The two following chapters deal with the historical and the eschatological trial of Jesus. We shall attempt to achieve an understanding of the crucified Christ, first of all in the light of his life and ministry, which led to his crucifixion, and then in the light of the eschatological faith which proclaims his resurrection from the dead, and in so doing proclaims him as the Christ. The understanding of the death of Jesus depends upon the point of view from which one attempts to understand his death: ‘Whether from the point of view of the life Jesus lived, or from that of the relationship of God to the life which he lived and which was ended in this way’.[1] But these must not be one-sided alternatives. To understand his death solely in the light of his resurrection would rapidly lead to a Christ-myth in which the death of the bringer of salvation was an important fact, but not Jesus himself and what brought him to the cross. If his death were considered only in the light of the life he lived, ultimately neither the death nor the life of Jesus would have any special importance beyond that of the comparable life and death of great prophets or demagogues. If it is the same Jesus who was crucified and rose from the dead—and this must be the starting point of Christian faith—then only an integral consideration from both points of view, constantly relating to the two aspects to each other, can do him justice.
The modern dilemma lies in the fact that the two sides can no longer be reduced to a common denominator. The choice is made between Jesuology, referring to the earthly Jesus, accessible to historical investigation and capable of human imitation, and Christology, referring to the Christ whom faith and the church proclaim. But this leads to fatal divisions in theology and in the life of Christianity.[2]
Jesuology had occupied the foreground since the early days of the historical Enlightenment, but the development of radical historical scepticism and historical positivism brought a new and different emphasis upon Christology.[3]
The very title of the book by M. Kähler, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ is characteristic of this.[4] R. Bultmann’s books Jesus and the Word, Primitive Christianity in its Historical Setting and more recently ‘The Primitive Christian Kerygma and the Historical Jesus’ have only made this dilemma more intense.[5]
The problem has been produced by the inevitable task of critical historical scholarship. This has made it increasingly difficult to reduce to a common denominator the historical and the theological, history and eschatology, as they relate to Jesus Christ. The understanding of the death of Jesus in the light of the life which he lived seems to be a purely historical task. The interpretation of the Christian Easter faith seems to be a purely theological task. In the pages which follow, however, we will attempt to treat the historical task of describing the death of Jesus within the framework of his life as a theological task; for his life, preaching and ministry, and his death too, were in his own mind theologically determined. We shall then approach the theological task of setting forth and interpreting the Easter faith as a historical task, in so far as all statements of faith concerning his resurrection and exaltation by God and his functions as Christ, Kyrios and Son of God are related to his life and his death. Our starting point here will be a reciprocal relationship between historical and eschatological method. In the historical account, birth precedes life, and life precedes death. The past can be narrated, and every narration, like enumeration, begins at the beginning and proceeds to the end. But in the direction of eschatological anticipation, the last must come first, the future precedes the past, the end reveals the beginning and objective time-relationships are reversed. ‘History as recollection’ and ‘history as hope’, within the ‘hope in the form of recollections’ which is the determining element of Christian faith, are not contradictory, but must be complementary.[6]
The expression ‘trial’ is used in the following chapters in its broadest sense, and refers both to a legal trial concerning the truth and also a historical trial. Thus the ‘trial of Jesus’ does not mean, in the narrow sense, his trial before the Sanhedrin or Pilate, but the struggle for the truth of God in which he came forward as a witness; while from the other point of view it refers to the ‘trial about Jesus’ in the judgment of God, in which his witnesses speak up on his behalf. The expression moves from one significance to another, but this makes it more fertile. Behind its use lies the view that history is better understood in the categories of a legal trial and of a struggle for righteousness, life and freedom than in naturalistic categories.
1. The Question of the Origin of Christology
M. Kähler, as a previous quotation shows, regarded the cross of Christ as the origin of Christology: ‘Without the cross there is no christology, nor is there any feature in’[7] Christology which can escape justifying itself by the cross. He was not attempting here to reduce Christology to a single theme, but to draw Christology, and with it the whole of Christian theology, within the range defined by the cross. The crucified Christ, in his view, was to be the key for all the divine secrets of Christian theology. His theses are sometimes still advanced at the present day. But even when they are repeated with approval, they still do not sound as though they have been ‘decoded’.[8] They do not deal with the issues of the christological task of present-day theology. If his theses, and those of Luther, which are similar, are not to remain credal acclamations, they must be tested in the form of historical and theological debate about the origin of Christology.
The question of the origin of Christology unites a historical and an exegetical interest in the early stages of Christology and an interest on the part of systematic theology in the permanent basis of Christology. Here we are touching on the question of the intrinsic basis of the Christology of faith, in Jesus and his history. Do Jesus and his history themselves legitimize the preaching of Jesus as the Christ? Is the preaching of the church in continuity and harmony with Jesus and his history?
This is a historical question, in so far as the exegesis of primitive Christian proclamations does not confine itself to elucidating what they express in terms of their formal categories and as religious phenomena, but goes on to test these statements continually against what they state; and this it must do if it is to do the work of historical criticism. It is not enough to identify what these testimonies say about how the believer understands his existence. Critical scholarship must also ask what the testimonies have to say about those to whom they bear witness, and what faith has to say about the one who is the object of faith, and whether it is in accordance with him.[9] Thus the central question about the origin of Christology is this: How did Jesus who preached become Jesus Christ who was preached? Why and in what way did the ‘witness of faith’ become the ‘basis of faith’?[10] What is the relationship between the primitive Christian gospel of Christ and the historical Jesus? What justification was there for the church to proclaim Jesus as the Christ after his public execution on the cross?
This is also a theological question; for every Christian must ask whether his faith in Jesus Christ is true and is in accordance with Jesus himself, or whether Christian tradition offers him or itself something different instead, an idea, a spirit or a phantom.[11] The way in which faith turns back to Jesus and his history in self-criticism derives from faith itself. The task of theological reflection is to carry out this questioning in a methodical fashion and to help faith to distinguish itself from its own superstition and its own unbelief and to seek the truth of Jesus himself.
It can carry out this task only if it conducts theological work on historical lines, without losing sight of its own ends.
The questioning which works back from the christological traditions of the church to the truth of Jesus may be impelled by a number of different concerns. But it is always a contemporary problem.
Let us outline three ways in which this questioning can take place.
1. In the New Testament itself, the truth of Jesus Christ is put on trial in the debate between different churches and traditions. This trial gave rise to the Christian creeds. In the earliest days, the Easter faith gave rise to different forms of Christian Judaism and enthusiastic Christian gnosis; then, as the Gospels were written, the experiences of Christ and the Spirit at the present moment were subjected to criticism and linked to the history of Jesus himself. The danger that the veneration of a being of the spirit or heavenly world might replace the recollection of Jesus was recognized by Paul in the Corinthian church, and his answer was the preaching of Jesus crucified. In this way he intensified the identification of the exalted Lord with Jesus who was crucified on Golgotha, but did not contrast the earthly crucified Jesus with the risen Christ.
For if primitive Christianity identifies the humiliated with the exalted Lord, in so doing it is confessing that, in its presentation of his story, it is incapable of abstracting from its faith. At the same time, however, it is also making it clear that it is not minded to allow myth to take the place of history nor a heavenly being to take the place of the Man of Nazareth.[12]
This process of looking back critically and recalling the earthly Jesus assumed a faith in the exalted Christ and the hope of his coming again, and kept faith and hope located in the identity of Jesus Christ; this is expressed in the couplet ‘crucified-risen’ (Rom. 10.6). This questioning of the past did not take the form here of explicit historical criticism, but in accordance with its purpose introduced into the christological traditions of primitive Christianity, as their criterion, the indispensable association of all statements about Christ with the name of Jesus. The trial undertaken by primitive Christianity concerning the truth of Christ derived its unifying factor from this. One might say that in the disputes of early Christianity, the name of Jesus became the primary mark of what could be called Christian and regarded as proper to the church. It became the basis and standard of the early christologies.
2. In the Reformation, the trial in which the truth of Christ was sought was conducted on the basis of the conflict between scripture and tradition. The Reformation principle sola scriptura took the place of the basic principle solus Christus. ‘The scriptures’ became the criterion of the true preaching and church of Christ against the false church which, in addition to him and beyond him, believed that it had the duty of teaching, demanding and propagating a great deal else. Thus for Protestantism the basis and standard of church doctrines came to be that they should be in accordance with scripture.[13] And in its turn, the standard of what was in accordance with scripture was for Luther the justifying gospel, or ‘what is about Christ’, as he put it. Any theology which by this criterion is in accordance with scripture and critical of tradition can be called ‘Reformation theology’, not because it goes back to a Reformation in the sixteenth century, but because it makes and must make continual reforming claims concerning preaching, the church and life. In the light of scripture and the Christ who was crucified to justify sinners, the church who bears witness to him becomes ecclesia reformata et semper reformunda.
3. The quest for the ‘historical Jesus’ as a criterion appeared only in association with the historical and critical thought of the modern age; hut it makes similar claims. The motive of the quest for the historical Jesus was the attempt to set free the portrait of the historical Jesus from the accretions of church christologies and, behind them, the accretions of the post-Easter kerygma of primitive Christianity, in order to encounter Jesus himself without what those who venerated and followed him had made of him. The ‘historical Jesus’ was to be ‘Jesus himself’. This quest of the historical Jesus was not merely a ‘noble act of truthfulness on the part of the German spirit’, as A. Schweitzer and P. Tillich said,[14] but is a direct successor of the continuing christological revisionism set in motion by the critical theology of the Reformation. But historical criticism in the name of the historical Jesus not only directed ideological criticism against church doctrines, but also criticized the testimonies of the primitive Christian faith in Christ which are gathered together in the scriptures. The standard by which a doctrine could be judged to be in accordance with scripture, that of the apostolicity, sufficiency and unambiguity of scripture, collapsed in the face of the disagreements and errors which historians unearthed in scripture. It was replaced by the general scientific standard of knowledge firmly based on historical criticism. It made faith a matter of arbitrary choice and located the basis of faith in man’s free subjectivity.
The result of the enquiry of historical criticism into the Jesus behind the traditions can be summed up from two points of view. It stumbled upon the discontinuity in time and the difference in content between Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom and the preaching of Christ by primitive Christianity. At the same time, it stumbled upon a multitude of continuities in the tradition and analogies in content. This is not surprising, since historical knowledge can perceive differences only in the framework of common factors, and common factors only amongst differences. Discontinuity is recognizable in history only within continuity, a fact to which the terminology itself bears witness. And continuity becomes an issue and gives rise to utterance only when there is a perception of discontinuity.[15] Discontinuity cannot signify a complete lack of connection, because it is impossible either to perceive or to express such a thing. Continuity cannot signify direct and unmediated identity, because no history within time can contain such a thing. In history identity and difference belong together in a dialectic, just as analogy and novelty belong together in historical knowledge. It is impossible to give expression to a novelty without a parallel, as Marcion already felt obliged to assert with regard to Jesus. A historical novelty is never totally new. Some dream or promise always comes first.[16] On the other hand, analogies lose their illuminative power if they assume that everything that happens is essentially the same.[17] Exclusive alternatives are impossible. But when particular concerns are associated with the twofold possibilities of historical knowledge, then alternatives arise. Historical criticism may emphasize that the church’s faith in Christ has very little to do with Jesus of Nazareth. In this case, historical criticism is associating itself with man’s concern to be emancipated from tradition, the church and authority: ‘The historical consciousness breaks the last chains which philosophy and natural science could not tear off. Now man is completely free’.[18] Here the concern of the historical consciousness is to set the subjectivity of man free from the prejudices and guardians of the institutional traditions of Christianity, which also sets it free with regard to Jesus. But the historical consciousness can also elucidate the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth. Here its concern is to educate present-day man to be more human. The authority of the heavenly Christ within the churches is replaced by a Jesus who is stylized as a teacher of morality and the brother of all men, and who is made comprehensible, as a human being, to other human beings. Here the aim of the historical consciousness is no longer the emancipation of man from traditions and history, but an understanding of human existence in the past for the purpose of one’s own human life within history. The first aim of its interpretation is to make the tradition a present reality. But this assumes that there is a continuous factor within the traditions and something which men share throughout history. Here it is possible for the long-standing question of humanity to be completely re-expressed within the programme of an existentialist interpretation: ‘Man’s quest for meaningful existence is his highest stimulus to scholarly enquiry: consequently a serious quest of the historical Jesus must have meaning in terms of man’s quest for meaningful existence’.[19] If this quest on the part of man for existence, a quest given its theme by death, is taken as a continuous factor throughout history, with all its differences and fresh starts, and if the historicity of existence is taken as a fundamental category for history altogether, then this concern encounters analogies between Jesus’ understanding of himself and believers’ understanding of themselves, between the preaching of Jesus and the preaching of Christ in the primitive church; for both face man, in a similar way, with the eschatological decision about his existence. But analogies are not genealogies. The ultimate legitimation of the Christian kerygma in Jesus himself and in his history is no longer called into question. The essential common factor which goes beyond the differences of time and circumstance is found here in a claim, a desire or an understanding of existence. Then a questionable anthropology really is providing the constants, and the Christology which is being questioned the variables.
The disagreements between R. Bultmann and his pupils who have undertaken the new quest of the historical Jesus show that the common factors cannot remove ‘the fundamental difference between his (i.e. Jesus’) preaching and the kerygma of Christ’, as Bultmann emphasizes; nor can this difference remove the common factors, as his pupils emphasize.[20] Thus the quest must begin at a more profound level than hitherto, in order to avoid the ‘dead ends in the dispute about the historical Jesus’ (E. Käsemann).
If theological study is to be carried out as historical study, there is no way of avoiding the possibilities of the historical knowledge of dialectic historical connections. Therefore the opposite task must be attempted, of regarding historical study as theological study;[21] i.e., in this case the relationship of the primitive Christian gospel to the historical Jesus must be understood as the theme of Christology. But this means in the first instance that the intimate link between Jesus’ preaching and his person must be taken seriously, and attention must be paid to the significance of his death on the cross for his preaching and for the primitive Christian kerygma. For his death is not simply a turning-point in history which can be compared with others, or one amongst many discontinuities in history. The true critique of the kerygma of Christ is to be found in the history of Jesus, which had its earthly end when he died, abandoned by God, on the cross.
The approach from the point of view of the history of ideas has increasingly shown the differences between the preaching of Jesus and the kerygma of Christ. ‘The point which was everything to Paul was nothing to Jesus’.[22] ‘For Paul, Jesus himself is the object not only of faith, but of religious veneration . . . this is something completely new by comparison with the preaching of Jesus . . . I see here a gap which no theological skill can bridge’.[23] ‘Jesus’ teaching is—to all intents and purposes—irrelevant for Paul’.[24] If we go beyond the approach of the history of ideas and look for the substance which was recognized and given utterance in these ‘ideas’, the picture changes. We owe this more profound understanding to Rudolf Bultmann.[25] The preaching of Jesus, like that of Paul, is eschatological preaching; in the case of Jesus, the preaching of the kingdom of God; in the case of Paul, of the righteousness of God. The difference between them is not the superficial one of changed ideas, but is determined by their different theological situation. For Paul, that which for Jesus was the future is the present or the future of God inaugurated in the history of Jesus. The differences arose not from the further development of the teaching of Jesus, but from an apprehension of the changed situation of the essential substance itself. Jesus speaks and acts with respect to the dominion of God which is to come and is now coming into being. Paul speaks and acts with regard to the dominion of God which has already been inaugurated in the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus, and the righteousness of God which has already been revealed. Thus their situations are determined by an event which they understand theologically. The difference in their theological situations is determined by a shift in the eschaton itself, from that of a future which is just beginning to a future which has already begun. Thus the eschatological event as it were lies behind the preaching of Paul, in which it is proclaimed as the Christ event. Apart from this intrinsic assumption, his preaching is incomprehensible. But according to Bultmann, this is also true of Jesus himself. He understands his preaching eschatologically. The true novelty was not what he preached. John the Baptist had already preached the imminence of the kingdom. But the fact that Jesus preached it, that it was he who preached it, and the way in which he preached—all this was new. What Jesus preached, on the level of the history of language and concept, can largely be reduced to the traditions of contemporary Judaism. According to Bultmann, the content of his preaching is pure prophetism or radicalized Torah.[26] But the fact that he now announces the kingdom of God which was yet to come, the fact that he says this and the way in which he says it, were so novel that they led to his crucifixion. For him to announce his hour as ‘the last hour’ and to characterize a decision for his person and his message as the eschatological decision is novel. Thus Bultmann emphasized that it is not the content but the fact of his preaching which is decisive. One must not overlook the fact that by contrast with prophets, Pharisees and Zealots, the content of his preaching also changed and became new. Beyond the radicalization of the Torah which was revealed in Jesus’ claim, he proclaimed the righteousness of God as the law of grace, as is shown by the parables and his forgiveness of sins.[27] It was this, in the first instance, which separated Jesus from the circle associated with John the Baptist. In this respect Jesus was also someone other than a pure prophet. Yet Bultmann and Ernst Fuchs are right in pointing to the distinctive nature of the ‘announcement of the eschatological moment’ in the sayings of Jesus. The verification of the announcement of an eschatological moment does not lie in its harmony with what has been regarded as true ‘from of old’, but in the kairos of the actual time. The announcement of a time can come too early, too late or ‘at the right time’. The guarantee of the ‘right time’ of his proclamation is the time itself, the kingdom proclaimed and the promised forgiveness of sin by God. If we are to understand Jesus’ preaching ‘kairologically’ in this way, the following becomes clear:
1. His preaching is tied to his person, and cannot be transferred to anyone else: ‘But I say to you . . . ’, and ‘Blessed is he who takes no offence at me’.
2. His preaching is particularly linked with his hour, and his hour with the hour of the kingdom: ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’ (Luke 4.21).
3. It is a concrete promise to concrete human beings to whom he presents himself and his preaching, and thereby, the God who is to come.
As I see it, Bultmann has clearly understood the identification of Jesus with his preaching. He saw this identification as follows: ‘. . . the person of Jesus is merged in his words. This means also that his Word is event’.[28] It is often only the first part of this identification which is stressed, even by Bultmann himself. But the other side remains: ‘His word becomes event (in him)’. Not only is the person of Jesus wholly taken up into his word, but his word in its turn is wholly taken up into his person, and becomes event in it. Only when the other side of this identification is understood can we see what it was in his preaching which gave offence: that someone from Nazareth (‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’), someone who was one of the poor, should proclaim the kingdom and the justification of God to the poor and the sinners. Julius Schniewind always laid particular emphasis upon this.[29] But if the person of Jesus is not only taken up into his word, but his word is also taken up into his person, so that it can no longer be separated from his person, then it cannot be transferred to anyone else. If this other side of the issue is not taken seriously, then it is possible to trace direct continuities in the history of the word of Jesus down to the primitive church; or else to point to the way in which the kerygmatic challenge to faith is firmly maintained; or else there is stress on the maintenance of the ‘coming to utterance of God’ in the history of Jesus down to the primitive church. Here Jesus and Paul are understood only as different phenomena of the history of faith or of the history of God’s coming to utterance. But if we follow Schniewind in taking the other aspect seriously, we are faced with the scandalous fact that the death of Jesus is also the death of his eschatological message through which he brought God to utterance and made the kingdom of God imminent. This means that for Jesus there cannot be disciples of his teaching as there were in the case of Socrates, and after the death of Socrates. His preaching then as it were goes down with him into the grave. And ‘the cause of Jesus’ cannot ‘continue’ without having regard to Jesus and his death.[30] If it is true that Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom is associated essentially with his person, and not merely by chance, then no continuities in the field of history, the philosophy of history, the history of language or the history of existential life can bridge the discontinuity which lies in his death. The ‘great enigma of New Testament theology, how the proclaimer became the proclaimed’,[31] becomes no longer a problem of general history or the philosophy of history, but is the essential problem of Jesus himself, and can only be understood in christological terms. From the point of view of the end to which he came, the historical Jesus is the crucified and dead Jesus. If his preaching is inseparable from his person, then his preaching dies with him on the cross, and there can be no disciples to carry on his teaching or his cause. The true critique of the preaching of Jesus is the outcome of his life and his end upon the cross.[32]
The historical gap introduced by his death, a death as one rejected on the cross, is a radical one in view of the intimate association between his person and his preaching. It cannot be compared with the dialectic association between continuity and discontinuity, likeness and difference in other historical upheavals.
Here, then, the problem of the origin of Christology is reduced to the question whether his death on the cross was and still is a refutation of his preaching, or whether behind the preaching of the resurrection of the crucified Jesus there lies the refutation of this refutation by his death. The claim of the preaching of Christ after Easter is consequently directed not merely against unbelief or superstition, but against the reality of death, against this very fact, which is as sure as death. The true criticism of history is then the proclamation that the crucified Jesus has risen. The purpose of this claim is not merely to achieve a new understanding of oneself, but at a more profound level, to bring new being out of non-being. Jesus associated his eschatological word with his human person and his vulnerability, and therefore with the fate which overtook him. This means either that his death represented the end of his eschatological message, or that his message must be proclaimed, on a ‘wholly other’ basis, as the ‘word of the cross’. The preaching of Christ by the primitive church is therefore the apostolic form of Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom. Because the preaching of the church, as a result of the fate that overtook Jesus himself, has taken on the form of the crucified one, the church proclaims his message by proclaiming the crucified and risen Christ. ‘For Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom could not be handed on unaltered, since it had an essential link with his person and could never be separated from it; and it had to be transformed, since with the death and resurrection of Jesus the eschaton had begun, and no disciple could ignore this event, when he spoke of Jesus’.[33] The historical and hermeneutic question, how Jesus who preached became Christ who is preached, is therefore basically the christological question, how the dead Jesus became the living, the crucified the resurrected and the humiliated the exalted. This transcends the other questions and is basically the theological question within Christology; for this is the point at which it is necessary to speak of God. Faith in God is faith in the resurrection. The identity of the historical Jesus and the Christ in whom one believes, of the crucified and of the risen Jesus, is the eschatological mystery and lies in the faithfulness of God, who manifests himself to be the same in the abandonment and in the resurrection of Jesus.[34]
Historically and hermeneutically, continuities and differences can be located and described at several levels. There are correspondences between the love shown by faith and the attitude and behaviour of Jesus. There are correspondences between the preaching of Jesus and the kerygma of the church. There are correspondences between the meals which Jesus took with his disciples and the Lord’s Supper of the church, between the meals which Jesus took with sinners and tax collectors and the agape feasts of the church. There are correspondences between the suffering of Jesus and the suffering of the apostles and martyrs. But the legitimation of these analogies is found only in the identity of the person of Christ in the crucifixion and the resurrection, which is determined by theological considerations.
This argument compels the conclusion that the understanding of the crucified Jesus must be the origin of all Christology, for otherwise his death on the cross would mean the end of all Christology. The crucifixion of Jesus either refuted his preaching in view of his person, or his person in view of his preaching, and so refuted both together; or else his preaching was drawn into his person to the very point of his death, so that on the basis of his resurrection from the dead it had to continue to be preached as the ‘word of the cross’. But in that case it can continue to be preached only together with and in the form of the proclamation of his person, that is, in the kerygma of Christ. Either the cross makes every Jesuology and every Christology impossible, or else, in association with his resurrection, it makes Jesuology possible as Christology, and Christology possible as Jesuology.
Let us check this by working out the alternative. Let us accept that sayings of Jesus were received and handed on in isolation from his person after his death. They would then be sayings which, like the truth of the Torah or of proverbs, spoke for themselves. Their truth would then have to be demonstrable, even without Jesus, in regard to something else, whether this was the moral law, man’s existential questions, or the general experience of life. But this is not possible for sayings which are directly associated with the person of Jesus and his personal claim. The expression from the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘But I say to you . . .’ cannot be transferred to any other ‘I’. Nor can it be handed on as a saying of his, if this ‘I’ has in the meantime been crucified and is dead. It would then have to read ‘But he said to them . . . ’, and by his death would be inescapably condemned to the past. The preaching of Jesus would therefore have to be depersonalized and transformed into a moral or religious teaching, if anyone were to hand it on after the general recognition of his death. But this would no longer be in accordance with his preaching. Moreover, if the exceptional claim of Jesus lay in his forgiveness of sins, the attempt might be made at least to go on forgiving sins in his name.
But it is impossible to forgive sins in the name of a dead man, particularly if he has died the death of a blasphemer. One could also continue to arouse faith in his name by the kerygma, as Jesus did through his preaching. But what faith can one call for in the name of a dead person? Finally, just as Jesus once anticipated the future kingdom, so it would be possible to stir up hope through eschatological preaching. But how can one arouse hope in the name and in the following of a preacher whose hope was cut off by his death? How can one base hope on good reasons, if the basis of this hope fell prey to death and has long ago decayed in the grave?
Thus ultimately it is not historical criticism which calls into question every church Christology and every humanist Jesuology, but the cross. He who proclaimed that the kingdom was near died abandoned by God. He who anticipated the future of God in miracles and in casting out demons died helpless on the cross. He who revealed the righteousness of God with an authority greater than Moses died according to the provision of the law as a blasphemer. He who spread the love of God in his fellowship with the poor and the sinners met his end between two criminals on the cross. Thus in the end the basic problem and the starting point of Christology is the scandal and the folly of the cross. In this sense M. Kähler is right: without the cross there is no Christology, and there is no Christology which does not have to demonstrate its legitimation in the cross.
2. Jesus’ Way to the Cross
Scarcely any historian now seriously doubts that Jesus of Nazareth lived at the beginning of our era. By the standards of historical certainty, his death on the cross can also be regarded as an assured ‘nuclear fact’.[35] But the question of the meaning of his death on the cross remains open. Death makes one dumb, and is dumb itself. But this does not mean that any arbitrary religious or secular interpretation can be put upon his death, for it was ‘his death’. No interpretation of his death can ignore his person and his ministry. The life and death of Jesus are accessible to us in the sources only in the context of the interpretations in which his death was understood and recounted. These are almost exclusively Christian testimonies. In them the experiences of the Easter faith have become so intermingled with the recollections of the history of Jesus that it is difficult to separate out the historical kernel.[36] But as we have seen in the previous section, there are two possible ways of understanding his death on the cross: we can understand his violent end in the context of his life, and we can understand it in the context of the primitive Christian belief in the resurrection. The retrospective historical understanding and the reflective understanding of theology must be constantly related to each other, in so far as they relate to the same person and the same events which happened to this person. Thus in the three sections which follow, we shall try to understand the end to which Jesus came, in the context of his life, by relating it to his way to the cross; then in the four subsequent sections of the next chapter we shall try to understand his death in the context of his resurrection by God and of eschatological faith. The first process looks at the trial of Jesus in the narrower sense, while the second is concerned with the recapitulation of the trial of Jesus by God and faith in the resurrection. This brings into an eschatological light not only his death on the cross, but also his life and his way to the cross, since the resurrection affects not only his death or his cross in itself, but his whole person and therefore also his life, preaching and ministry. It is not his death which is lifted up into the divine life; it is not his cross which is transfigured; it is the crucified Jesus who, according to the Easter testimony, is raised and exalted to become the lord of the future of God. Thus we must understand Jesus’ way to the cross not only for the sake of historical understanding, but even more for the sake of eschatological faith.
Since Jesus was condemned and executed on the cross, he did not die a natural or accidental death, neither of which have much connection with the kind of life one has led, but died because of the action taken against him by his Jewish and Roman contemporaries, provoked by the actions of his own life. Thus his death is also a ‘consequence of his ministry’.[37] But because Jesus did not kill himself, his death must be understood in the context of the conflicts between him and the world around him. The causae crucis also belong to his crucifixion. His death on the cross was not a fact without any reason, which could be interpreted afterwards in any way. The concepts in which his death is described in the setting of his resurrection and of eschatological faith are not only able to call upon the fact of his death. They must also be able to draw upon the causae crucis, in recapitulating the trial and testing of Jesus and going back to the crucified Jesus himself. Without going back to the history of Jesus which led to the cross, no post-Easter interpretations are possible. This must not lead to a biographical description of the life of Jesus, nor to psychological conjectures about his personal evaluation of his suffering and death. The history of Jesus which led to his crucifixion was rather a theological history in itself, and was dominated by the conflict between God and the gods; that is, between the God whom Jesus preached as his Father, and the God of the law as he was understood by the guardians of the law, together with the political gods of the Roman occupying power. In biographical terms we have very little interpretation of Jesus’ death by himself; such an interpretation occurs at best in the tentative form of the passion prophecies, if they are themselves historical. But his death cannot be understood without his life, and his life cannot be understood without the one for whom he lived, his God and Father, and that for which he lived, the gospel of the kingdom for the poor. A historical understanding of the history of Jesus must understand his history as a theological history defined in this way; otherwise it understands nothing. His death on the cross, however, cannot be understood solely from the more immediate circumstances of his ministry, but only through the interaction between Jesus, the Jews and the Romans. An interpretation of his death in the context of his life therefore goes beyond his life as a private person and must understand the life of Jesus as that of a public person. Consequently, a retroactive interpretation in the light of his resurrection by God must consider the death of Jesus as the consequence of his ministry and as the consequence of the reactions of the Jews and Romans to his ministry. Not until this is done is the testimony to the resurrection by God brought back into the public sphere in which he was crucified and Christian faith made a public testimony in the legitimation of God with regard to Jesus.
(a) Jesus and the law: ‘The blasphemer’
Doubts have been expressed whether Jesus was really condemned and executed because of a declared claim to be the Messiah. The cleansing of the temple and the prophecy of the destruction of the temple can also be advanced as the direct reason for his death.[38] But that he was regarded and condemned as a ‘blasphemer’, as a demagogic false Messiah, is difficult to dispute in view of the whole of his scandalous message. The career of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem was unusual and unparalleled.[39] With arrogant authority Jesus proclaimed God as the one who in his eschatological condescension towards lost men is free from the human observance of the prescriptions of the law, and in prevenient love shows gracious mercy towards men. By so doing, Jesus placed his preaching of God, and therefore himself, above the authority of Moses and the Torah. This freedom of God is unmistakably manifested in the attitude and behaviour of Jesus, in the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount, in the call to follow him and in his sovereign transgression of the sabbath commandment. But anyone claiming authority beside and above Moses in fact places himself above Moses and the law, and ceases to be a rabbi, who never possesses any authority other than that derived from Moses.[40] He has also ceased to be a prophet in the succession of Moses. In his ministry Jesus placed himself with sovereign authority above the limits of the contemporary understanding of the law, and demonstrated God’s eschatological law of grace towards those without the law and the transgressors of the law, through his forgiveness of sins. By so doing he abolished the legal distinction between religious and secular, righteous and unrighteous, devout and sinful. He revealed God in a different way from that in which he was understood in the law and the tradition and was perceived by the guardians of the law. The acts of forgiveness of sin represent the very culmination of his freedom from the law, for the right of showing mercy belongs to the judge alone. When a man who cannot but be under the law arrogates to himself this exclusive right of a judge, and puts himself in the judge’s place, he reaches out his arm towards God and blasphemes the Holy One. This is not the blasphemy of cursing God, according to the law, but the blasphemy of self-deification.[41]
Not only with regard to the law and the tradition of the law, but also with regard to the figures represented in the hopes of prophecy and apocalyptic, the appearance and activity of Jesus was a novelty which was bound to arouse resistance. ‘Whereas according to the expectation of the Jews the Son of Man was to appear at the last judgment only as the judge of sinners and the redeemer of the righteous, Jesus actually turned towards the sinners and the lost’.[42] But anyone preaching and acting in this way was abandoning the role attributed to the figures of the messianic hope. They all represented the victory of the righteousness of God according to the law with the exaltation of the righteous who suffer injustice on earth, and the putting to shame of the lawless and godless. The splendour of all their hopes was merely a reflection of the mighty and glorified Torah at the end of history. Anyone who preaches the imminent kingdom of God not as judgment, but as the gospel of the justification of sinners by grace, and demonstrates it as such through his life with sinners and tax collectors, contradicts the hope based upon the law, is deceiving the sinners and tax collectors and is blaspheming the God of hope. Clearly this drastic novelty and contradiction formed part of the preaching and the ministry of Jesus from the first. It was probably for this reason that he withdrew from the circle of John the Baptist in which he himself had received the baptism of repentance.[43] His preaching was literally the same as that of John: ‘The kingdom of God is at hand’, but the content of his preaching of this imminent kingdom was different. The kingdom does not come as judgment, so that one must anticipate it in one’s self through repentance in order to endure. Rather, anticipated by the word of the gospel which Jesus preached and his living offering of himself to the poor, the sinners and the tax collectors, it comes as the unconditional and free grace of God, by which the lost are sought out and those without rights, and the unrighteous, are accepted. It is this different and new righteousness of God promised and demonstrated by Jesus which separates him from John the Baptist and his repentance movement in Israel.
Thus Jesus’ claim of authority had no legitimizing basis in the traditions of Israel, either in the traditions of the rabbis and Pharisees, or in those of the prophets and of apocalyptic, for all of which the law comes at the beginning and will triumph in its righteousness at the end. Consequently Jesus had to reject the self-characterizations of the rabbis and prophetic apocalyptic. To lay claim to the righteousness of God on behalf of those outside the law, and the transgressors of the law, was in contradiction to the traditions of his people. His authoritative claim to the righteousness of God through grace had, in the light of the traditions which drew on the memory and hope of the history of salvation, no authority at all: that is, his claim was derived directly, and by himself alone, from the God whom he called ‘My Father’. In this sense, Jesus was someone anonymous, whose true name derived solely from his authentification by his God and Father, and could be revealed only when the grace which he proclaimed should come.
Anyone who proclaimed the coming of the kingdom and the closeness of God as prevenient and unconditional grace to those who according to the law were rightly rejected and could have no hope, and who demonstrated this coming grace by giving himself to those outside the law and the transgressors of the law, who placed himself above the authority of Moses, and who was all the time no more than ‘a carpenter’s son from Nazareth’, was inevitably bound to come into conflict with the devout and the ruling class and their laws, and from the human point of view was bound to lose this conflict. The conflict was provoked not by his incomprehensible claim to authority as such, but by the discrepancy between a claim which arrogated to itself the righteousness of God and his unprotected and therefore vulnerable humanity. For one ‘without office or dignities’ to abandon the tradition and lay claim to the office and dignity of God himself, and to reveal divine righteousness in a ‘wholly other’ way by the forgiveness of sins, was a provocation of the guardians of the law.
We must make a close distinction here between the anticipatory structure of Jesus’ preaching and its new content. From the formal point of view, Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom was wholly proleptic in nature.[44] But in its content it goes far beyond apocalyptic conceptions of the righteousness of God, because it does not anticipate the kingdom for the righteous and judgment for the unrighteous, but paradoxically promises the kingdom to the unrighteous as a gift of grace, and leaves the supposedly righteous outside it. The scandal lay not just in its anticipation of the kingdom and its openness to the future, nor just in its proclamation of the eschatological age. In the structures of the anticipation of the future of God, the preaching of Jesus is in fact similar to that of John the Baptist, of the apocalyptists and the Zealots. The source of the contradiction is that he, a human being who was powerless, should anticipate the power of God as grace amongst the rejected and the powerless. Through its association with his lowliness, his preaching was open to rejection. Through its association with his claim for authority, his humanity could be refuted by casting him out and killing him. The inner contradiction between his claim and his poverty is characteristic of his whole appearance. Such a claim associated with such poverty was bound to be understood as a contradiction. The preaching of the kingdom by the poor man Jesus of Nazareth was open to refutation by crucifixion; but by that very fact it was also wholly dependent upon the God whom he proclaimed and demonstrated in this way, and not in any other. This inner contradiction, as it was bound to appear to any outside onlooker, is resolved only in the light of the resurrection of the crucified Jesus by his God and Father, in that through his very poverty, lowliness and abandonment the kingdom, the righteousness and the grace of God come to the poor, lowly and abandoned and are imparted to them. This is the message of the ‘word of the cross’ on the basis of his resurrection into the future of his God, through his progress to the cross and through Jesus crucified.
The sources show that from the very first Jesus received not merely support, but also hostility and opposition. The conflict which ultimately led to his death was inherent from the first in his life because of his opposition. Thus his death on the cross cannot be understood without the conflict between his life on the one hand and the law and its representatives on the other. If this is true, then through his death the prevailing law calls him into question, as one who by his freedom in life and preaching had called into question this understanding of the law.
But if Jesus was nailed to the cross in the name of the God who was regarded as the guarantor of the religious and cultic legal ordinance with which Jesus had come into collision, then his life ended, leaving open the question whether he had rightly associated with sinners and placed himself above Moses, and whether God’s eschatological action had truly been inaugurated in his preaching and actions.[45]
It is necessary to add that his life ended with this question only in the light of his resurrection and in the testimony of the Easter faith. For in the first instance his death on the cross dealt with the ‘open question’ of his trial before the law concerning the true righteousness of God, with an unequivocal rejection. His execution must be seen as a necessary consequence of his conflict with the law. His trial by the guardians of the law was in the broader sense of the term a trial about the will of God, which the law claimed to have codified once for all. Here the conflict between Jesus and the law was not a dispute about a different will, or the will of a different God, but about the true will of God, which for Jesus was hidden and not revealed by the human concept of the law. Jesus’ claim to fulfil the law of the righteousness of God, the claim made in the Sermon on the Mount, and his freedom from the law should not be understood as contradictory. For Jesus the ‘radicalization of the Torah’ and the ‘transgression of the Torah’ basically both amount to the same thing, the freedom of God to show grace. Thus the right which he claimed to forgive sins goes beyond the Torah and reveals a new righteousness of God in judgment, which could not be expected according to the traditions of the law.
Jesus’ uncomplaining suffering and his powerless death were a visible demonstration to everyone of the power and the right of the law and its guardians. Consequently the disciples left him in the hour of the crucifixion and ‘all fled’ (Mark 14.50). One cannot but flee from someone who has been so visibly rejected, even and indeed above all when one has believed and followed him. Thus the flight of the disciples can be regarded as historical, because it conflicts with any kind of veneration for a hero and forbear. It is a record not of cowardice, but of a faith contradicted by the fact of a contemptible death.[46] For the disciples who had followed Jesus to Jerusalem, his shameful death was not the consummation of his obedience to God nor a demonstration of martyrdom for his truth, but the rejection of his claim. It did not confirm their hopes in him, but permanently destroyed them. Nor had they any examples from the tradition which might have suggested to them a ‘dying Messiah’, or a bringer of salvation condemned by the law as a ‘blasphemer’, to explain to them the fate of Jesus and to give them comfort. In view of their flight from the cross, there can be no suggestion that the disciples in any way maintained their faith; someone who believes does not flee.
From this point of view, the life of Jesus was a theological clash between him and the prevailing understanding of the law. From this clash arose the legal trial concerning the righteousness of God in which his gospel and the law were opponents. He did not die through chance or misfortune, but died by the law as one who was ‘reckoned with transgressors’ (Luke 22.37), because he was condemned as a ‘blasphemer’ by the guardians of the law and of faith. As they understood it, his death was the carrying out of the curse of the law. Of course this is not a necessary and inevitable explanation of the way in which the guardians of the law reacted, the historical circumstances of his betrayal by Judas and the political situation which led to his crucifixion. There remains a sufficient element of historical chance in his trial before the Sanhedrin and Pilate. Yet his conflict with the law displays a certain intrinsic necessity which was bound to lead to his rejection and cursing as a ‘blasphemer’. The understanding of the causes of Jesus’ conflict with the law and of this causa crucis do not make clear every feature of his historical death, but make clear why he was drawn into the trial which led to his death. Ultimately the understanding of the matter in dispute and the substance of the trial can make the continuation of the dispute and trial comprehensible when they come to be recapitulated. The primitive Christian interpretations of the crucified Jesus in the light of his resurrection by God and within the testimony of eschatological faith set out to recapitulate the trial in which Jesus and the law are opposed, and to draw upon it in the name of God. Paul did this with complete clarity: since the law had brought Jesus to his death upon the cross, so the risen and exalted Jesus becomes ‘the end of the law, that everyone who has faith may be justified’ (Rom. 10.4).
Thus the theological trial concerning Jesus after Easter turns on the question of righteousness: Aut Christus—aut traditio legis. It is a contest between the gospel and the law, between the righteousness of faith and the righteousness of works, between the justification of the godless and the justification of the righteous. The theology of the cross understands Christian faith as bearing testimony to the righteousness of Jesus Christ in this judicial trial of God. It therefore forms a parallel to Jesus himself with regard to his gospel and the theological conflict in his life and death. In so far as Jews and Gentiles are involved in the crucifixion of Jesus, faith in the righteousness of the crucified Jesus regards itself as bearing public witness in the universal trial concerning the righteousness of God, a trial which is the ultimate motive force of human history. The cross does not divide Christians from Jews, but brings them into the most profound solidarity with them, as Paul put it in Rom. 9.3. It is a universal triumph for a further reason: because it embraces both the question of human guilt and man’s liberation from it, and also the question of human suffering and man’s redemption from it.
Here we shall break off, and in the following chapter we shall recapitulate the trial of Jesus before this understanding of the law, in the eschatological context of his resurrection.
By way of an appendix to this discussion of Jesus and the law we must deal with certain misunderstandings which arose in the dialogue between Christ and the Jews and continue to be found. Jews and Christians are divided by their attitude to the crucified Jesus, equally as they are drawn by it into a history which they share: Christians are drawn into an inescapable solidarity with Israel—not only with the Israel of the Old Testament, but also with the Israel which rightfully exists alongside the church and which in consequence cannot be abolished. Israel demonstrates this to the church which lives through the reconciliation of the (Gentile) world in the crucified Christ, that the redemption of the world is still to come. The church of Christ is not yet perfect and the kingdom of God has not achieved full revelation as long as these two communities of hope, Israel and the church, exist side by side. Thus one cannot conclude from the above discussion that Israel is the old ‘religion of the law’ which since the death and resurrection of Christ has been inherited and replaced by the Christian ‘religion of love’. Anyone who speaks here of an inheritance by way of the history of salvation is basically declaring that the testator is dead. The struggle between the gospel of Jesus and the understanding of the law which prevailed at this time cannot lead to any division, for it turned upon something held in common, the freedom of God in his faithfulness to his promises. I have therefore related the conflict between law and gospel to the promise to Abraham, the promise of life, and have argued that through the gospel this promise was liberated from the shadow of a legalist understanding of the law and given universal force for everyone who believes, whether Jew or Gentile.[47] The gospel assumes this promise and leads the believer out of the uncertainties of a legalist understanding to the point of trust in the faithfulness of God, ‘who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’ (Rom. 4.17). The conflict of Jesus with this contemporary understanding of the law and the conflict of the kerygma of Christ with the nomist understanding of the law in Paul in the following period consequently invalidate neither the promises of Israel nor the election of Israel; rather, they give force to the latter and make it universal. I am convinced that Christian faith understood in this way can be a profitable partner in dialogue for a convinced Jew, for with the crucified Jesus it reminds him of his best traditions, and indeed of the very basis of his existence, which lies prior to the law in election and promise. An openness on the part of Christians to the existential basis of Judaism automatically follows from this. Thus when we have spoken of the conflict into which Jesus came with the ‘law’, this does not refer to the Old Testament Torah as instruction in the covenant of promise. The more the understanding of the Torah became remote from the promise, the more violent became the conflict with the gospel. The closer the understanding of the Torah draws to the original promise and election of Israel, the greater the possibility of an understanding for the law of grace of the gospel and for the hope which it gives to the hopeless and to the Gentiles. For a Christian there can be no question of any guilt on the part of the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus—for his history is a theological history; there can only be a question of an offer of God’s law of grace, and therefore only a question of hope for Israel. I regard the declarations of the second Vatican Council on the attitude of the church to the Jews to be weak, since here Judaism is still included amongst the ‘non-Christian religions’, while the church is described as a successor organization in the history of salvation to Israel, which she cannot be. Much better is Article 17 of the confession of faith of the Dutch Reformed Church, Fundamenten en Perspektieven van Belijden (‘Confessional Fundamentals and Perspectives’), 1949, which speaks of the ‘present and future of Israel’ and expresses the eschatological dependence of the church upon Israel.[48]
(b) Jesus and authority: ‘The rebel’
The theological conflict between Jesus and the contemporary understanding of the law can explain his rejection as a ‘blasphemer’, and in some circumstances his condemnation by the Sanhedrin, if such a trial is historical, but does not explain his execution by crucifixion. Jesus did not undergo the punishment for blasphemy, which in Israel at his time, as can be seen from the death of Stephen, was always that of stoning. Jesus was crucified by the Roman occupying power.
According to Roman law, crucifixion was a punishment for escaped slaves, as we know from the revolt of Spartacus and the crucifixion of more than 7,000 slaves on the Via Appia.[49] It was also a punishment for rebels against the lmperium Romanum, as is shown by the many crucified resistance fighters after the revolts in Israel had been crushed. Crucifixion was a punishment for crimes against the state, and not part of general criminal jurisdiction. To this extent, one can say that crucifixion at that time was a political punishment for rebellion against the social and political order of the Imperium Romanum.[50]
The spread of the lmperium Romanum was associated with the idea of the Pax Romana, and the Pax Romana in its turn was associated, in spite of all the religious tolerance which we know the Romans to have exercised, with the compulsory recognition of the Roman emperor cult. The lmperium Romanum was a religious and political ordinance in the world of that time. In Israel the resultant setting up of Roman standards in the temple and the placing of the head of Caesar on the currency in circulation was consequently regarded by the ‘zealots for the law’ as a breach of the first commandment and therefore as an offence against religion which had to be resisted. It can be said, then, that Jesus was crucified by the Romans not merely for tactical and immediate political reasons of peace and good order in Jerusalem, but basically in the name of the state gods of Rome who assured the Pax Romana. In the societies of that time there was no politics without religion, any more than there was religion without politics. ‘Jesus was condemned by Pilate as a political rebel, as a Zealot’.[51] If we follow the historical conjectures of Oscar Cullmann, the Roman cohorts whose duty was to protect the temple captured Jesus in Gethsemane. He was consequently from the first a prisoner of the Romans who, as the result of his appearances in Jerusalem, feared stasis, revolt. In this case, the hearing before the High Priest would rather have been a moral consultation which Pilate desired, in order to be certain that as a result of the execution of the supposed Zealot leader Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish authorities and the Jewish people would not rise against him. The true trial, then, was a trial before Pilate, a political trial, made possible by the collusion of the Sanhedrin and Pilate. The inscription over the cross, the titulus, followed the practice of antiquity in naming the crime for which the punishment was given. It read: INRI—‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’. As this titulus is recorded in the Gospels, it can hardly be an invention of the Christian church, for it was too dangerous, and came into conflict with the terms which the Christian churches later sought with the Imperium Romanum in order to survive.[52]
How can we explain the political fact that Jesus was crucified as a ‘rebel’ against the Roman Empire and as ‘King of the Jews’? R. Bultmann states:
What is certain is merely that he was crucified by the Romans, and thus suffered the death of a political criminal. This death can scarcely be understood as an inherent and necessary consequence of his activity; rather it took place because his activity was misconstrued as a political activity. In that case it would have been—historically speaking—a meaningless fate.[53]
But was he really no more than the victim of a misunderstanding and a meaningless fate? And if it was a misunderstanding, what brought it about? Was it merely a chance misunderstanding or an intrinsically necessary and inevitable misunderstanding? How otherwise could the Romans, afraid of revolt and anxious to maintain order, have understood Jesus? Is not their ‘misunderstanding’ on the same level as the ‘misunderstanding’ of him by the Pharisees? Did not even his own disciples ‘misunderstand’ him, as is shown by their flight from the cross? The simple distinction between religion and politics which Bultmann introduces when he speaks of his activity ‘being misconstrued as a political activity’ is nothing less than the projection back of the separation of religion and politics—‘religion is a private matter’—from the bourgeois world of the nineteenth century, a separation which was sought only after a thousand years of conflicts between church and emperor, but has never yet been reached, even at the present day.
The first question is, was Jesus a Zealot? Or had he in fact nothing to do with the Zealots?[54] These are the specific historical questions raised by the theological history of Jesus, and they must not be overshadowed by prejudice. One cannot begin by assuming that whatever the motivation of Jesus’ ministry, it was ‘unpolitical’. This is to beg the question. How could a public ministry in so tense a political situation between the Roman occupying forces and popular uprisings, such as existed in Palestine at that time, have remained without political effects? In the Judaism of that period, the political and the religious situations were inseparable. The ministry of Jesus could have been non-political only if it had been concerned with ineffective inner dispositions. But it was effective, and produced reactions which took effect themselves. Any such activity takes place within a network of interactions. To speak of the effects of the ministry of Jesus without mentioning these concrete interactions is deliberate abstraction. For Pilate, the case of Jesus of Nazareth was clearly on the same level as that of Barabbas, who was probably a Zealot; we read of him as a ‘rebel’ captured ‘in the insurrection’ (Mark 15.7). Such an ‘error of justice’ would probably not have been possible on the part of the Romans if the effect of the ministry of Jesus had not created at least the danger of a new popular revolt. Nor could the Jewish authorities have accused Jesus to the Romans as a Zealot leader seeking to be king of Israel if his ministry had not included a claim which it was possible to misrepresent as a Zealot claim.[55] Let us begin, then, by listing the features which could have led to the association of Jesus with the Zealots:
1. Like the Zealots, Jesus preached that the kingdom of God was at hand.
2. Like them, he understood his ministry and his gospel as a mission to bring about the kingdom, i.e. as an anticipation of the kingdom of God.
3. The sources record Jesus’ polemic against the Pharisees, but scarcely any polemic against the Zealots.
4. He adopted Zealot criticism in calling Herod a ‘fox’ (Luke 13.32). In the face of the established political and social ruling class he formulated the fundamental alternative for himself and his disciples: ‘The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you; rather let the greatest among you become as the youngest and the leader as one who serves’ (Luke 22.25-27; Mark 10.42-45).
5. Jesus actually attracted Zealots to himself. Amongst the Twelve there was at least one, Simon Zelotes, who had previously belonged to the Zealots; and it is possible that Peter Bar-Jonah had been a Zealot.[56] It is very probable that Judas Iscariot belonged to the Zealot group know as the sicarii. Moreover, amongst the motley crew of his disciples there were some who carried weapons. This is in accordance with the Jewish practice of going armed on journeys as a protection against wild animals and robbers.[57] The farewell saying, which is certainly a post-resurrection utterance, in Luke 22.35–38, warns the disciples to go well armed: ‘And let him who has no sword sell his mantle and buy one’. In the garden at Gethsemane some of the disciples carried swords. This is not evidence for a planned Zealot revolt by Jesus in Jerusalem; nor is it evidence that from the first Jesus imposed upon his disciples the duty of absolute non-violence and disarmed them.
6. The entry into Jerusalem and the cleansing of the temple could perfectly well have been understood by the disciples, the Jewish inhabitants and the Romans as Zealot symbolical actions.
Let us now list the features that distinguished Jesus from the Zealots:
1. The Zealots anticipated the coming Messianic kingdom by the struggle for liberation from Rome. To use an expression of the time, they sought to ‘bring in the kingdom by violence’. Jesus may have been referring to them by his saying: ‘Until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force’ (Matt. 11.12). It is significant that it is not clear whether this passage expresses praise or blame. For the Zealots, the occupation of Israel by the heathen Romans was a usurpation by men of violence. The violent imposition of Roman imperial rule was an offence against religion: ‘Caesar demands what belongs to God’. By his statues he was setting himself up in the place of the Holy One. In these circumstances, the ‘holy war’, understood in an apocalyptic sense, was appropriate. Militant resistance against the godless, lawless Romans was the political worship of the Zealots: ‘Anyone who sheds the blood of a godless man is like one who offers a sacrifice’.[58] They let themselves be tortured to death rather than call the Roman Caesar Kyrios, for to them this title was the Old Testament attribute of God. Thus for the Zealots the eschatological ‘holy war’ was the apocalyptic commandment of the moment. But the purpose of this ‘holy war’ was solely to establish the law of God, and above all the first and second commandments. Thus those who broke the law had to be killed, those without the law driven out and Israel purified, in order for it to rise again out of its shame.
In Jesus’ case, the anticipation of the kingdom of God through his gospel to the poor was brought about not by this kind of legalism, but by the divine principle of free grace. What distinguishes Jesus from the Zealots is not the anticipation of the future of God as such, nor the principle of non-violence, but his freedom from the legalism which led the Zealots to carry out here and now the final judgment upon the enemies of God and Israel. The often-quoted saying of Jesus, ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ (John 18.36), does not signify that his kingdom is elsewhere, but that it is of a different pattern from this world. Yet, different as it is, it is in the midst of this world through Jesus himself. Thus it is not in accordance with Jesus’ preaching to call the kingdom ‘unpolitical’ and to banish it into another sphere, that of heaven or of the heart. The kingdom is political in a quite different way, and politically, it is quite different from the systems and rules of the struggle for world domination and revenge.
2. It is clear from the accounts by Josephus that the Zealots were a kind of ‘radically legalist’ Pharisee party. Thus Jesus’ polemic against the Pharisees’ concept of the law was also aimed at the Zealot enthusiasts for the law. Jesus did not attack the thoroughgoing moral obedience of the Pharisees towards God, so he did not attack the thoroughgoing political obedience of the Zealots either. He made a fundamental attack upon the legalism of both. The main theme of his polemic was not the practical question whether resistance should be non-violent or violent, but the fundamental question of the righteousness which was demanded by God. As we have shown, Jesus anticipated the divine righteousness of grace, which makes both lawbreaker and lawless righteous. Here he was in conflict with the central issue of Zealot faith, that the coming righteousness of God could be anticipated by the judgment and punishment of the godless.
3. The disciples of Jesus included not only the Zealots, but also their deadly enemies, the tax collectors. These were people who, because of their collaboration with the Roman occupying forces, were particularly hated by the Pharisees and Zealots. Jesus did not dismiss these collaborators as beyond redemption. The notorious ‘friend of tax collectors and sinners’ thereby broke down the strictly regulated pattern of friend and enemy prescribed by Pharisees and Zealots, just as he broke down the traditional pattern of friend and enemy which divided Jews and Samaritans. This is a further sign of the completely different righteousness of God which he proclaimed and revealed by his behaviour. Finally, Jesus did not demand any ‘social-revolutionary rejection of consumption’, as M. Hengel describes the mourning of that period for Israel’s lost freedom and the penance carried out to purify the abomination of desolation. Pharisees and Zealots mocked him as a ‘glutton and drunkard’ (Luke 7.34) who, in the midst of the misery of Israel, did not fast with his disciples, but feasted. This too points to a different understanding on his part of the imminent righteousness of the kingdom of God. In spite of the economic distress, political servitude and religious oppression of his people, for Jesus the kingdom of God was like a marriage feast. In the Zealots’ eyes, this must have been the very substance of his folly. The God of Israel could not be like this in the face of the distress of his people. This was contradictory to their understanding of the law. They must have understood Jesus’ thoroughly festive way of life as a mockery of their serious purpose.
4. In a similar way to the political and social criticism of the Zealots, Jesus also pilloried the offence against religion committed by rulers who divinized themselves, and sharply distinguished what they confounded. ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’ (Luke 20.25). Like them, he perceived the superstition and godlessness of Mammon, and considered it difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Like them, he condemned social injustice. His beatitudes for the poor are paralleled by woes concerning the rich (Luke 6.24; Luke 12.16ff.). But he did not call upon the poor to revenge themselves upon their exploiters nor the oppressed to opress their oppressors. Theologically, this would have been no more than the anticipation of the last judgment according to the law, but not the new righteousness of God which Jesus revealed in the law of grace. Instead, its consequence is: ‘Love your enemies and pray for those that persecute you’. This is the beatitude upon the peacemakers, the new men who break the pattern of oppression and are not concerned to gain power. ‘This Magna Charta of agape is, if you please, that which is actually revolutionary in the message of Jesus’.[59] It cannot be called ‘revolutionary’ in the context of the revolutionary strategy and tactics of the self-liberation of the enslaved righteous from oppression by the rich and the Romans, with the aim of restoring the ancient righteousness of God in the land of their fathers. But it can be called ‘revolutionary’ in contrast to the legalism with which the righteous hoped to establish the righteousness of God in place of the Roman nomos. Finally, it is ‘revolutionary’ in an eschatological context: in the final judgment God replaces his sovereign righteousness by his law of grace. In this way, the future hope is free from visions of revenge and dreams of omnipotence on the part of the oppressed and the weak. Everything that can be categorized as ‘non-violence’ in the sayings and actions of Jesus can ultimately be derived from this ‘revolution in the concept of God’ which he set forth: God comes not to carry out just revenge upon the evil, but to justify by grace sinners, whether they are Zealots or tax collectors, Pharisees or sinners, Jews or Samaritans, and therefore, also, whether they are Jews or Gentiles. This liberation from legalism, which was bound and is always bound to lead to retribution, by means of a disarming delight in God’s law of grace, can indeed be called the ‘humane revolt’ of Jesus—if one is to use the modern terminology of revolution at all, something which is possible only with caution.
5. The danger of losing this freedom from the vicious circle of legalism, of violence and counter-violence, of guilt or retribution, and of falling victim to it once again, can clearly be seen from the experiences of the church and its recollections of Jesus to have been faced several times by him and his disciples. According to the temptation narrative, this danger was seen as the particular temptation of Jesus. Satan shows Jesus the kingdoms of the world and promises to give them to him. Here he is proposing the ideal of the Zealots to Jesus.[60] Something similar may have faced Jesus in the dialogue on the road to Caesarea Philippi (Mark 8.27–33) in Peter’s rejection of his Master’s suffering. According to the tradition Jesus reacted sharply: ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ In spite of the general rejection of the Zealot ideal in the tradition, this indicates that it would have been dangerously easy for Jesus to have followed this course.
To sum up, we can make the following comments on this question, which is so hotly disputed at the present day:
1. Like the Zealots, Jesus broke with the status quo and those who maintained it in being. Like them, he provoked tangible political unrest (stasis). He was therefore crucified by the Romans as a ‘Zealot leader’. But in fact he was breaking with a quite different status quo from the Zealots. Unlike them, he was breaking not merely with a compromising transgression of the law and Gentile lawlessness, in order to restore the law, but was breaking with legalism—in so far as it concentrated upon the jus talionis— in order to proclaim the kingdom of freedom through joy in God’s righteousness of grace, and to anticipate it by demonstrating it.
2. He therefore propagated the coming righteousness of God as the law of grace amongst the righteous and the unrighteous in order to liberate Zealots and tax collectors from their legalistic relationship of hostility.
3. He denied that human beings, Zealots and Romans, had the right to pass judgment and execute vengeance in their own cause: ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone’ (John 8.7). He revealed God not as a righteous avenger in judgment, but as an incomprehensibly gracious and thereby righteous God. Consequently, his preaching set men free from the legalism with which they sought to bring themselves into accordance with the God of vengeance.
4. His opponents clearly understood this. They were well aware of the attack upon their religious and political principles implied in his preaching and in his familiarity with both friend and enemy. For the Pharisees and Zealots he was a ‘traitor’ to the sacred cause of Israel. For the Romans, he was, like the leaders of the Zealots, one more instigator of unrest. Jesus’ ministry and the reactions it provoked led logically to his being handed over to the Romans, and therefore to his crucifixion.
5. Even though Pilate was merely removing one more agitator and demagogue, and from his point of view could not have distinguished between an anti-Roman Zealot leader and the non-Zealot agitator Jesus, his condemnation of Jesus as a ‘rebel’ against the imperial Pax Romana does not merely imply a ‘misunderstanding’ of Jesus inevitable in the circumstances. The freedom of Jesus and his proclamation of God’s law of grace affected not only the Pharisees and Zealots, but equally the cultic and political religious foundations of the Pax Romana and the archaic conceptions of righteousness held by all men. By regarding him as a Zealot rebel, Pilate certainly misunderstood Jesus, and because of his fear of a popular revolt was bound so to misunderstand him. But in the deeper sense of a challenge to the Pax Romana and its gods and laws, we can look back and realize that Pilate understood him aright. This is shown by the effect that the crucified man from Nazareth ultimately had upon the Roman Empire in the life of early Christianity. The worship of such a ‘crucified God’ contained a strictly political significance which cannot be sublimated into the religious sphere. The Christians’ open rejection of emperor worship brought them martyrdom in a sense which was both religious and political. ‘Since demons rule in the world, anyone who wishes to live there must show them veneration and submit to their ordinances. And therefore one must also submit to rulers, even if they demand that one takes an oath in their name. Through this belief Rome grew great, and it is not right to reject their gods and accept a god who is not even able to give his followers a patch of earth or a home, so that they have to slink about secretly in constant fear’, says Celsus.[61] He accused the followers of the crucified Christ of rebellion (stasis). By their irreligiousness they were introducing revolt into the heavenly world amongst the gods and were therefore bringing revolt into the religious and political world on earth which corresponded to those gods.[62] In an age in which politics and religion were one and, apart from domestic cults, could not be separated, it was scarcely possible for the activity of Jesus to be ‘misconstrued as a political activity’, as R. Bultmann supposes. The gospel of Jesus and his public behaviour were political in the extreme. He was bound to be understood as both religious and political, even if this did not mean that he himself was not understood as an object of faith. Consequently, he alienated both the anti-Roman Zealots and the anti-Jewish Romans. Both knew their business, the use of armed force as divine judgment, as was the custom in the world of that time. But Jesus interfered in this religious and political business to challenge and disrupt its rules, and ‘had to be’ removed.
Thus as a second theological dimension to the history of Jesus which led to his crucifixion as a ‘rebel’, we can definitely add the political dimension of the gospel of Jesus within a world in which religion and politics were inseparable.
If the one who was crucified in this way was raised up and vindicated by God, as eschatological faith affirms, then this aspect too of the trial of Jesus must be recapitulated, and the faith which bears public testimony to it must draw upon the political dimension of his history. Christianity then poses the question, for resolution by open trial: Christ—or Caesar?
The theology of the cross is not ‘pure theology’ in a modern, non-political sense, or in the sense of private religion. Faith in the crucified Christ is in the political sense a public testimony to the freedom of Christ and the law of grace in the face of the political religions of nations, empires, races and classes. Between faith in Christ and the deified rulers of the world, the personal cults and the social and political fetishes of society, Jesus himself stands. The recollection of his crucifixion is something both dangerous and liberating. Let us break off here, to return to this political dimension later in the context of the resurrection of the crucified Jesus.
(c) Jesus and God: ‘The godforsaken’
The theological conflict of Jesus with the understanding of the law on the part of the Pharisees, and his theological and political conflict with the Zealots and the Romans, provide an explanation of his condemnation as a ‘blasphemer’ and his crucifixion as a ‘rebel’; but they do not explain the true inner pain of his suffering and death.
Let us begin by looking at this from the outside.
Socrates died as a wise man. Cheerfully and calmly he drank the cup of hemlock. This was a demonstration of magnanimity, and was also a testimony to the immortality of the soul, which Plato tells us he taught. For him, death was a breakthrough to a higher, purer life. Thus his farewell was not difficult. He had a cock sacrificed to Asclepius, which was only done on recovery from a severe illness. The death of Socrates was a festival of liberty.[63]
The Zealot martyrs who were crucified after the unsuccessful revolts against the Romans died conscious of their righteousness in the sight of God, and looked forward to their resurrection to eternal life just as they looked forward to the resurrection of their lawless enemies, and of the transgressors of the law who had betrayed them, to eternal shame. They died for their righteous cause, the cause of the righteousness of God, conscious that this would ultimately triumph over their enemies. Many of them succeeded in cursing their enemies even as they died. Rabbi Akiba found in his death on the cross the freedom for which he had longed, to give himself utterly to the God who, according to Israel’s Shema, can only be loved ‘with the whole heart, the whole soul and the whole might’.
The wise men of the Stoics demonstrated to the tyrants in the arena, where they were torn to pieces by wild animals, their inner liberty and their superiority. ‘Without fear and without hope’, as we are told, they endured in freedom and demonstrated to their fearful overlords and horrified crowds their complete lack of terror even at their own death.
The Christian martyrs too went calmly and in faith to their death. Conscious of being crucified with Christ and receiving the baptism of blood, and of thereby being united for ever with Christ, they went to their death in ‘hope against hope’. The last words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, with which he took leave of his fellow-prisoner Payne Best as he went to the place of execution in Flossenburg extermination camp were: ‘This is the end—for me the beginning of life’.[64] As he had written in a letter, he was certain ‘that our joy is hidden in suffering, and our life in death’.[65]
Jesus clearly died in a different way. His death was not a ‘fine death’. The Synoptic Gospels agree that he was ‘greatly distressed and troubled’ (Mark 14.33 par.) and that his soul was sorrowful even to death. He died ‘with loud cries and tears’, according to the Epistle to the Hebrews (5.7). According to Mark 15.37 he died with a loud, incoherent cry. Because, as the Christian tradition developed, this terrible cry of the dying Jesus was gradually weakened in the passion narratives and replaced by words of comfort and triumph, we can probably rely upon it as a kernel of historical truth. Jesus clearly died with every expression of the most profound horror. How can this be explained? The comparison with Socrates, and with Stoic and Christian martyrs, shows that there is something special here about the death of Jesus. We can understand it only if we see his death not against his relationship to the Jews and the Romans, to the law and to the political power, but in relation to his God and Father, whose closeness and whose grace he himself had proclaimed. Here we come upon the theological dimension of his life and death. Mark 15.34 reproduces the cry of the dying Jesus in the words of Ps. 22.2: ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ This is certainly an interpretation of the church after Easter, and indeed Psalm 22 as a whole had a formative influence on the Christian passion narratives.[66] But it seems to be as near as possible to the historical reality of the death of Jesus.[67] The Western group of texts of Mark 15.34 have watered down the words, and read: ‘My God, what hast thou to reproach me for?’ Luke omits these words completely and replaces them by the confident utterance of the Jewish evening prayer from Ps. 31.6: ‘Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit’ (23.46). Therefore the disciples in Luke do not flee from the cross, for in his view Jesus did not die ‘forsaken by God’, but as an exemplary martyr. In John, for different theological reasons yet again, we read: ‘It is finished’ (19.30), since for John Jesus’ struggle ends with his victory and glorification on the cross. The history of the tradition being as it is, it can be accepted that the difficult reading of Mark is as close as may be to historical reality. To complete the paradox, in Mark the Gentile centurion responds to the cry with which Jesus breathes his last by professing that Jesus is the Son of God: ‘Truly this man was the Son of God’ (15.39). In the pages that follow, therefore, we start from the assumption that Jesus died with the signs and expressions of a profound abandonment by God.[68]
In order to understand the mystery of the death of Jesus, which is so unlike comparable narratives of the death of great witnesses of faith, let us begin once again with the context of his life and ministry. Like no one before him in Israel, Jesus had proclaimed the imminence of the kingdom of God and demonstrated amongst the incurable, the rejected and the hated that it was a gracious imminence, not to judge but to save. In his own relationship to the God of this kingdom, he himself had gone beyond the framework of the tradition of God’s covenant with Israel, in which the closeness of God to his people was mediated through the covenant, the law and Moses. Note in passing that Jesus often called God exclusively ‘My Father’.[69] This is the expression of a fellowship with God which is not mediated through the covenant, the nation and tradition, and must therefore be termed a direct fellowship. The unparalleled claim of Jesus includes the forgiveness of sins here on earth, through the exercise of the divine right of grace. By identifying himself with God in this way, Jesus was clearly assuming that God identified himself with him and his words. But anyone who lived and preached so close to God, his kingdom and his grace, and associated the decision of faith with his own person, could not regard his being handed over to death on the cross as one accursed as a mere mishap, a human misunderstanding or a final trial, but was bound to experience it as rejection by the very God whom he had dared to call ‘My Father’. When we look at his non-miraculous and helpless suffering and dying in the context of his preaching and his life, we understand how his misery cried out to heaven: it is the experience of abandonment by God in the knowledge that God is not distant but close; does not judge, but shows grace. And this, in full consciousness that God is close at hand in his grace, to be abandoned and delivered up to death as one rejected, is the torment of hell.[70] Thus in the context of his life, his abandonment on the cross, which he expressed in his last cry, should not be interpreted as the ultimate test of a deeply religious man in temptation and suffering, on the pattern of the martyr Christology which ever since Luke has repeatedly presented Jesus as the archetype or example of faith under temptation. Nor, in the context of his preaching, can his end be represented as a ‘failure’. Heroes such as Leonidas ‘failed’ and demonstrated their heroism by a heroic death. For this reason they are admired by posterity. Bultmann says:
We cannot tell whether or how Jesus found meaning in it (viz., his death). We may not veil from ourselves the possibility that he suffered a collapse.[71]
This is certainly correct from the historical point of view, but is much too biographical and psychological in its approach, something which in this very passage Bultmann is trying to avoid. The understanding of the death of Jesus in the context of his life must be theological, and must take into account the God for whom he lived and spoke. Jesus did not live as a private person, which the historical account of the liberal nineteenth century was the first to make him, but as far as we can tell from the sources as a public person, on the basis of the closeness of his God and his Father, and for the sake of God’s coming kingdom. The splendour of his life and the horror of his death can be understood only on the basis of that by which and for which he lived. The two Zealots who were crucified with him may have ‘broken down’ and ‘failed’, but the cause for which they had lived and fought was to them inviolable and could not be destroyed by any death. They could die in the consciousness that the coming world judgment would vindicate them. But as we have shown, for Jesus, according to his whole preaching, the cause for which he lived and worked was so closely linked with his own person and life that his death was bound to mean the death of his cause. It is this which makes his death on the cross so unique. Other men, too, have been misunderstood and brought to disaster by the failure of men to understand them. Prophets, too, have been cursed as blasphemers by their own people. Many brave men have been executed by crucifixion and worse tortures. None of this distinguishes the death of Jesus from other crosses in the history of human suffering. Not until we understand his abandonment by the God and Father whose imminence and closeness he had proclaimed in a unique, gracious and festive way, can we understand what was distinctive about his death. Just as there was a unique fellowship with God in his life and preaching, so in his death there was a unique abandonment by God. This is something more than and something different from ‘collapse’ and ‘failure’.
Why did Jesus die? He died not only because of the understanding of the law by his contemporaries or because of Roman power politics, but ultimately because of his God and Father. The torment in his torments was this abandonment by God. It leads us to understand, in the context of his life itself, what happened on the cross as something which took place between Jesus and his God, and between his Father and Jesus. The origin of Christology, the purpose of which is to say who Jesus is in reality, consequently lies not in Jesus’ understanding of himself or in his messianic consciousness, nor in the evaluation of him by his disciples, nor solely in his call to decision, which might imply a Christology. It lies in what took place between Jesus and his God, between that ‘Father’ and Jesus, in what was given expression in his preaching and his actions and was literally ‘put to death’ in his abandonment as he died.
Let us attempt to test what took place between Jesus and his God in his death, by an interpretation of the words of Ps. 22.2 as Jesus spoke them. We shall take into account the fact that the church attempted to interpret Jesus’ dying cry in these words, but shall regard this interpretation as the most accurate. Interpreters have usually understood the cry of Jesus in the sense of the prayer of Psalm 22. But even when the two use the same words, they do not necessarily mean the same thing, and a consideration purely from the point of view of the history of tradition can easily overlook this. Thus it is not right to interpret the cry of Jesus in the sense of Psalm 22, but more proper to interpret the words of the psalm here in the sense of the situation of Jesus. In the original Psalm 22, ‘My God’ means the covenant God of Israel, and the ‘I’ who has been forsaken is the other partner of the covenant, the righteous sufferer. But in Jesus’ case the cry ‘My God’ implies the same content as his own message of God who comes close in grace, the message he had often expressed in the exclusive words ‘My Father’. And the community which may have placed these words from the psalm on the lips of the dying Jesus must have regarded them in this way and related the psalm to Jesus’ situation. He is no longer crying for Israel’s covenant God. Were that the case, the Zealots who were crucified with him could have echoed him. He is crying for ‘his’ God and Father. Jesus is speaking not of any other god, but of a special relationship to God by comparison with the traditions of Israel. Similarly, the ‘I’ of the forsaken speaker is no longer simply identical with the ‘I’ of a righteous man, faithful to the covenant, from the Old Testament, but must be understood in a special way as the ‘I’ of the Son. What is Psalm 22 lamenting, and what in his turn is the dying Jesus lamenting? The prayer of the Old Testament itself is not lamenting the speaker’s own fate in a mood of self-pity, but in the words of the psalm is calling upon the faithfulness of God, which as a righteous man he is defending. Psalm 22 is a legal plea. Jesus is not calling for the compassion of God upon his own person, but for the revelation of the righteousness of the God who promised ‘not to forsake the work of his hands’. Abandoned by God, the righteous man sees God’s deity itself at stake, for he himself is the faithfulness and honour of God in the world. And therefore the prayer of Psalm 22 calls upon the faithfulness of God for God’s sake. Likewise, the cry of Jesus, as interpreted by Psalm 22, is not one of self-pity and an expression of personal distress, but is once again a call upon God for God’s sake, a legal plea. However, unlike the speaker in Psalm 22, Jesus is not just making a claim upon the faithfulness of the God of Israel to his covenant, as he had promised to the whole people; in a special way he is laying claim upon the faithfulness of his Father to himself, the Son who has taken his part. In the words ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Jesus is putting at stake not only his personal existence, but his theological existence, his whole proclamation of God. Thus ultimately, in his rejection, the deity of his God and the fatherhood of his Father, which Jesus had brought close to men, are at stake. From this point of view, on the cross not only is Jesus himself in agony, but also the one for whom he lived and spoke, his Father. In the words of Psalm 22 Jesus is making a claim upon his own being in the particular relationship of his life and preaching to the Father. If we take this as our starting point, then in the death of Jesus more is at stake than Yahweh’s covenant fellowship with the righteous of his people Israel. In the death of Jesus the deity of his God and Father is at stake.[72] Jesus is then calling upon the deity and faithfulness of his Father against his rejection and the non-deity of his Father. This can be put in an exaggerated form: the cry of Jesus in the words of Psalm 22 means not only ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ but at the same time, ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken thyself?’ In the theological context of what he preached and lived, the unity of Jesus and God must be emphasized as strongly as this.
If this were not so, then Psalm 22 on the lips of Jesus would merely show that after all his conflicts with the Pharisees and Zealots and their understanding of the law, Jesus had returned at his death to the God of the fathers. But this would mean the end of his novel message and the liquidation of his special mission. There is therefore nothing to be gained by emphasizing, in the words of the psalm which Jesus spoke as he died, first the rejection and secondly the confidence which is expressed in the term ‘My God’, in order to go on to the affirmation that in extreme despair, Jesus cast himself into the arms of God.[73] This, of course, is also the case with the Old Testament figure who utters the prayer of Psalm 22; and to imitate him and to die in ‘comforted despair’ there is no need for the passion narrative of Jesus. In the theological context of his life and preaching, the issue in his death is not the general paradox of confidence in God in abandonment by God, but above all that of the deity of his God and his Father. The rejection expressed in his dying cry, and accurately interpreted by the words of Psalm 22, must therefore be understood strictly as something which took place between Jesus and his Father, and in the other direction between his Father and Jesus, the Son—that is, as something which took place between God and God. The abandonment on the cross which separates the Son from the Father is something which takes place within God himself; it is stasis within God—‘God against God’—particularly if we are to maintain that Jesus bore witness to and lived out the truth of God. We must not allow ourselves to overlook this ‘enmity’ between God and God by failing to take seriously either the rejection of Jesus by God, the gospel of God which he lived out, or his last cry to God upon the cross.
As a ‘blasphemer’, Jesus was rejected by the guardians of his people’s law. As a ‘rebel’ he was crucified by the Romans. But finally, and most profoundly, he died as one rejected by his God and his Father. In the theological context of his life this is the most important dimension. It is this alone which distinguishes his cross from the many crosses of forgotten and nameless persons in world history. In his conflict with the law it was possible to speak of a ‘misunderstanding’ on the part of the Jews. In the political conflict of his crucifixion as a rebel it is customary to speak of a ‘misunderstanding’ on the part of the Romans. But is it possible to speak of a ‘misunderstanding’ in the theological context of his abandonment by God? If so, either Jesus must have misunderstood God in his preaching, or God must have misunderstood Jesus at the end of his life. But in view of his message concerning God, his abandonment on the cross cannot be interpreted as a misunderstanding unless Jesus is to be explained as a liar, or God as non-God.
The theology of the cross must take up and think through to a conclusion this third dimension of the dying of Jesus in abandonment by God. If, abandoned by his God and Father, he was raised through the ‘glory of the Father’, then eschatological faith in the cross of Jesus Christ must acknowledge the theological trial between God and God. The cross of the Son divides God from God to the utmost degree of enmity and distinction. The resurrection of the Son abandoned by God unites God with God in the most intimate fellowship. How is this Easter day fellowship of God with God to be conceived in the Good Friday cross? To comprehend God in the crucified Jesus, abandoned by God, requires a ‘revolution in the concept of God’: Nemo contra Deum nisi Deus ipse.[74] Here the Christian concept of God itself becomes a revolt in a quite different sense from the revolt which scandalized the Pharisees and priests over Jesus and which the Romans suppressed by executing him.[75]
There are two traditions in Christian theology which have taken account of this ‘revolt’ in the Christian concept of God: the development of the doctrine of the Trinity and the elaboration of the theology of the cross. But apart from these tentative steps, which we hope to take up again and continue in Chapter 6, every theology which claims to be Christian must come to terms with Jesus’ cry on the cross. Basically, every Christian theology is consciously or unconsciously answering the question, ‘Why has thou forsaken me?’, when their doctrines of salvation say ‘for this reason’ or ‘for that reason’. In the face of Jesus’ death-cry to God, theology either becomes impossible or becomes possible only as specifically Christian theology. Christian theology cannot come to terms with the cry of its own age and at the same time always be on the side of the rulers of this world. But it must come to terms with the cry of the wretched for God and for freedom out of the depths of the sufferings of this age. Sharing in the sufferings of this time, Christian theology is truly contemporary theology. Whether or not it can be so depends less upon the openness of theologians and their theories to the world and more upon whether they have honestly and without reserve come to terms with the death-cry of Jesus for God. By the standards of the cry of the dying Jesus for God, theological systems collapse at once in their inadequacy. How can Christian theology speak of God at all in the face of Jesus’ abandonment by God? How can Christian theology not speak of God in the face of the cry of Jesus for God on the cross?
In the context of the gospel of God which he lived out, the life of Jesus ends with an open question concerning God. In the context of the resurrection and of eschatological faith there must be a return to this abandonment of Jesus by God, and the trial that takes place between God and God must be recapitulated.