thing, together.

Only through the cruciform suffering love that forgiveness is motivated by do we undo the violence that leads to the cross. Jesus showed us that we defuse that kind of hate by loving, radically and wastefully and abundantly, by practicing grace. This is where we gain a glimpse of what God is all about.

Where I want to end is with Martin Luther. Moltmann, at the beginning of his section on theism (which we covered in part three), spends some time engaging Luther as a refutation of pure natural theology. Natural theology is the idea that God can be known solely from human experience or perception of the world. This is in contrast to revelation, which is the knowledge of God obtained through something like Scripture, or the actual words of God. Moltmann is not Barth, and doesn’t throughout his works wholly reject natural theology, but he does here show that he places a particular importance on the cross as divine revelation of God’s nature.

Martin Luther

Moltmann writes that Luther used the cross as “a new principle of theological epistemology”, which is a theological way of say that the cross, rather than just being a vehicle for contemplating vicarious suffering as a spiritual practice, is instead the ground for all knowledge of God. The cross, in this sense, becomes what we have been describing above: the center and the source of all God-talk. We cannot understand the Hebrew Scriptures, the like of Christ, Easter and Pentecost, the Epistles, all of human history, without understanding the cross as the crux of it all. 

For Moltmann, this reading of Luther is key to overcoming the classical theism that infects the church. Let me quote and unpack a particularly dense section of Moltmann to illustrate this further:

“For Luther understands the cross of Christ in a quite unmystical way as God’s protest against the misuse of his name for the purpose of a religious consummation of human wisdom, human works and the Christian imperialism of medieval ecclesiastical society.”

What he is saying here is that Luther viewed the cross as, like we said above, a statement of God about God, which works to undo the ways humanity appropriates the name of God to justify ungodly things like imperialism, violence, nationalism, and other Power and Principalities. A theistic God, steeped in glory and power, becomes a justification for all manner of sin. But the cross as the standard of the divine posits a wholly different God, one who becomes powerful in weakness, to quote Paul. This is the only true God, the one on the cross. “Christ the crucified alone is ‘man’s true theology and knowledge of God.’”

This is the key insight of Moltmann’s The Crucified God. God is first and foremost, primarily, found on the cross, on Friday, in Golgotha. If we truly want to know what God is like, we must not remove Christ from our crucifixes but truly contemplate him there, in his humiliation and vulnerability and death. All other knowledge of God – everything written in Scripture, Old and New, all the words of theology and devotion and praise and hymnody and evangelism – it all must conform to Christ crucified, or it is no word about God at all. 

This is not an easy word. Cruciform Christianity is a hard word. As Moltmann writes, “To know God means to endure God. To know God in the cross of Christ is a crucifying form of knowledge, because it shatters everything to which a man can hold and on which he can build, both his works and his knowledge of reality, and precisely in so doing sets him free.” This gets at our on-going question about the presence of suffering. I still don’t have any answers for you. I’m not even willing to disavow the righteous protest of Ivan and protest atheism; I’m inclined to affirm it, to rage against God. But the cross is a convicting moment for all of us. We don’t know why suffering exists. But what we do know is that God emptied God’s own self of all power and glory and might, and took the form of a human being, and died a cruel and humiliating death, in the desire to ensure for us an eternal life in Christ. We cannot dismiss that action, anymore than we can dismiss the suffering of the world. It is all there in the cross, and as Moltmann says, it is something we must endure.

I said at the beginning of this series that none of this may be satisfying. It may not be. That’s ok. Its Friday. Christ’s body is on the cross, and he is dead. Today, we weep, and our hope flees our souls. Sunday morning is a long way away. 

Job replied:

“I’m not letting up—I’m standing my ground.
    My complaint is legitimate.
God has no right to treat me like this—
    it isn’t fair!
If I knew where on earth to find him,
    I’d go straight to him.
I’d lay my case before him face-to-face,
    give him all my arguments firsthand.
I’d find out exactly what he’s thinking,
    discover what’s going on in his head.
Do you think he’d dismiss me or bully me?
    No, he’d take me seriously.

Job 23:1-7, The Message translation

No Right to Forgive, Part Four: A Poor and Arrogant God

The section of chapter 6 of Jurgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God, titled “The Theology of the Cross and Atheism”, has probably influenced my thinking on theological matters more than any other piece of writing. My take on theology is invariably grounded in the idea of a God who can – who did! – suffer and die. The critiques of the traditional theistic concept of God contained in this section are massively influential on how think about who God is and who God isn’t. So, as I’ve been developing this series of essays, they have all be inevitably pointing towards this particular one. The work has been figuring out how the rest of the first half of the chapter gets us to this point, and what these words are set up to do.

Tomorrow’s essay, the closing one of this series, will actually take us backwards in the text. As I’ve stated a couple of times before, what I explicitly did not want to do over the course of these essays was try to come to some form of answer to the question of why God allows suffering in the world. I find myself too often drawn to declarative statements of theology, to the detriment of doing theology as a questioning and perhaps even apophatic task. I hope I’ve corrected that tendency this week (even if yesterday’s essay shaded a little too far into firm answers.) Tomorrow, while hopefully we’ll point towards some understanding of the problem of theodicy, we won’t be seeking firm answers. We’ll be moving backwards in the chapter merely to reflect on what a Crucified God means for us.

This section of the chapter lends itself very well to merely asking questions, especially accusatory ones. After leading us through the extended critique of theistic notions of God, Moltmann is ready to turn to what he calls protest atheism. Protest atheism is defined in this chapter by anguish and righteous indignation present in the Dostoevsky quote from The Brothers Karamazov that we started this essay series with:

And what sort of harmony is it, if there is a hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don’t want any more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go up to make up the sum of sufferings which is necessary for the purchase of truth, then I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price. I do not want a mother to embrace the torturer who had her child torn to pieces by dogs. She has no right to forgive him. And if that is so, if she has no right to forgive him, what becomes of harmony? I don’t want harmony. I don’t want it out of the love I bear to mankind. I want to remain with my suffering unavenged. Besides, too high a price has been placed on harmony. We cannot afford to pay so much for admission. And indeed, if I am an honest man, I’m bound to hand it back as soon as possible. This I am doing. It is not God that I do not accept, Alyosha. I merely more respectfully return him the ticket. I accept God, understand that, but I cannot accept the world he has made.

Ivan Karamazov, in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The theistic form of God breaks down in the face of questions like this. The Unmoved Mover can provide no better answer to Ivan than “Because I made it to be so.” Some, in the face of the glory of the Divine, may accept this as an adequate answer, that one we must simply lay down in front of because of our very smallness. But, I think all humans, deep in the depths of their souls, know this to be inadequate. We demand more of God, because we sense God to be something more. We see the hurts and the suffering, and we too feel compelled to return our tickets.

Protest atheism that arises from such feelings is not classical atheism, which is simply the rejection of the existence of God. Moltmann says that, for protest atheism, “the question of the existence of God is, in itself, a minor issue in the face of the question of his righteousness in the world.” When we demand to know why God allows such things to happen, we are not questioning the existence of God; the question itself presumes the existence itself! Instead, we are asking: how can such a God be worthy of worship and allegiance? How can we stand the fact that God allows such suffering to persist, if God is all-powerful?

The answers classic theism posits concerning the glory of God and our inadequacy in questioning the Divine again throws up more problems than solutions. Here is Moltmann again (apologies in advance, because I’ll be doing a lot of quoting in this essay):

“And this question of suffering and revolt is not answered by any cosmological argument for the existence of God or any theism, but is rather provoked by both of these…for there is something that the atheist fears over and above all torments. That is the indifference of God and his final retreat from the world of men.” Protest atheists are not arguing against the existence of God; we all want a loving, benevolent and good God to exist. But they, and we, look around at the state of the world – we look at the little child in Ivan’s story – and we only see indifference and absence reflected back at us. No wonder nihilism has absorbed modernity! How could it not in the wake of Aushwitz and Hiroshima, of My Lai and Abu Ghraib, of Ukraine and Myanmar and Gaza and the Uyghurs? A God who is simply unmoved and unchanged is wholly inadequate to the world that that God is said to have created. To not be moved by the world is to not be dead. Wanting a loving God is fine; but how can a loving God who controls all simply sit by and allow things to exist as they do?

I want to take a stab one more time at the core of what is wrong with this traditional theistic God worshiped in so many churches today. Because I’ve been slightly unfair, to simply paint this God as the Unmoved Mover. I don’t think any church actually worships Aristotle’s Divine Being. I think the God worshiped in most churches today is actually a profoundly confused being. It has echoes of the Unmoved Mover: it is impassable and immovable and unchanging. But, it also declared to be wrathful and jealous (and thus not impassable), as a simple reading of the Hebrew Scriptures would reveal, but it is a wrath and jealousy that seems to center on the individual choices people make in their daily interpersonal conduct. Yet, this God is also called merciful and overflowing with love, although the nature of that love is seemingly conditional. It is a God that is said to care about all, but it also conceived of as caring about this particular congregation or group or nation or tribe a little bit more than the others. It is a God that wants success for us, and yet takes it away at the slightest whim. This God is a Frankenstein’s monster, concocted of everything we have decided this God needs to be, held together at the seams with a patchwork of Bible verses singled out and glued into place to keep everything from totally collapsing into contingency. This God is not a mystery, but an impossibility and a mirror of our own insecurities and shortcomings.

The thing that this God is not is relatable in any way. I don’t mean that God should be our best friend and close companion. I mean, a God that is merciful and compassionate, loving and just, gracious and righteous, is a God who can hear the cry of Ivan with us, and know what that depth of anguish feels like. This is a God who not only gets angry at suffering, but who knows what it means to suffer, because that distinction is crucial to any understanding of suffering that actually matters. It is a God who can relate to us in our current state, because like us, it doesn’t merely sympathize with the hurting in a merely intellectual and detached sense; like us, it feels it deep in our very Being. We recall moments in our own experience that are analogous; we re-experience that suffering in some way, and in that depth of feeling, we find solidarity with the hurting. From there, our desire to do something arises. No one who truly empathizes with hurt in this way can be unaffected, or completely unwilling to do something. The only God who matters is one who can do the same thing. An impassable, distant, and unmoved God simply doesn’t matter. God might as well be dead.

This understanding that a God who cares about our hurt must be a God who can truly understand it leads to the most important passage in all of The Crucified God. It is important enough that I am going to quote it at length, because it is the most powerful critique of the traditional ideas of God I’ve ever read:

“What kind of a poor being is a God who cannot suffer and cannot even die? He is certainly superior to mortal man so long as this man allows suffering and death to come together as a doom over his head. But he is inferior to man if man grasps this suffering and death as his own possibilities and chooses them himself. Where a mean accepts and choose his own death, he raises himself to a freedom which no animal and no god can have. This was already said by Greek tragedy. For to accept death and to choose it for oneself is a human possibility and only a human possibility. ‘The experience of death is the extra and the advantage that he has over all divine wisdom.’ The peak of metaphysical rebellion against the God who cannot die to therefore freely chosen death, which is called suicide. It is the extreme possibility of protest atheism, because it is only this which makes man his own god, so that the gods become dispensable. But even apart from this extreme position, which Dostoevsky worked through again and again in The Demons, a God who cannot suffer is poorer than any man. For a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved. Suffering and injustice do not affect him. And because he is so completely insensitive, he cannot be affected or shaken by anything. He cannot weep, for he has no tears. But the one who cannot suffering cannot love either So he is also a loveless being. Aristotle’s God cannot love; he can only be loved by all non-divine beings by virtue of his perfection and beauty, and in this way draw them to him. The ‘unmoved Mover’ is a ‘loveless Beloved’. If he is the ground of the love (eros) of all things for him (causa prima), and at the same time his own cause (causa sui), he is the beloved who is in love with himself; a Narcissus in a metaphysical degree: Deus incurvatus in se. But a man can suffer because he can love, even as a Narcissus, and he always suffers only to the degree that he loves. If he kills all love in himself, he no longer suffers. He becomes apathetic. But in that case is he a God? Is he not rather a stone?

Finally, a God who is only omnipotent is in himself an incomplete being, for he cannot experience helplessness and powerlessness. Omnipotence can indeed be longed for and worshipped by helpless men, but omnipotence is never loved; it is only feared. What sort of being, then, would be a God who is only ‘almighty’? He would rather be a being without experience, a being without destiny and a being who is loved by no one. A man who experiences helplessness, a man who suffers because he loves, a man who can die, is therefore a richer being than an omnipotent God who cannot suffer, cannot love and cannot die. Therefore for a man who is aware of the riches of his own nature in his love, his suffering, his protest and his freedom, such a God ia not a necessary and supreme being, but a highly indispensable and superfluous being.”

While there is so much theological richness throughout this passage, that last line is key point of everything we’ve done in these last two essays. We don’t live in the pre-modern age anymore. Our God must be able to answer the things we know to be true about the universe. Human beings, through our God-given faculties of logic and science and intelligence, have deduced much about the nature of the universe, enough that mere wonder at it all is no longer the primary human experience of nature. Wonder still exists, certainly. But we know why and how things happen, and so the role of God as simply the initiator of the unknown and majestic is behind us now. We need a God who not only made things, but who can answer for them, in a way that is better than, “Because I said so.” Let us not skip over the majesty declared by God in his answer to Job, and let us not fail to acknowledge our limited understanding of things, even in a scientific world. But let us not also be condescended to by an arrogant and inhumane God. The Scriptures grant humanity more dignity than that. God cannot simply handwave away our concerns with a light and magic show. Protest atheism is just that – a protest. God must answer.

This is the problem of the theistic God. That God is arrogant in the face of our suffering. And we cannot accept that, when we know our God is loving and humble and merciful and gracious. So how do we square this circle? Can we countenance a God who can suffer and die, as Moltmann puts it? That is the question we will close with tomorrow: not with a neatly packaged answer, but merely with an attempt to try to see what God is like, as a starting point for our grappling with the suffering of the world.

No Right to Forgive, Part Three: The Unmoved Mover

One of the most common stories you will hear in progressive church settings, places where people are deconstructing and reconstructing their faith, is that of empty comfort. A person endures something more difficult than they could imagine – the death of a parent, a child, or a spouse; physical, mental, or sexual abuse; prolonged unemployment, financial instability, or homelessness – and when they turn to their church or their Christian friends and family, all they get are empty platitudes and harmful theologies. 

“God wouldn’t give you more than you can handle.”

“Its all part of a bigger plan.”

“They are in a better place now.”

“Heaven needed another angel.”

“God must be testing you.”

“Are you sure you didn’t do something that angered God?”

Its really not hard to hear these kinds of stories, read the data about church attendance we thought about last time, and start to understand why people are leaving the church. These kinds of phrases – while often uttered with good, loving intent, by people who want to help, but who may not know a better way to do so – drive people far from God and the church. Who wants to worship a God that they are told is responsible for the death of a child, or the loss of a job? Who wants to be part of a community that turns a blind eye to abuse, or justifies it as punishment for sin, or part of God’s plan for you? 

A visual representation of really bad theology

We’ve been thinking about God and the presence of suffering in the first two parts of this series. How are we to reconcile the existence of God with the reality of hurt and death in the world? What does it say about God? Why would we invest our times and our souls with a church that not only can’t give us good answers to these questions, but so often contributes even further to that hurt? These are questions all Christians should be grappling with, and not dismissing with snide comments about sin and a lack of faith.

The reason so many Christians and their churches respond in that way, however, is because their vision of God allows for no other response. Further, their distorted vision of God is the one that is too often presented as the “correct” vision, and thus when someone experiences moments of suffering, this false God is what they are confronted with, and which they rightly reject. The reason the conversation around suffering and God is so fraught is because, too often, the concept of God being debated is so toxic.

This isn’t to say that a better understanding of God will resolve all the issues of theodicy, if only we better understand the true God intellectually. This is the heresy of Gnosticism at its worst. A better idea of God – that which we are grasping towards in this series of essays – is one that we still must confront with the same cry uttered by Jesus on the Cross: “Why have you forsaken us?” As we will see in the next essay, this cry must always be on our lips as long as sin and death exist in the world. Remember, we aren’t looking to “solve” anything this week. We are resting in the darkness of the Saturday before Easter, sitting with the suffering of the world. 

But, one thing we can do in that darkness is demolish the false God that we are told is both responsible for causing and overcoming human suffering.

In Chapter 6 of The Crucified God, Jurgen Moltmann asks the question, “Is Christian faith applicable to the theistic concept of God?” I want to use this essay to understand just what he means by the “theistic concept of God”, because in doing so, we will start to understand why the kinds of answers the church tries to give to the suffering and the hurt so often cause more harm, and drive people away. By taking apart the traditional theism espoused by the church, we can then begin to see a different way to conceive of God.

Moltmann calls this section of the chapter “Theism and the Theology of the Cross”; by theism, he simply means the belief in the existence of god, and especially in a single god who created and controls all of the universe. This is the common definition of theism, one that is intertwined with what we mean we say “Christianity.” The important move Moltmann makes here is to decouple theism from Christianity, and to replace the idea of a theistic God with a Crucified God. We’ll get to that move in the next couple of essays, but for now let’s focus on what Moltmann understands “theism” to mean. He clearly views the common understanding of God as theistic. But what does that entail?

Moltmann writes, “the nature of divine being is determined by its unity and indivisibility, its lack of beginning and end, its immovability and immutability.” There are three attributes given to the divine theistic being here: it is singular, it is infinite, and it is static or stable. Let’s look at each of these before getting to the question of why God is conceived of in this way.

Unity and indivisibility seems to comport very well with something that is considered essential to Christianity (and, by extension, the Judaism that it evolved out of): monotheism. What set Israel apart from the other nations was its belief that only one God exists; this is enshrined in the First Commandment, and is a common theme in Israel’s dealings with God throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. God is One, and other gods are false pretenders: dumb wooden or metal totems at best, demons and other fallen spiritual beings at worst. 

Christianity obviously embraced this monotheism, but with the Trinitarian twist that has confounded believers and critics for so long. God is one, but God is also three, according to the Trinity. For some, rejecting the Trinity outright was the way past this dilemma; unitarianism has a long and rich history stretching back to the earliest church, with Arian often being credited as the first official unitarian. But for most Christians, the Trinity was accepted as a necessary piece of the faith, but one that didn’t make much sense in their everyday experience of faith. Theistic Christianity is functionally unitarian, even if it pays lip service to the Trinity. This is so because of the adherence to the other two legs Moltmann attributes to theism: that of the infinity, and  the immovability and immutability, of God. God must be outside of creation and unable to be changed, and if God is somehow three in one (one of which is a human) then the idea of singular divine being starts to crumble.

To say God has no beginning and no end would not seem problematic to any Christian understanding of God; it is easily accepted that God existed before the creation of the universe (which includes time). Without a Creator, after all, there is no Creation. But I think Moltmann is pointing to the lack of a beginning and end in a different way. Despite God’s preexistence outside of our concept of time, God is not separate from creation. To assert a God completely removed from any concept of time is to assert a deistic and distant God. As we will explore in further essays, in Christ, God stepped into time, and thus, into a real and active relationship with Creation. The theistic God, on the other hand, holds itself completely aloof from creation, for fear of experiencing the decay and change associated with time.

That decay and chance obviously leads us to the third aspect of the theistic God: immutability and immovability. This is probably the most important leg for theism to stand on, and the one people most often associate with a theistic God. God is supposed to be in control over all aspects of creation, but in order to put trust in an all-controlling God, that God must be free of the possibility of the unexpected or the contingent. Thus, a theistic God cannot change or be changed; it is always solid, stable, and static, and cannot be swayed by creation or anything inside of it.

Raphael’s depiction of the unmoved mover from the Stanza della Segnatura

All of these things come together to create what Aristotle posited as the “Unmoved Mover”, a conception of God that Christianity very readily adopted as its own. For Aristotle, this divine being set in motion all of creation, but what not itself set in motion in any way. The Unmoved Mover cannot be affected by Creation, but is sufficient in itself and always and forever the same; to be otherwise would be to concede less than total perfection and complete omnipotence.

As Moltmann points out, humans crave this Unmoved Mover because of the anxiety of mortality we face as created beings. In order to not devolve into existential terrorist, we require assurance that “death, suffering and mortality…be excluded from the divine being.” In a traditional theistic worldview, the only way to overcome our lack of control is to put all our assurance in a controlling being. This is a completely understandable instinct. But it is also one that carries with it great danger for our relationship with God, especially in light of our inherent dignity as beings. Furthermore, this theistic concept of God very quickly clashes with the God we see in Scripture and in the life of Jesus. By posing such a theistic God, we do that which we are claiming cannot be done: we are limiting God, striking from the Divine all love and feeling and passion.

What does the Unmoved Mover have to do with the problem of suffering, and the weak answers the church gives to the hurt of the world? This is the central question we are driving towards, and which we will unpack in detail in our next essay. The Unmoved Mover is inevitably a false God that cannot stand up in the face of genuine human experience of a limited world and mortality, because it is a God that cannot conceive of suffering and hurt. In order to get a better idea of how this is so, we must take seriously the critiques of God that atheism raises. Only then can we start to look for a God that evokes better responses to suffering than “this must be part of God’s plan for you.”

Before we do that, however, one last note on the role of the Unmoved Mover plays in driving forward churches that do harm in the world. It is easy to see how some churches are so committed to the classic theistic view of God. This is the case in almost all evangelical and fundamentalist churches; the omniscient, omnipotent, immutable God is crucial to versions of Christianity that survive on exercising control. The theistic God is an authoritarian God, and this justifies authoritarian models of leadership. It becomes easy to declare who is in and who is out, who can fill a pulpit and who can’t, who is deserving of God’s love and forgiveness and who isn’t, when your view of God is that of a Divine Being who is only and always one way, and can never be changed or affected by human experience and dignity.

But it isn’t just evangelicals and fundamentalists who make their living on the back of the theistic God. Many progressives and critics of Christianity also rely on the existence of this kind of God to sustain their critique and rejection of the church. It becomes harder to hang on to that identity as an opponent of all religion when the church not only agrees with your critique of theism, but also takes concrete steps towards reimagining what God is like. I point this out because I want our grappling in this series to not be cheap and easy, like the easy and (false) answers we started this essay with, but to have some meat behind it: when we demand of God why suffering exists, we are going to get a response, like Job. We aren’t doing this to score points or get clicks. We expect a God who is in relationship with us, and thus who is going to have a conversation. We expect – we demand – more than the silence of a nonexistent God or the wrath of an authoritarian God. That conversation is where we begin to turn next.