Theodicy of the Cross - November 2006

Pieta - Giovanni Bellini, Venice c1465

THE GOD

WHO MURDERS HIS SON: A THEODICY OF THE C ROSS

Lyle A. Brecht November 2006 School of Theology

The University of the South

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23

THE GOD WHO MURDERS HIS SON: A THEODICY OF THE CROSS By Lyle Brecht

Oh God, better thou are Not; Better that I had not been born, To see the murder of Your son.

The Ethics and Aesthetics of Suffering on the Cross1 What is it that we believe makes it “worth living for in the midst of troubled times”?2 Is

it, as Reinhold Niebuhr imagines, merely a blind “faith in history,”3 or is it our ability to

forget another version of history that is just “the long and tragic story of the fact that

privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily”?4 What has changed as we

have traveled through time into a new, postmodern history defined by entangled

contingencies and overwhelming complexities?5 Could it be that just like the Pharisees,

we “are confused to what Jesus is doing since [we] are blinded to concrete human reality 1 “Since the appearance of Christ, ethics can be concerned with only one thing: to partake in the reality of the fulfilled will of God.” “The source of a Christian ethic is not the reality of one’s own self, not the reality of the world, nor is it the reality of norms and values. It is the reality of God that is revealed in Jesus Christ.” See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 6, Clifford J. Green, ed., Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott, eds. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 49, 74. 2 Denise M. Ackerman, After the Locusts: Letters from a Landscape of Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), xii. 3 History conceived as a “redemptive history.” See Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), 3 quoted in Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster press, 1976), 55. 4 Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” in James M. Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (HarperSanFrancisco: HarperCollins, 1986), 292. 5 Under Postmodernity the very metaphors of history (e.g. “the march of history,” “destiny,” “the events leading up to…”) are rendered obsolete as humanity begins to understand “that significant change often happens over vast areas and long periods of time in such a creeping fashion that the consequences are hardly detectable locally” and thus rarely even enter into one’s notion of ‘history.’ Or, conversely, like the dynamics of a thermonuclear explosion, humankind sets into motion a process that quickly creates a set of unpredictable conditions that extend beyond humanity’s ability to control or to recover from or even to understand fully. Yrjö Haila and Chuck Dyke, eds., How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 5, 26.

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 by [our] very theological certainties and are frozen by a way of understanding [reality]

that is no longer truly human,” at least as how Christ Jesus illuminates what it means to

be human.6 Might the faith that we aspire to not be either a blind faith in history, science,

and ideologies, or resignation to fate determined by gods or by chance, but a faith

whereby we commit “ourselves to an authentic struggle that opens our eyes to the new

possibilities and meanings of God’s word.”7 The great ethical dilemmas of “war, poverty,

inequality, abuse of power and wealth, crime, human greed”8 are still with us in these

more-than-modern times (postmodern, late-modern).9 However, as they are played out

today, the results of these human evils overwhelm our meager, conventional theodicies:10

• the increase in the world’s population from ~6.5 billion today to an estimated 9.1 billion in 2050, a 40% increase;11

6 John Ries, “Of Truth and Method: Juan Luis Segundo’s Mapping of a Liberating Hermeneutic Circle,” in Louvain Studies 22/3 (Fall 1997), 211. 7 Ries, 212. This certainly echoes H. Richard Niebuhr’s belief “that man exists and moves and has his being in God; that his fundamental relation is to God.” See H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 44. 8 Douglas John Hall 1976, 146. 9 Postmodernity may be thought of as merely modernity without illusions of moral universality. Under modernity, moral and ethical beliefs were split off from religion, as religion was split off from culture and civitas. Ethics then was used therapeutically to support the status-quo of the dominant consciousness, or critically “articulating what is wrong with this order as such, a space for the voices of discontent…” The objective of the dominant consciousness, what Brueggemann calls the ‘royal consciousness’ is depoliticization, the return to ‘normalcy’, with everyone going about happily doing his or her job. See Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 3, 65. 10 These evils are ultimately socially and culturally determined. The definition of ultimate evil today in Western democracies is the Holocaust. Yet, these very same democracies are direct beneficiaries of the deliberate (hacked apart, burned alive, hunted as game, fed to dogs, shot, beaten, stabbed, scalped, worked to death as slave labor) and unintended (the communication of diseases the immune systems of indigenous populations were unable to fight) genocidal reduction of 90% of as many as 125 million American Indians from 1492 to 1616. See Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2005). 11 Population Division, United Nations report, February 24, 2005. Virtually all the additional growth in population will occur in less developed countries: from 5.3 billion today to 7.8 billion in 2050. The population of developed countries is expected to remain at today’s level of ~1.2 billion over the same period. For much of the world’s population, things have not changed much since the second century CE where there was “an average life expectancy of less than twenty-five


• the immiseration of much of this population where “humans exist in conditions of

severe abasement” and even within the small group of highly ‘advanced’ wealthy Western democracies “considerable fractions of the population live on the edge of poverty.”12

• the new world economy that is driven by globalization and technological

innovation13 where both positive and negative influences flow between the developed and the developing world;14

• the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons and

weapons-usable fissile materials;15 and

• the destruction of the basic life-support systems of the earth.16

years…. Only four out of every hundred men, and fewer women, lived beyond the age of forty.” See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 6. 12 Charles T. Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 16. The “total wealth of the top 358 ‘global billionaires’ equals the combined income of 2.3 billion poorest people” Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (European Perspectives; New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 70-1. 13 This technological innovation causes much good, but in many cases, much harm and suffering to the world’s human population. “The only question is whether [these problems] will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choosing, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies.” See Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005), 498. 14 For example, the developed world exports its toxins to the developing world (e.g. The Inuit have the highest concentration of neurotoxins and gender shifters such as toxaphene, mercury and PCPs of any human population on earth. These toxic chemicals have been migrating from the tropics to Arctic food chains and into the diets of northern peoples for decades, far exceeding levels considered safe for humans in the developed countries.) and the developing countries export diseases and problems to the developed countries (e.g. AIDS, SARS, cholera, West Nile virus, avian influenza, illegal immigrants, terrorists, debt, etc.) [Diamond, 517]. 15 The number of nuclear devices has grown from a few in 1950 controlled by two nuclear states to 31,732 nuclear devices controlled by nine nuclear states and more than 40 other states with 3,755 tons of weapons-usable fissile materials that could be used to make 240,000 nuclear weapons.


It increasingly appears to even the most hard-hearted of us that we live in a ‘risk society’

– a time and place of Being where more and more, the evil and suffering we face are not

only inadvertent but “are neither visible or [even oftentimes] perceptible to the victims:”

evil and suffering “that in some cases may not take effect within the lifespan of those

affected, but instead during those of their children.”17 An obvious example might be

global warming, first pointed out to us thirty years ago by leading-edge scientific studies.

The uncertainly in those studies allowed many of us to imagine that nothing need be

done, that somehow God, or nature, or ‘the powers’ would take care of this problem, or

even better, the problem would turn out to be benign. Yet, today we learn (those of us

who are open to or capable of learning) that the problem is much more dire than anyone,

including the scientists imagined. And, what we are collectively facing is an inadvertent

man-made evil of biblical proportions that most likely could result in the genocidal

murder of as many as two billion of the humanity presently living on earth.18 Nobody

planned or wished this evil, but collectively we are responsible for it. Or are we?

16 Giorgio Agamben and Zygmunt Bauman imagine that these ‘problems’ are similar to the phenomena of the concentration camps under the National Socialist regime of the Nazis (democratically elected!) in that they represent the truth of the ideology of Western democratic capitalist states (Zizek, 153). 17 Note # 3, Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Mark Ritter, trans. (London, Sage, 1992), 27 quoted in Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 17-18. 18 While the potential numbers of humans ‘murdered’ by the ‘system’ are not really known with any certainty, this history will most likely remain hidden from view. An example of a hidden history is the manufacture of the ‘Third World’ (a Cold War term), conditions of immiseration of large segments of humanity, by “the outgrowth of income and wealth inequalities” under British colonial rule during “three waves of drought, famine and disease” during the periods: 1845-7, 1876-9, and 1889-91. During these periods of mass death (as many as 50 million people died), Christian Britain commoditized food stocks and used markets to export food to Western Europe from the very countries where famine existed. Clearly, the prevailing theology that rationalizes this behavior is that of the “sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill,” not Christ Jesus. See Mike Davis, “The Political Ecology of Famine: The Origins of the Third World,” in Richard Peet and Michael Watts, eds., Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements, Second Edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 51, 53, 61.

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 Another example might be the present U.S. ‘war on terrorism.’ Who among us can

rightly imagine that the present war on terrorism waged by the principalities19 and

powers20 on behalf of the American people is moral (or even effective)?21 What might an

ethical and moral stance in the world look like if we actually modeled our behavior on

that of Jesus, the Christ, as he might teach today, given the realities and exigencies of

twenty-first century life? Can we say that we are truly living a Christian moral and

ethical life if our actions, however rational, are devoid of moral and ethical purpose?

Could it be that what characterizes our actions, instead of their morality and ethicality, is

their adiphorization; the demobilization of moral sentiments and beliefs from our day-to-

day actions?22 Might the greatest harm we are unwittingly committing as Christians

living in the world today is going about our daily business while morally asleep, a sort of

moral and ethical quietism? Have many of us become just like the “pilot delivering the

bomb to Hiroshima23 or to Dresden,”24 asleep at the moral wheel of life, able to proceed

through the day, oblivious, “without detracting from one’s moral integrity.”25

19 ‘Principalities’ (images; institutions, of which the state is the primary one; and ideologies) “claim… sovereignty over human life and history” See William Stringfellow, “Principalities and Powers” section in Bill Wylie Kellerman, ed. A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 200. 20 ‘Powers’ play a death game with truth through the use of the following tactics: (1) denial of truth; (2) doublespeak and overtalk; (3) secrecy and boasts of expertise; (4) surveillance and harassment; (5) exaggeration and deception; (6) cursing and conjuring; and, (7) diversion and demoralization” (Kellerman, 218-220). 21 This “‘war on terror’ is one of the endlessly suspended terrorist threat: the Catastrophe (the new terrorist attack) is taken for granted, yet endless postponed by the powers conducting this war” (Zizek, 165). But during this ‘state of exception’ the War has actually produced Catastrophe for the Other by killing an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 people, wounding another 100,000 to 250,000 people, and displacing as many as a million people from their homes. The vast majority of those killed, wounded or displaced being women and children. [These dire and counter-productive results have prompted the U.S. Army, three years into the war in Iraq, to develop a thorough revision and update of its official doctrine on counterinsurgency (COIN) that states that “The cornerstone of any COIN effort is security for the civilian population” (FM 3-24-June 2006).] 22 Zygmunt Bauman, “A Century of Camps? (1995)” in Peter Beilhartz, ed., The Bauman Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 270-1. 23 In 1946, reliable estimates of the civilian deaths from the atomic blast and those dying within a year of radiation sickness were ~90,000.


Issues of morality, ethics and theodicy intersect in the very understanding of Self and

agency towards the Other in this postmodern time and place of Being. The ‘I’ that, by my

way of living in the world, apprehends such suffering and evil, and even owns some

complicity in this state-of-affairs. Yet, how do I reconcile this Self and its agency with

the God of love that appears so definitely in the Scripture of the New Testament? In fact,

how can God allow a “world fascinated with idolatry, drunk with power, bloated with

arrogance” that produces such profound suffering?26 Has God hidden his face (hester

panim) as punishment to humanity? Do we suffer mipnei khata’einu (‘because of our

sins’)? 27 “Lord, you who are everywhere, have you been in Villa Grimalde too?”28 Has

God voluntarily removed himself (tzimtzum) from the universe, becoming a God who

24 The firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 resulted in ~20,000 civilian deaths. “Overall, Anglo-American bombing of German cities claimed between 305,000 and 600,000 civilian lives” during WWII (Wikipedia). 25 Zygmunt Bauman, “Sociology After the Holocaust (1989)” in Beilhartz, 254. This view of ethics mirrors that of Emmanuel Levinas who believes that ethics is more about encounter with the Other than about evaluation or judging the Other against some fixed, normative measure or a deontological ethics that motivates by appealing to one’s ‘duty’. See Jacqueline E. Lapsley, Whispering the Word: Hearing Women’s Stories in the Old Testament (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 12. 26 Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 183. 27 “Mipnei khata’einu – ‘because of our sins’ became the general explanation for all disasters of Jewish history” as revealed by the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. In the face of the northern kingdom of Israel being conquered by Tiglath-pilester III of Assyria in 722 BCE and the destruction of the Temple and deportations from the southern kingdom of Judah to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar in 587/6 BCE, the prophets gave the Israelites hope by declaring that this was, after all, God’s will for their sins and all the Israelites needed to do to reclaim their land was to repent and follow YHWH’s torah (instruction, teachings). “God has hidden his face (hester panim) as punishment” for the sins of the Jews. See Mark S. Smith, The Memoirs of God: History, Memory, and Experience of the Divine in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 36; Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 192. 28 Villa Grimalde was the most notorious of Chile’s clandestine torture centers under Pinochet. Quoted in William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist (Challenges in Contemporary Theology; Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 1. Today, we could ask the same question about Abu Garib and Guantanamo.

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 runs away (deus absconditus)?29 “In his clearest statement about his life purpose, Jesus

says that his purpose is to reveal truth: For this I was born and for this I came into the

world, to testify to the truth (John 18:37).”30 Could the truth be that “God enters into the

depths of human life, shares human suffering, and redeems evil by personally

suffering.”31 But is that good enough? Does this perspective of a suffering Son of God on

the cross really change anything? Humanity still suffers. Human agency still either

wittingly or unwittingly causes evil and untold suffering.

Could the identity of Self and the problem of human agency resulting in evil and

suffering be the result of false identity; identity that has been shaped by a universalism

that is mistaken in its very foundations. What I am taking about is the twisted theologia

gloriae and ideology32 of utilitarianism (‘the more human desires that can be met, the

more moral good that has been created’) that presently serves as the “primary moral

framework for decision making in modern societies.”33 In modernity, the ideology of

utilitarianism was legitimized and sustained by a central myth of modernity that equates

the telos of history as human progress brought about by goods resulting from economic

development and technological innovation. But who would of expected it to become a

theologia gloriae, a triumphalist religion that believes itself a “full and complete

account[] of reality;” a religion with a theology that leaves “little room for debate or

difference of opinion.”34 A hegemonic system of implicit righteous Being in the world

29 Tzimtzum (contraction) posits that God removed himself from History to permit the world to exist. “God withdrew himself so that human free will could exert itself, for good or evil” (Bauer, 189). However, “By choosing to be absent, he may be held responsible for the evil he permits, and we can call it evil by setting it against the moral standards” set in Scripture (Bauer, 190-1). 30 Stephen Finlan, Problems with Atonement: The Origins of, and Controversy about, the Atonement Doctrine (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005), 124. 31 Finlan, 106. 32 “Ideology, whatever its object, represents the enshrinement of another person or thing in the place of God. Idolatry embraces some person of thing, instead of God, as the source and rationalization of the moral significance of this life” (Kellerman, 245). 33 Michael S. Northcott, The Environment and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 70.

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 that relies on the “mechanics of authority, to shore up alleged truth with power,

potentially with absolute power.”35 A triumphalist system that believes that the goods of

human progress can be justified as moral exclusively by human happiness measured in

economic terms.

The foundational problem with the theogia gloriae and ideology of utilitarianism,

however, is that the system that results imagines that “God is superfluous to the order of

the material world.”36 Instead of imago dei, we live for imago hominis.37 Instead of

“persistent doubt and self-criticism,” we live in an illusory world of certainty and

assensus, faith built on doctrinal propositions.38 Yet, the results of such certainty, such

faith, results ultimately in genocide, torture, and ecocide carried out by normal human

beings acting on the behest of a ‘rational’ society managed by “the omnipotent state in

full and constant [pastoral] control of the body and the spirit of its subjects.”39 Could it

be that without a truly more non-triumphalist way of being-in-the-world that humanity

might even have a chance of addressing some of the problems that confronts us today?

Maybe an antidote to this righteous ideology of utility is fiducia, belief and faith in a God

where the Self, God, our relations with the Other, and with God’s good creation have

non-instrumentalist value. Thus, even if “there is no human condition into which the

divine presence does not penetrate” that penetration is neither triumphalist nor

utilitarian.40 Instead, what the incarnation and the cross reveal is41 that “the basis for the

common good, for collective action, civic virtue and the very consent to common social

34 John Douglas Hall, The Cross in our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 17. 35 Hall 2003, 17. 36 Northcott, 57. 37 Hall 1976, 146. 38 Hall 2003, 18, 19. 39 Bauman, “Dictatorship Over Needs [1984]” in Beilhartz, 262-63. 40 Paul Tillich, “The Riddle of Inequality,” Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), 46. 41 Tillich 1963, 46.

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 goals on which societies depend” 42 is dependent not on a theologia gloriae, by a

triumphalist ideology of humanocentric utility, but something much different. Could it be

that “True community exists only at the foot of the cross”?43

Saving the Appearances:44 Jesus Becomes Sin45

If God does not so much create a world, but a history that is the world, why does the

coherence of this history incorporate so much suffering?46 And if this history and the

creation that contains it continues to exist moment to moment “only by an active

command on God’s part,” why should God’s command include such suffering?47 If “ we

exist because we are addressed by God and establish our specific identity as those who

respond to God,” how does suffering form this God-addressed-identity?48 If so much of

the appearances of human reality and history, and emergence of self-identity involves

brokenness and suffering, how could God’s presence then only be discerned where all is

42 Northcott, 76. 43 Hall 1976, 153. 44 “Saving the appearances through imagination and participation is, above all, saving human passion and commitment – what we can care again about. Before all else, this passionate caring is the ground of moral character.” See Joseph Monti, “‘Saving the Appearances’: Christian Social Ethics for a Middle-Class Church,” Sewanee Theological Review 42:2 (1999), 219. 45 Instead of using a juridical concept of sin, or even sin as a transgression of normative morality, sin is used here “as failure of persons to seek and love God…. What makes sin really sin, is the guilt resulting from the decision to do evil,” which could be thought of as “alienation from one’s authentic being.” Could it be that human beings exist authentically only as they reflect God’s gracious gift of life to them, by transcending their selves and loving their neighbor? From this perspective, sin is not necessarily the same as moral evil in that sin “is privation of total loving; it is a radical dimension of lovelessness.” See Tatha Wiley, Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Contemporary Meanings (New York: Paulist Press, 2002), 134, 191, 196. 46 Robert W. Jensen, Systematic Theology, Vol. 2: The Works of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14. For Barth, creation is to “prepare the sphere in which the institution and history of the covenant takes place… and the subject that is to be God’s partner in this history” (Jensen, 20). 47 Jensen, 21. 48 Jensen, 63.

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 good and beautiful?49 God must also be present in, not beyond, where things go terribly,

horribly wrong – places where we are broken and suffering.50 Can a God who cannot

suffer even be God? As Miroslav Volf reminds us: “on the cross God renews the

covenant by making space for humanity in God’s very self. The open arms of Christ on

the cross are a sign that God does not want to be a God without humanity; God suffers

humanity’s violence in order to embrace it.”51 Could the cross be the preeminent place

where God shows his engagement, his radical involvement and identity with human

beings and their history, including our brokenness and suffering to the point of death.52

Might God’s gracious, loving solidarity and communion with the depths of human pain

and suffering, of lostness and brokenness in the death of Christ, His Son, on the cross

illuminate our Christian ministry – to also be in solidarity with others in their suffering?

Through the life, cross and resurrection of Christ Jesus humanity experiences the history

of a “mutual moral address by which God speaks to us to initiate and sustain the koinonia

49 “In effect, the world itself is broken” and it is the task of the faithful – to bring light into this brokenness in the midst of their common suffering. This involves working in partnership with God in bringing good to the world (Bauer, 191-2). 50 This view contrasts sharply from a theology of divine impassibility that posits an uninvolved God, “resting in sublime self-enjoyment of the divine goodness and glory” of creation. See Jane Linahan, “Experiencing God in Brokenness: the Self-emptying of the Holy Spirit in Moltmann's Pneumatology” from Religious Experience and Contemporary Theological Epistemology, 4th International Leuven Encounters in Systematic Theology Conference, Leuven, Nov. 5-8, 2003, available at http://www.theo.kuleuven.ac.be /ogtpc/lest4/seniors#Marie%20BAIRD (accessed 02/04/05), 5. 51 Miroslav Volf, “A Theology of Embrace for a World of Exclusion.” In David Tombs and Joseph Liechty, eds., Explorations in Reconciliation, New Directions in Theology Series (Hants, England: Ashgate, 2006), 27-8. 52 This is Martin Luther’s theologia cruces (“theology of the cross”) that was first mentioned in his 1518 Ninety-Five Theses (#21): “A theology of glory [theologia gloriae] calls evil good. A theology of the cross [theologia crucies] calls a thing what it actually is” (ref. Isa. 5:20). See Douglas John Hall, The Cross in our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 16. Essentially, Luther is positing that, “God displays himself ‘visibly’ publicly and historically, only as the humiliated and tortured Jesus.” Thus, it is useless to “consider the transcendence of God, ‘His glory and majesty,’ independently of the human encounter with him in the godlessness of the cross…. God himself…shatters all our images [of Him] by addressing us in the cross of Jesus.” See Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New testament to Saint John of the Cross (Cambridge, MA.: Cowley Publications, 1990), 157-8.

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 of humanity living together in community” amidst the suffering.53 This “‘koinonia of

humanity living together in community’ amidst the suffering” is the church. And “the

church will always be a resistance movement in the world, resisting evil and the agents of

death” and witnessing to God’s kingdom.54 Through living in Christ (e.g. living in a

koinonia community of resistance) we are transformed to a ‘new life’ where history is an

‘opening-up’ of God’s purposes. The myth of the Son of God becoming one flesh with

humanity liberates us from the meaninglessness of Sin and Death.55 What we are

liberated for, what this cruciform hope illuminates, is a mission for Being in the world in

a way that identifies with, and suffers with “people in pain, the world in crisis, the

environment at risk.”56

If Jesus, the Word of God, “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality

with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,

being born in human likeness [Menschwerdung –“becoming human”];57 and being found

in human form, [] humbled himself and became obedient [suffered!] to the point of death

– even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6-8)”:58 then, the means for us to “participate in that

53 Jensen, 79. 54 Carl E. Braaten, “The Recovery of Apocalyptic Imagination,” in Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jensen, eds., The Last Things: Biblical and Theological Perspectives on Eschatology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 30. 55 Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 39. 56 Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 345. 57 This term, used extensively in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics emphasizes not merely enfleshment, but “humanity and humanization…. God’s becoming human in Jesus Christ not only discloses something about God, namely, God’s being-for-humanity; God’s being-for-humanity has a purpose and an end – it is the promise and offer to human beings of a new humanity, indeed the renewal of humanity both personally and corporately – the restoration of true humanity.” See Clifford J. Green, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition” in Bonhoeffer, 6. 58 Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2005), 83. In Jesus’ ministry as remembered in the Gospels, “sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 divine mission and thereby realize the shape of God’s own economy” as manifest by

Jesus’ kenotic example is “by giving that follows the same principle.” That is, “self-

sharing for the good of others.”59 For even these Others are “the created versions, so to

speak, of God’s own goodness.”60 Might we imagine, as Phillips Brooks did, that the

Incarnation, more than just affirming God’s mercy, also serves to highlight and affirm

humanity’s worth to each other, as well as to God.61 Maybe the message God is revealing

through Jesus’ incarnation and death on the cross is that “humanity must suffer.”62 That

“only when I experience the infinite pain of separation from God do I share an experience

with God Himself (Christ on the Cross).”63 And as we are in solidarity with those that

suffer – the Other, our neighbor – we begin to “recognize that their condition is our own:

we are all beggars together.”64 Thus the reality of Christ’s incarnation and death on the

cross becomes a “way of speaking about the character of God’s entry into the sphere of

human history. It is not merely a statement about the death of Jesus, but about his life and

the meaning of his life for our lives…. It insists that God who wills to meet us, loves us,

redeems us, meets, loves, and redeems us precisely where we are: in the valley of the

work or purposes of God.” See David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 87. 59 Tanner, Economy of Grace, 85. Tanner suggests that “the goods of God’s own life are already and forever ours in Christ by virtue of the fact that God has become one with humanity there. The Incarnation of Christ as one with humanity indeed is the way God has of giving to us – of changing the character of our fundamental property, so to speak, that makes what we are – whatever we might do, despite ourselves, even while we remain sinners” (66). For through the Incarnation “Christ is the way God comes, not to the righteous and the already blessed, who fully expect their privileges of moral standing and good fortune to bring with them all the further goods of life, but to sinners in the midst of their sin, to the poor crushed by burdens of pain and injustice, to all who seem to be owed nothing” (64). 60 Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001, 43. This solidarity consists of “being with one another in faith.” Jon Sobrino, S.J., “Being with One Another in Faith,” in Jon Sobrino and Juan Hernandez Pico, S.J., Theology of Christian Solidarity, trans. Phillip Berryman (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985), 31. 61 Gillis J. Harp, Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 175. 62 Hall 1976, 151. 63 Zizek, 91. 64 Hall 1976, 149. “We are beggars before the cross, that is certain” (Martin Luther).

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 shadow of death.”65 Thus, the faith, hope, and love that we experience in the koinonia of

Christian community are “all aspects of the cross of Christ…. Christ’s cross is both the

source and the shape of our salvation…. Our devotion to God, our love for others, and

our hope for the future are all grounded in and shaped by the cross.”66

The Particularity and Contingency of the Cross

Emanuel Levinas imagines that regard for the Other even precedes Being, or self-

identification as ‘I.’67 “I am I in as far as I am for the Other.”68 Only by looking an other

in the face and asking: “Chè voui?” (“What do you want”) does the self become an ‘I.”69

This speech meets the two conditions required for the self to be fully responsible for the

other I encounter: “social similarity [another human being created by God] and personal

identity [an enfleshed, unique individual].”70 If this is the case, then through this

encounter I have created a Lebensraum (“living space’) where “My relation to the Other

is not reversible; if it happens to be reciprocated, the reciprocation is but an accident from

the point of view of my being for.”71 And being for the other precedes even being with.72

65 Hall 1976, 149. 66 Michael J. Gorman, Apostle of the Crucified Lord: A Theological Introduction to Paul and his Letters (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 585. 67 “The Other is…the locus in which is constituted the I who speaks along with he who hears…. This Other, distinguished as the locus of speech…emerges as Truth’s witness.” Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, Bruce Fink, trans. (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), Sections 432, 807.3. 68 Bauman 1993, 78. “It is I who support the Other and am responsible for him…. My responsibility is untransferable, no one could replace me…. Responsibility is what is incumbent on me exclusively, and what, humanly, I cannot refuse…. No one can substitute himself for me.” Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: A Conversation with Phillipe Nemo, Richard A. Cohen, trans. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 100-1 quoted in Bauman 1993, 77. 69 Lacan, section 815. 70 Lacan, section 139.1. 71 Bauman 1993, 50. For example, “‘I am ready to die for the Other’ is a moral statement; ‘He should be ready to die for me,’ blatantly, not” (Bauman 1993, 51).

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 This solidarity for the Other ultimately begins with accusatio sui, an alienation from Self,

an emptying (kenosis) that results in metanoia, a turning away from one’s former

triumphalist and certain path; a conversion to a new way that “is seen as a taking of the

cross, standing where Christ once stood…. the ‘emptying out’ of human wisdom and

human righteousness.”73 It is a true coming together for the Other in that it “unveils the

truth” of our dependence on a God who reveals himself for us only in weakness, in our

deep inter-dependence with others, and in our heartfelt common suffering.74 “If God is

free to act and to be present [for us] in all the diverse conditions of human life [even

those times of human suffering], men and women are free to go find him there” and be

for each other.75 What Jesus promises is that in this relationality with the Other, what we

72 “[M]oral responsibility – being for the Other before one can be with the Other – is the first reality of the self…. It precedes all engagement with the Other, be it through knowledge, evaluation, suffering or doing’ (Bauman 1993, 14. 73 Metanoia is a physical movement and new engagement with the world, not just a change of attitude or intension. “The thrust of the Spirit does not end with the discovery of the battered victim lying in the ditch. It drives us, to make a commitment to that victim to enter actively upon his or her pathway, to make a commitment to his or her liberation.” See Roberto Oliveras Maguero, “History of the Theology of Liberation,” in Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, eds. Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino (Maryknoll, NY” Orbis Books, 1993), 9 quoted in Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Liberation Theology after the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering (London: Routledge, 2001), 177-8. 74 For example, a close reading of New Testament Scripture reveals that “Jesus is not naïve, he does not ask us to be passive [in the face of suffering], he does not require us to give up fighting against evil – but he shows us that equivalence in evil, even in the name of justice, does not transform human society. What is required is an attitude that is not determined by what has already been done, an innovative, a creative gesture. Otherwise enclosure within a repetitive logic is inevitable, and the term of this logic is the exclusion or death of at least one of the parties. It is forgiveness that represents this innovative gesture: it creates a space in which the logic inherent in legal equivalences [i.e. counter-violence] no longer runs.” See Christian Duquoc, “The Forgiveness of God,” Concilium 184 (1986): 39 quoted in Bell, 149. In this forgiveness of God and our fellow human, the endless cycle of violence and counter-violence as the response to human suffering is interrupted and “holds out the promise of a peace [e.g. the cessation of suffering] that is more than the uneasy truce of adversaries” (Bell, 150). 75 Williams 1990, 158-160, 163. William Tyndale (c. 1494-1536) in his Obedience of a Christian Man builds on and extends Luther’s theologia crucis by describing why the solidarity with others is a requirement of our God-given freedom. Rowan Williams summarizes Tyndale’s thinking: “We are delivered by Christ from slavery into freedom; and that freedom is experienced and expressed as indebtedness – not to God, but to each other….God’s service to us in Christ is both the model and the motive force for our relation to our neighbor” (Lev. 19:18; Mark 12:31; Luke

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 will find is the truth. “Belonging completely to Christ, one stands at the same time

completely in the world.”76 This is how Anna Rosmus speaks about her yearning for an

ethical and moral place where truth and solidarity with the Other happen in this world:

I would so much like to live among a people that does not fear or suppress the truth, a nation that admits its past mistakes. I would so much like to live in a nation where somebody who thinks ‘against the stream’ can be an adversary but not necessarily an enemy. I would like to live among people who can take criticism, among people who will try to right their wrongs instead of trying to hide them. I would like to live in a country whose official representatives help to expose dangers and fight against them rather than pretending they don’t exist…. I would like to live among a people who see each person as an individual, and I would like to see each human being allowed to be just that, a human being…. I would like it if people could simply be here for each other…. That is the country I would like to live in.77

What Rosmus describes is a practiced theology where “Humanity is at one with the

divine in Jesus – on the cross as everywhere else in Jesus’ life – and that is what is saving

about it.”78 This presence of Jesus as model of relationality with Self, with God, with

neighbor, and with creation then provides a realistic model for all of us living in

community to begin to learn and to express Christian practices whereby “taken from the

cross we are returned to our original owner God, to God’s kingdom of unconditional

giving, snatched out of a world of deprivation and injustice from which we suffer because

10:27; Rom. 13:9; Gal. 5:14; James 2:8). See Rowan Williams, Anglican Identities (Cambridge, MA.: Cowley Publications, 2003), 11-13. 76 “Worldliness does not separate one from Christ, and being Christian does not separate one from the world” (Bonhoeffer, 62). [T]here is no real Christian existence outside the reality of the world and no real worldliness outside the reality of Jesus Christ” (Bonhoeffer, 61). “There are not two realities, but only one reality, and that is God’s reality revealed in Christ in the reality of the world” (Bonhoeffer, 58). 77 Anna Elizabeth Rosmus, Against the Stream: Growing Up Where Hitler Used To Live, Imagen von Tannenberg, trans. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 2002), 3-7 quoted in Christopher Bryan, Render to Caesar: Jesus, The Early Church, and the Roman Superpower (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 63. 78 Kathryn Tanner, “Incarnation, Cross, and Sacrifice: A Feminist-Inspired Reappraisal,” in Anglican Theological Review 86/1 (Winter 2004), 43.

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 of our poverty, our inability to pay what others demand of us.”79 Thus, “our acts are

perfected only as we incorporate what is God’s very own within ourselves; our actions

are perfected only as we act along with and under the direction of God….we are

ourselves only as we incorporate what is God’s very own within ourselves….we are

ourselves and act according to our human nature only as we thereby act along with and

under the direction of God.”80

From the cross the Self is now defined through relationship, with particularity and

contingency, with plurality and ambiguity in this newly created living space where

humans “act along with and under the direction of God.”81 What that means in practice is

that as a member of the community of the faithful we become “dedicated to… what Jesus

was dedicated to in his relations with other people” as the primary form of relationality.

Thus, this form of grace-full being-in-the-world becomes the practice for living in

Christian community and models for the surrounding, non-confessing community what

Christian solidarity with the Other actually looks like on-the-ground.82

God is no Longer in the Dock, Instead Humanity’s hesed Occupies the

Dock

As Joseph Monti points out is his essay, “God in the Dock?”, the various theodicies that

have been tried over the ages offer no satisfactory explanation for reconciling the God of

79 Kathryn Tanner, “Economies of Grace” in William Schweiker and Charles Mathewes, Having: Property and Possession in Religious and Social Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 374. 80 Tanner, “Economies of Grace,” 379-380. 81 David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 61. 82 Kathryn Tanner, “Trinity” in Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 331.

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 love and the presence of evil and suffering in the world.83 But could this be because they

are all based on atonement models that fail to satisfactorily answer the question: “Why

did God murder (sacrifice) his only son?”

Biblical “explanations” for the cross: Christ “died for us” (Paul) He died to save us (martyr model) He died in our place (personal substitution model) He paid the price to buy our freedom (ransoming model) He died as the new place of atonement (sacrificial and typological model) He took on our curse and bore away our sins (scapegoat, also typological model)

Post-biblical doctrines of atonement: Christus Victor (Christ is victorious over the devil and his forces of evil) Satisfaction theory (Christ is paying or suffering a penalty that humanity owed or incurred) Moral Influence Theory (Christ’s heroic death can move people to repent and be loyal to God’s ways).84

An alternative approach might be an incarnational model that attempts to recover a “God

who works unswervingly for our good, who puts no value in death and suffering, and no

ultimate value on self-sacrifice for the good, a God-gift-giving abundance struggling

against the forces of sin and death in the greatest possible solidarity with us – that of

incarnation.”85 Thus, “Jesus is obedient to the mission of God, and that is a good thing,

but that obedience is itself the result of the same saving force of incarnation that accounts

for what is saving about the cross.”86 Essentially, “The whole of Jesus’ life – before, as

after his death – is such a life-giving sacrifice given by God for us to feed on, for our

83 Joseph Monti, “‘God in the Dock?’ Pastoral Ministry and the Justification of God in Late Modernity,” Anglican Theology Review, Vol. LXXXV/3 (Summer, 1993), 315-344. 84 Finlan, 58, 65. All these models assume that “Christ is the sacrificial gateway through which one must go in order to pass from alienation to reconciliation” (Finlan, 9). 85 Tanner, “Incarnation, Cross, and Sacrifice,” 47. 86 Tanner, “Incarnation, Cross, and Sacrifice,” 47.

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 nourishment.”87 Paradoxically, “the cross of Christ does not signify God’s or the world’s

destruction of Jesus, rather it is a concrete manifestation of salvation.”88

With this incarnational model of the atonement, the question then becomes the question

of theodicy posed by the Book Of Job: “Can human beings have a disinterested faith in

God – that is, can they believe in God without looking for rewards and fearing

punishments? Even more specifically: Are human beings capable, in the midst of unjust

suffering, of continuing to assert their faith in God and speak of God without expecting a

return?”89 Might “Job’s suffering [be] announcing the Way of the Cross: Christ’s

suffering is also meaningless, not an act of meaningful exchange.”90 Might the Gospel be

describing human History (Life) as a “soul-making journey” towards justice and

compassion – “a feeling-along-with the suffering of others through a framework of

love.”91 The model for what this stance towards justice and compassion looks like is

God’s hesed (faithfulness/persevering love) that God has for not only His Son, but also

all of humanity.92 The question is whether humankind can reflect this hesed to each other

87 Tanner, “Incarnation, Cross, and Sacrifice,” 56. 88 Stephen E. Fowl, Philippians (The Two Horizons New Testament Commentary; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 69. 89 Gustavo Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, trans. by Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987), 1. The Book of Job also “provides what is perhaps the first exemplary case of critique of ideology in human history, laying bare the basic discursive strategies of legitimizing suffering” (Zizek, 125). 90 Zizek, 125. 91 Michael Stoeber, Reclaiming Theodicy: Reflections on Suffering, Compassion, and Spiritual Transformation (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2005), 11, 29. 92 Hesed (the goodness and favor that God reserves for his faithful) “was a particularly useful word for speaking of God’s relationship to his people… because it held together in a single expression an emphasis on divine freedom on the one hand and divine commitment on the other, an emphasis on human need and weakness on the one hand and human responsibility to trust in God alone on the other. By a stretching of the secular usage for delivering and protective action and concern to embrace even forgiveness, the term came to express the uniqueness of god’s hesed as the basis for a relationship stronger than any human bond.” See Katherine Doob Sakenfeld, The Meaning of Hesed in the Hebrew Bible: A New Inquiry, HMS 17 (Missoula: Scholars Press,

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 and to God even in the face of destructive suffering, when there is no prospect for

redemption or hope for the victim to recover from the suffering that they endure.93 Thus,

the answer to this cry from the psalmist: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest. (Ps. 22:1-2, NRSV)

is the human Other answering: “I am here, with you, in your pain, in your suffering.”

And the ‘here’ is more than mild consideration but a deep compassion that calls forth

Doing – speaking the Word. The primary grammar of this Doing that ensues en tö nyn

kairo (‘in the time of the now’) is that of pastoral listening and active presence.94 Our call

as ministers of the Word is to interpret the suffering presented to us and to arrive at a

provisional and conditional description of truth as best as we are able;95 “to add an

important element to the process” of being with the Other in solidarity, whether that

Other is our neighbor, God’s good creation, or God, herself.96 To become a good

interpreter of suffering, what we require is a stance of compassionate engagement in the

interpretive conversation; an openness to the richness of the situation.97 The importance

of this stance of engaged compassion and hospitality is to hold the truth that emerges

from the dialogic of this particular situation lightly, praying:

1978), 149-50 quoted in Joseph Jensen, O.S.B., Ethical Dimensions of the Prophets (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2006), 97-8. 93 Stoeber, 60. 94 This time is essentially messianic time. See Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Patricia Dailey, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 53, 67-8. 95 “Truth for Paul is never anything but ‘faith working through love’ (Gal. 5:6).” See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Ray Brassier, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 92. 96 L. William Countryman, Interpreting the Truth: Changing the Paradigm of Biblical Studies (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), 232. 97 Countryman, 231.


Train us, Lord, to fling ourselves upon the impossible, for behind the impossible is your grace and your presence; we cannot fall into emptiness. The future is an enigma, our road is covered by midst, but we want to go on giving ourselves, because you continue hoping amid the night and weeping tears through a thousand human eyes. – Luis Espinal, a priest murdered in Bolivia for his Christian ministry to the poor98

As ministers of the Word we “are called to strive to make good the evils of

suffering, to transform the experienced pain positively, to move from empathy (a

feeling-along-with-others) to compassion (a feeling-along-with-others through a

framework of love).”99 Maybe all this entails is the speech of witness of God’s

presence that confronts powers that remain silent and unengaged in the face of

“the sea of suffering and misery prevailing in the world.”100 And might it be that

we are speaking thusly about God, not because we are pastors, but we are pastors

because we must speak thusly about our God.101 This is our gift to the world, a

grace-filled gift through which God speaks His Word into a transformed world of

freedom to walk with Christ, even through the trials of suffering and evil.102 And

this grace-filled gift of compassion comes from a love that “is not a feeling of

goodwill toward the neighbor [the Other], but the active search for that word – so

that I can hear what God has to say to me and give to me through the neighbor,

and also so that I can speak to what is real in the neighbor, not what suits or

interests me and my agenda.”103 For what the cross of Christ has revealed to me

is that “the route to authentic selfhood… remains the radical discipleship of an

98 Quoted in Gutierrez, 91-2. 99 Stoeber, 45. 100 Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (NY: 1963), 140-1 quoted in Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology, Geoffrey W. Bromiley, trans. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 10. 101 Based on thoughts of Karl Barth in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth, His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (London and Philadelphia: 1976), 61 quoted in Busch, 7. 102 David Tracy 1987, 75. 103 Rowan Williams, Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another (Boston: New Seeds Press, 2005), 83.

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 imitatio Christi.”104 It is the reality of the gift-giving God of love “decisively

revealed in the event” of the cross of Jesus Christ that provides the answer to my

willingness to speak the Word, even in the face of unending and unspeakable

suffering and evil that I cannot explain.105 And the speech that I am imagining is

really a “discipleship of the crucified Christ [that] is characterized by a faith that

drives…[me] into the world with a relentlessness and a doing…[that I] could not

manage on the basis of human volition alone.”106 When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God. (1Cor. 2:4)

The purpose of this speech, of this “discipleship of the crucified Christ,” is neither

reconciliation nor redemption, but “the creation of the beloved community.”107 And the

vision of this beloved community is nothing other than “the realization of divine love

lived in social relation.”108 For only in this form of community, when suffering confronts

us, will we be capable of remembering that the cross is the “great event that stands at the

center of our faith, which reveals to us that God is on the side of truth and love and

justice.”109 Can our churches become this beloved community?110 Maybe only when we

104 David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 435. Maybe “the true communication with Christ, the imitatio Christi, is to participate in Christ’s doubt and disbelief” (Zizek, 102). 105 Tracy 1981, 435. 106 Hall 2003, 183. 107 Martin Luther King Jr., The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr., vol. 3, ed. Steward Burns, Susan Carson, Peter Holloran, and Dana L.H. Powell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 136 quoted in Charles Marsh, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 1. 108 Marsh, 2. 109 The Papers, vol. 3, 328 quoted in Marsh, 44. 110 “The church is the place where it is proclaimed and taken seriously that God has reconciled the world to himself in Christ” (Bonhoeffer, 63).

Lyle Brecht 16-Nov-06 DRAFT of 23 get out of the business of saving souls and begin to embody “the ‘great event’ of the

cross.” For by this embodiment we make ‘free space’ and our churches become ‘centers

of difference’ and ‘centers of resistance’ “established by the ‘great event on Calvary.’”111

What I am describing is a heterarchal112 community whose Being and Doing in the face

of suffering and evil is defined through its relationality with Self, with God, with

neighbor, and with God’s good creation (“the environment”). Instead of perceiving

“ourselves as minor characters in a [historical] narrative over which we do not have

control,” we become co-creators with God of a history that has both direction (e.g.

towards God) and purpose (e.g. human freedom) in spite of, or even because of, the

suffering and evil all around us that cannot be explained.113 As Bonhoeffer puts it, “the

first task of the church of God is not to be something for themselves, for example, by

creating a religious organization or leading a pious life, but to be witnesses of Jesus

Christ to the world.”114

111 The Papers, vol. 3, 328, 458 quoted in Marsh, 45, 50. 112 “Socially, a heterarchy distributes privilege and decision-making among participants, while a hierarchy assigns more power and privilege to the members high in the structure” (Wikipedia). 113 Haila and Dyke, 26. “Free action, as it determines history, recognizes itself ultimately as being God’s action…. Nothing but God makes human action in history good” (Bonhoeffer, 226). 114 Bonhoeffer, 64.

Theodicy of the Cross - November 2006

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