BRUCE L. MCCORMACK
INTRODUCTION
Most Christians do not know why Jesus died. Not really. There was a time when evangelicals thought they knew, but they do so no longer. Embarrassment over the penal substitution theory which most of us grew up with haunts us now; the faith of our parents and grandparents is not our own. The truth is that most of us would do almost anything to avoid having to answer the question in any great detail. That He died “for us” — most still would like to be able to say that much; that His death was somehow vicarious, an act of substitution — maybe.
Whether this is best understood in a judicial, an ontological, or an ethical frame of reference (to put the matter in the broadest terms possible) is a question we prefer not to have to answer, or that we answer in a highly disintegrative way (e.g., playing the “ontological” off against the judicial and the ethical to the obvious detriment of the latter two frames of reference).
The one thing many do seem to be sure of is this: The God we serve could not possibly have willed what took place on that final weekend in
Jerusalem. Whatever else we say, we cannot and must not suggest that God willed the death of His Son, that in His death Christ served a divine purpose. God willed the incarnation, yes. God willed the healing of human nature in Christ and His triumph over death in the resurrection. But the death itself? No. Our God is a nonviolent God. But that is not the way the New Testament tells the story.
Hear the words of Karl Barth, a man not yet subject to our anxieties or prone to our rationalizations:
In His passion, the name of God active and revealed in Him is conclusively sanctified; His will is done on earth as it is done in heaven; His kingdom comes, in a form and with a power to which as a man He can only give a terrified but determined assent. And in the passion He exists conclusively as the One He is — the Son of God who is also the Son of Man. In the deepest darkness of Golgotha, He enters supremely into the glory of the unity of the Son with the Father. In that abandonment by God He is the One who is directly loved by God. This is the secret that we have to see and understand.1
Notice carefully what Barth has said. In Christ’s passion, God’s will was done — on earth as it is in heaven. The answer to the prayer we pray in churches across the land, Sunday by Sunday, the prayer which Jesus taught His disciples, was answered decisively and definitively here in the passion and death of Christ.
But now see what Barth says next!
What we have to say along these lines is . . . in direct contradiction to the conception of the passion story which has found its classical exposition in the St. Matthew’s Passion of Bach. . . . In an almost unbroken minor it is a wonderful cloud-pattern of sighs and lamentations and complaints, of cries of horror and sorrow and sympathy. It is a tragic ode culminating in a conventional funeral dirge (‘Rest Softly’). It is neither determined nor delimited by the Easter message, and Jesus never once speaks in it as the Victor. When is the Church going to realize, and to make it clear to the thousands and thousands who have direct knowledge of the evangelical passion-story only in this form, that what we have here is only an abstraction and not the real passion of Jesus Christ?2
Jesus is Victor in His death because it is in His death that death itself dies. This understanding — expressed with great intuitive insight by Gregory Nazianzen when he said, “He dies, but He gives life, and by His death destroys death”3 — was made central in Reformed soteriology in the seventeenth century. For John Owen, the death of death was understood to occur in the death of Christ, not in the resurrection.4 The resurrection is the public and universal declaration of the death of death in the death of Jesus Christ, a declaration which is itself a creative and effective Word which brings new life, new creation. But it is not the cause of death’s demise.
The negative significance of this insight is that Jesus was not, in His death, a victim. Or better perhaps: He was not only that. And to the extent that we focus our attention there, we miss the overarching story being told in the Gospels and concern ourselves instead with a spin-off, a sequel which cannot stand comparison with the original. The positive significance lies in the fact that Christ’s death was willed by Him — and willed at the cost of enduring an excruciating spiritual struggle to unite His will with that of His Father. And make no mistake: this was the will of the Father. Jesus was not laboring under a misunderstanding. As Peter put it in his great prayer of thanksgiving in Acts 4:27 – 28:
For in this city [Sovereign Lord] . . . both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, to do whatever your hand and plan had predestined to occur (NRSV).
Let’s be honest: The narrative structure of the Gospels is torn to shreds where it is not recognized that Jesus Christ came into this world to suffer and die. Historians of the New Testament may wish to deny it, with their attempts to devalue Jesus’ predictions of His suffering and death. But even those who protest most loudly against historical-critical reconstructions of the life of Jesus often fail to take as seriously as they ought the fact that, as Hans Urs von Balthasar put it, “It is impossible to suppose that God could use this death to reconcile the world to himself if the one who died it was unaware of its significance.”5
Of course, the minute one says such things today, the immediate response is going to be: It is not possible to make God responsible for the passion and death of Jesus without establishing some sort of “inner peace” on God’s part with violence, with the torture and judicial murder of an innocent human being. If God willed the death of His only Son, then God Himself is capable of violence — which authorizes violence on the plane of human-to-human relations. Mind you, this objection is the most serious one that could be raised. It is a deeply moral objection, and it is to the credit of feminist theologians over the last decades to have raised it in a persuasive and compelling way that forces a good bit of rethinking where it is taken seriously.6
So how are we to think about God’s will in the death of Jesus? Can we do so in a way that does not establish an “inner peace” between God and violence? Yes, I think we can — though the way forward is anything but obvious. It requires that we think systematically across a range of doctrines which are affected quite dramatically by the decisions that will be made here, locating the doctrine of the atonement in relation to the doctrine of sin, to Christology, the doctrine of the Trinity, and the being and attributes of God, to name but a few.
My task in this essay is to locate the atonement in relation to human suffering. To carry out that task, I must begin with a delimitation. Human suffering is, at best, an analogy to the sufferings of Christ. Not because of a quantitative calculus, mind you. Others have certainly suffered as much or more. No, the difference between Christ’s death and those of others is qualitative, not quantitative. And it is qualitative because the death He died was not merely physical.
We confuse ourselves a second time when we focus our attention on Christ’s physical agonies and on death as a “separation of soul and body.” Death in the latter sense is continuous with the death toward which all living things move “by nature” in this world. To be sure, the traditional talk of a “separation of soul and body” was an attempt to distinguish the kind of death humans die from the death experienced by other life forms. But even if that attempt had been successful, it would have told us nothing with regard to what makes the death of Jesus redemptive — for a merely biological death cannot possibly be redemptive.
The truth is that biological death was in this world long before human beings came into existence and, therefore, long before the fall of the latter into sin.7 But the death which Adam and Eve died when they ate from the forbidden tree was not this death anyway. In the day they sinned, they did indeed die — but not biologically. They were instead driven from the garden, driven from the presence of God into the death of alienation from God. The death that they died was a handing over to sin and its consequences (Rom 1:24, 26, 28) — which prefigured and provisionally realized in a less complete form the final and definitive handing over of Christ to the full consequences of sin as death in God-abandonment (Rom 8:32). If we do not understand Christ to have died this death, then we will not understand it at all.
In what follows, I will begin by giving some attention to the gospel accounts of Jesus’ death. I will turn in a second section to a critical engagement with that treatment of the death of Christ that has been most influential where my thinking about these matters is concerned, that of Hans Urs von Balthasar. In doing so, I will touch upon the Christology which I think best supports an adequate theology of the cross. After that, a third brief section will be devoted to the problem of human suffering.
I. THE DEATH OF CHRIST IN GOSPEL NARRATIVE
The four Gospels do not say the same things of the death of Christ. But they supplement one another in interesting ways. Their differences, when taken together, can produce a synthesis of enormous power and, indeed, considerable unity. Christ is, in His death, the sinner; not merely the bearer of the guilt of others (though He is that too) but the sinner.
This is the great insight of Karl Barth, an insight which takes us beyond classical penal substitution theories into the realm not of metaphysical speculation but of apocalyptic: The in-breaking of God’s reign through the death of death and a new creation which lifts the finite above the conditions of life proper to it in this world.8 In the description that follows, I am not interested in every detail of the four renditions of the story but in those elements which contribute most directly to a theological construal of the meaning of Christ’s death.
Mark’s rendering is the briefest and the most raw, the most tragically beautiful. Here darkness enshrouds the land, from noon until three in the afternoon (Mark 15:33). It ends with the cry of dereliction, the surrender of bodily life, and the tearing of the temple curtain. That darkness should have descended upon the earth at high noon is, in all likelihood, an evocation of Amos 8:9 — “And on that day, says the Lord God, the sun will set at midday, and the light will grow dark upon the land at daytime” — a passage which speaks of the “day of the Lord,” a day of divine judgment and, indeed, of punishment (cf. Mark.13:24).9 The darkness is, I would say, a sign, a portent, of the passing away of the old world so that the new might be born.
More than that, though, Adela Yarbro Collins says that it is at least possible that this passage is connected in the mind of the Evangelist with the image of the cup of wrath which Jesus accepts in 14:36 as in accordance with the will of God.10 This seems to me all the more probable given that the darkness comes to an end with the cry of dereliction and expiration. This is certainly not the death of a tragic hero.11 The darkness does not begin at the point at which Jesus dies and last until Easter morning (as our Good Friday liturgies might lead us to expect). In Mark, the darkness comes to an end at that point, suggesting that the passion has a significance that far transcends the merely physical. The passion, in its physical dimensions, is but a symbol of the outpouring of the eschatological wrath of God — an outpouring which culminates in the anguish of a deeply personal separation, rejection, dereliction.
Or does it? Many there have been who have wanted to soften the significance of the cry of dereliction — to find in it a demonstration of Jesus’ sympathy for sinners who, in His place, would have felt abandonment (though He, in reality, did not). But of such sympathy, the text says nothing. This interpretation, found in thinkers as diverse as Cyril and Friedrich Schleiermacher,12 is the result of the imposition of a conclusion drawn from an ontological construct which has been devised without regard for the lived existence of the Subject depicted in this narrative and brought to the text from without.
One might be tempted to say (on the basis of a certain reading of the Chalcedonian Definition) that the experience was real enough, yet one would like to see it confined to the so-called human “nature” alone — the divine Logos, on this view, being preserved inviolate from all threat of dissolution of that bliss which is His “by nature.” But on this point, too, our text is silent. Indeed, the centurion’s confession, “Truly, this man was God’s Son!” (Mark 15:39 NRSV), would lead us to raise serious doubts about this particular application of the Chalcedonian Definition. No, it is from a unified Subject (the God-human in His divine-human unity) that this word of lament and, I would say, complaint, is forcibly wrenched.13 And the abandonment itself — because we are speaking here of divine judgment — is all too real. More than that cannot be said exegetically. But that much can be said.
The truth is that death in God-abandonment is not “saving” simply because a human has experienced it. This death is the death which ought to have come to all if God were merely “ just.” Any and every human could and should experience it; therefore, insofar as it is merely a human experience, it has no value “for all.” The fact that it is “for all” strongly suggests that it is not merely a human experience but a human experience in God; it is something taken up very directly into the life of God, which is what the unified Subject of Chalcedon might have led us to expect, were it not accompanied by an implicit commitment to the notion of divine impassibility.
I should say, before continuing, that the question often raised as to whether the cry is intended to call to mind in the reader the whole of Psalm 22 or merely the first verse (which is all that is actually ascribed to Jesus) rests on an effort to bring comfort to ourselves. That Psalm ends in praise to the God who does not leave the psalmist in abandonment. So if the whole of the psalm is alluded to here, then the often-drawn conclusion is that the abandonment, even if real, does not threaten Christ’s trust and confidence in God in the least. But the cry is followed immediately by death. And just as immediately, the lights come back on — which strongly suggests that the victory takes place in and through abandonment, not as a response to Jesus’ perception of it — an abandonment which clearly extends into death.14
“Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last” (Mark 15:37 NRSV) — at which point the temple curtain is torn in two. It has been suggested that the two events are joined; that the “loud cry” is evidence of the Spirit’s departure from Jesus (since a crucified person dies of asphyxiation and would have no breath left with which to cry aloud) — a departure which results quite directly in the tearing of the curtain.15 Joel Marcus says that the foregoing narrative renders this suggestion implausible, since it “points in the opposite direction. Jesus dies forsaken.”16 But surely, the departure of the Spirit from Jesus could just as well be seen as sealing that forsakenness and making it complete.17 In any event, the curtain is torn.
The tearing has both a negative and a positive significance, both of which point once again to the in-breaking of God’s reign, the passing away of the old world and the birth of the new. Divine judgment is here shown to serve the interests of divine mercy. “The glory of God” which had been hidden behind the veil “begins to radiate out into the world”18 — and it is significant that the first to acknowledge it is a Gentile, the Roman centurion. God alone could remove the temple veil. He it was who ordered it to be put in place; He alone possessed the authority to effectively erase the boundary between God and human beings which it symbolized.19
To the foregoing account, Matthew’s version adds that an earthquake took place as the curtain was being torn. Coincident with the earthquake, tombs were opened and the bodies of deceased saints were raised. These resurrected ones appeared to many in Jerusalem after the resurrection of Jesus. Davies and Allison interpret this as an eschatological sign whose meaning is: “Jesus’ death is a resurrecting death; the dead are revived by his dying.”20 Here again, redeeming power is ascribed to the death of Jesus as such. It does not await His own resurrection to be made effective. The “primary purpose” is, however, witness in Jerusalem.21 This is not yet the general resurrection of the dead but a proleptic event which testifies to a future whose power is present even now.22
Taken together, Mark and Matthew place the death of Jesus in the framework of apocalyptic expectation even as they revise those expectations christologically: “The Day of the Lord dawns on Golgotha: the divine judgment descends, and the first-fruits of the resurrection are gathered. The end of Jesus is the end of the world in miniature.”23 But the disclosure of the depths of human depravity in this scene does not take place through the actions of those who tortured and put to death an innocent; such expressions of depravity are, sadly, all too commonplace. Disclosure takes place rather through the silence of God which declares that this man was in His death the sinner— One who had taken personal responsibility for the sins of all and who had identified Himself to the uttermost with their cause. The Christological modulation of apocalyptic expectation is revealed precisely here, in that the destruction of sinners takes place in and through the destruction of the sinner.
The death of Jesus in Luke’s gospel retains some apocalyptic elements (the darkness and the tearing of the temple curtain). But the cry of dereliction is no longer to be found between these two events. The effect of that decision is to make the darkness to be more nearly a sign of divine displeasure with the human beings who crucified Jesus, rather than a sign of judgment upon Jesus as the sinner. In the place of the cry of dereliction we find the “more edifying and exemplary saying: ‘Father, into your hands I entrust my spirit,’ ”24 a saying which could easily be turned in the direction of interpreting the death of Jesus as the death of a tragic hero if Luke should be treated in isolation from Mark and Matthew (a non-canonical hermeneutic, to be sure) or valued more highly for one reason or another.
More generally, though, the dying Jesus appears in Luke’s gospel as more “in control,” one might say. As in Mark and Matthew, Simon of Cyrene is made to carry the cross (Luke 23:26), thereby suggesting that Jesus has been physically weakened by His ordeal. And yet, He is still able (in Luke’s telling of the story) to have a conversation with the “daughters of Jerusalem” (vv. 27 – 31 NRSV) and to tell them, “Do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children” (v. 28). Luke’s Jesus prays from the cross for those who crucified Him: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (v. 34). He has a conversation with the penitent thief which ends with a promise: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (v. 43). More in control, then; more spiritually powerful — even as He endures the agony of crucifixion.
But then, Luke also has Jesus being strengthened by an angel (Luke 22:43), an element in the story that is missing in Mark and Matthew. Interestingly enough, in spite of the heroic nature of much that is said in Luke — again, when read in isolation — the introduction of an angel testifies to the very human nature of the enterprise. There is no evidence here of a divine Person (the Logos) acting through the man Jesus instrumentally. That does not mean, of course, that a dyothelite Christology has been rendered impossible; far from it. It only means that the version of it which would make the human “nature” of Christ to be the instrument of the divine Person faces a challenge — even in Luke’s treatment of the death of Jesus.
The saying to the penitent thief deserves further comment. That the thief should be with Jesus in paradise “today” might well seem to collide with the fact that God would not raise Jesus from the dead for three days. Francois Bovon solves the problem by suggesting that the statement is not to be taken in terms of a “chronological objectivity” but as an evocative expression of Luke’s confidence that the righteous would be “with God” beyond death, as they await the final resurrection.25 In any event, the “today” of this saying does not render impossible a “being in death” during the three days; indeed, it does not rule out a “descent into hell” (depending on how that theme is elaborated).
John’s gospel is even more sparing in its description of the death of Jesus. He speaks from the cross only to arrange care for His mother now that He is dying (John 19:26) and to say that He is thirsty — a statement made in order, John says, that Scripture might be fulfilled. Having drunk some sour wine (which Mark’s Jesus refused to do), Jesus says, “It is finished” — then lowers His head and gives up His “spirit” (John 19:30).
Taking a step back, it seems to me that a canonical reading of the four Gospels must inevitably be faced with the task of producing a synthetic picture which embraces as many of the details as possible. But we must prepare ourselves for a bit of awkwardness. No synthetic picture can be complete; the details cannot all be made to agree. Moreover, imagination will be needed: a theologically informed imagination, based not only on the evidence we find here but also on Paul’s teaching especially, and on the contribution that can be made by the history of theology as well as by systematic/constructive reflection. I would add, as a matter of deeply held personal conviction, that a canonical reading should not be played off against all historical-critical reconstructions without further ado. The two must inform each other, pose questions to each other.
A canonical reading, then, must never be confused with reading under the constraint of an ecclesial decision whose authority is placed beyond question. Protestants have no holy tradition in the Catholic sense; for them, every ecclesial pronouncement is inherently reformable; indeed, repairable.
So what do we get when we place the four gospel accounts of the death of Jesus alongside one another? It seems to me that Mark and Matthew ought to be granted a certain historical priority, if for no other reason than that the more offensive a text is to regnant philosophical opinions at work in its environment, the more likely it is to rest on traditions which find their origins in real history. But beyond that, Luke at least is clearly editing and altering the Markan and Matthean accounts — which also argues for the priority of the latter. And Luke can even introduce a new apocalyptic element with his talk of the paradise to which the penitent thief will go.
So the overarching horizon in the Synoptics (taken together) is, broadly speaking, apocalyptic in nature. And we would do well to try to understand the words from the cross in Luke and John in the light of the harder sayings found in Mark and Matthew,26 and go from there. When we do that, it seems to me that the resulting synthetic picture is bound to look a great deal like that drawn by Hans Urs von Balthasar.
II. THE DEATH OF CHRIST: AN HOMAGE TO VON BALTHASAR — WITH A BIT OF CRITIQUE
To understand what made the death of Christ a “saving” event, we must first of all know who it is who dies here — and how He dies, the conditions under which He dies. That is to say, we must attend to Christology in the strict sense and to the full meaning of divine judgment. Hans Urs von Balthasar does both.
Basic to von Balthasar’s Christology is the conviction that Christ’s person simply is His mission. His mission is not something
imposed on him from outside, like a “law.” . . . [H]e is the one who, from before all time, has had the task — indeed, he is the task — of fulfilling this universal design; everything in him, mind, intelligence and free will is oriented to it. We cannot say that they are “instrumental”; that would suggest that the mission takes precedence over his “I,” whereas we must hold fast to the[ir] identity.27
Von Balthasar tries to offer a somewhat psychologized explanation for his identification of being and mission in Christ which is not entirely convincing, even though it is highly suggestive.
Where a person is entrusted with a substantial mission that summons him to put his very existence at its disposal, the person thus sent [der Gesendete] can, as a result, become (to a degree) identified with the mission [Sendung].28
In such cases, identity is given with mission. And so it is, he thinks, with Jesus Christ, but with this qualitative difference: Jesus’ “consciousness” of His mission is “absolute” in the sense that His mission is to reconcile the world with His God and Father — a “more than human mission.”29 The identity of being and mission in Him is therefore complete, total, and has always been so. Christ’s mission is one that a mere human could not accomplish; it is a divine mission. Hence, what is said here of the unity of person and mission is rightly applied not to a “mere human” in the first instance but to the “person of the union” and, therefore, ultimately, to the second person of the Trinity. “Since the Subject in whom person and mission are identical can only be divine, it follows that ‘God’s being’ really ‘undergoes development’ (E. Jüngel).” And so
if Jesus, this man who is also God . . . also has a reciprocal relation with God, that is, a relationship expressed in terms of genuine life, developing in decisive events, it is also clear that both elements — both being and becoming in the Incarnate One — express a single being, which, while we may not call it becoming, is the streaming forth of eternal life. . . . The dramatic dimension that is part of the definition of the person of Jesus does not belong exclusively to the worldly side of his being: its ultimate presuppositions lie in the divine life itself.30
What fails to convince here is the talk of a becoming that entails development and change. To seek to find the root of the identity of person and mission, of being and becoming, in the second person of the Trinity, as von Balthasar does, is good in my view; it is, in fact, a necessity if we are not to separate the being of God and the being of the man Jesus in quasi-Nestorian fashion.
But we carry that task out wrongly, it seems to me, where we introduce any element of mutability into God. The “becoming” which the second person of the Trinity undergoes as incarnate must be proper to Him: not an almost-eternal obedience of the Son to the Father (which is actually made to belong to our time insofar as it is treated as resting upon a “contingent” decision) but one which is truly eternal and, therefore, proper to Him. God does not cease to be God, He does not become anything other than what He is eternally in that He gives Himself over in Jesus Christ to the human experience of that death which reconciles us to Him. He gives Himself wholly and completely to this experience, but, as Karl Barth rightly says, He does not give Himself away.31
Von Balthasar would certainly agree with this much. But his solution, unlike Barth’s, is to posit (as a speculative act) a Being in God that is beyond the identity of being and becoming in Jesus Christ — or, to put it another way, an immanent Trinity which is somehow more than the economy.32 He fails to honor the “rule” which Barth advanced in laying the foundations of his actualistic account of the divine life, viz., that “statements about the divine modes of being antecedently in themselves cannot be different in content from those that are about their reality in revelation.”33 And so von Balthasar assigns the identity of being and becoming to an “economy” which stands in no clear relation to the identity of the eternal Son in the immanent Trinity.
It did not have to turn out this way. In fact, consistently applied, the method which von Balthasar himself advocates could not have had this outcome. Von Balthasar tells us that he is pursuing a Christology “from below”34 — from a starting point in a “Christology of consciousness” (i.e., a historically constructed understanding of the self-consciousness of Jesus with regard to the mission that He is) to a “Christology of being.”35 Such a “method” is quasi-transcendental in nature. He asks, “Who must he be, to behave and to act in this way”36 — that is, in the way of One conscious of having a divine mission which can only be carried out humanly? We might say: What must God be “in Himself ” if Jesus Christ, the God-human” is truly God “for us”? What are the ontological conditions in God for this outcome in time?
This is, as I say, a promising method, and the decision to start with Jesus’ consciousness of having been sent into this world to achieve a divine purpose has a strong exegetical foundation. If only von Balthasar had been able to resist the temptation to engage in speculation, thereby lapsing back into a metaphysical conception of the immanent Trinity! For it was that fateful move which made it impossible to make consistent use of his preferred method in Christology.
Much more could be said about von Balthasar’s Christology in a lengthier treatment. He does not yet have the Christology he needs to make his treatment of the atonement fully coherent and render it immune to moral objection. And that is a pity. Von Balthasar was heir to the version of dyothelite teaching set forth by Aloys Grillmeier, a version which is often hard to distinguish from a “two-subjects” Christology.37 Every dyothelite faces the challenge, of course, of explaining how it is that two minds, wills, and energies of operation (one divine and one human) can yield one person — a single, unified subject. Cyril solved the problem by making the divine to be active, the human passive, thereby narrowing the distance between what might otherwise seem to be two (independent?) subjects whose unity could not rise above the level of a simple agreement of wills. In other words, Cyril instrumentalized the human nature of Christ.
But von Balthasar is negatively disposed toward this strategy; he understands Cyril to have revived the Apollinarian heresy, at least in part.38 And he has his worries about the enhypostatic doctrine of Leontius. For, he asks, “How can an essentially self-subsistent being, equipped with reason and freedom, be the ‘property’ of another? Surely the latter, by definition, must rob it of its self-possession (substantia)?”39 Von Balthasar is clearly concerned, as he puts it, to uphold “the christological distinction between the human conscious subject and the divine Person.”40
In order to achieve this goal, von Balthasar makes the novel suggestion that a “nature” — even when understood as equipped with self-conscious agency — is not yet a “person” until he or she has a mission, an identity. In the case of Jesus, this happens in that God addresses Him and speaks to Him the truth as it has been known to God from all eternity: “You are my beloved Son.”41 At this point, the man Jesus becomes a “person” — and, indeed, a divine person, since it is in this event that the Son identifies Himself with the man who has received God’s identity-giving words. But now notice: the term person is being employed here to speak of the man Jesus, a man who as such is divine but who, in His divinity, remains other than the Son who identifies Himself with Him. The distance between them — indeed, the essential abyss that distinguishes God from all created things — has been preserved in this christological construct. That this is so is made all the more clear when von Balthasar goes on to say that “the analogia entis that prevails between God and the creature . . . goes right through the incarnate Son of God.”42
So von Balthasar cannot attain what he most wants, viz., to be in a position to show how it is possible to say that “a perfect man, endowed with reason and even possessing a free will . . . can be God.”43 He cannot say this coherently because, at the end of the day, his Jesus is but an analogy of God. He is not fully God. Sadly, von Balthasar has not been able to free himself from a two-subjects Christology — a problem which, if left unresolved, would undermine his most brilliant achievement, viz., his treatment of the atonement.
My primary source for establishing von Balthasar’s understanding of the atonement will be his 1969 work, Mysterium Paschale. What he says touching on atonement in the third volume of the Theo-drama (which has been our concern up to this point) is entirely commensurate with this earlier theology of the cross. But this earlier version is not entirely compatible with the later treatment found in volume IV of the Theo-drama (first published in 1980). Mysterium Paschale is a more useful resource for the model I would like to elaborate on here, and, it has to be said, it is more in line with the apocalyptic understanding which informs the Gospels.
The earlier von Balthasar knew full well that a real substitution in the event of the cross would be impossible if it were thought that “it is simply some man or other who suffers on others’ behalf: it is only possible if “unus ex Trinitate passus est” [i.e., “One of the Trinity is suffered”] both in his human nature and in his divine person.”44 He is right about this, which is why the shortcomings in his Christology are so hard to understand. But I will stay focused now on his theology of the cross.
Von Balthasar’s theology of the cross is, from start to finish, a Christian modulation of what Martinus de Boer has called the “forensic” form of Jewish apocalyptic, according to which punishment with eternal death awaits those who have rejected their Creator, while eternal life is the reward of those who have believed.45 For von Balthasar, what takes place in the cross of Christ is “a turning-point between the old aeon and the new”46 — a turning which occurs with the outpouring of divine wrath on the Son of God made flesh.
Von Balthasar describes the way of the Son to the cross in kenotic terms of humiliation, self-emptying, surrender for the sake of the others. This way reaches its initial climax in the eschatological “trial” of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, at the point when Jesus pleads with His Father, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want but what you want” (Mark 14:36 NRSV; cf. Matt 26:39b; Luke 22:42). Von Balthasar interprets the “cup” as the chalice of “eschatological wrath”47 referred to in the Old Testament and apocalyptic literature (see, for example, Isa 51:17, 22; Jer 25:15; Eze 23:31 – 34; and Ps 75:8).48 Jesus prays according to Mark’s version (which von Balthasar regards as primary), as One who has been “dashed to the ground” and filled with horror as God distances Himself from Him.49 His fear is the “fear of hell” (the timor gehennalis).50 His obedience is not cheerfully offered; it is something to which He is reduced.51 Moreover, the “not my will but yours” is the drinking of the chalice, signaling the entrance of sin. The “sin of the world” — its very being as sin — is made to be Christ’s in body and soul.52 And so in the event of the cross, God “condemned sin in the flesh” (Rom 8:3).53 That means that the suffering endured by Christ was not just any suffering: it was suffering the eschatological wrath of God.54
It should be noted that von Balthasar argues that primacy, where the words from the cross are concerned, “must go to the cry of abandonment.”55 All other words are interpreted by him in its light. The Lucan words make clear theologically that the judgment of God which realizes itself in abandonment has a gracious goal in view. The Johannine “consummatum est” refers to the completion of Christ’s commission, insofar as it is viewed as a consciously willed act.56 But that is not the end of the experience of eschatological wrath. What happens next has nothing to do with consciously willed activity.
Of considerable importance, too, is von Balthasar’s belief that the Holy Spirit is “freed” when Jesus breathes His last.57 That the Spirit should depart from Him is the completion of His isolation and abandonment. Whatever happens next, Jesus will be alone: alone in death, alone in the experience of “hell.”
Von Balthasar’s notoriety — for those who disdain his theology — has everything to do with his theology of Holy Saturday, his meditation on the theme of Christ’s “descent into hell.” Hell for von Balthasar is not a place; it is a spiritual condition, a condition of the soul.58 Indeed, it is (following Isaac of Ninevah) a timeless experience, one in which there can be no hope of change.59 Von Balthasar describes this condition as one in which all spontaneous activity has ceased. It is complete and total passivity. That Jesus was “really dead” means that during the time between physical death and resurrection, He did not engage in “all manner of ‘activities’ in the world beyond.”60
The traditional Catholic teaching with regard to the “harrowing of hell” would require that Jesus be doing things that only a living person can do, not a dead one.61 So even the word descent has to be understood metaphorically as a “being with the dead.”62 But, of course, there is more to “hell” than simply being with the dead. The spiritual condition into which Christ enters as a consequence of the outpouring of the eschatological wrath of God is not adequately described in terms of a going to Sheol (though that may well be included) but of Gehenna.
What then is this spiritual condition called “hell”? Negatively expressed, it is that deprivation of the vision of God which is the poena damni.63 More positively (and all the more horrifically), it is (following Nicholas of Cusa) the visio mortis— the contemplation (remember that the dead can engage in no spontaneous activity) of “the pure substantiality of ‘Hell’ which is ‘sin in itself.’ ”64 To contemplate this “object” is, for Christ, to contemplate His own victory (the grain of truth in the “harrowing of hell” idea) as the unintuitable (if I may put it that way) means to the vanquishing of the “second death.”65 But He is not in a condition to know all of that. In a “timeless” condition, He cannot experience its end in resurrection prematurely, so to speak.
“Hell in the New Testament sense,” von Balthasar says in conclusion, “is a function of the Christ event.”66 Indeed, it is “a product of the Redemption,”67 for Christ alone has measured “the depths of that abyss” and, in doing so, set its limits.68
Who is the Subject who dies this death? Who takes upon Himself the eschatological “No” of God to the sinner? It is “the Son, the Word of the Father.”69 Here again, to say this in the sense of understanding the divine Word to be the Subject of this human experience would require that identification with the man in whom this thoroughly human experience takes place be construed not merely in psychological terms but in ontological terms, i.e., in terms of what I would call an ontological receptivity. And if such receptivity is not to set aside divine immutability, then identification with the human Jesus must be proper to the second person of the Trinity, so that what happens to Him in the cross and the descent into hell constitute the realization in time of who and what He is in Himself eternally.
Thus far, von Balthasar on the death of God — and my christological correction.
III. THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN SUFFERING
Human suffering has many sources, many if not most unrelated to sin. Growth, degeneration, decay, and death are natural to the finite creature in this world that is passing away — and suffering is part of that experience, an ever-present feature of life. It is quite true, of course, that human beings can increase the measure of suffering in this world artificially. But suffering in and of itself is natural.
What can we say then of the relation of atonement and human suffering? First, that it is not the atoning work of Christ as such which brings an end to physical and emotional suffering. It is only the general resurrection of the dead at the end of time which will do that. Resurrection is new creation; it is a lifting of the finite above its natural state, thereby making the finite to be more than finite. A creature who cannot die is not natural; she has been lifted above her finitude by a transfiguring of the finite through the power of the Holy Spirit. Christ’s resurrection is a proleptic realization in time of this final end of all things. Still, the “sublation” of the finite (if I may put it that way) that occurs in the resurrection and results in unending and unbreakable fellowship with God can only follow the destruction of the sinfulness of human creatures who failed morally and spiritually to live in the world and under its conditions as those who are righteous — so that atonement must precede resurrection.
The last step is to see that there is a certain necessity in the movement from God to the creation of the finite and its eschatological transfiguration. It is a necessity grounded, I would say, in God’s very being. God is, by nature, love — self-giving, self-emptying love (according to Philippians 2); a love which contains the object of that love in itself. And what can be truly “other” than God, and therefore other than the telos of the self-emptying activity that God is, but the finite, rational creature capable of responding to that love?
Does such a view make God dependent on the world in order to be God? In no way. The love that God is cannot be contained or privatized; it overflows its boundaries. Its going forth is not to remedy a defect or lack or any deficiency in being. And it cannot be the expression of need or it would not be the kind of love it is, viz., Self-giving love.
On this view, the fall into sin is not a catastrophe that God either did not foresee or was unable to do anything to prevent. It did not overtake Him unexpectedly. Does this mean that God wills natural evils and sin? Not as ends in themselves certainly.70 What God wills is the redemption of the human race in Jesus Christ for the sake of unending and unbreakable fellowship. A finite world with all that this entails is the unavoidable result.
But this also means that the misery of this world is not the consequence of a contingent decision made by God — call it the “covenant of grace” — for which no sufficient reason can be given. To put it that way would be to elevate the divine will over the divine Self-knowledge and divine Self-love (God’s love of the Self-giving love that He is), to the point where no reasons for what God does can be given beyond the stark statement that God willed it so. God’s willing is, on this showing, its own justification — and in this bare assertion is grounded the glory of God. Classical Reformed theology treaded this path, but it should not have done so. To think of God in this way is to make Him ultimately indifferent — which is the final end of all voluntaristic conceptions of divine freedom. And as Jürgen Moltmann rightly observed, “To speak . . . of an indifferent God would condemn men [and women] to indifference.”71
CONCLUSION
Does God’s redemptive activity as here described suggest that God has made an “inner peace” with the violence of this world? Not at all. We must remember that the physical dimensions of Christ’s death are not, as such, redemptive. What is redemptive is death in God-abandonment. God wills this form of death as a way of bringing this world (and the moral evil that human beings do in it) to an end through making Himself the object of His own judgment.
Seen in this way, divine judgment is a wholly gracious activity whose goal is the destruction of the old world to make way for the new. And, it should be added, in the new creation, violence will be no more. It will have been made an ontological impossibility because the finitude itself will have been transfigured. And so, God’s “No” is the instrument for realizing God’s “Yes.”
“For the Son of God, Jesus Christ . . . was not ‘Yes and No’; but in him it is always ‘Yes.’ For in him every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes.’ For this reason it is through him that we say ‘Amen,’ to the glory of God” (2 Cor 1:19 – 20 NRSV).
1. Karl Barth, CD IV/2, 252 (emphases added).
2. Ibid., 252 – 53 (emphasis added).
3. Gregory of Nazianzus, “The Theological Orations” in Edward R. Hardy, ed., Christology of the Later Fathers (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 175.
4. John Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Jesus Christ, with an introduction by J. I. Packer (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1995).
5. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. III, “Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ” (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 164.
6. For a respectful engagement with this critique, see Bruce L. McCormack, “The Only Mediator: The Person and Work of Christ in Evangelical Perspective” in Richard L. Lints, ed., Renewing the Evangelical Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 266 – 69.
7. See on this point Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil (Louisville/London: Westminster/John Knox, 2008).
8. See, for example, Karl Barth, CD IV/1, 247: “We are dealing with the painful confrontation of God and this man not with any evil, not merely with death, but with eternal death, with the power of that which is not. Therefore, we are not dealing merely with any sin, or with many sins. . . . We are dealing with sin itself and as such . . . the corruption which God has made His own, for which He willed to take responsibility in this one man.” And again, ibid., 253: “In the suffering and death of Jesus Christ, it has come to pass that in His own person He has made an end to us as sinners and therefore of sin itself by going to death as the One who took our place as sinners. In His person He has delivered us up as sinners and sin itself to destruction.”
9. See on this point, Joel Marcus, Mark 8–10: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 1054, 1062. Marcus says of this darkness, precisely in its character as judgment, that it recalls the darkness of Exodus 10:21: “a darkness that can be felt.” And he adds, “Jesus feels it,” which is why he immediately gives voice to the cry of dereliction, for darkness is also a sign of divine absence. Ibid., 1062, 1063.
10. Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 751.
11. Cf. Ibid., 754: “What is clear is that Mark did not portray Jesus’ last words on the model of the noble death.”
12. St. Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ (Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 105 – 6; Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976),
13. See on this point, Marcus, Mark 8–16, 1063, where Jesus is said to “complain searingly.”
14. See on this point, W. D. Davies and D. C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, vol. III (London: T&T Clark, 1997), 625. Davies and Allison rightly protest against the attempt to construe the cry of dereliction in terms of unrecited verses from Psalm 22. They also note that divine abandonment, while real, finds a limit in the resurrection. Death in God-abandonment is not the final act.
15. Howard M. Jackson, “The Death of Jesus in Mark and the Miracle from the Cross,” New Testament Studies 33 (1987): 27.
16. Marcus, Mark 8–16, 1,066.
17. This answer to Marcus is also sufficient to address the criticism offered by Collins. She writes, “The idea that a strong wind came forth from Jesus directed specifically and only at the veil of the temple is bizarre.” Collins, Mark, 763. The valid point in this complaint has to do, of course, with the equation of the Spirit’s work with a naturally conceived wind. But the work of the Spirit does not have to be explained in this way.
18. Ibid., 1,067.
19. Ibid., 1,066 – 67.
20. Davies and Allison, The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, vol. III, 633.
21. Ibid.
22. Davies and Allison are right to say that there is no hint of the “traditional equation of our passage with the descent into hell.” Ibid. Of course, the fact that the traditional rendering of that theme is not to be found here offers no reason in itself that a nontraditional construal might not render the whole more meaningful.
23. Ibid., 639.
24. Collins, Mark, 754.
25. Francois Bovon, Luke 3: A Commentary on Luke 9:28–24:53 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 313.
26. Ibid., 312 (where Bovon finds a possible antecedent for “paradise” in I Enoch 60:8).
27. Von Balthasar, Theo-drama III, 167 – 68.
28. Ibid., 154.
29. Ibid., 166.
30. Ibid., 158 – 59.
31. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 185.
32. Von Balthasar, Theo-drama III, 157.
33. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 479 (emphasis added).
34. Von Balthasar, Theo-drama III, 150.
35. Ibid., 163.
36. Ibid., 149.
37. Ibid., 214.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 207.
42. Ibid., 203, 220 – 29.
43. Ibid., 215.
44. Ibid., 239 – 40.
45. Martinus de Boer, “Paul and Apocalyptic Eschatology,” in John J. Collins, ed., The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, vol. 1 (New York/London: Continuum, 2003), 359.
46. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1990), 56. It should be noted that the subtitle given to this work in its English dress is not original. The original referred to the “mystery of salvation” — a mystery centered not in Easter but in von Balthasar’s treatment of the passion and death of Christ and his quite original treatment of Holy Saturday.
47. Ibid., 101.
48. Ibid., 123. The examples offered here are von Balthasar’s.
49. Ibid., 100.
50. Ibid., 102. Cf. 104: “Christ’s anguish was a co-suffering with sinners, of such a kind that the real loss of God which threatened them (the poena damni) was assumed by the incarnate Love of God in the form of a timor gehennalis.”
51. Ibid., 105.
52. Ibid., 101.
53. Ibid., 119.
54. Ibid., 123.
55. Ibid., 125.
56. Ibid., 126.
57. Ibid., 127.
58. Ibid., 77, 162 – 63.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., 148.
61. Ibid., 149. In any case, 1 Peter 3:19, to which appeal is often made in an effort to find a basis for the harrowing of hell, speaks of a “preaching to the spirits in prison” but does not speak of a combat. Cf. Ibid., 152. Moreover, in relation to a passage like Colossians 2:14f., which speaks of a disarming of the powers and principalities, it is God who is the Subject, not Christ. Ibid., 154 – 55.
62. Ibid., 150.
63. Ibid., 164 – 65.
64. Ibid., 173.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., 172.
67. Ibid., 174.
68. Ibid., 168.
69. Ibid., 49.
70. See on this point Matthew Levering, Predestination: Biblical and Theological Paths (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 78 – 79.
71. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: the Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 274.