With reference to Marx's challenge which calls for a radical concept of God, the theology of the cross points to a soteriology in which God enters into human history participating fully in the liberation of man and the whole of creation. God stands in solidarity with the weak, the forsaken, and the despised. Solidarity and identification, and cruci fixion are salvific in light of the resurrection of the crucified One, Douglas John Hall expresses this outlook very clearly as he focuses attention on the presence of the crucified One:
The theology of the cross is first of all 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 is not merely a statement about the human condition; it is testimony to the assumption of the human condition by the One who created and creates out of nothing. The basic point of this theology is not to reveal that our condition is one of darkness and death; it is to reveal to us the One who meets us in our darkness and death. 90
Hall adds that what makes this theology peculiarly a theologia crucis is not that "it wants to put forward this ghastly spectacle as a final statement about life in this world, but because it insists that God,
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who wills to meet us, love us, redeem us, meets, loves, and redeems 91 us precisely where we are; in the valley of the shadox^ of death."
This talk about God is Christological for it is only in and through Christ that God is encountered and grasped in faith by man, Ian D.K, Siggins summarily explains Luther’s thought on the subject when he notes;
He who wants to encounter God must encounter Him where He may be grasped as He cannot be grasped in His majesty; in the incarnate God, who lives in His mother’s lap, and in the crucified God, To cling solely to Christ as He goes through death to the Father is the only way to find Qod. 92
Siggins therefore concludes that, according to Luther, "Since God will not and cannot be found except in and through the humanity of Christ, that humanity is the ’ensign for the nations’ of Isaiah's prophecy
(Isa, God is available for man to grasp Him, for Christ is the Emmanuel «- "God with us". He is God incarnate who1‘suffers
death, even death on the cross for the sake of the whole world. Because of Marx’s Weltanschauung, as well as in spite of it, Luther’s theologia crucis, with its emphasis upon the salvatory encounter between God and man in the cross of Christ, is crucially relevant to the proclamation of
the Gospel, in word and deed, in the world today.
In both sections of this chapter we have sought to show that it is at the cross of Christ that God reveals His essence as suffering for the sake of man. This affirmation by Christian theology - indeed by the theologian of the cross — is not an opiate for it calls a thing what it is; it is hope incarnated in suffering. It is hope in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, the God-Man, who opens the way out of suffering which is, in reality, a way that is present in the midst of suffering and leads through suffering to the resurrection beyond this world. Salvation is sola gratia, which is the praxis of God,
Chapter IV.
Proclaiming and "Incarnating" the Gospel: The double crises of Identity and Relevance.
Introduction,
In this chapter we shall examine the basic features of the theology -|
of Moltmann, on the one hand, and the Theology of Liberation , on the other hand. Our overriding concern will be with the respective ways in which they both talk about God in the face of the pressing socio-economic and political problems which confront the world today. Both Moltmann and the Liberation theologians from Latin America recognize that the Gospel of Christ has a peculiar relevance to those problems, and in their own peculiar way they each attempt to articulate this relevance in ways that are rooted in and not divorced from the peculiar identity of the Gospel,
The presentation of Moltmann’ s theology is based on the primary assumption that his theology of the cross is the fundamental method which he uses in his talk about God. We shall therefore refer to several of his writings, and not only to any one of them.
By the same token it is assumed that, despite the variety of writings on Liberation Theology by a motley group of scholars, there is the
primary concern in Liberation Theology with the theme of historical liberation from socio-economic and political enslavement and oppression.
Finally, we shall show that, to a very great extent, in both "theologies" - more especially in Liberation Theology - talk about God is in fact a theological explication of the Marxian concept of praxis-
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Triune God within Himself and in history, and on the practical-critical activity of the believer in the light of God's praxis. In contrast to this emphasis Liberation Theology stresses the believer's practical- critical activity in history, which is his creative response to the God of justice and liberation. Consequently, when Moltmann's theology is seen in the light of Liberation Theology it appears abstract and vague about the Church's socio-political involvement in any given society. By the same token, when Liberation Theology is viewed in terms of
Moltmann's theology it appears that God is so actively engaged in man's liberation in history that He seems more like man's co-agent than as sovereign Lord. Both "theologies", however, are practical "theologies" with significant pastoral import which reflects the tension between the universal meaning of the Gospel, and the particular, indigenous meaning of that message, Moltmann is more concerned with the first emphasis, while Liberation is more concerned with the second,
A.
Moltmann's Trinitarian Political Theology of the Cross - A Radical Concept of God.
a.
Political Theology of the Cross.
It is obvious from Moltmann's explicit description of his theology of the cross that he is greatly indebted to Luther. In Luther he found the radical meaning of the Incarnation most clearly explicated. He accepts Walther von Loewenich's thesis that Luther's theologia crucis