The Crucified God

THE CROSS OF CHRIST AS THE FOUNDATION AND CRITICISM OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY

Fortress Press

JRGEN MOLTMANN
Minneapolis

p iv THE CRUCIFIED GOD

The Cross of Christ as the Foundation
and Criticism of Christian Theology
First Fortress Press edition, 1993
Translated by R. A. Wilson and John Bowden from the German Der gekreuzigte Gott (Christian Kaiser
Verlag, Munich, second edition 1973). Preface to the paperback edition translated by Margaret Kohl.
Copyright 1974 in the English translation by SCM Press Ltd. New Preface copyright 1991
HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews,
no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the
publisher. Write to: Permissions, Augsburg Fortress Publishers, Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440.
Author photo: Thomas Kucharz
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moltmann, Jrgen.
[Gekreuzigte Gott. English]
The crucified god: the cross of Christ as the foundation and criticism of Christian theology /
Jrgen Moltmann; [translated by R. A. Wilson and John Bowden from the German]1st Fortress Press
ed.
p. cm.
Translation of: Der gekreuzigte Gott.
Reprint. Originally published: New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8006-2822-5 (alk. paper)
1. Jesus ChristPerson and offices. 2. Jesus ChristCrucifixion. I. Title
BT 202.M5513 1993
232dc20
93-29953
CIP
p v Illustrissimae
Dukianae universitati
in civitate Carolina septentrionali
ob summum in Sancta Theologia
honorem sibi oblatum
hunc librum
grato devotoque animo
dedicat
Jrgen Moltmann
a.d. III. Id. Mai.

anno p. Chr.n. MCLXXIII.

p vii CONTENTS
Preface to the Paperback Edition
In Explanation of the Theme
1 The Identity and Relevance of Faith
1. The Crisis of Relevance in Christian Life
2. The Crisis of Identity for Christian Faith
3. Revelation in Contradiction and Dialectical Knowledge
2 The Resistance of the Cross against its Interpretations
1. The Unreligious Cross in the Church
2. The Cult of the Cross
3. The Mysticism of the Cross
4. Following the Cross
5. The Theology of the Cross
3 Questions about Jesus
1. Is Jesus true God?
2. Is Jesus true Man?
3. Are you he who is to come?
4. Who do you say that I am?
4 The Historical Trial of Jesus
1. The Question of the Origin of Christology
2. Jesus Way to the Cross
(a) Jesus and the law: The blasphemer
(b) Jesus and authority: The rebel
(c) Jesus and God: The godforsaken
5 The Eschatological Trial of Jesus Christ
1. Eschatology and History
2. Jesus Resurrection from the Dead
3. The Significance of the Cross of the Risen Christ
4. The Future of God in the Sign of the Crucified Christ
p viii 6
The Crucified God
1. The Death of God as the Origin of Christian Theology?
2. Theism and the Theology of the Cross
3. The Theology of the Cross and Atheism
4. The Doctrine of Two Natures and the Suffering of Christ
5. Trinitarian Theology of the Cross
6. Beyond Theism and Atheism
7. Beyond Obedience and Rebellion
8. Trinity and Eschatology
9. The Experience of Human Life in the Pathos of God
(a) The apatheia of God and the freedom of man
(b) The pathos of God and the sympatheia of man

(c) The fullness of life in the trinitarian history of God

7 Ways towards the Psychological Liberation of Man
1. Psychological Hermeneutics of Liberation
2. Patterns of the Dialogue between Theology and Psychoanalysis
3. The Law of Repression
4. The Law of Parricide
5. The Principle of Illusion
8 Ways towards the Political Liberation of Man
1. Political Hermeneutics of Liberation
2. Political Religion
3. Political Theology of the Cross
4. Vicious Circles of Death
5. Ways towards Liberation
6. The Transformations of God in the Liberations of Men
Abbreviations
Index of Names
p ix PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
The theological foundation for Christian hope is the raising of the crucified Christ. Anyone who
develops a theology of hope from this centre will be inescapably reminded of the other side of that
foundation: the cross of the risen Christ. So after publishing Theology of Hope, the logic of my
theological approach led me to work more deeply on the remembrance of the crucified Christ. Hope
without remembrance leads to illusion, just as, conversely, remembrance without hope can result in
resignation.
Of course I had not planned this. I was led to the theology of the cross through reactions to
Theology of Hope and, even more, through personal participation in the sufferings of those years.
Wherever Christian hope makes people active and leads them into the creative discipleship of Christ,
the contradictions and confutations of the world are painfully experienced. When freedom is near the
chains begin to chafe. One begins to suffer with the victims of injustice and violence. One puts oneself
on the side of the persecuted and becomes persecuted oneself. In the years between 1968 and 1972 I
discovered something of this both personally and politically. At that time the suffering of friends living
under Stalinism in Eastern Europe and under military dictatorships in Latin America and South Korea
moved me deeply. In 1970 I wrote,
As well as developing a political theology, I have resolved to think more intensively than I have done
up to now about the meaning of the cross of Christ for theology, for the church and for society. In a
civilization that glorifies success and happiness and is blind to the sufferings of others, peoples eyes
can be opened to the truth if they remember that at the centre of the Christian faith stands an
unsuccessful, tormented Christ, dying in forsakenness. The recollection that God raised this crucified
Christ and made him the hope of the world must lead the churches to break their alliances with the
powerful and to enter into the solidarity of the humiliated.1
p x The same thing now happened to me that had happened when I was writing Theology of
Hope. The whole of theology was drawn as if by a magnifying glass into a single focus: the cross. I
1

Umkehr zur Zukunft, Munich 1970, 14.

began to see things with the eyes of the Christ dying on the cross. I often used to sit for long periods of
time meditating before the crucifix in the Martinskirche in Tbingen. For me the crucified Christ
became more and more the foundation and criticism of Christian theology. And for me that meant,
whatever can stand before the face of the crucified Christ is true Christian theology. What cannot stand
there must disappear. This is especially true of what we say about God. Christ died on the cross with a
loud cry, which Mark interprets with the words of the twenty-second psalm: My God, why hast thou
forsaken me? This cry of abandonment is either the end of every theology and every religion, or it is
the beginning of a truly Christian theologyand that means a liberating theology. The criticism that
emanates from Christs cross exposes us theologians for what we are, like Jobs friends. We want to
produce an answer to the question about God with which Christ dies. But he dies with this open
question. So a truly Christian theology has to make Jesus experience of God on the cross the centre of
all our ideas about God: that is its foundation.
I began with an interpretation of the theologia crucis of the young Luther. I saw that when God
reveals himself to us godless men and women, who turn ourselves into proud and unhappy gods, he
does not do so through power and glory. He reveals himself through suffering and cross, so he
repudiates in us the arrogant man or woman and accepts the sinner in us. But then I turned the question
around, and instead of asking just what God means for us human beings in the cross of Christ, I asked
too what this human cross of Christ means for God. I found the answer in the idea of Gods passion,
which reveals itself in the passion of Christ. What is manifested in the cross is Gods suffering of a
passionate love for his lost creatures, a suffering prepared for sacrifice.
The idea of the passion of the passionate God contraverts the fundamental axiom of Aristotelian,
philosophical theology, which was Gods essential apathy. The impassibility of God was an idea
cherished by the Greek Fathers (with the exception of Origen) and by the mediaeval theologians. When
I began to get p xi beyond this axiom, I discovered links about which I had previously had no idea.
My first discovery was the Jewish concept of the pathos of God, which Abraham Heschel found in the
prophets; then my attention was drawn to rabbinic and kabbalistic ideas about Gods Shekinah in the
people of Israel, through which God becomes the companion-in-suffering of his persecuted people. I
owe these insights to Franz Rosenzweig and Gershom Scholem.
But it was not merely the experiences of the years between 1968 and 1972 that led me to this
theology of the cross. In addition, I experienced a very different dark night in my soul, for the
pictures of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and horror over the crimes in Auschwitz, had
weighed on me and many other people of my generation ever since 1945. Much time passed before we
could emerge from the silence that stops the mouths of people over whom the cloud of the victims
hangs heavy. It was Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and Jewish theologians who opened our lips.
The Crucified God was said to be a Christian theology after Auschwitz. That is true, inasmuch as I
perceived Golgotha in the shadow of Auschwitz, finding help here in Jewish theology after
Auschwitz and especially in Elie Wiesel. Ever since then, the question about God for me has been
identical with the cry of the victims for justice and the hunger of the perpetrators for a way back from
the path of death.
At the end of the war the theology of Gods suffering had already been outlined by the Japanese
theologian Kazoh Kitamori2 and by the theologian of the German resistance movement, Dietrich
2

Theology of the Pain of God, English translation, 1965.

Bonhoeffer. Only the suffering God can help, wrote Bonhoeffer from his prison cell.3 It was only
after I had written The Crucified God that I discovered the intense discussion about the passibility or
impassibility of God that had been carried on in Anglican theology of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries but had been completely ignored by German theology.
I found the positive influence of my theology of the cross especially in the christology of Jon
Sobrino, who deepened and sharpened it for the Latin American context. 4 I have learnt from his
theology of the cross, which he not only taught but suffered. A few days ago I received a letter from
Robert McAfee Brown, in which he told me the following moving story from San Salvador. p xii On
16 November 1989, six well-known Jesuits, together with their housekeeper and her daughter, were
brutally murdered in the university there. The rector of the university, Father Ignacio Ellacuria, was
one of them. Jon Sobrino escaped the massacre only because he happened not to be in the country at
the time. The letter continues, When the killers were dragging some of the bodies back into the
building, as they took one of the bodies into Jons room, they hit a bookcase and knocked a book on to
the floor, which became drenched with the martyrs blood. In the morning, when they picked up the
book, they found that it was your The Crucified God. This sign and symbol gives me a great deal to
think about. What it says to me is that these martyrs are the seed of the resurrection of a new world.
Like Archbishop Oscar Romero, they are the hope of the people: unforgettable, inextinguishable,
irresistible.
The translation of The Crucified God into many languages brought me into the community of many
struggling and suffering brothers and sisters. The book was read in Korean and South African prisons.
People working in slums and hospitals wrote to me, as well as people who were themselves suffering
under the dark night of the soul. I came into contact with Catholic orders vowed to poverty and the
mysticism of the cross, and with Mennonite congregations who are following the path of Jesus. I need
not tell it all. What I should like to say is this: even more than Theology of Hope, this book brought me
into a great company. I believe it is the company of people under the cross. Beneath the cross the
boundaries of denominations and cultures collapse. The community of the sufferers and the seekers is
an open, inviting community. It is about this community that I am thinking, now that this book appears
again, for it is there that I am at home.
Jrgen Moltmann
Tbingen, Germany
April 1990

3
4

Letters and Papers from Prison, English translation, 1977, 361.

See his Christology at the Crossroads. A Latin American Approach, Orbis 1978.