Reading Journal: The Crucified God by Jurgen Moltmann

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".