#moltmann

[azspot]

The church of Christ ecumenically embraces the whole inhabited earth. She is not a tribal religion, nor a Western religion, nor a white religion, but the church of all humanity.

Jürgen Moltmann

[buggie-hagen]

God intends in the end to fill all creation with his own presence and love. This is part of an answer to Jürgen Moltmann’s proposal to revive the rabbinic doctrine of zimzum, in which God as it were retreats, creates space within himself, so that there is ontological space for there to be something else other than him. If I am right, it works the other way around. God’s creative love, precisely by being love, creates new space for there to be things that are genuinely other than God.

~N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, 102.

[hollowandeceptivephilosophy]

Brief Note on Sacrifice

I saw earlier today a post elsewhere which claimed that “sacrifice” is a inherently morally bad category and that we should only aim at win-win scenarios: to which I have several responses, which are all in slight tension with one another.  

Response 1: A society built entirely on win-win scenarios only can exist when there is a functional medium of exchange which enables rough (and to a large extent, illusory and constructed) equivalence between different desires. If you deal with people who do not accept your medium of exchange, then win-win scenarios can be impossible (because you have conflicting desires or imperatives which cannot be exchanged way through the compelling illusion of equivalency). In such a world, sacrifice, either self-accepted or imposed upon the other, is necessary. 

Response 2: Certain things are, in themselves non-exchangeable, and we all recognize that the notion that they are exchangeable is illusory. Human life is the typical example here: we put a price on it in various ways, but non-morally blind people recognize that such price is driven by the necessity of the current system rather than a coherent expression of value. Being willing to risk what is non-exchangeable, such as one’s life, for what is exchangeable, such as money, is a sacrifice, and it is the fundamental ground of all human societies. (especially a society like our own, where we impose massive risks on others in order to live (e.g. driving), and require certain individuals to accept disproportionate risks in order for our societies to survive (e.g. soldiers).   Response 3: The decision for one non-commensurable good over another can be rational; and indeed based on one’s previous actions and the structure of one’s life, there can even be a clear answer which good one must choose. Nonetheless, one is still rejecting a good that cannot truly be placed in equivalence with another. That, in  real sense can be described as a sacrifice. Response 4: Once we recognize that non-commensurable goods exist, the possibility of sacrifice one (real) set of goods for another exists. This is, of course, one meaning of the Garden of Gethsemene. Jesus’ weeps because he is sacrificing a genuine good and properly incommensurable good, of a human life which has not yet faced death.  Of course, Jesus not only dies for the sake of another real good (salvation), but he also continues to live: but the resurrected life is a different kind of life, with different goods, as is made obvious by the ascension. 

Response 5: Sacrifice has never been a moral imperative in a universe of exchange, it has always been a symbol and opening to a world beyond the logic of exchange. While it has an intrinsic rationality that is deeper and richer than that of pure exchange of things, trying to restrict it and understand it within an immanent ethical calculus is to miss the fullness of the point. (though, incidentally, for the reasons described above and others, sacrifice is also immanently rational.)  

Response 6: The whole point of a symbol is that it is not calculable, that it includes a variety of irreducible worlds. Each thing described above is an expression of that primordial reality that we represent and recognize in sacrifice: but it is not the totality of the thing. As Christians, insofar as we take the Cross to be the revelation of God (along of course with the life, death resurrection etc), we must say that he is a sacrificing and crucified God. This is his nature. 

Of course, the truth of other things about God make this a mystery, which hopefully I will write more about. But ultimately, in addition to the immanent and transcendent reasons why sacrifice matters, the ultimate truth is this.  God is Sacrifice; which is hardly a strange belief insofar as love as well, is a mode of sacrifice.  Necessary Counterweight: When we say “God is Sacrifice” we must not downplay any of the ways that God is not like our human institutions of sacrificing.  The divine model of sacrifice is the one who has absolute power giving himself up for the sake of others: whereas the human model of sacrifice has all too frequently turned to the forcing the weak to give up what little they have for the comfort of the powerful. This is especially true of self-sacrifice, which is imposed as a moral rule upon the weak. 

To be clear, the seizing of sacrifice by those the world judges as weak can be a source of power for the overcoming of evil (for the immanent, transcendent, and divine reasons described above). But the imposition of sacrifice on them is demonic and in utter opposition to God. 

Properly speaking, sacrifice is a mode of power, and if a sacrifice is not genuinely empowering to the one making it, then it is not a true sacrifice. 

Full credit to Sarah Coakley, who inspired many of these remarks, and to Moltmann who inspired much of the rest. And as always, to Aquinas. 

[buggie-hagen]

The cross-theology renaissance--represented by Douglas Hall, Stanley Hauerwas, Jürgen Moltmann, and others--could use a fuller dose of Luther's own cross theology to counteract its inclination toward law-shyness. The corollary to their law-shyness is some timidity about Christ's resurrection.

Edward Schroeder, “Preach One Thing: The Wisdom of the Cross” in Gift and Promise: The Augsburg Confession & the Heart of Christian Theology, 14.

[azspot]

Original sin wants to punish all of humanity for wanting to be like God. But the entire point of faithful discipleship is to try to be like God. What Western Christianity doesn’t want to admit is that to do so, we have to go through a stage of differentiation in order to move toward a mature relational life with God. You do this with your parents. You do this with you best friends, in toddlerhood and elementary school and high school and beyond. You do this with your career identity, and with your marriage identity. Wisdom is always a process of navigating through the identities of connection and distinction in order to arrive at harmony. There is not a healthy relationship on the planet that hasn’t done so. Even Jesus distinguished himself from his family, remember? But we also remember that tender moment in the Gospel of John where he connected his mother and John, because he cared deeply for them both.

Moltmann Monday: On Original Sin

[azspot]

If you’re still looking to give something up for Lent, I’ve got an idea for you: give up original sin. Seriously, just consider letting it go. Try it out for six weeks and, if you really miss it, I guess you can do the weird thing of picking it up as an act of celebrating resurrection come Easter morning. What I bet will happen instead is that you realize it is not necessary to your faith, and probably is actually hindering you in a few key ways, and that original blessing helps you see others with more compassion and honesty, and wow will it expand your view of Jesus, not to mention the cross.

Moltmann Monday: Humans Prepare the Feast of Creation

[azspot]

The religions and humanist world which surrounded Christianity from the very first despised the cross, because this dehumanized Christ represented a contradiction to all ideas of God, and of man as divine. Yet even in historic Christianity the bitterness of the cross was not maintained in the recollection of believers or in the reality presented by the church. There were times of persecution and times of reformation, in which the crucified Christ was to some extent experienced as directly present. In historic Christianity there was also the ‘religion of the suppressed’ (Laternari), who knew that their faith brought them into spontaneous fellowship with the suffering Christ. But the more the church of the crucified Christ became the prevailing religion of society, and set about satisfying the personal and public needs of this society, the more it left the cross behind it, and gilded the cross with the expectations and ideas of salvation.

Moltmann

[professorgtnt]

當代德國神學家莫特曼(Juergen Moltmann, 1926- )原本志在科學，受到納粹愛國情操所鼓動，16歲時加入希特勒青年團。18歲被派上前線，在部隊中經歷數次的死裡逃生，眼見戰友被炸死，他在爭扎與矛盾中生平第一次向上帝發出吶喊。19歲因德國戰敗，成為戰俘。在戰俘營看見奧斯維辛（Auschwitz）集中營，德軍屠殺猶太人的慘狀，粉碎了對祖國的形象。他在獄中勤讀聖經，詩篇中的哀歌成為他訴說苦境的安慰，從中領悟到「盼望」的意義。莫特曼出獄後，為尋求真理改念神學，26歳獲得神學博士。後來在波昂大學（Bonn）、杜賓根大學（Tuebingen）任教。1964年莫特曼以其《盼望神學》（Theology of Hope）而廣為人知。此書是二次大戰後最具影響力的一本神學書籍，他說復活是神應許給世界的希望，耶穌藉著十架上的死亡認同今世一切反面的力量，同樣地，祂的復活在每一方面都與十字架相對立，也成了整個世界要被改變的應許，此應許既關乎神要更新整個受造界，也為我們現在投身改造世界的行動提供動機。莫特曼要教會正視自己的社會和今世的責任，並促使「希望」變成人類的具體責任。