Theological Journal -March 9 (Lent 2020): Moltmann Monday

“When the crucified Jesus is called "the image of the invisible God," the meaning is that THIS is God, and God is like THIS.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology


This is where so much “Christian” theology fails. We presume we know who, what, and how God is before we get to the human Jesus and then try to fit him into the mold of the God we already believe we know or else we separate the two saying God is one way, Jesus another. And when push comes to shove God trumps Jesus or they stand in tension or opposite one another.

This latter dilemma arises in some atonement theology where God (the Father) stands on the side of justice while Jesus stands on the side of love and forgiveness. Jesus dies out of love to forgive humanity thus blocking the wrath of the Father who must have his offended justice satisfied before he can forgive. The Father and Jesus thus operate out of opposed motivations and leave with a Father we cannot wholly trust to be for us as Jesus is for us.

Another form of this comes in some forms of double predestination theology where God determines from all eternity the eternal destination of each human being – some to eternal life, some to eternal perdition. When Jesus announces the good news indiscriminately to all hearers in the gospels he is either acting in ignorance of the Father’s predestination (willfully or not) or is “crossing his fingers behind his back” in offering to gospel to anyone who repents and believes. Thus the Father and Son in some measure opposed to each other here too.

Karl Barth critiqued this kind of thinking by adopting the criterion Moltmann articulates above and claiming that there is no other God than the one we see in Jesus, no other God behind Jesus’ back whose inscrutable designs we do not know nor whether they mean good or ill for us.

The most decisive and distinctive claim Christians make about God, then, is not how “godlike” Jesus is but how “Jesus-like” God is! Or in the words of A Declaration of Faith says:

“We affirm the unity of God's being and work.

We may not separate the work of God as Creator

from the work of God as Redeemer.
We may not set the Son's love against the Father's jus

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spikenard Sunday/Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut

by Columbia Lutherans on Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 11:55am • THE SERMON “I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far. Perhaps we will get another idea that good by and by-and then we will have two good ideas. What might that second good idea be? I don’t know. How could I know? I will make a wild guess that it will come from music somehow. I have often wondered what music is and why we love it so. It may be that music is that second good idea’s being born. “I choose as my text the first eight verses of John twelve, which deal not with Palm Sunday but with the night before-with Palm Sunday Eve, with what we might call ‘Spikenard Saturday.’ I hope that will be close enough to Palm Sunday to leave you more or less satisfied. I asked an Episcopalian priest the other day what I should say to you about PalmSunday itself. She told me to say that it was a brilliant satire on pomp and circumst...
Read more

The Parable of the Talents – A View from the Other Side

May 18, 2010 http://godspace-msa.com/2010/05/18/the-parable-of-the-talents-a-view-from-the-other-side/ As promised here is the second article on economics as presented in the Parable of the Talents .  It presents a very compelling and challenging view of this parable that I think has a lot to say in our present economic situation . This articles is from “Towering Trees and Talented Slaves”, commentary of Ched Myers and Eric DeBode, originally published in  The Other Side Online, © 1999 The Other Side, May-June 1999, Vol. 35, No. 3. The complete article was originally published atwww.theotherside.org/archive/may-jun99/myers.html. The article is no longer available at that site and apparently has all but disappeared from the Internet. The Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30   Even more problematic than our sentimentalizing of kingdom parables is the way we misread Jesus’ parables about the world, reading them as if they were kingdom parables—with disastr...
Read more

How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform

Image
  It's bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it - with a big assist from Congress and the White House. By Matt Taibbi May 10, 2012   President Barack Obama signs the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act alongside members of Congress in 2010. ROD LAMKEY JR/AFP/Getty Images Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he'd dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. "These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history," the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. "In history ." Th...
Read more