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ABSTRACT
Jurgen Moltmann is one of the most important theologians in the XXth century who intended to leave aside a rigid and impassible notion of God. However, although Moltmann opens new ways to consider God’s life by stressing God’s passivity and relationality, the concepts of activity and self-sufficiency are still structuring the whole theological argument. I intend to show how our understanding of life has been shaped by a bio-theo-political paradigm of autarchy that defines life by the use of the Greek prefix ‘autos,’ and how this paradigm is still working on Moltmann’s theology, who is not able yet to overcome the metaphysical impassible God. I claim that only a radical deconstruction of this paradigm and the construction of a new way of defining life by the use of the Greek prefix ‘syn’ (with) could enable to think seriously on God’s relationality and love.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. An introductory study on this Western paradigm of life as autarchy can be found in Grassi, Martín, ‘Life as Autarchy: Deconstructing Bio-Theological Western Paradigm’.
2. Moltmann, Kein Monotheismus gleicht dem anderen.
3. The expression ‘Political Theology’ is ambivalent in Moltmann’s work, since, on the one hand, it designates the abstract concept of a unique God that rules over a unique Kingdom, while on the other hand, Christian Theology as a ‘Political Theology’ has a positive historical meaning and can be taken as an ‘Hermeneutical category’ (“Political Theology,” 8). As Moltmann himself argues: ‘Political Theology would like to try to interpret the dangerous memory of the messianic message of Christ within the conditions of contemporary society in order to free man practically from the coercions of this society and to prepare the way for the eschatological freedom of the new man’ (“Political Theology,” 8). He insists, however, that ‘the Political Theology about which we have inquired does not want to dissolve Christian faith into politics; nor does it want to replace Christianity with humanism. If we would in practice put man in place of the divine, we could theoretically have to put the human essence in place of the divine. If we would change religion into politics, as our “leftist” friends and Marxist demand, politics would have to become our religion. (…) That would mean abolishing once again the desacralization of politics which Christianity has effected. The divinization of politics is a superstition which Christians cannot accept. They are Christians and hold to the crucified one in order to witness to men of a greater freedom’ (“Political Theology,” 23). I shall return to this ambivalence when I analyze Moltmann’s concept of Eschatology to see if he can really separate the one meaning of Political Theology from the other. For further examination of Moltmann’s perspective on Political Theology, see Moltmann, Trinität und Reich Gottes, 207–9.
4. “Kein Monotheismus gleicht dem anderen,” 115.
5. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 210.
6. Moltmann underlines that in the early history of Christianity, Christian philosophers united biblical monotheism with philosophical monotheism, that was, strictly speaking, a metaphysical monarchism: ‘If there is one God, there is also one ruler on Earth. The Universe itself has a hierarchical-monarchical structure: One God – one logos – one cosmos. Divinity is the symbol and integration point for the unity of reality as a totality. The monotheism of this “natural theology” corresponds to the imperialism of the one emperor in the related “political theology”’ (“Political Theology,” 11). However, as Erik Peterson showed, ‘this political-religious monotheism [of the first Christian philosophers as Eusebius] was destroyed by the inner power of the Christian faith itself. This took place at two basic points: the trinitarian doctrine of God and the eschatological concept of peace’ (“Political Theology,” 12). Moltmann argues that this early Christian Political Theology was possible because there is a correspondence between world-view and the foundation of a state and that these Christian Apologetical thinkers ‘appropriated this convertibility of concepts in order to turn the early Christian denial of the Emperor cult into a Christian foundation of the Roman empire of peace’ (“Political Theology,” 12, my italics). What I call inversion within analogy is what Moltmann calls convertibility of concepts, and it is absolutely necessary to keep this essential feature of concepts in mind.
7. Moltmann, “Kein Monotheismus gleicht dem anderen,” 118. For further Trinitarian examination and its historical development, see Moltmann, Trinität und Reich Gottes, 17–35.
8. ‘The more one understands the whole event of the cross as an event of God, the more any simple concept of God falls apart. In epistemological terms it takes so to speak Trinitarian form. One moves from the exterior of the mystery which is called “God” to the interior, which is Trinitarian. This is the “revolution in the concept of God” which is manifested by the crucified Christ. But in that case, who or what is meant by “God”’ (Moltmann, The Crucified God, 210).
9. Moltmann, “The Crucified God,” 279. I decided to use this paper and not the major book with the same name, because I found the paper more accurate and precise in philosophical and theological terminology concerning the imbrication between Trinity and God’s pathos. The reader may find these ideas on Chapter 6 of The Crucified God (206–303).
10. Moltmann, “The Crucified God,” 280.
11. Ibid, 282.
12. Moltmann, Trinität und Reich Gottes, 65.
13. Moltmann, “God’s Kingdom as the meaning of Life,” cited in: Dean-Drummond, Ecology in J. Moltmann’s Theology, 77, my italics).
14. Moltmann, “The Crucified God,” 284.
15. Ibid., 288.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 290. For further examination on the meaning of God’s passion, see Moltmann, Trinität und Reich Gottes, 36–76.
18. Moltmann, “The Crucified God,” 290.
19. Ibid., 293.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 293–4.
22. Ibid., 295, my italics. ‘The Father is the one who abandons. He abandons Jesus to the abyss of being forsaken, and that is the real abyss of this world forsaken by God. The Father’s pain is the death of the Son in this absolute destruction. The Son is the one who is abandoned by the Father and the one who gives himself in self-surrender. He suffers the hell of this death. The Spirit is the Spirit of surrender of the Father and the Son. He is creative love proceeding out of the Father’s pain and the Son’s self-surrender and coming to forsaken human beings in order to open to them a future of life’ (Moltmann, “The Crucified God,” 294–295).
23. Moltmann, “The Crucified God,” 295.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 297.
26. See Moltmann, The Crucified God, 331–6. The eschatological meaning of Christianity is present in Moltmann’s mayor work, The Theology of Hope. See also: Moltmann, “Hope and History”.
27. Moltmann, “The Crucified God,” 299, my italics.
28. Ibid., 287–8.
29. Moltmann, “The Crucified God”, 288, my italics.
30. For further examination of God’s freedom, see Moltmann, Trinität und Reich Gottes, 68–72. In this book, he defines authentic freedom as different from power or possession over something and understands it from love. But he is still grasped in the paradigm of autarchy when he states that ‘true freedom must be understood as auto-communication of the good’ (Moltmann, Trinität und Reich Gottes, 71, my italics). This definition of freedom stems, for Moltmann, from the experience and meaning of love. For Moltmann, that ‘God is love’ means, among other things, that (1) love is the auto-communication of the good, (2) that every communication of oneself presupposes the capacity of auto-distinction, (3) and that in Her decision to communicate, God opens Her own essence (Trinität und Reich Gottes, 72–76). In his paper, Komline accounts for the difference between Moltmann and Barth regarding God’s freedom. Moltmann criticizes Barth’s understanding of Divine Freedom as being defined by absoluteness and sovereignty, whereas for Moltmann himself, Divine freedom must be defined by love, that is, by its openness to alterity. The dogma of Trinity is, therefore, a key element for Moltmann to understand this divine love, that is only such in opening itself to men and the world. ‘In Moltmann’s concept of divine freedom as friendship, God’s love ad extra makes possible God’s authentic freedom. For Barth, God’s full and perfect freedom in Godself makes possible God’s authentic love ad extra. Each, therefore, defines the relationship of love and freedom in a way that renders his notion of authentic freedom incompatible with the other’s notion of authentic love’ (“Friendship and being,” 11). I will leave aside the defense and the new reading of Barth that Komline puts forward, showing that Moltmann’s critics are not conclusive, and how, through McCormack new reading of Barth renders both theologians closer than it looks at a first glance. What I want to stress is that, despite Moltmann’s attempt to surpass an understanding of freedom coming from the scheme of sovereignty, his understanding of love is still captured by the bio-theo-political paradigm of autarchy. If life is essentially autarchy, and love is the ultimate expression of life, then ultimate love coincides with sovereign freedom, that is, with the kind of love that is given without any condition or necessity, the love that God gives from his own fullness.
31. In a footnote (“The Crucified God,” 293, n. 35), Moltmann states that a ‘pain of God’ theology, such as the one of Kazoh Kitamori and Bonhoeffer, arises from peculiar political situations.
32. Paul Fiddes made a similar objection to Moltmann’s perspective when he argues that ‘if moments of divine action are all basically God’s act upon himself like this, we are bound to ask whether the impress of the World upon God is taken seriously’ (The Creative Suffering of God, 137). Fiddes’ work is deeply influenced by Process Theology, but mostly by Karl Barth’s theology of event. I think that, albeit his important perspectives on the suffering of God, he still depends on this paradigm of autarchy, for it is God Himself who decides to open herself to the world and to human beings. As Fiddes claims, ‘There is of course no circle of relationships which is already enclosed without us, and which is then opened up subsequently for latecomers; God is open to us in his very form, for it is for the sake of the world that the relationships within God are movements of suffering and self-giving. He determines that when He determines His own Being’ (The Creative Suffering of God, 142, my italics). As one could easily see, the great fear of opening God to alterity is to lose His transcendence, is not surprising, then, that the chapter I quote is entitled ‘The God who suffers and remains God’ (my italics). The question of God is the question of transcendence, the question for a remaining.
33. Moltmann, The Living God, 25, my italics.
34. Moltmann, The Living God, 23.
35. In the Scholastic tradition, this reflexive dimension of living beings is called ‘immanent causality’. See Oderberg, “Synthetic Life and the Brutness of Immanent Causation”.
36. Moltmann, The Living God, 26.
37. For an interesting examination of the difficulties concerning God’s immutability in Moltmann’s Theology, see Jansen, “Moltmann’s View of God’s (Im)mutability”. Also, Castelo (Moltmann’s dismissal of divine impassibility), following the work of Gavrilyuk, critiques Moltmann’s dismissal of divine impassibility both for the theological consequences it may carry and for a certain naïve examination of the concept of impassibility in patristic ages. Nevertheless, the various critics of Moltmann’s theology of the suffering God aim at some kind of restoration of classical theism, which would account for God’s Transcendence.
38. Moltmann, The Living God, 36–7.
39. ibid., 37.
40. Moltmann, The Living God, 40. For an introductory study of Heschel’s influence in Moltmann, and their differences, see Almeida, “J. Moltmann e la noacao de pathos divino”.
41. Moltmann, The Living God, 42, my italics.
42. In his paper, ‘Moltmann’s Crucified God’, Christiaan Mostert gives an account of the different objections on Moltmann’s Crucified God made by various theologians. In the first place, Moltmann does not give a sufficient account of God’s transcendence; second, his use of anthropomorphism and anthropopathism is taken too far; third, his claim that an impassible being cannot be a loving person is not conclusive; fourth, his understanding of apatheia is flawed, since apatheia never mean detachment and indifference; and finally, it is not clear how Moltmann understands the relation between the utterly transcendent God and the contingencies of history. My claim is that all of these objections ultimately understand that Moltmann is trying to reform our traditional way of thinking of God, but from within the same metaphysical framework. I think that a real change regarding our understanding of God is only possible by suspending the Western paradigm of autarchy. To think on a Crucified God is to think of a God that is perfectly alive in Her suffering, that is, in Her love. But to think on love from the perspective of agape, defined by the capacity to auto-communicate, is not only insufficient to surpass classical metaphysical frame, but it is a key element of the architecture of the paradigm. I am certain that our metaphysics is not dependent on the concepts of substance or of subject, but ultimately on our concept of life, from which the ideas of substance, subject, and relationality stem from.
43. The question that Almeida poses in his article (“J. Moltmann e la noacao de pathos divino”, 149) about a certain remaining of a metaphysical God in Moltmann, albeit leaving it without an answer, is not to be understood as the inclusion of foreign concepts in the reading of the Biblical text (as Almeida suggests), but as Moltmann’s strategy to warrant God’s transcendence with the use of the prefix ‘autos-’. Classical Theism will remain unchallenged as long as the paradigm of reflexivity and autonomy of God is not contrasted with the real affection of the other, in a relational paradigm that suspends the value of the self if it is not pierced by its communion with the other.
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Martín Grassi
Martín Grassi PhD in Philosophy (University of Buenos Aires). Professor of Natural Theology and Philosophy of Religion in the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature in the Catholic University of Argentina. Assistant researcher, National Council of Science and Technology of Argentina (CONICET) at the Buenos Aires National Academy of Sciences. My main researches aim at the semantical displacements concerning the idea of community and life from theological, biological, political, and ethical discourses, by deconstructing what I call the Bio-Theo-Political Paradigm of Autarchy. This paper is a result of my Oxford – Templeton Latin America Fellowship (2016) at the Protestant Faculty of the University of Bonn (under Dr Cornelia Richter’s advise) and at the Ian Ramsey Center of the University of Oxford (under Dr Ignacio Silva’s advise). I am really thankful for these two prominent scholars for discussing my paper and project.