Jürgen Moltmann’s theology of the incarnation is one of the integral concepts underpinning his entire theology. His perspective takes the incarnation very seriously and this leads him to some radical theological conclusions about the relationship between God and the world. His theology of the incarnation is not itself radical, but he does not abandon it as he reaches conclusions about that it means for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In this paper, I will attempt to describe Moltmann’s theology of the incarnation in detail and demonstrate how it is central to his understanding of the Jesus’ crucifixion.
- What is Moltmann’s theology of the Incarnation?
Christians and non-Christians have quite often produced an image of Jesus which suits their own desires. They have idolized Jesus, and then have taken away the idolizations of believers and humanized him again. He has become the archetype of divine authority and glory which men have longed for. He has become the teacher of a new morality of mankind. He has become the resistance fighter from Galilee. An analysis of the changing ideas of Christ and the portraits of Jesus in history shows that they correspond so much to the needs of their age, place of origin and intended purpose that one cannot avoid the suspicion that they are illusory and artificial.
-Jürgen Moltmann The Crucified God[1]
In The Crucified God, Moltmann dedicates a chapter to discussing questions about Jesus’ incarnation. The theology that emerges is simple and clear; Jesus is God incarnate, fully human and fully divine. This doctrine is certainly not new or radical, but Moltmann explores the theological shifts that have altered this perspective. Although he explores newer formulations informed by more recent philosophical and theological understandings, Moltmann’s fundamental theology of the incarnation is closely correlated to the theology he identifies with the early church. “He is of one substance with God, begotten not made, God from God, light from light, etc. as the Nicene Creed says in the style of a hymn. The mystery of Jesus here is the incarnation of God, the incarnation of eternal, original, unchangeable being in the sphere of temporal, decaying, transitory existence, in which men live and die.”[2] The important difference in Moltmann’s thinking is that he does not accept the premises about God’s nature which are based on what he calls “Natural Theology”. “The general question of God which was taken as a starting point assumes a particular concept of God. That divine being is intransitory, immortal, unchangeable, and impassible.”[3] Moltmann’s theology of the incarnation seeks to preserve the doctrine of Jesus’ two natures and does so at the expense of this kind of philosophically based conception of God’s nature. For Moltmann, the incarnation of Jesus is the primary revelation for understanding the nature of God and other conceptions of God’s nature must be tested against this primary revelation.
2. Traditional Counterpoints
Following Moltmann’s example, I suggest two other possible possible theologies of incarnation that can be used to provide counterpoints to his own perspective. He sums up these perspectives well in the question he quotes from Bultmann: “Does Jesus help me because he is the Son of God, or is he the Son of God because he helps ms?”[4] Of course, Moltmann rejects this as a false dichotomy, but I think these two other perspectives are very common and can offer insight into how Moltmann’s theology functions. Using each of these three perspectives, I will demonstrate how his view of the incarnation is integral to his entire theology by exploring the consequences of the other two perspectives within his theological framework.
The first counterpoint to Moltmann is what I call ‘Jesus as man of God’. This corresponds to the “is he the Son of God because he helps me?” side of the question. Moltmann explores this perspective in The Crucified God, but does little analysis of the impact if would have on other areas of his theology. The premise of this particular perspective is that Jesus is the perfect example of humanity. “Within the context of practical reason, Jesus becomes the ‘personified idea of a good principle’.”[5] Moltmann references Kant as an exemplar of this theological perspective because he takes it to an extreme; “Even the Holy One of the gospel must first be compared to our ideal of moral perfection before we can recognize him to be such.”[6] This perspective does not sway completely to Unitarianism or Adoptionism, because it assumes that Jesus is still the incarnation of that ‘ideal moral perfection’, but it differs strongly from Moltmann’s own perspective because it begins with an ideal of moral perfection that is arrived at philosophically. That ideal could certainly be scripturally based, but the important difference is that it need not begin with the person of Jesus Christ. Instead this perspective begins with a series of assumptions about God and derives the person and nature of Jesus Christ.
The other pole of this false dichotomy is the concept that Jesus divinity is his primary attribute. This is the “Does Jesus save me because he is the Son of God?” half of the question. Moltmann considers this to be the more widely accepted view historically and connects it with the assumptions made in antiquity about God’s nature being ‘intransitory, immortal, unchangeable, and impassible’. “The more [the early church] emphasized the divinity of Christ, making use of this concept of God, the more difficult it became to demonstrate that the Son of God who was of one substance with God was Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate. Consequently, a mild docetism runs through the christology of the early church.”[7] Like the other extreme, this perspective begins with something other than the person of Jesus Christ, it begins with an assumption about God’s nature which is based in philosophy and the so called “Natural Theology”.
In both of these examples, faith in Jesus is a secondary element to a more primary faith, either in the human ideal of moral perfection or in the human assumptions about the nature of God. Neither of these is really faith, in my opinion, because they assume their conclusion and attempt to fit Jesus into a preexisting theological and philosophical framework. By beginning with faith in Jesus, Moltmann demonstrates that there is another option beside the classic extremes presented in this false dichotomy, one that begins with faith in Jesus and explicates all other doctrinal points from that faith. In a way, this could be considered a more empirical approach. Our knowledge of God begins with observations of Jesus. That experimental data, so to speak, helps form a theory about God’s nature. Rather than beginning with an assumption about God, this method begins with hypotheses about God and tests them against the historical reality of God incarnate. This is not purely analytical, however, because the premise for this way of thinking is Christian faith itself. Jesus’ incarnation must be taken as a matter of faith.
3. The Crucifixion
Using each of these three perspectives, I would like to delve deeper into Moltmann’s theology of the crucifixion as presented in The Crucified God and Theology of Hope. I’m beginning here intentionally because Moltmann’s perspective begins with the historical person and events, the so-called empirical evidence. One place where these difference are most sharply defined is in Moltmann’s interpretation of Jesus’ cry of dereliction, the ‘god-forsakenness of Jesus’. “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.”[8] In my opinion, Jesus’ cry of dereliction is the center of the crucifixion, at least as far as a living person can understand it. Certainly, Jesus’ actual death should not be forgotten as important to that event, but in the cry of dereliction, we witness God incarnate experience the feeling that every person experiences, the feeling of separation from God and the weight of human sin.
From the Kantian ‘Man of God’ perspective, the cry of dereliction becomes somewhat problematic. Because this perspective begins with the assumption that Jesus is God’s perfect holy man, there is no room for him to feel god-forsaken. A perfect holy man would never forget God’s presence, would never succumb to feeling god-forsaken, but would instead suffer this fate the way later martyrs did, with joyous singing and religious ecstasy. The cognitive dissonance this creates is evidenced by the later gospel accounts, which sublimate Jesus’ cry of dereliction from the painful “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” into the serene statement “it is finished”. I agree with Moltmann that we can reasonably assume that the earlier Markan and Matthean accounts are more historically accurate and that it was changed to avoid this tricky theological territory.
On the opposite pole, this moment is equally if not more difficult. If Jesus is the incarnation of the unchanging and impassible God, how could he feel God-forsaken. This problem, and the problem of Jesus’ suffering in general was very prominent in the early church. There is no way to preserve both the doctrine of God’s impassibility and of Jesus’ incarnation in the face of this event. I think this is the source of the ‘mild docetism’ that Moltmann ascribes to the early church. Because the person and nature of Jesus were derived from assumptions about God, there is no way in this framework that he could have suffered. “More recent Protestant and Catholic of the history of the dogmas of the early church are agreed that a central difficulty for early christology was the undisguised recognition of the forsakenness of Jesus”[9] The heresies of the early church are a testament to this problem, with docetists on one extreme claiming that Jesus only seemed to suffer because he only appeared to be a human being, and Gnostics on the other claiming that the man Jesus suffered (or sometimes a completely different person) and that the divine ‘Christ’ was separated from him in the crucifixion. I don’t think the early church ever really settled this issue, but simply stopped exploring the theological implications of holding a faith in both in the two natures of Jesus Christ and the reality of his suffering on the cross.
The prophets had no ‘idea’ of God, but understood themselves and the people in the situation of God. Heschel called the situation of God the pathos of God. It had nothing to do with the irrational human emotions like desire, anger, anxiety, envy or sympathy, but described the way in which God is affected by events and human actions and suffering in history. He is affected by them because he is interested in his creation, his people and his right.
-Jurgen Moltmann The Crucified God[10]
Moltmann’s perspective is radical because it does not accept the traditional Christian and later philosophical Jewish belief in the impassibility of God, but I think it is ultimately far less problematic than the alternatives. Given that God’s ‘pathos’ is not antithetical to older Judaism, such as the religion existed in Jesus’ time, I think that Moltmann’s position need not be considered truly radical. It may in fact be a more traditional interpretation which may have fit well with the theological perspective of the intended audiences for the Gospels of Mark and Matthew.
With Moltmann’s theology of incarnation in mind, Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross adopts a special poignancy. Because Jesus’ nature as fully divine and fully human, that very god-forsakenness is taken up into the very heart of God. The only condition which would seem impossible for God to experience becomes a part of God’s being, and the depths of human suffering are taken up into God. This was not a mere accident of chance that could have been avoided if Jesus had lived his life in some other way, the godforsakennes of Jesus was a consequence of God’s incarnation as a human. “When God becomes a human in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross enters into man’s godforsakenness.”[11] Humanity’s default reality is one of godforsakenness, it is only through Jesus’ crucifixion where God takes on even that godforsakenness that we are saved. Moltmann’s easy assertion of our godforsakenness seems radical, but I think it is a natural extension of the theology expressed in Paul’s letter to the Romans; “For ‘no human being will be justified in his sight’ by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes only knowledges of sin. But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus”[12] When we attempt to justify ourselves to make ourselves righteous by works of the law, we will fail and see that we are godforsaken, yet through the grace revealed in Jesus Christ we are no longer godforsaken.
5. Why the incarnation?
I chose the incarnation as the key theological concept underpinning Moltmann’s theology of the crucifixion, but it could be argued that it is really his general Christology, or the doctrine of Jesus’ two natures that is really at stake here. The important distinction here is that the incarnation begins the discussion at the beginning of the historical life of Jesus. To begin else where would to bring up the messy possibilities of Adoptionism or Docetism, but as we have seen those simply don’t work with Moltmann’s theology so it must begin with Jesus’ incarnation. The conclusions that Moltmann comes to about Jesus’ crucifixion and even some of his less explicit ideas about atonement rest on faith in Jesus nature as God incarnate in human form, and that idea must be stated strongly and centrally in his theological framework. That emphasis also begins where Moltmann says all Christian theology should begin, not with philosophical ponderings about the nature of God, but in the very person of Jesus Christ.
[1] Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993. p83
[2] Ibid . 88
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid. 91
[5] Ibid. 94
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid. 89
[8] Ibid. 146
[9] Ibid. 226
[10] Ibid. 270
[11] Ibid. 276
[12] Romans 3:20-24 NRSV
