Suffering God

The more seriously one takes the evangelical claim that God suffers the condemnation of humanity in Jesus, “the stronger becomes the temptation to approximate to the view of a contradiction and conflict in God Himself.” So says Barth. Yet Barth with equal vehemence rejects the notion of self-contradiction in God as a blasphemy.

What’s contradicted is not God but metaphysical concepts of God, “abstract” notions of God that construct a theology without reference to Jesus in His actual history: “who God is and what it is to be divine is something we have to learn where God has revealed Himself and His nature, the essence of the divine . . . . It is not for us to speak of a contradiction and rift in the being of God, but to learn to correct our notions of the being of God, to reconstitute them in the light of the fact that He does this. We ma believe that God can and must only be absolute in contrast to all that is relative, exalted in contrast to all that is lowly, active in contrast to all suffering, inviolable in contrast to all temptation, transcendence in contrast to all immanence, and therefore divine in contrast to everything human, in short that He can and must be only the ‘Holly Other.’ But such believes are shown to be quite untenable, and corrupt and pagan, by the fact that God does in fact be and do this in Jesus Christ.”