Hans Kueng, who is probably the leading living Christian theolgian today, emphasizes that the crucifixion of Jesus should not be seen as the death of a suffering God. As he explains in Credo (1992) [I'm translating here from the German original]:
A paradox, but not a contradiction, and one which is important for the Jewish-Christian dialogue: On the cross of Jesus Christ - as the New Testament hold along the lines of the Old against all Gnostic-Kabbalistic speculations - is not simply God as such crucified: the God, ho theόs, Deus pater omnipotens (and obviously certainly not God's Holy Spirit). How otherwise could the crucified one have cried out to God in his abandonment by God: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mk 15:34)
Kueng stresses that the crucified Jesus is a "symbol of the mortal anguish of suffering human beings." And that suffering can be understood in the light of traditions preserved in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament): a prophet commissioned by God but persecuted by humanity; a servant of God who suffers for the sins of others; and, the lamb sacrificed for the sins of humanity.
He says that Jewish theologians are right to protest against a "cruel, sadistic image of God, according to which a God greedy for blood demanded the sacrifice of His own Son." He summarizes the message of the Christian Scriptures on the Resurrection by quoting St. Paul: "For [Christ] was crucified in his weakness, but he lives by the power of God." (2 Cor 13:4)
He understands this as showing God's presence and solidarity for men and women who suffer. But for Kueng as for the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth, this understanding is also a challenge for faith in God, which Küng frames as the question: Was God also present in the hell of Auschwitz?
2 comments:
Hans "Kueng" is normally spelled Hans Küng, which I tried to do in this post. But using these special characters like u-umlaut takes up an inordinate amount of character space in the Journals, apparently. In March with the new, expanded character limits, that shouldn't be so much of a problem.
Maybe I should have explained more of what Küng meant by his comment I mention in the first paragraph. One of the traditional Christian collective accusations against "the Jews" was that they were responsible for "deicide," for the killing of God. This makes a kind of warped sense in the context of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Küng is addressing why that concept of "deicide" is theologically wrong. - Bruce
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