Radical acceptance isn't complacency or resignation.  It is consciously noticing and acknowledging the emotional weather of the moment, without judgment.  Those two words "without judgement" are the hardest part.   Our conditioning tells us to suppress, to resist, to run, and to hide from our emotional weather.    Radical acceptance is sitting in the rain until the time comes to dance in it.   To dance first is to form an active and repressive denial of reality.  Sitting with feelings and then recognizing and releasing judging thoughts is the first step to willingly living life, just as it, just as we are, and exactly where we are.   The next obstacle is to avoid using acceptance and willingness as a new method to control feelings.   This is resistance with a new mask in disguise.   The willingness that follows acceptance is sitting in the emotional rainy weather, welcoming the thoughts and sensations without owning or rejecting them, and then deciding that this is the time to dance in the moment of life, even if the rains have come for a brief visit.

July 25


On The Crucified God chapter in The Crucified God.

Have difficulties with the "man upstairs"? So does an understanding of the cross of Jesus.

Have difficulties when Christians minimize, grief, suffering, and death?   So does an understanding of the cross.

Ashamed of the political power that exploits what it ought to protect and in a manner that is self-righteous and motivated by religion?  So is an understanding of the cross.

By starting with a discussion on Luther's complaints against the Church, Moltmann has the foundation set to explore a crucial idea about the crucifixion of Jesus.  Because  of the cross, Christian Theology is the "criticism of and liberation from philosophical and political monotheism."   Written in the height of "Death of God" movement, Moltmann describes how the cross event has always been the "death" of childish projections of the detached theistic God, human impotence and helplessness caused by God's omnipotence, divinized father figures that cause men to remain children, political omnipotence in the name of God, and Godlike puppetry of human affairs.

Page 315 " In the cross of his Son, God took upon himself not only death, so that man might be able to die comforted with the certainty  that even death could not separate him from God, but still more, in order to make the crucified Christ the ground of his new creation, in which death itself is swallowed  up in the victory of life and there will be "no sorrow, no crying, and no more tears".  

July 23
On "The Eschatological Trial of Jesus" in The Crucified God.
The resurrection, as God's new creation breaks into this world, means that the current system of guilt, shame, suffering and death cannot demonstrate the new creation.   The world cannot comprehend the cross nor the resurrection but it will question and challenge those that, through faith,  live in way that is fixed on God's future creation and against the world's grain.

The resurrection is God's demonstration of his righteousness.  The righteousness in God does not ignore the victims and God does not empower the perpetrators because he died as one victim himself, and in so doing, he has disarmed and restored both of these groups.     To make vengeance the future hope is ask that law win over sin; however, it is Grace that triumphed over law and sin.   This is a scandal!  This is not how our scales of justice balance.  It is even more  surprising, that the blaspheming rebel named Jesus was the first to experience the resurrection.    This subversion of the world power structures, both corporate and interpersonal, cannot be understood inside the old creation.   To be a person of hope, is to live in that future new creation.

July 21,  2018

I have been thoroughly challenged by the Crucified God.   In the partial section of the Historical Trial of Jesus,  Moltmann has described the relationship between Jesus the preacher and the Christ who is preached.   To separate history and theology in this manner leaves many stating that Jesus, because of his death, was a failed preacher and that his message, self-referential as it was, died with him.    Moltmann is showing that Jesus' preaching and the apostles preaching of him (which appear to have differences) are related in that they both are eschatological - they are focused on a future that is coming and is perpetually still to come.  Jesus was the beginning and the apostles are the ones tasked with "what has begun".   The cross has functioned as hard line marking history and kerygma (the confession and preaching of the early church), but Moltmann is tying the death, which purposely referred to as “crucified”, as a consequence of his ministry both to the secular authorities and the religious leaders.   Embedded in his death are political reasons from authorities, religious reasons from his homeland, and Jesus' on theological reasons.


 What can it all mean? At the cross we meet paradox, the one preaching the beginning of God’s kingdom was crushed by another kingdom, the one opening doors of love was declared a blasphemer, and the one healing was the one who died alone, and abandoned by God.  Historically speaking, the question becomes, is the cross a refutation of his person or his preaching, or both?   Theologically, how does the cross change the proclamation from the one Jesus made of himself to the one the apostles made of him?   


The cross is the pivot point of all paradoxes of life. It is where the dead became the living, the abandoned the vindicated, and the humiliated the exalted.