1. The Unreligious Cross in the Church
When archaeologists dig up a place of worship in the desert sand and find in it the sign of the cross, they can be virtually certain that it is a Christian church. Today, too, we find the cross in Christian churches as the central symbol. The worshippers gaze upon the crucifix. The word of the cross is preached to the congregation. They are blessed and sent from the church with the sign of the cross. Many make the sign of the cross as the Holy Trinity is named. In Passiontide, in many churches, devout Christians follow the course of Jesus’ passion in the stations of the cross, and meditate on the reasons for his sufferings and the redeeming effects of his death. In other churches, even today, Good Friday is the central Christian festival of the church year. There is little that expresses Christian fellowship with God better than passion hymns. Even in the world of Islam, Christianity is represented by the symbol of the cross:
What keeps the Copt a Copt is the cross of Jesus, al salib, in other words, his inward, unutterable and ineffable faith in Jesus who died on the cross to redeem mankind.[1]
Thus Christianity has rightly been described as ‘the religion of the cross’: ‘Thou alone, religion of the cross, dost join in one wreath the double palm of humility and power’ (Schiller). Goethe describes Christianity as the ‘ultimate religion’, because it was the ultimate and final thing which mankind could and had to achieve; for not until Christianity was the ‘divine depth of suffering’ revealed to us.[2] But what does this actually mean? It is often better recongized by non-Christians and atheists than by religious Christians, because it astonishes and offends them. They see the profane horror and godlessness of the cross, because they do not believe the religious interpretations which have given a meaning to the senselessness of this death. All they find in it is ‘the image of irreconcilability’.[3] To restore Good Friday in all its horror and godlessness (Hegel) it is necessary for Christian faith first of all to abandon the traditional theories of salvation which have made the way the cross is spoken of in Christianity a mere habit. From the very first the Christian faith was distinguished from the religions which surrounded it by its worship of the crucified Christ.
In Israelite understanding, someone executed in this way was rejected by his people, cursed amongst the people of God by the God of the law, and excluded from the covenant of life. ‘Cursed be everyone that hangs on a tree’ (Gal. 3.13; Deut. 21.23). Anyone who, condemned by the law as a blasphemer, suffers such a death is cursed and excluded from the circle of the living and from the fellowship of God. ‘We have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he has made himself the Son of God’ (John 19.7). One can only turn one’s back on him. Of course when Israel was occupied by the Romans, there were many freedom fighters during the revolts who died on the cross. But they were martyrs for the righteous cause of the God of Israel, and not rejected blasphemers.
To the humanism of antiquity the crucified Christ and the veneration of him were also an embarrassment. Crucifixion, as the punishment of escaped slaves or rebels against the Roman Empire, was regarded as ‘the most degrading kind of punishment’.[4] Thus Roman humanism always felt the ‘religion of the Cross’ to be unaesthetic, unrespectable and perverse. ‘Let even the name of the cross be kept away not only from the bodies of the citizens of Rome, but also from their thought, sight and hearing’, declared Cicero.[5] It was regarded as an offence against good manners to speak of this hideous death for slaves in the presence of respectable people.[6] In the human search for the good, the true and the beautiful, the crucified Christ was not a valuable aesthetic symbol. He possessed ‘no form or comeliness’ (Isa. 53.2). The idea of a ‘crucified God’ to whom veneration and worship were due was regarded in the ancient world as totally inappropriate to God, just as for Israel the assertion that a condemned blasphemer had risen from the dead was bound to conflict with the righteousness of God revealed in the law. Thus Christian belief in the crucified Christ was bound to produce on Jews and Romans the effect of continued blasphemy. The early Christians had constantly to defend themselves against the charge of irreligiositas and sacrilegium. In so far as they refused to make the obligatory sacrifices to the gods of the Roman state they drew on themselves the charge of ‘atheism’. This was not meant merely as an abusive description of Christians, but was a formal accusation which resulted in exclusion from society as ‘enemies of the human race’. Justin readily admitted his Christian atheism, which consisted of a denial of the gods of the state, and with regard to these ‘so-called gods’ confessed himself to be an ‘atheist’.[7] Amongst the educated despisers of Christianity, this belief in a crucified Christ was merely bad taste, which was met with mockery. There is a graffito on the Palatine which represents a crucified figure with a donkey’s head, and bears the inscription: ‘Alexamenos worships his god’.[8] At that time, the cross was not the sign in which one conquered, a sign of triumph on churches, or an adornment on the Imperial Throne, nor was it the sign of orders and honours; it was a sign of contradiction and scandal, which quite often brought expulsion and death.
Modern, post-Christian humanism has done a great service by bringing to the fore once again this original and natural dislike of the cross. In this way it has reminded Christianity, which has made itself so much at home in European civilization, of its original and fundamental alienation. When Hegel received from his pupils on his sixtieth birthday a medal which showed an owl and a cross, Goethe reacted angrily: ‘Who can demand that I love the cross if with that I am forced to share its burden?’[9] For him, its harshness and nakedness was in conflict with the ‘humane and rational’, which was indispensable.[10] Hegel’s symbolic link between philosophy and the theology of the cross in the well-known statement in the introduction to the Philosophy of Right that reason is ‘the rose in the cross of the present’, was offensive to him. ‘An airy, decorative cross is always a cheerful object: the loathsome wood of the martyrs, the most repugnant object under the sun, no man in his right mind should be concerned to excavate and erect’.[11] The symbol under which the cross was discussed at this period was the Rosy Cross. K. Löwith has described the various interpretations of this symbol on Luther’s coat of arms, amongst the Rosicrucians, in Hegel and in Goethe. For Goethe the roses add gentleness to ‘the rough wood’ and make Good Friday a humane Good Friday. Although he regarded the roses as of more value for his humanity and religion than the cross which they surrounded, Goethe nevertheless challenged Christianity with the mystery of this cross:
There the cross stands, thickly wreathed in roses.
Who put the roses on the cross?
The wreath grows bigger, so that on every side
The harsh cross is surrounded by gentleness.[12]
At the end of the last century, the ‘roses’ of humanity from the Western Christian tradition were no longer visible to Nietzsche on the cross of Christianity. He saw Christianity as standing alone beside the crucified Christ, and therefore decried it in The Antichrist as a ‘religion of decadence’, as a religious hatred for everything proud, for freedom, for sensual joy, and as the hostility of the weak and lowly against the lords of the earth and the noble.
Modern men, with their obtuseness as regards all Christian nomenclature, no longer have the sense for the terribly superlative conception which was implied to an antique taste by the paradox of the formula, ‘God on the cross’. Hitherto there had never and nowhere been such boldness in inversion, nor anything at once so dreadful, questioning and questionable as this formula: it promised a transformation of all ancient values. (Beyond Good and Evil, III, 46)
He called its morality the pitiful ‘morality of a child made to stand in the corner’, which had made the morbid virtue of compassion out of the necessity of suffering. He treated Christianity as a nihilist religion which had developed from Judaism. One statement which sums up his criticism is: ‘Basically there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross’.[13] Down to the present day, everything else was morality for slaves. Karl Marx also directs his criticism of Christianity to the ‘roses’ in the ‘cross of reality’:
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not so that man should wear an unimaginative, comfortless chain, but so that he might throw away the chain and break the live flowers.[14]
The more post-Christian humanism breaks away from the religious and humanist ‘roses’ of the cross, the more Christian faith today is forced back upon the naked cross without all the roses of tradition. It can no longer be a traditional faith in the roses which make the cross of Christ pleasant and wholesome for it. It is drawn into the full, undisguised bitterness and abandonment of Good Friday, where it can become true faith.
The cross is the utterly incommensurable factor in the revelation of God. We have become far too used to it. We have surrounded the scandal of the cross with roses. We have made a theory of salvation out of it. But that is not the cross. That is not the bleakness inherent in it, placed in it by God. Hegel defined the cross: ‘God is dead’— and he no doubt rightly saw that here we are faced by the night of the real, ultimate and inexplicable absence of God, and that before the ‘Word of the cross’ we are dependent upon the principle sola fide; dependent upon it as nowhere else. Here we have not the opera Dei, which point to him as the eternal creator, and to his wisdom. Here the faith in creation, the source of all paganism, breaks down. Here this whole philosophy and wisdom is abandoned to folly. Here God is non-God. Here is the triumph of death, the enemy, the non-church, the lawless state, the blasphemer, the soldiers. Here Satan triumphs over God. Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation and doubt about everything that exists! Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of nothingness, it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way that no philosophy of nihilism can imagine.[15]
For Christian faith this means that it can no longer understand itself only in the context of its place in world history, and of the history and success of Christianity, but must recall the event in which it originated. ‘The primary existent for faith, revealed only to faith, and, as revelation, the first thing to bring faith into being, is, as far as “Christian” faith is concerned, Christ, the crucified God’.[16] If any one of the historical forms in which it has expressed itself grows out of date, as its educational process is completed, it is not sufficient simply to distil out the idea inherent in that form of Christianity. Instead, the Christian faith which once ‘conquered the world’ must also learn to conquer its own forms when they have become worldly. It can do so only when it breaks down the idols of the Christian West, and, in a reforming and revolutionary way, remembers the ‘crucified God’. ‘For how should the Christian pilgrimage in hoc saeculo ever become homeless in the land where it has never been at home?’[17] A radical return to the origin of Christian faith in the night of the cross makes this faith homeless not only in an alien, religious world, but also in the syncretistic world of present-day bourgeois Christianity. The task of theology is then no longer that of presenting itself as the self-awareness of Christianity as one of the phenomena of world history, but that of committing itself radically to the event which is the origin of faith in the cross; that is, of becoming a theology of the cross. If it were to be satisfied with a theory of present-day Christianity, it would be like the owl of Minerva which spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk, and the philosophy which ‘paints its grey in grey’ when a form of life has grown old. ‘With . . . grey in grey, it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood’, said Hegel.[18] A rejuvenation of Christianity when it has grown old and grey is only possible on the basis of its own origin, and becomes a dangerous and liberating reality when faith becomes aware of the incommensurability of the cross of Christ with the revelation of God, and realizing this, becomes aware too of its own strangeness and homelessness in its own Christian world. If faith in the crucified Christ is in contradiction to all conceptions of the righteousness, beauty and morality of man, faith in the ‘crucified God’ is also a contradiction of everything men have ever conceived, desired and sought to be assured of by the term ‘God’. That ‘God’, the ‘supreme being’ and the ‘supreme good’, should be revealed and present in the abandonment of Jesus by God on the cross, is something that it is difficult to desire. What interest can the religious longing for fellowship with God have in the crucifixion of its God, and his powerlessness and abandonment in absolute death?[19] In spite of all the ‘roses’ which the needs of religion and theological interpretation have draped round the cross, the cross is the really irreligious thing in Christian faith. It is the suffering of God in Christ, rejected and killed in the absence of God, which qualifies Christian faith as faith, and as something different from the projection of man’s desire. The modern criticism of religion can attack the whole world of religious Christianity, but not this unreligious cross. There is no pattern for religious projections in the cross. For he who was crucified represents the fundamental and total crucifixion of all religion: the deification of the human heart, the sacralization of certain localities in nature and certain sacred dates and times, the worship of those who hold political power, and their power politics. Even the disciples of Jesus all fled from their master’s cross. Christians who do not have the feeling that they must flee the crucified Christ have probably not yet understood him in a sufficiently radical way. The fatal and liberating contradiction which man experiences in his most sacred religious feelings when faced with the crucified Christ can then be applied to the tacit religious assumptions of his modern criticism of religion, with which he legitimizes his flight and his contempt: to the self-deification of atheist movements of liberation; to the post-Christian idolization of the laws of history and historical success; and to post-Christian confidence in an eternally productive nature. The historical cross of Christ, believed in as revelation and calling true faith into being, is the crux of the criticism of religion in Feuerbach and Freud. The cross, as the negation of everything which is religious in their sense, of all deifications, all assurances, all images and analogies and every established holy place which promises permanence, remains outside the conflict between religion and the criticism of religion, between theism and atheism. The faith that it arouses is something quite different from either.
Faith in the cross distinguishes Christian faith from the world of religions and from secular ideologies and utopias, in so far as they seek to replace these religions or to inherit their legacy and bring them to realization. But faith in the cross also distinguishes Christian faith from its own superstitious manifestions. The recollection of the crucified Christ obliges Christian faith permanently to distinguish itself from its own religious and secular forms. In Western civilization, this means, in concrete terms, distinguishing itself from the ‘Christian-bourgeois world’ and from Christianity as the ‘religion of contemporary society’.
A Christianity which does not measures itself in theology and practice by this criterion loses its identity and becomes confused with the surrounding world; it becomes the religious fulfilment of the prevailing social interests, or of the interests of those who dominate society. It becomes a chameleon which can no longer be distinguished from the leaves of the tree in which it sits.
But a Christianity which applies to its theology and practice the criterion of its own fundamental origin cannot remain what it is at the present moment in social, political and psychological terms. It experiences an outward crisis of identity, in which its inherited identification with the desires and interests of the world around it is broken down. It becomes something other than what it imagined itself to be, and what was expected of it.[20]
To be radical, of course, means to seize a matter at its roots. More radical Christian faith can only mean committing oneself without reserve to the ‘crucified God’. This is dangerous. It does not promise the confirmation of one’s own conceptions, hopes and good intentions. It promises first of all the pain of repentance and fundamental change. It offers no recipe for success. But it brings a confrontation with the truth. It is not positive and constructive, but is in the first instance critical and destructive. It does not bring man into a better harmony with himself and his environment, but into contradiction with himself and his environment. It does not create a home for him and integrate him into society, but makes him ‘homeless’ and ‘rootless’, and liberates him in following Christ who was homeless and rootless. The ‘religion of the cross’, if faith on this basis can ever be so called, does not elevate and edify in the usual sense, but scandalizes; and most of all it scandalizes one’s ‘co-religionists’ in one’s own circle. But by this scandal, it brings liberation into a world which is not free. For ultimately, in a civilization which is constructed on the principle of achievement and enjoyment, and therefore makes pain and death a private matter, excluded from its public life, so that in the final issue the world must no longer be experienced as offering resistance, there is nothing so unpopular as for the crucified God to be made a present reality through faith. It alienates alienated men, who have come to terms with alienation. And yet this faith, with its consequences, is capable of setting men free from their cultural illusions, releasing them from the involvements which blind them, and confronting them with the truth of their existence and their society. Before there can be correspondence and agreements between faith and the surrounding world, there must first be the painful demonstration of truth in the midst of untruth. In this pain we experience reality outside ourselves, which we have not made or thought out for ourselves. The pain arouses a love which can no longer be indifferent, but seeks out its opposite, what is ugly and unworthy of love, in order to love it. This pain breaks down the apathy in which everything is a matter of indifference, because everything one meets is always the same and familiar.
Thus the cross in the church is not just what Christian custom would have imagined. The cross in the church symbolizes the contradiction which comes into the church from the God who was crucified ‘outside’. Every symbol points beyond itself to something else. Every symbol invites thought. The symbol of the cross in the church points to the God who was crucified not between two candles on an altar, but between two thieves in the place of the skull, where the outcasts belong, outside the gates of the city. It does not invite thought but a change of mind. It is a symbol which therefore leads out of the church and out of religious longing into the fellowship of the oppressed and abandoned. On the other hand, it is a symbol which calls the oppressed and godless into the church and through the church into the fellowship of the crucified God. Where this contradiction in the cross, and its revolution in religious values, is forgotten, the cross ceases to be a symbol and becomes an idol, and no longer invites a revolution in thought, but the end of thought in self-affirmation.
The ‘religion of the cross’ is a contradiction in itself, for the crucified God is a contradiction in this religion. To endure this contradiction is to take leave of one’s religious traditions; to be free of one’s religious needs; to abandon one’s previous identity as known to others, and to gain the identity of Christ in faith; to become anonymous and unknown in one’s environment and obtain citizenship in the new creation of God. To make the cross a present reality in our civilization means to put into practice the experience one has received of being liberated from fear for oneself; no longer to adapt oneself to this society, its idols and taboos, its imaginary enemies and fetishes; and in the name of him who was once the victim of religion, society and the state to enter into solidarity with the victims of religion, society and the state at the present day, in the same way as he who was crucified became their brother and their liberator.
The religions and humanist world which surrounded Christianity from the very first despised the cross, because this dehumanized Christ represented a contradiction to all ideas of God, and of man as divine. Yet even in historic Christianity the bitterness of the cross was not maintained in the recollection of believers or in the reality presented by the church. There were times of persecution and times of reformation, in which the crucified Christ was to some extent experienced as directly present. In historic Christianity there was also the ‘religion of the suppressed’ (Laternari), who knew that their faith brought them into spontaneous fellowship with the suffering Christ. But the more the church of the crucified Christ became the prevailing religion of society, and set about satisfying the personal and public needs of this society, the more it left the cross behind it, and gilded the cross with the expectations and ideas of salvation.
We have made the bitterness of the cross, the revelation of God in the cross of Jesus Christ, tolerable to ourselves by learning to understand it as a necessity for the process of salvation . . . As a result the cross loses its arbitrary and incomprehensible character.[21]
This is to maintain the significance which the cross has come to have in the context of the process of one’s own salvation, one’s own faith, and one’s own theory of reality, and to suppress and destroy the unique, the particular and the scandalous in it. We shall now describe this process of the absorption of the cross in Christianity, in the double sense of its maintenance and its destruction, in the various forms under which the crucified Christ has been realized: in the cult of the cross, the mysticism of the cross, the ethics of the cross and the theology of the cross, in order to restore faith in the crucified Christ to its truth, the truth of him who was crucified.
2. The Cult of the Cross
By the cult of the cross we understand the unbloody repetition of the event that took place on Golgotha on the altar of the church; that is, the making present of Christ in the sacrifice of the mass.
We can begin with the finding of general anthropology and comparative religion, that from a very early stage men understood their existence as a gift from a transcendental power. The response which they made in their lives to this existence, experienced as a gift of grace, was that of self-sacrifice, in which they devoted themselves to this transcendental power. In the sacrificial cults of religion, this self-offering of man was celebrated through real symbols as a pars pro toto. The basic form of all sacrifice was the sacrifice of first fruits. Through them, the whole flock or the whole harvest was consecrated to the gods and so sanctified. It was also thought of as a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, expressing the recognition of the deity’s right of ownership. The representative nature of these sacrifices brought them, like all representative action, into the ambiguous region between the relief of a burden and alienation. The offering of the part for the whole can never mean more than the part instead of the whole. In comparative religion it is not a tenable view that the sacrificial gifts of men were calculated to bring the favour of the gods. This do ut des formula does recur in many late forms of religion, and especially in Rome, but is a departure from the original situation in which all sacrificial gifts unite the giver and the receiver and bring them into a solemn and fundamental fellowship. All the societies of antiquity into which Christianity came were at heart religious, and at the heart of their social religions were the cults; and at the heart of the cults were the sacrifices to the gods of the state and the fellowship with them established at festivals. The more the Christian church obtained public recognition, the more it was also obliged to fulfil this public need for cult and sacrifice. The church did suppress pagan sacrificial actions and cultic drama, but replaced them by its own cult. It radically altered the meaning of cultic sacrifice. The gods no longer had to be reconciled by men’s sacrifices. Nor was life any longer regarded as a gift from the ultimate realities of existence in nature, society and politics, a gift of grace which had to be acknowledged and consequently sanctified. It was the one God himself who by the sacrifice in the self-offering of Christ had reconciled sinful men to himself and provided the basis of their life by his grace, so that it was to him that thanks had to be offered for it, and to him it had to be consecrated. But the unbloody repetition of the self-offering of Christ took place at that integral point in public life and private devotion at which the ancient sacrificial religions had been celebrated and had become effective. As a result, the Christian cult of the sacrifice of Christ retained and still retains a manifold significance, and has been at the disposal of more than one interest.
The dogmatic problem of the concept of sacrifice lies in the development of a concept of sacrifice which on the one hand does justice to the data of comparative religion in general (however varied these may be), and at the same time is applicable both to the ‘sacrifice’ of Christ on the cross, and also to the celebration of the mass as a ‘sacrifice’, without doing violence to both these New Testament sacrifices.[22]
In so far as it is true that the meaning of ‘sacrifice’ in the case of the cross and the mass can be known from themselves alone, to understand them as ‘sacrifices’ would be tautological, if it were not possible to assume an independent concept of sacrifice applicable to them at least in an analogous and modified way.[23] But this makes the sacrifice of the mass and the Eucharist particularly ambiguous. On the one hand, the understanding of the mass as a sacrifice is based on biblical tradition, according to which it is the symbolic actual presence by anamnesis of the unique atoning sacrifice of Christ. ‘The cross remains the absolute sacrifice, and the mass the relative. Christ himself is the true priest in the mass, and the earthly priest acts in persona ejus’.[24] But on the other hand the sacrificial death of Christ is thereby recognized as a divine, transcendent background for the cultic practice of the church, and as a result the unique, historical and eschatological event of the self-offering of Christ is absorbed into the cultic repetitions of the church, which are celebrated in a modified analogy to sacrifice in religions in general. From the point of view of the relative sacrifice of the Eucharist, dependent upon this basis, all that is visible of Christ’s death on the cross is his absolute self-sacrifice which provides the basis for it. What is maintained and made a present reality by the continuous and repeated cult is that which in the cross on Golgotha seems to be of eternal significance: the divine value of the self-sacrifice of Christ for the relationship of God to man and of man to God, for grace and thanksgiving. What was unique, particular and scandalous in the death of Christ is not retained, but suppressed and destroyed. How did this come about, and how should it be regarded?
His cross is not found in the intimacy of the individual, personal heart, nor in the sanctuary of a purely religious devotion. It is erected beyond these protected and separated precincts, ‘outside’, as the theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us. The curtain of the temple is torn forever.[25]
But this means that basically the crucified Christ represents the end of the cult. He has died ‘once for all’, as Paul emphasizes. His death is not a sacrifice which can be repeated or transferred. He has finally risen from the death which he died once for all, as Paul emphasizes again, and ‘will never die again’ (Rom. 6.9), in either a bloody or an unbloody way. He cannot be turned into an eternally dying and rising cultic god. He is not drawn into the cycle of the ‘eternal return of the like’ (M. Eliade), but breaks out of the compulsive repetition of the cult. It is true that the Eucharist or the celebration of the Lord’s Supper recalls and makes present the death of Christ ‘until he comes’ (I Cor. 11.26), but in the form of ‘proclamation’, not in the form of the ‘repetition’ of Christ’s death on the cross. Thus one must distinguish between the death of Christ on the cross on Golgotha, which happened once for all, and the constantly repeated celebration of the hope which remembers him, to the point of using different terms. The unique historical nature of his death on the cross, outside religion and the temple, makes the identification of the crucified Christ with the cult impossible. The eschatological finality which associates the preaching of the resurrection with the one who was executed at a particular time and place makes it impossible for him to be part of cultic repetition, and both ultimately make the separation of cultic and profane in Christianity impossible, and demand that Christians should break down this separation.
Thus it is not enough simply to Christianize the cults of religious societies. It is not enough simply to ‘do justice’ in the theology of the cross to the sacrificial concept of comparative religion by accepting it in an analogical and modified way. Cultic religion must be replaced by the spreading of the word of the cross, the celebration of faith and the practical following of Jesus. The cultic division between the religious and the profane is potentially abolished in faith in the Christ who was profaned by crucifixion. Thus the Eucharist, like the meals held by Jesus with ‘sinners and publicans’, must also be celebrated with the unrighteous, those who have no rights and the godless from the ‘highways and hedges’ of society, in all their profanity, and should no longer be limited, as a religious sacrifice, to the inner circle of the devout, to those who are members of the same denomination. The Christian church can re-introduce the divisions between the religious and the profane and between those who are within and those who are without, only at the price of losing its own identity as the church of the crucified Christ. But because even a cultic religious church, if it is Christian, however splendid a form it may have taken on, still retains the memory of the crucified Christ, it constantly bears with it its own crisis. This crisis becomes a reality when faith encounters the total truth of the crucified Christ, and when the whole truth of the crucified Christ encounters unbelief. Then the arbitrary aspect of his death on the cross, with which the cult cannot deal, reappears from beneath its representations in the cult and makes the memoria passionis Domini a dangerous matter even for the established cultic churches. And it is the godless, forced out by the church, who recognize the inner distinction between the reality of the cross on Golgotha and its cultic representation within the church. Thus for the faith which believes in and celebrates the representation of the crucified Christ as a reality in the ‘sacrifice of the mass’, it is also indispensable to be aware once again of this inner distinction.
3. The Mysticism of the Cross
In historic Christianity, the passion of Christ has also been understood and relived in the sense of the mysticism of suffering. Here the crucified Christ was seen less as the sacrifice which God creates to reconcile the world to himself, and more as the exemplary path trodden by a righteous man suffering unjustly, leading to salvation. Fellowship with God is not attained by outward sacrifice and presence in the church’s cult; the way to glory leads through personal suffering. Thus by meditation and adoration people have drawn closer to the sufferings of Christ, participated in them and felt them as their own sufferings. And again, in their own sufferings, people have discovered a fellowship with the ‘sacred head sore wounded’. This spiritual absorption into the sufferings of Christ led, as late medieval mysticism said, to a conformity of the soul with the crucified Christ. And this conformitas crucis indirectly brought an assurance of salvation and of glorification. One did not achieve fellowship with Christ by sacrifice and good works, but by mystical suffering and resignation. In fellowship with the sufferings of Christ, one received in a very personal way a more inward fellowship with Christ in belonging to the organized church and in taking part in the Christian cult. The via negativa of mystical theology internalized or even replaced the via analogiae laid down as a positive requirement by the church.
It is impossible to overlook how much this passion mysticism was and is the devotion of the laity in Christianity. It is demonstrably the devotion of the poor and sick, the oppressed and crushed. The ‘God’ of the poor, the peasant and the slave has always been the poor, suffering, unprotected Christ, whereas the God of empires and rulers has usually been the Pantocrator, Christ enthroned in heaven.[26] In the later Middle Ages, the Christian people of Europe were seized by this devotion to the passion. The Byzantine portraits of Christ, the divine lord of heaven, and the imperial images of Christ, the judge of the world, were supplemented in churches by images of the crucified Christ of the poor, in which no realistic detail of pain and torture was omitted. The ‘man of sorrows’ spoke to those who were wasting away in pain, and to whom no one else spoke, because no one could help them. In representations of the crucified Christ, the emphasis moved away from sacramental devotion to his victory on the cross to inward devotion to his sacrificial death on the cross. These images of the crucifixion, such as that upon the Isenheim altar, were not merely the artistic expression of a new form of devotion, but at that time were regarded as miracle-working images. The sick, the cripples and the incurable were brought before these images, and in their worship there they experienced relief from their sufferings and healings. We shall not discuss here the medical question whether such miraculous heatings can exist or not. What is theologically more important is the faith that they express. It derives its vitality not from Christ healing as a superhuman, divine miracle-worker, but on the contrary from the fact that he brings help through his wounds and through what from the human point of view is his impotent suffering. ‘When my heart is most fearful, help me out of my fears, through thy fear and pain’, says a hymn by Paul Gerhardt. This mysticism of the passion has discovered a truth about Christ which ought not to be suppressed by being understood in a superficial way. It can be summed up by saying that suffering is overcome by suffering, and wounds are healed by wounds. For the suffering in suffering is the lack of love, and the wounds in wounds are the abandonment, and the powerlessness in pain is unbelief. And therefore the suffering of abandonment is overcome by the suffering of love, which is not afraid of what is sick and ugly, but accepts it and takes it to itself in order to heal it. Through his own abandonment by God, the crucified Christ brings God to those who are abandoned by God. Through his suffering he brings salvation to those who suffer. Through his death he brings eternal life to those who are dying. And therefore the tempted, rejected, suffering and dying Christ came to be the centre of the religion of the oppressed and the piety of the lost. And it is here, in the theology of the mysticism of the cross in the late Middle Ages, that we first hear the monstrous phrase ‘the crucified God’, which Luther then took up.[27]
In our own time, this understanding has taken on new vitality in Protestant theology. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison, shortly before his execution:
God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matt. 8.17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering . . . Only the suffering God can help . . . That is a reversal of what the religious man expects from God. Man is summoned to share in God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world.[28]
At about the same time, and in a similar political situation in his country, the Japanese Lutheran theologian Kazoh Kitamori was writing his book Theology of the Pain of God,[29] in which he developed a similar theology of the cross: the pain of God heals our pains. In the suffering of Christ God himself suffers. These suggestions must be taken further.
Why and in what way did the suffering, crucified God become the God of the poor and abandoned? What is the significance of the mysticism of the cross in popular devotion? These people in their wretchedness clearly understood him better because of their own concrete situation than the rich and their masters. They understood him better, because they rightly had the impression that he understood them better than their masters.
In Europe, Christmas and Easter are the high points of the church year, in custom and folklore and popular piety. This is not so in Latin America. The Christian ‘feasts of life and hope’ mean nothing to Indians and Mestizos. Their feast is Holy Week. The suffering and death of Jesus, the pain and mourning is something in which they can share. There they are at home. That is their life. The submission to fate and ability to suffer of the original inhabitants of Latin America has long been assisted by particular devotional forms. These include the stations of the cross, intercessory processions around representations of the fourteen biblical and legendary stations of Jesus during his passion.[30]
Here, of course, the dominant church has from earliest times so formulated the texts of the stations of the cross that the believers are made aware only of the pains caused to Christ by their individual sins and their private immorality. But the poor no doubt recognized all their suffering in the crucified Christ: what they suffered from society and what they suffered from their fate.
Similarly, the piety of the Negro spirituals sung by black slaves in the southern states of the USA concentrates upon the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. For them his sufferings and death were a symbol of their own sufferings, their despised condition and their temptations in an unfriendly and inhuman world. They saw their fate in his sufferings. On the other hand, they could say that when Jesus was nailed to the cross and the Roman soldiers stabbed him in the side, he was not alone. The black slaves suffered with him and died with him.
‘Were you there, when they crucified my Lord?’ begins one of their songs. And the answer is: ‘We, the black slaves, were there with him in his agony’.
In Jesus’ death black slaves saw themselves, and they unleashed their imagination in describing what they felt and saw . . . His death was a symbol of their suffering, trials and tribulations in an unfriendly world. They knew the agony of rejection and the pain of hanging from a tree . . . Because black slaves knew the significance of the pain and shame of Jesus’ death on the cross, they found themselves by his side.[31]
By his suffering and death, Jesus identified himself with those who were enslaved, and took their pain upon himself. And if he was not alone in his suffering, nor were they abandoned in the pains of their slavery. Jesus was with them. And there too lay their hope of freedom, by virtue of his resurrection into the freedom of God. Jesus was their identity with God in a world which had taken all hope from them and destroyed their human identity until it was unrecognizable.
One can perhaps apply to this mysticism of the cross of the poor, the sick and the slaves the saying of Karl Marx: ‘Religion is the groaning of oppressed creation, the heart of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of situations where there is no spirit’.[32] The point of this mysticism of the cross is missed if it is seen as only the ‘opium of the people’, given to them by their masters to keep them quiet, as is suggested by the other expression of Lenin, that religion is ‘opium the people’. Of course the mysticism of suffering can easily be peverted into a justification of suffering itself. The mysticism of the cross can of course praise submission to fate as a virtue and be perverted into melancholy apathy. To suffer with the crucified Christ can also lead to self-pity. But faith is then dissociated from the suffering Christ, seeing him as no more than a replaceable pattern for one’s own sufferings, as the patient sufferer who provides the example for one’s own endurance of an alien destiny. His suffering is then no longer of special significance for one’s own acceptance of suffering. It does not change anything in it, nor does it change the human being who suffers. The church has much abused the theology of the cross and the mysticism of the passion in the interest of those who cause the suffering. Too often, peasants, Indians and black slaves have been called upon by the representatives of the dominant religion to accept their sufferings as ‘their cross’ and not to rebel against them. Luther need not have recommended the peasants to accept their suffering as their cross. They already bore the burdens their masters imposed upon them. Instead, a sermon on the cross would have done the princes and the bourgeoisie who ruled them a great deal of good, if it was aimed at setting them free from their pride and moving them to an attitude of solidarity with their victims.[33] Thus it makes a difference who speaks of this mysticism of the cross, to whom he speaks and in whose interests he speaks. In a world of domination and oppression one must pay close attention to the concrete function of any preaching and any devotion. As ‘opium for the people’, produced by those who caused the suffering, this mysticism of suffering is a blasphemy, a kind of monstrous product of inhumanity.
But this does not explain the strange fact that the Christ of the poor has always been the crucified Christ. What do they themselves see in him? They clearly do not find in his passion another ‘poor devil’ who had no better luck than they. Rather, they find in him the brother who put off his divine form and took on the form of a slave (Phil. 2), to be with them and to love them. They find in him a God who does not torture them, as their masters do, but becomes their brother and companion. Where their own lives have been deprived of freedom, dignity and humanity, they find in fellowship with him respect, recognition, human dignity and hope. They find this, their true identity, hidden and guaranteed in the Christ who suffers with them, so that no one can deprive them of this identity (Col. 3.3). They find open to them in the crucified Christ the heaven from which, as a Negro spiritual says, ‘No one can throw me out’, as from a white bus. As a result, this mysticism of the cross on the part of the oppressed is in fact an ‘expression of misery’, and is already implicitly a ‘protest against misery’, as Marx said. In essence, however, it is something more, and something quite different, which was not recognized by Marx: the expression of human dignity and self-respect in the experience that God counts them worthy and the belief that Christ loves them. For in the hymns of this mysticism of the cross a new experience of identity is concealed. Anyone who in these hymns encounters the passion of Christ, and experiences in them the pain of the love of God for himself, knows that he himself is something different from what sorrow and the fear of death, the yoke of slavery and his masters have made and seek to make of him. He finds an identity in the fellowship of the cross, which contradicts the definitions of suffering and slavery, and in which the definitions made by his masters find their limit. This is a foothold and a freedom in faith which prevents those who suffer from abandoning themselves involuntarily to suffering and abandoning themselves in it, from coming to terms with slavery and from feeling themselves to be nothing more than slaves or units of labour, complete nobodies. The faith which is obtained by gazing upon the suffering and crucified God in this mysticism of the cross prevents them from sinking back into misery, from giving themselves up for lost and often enough from committing suicide out of despair. Thus we can describe this intangible experience of identity in faith in the cross as the enduring element in the mysticism of the cross, and as the inner reason for the outward expression of misery and the ever recurring protest against it.
With this account of the inner significance of the mysticism of the cross, our trend of thought is leading beyond the mere conformitas crucis. When the poor and oppressed look upon the poor and humiliated Christ they do not see only their own poverty and humiliation repeated in another human being. He shows them their misery in someone who is different from them. He therefore basically shows them a different misery and a different suffering. If those who practise the mysticism of the passion were to regard the crucified Christ only as the archetype of their own pain and humiliation, they would indeed be maintaining the memory of the features of his humanity and abasement, and would be making it a present reality in their own consciousness of abasement. But they would then be destroying what is distinctive about the person of Jesus and what is special about his suffering and dying. They would then be understanding his cross only in the general sense of ‘cross and misery’, as the passive suffering of an uncomprehended fate, like a miscarriage, an illness, a plague, a premature death, or suffering from the deep rooted evil of other people, as social suffering, and suffering from the society which humiliates them. But these sufferings would not be the sufferings of Christ. There is no mention in the Gospels of his suffering from nature and fate, and his economic sufferings as a ‘carpenter’s son’. Rather, his sufferings and humiliation came from his actions, from his preaching of the imminence of the kingdom as a kingdom of unconditional grace, from his freedom towards the law, and from his table-fellowship with ‘sinners and tax collectors’. Jesus did not suffer passively from the world in which he lived, but incited it against himself by his message and the life he lived. Nor did his crucifixion in Jerusalem come upon him as the act of an evil destiny, so that one could speak of a heroic failure, as heroes have often failed and yet remained heroes to posterity. According to the Gospels, Jesus himself set out for Jerusalem and actively took the expected suffering upon himself. By proclaiming the righteousness of God as the right of those who were rejected and without grace to receive grace, he provoked the hostility of the guardians of the law. By becoming a ‘friend of sinners and tax collectors’, he made their enemies his enemies. By claiming that God himself was on the side of the godless, he incited the devout against him and was cast out into the godlessness of Golgotha. The more the mysticism of the cross recognizes this, the less it can accept Jesus as an example of patience and submission to fate. The more it recognizes his active suffering, the less it can make him the archetype of its own weakness. To the extent that men in misery feel his solidarity with them, their solidarity with his sufferings brings them out of their situation. If they understand him as their brother in their sufferings, they in turn do not become imitators of his sufferings until they accept his mission and actively follow him. He suffered on account of the liberating word of God, and died on account of his liberating fellowship with those who were not free. Consequently, his sufferings and death are the messianic sufferings and death of the ‘Christ of God’. His death is the death of the one who redeems men from death, which is evil. In other words, they are the pains of love for abandoned men, which the mysticism of the cross apprehends when it identifies men with the sufferings of Christ. And the traditional Christian praise of poverty cannot be Christian if it simply gives a religious blessing to the situation of the poor, promising them compensation in heaven, so that on earth the poor become poorer and the rich become richer. As Jesus understood it, poverty is ‘to become poor’, to empty oneself and devote everything that one is and has to the liberation of the poor. ‘Though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich’, said Paul (II Cor. 8.9), demonstrating this by the life he lived as an apostle, ‘always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies . . . so death is at work in us, but life in you’ (II Cor. 4.10, 12). This apostolic suffering and death cannot be attributed in an equivocal fashion to the suffering and death of men in general, as Christian tradition has unfortunately often done, even in Luther. The poverty and sufferings of Christ are experienced and understood only by participation in his mission and in imitating the task he carried out. Thus the more the poor understand the cross, in the mysticism of the cross, as the cross of Christ, the more they are liberated from their submission to fate and apathy in suffering. Thus the potential contained in the devotion of the poor to the cross is different from what has been attributed to it by the dominating religion. For the crucified Messiah to become a present reality amongst slaves is therefore as dangerous to their masters as their reading of the Bible in general.
The church of the crucified was at first, and basically remains, the church of the oppressed and insulted, the poor and wretched, the church of the people. On the other hand, it is also the church of those who have turned away from their inward and external forms of domination and oppression. But it is not the church of those who inwardly are self-righteous and outwardly exercise domination. If it truly remembers the crucified Christ, it cannot allow a bland, religious indifference to prevail towards everyone. As the crucified Messiah, it is the church of liberation for all men, whether Jews or Gentiles, Greeks or barbarians, masters or servants, men or women, but not for everyone in the same way. As the people of the crucified Christ, the church originated in the particular earthly events of the oppression and liberation of Jesus, and exists in the midst of a divided and mutually hostile world of inhuman people on one side and dehumanized people on the other. Its concrete language must therefore take this difference into account, and its action must be that of commitment. The liberation of the poor from the vicious circle of poverty is different in form from the liberation of the rich from the vicious circle of riches, although both vicious circles are interlinked. The justification of godless sinners is different from that of the sinful devout. The liberation of slaves who have been deprived of human life is different from the liberation of the slave owners, who in a double sense of the word themselves ‘take life’. Thus to save all men, and in accordance with the contradiction of the cross, the church of the crucified Christ must take sides in the concrete social and political conflicts going on about it and in which it is involved, and must be prepared to join and form parties. It must not ally itself with the existing parties, but in a partisan fashion intervene on behalf of betrayed humanity and suppressed freedom. The sole legitimate starting point for this is the apprehension of the liberating cross of Christ in the concrete situations in which it is involved with others. To give an example of how the passive criticism of the cross can become an active and politically relevant imitation, let us quote an attempt made in Latin America:
Today the favourite cultic practice of Latin America, the stations of the cross, has come to be fruitful for the inculcation of a social conscience. The central point is the guilt of society, and the leading idea is that Christ is our suffering fellow-man, oppressed, exploited and defenceless. That is, the following statement of Christ is taken literally: ‘As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me’. The ‘twentieth century stations of the cross’ from Central America are a classic example of this new form of the stations of the cross, and its social and political relevance . . . They have often been put on the stage and broadcast, but in 1964 were forbidden by the military government.[34]
4. Following the Cross
In the previous chapter we went on from the mysticism of the cross in passive suffering, by way of the recognition of the active sufferings of Christ, in the direction of active imitation of the crucified Christ. We must now describe in outline the forms in which the crucified Christ becomes a present reality in the experience of fellowship with Christ, on the part of those who follow him. We shall then ask once more how much of his cross on Golgotha is to be found in the cross of those who follow him, and how much is exclusively his own cross. The idea of following Christ has been neglected by bourgeois Protestantism, because it no longer recognized or wished to recognize the suffering church, the church of the martyrs, but established itself in a situation of apparent harmony with the ‘Christian world’. Not until the period of conflict between the church and society did anyone have the experience of consciously following Christ, did anyone come forward as a martyr and understand once again what it means to be crucified with him.
The Gospels intentionally direct the gaze of Christians away from the experiences of the risen Christ and the Holy Spirit back to the earthly Jesus and his way to the cross. They represent faith as a call to follow Jesus. The call to follow him (Mark 8.31–38 par.) is associated with Jesus’ proclamation of suffering. To follow Jesus always means to deny oneself and to take ‘his cross’ on oneself. Let us first of all summarize the basic features of his call to follow Jesus. He gathers about himself a circle of disciples who follow him (Mark 1.29; Matt. 8.1; 14.13; Luke 7.9; 9.11; John 6.2, etc.). Outwardly, there is no distinction between this and the picture presented by the scribes and their disciples. But the relationship was of a different kind. The disciples of Jesus did not request to be accepted into his ‘school’, but were called by him. Presumably calling and following were originally concerned with God alone. Thus for Jesus to call people to follow him was an unparalleled claim to authority on his part. His disciples did not follow him in order to become rabbis themselves one day. They were to call each other brother, rather than rabbi (Matt. 10.24). For Jesus did not found a new rabbinic school, but proclaimed the imminence of the kingdom. His call to discipleship was made under the sign of the kingdom of God which was beginning, and this sign was Jesus himself in person. Consequently, the call to follow him was absolute, and no motive was given at the time or later. Instead, there was a direct appeal: ‘Follow me!’ (Mark 1.17 par.; 2.14 par.). Those who followed this call abandoned everything, and others refused and remained what they were. To follow Jesus was to break all links with one’s family, job, etc., and indeed to break the link with oneself, to deny and hate oneself, in order to gain the kingdom: ‘Whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it’ (Mark 8.35).
Thus the motivation for the call to follow Jesus is eschatological, and must not be understood in a moral sense. It is a call into the future of God which is now beginning in Jesus, and for the sake of this future it is not only necessary but possible to break one’s links with the world which is now passing away and abandon a concern for one’s own life. The call to follow Jesus is the commandment of the eschatological moment. But as a call to follow Jesus, it is also a call to share his suffering and to stand beneath his cross. What is this suffering? Bonhoeffer has rightly pointed out that according to the proclamations of his suffering in the context of which the call to follow him occurs, Jesus has to suffer and to be rejected.[35] To suffer and to be rejected are not identical. Suffering can be celebrated and admired. It can arouse compassion. But to be rejected takes away the dignity from suffering and makes it dishonourable suffering. To suffer and be rejected signify the cross. To die on the cross means to suffer and to die as one who is an outcast and rejected. If those who follow Jesus are to take ‘their cross’ on themselves, they are taking on not only suffering and a bitter fate, but the suffering of rejection. According to their own experience, the greatest Christian saints were also the most profoundly abandoned by God. The expression ‘cross’ for the sufferings undergone in following Jesus takes its meaning solely from the cross of Christ, not from natural or social sufferings. ‘The cross . . . is not the sort of suffering which is inseparable from this mortal life, but the suffering which is an essential part of the specifically Christian life’.[36] And the cross of Christ, in the context of his life, is explained in the first instance by his mission, which provoked hostility. But in addition to the hostility of the law and society, it also contains the element of abandonment by God, expressed in Mark 15.34. His cross includes acceptance of rejection by the Father, in which, in the context of his resurrection, election and atonement are revealed. We must ask whether this cross of absolute abandonment by God is not exclusively his cross alone, and is endured in the cross of those who share in his sufferings only in a watered-down form. The cross of Christ cannot be reduced to an example for the cross of those who follow him. His suffering from abandonment by God is not merely a blueprint for Christian existence in the abandonment by God of a world which is passing away. And therefore Mark 8.35 reads, no doubt intentionally, not that the disciple should take up ‘his’, that is Christ’s cross, but ‘your’ cross. There is no question of their being on the same level, as is shown by the story of Gethsemane. Jesus suffered and died alone. But those who follow him suffer and die in fellowship with him. For all that they have in common, there is a difference. ‘Hence while it is still true that suffering means being cut off from God, yet within the fellowship of Christ’s suffering, suffering is overcome by suffering, and becomes the way to communion with God’.[37] And therefore to follow Jesus is joyful.
In the exhortatory passages in his epistles, Paul translated his well-known proclamation of the ‘word of the cross’ (I Cor. 1.18) into the ethics of the cross, and tells the members of the churches to crucify their flesh and to make the dying of Jesus visible in their bodies.[38] Crucifixion with Jesus was creatively symbolized in baptism and practised in the new obedience which is no longer conformed to this world (Rom. 12.2). He who has died with Christ (Rom. 6.4) is crucified to the world and the world to him (Gal. 6.14). The ‘world’ here does not mean the essence of experienced reality, but the world of the law, of sin, of the powers and of death. He is ‘dead’ to this world, so that he no longer has any rights and any claims upon it. But he lives in the life-giving spirit of the new creation, is governed by it, and walks in a renewed life. Paul no longer uses the expression ‘following’, but he can sometimes speak of ‘imitating’ (I Cor. 11.1; I Thess. 1.6). In the disagreement about his legitimation as an apostle he counters ideas of following in the sense of succession by the visible signs of the cross in his life and his body (II Cor. 4; II Cor. 6; II Cor. 11.22ff.).[39] These are the very tangible experiences of suffering, of persecution and rejection, to which his apostolate had led him. If as an apostle Paul follows the mission of Christ, by its outward and inward temptations it leads him into the following of the cross. He bears the dying of Jesus in his body, so that the life of Jesus may be revealed. ‘So death is at work in us, but life in you’ (II Cor. 4.12). These were not sufferings he had chosen himself. Nor is there an attempt to achieve a deeper fellowship with Christ through suffering. Nor is there any imitation of the sufferings of Christ. They are apostolic sufferings and the cross of one who bears witness. The authentication of his apostolate is given by Christ himself, who reveals himself in his apostle’s cross. Because he follows the mission of Christ, Paul takes ‘his’ cross upon him and reveals the power of Christ through his weakness and the life of the risen Christ through his daily dying.
In church history, the closest form of following the crucified Christ was to be a martyr. E. Peterson has shown that the apostles were a limited group, whereas the idea of a martyr was not limited to that of an apostle. ‘The apostolic church, based upon apostles who were martyrs, is also the suffering church, the church of the martyrs’.[40] The sufferings of an apostle could be renewed in a martyr, who in a juridical sense was not a successor of the apostles. The apostolate of the eye-witnesses of the risen Christ could not be passed on to anyone else. But the ministry of preaching and of being crucified with Christ is passed on to the whole church (A. Schlatter). In the ancient church of the time of persecution, martyrdom was regarded as a special charisma. Those who were put to death were considered to have undergone the ‘baptism of blood’ and to have fellowship with Jesus in death. Their testimony was consummated in the giving of their lives, and the giving of their lives was understood as sharing in the victory of the crucified Christ. Thus a martyr did not suffer only for Christ, his lord, as a soldier goes to his death for his king. His martyrdom was understood as a suffering with Christ, and therefore also as the suffering of Christ in him and with him. And because Christ himself suffered in the martyrs, it can be said with Col. 1.24 that the martyrs ‘in their body complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of the church’. Thus they do not merely imitate the sufferings of Christ and bear witness to it by doing the same, but take part in and fulfil the continuing sufferings of Christ. They are drawn into the mystery of the suffering of Christ and come to participate in him. This led later to the idea that the altars of the church must be built over the graves or relics of apostles and martyrs, and that the sufferings of the martyrs, by participating is the sufferings of Christ, could be counted as good works. But the imitative participation and cooperation of the martyrs in the agony of Christ must not be understood in this sense. They also make clear the connection between the sufferings of Christ and the sufferings of the final age, which pervade the whole of enslaved creation (Rom. 8.19). ‘Suffering in this cosmos is universal, because it is a suffering with the suffering of Christ, who came into this cosmos and yet has burst the bounds of this cosmos, when he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven’. This is the interpretation of E. Peterson,[41] who thereby makes clear the universal and public character of the cross of Christ in its significance for the unrecognized sufferings of the final age undergone by a world which is godless and abandoned by God. Thus between Golgotha and the eschatological end of the world, the death of a martyr is a public testimony. The suffering and rejection of Christ on the cross is understood as eschatological suffering and rejection, and is brought by the martyrs into the eschatological public arena, where they are cast out, rejected and publicly executed. Kierkegaard’s ‘attack on Christianity’, in the midst of the liberal bourgeois-Protestant world of the nineteenth century, made impressively clear that the rejection of the concept of martyrdom had brought with it the abandonment of the church’s understanding of suffering, and meant that the gospel of the cross had lost its meaning and ultimately that established Christianity was bound to lose its eschatological hope. The assimilation of Christianity to bourgeois society always means that the cross is forgotten and hope is lost.
A third manner of following Christ came into being later than the period of the martyrs, in the special form of monasticism. The concept of following was changed here to that of imitation (imitatio Christi). The humiliations which the apostles and martyrs experienced became the Christian virtue of humility. The persecutions undergone by the apostles and martyrs in their proclamation of the truth of Christ became the exercise of the self-abnegation of the soul. Concrete martyrdom became ‘spiritual death’ in the form of self-mortification. Jesus’ eschatological calls to follow him became spiritual and moral maxims. The process of transformation and spiritualization can no doubt be described this way. Yet in this form, too, the recollection of the sufferings of Christ was maintained in a vital form. The foundations and reforms of monastic orders were constantly inspired by the idea of the imitation of Christ. The Celtic monks were to be homeless, as Jesus had been homeless. The unmarried state was based upon the fact that Jesus was not married, and poverty, upon Jesus’ poverty. In the Franciscans, the mendicant orders and the devotio moderna, the reforming protest against the riches, political power and secularization of the church appealed time and again to the example of Jesus. The Christian movements which set out to follow Christ but did not succeed in remaining within the church, like the Waldensians, Albigensians, Luddites and Hussites, were suppressed and persecuted. The following of Christ was then spiritualized in the form of mystical exercises, which often supplemented and replaced scholastic theology. The issue here was the unity of theory and practice in Christian life. Belief without following Christ became a matter of merely giving credence to doctrines and carrying out ceremonies. From an Augustinian and Franciscan legacy, Bonaventure introduced a voluntarist and affective element into theology.[42] Theology is not pure theory, but a synthesis of theory and practical wisdom, that is, a theologia affectiva. It is a unity of intellectual reflection and spiritual experience. But the spiritual experiences which belong to the knowledge of God are made in the form of the meditatio crucis. Here the via crucis becomes a third factor, parallel to the via activa of good works pleasing to God and the via contemplativa, the eternal adoration of mystical, negative theology.[43] The itinerarium in Deum begins with a mental absorption in the sufferings and death of Christ, until his sufferings are experienced as one’s own sufferings and his temptations as one’s own temptations. This assimilation of the soul to Christ through suffering was called by Eckhardt and Tauler the via compendii, the shortest way to the mystical divine birth of the soul. By the aid of the meditatio crucis, the soul returns to the darkness of its uncreated ground. By conformity to the cross, the soul conforms to God. The way of salvation in mystical crucifixions with Jesus leads through suffering to glory, by way of abandonment for damnation to election, and through the cross to the crown. It is described in this way by Thomas à Kempis in his Imitation of Christ, which still influences Christian piety at the present day.[44] The primary virtue in following Christ is humility (humilitas). This is displayed in obedience, contempt for the world and silence. Jesus is the pattern of this humility. His way of humility leads through the cross to eternal life. To follow him is to give up love for the world and self-love, and to be seized by the amor crucis. On the via regia sanctae crucis one passes through severe temptations, the withdrawal of grace and inner annihilation (annihilatio), arriving at complete calm in God. The conformitas crucis leads to the contemplatio Dei in the mystical excessus mentis. The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, in the third week, contemplate the sufferings of Christ:
The special grace to ask for in the passion is sorrow with Christ in His sorrow, a broken heart with Christ heart-broken, tears and interior suffering for the great suffering Christ endured for me.
The intention is for the soul to participate in the very moment of Christ’s suffering and crucifixion. And Luther’s theology of the cross is not conceivable without this mystical imitation of the cross and its conformitas Christology.[45] By way of the spiritual exercises of the cross, the believer becomes an ‘imitator of Christ’ in a spiritual and internalized way, and by so doing continues the experiences of the apostles and martyrs, without himself becoming an apostle and martyr. Faith in the crucified Christ leads to an existence which is in conformity with the cross and with Christ. The cross of Christ is taken up existentially as one’s own cross. This ‘mysticism of introversion’, an internalization of the following of Christ, can be considered a departure from the practical, physical following of Christ. But it must also be realized that his mysticism of the inner light can be and has been transformed into the ‘consuming flame, which turns outward’.[46] The transformation of mysticism into millenarianism and of religion into revolution can be seen both in the Reformation Anabaptists and also in Thomas Münzer’s mysticism of the cross.[47] But to follow Jesus is not to imitate him, for following him does not mean becoming a Jesus oneself. Nor does it mean admiration of a hero and a mystical contemporaneity with him.[48] One follows Christ in one’s own response to the mission of Christ at the present day and in taking up one’s own cross.
To follow Christ means to have faith, and faith is in fact an existential unity of theory and practice, as can be seen in the life of the apostles, in the life of the martyrs, and to a certain extent also in the mystical theology of inner experience.
But two things must be considered: 1. What are the suffering and cross of Christ, and what are the sufferings and the cross of those who follow him? 2. When the mission and cross of Christ become a present reality today, what form do they take, if they are to be anything more than a private imitation?
The significance of the first question can be seen from Rudolf Bultmann’s understanding of the cross.
By giving up Jesus to be crucified, God has set up the cross for us. To believe in the cross of Christ does not mean to concern ourselves with a mythical process wrought outside of us and our world, or with an objective event turned by God to our advantage, but rather to make the cross of Christ our own, to undergo crucifixion with him.
For Bultmann the cross is an ‘eschatological event’:
In other words, the cross is not just an event of the past which can be contemplated in detachment, but the eschatological event in and beyond time, for as far as its meaning—that is, its meaning for faith—is concerned, it is an ever-present reality.
Bultmann gives as an example Paul’s apostolic theology of the cross, and continues:
In its redemptive aspect the cross of Christ is no mere mythical event, but a permanent historical fact originating in the past historical event which is the crucifixion of Jesus. The abiding significance of the cross is that it is the judgement of the world, the judgement and the deliverance of man . . . The preaching of the cross as the event of redemption challenges all who hear it to appropriate this significance for themselves, to be willing to be crucified with Christ.[49]
Bultmann is rightly resisting the mythical objectivization of the cross of Christ, and the historicizing of the cross of Jesus until it is completely meaningless. Yet here the cross of Jesus Christ seems to have been deprived of any significance of its own, and to obtain historical significance only in the existential process of being crucified with Christ. To believe in the cross of Christ certainly also means to let oneself be crucified with him, to justify the justifying judgment of God. But it is so only in a secondary sense. Paul tells us that ‘while we were yet helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly’ (Rom. 5.6), ‘while we were yet sinners’ (v.8). His death on the cross ‘for us’, the godless, the sinners, is certainly not a vividly portrayed mythical action. Nor is it sufficient to give it mere doctrinal acknowledgment. But neither is it an event of eschatological history in the sense that it originates in the crucifixion of Jesus, is continued in the crucifixion of the believer with him, and is ‘always present’. The inner basis and continual assumption of Paul’s ‘we with Christ’ is found in ‘Christ for us’. That we are crucified with Christ, as it were simultaneously and in conformity with him, is something which comes about in faith, and is possible and effective only on the basis of the revelation of God in his counterpart, in the one who was abandoned by God, and in the death of Christ for his enemies, the godless and the sinners. The significance of the cross of Christ does not derive from the crucifixion of the believer with him. The reverse is true; the crucifixion of the believer with Christ takes its meaning from Christ’s death on the cross for the godless. If this ‘meaning’ is to be understood as nothing more than ‘interpreted history’, and this ‘historical interpretation’ is nothing more than existential repetition, then in the cross with which we follow Christ we find his cross rather than the reverse. But in the first instance the preaching of the cross does not ask the hearer whether he will allow himself to be crucified with Christ; it proclaims to him Christ abandoned by God and crucified for him who is godless. It is the revelation of God in abandonment by God, the acceptance of the godless by Christ himself taking on his abandonment, which brings him into fellowship with the crucified Christ and makes it possible for him to follow Christ. Not until Christ has taken on our cross as his own is it meaningful to take up our cross in order to follow him. As a result of his distinctions between mythical and historical, and between historical in the sense of hard fact and historical in the sense of an event in its meaning for us, and his exclusively existential understanding of this latter, interpreted history, Bultmann is in danger of being able to understand the cross of Christ only as an example for the conformitas of Christian existential life by following him. There is a good deal of support for this in Luther’s early theology of the cross, which is still mystical in form, but it easily leads to the impossibility of regarding Jesus as the Christ except in so far as this event of eschatological history, this liberating judgment, had its historical origin in his crucifixion, and in so far as he was the first person in time to have borne the eternally present cross of eternity.
This danger is even greater, when the creative following of Jesus through a personal response seeks its own example in him, or even accepts only those elements in the ‘course followed by Jesus’ which a person can follow himself, and which seem meaningful at the present day.[50] It is true that in a technocratic society all human relationships are reduced to the level of things, and general apathy is spreading on an epidemic scale. It is true that in a world of high consumption, where anything and everything is possible, nothing is so humanizing as love, and a conscious interest in the life of others, particularly in the life of the oppressed. For love leaves us open to wounding and disappointment. It makes us ready to suffer. It leads us out of isolation into a fellowship with others, with people different from ourselves, and this fellowship is always associated with suffering. It changes the world, in so far as it puts life into a static situation and overcomes the death urge which turns everything into a possession or an instrument of power. It is also true that in Jesus’ preaching of the imminence of the kingdom of God’s prevenient grace, and in his life for and with the lepers, the outcasts, the sinners and the tax collectors, such love can be seen personified. Moreover, it is right to follow Jesus at the present time in the specific activities of love, suffering and revolt. This does not mean that in following Christ, faith is reduced to ethics, as the orthodox fear; orthodoxy is fulfilled in the unity of theory and practice, in ‘orthopraxy’. This leads in the end beyond the narrow circle in which Christ is understood in the categories of the historicity of an individual’s life, into the domains of economic, social and political life, in which men in fact have to carry out their struggle for ‘existence’. This means that to be crucified with Christ is no longer a purely private and spiritualized matter, but develops into a political theology of the following of the crucified Christ. But it is not sufficient for the ethics of following Christ to begin only with the ‘portrait and testimony of the man Jesus’ and ‘to live on the pattern of Jesus’.[51] It is right to extend the understanding of the following of Christ and to give concrete meaning to our taking up the cross, for this does not take place only in the inner life of faith, any more than concrete martyrdom is exhausted in the mystical conformitascrucis. But this imagery obscures the unique and unrepeatable nature of the course taken by Christ and of his cross. His suffering contains more than merely the necessary suffering of love which becomes a reality in following him, the ability of love to be wounded and disappointed. When the pains of love are accepted, they deepen love. But Christ’s suffering on the cross does not consist merely in the ethical suffering of love, even if ‘ethics’ is not used here in any disparaging or limited sense. Bonhoeffer rightly says: ‘In the passion Jesus is a rejected Messiah. His rejection robs the passion of its halo of glory’.[52] Jesus was also rejected by inhuman persons because of his love for those whom they had dehumanized. But this was not all; he was also, and most completely of all, abandoned by his Father, whose immediate presence he proclaimed and experienced in his life. This rejection in suffering, this judgment in the cross, goes far beyond the suffering involved in the love of one’s neighbour or enemy. But it leads beyond it not into metaphysics, but into the universal, cosmic eschatology of the end, into the abandonment by God of the godless and the destruction of all that exists. Seen in this light, the cross of Christ comes to have a significance for the testimony of faith, of perseverance when there is no support at all, and of fellowship with Christ in abandonment, which goes beyond the sufferings of love. Nor can the significance of being crucified with Christ as Paul describes it be reduced to that of an example or archetype of the sufferings of love. The list of afflictions endured in II Cor. 4 is not a paradoxical ethic of love regardless of suffering, but must be read in the apocalyptic context of the destruction of the world and the new creation. Nor was the crucifixion of the martyrs with Christ simply a matter of suffering for love; it was more than this— it was a testimony of the truth against the lords of the lie. The suffering of love for forgotten, despised and betrayed human beings wherever they are oppressed is concrete suffering in imitation of Christ, and in practice can be called taking ‘one’s cross’ upon oneself. But it should not be isolated, and for all the existential understanding of Jesus that in fact is achieved in it, the qualitative difference between Christ’s own cross and the cross of those who follow him should not be ignored. The cross of Christ is the basis on which the apostle, the martyrs and those who show selfless love are crucified with him. This basis can be recognized only through what it underlies, but it is more than that. When faith and love take up the cross and follow Christ, his cross becomes the object of existential experience; but in time, in content and in its eschatological significance for the godless, the cross of Christ is prior to the taking up of the cross by others.
It would be a good thing if, after speaking of the cross of Christ who died for the godless, the theology of the cross were to distinguish between:
1. The apostolic cross of the establishment of the obedience of faith in a world full of idols, demons, fetishes and superstition.
2. The cross of the martyrs, who bore bodily witness to the lordship of the crucified Christ before the rulers of the world.
3. The suffering of love for abandoned, despised and betrayed human beings.
4. The ‘sufferings of this age’, the groaning of the enslaved creation, the apocalyptic sorrow of the godless world.
The theology of the cross must make these distinctions in order to perceive and put into effect the connections between them with realism, and, in the sense of the eschatological liberation of the world with hope. A Christian stands at the intersection of these four different points of suffering, and must give a theoretical and practical account of the significance of the cross of Christ in them, if he is to do justice to the cross on Golgotha in the context of the world. The theology of the cross cannot permit itself any equivocation here, as unfortunately it has constantly done in history.
5. The Theology of the Cross
Christian faith stands and falls with the knowledge of the crucified Christ, that is, with the knowledge of God in the crucified Christ, or, to use Luther’s even bolder phrase, with the knowledge of the ‘crucified God’. What does this mean for the theology of Christian faith? Let us look once again at basic forms of Christian theology, and ask what their attitude is to the cross as their inner criterion.
In Greek usage, ‘theology’ is talking about God, the gods, or divine things.[53] Plato called the poets’ stories of the gods ‘theologies’ (Republic, 379a). He regarded them as mythicaltheology, as the Stoics later called it. The myths and rites of the state religion could also be called theological. The later Stoics called this field political theology. Plato himself, in considering the ‘theology’ of the poets and the statesmen, looks for the typoi peri theologias, i.e. the standards for the admissibility of such stories of the gods; and he found them in his theory of ideas and in morality. Aristotle speaks in the same terms of the ‘theologizing’ poets of myth such as Hesiod and Homer (Metaphysics III, iv, 1000a); yet we should note that he calls his own metaphysical doctrine of the ‘unmoved mover’ theological philosophy (Metaphysics VI, i, 1026a). The Stoics later distinguished between three forms of theology: the mythical theology of the poets, the political theology of the legislators and the natural theology (study of being) of the philosophers.[54]
The expression ‘theology’ does not occur in the New Testament. This explains why the ancient church in the Greek-speaking area found the philosophical concept of theology most readily accessible and adopted it. By ‘theology’ the Alexandrians meant the ‘knowledge of the eternally existent logos’, by contrast to the mythical conceptual world of simple faith. In the following period the expression ‘theo-logy’ was also reserved for the special knowledge of God, the doctrine of God, the vision of God, and was associated in Christian practice with the praise of God in hymns, in the liturgy. The ‘economy of salvation’ in which the incarnation of the logos, the cross and the resurrection, the church and the sacraments were described, was distinguished from this.[55] Thus there was doxological theology and economic theology, or in other words, theology as ‘pure theory’ and theology as ‘practical theory’, concerned with the history of salvation.
The first forms of theologicalscience did not arise until the Middle Ages. They included not only the special doctrine of God, but the whole complex, drawn from specifically Christian tradition, of sacra doctrina, and more generally of the philosophical theology which included the knowledge of the time. Unde theologia, quae ad sacram doctrinam pertinet, differt secundum genus ab illa theologia, quae pars philosophiae ponitur, said Aquinas (S.Th. I, q I, a I). Thus he distinguished between philosophical theology and theological theology, and yet used the same word ‘theology’ for both.[56] Here, theology as a science means giving public account of Christian faith with all the intellectual means generally available at a particular time, and at the same time the use made of contemporary knowledge by Christian faith. The claim tacitly made is that Christian theology is ‘true philosophy’, and not a branch of specifically religious knowledge, or a private matter.
Both forms of theology exist at the present day. But they proceed from a strict understanding of the concept ‘theology’, and by the logos of theology they understand theology as the word of God.[57] In this ‘word’ God is not only the object of human discourse; for God is not an object of experience like the objects in the world which human understanding can know, define and control. If God himself is taken seriously as the Lord, he must be perceived and thought of as the subject who utters his word. Thus theology as speaking about God is possible only on the basis of what God himself says. Theology as the reflection of faith upon the word received assumes the event of the word spoken by God himself. Faith can claim to be in accord with rational understanding only in so far as it understands what God says. And this understanding consists of considering the word of God in constant awareness that God is the subject of everything which theology considers, and in attentiveness to the word of God as it is uttered.[58] The theology of faith presupposes the theology of God, which is found in the word of God which has been and which is uttered.[59] Thus it is church theology. The weakness of this starting point is that it comes very close to the distinction made by the early church between theology as the doctrine of God and economy as the doctrine of salvation, and can therefore lose contact with the reality of unredeemed humanity. It does not always begin by taking seriously that both are united in the cross of Christ, and that therefore, as Paul states, the λόγοϛ τοῦ θεοῦ (II Cor. 2.17) cannot in Christian terms be anything other than the, λόγοϛ τοῦ σταυροῦ (I Cor. 1.18).[60]
On the other hand, one can conduct theology as a science under the conditions of the modern age, appealing to Schleiermacher and Hegel. Here theology is a ‘positive science’, the parts of which are drawn together into a whole by their common relationship to a particular form of belief. Here Christian theology is the science of Christianity.[61]
One can then go further than Schleiermacher in affirming that in Christian countries in the modern age this ‘Christianity’ is by no means to be found solely in the organized church, but has become involved in numerous material and personal ways in general culture. This sociological insight is often expressed in the thesis which R. Rothe put forward with messianic and millenarian emotion, that after its ecclesiastical stage, Christianity has for the time being moved into the epoch in which it is part of secular history.[62] This assertion, which states not merely a fact, but a myth, confronts theology with the overwhelming task of developing a ‘theory of present-day Christianity’ as a whole. And this includes the medieval claim that Christian theology must be in a position to present the true philosophy, by developing a Christian theory of the present time. In the circumstances of present-day history, this means that the ‘theory of Christianity’ undertakes the task of a philosophy of world history which Hegel saw as the task of philosophy, as the knowledge of being, to ‘apprehend its own time in thoughts’.[63] But if such a philosophy is only possible when what is real is rational, so such a theory of Christianity in terms of world history is possible only when what is real is Christian. But what is ‘real’? And even if this theory were ever to prevail, its price would have to be paid: that of ignoring the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ (M. Horkheimer, T. Adorno) in the modern world, the misery of the modern age characterized by the names of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and the conflicts which modern capitalism and the white man have produced.[64] The credibility structure of modern society is often enough, in more than one respect, one of delusion. And it would be necessary, within the inner identity of Christianity, to reduce the contradiction and foolishness of the cross to the ‘wisdom’ of Christianity. Yet even a theory of world-accepting Christianity, which saw Christianity as religious culture, would not be able totally to conceal the alien nature of the crucified Christ in a ‘Christian’ culture. Outsiders and atheists would remind the Christians of it.[65]
A Christian theology which sees its problem and its task in knowing God in the crucified Christ, cannot be pure theory. It cannot lead to a pure theory of God, as in the vision of God in the early church. Pure contemplation of this kind abandons the realm of the transitory, of mere appearance and uncertain opinion, and finds true, eternal being in the logos. The pure, self-forgetting contemplation of God transforms him who contemplates into that which he contemplates, and enables him to participate in God himself, making him divine through mimesis and methexis. He who loves wisdom, through the eros for wisdom which has taken hold of him, himself becomes wise. Thus pure contemplation indirectly bestows participation in, and likeness to, what is contemplated. The steps by which it is imported can here only be the likenesses of God in nature, history and tradition, which indirectly reflect and reveal something of God himself—e.g., his works in creation and history, in men and ideas which have been conformed to God. The principle of knowledge prevailing here is that of analogy, as in Parmenides, Empedocles and Aristotle.[66]
But in the crucified Christ, abandoned by God and cursed, faith can find no equivalents of this kind which provide it with an indirect, analogical knowledge of God, but encounters the very contrary. In the crucified Christ the contrary is found on several levels: in the contrary to the God who has revealed his will in the law and is in practice known in the works of the law. For Jesus was sentenced to death by the law as a blasphemer. Faith finds in him the contrary to, and liberation from, the so-called gods, who are venerated in the political theology of political religions. For Jesus died, whether rightly or wrongly, a political death as a rebel, on the cross. Finally, faith finds in him the contrary to a God who reveals himself indirectly in the creation and in history. For Jesus died abandoned by God. But if this is the point at which faith comes into being, this means first of all that Christian theology cannot be a pure theory of God, but must become a critical theory of God. This criticism is directed from the crucified Christ to man in his attempt to know God, and destroys the concern which guides him to knowledge. For man seeks God in the law, and attempts to conform to him through the works of the law, in order to bring himself into the righteousness of God. If he sees and believes in God in the person of Christ, condemned by the law, he is set free from the legalist concern to justify himself. Man seeks God in the will for political power and world domination. If he sees and believes God in Christ who was powerless and crucified, he is set free from this desire to have power and domination over others. Man seeks to know God in the works and ordinances of the cosmos or the course of world history, in order to become divine himself through knowledge. If he sees and believes God in the suffering and dying Christ, he is set free from the concern for self-deification which guides him towards knowledge. Thus the knowledge of God in the crucified Christ takes seriously the situation of man in pursuit of his own interests, man who in reality is inhuman, because he is under the compulsion of self-justification, dominating self-assertion and illusionary self-deification. ‘For this reason, the crucified Jesus is the “image of the invisible God”’.[67] Thus because of its subject, the theology of the cross, right down to its method and practice, can only be polemical, dialectical, antithetical and critical theory. This theology is ‘itself crucified theology and speaks only of the cross’ (K. Rahner). It is also crucifying theology, and is thereby liberating theology.
We can see this clearly in the theological tradition which is called the theology of the cross in the special sense. In this sense, the theology of the cross was founded by Paul. Just as in Rom. 1.17ff. Paul develops justification by faith in a critical direction against justification by the works of the law, so that it leads to liberation from the compulsion for self-justification by works, so in I Cor. 1.18ff., he developed the word of the cross against wisdom and the knowledge of God from the world, so that the knowledge of the cross would bring about liberation from the powers of the cosmos. What is a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Greeks, becomes for believers the power of God for freedom. The question here is not whether in his polemic Paul gives a just account of historic Judaism, faithful to the law, or of historic Hellenism, with its wisdom piety. For his polemic is aimed at the deeper issue of the situation of dehumanized man as one who pursues his own interest, and who, whether he is a Jew or a Greek, cannot let God be God, but must make himself the unhappy and proud God of his own self, his fellow men, and his world. At this level the word of the cross liberates dehumanized man from the fatal concern for deification, and it is no accident that in the first chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul draws attention to the concrete social consequences, in order to demonstrate the power which is contained in the weakness and folly of the crucified God:
For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your call, brethren; not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God . . . Let him who boasts, boast of the Lord. (I Cor. 1.25–31)
The theology of the cross leads to criticism of the self-glorification of dehumanized man and to his liberation, and is directly associated with the human way of life and practice chosen by this congregation of weak, lowly and despised persons, a way of life which takes away the power of the social circumstances which bring about the aggression of dehumanized man, and endeavours to overcome it.
The ‘theology of the cross’ is the explicit formulation which Luther used in 1518 in the Heidelberg Disputation, in order to find words for the Reformation insight of the liberating gospel of the crucified Christ, by contrast to the theologiagloriae of the medieval institutional church.[68]
Appealing constantly to Paul, Luther in his polemic contrasts the knowledge of God through his sufferings and cross with the knowledge of God through his works in creation and history. He does not deny that man in himself can have an indirect knowledge of God from creation, history and the soul. But man is no longer in himself, but in practice is outside himself. He is in practice a sinner, although he is created in the image of God. Thus dehumanized man, who must exalt himself, because he cannot ensure himself as he is, in practice uses these religious insights only in the interest of his own self-deification. As a result, they do not help him to achieve humanity, but only give greater force to his inhumanity. The knowledge of the cross is the knowledge of God in the suffering caused to him by dehumanized man, that is, in the contrary of everything which dehumanized man seeks and tries to attain as the deity in him. Consequently, this knowledge does not confirm him as what he is, but destroys him. It destroys the god, miserable in his pride, which we would like to be, and restores to us our abandoned and despised humanity. The knowledge of the cross brings a conflict of interest between God who has become man and man who wishes to become God. It destroys the destruction of man. It alienates alienated man. And in this way it restores the humanity of dehumanized man. Just as Paul contrasted the wisdom of this world and the folly of the cross, and in parallel with this, contrasted righteousness by the works of the law and the scandal of the cross, so Luther brought together the religious way to knowledge through the contemplation of the works of God, and the moral way of self-affirmation through one’s own works, and directed the theologiacrucis polemically against both. ‘Religious speculation and sanctification by works are only two manifestations of the same desire in man, the desire for unbroken, direct dealings with God’.[69] In fact ethics and metaphysics never run parallel, without contact with each other, but influence each other in accordance with the needs and concerns of man. Moreover, the metaphysics and ethics of Aristotle, which lie behind medieval theology as a science and as church practice, are both based upon achievement and works.[70]
The historical question, whether Luther’s portrait of the ‘theology of glory’ which he opposed was a correct description of medieval catholic theology, is a superficial one. His theologiacrucis is not an attack on medieval catholic theology as such, but what he recognized in it, man’s inhuman concern for self-deification through knowledge and works. The knowledge of God in the suffering of the cross of Christ destroys man who abandons his humanity, for it destroys his gods and destroys his supposed divinity. It sets him free from his inhuman hybris, to restore his true human nature. It makes the homoincurvatusin se once again open to God and his neighbour, and gives Narcissus the power to love someone else.
Luther developed his theologia crucis as the programme of critical and Reformation theology. Theologiacrucis is not a single chapter in theology, but the key signature for all Christian theology. It is a completely distinctive kind of theology. It is the point from which all theological statements which seek to be Christian are viewed (W. von Löwenich). And yet it only remains theologiacrucis in the context of critical and liberating practice in preaching and life. The theology of the cross is a practical doctrine for battle, and can therefore become neither a theory of Christianity as it is now, nor the Christian theory of world history. It is a dialectic and historical theology, and not a theology of world history. It does not state what exists, but sets out to liberate men from their inhuman definitions and their idolized assertions, in which they have become set, and in which society has ensnared them.
The limit of Luther’s theologiacrucis in its historical form lay in the fact that it was impossible for him to oppose Aristotle’s philosophy of works with its aid so effectively that a philosophiacrucis could arise from it. Although in his polemic against Erasmus in 1525 he once again put forward his theology of the cross against the rising humanism of the modern age, the humanism of Erasmus, with the aid of Melanchthon, found its way into Protestantism and encouraged the Protestant ethic of achievement.
In political terms, its limit lay in the fact that while as a reformer Luther formulated the theologiacrucis in theoretical and practical terms against the medieval institutional church, he did not formulate it as social criticism against feudal society in the Peasant Wars of 1524 and 1525.[71] What he wrote to the peasants did not express the critical and liberating force of the cross, the choosing of the lowly which puts the mighty to shame, nor the polemic of the crucified God against pride and subjection, domination and slavery, but instead a non-Protestant mysticism of suffering and humble submission.[72] The task therefore remained of developing the theology of the cross in the direction of an understanding of the world and of history. The theology of the cross had to be worked out not merely for the reform of the church but as social criticism, is association with practical actions to set free both the wretched and their rulers. A thoroughgoing theology of the cross must apprehend the crucified God in all the three areas in which the ancient world used the term theology, and in which even today men are inescapably religious: in mythical theology, in the form of demythologization; in political theology, in the form of liberation; and in philosophical theology, in the form of understanding the universe as creation.
We must once again ask a critical question: Is this theology of the cross in accordance with Jesus who was historically crucified? Does the word of the cross, as Paul calls the gospel, absorb the person of Jesus and the event of the crucifixion into language? The crucified Jesus is dead, and dead men do not speak. Death is dumb and deprives one of speech. Is the ‘word of the cross’ as Paul and Luther understood it simply one more of many possible interpretations to which the dead Jesus has had to submit? Paul understood the gospel as the ‘revelation’ of the gracious righteousness of God and as the imparting of the liberating power of God in Christ. The word of the cross enables one to participate in the divine event of the cross, and faith allows the godless to participate in this in fellowship with Christ. This is something more than merely conveying a piece of information or an arbitrary interpretation. For Paul the ‘word of the cross’ is based in the event of the resurrection of the crucified Christ; but it is a message about the cross of Christ. He did not understand the resurrection of Christ as an event which simply followed his death, but as the eschatological event which characterized the earthly Jesus, crucified under Pontius Pilate, as the Kyrios. On the basis of the resurrection of the crucified Christ, he spoke in his gospel of the ‘cross of the risen Christ’ and worked out its significance for the godless, whether Jews or Gentiles. His gospel, which he expresses in his theology of the cross, is not meant to be one possible interpretation, which the dead must accept, but claims to be the one revelation of the crucified Christ in the light of his resurrection from the dead. A dead man cannot forgive sins. The gospel, as the present forgiveness of sins, assumes the new, divine, eschatological life of the crucified Christ, and is itself the ‘Spirit’ and the present ‘power of the resurrection’. Thus according to Paul’s understanding, in the ‘word of the cross’ the crucified Christ himself speaks. Consequently, the event of revelation consists not only of the event of the cross and resurrection of Christ, but also the preaching of the gospel.[73] The modern distinction between fact and interpretation, which we assume in natural science and history, is inappropriate to the understanding of the ‘word of the cross’. This distinction is essential to modern knowledge, which dominates, which defines in order to affirm and to control what has been affirmed, and which isolates facts in order to take possession of them. But does this mean that the ‘word of the cross’ is beyond all criticism? It claims that the crucified Christ himself speaks and is revealed in it. But if one accepts this claim, one must ask whether this word reveals the one whom it intends to reveal and is in conformity with the one whose voice it intends to make heard: and again, whether the crucified Christ is to be found in this word, so that it can take his place and be his representative (II Cor. 5.20). It is important for the history of the primitive Christian tradition to realize that after the theology of the resurrection and the enthusiasm of the Spirit, faith once again returned and reached back to the earthly and crucified Jesus of Nazareth. Students of Paul have emphasized this astonishing fact and its significance.[74] It was this which gave rise to the new literary category of a gospel, in the synoptic sense. This raises the further question of the relationship of the gospel as the ‘word of the cross’ in Paul’s sense to the gospel in the sense of the passion narrative. Does the ‘word of the cross’ really make superfluous the Synoptic Gospels, which Kähler rightly called ‘passion narratives with an extended introduction’, in the sense that faith no longer knows Christ ‘from a human point of view’ (II Cor. 5.16, rsv; literally: ‘according to the flesh’)? Or do they point to historical features in Jesus’ crucifixion on Golgotha which are not taken into account by Paul’s preaching? Alternatively, is the ‘word of the cross’ possible without a recollection of the historic cross on Golgotha? We shall return to this in greater detail in the next section. In this context, the intrinsic difference between the cross on Golgotha and the ‘word of the cross’ should always be kept in mind, even when it is maintained that the crucified Christ, by virtue of his resurrection, is present himself in the preaching of the cross and speaks in the profession of faith and the promise of freedom. The crucified Christ speaks in the ‘word of the cross’, but he is reduced wholly to this preaching. ‘The crucifixion was more than a speech event’.[75] Although this preaching reveals him to the godless and brings them to faith, when Christ rose, he did not turn into words. The crucified Christ is more than the preaching of the cross. For the very reason that this preaching is the only adequate access which the godless have to God who was crucified, this intrinsic distinction must not be removed. Precisely because the person must be apprehended in the word, the word cannot be taken for the person himself. There is a reality in the crucified Christ which cannot be identified with any Logos in such a way that it is replaced. The cross signifies that in Jesus which makes him the object of preaching and every subsequent theological interpretation, an object which is in contrast to them, and with which hearer and interpreter are brought face to face. The crucified Christ therefore remains the inner criterion of all preaching which appeals to him. So far as it points to him, it is tested by him; so far as it reveals him, it is authorized by him.