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.

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

The Partial Success of the Protestant Reformation

This following is a paper I wrote this spring for my History of Christianity class.

The Protestant Reformation is largely understood today as the work of theologians and priests. These religious actos rethought the tenets of Christianity, and envisioned a new way of being the Church, and the process, radically reshaped religious thought and practice in Europe. These theologians and priests weren’t the only leaders of change, however. Kings, queens, emperor, and courtiers also played a large role in the Reformation, and their contributions drove the Reformation to also be movement of political change in Europe. The various wings of the Reformation were all generally successful in forming new ideas on theological and ecclesial matters, and even in forcing the Catholic church to examine itself and make significant changes. However, across Europe, all of the major Reformation movements were eventually co-opted by political interests, and put to work in service of the ongoing wranglings of monarchs and nations. Thus, the Reformation should be viewed as only partly successful: it certainly forced religious reform across Europe, but it failed to make life appreciably, materially better for millions of regular people.

The Late Middle Ages, the time in which the Reformation began, was a time of crisis and struggle for Europe. Ward Holder writes, “These crises were not all religious, but the minds of the people at that time tended to see things religiously.” The Black Death was the primary driver of angst through the 13th and 14th centuries, although drought, plagues, severe winters, and the threat of Islamic invasion also plunged people into insecurity and fear. All these threats challenged what Holder calls the “medieval imagination,” causing people to attribute the troubles to God’s wrath, and more importantly, bringing questions of eternity and salvation to the forefront of people’s minds. “Death seems never to have been more realistically considered than in this era and hardly ever so anxiously feared.”

The idea of purgatory sprung up at this time. Purgatory, in Catholic theology, “was a place reserved for those Christian believers who had failed to make full satisfaction for their sinning during the span of their lives.” People began looking for ways to limit the purgatorial work their souls would have to do after death, and also to lessen the burden of their own loved ones in Purgatory. One way the church proposed to address this was via the selling of indulgences. Indulgences served purportedly to release souls from purgatory, but more temporally, they filled the coffers of the Catholic church, and of its clerics. Indulgences were merely one form of corruption people perceived among their clergy, along with simony, adultery, and absenteeism.

The leading edge of the Reformation was in Germany, led by the monk Martin Luther. Luther, in response to the growing indulgence trade, began to question vital church doctrine. His 95 Theses addressed a variety of theological claims, including his assertion that salvation occurred through faith, not works. Denounced by the pope, Luther refused to recant and eventually become more strident in his denunciations of ecclesial hierarchy and corruption.

In Geneva, John Calvin was the other major figure of the Protestant Reformation. Drawing on humanism and the works of Luther, Calvin issued his Institutes of the Christian Religion, which critiqued traditional theology and ecclesiology in a variety of ways. In Geneva, Calvin was pressured to lead the city as a center of the Reformation. Initially reluctant, Calvin eventually accepted the role, and despite a brief exile, he transformed the city into his image of a Christian city-state, ruled by his firm theological and ethical standards.

Two other major movements characterized the Reformation. In England, King Henry VIII initiated a break with Rome due to his desire for an annulment in his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. After the pope refused (due as much to political considerations as theological), Henry declared himself the head of the church in England. Religious reformers, led by Lord Chancellor Thomas More, seized the opportunity to bring Reformation ideas to England. Although Henry never officially broke with Catholic theology (his Six Articles largely maintained the historical positions of the Church), after his death, the Reformers successfully pushed the child-king Edward VI to embrace Protestantism. Edward died after a short stint as king, and Mary Tudor tried to return England to Catholicism, before her sister Elizabeth I took the throne and reasserted a preference for Protestantism. However, Elizabeth understood the international political implications of the tensions between Catholics and Protestants, and took a policy of appeasement towards English Catholics.

The final major section of the Reformation were the Anabaptists. Arising variously from Bohemia, Moravia, the Swiss cantons, and the Netherlands, Anabaptists clashed theologically with both Catholics and Protestants, and suffered persecution at the hands of both. Anabaptist embraced a theology and ecclesiology far more radical even than the Protestants, proclaiming absolute pacifism, adult baptism, and a separation from worldly affairs. Christians on all sides saw these ideas as dangerous to church and state political arrangements, and consequently suppressed Anabaptists. When Anabaptist reformers finally gained a measure of power, in Munster, they subsequently sank the city into chaos and carnage, causing later Anabaptists to shrink away from the affairs of the state.

The success of Protestant Reformers in seizing the public imagination and providing people with visions of a better society was seen with political leaders as an opportunity to advance their own goals. Consequently, in the years after the initial Reformation movement, the theological and ecclesial goals of the Reformers were subsumed under the political goals of various monarchs and emperors. For the vast majority of common people, this meant that their subsistence form of living was never transformed in any meaningful way, but was instead transferred from one liege to another.

Lutheran shortcomings became evident during the life of Luther himself. Luther himself advocated a strict separation between political and church leadership, but advocated for positive political reform, including “efforts to improve education, social welfare, and the political process.” However, during the Peasants’ War, in 1525, Luther took the side of German princes against peasants who called for political reform to give them more rights and privileges. Luther called on princes to meet the demands of the peasants, but when they failed to do so and the peasants rebelled, Luther called for a violent crackdown on the peasants in his Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants.

In Geneva, Calvin also took part in political repression. Driven by his dogmatic belief in church discipline, Calvin used the Consistory, which at times under Calvin became a “moral reign of terror.” Calvin viewed violations of his city rules severely, liberally employing exile and execution against those who stepped out of line.

The English Reformation was tied up in political affairs and monarchical politics from the beginning, with the marriage wishes of Henry VIII being the original precipitating event of reform. As power swung between Protestants and Catholics under his various children’s’ reins, people on both sides of the divide suffered. Most crucially, unlike Luther and Calvin, no form of social reform became a part of the English Reformation. Aside from various changes within church practice and structure, in fact, many English peasants and commoners surely would never have seen much difference in their lives no matter which faction controlled the throne. Whether Protestant or Catholic, the monarchy still ruled and life was still largely bleak and precarious. Social justice of any type was never considered.

Finally, the debacle at Munster showed the limits of social reform in the name of Christianity. Anabaptist leaders instituted radical social change in Munster:

“The property of the expelled citizens was confiscated; food was made public property; real property was declared to be common, although people could continue using what was theirs, with the stipulation that all house doors had to be kept open day and night; the use of money was outlawed; and twelve elders were appointed to oversee the stockpiling of goods and their distribution to the needy.”

Despite all this, political repression was used against Munster citizens who objected to the rule of the Anabaptist leaders, including exile and execution. The Munster experiment was unable to sustain itself against attack by Protestant and Catholic armies, the city eventually fell. Later Anabaptist reformers rejected the attempt to spread their radical view of society very wide, instead choosing separation and distance from the dominant culture.

Overall, Protestantism became an arm of monarchical intrigue at large in Europe. Nations began aligning along Catholic and Protestant lines, creating vast tensions between states representing each faction. Catholic nations like France, Spain, and Portugal, along with the Papal States and the Holy Roman Emperor, clashed with England, German princes, the Dutch and the Swiss. Wars of religion, such the Thirty Years War, killed thousands. Repression and disregard for the masses of people flourished just as much among Protestant leaders as Catholic ones.

Through all four of these loci of Reformation, the good of theological and ecclesial reforms never translated to social reform for the vast majority of people. Consequently, the result of the Protestant Reformation can be viewed only as a partial success. It certainly succeeded in reforming theological and ecclesial thought, especially around the role of the clergy, the nature of the Lord’s Supper, the approach to various forms of corruption, and the relation of the church and the state. However, it failed to embody the justice and mercy of Christ any better than Catholics had done. Crucially, other than in a few Anabaptist outposts, the identification of Christianity with the state continued unabated as it had since the time of Constantine. The focus and emphasis remained on obedience to authority, rather than the bettering of the lives of human beings. In this sense, the Reformation was a failure.

Certainly, none of this was ever a stated goal of reform, and actors who lived hundreds of years before the era of human rights cannot be held to the same moral standard as modernity. But the precepts of Christianity, as laid out in Scripture, are regard for human life, a desire for justice, and a preference for mercy and forgiveness over obedience and punishment. Surely, the failure of Protestant reformers to seize on any of these themes, rather than merely the nature of the Host or the debate between faith and works, is glaring and damning. The Protestant Reformation, then, can fairly be called a partial success for the advancement of human civilization.

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