There is a dastardly uncomfortable feeling in challenging the view of God as anything but a principality of power; that is, a God that is “deniably” omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, one whom is just as powerless as those He is the God of. The traditional and beatific image of a God who is a Sovereign, is immutable, is all-powerful, placed upon some semblance of a throne of divine detachment—He is certainly transcendent. He is impersonal and exists as a metaphysical guarantee that all within world is under Order. And such a God is, too, ontologically unidentifiable, something Beyond.
We see this as God the Father. Then we make the assumption to extend this to all of God, Spirit and Son, for we are foolish. Yet, what of the life of the Son? The figure of the Crucified God, whom was the revealed, the Logos, and the image of vulnerability and cruelty of the human condition for sin. A God who reveals Himself to the powerless through the suffering of The Man, Jesus Christ, is an unsettling picture. Where value upon dominance and control is high, the acceptance of divine power most fully revealed in Jesus as not the power of the powerful, but the power of the powerless, is a most troubling proposition.
If we were to see, then, instead of Christ, powerful sufferer of human Sin, but Christ, a God who chooses to suffer, to be humiliated and broken, what does this mean for the Image of God? Such is the idea of Sölle, where the true and real power of God is not within the abstractions we form through philosophical nonsese of omnipotence, of omnibenevolence, and our derivations of Trinitarian theology, but instead within the painful reality of shared suffering between Man and God; the Father to be the transcendence, and the Son to be the immanence, as revealer and revealed, respectively. Such ideas allow us to embrace the mysticism of God and too His paternal and maternal love.
Introduction
Dorothee Sölle presents a critique (which I find quite lovely) of the historical development of Christian thought. Most particularly, a critique on the way in which Greek philosophy and the Scholastic era has most dramatically shaped modern conceptions of God in harmful ways. The intellectualism of Greek philosophy—most notably that of Aristotle, herladed with great pride by the Scholastics—and the synthesis of St. Aquinas have bequeathed to us a distorted perception of the Divine; one wherein such traditions have encouraged a perception of God as a strictly transcendental Soverign and Principality of power, an image that excludes the open love of the Crucified God.
The Power of the Divine
Sölle’s critique at its heart is a critique against the very notion of divine power. Greek philosophy enjoyed the conception of God as the Unmoved Mover, a being whose essence is indeed pure actuality and whose power is uncontensted and absolute. God is the ultimate source of Order and Being, the First of all, and a principle of immutable perfection. Scholasticism did not orphan these ideas as it progressed into the further centuries and instead, of course, greatly embraced the metaphysics of Aristotle. St. Aquinas’ “reconciliation” of faith and reason constructed for us a character of God who is omnipotent, immutable, impassible—qualities that, to Sölle, are more in accordance with a deity of some impersonal power rather than the relational and self-giving God revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. This very inheritance produced a conception of God that is most fundamentally at odds with the figure of Jesus on the Cross, to such an intense degree that the Cross is denied as a symbol of a vulnerable God, and instead deferred to its placement at the hand of Man. With the Greek and Scholastic idea of an all-powerful monarch, the New Testament idea of divine power from weakness and self-sacrifice notably stands out. The Crucified God is not one who commands from a position of unassailable power as St. Aquinas may appear to suggest, but rather one who submits to suffering and death for the sake of redemption and love. For some reason inexplicable to me, such sacrifice upon the Cross is accepted, and yet the weakness imbued within it—the blood of the stigmata, or the sweat upon His brow—is not.
A Crucified Christ
The insistence upon God’s impassibility and His inability to suffer is a direct confliction with the central Christian assertion of a God that enters into human suffering. If God is impassible, as St. Aquinas maintains, Sölle argues then: how can He genuinely participate in the suffering of the world? How may He be the God who, as Christ, embraces the fragility of human existence, faces betrayal from the Love of Judas, and ultimately dies on the Cross divorced from His Mother? There is no such thing, and any answer that assents and says Yes, He may is a distortion of the concept of the Crucified God.
Christianity has become a dominant ‘politic’—that is to say, where the Crucified God is as powerless as the powerless He embraces, the marginalized, the oppressed, the Scholastic God maintains philosophical coherence in metaphysical assumptions but entirely obscures the profound mystery of God’s participation in human suffering, and by extension His very essence.
Our idea of God’s power, whether theologically or personally, must not be found within dominion and stewardship but in the Cross. God submits to Man just as Man submits to God, and this does not deny Him of His nature, but rather leads us to understand the very mystery of it. God was never denied the flesh, the Logos asarkos a crude misunderstanding of the Son, and God can never be abstracted into such philosophical concepts of omnipotence, omnibenevolence, of the Logos asarkos / ensarkos. God simply Is.