Wednesday, September 25, 2019

The Scandal of the Theology of the Cross


I
The cross has been a scandal in every age.  It subverts our dreams and overturns our idealisms.  Human nobility and spirituality die upon this cross.[1]  It stands in opposition to the values of the world, the values summed up in the expression “theology of glory.”  Because, as Luther says, “Crux sola est nostra theologia” (“the cross alone is our theology”), it follows that the cross is opposed to all theologies of glory.[2]  But what is a theology of glory, and how must it be understood over and against a theology of the cross?
As soon as we reflect upon this, other questions naturally arise.  What is the best in man?   What is it that makes human beings noble?  What gives men and women dignity?  In answering this, we might start with the following catalog of human virtues, those characteristics seemingly separating us from the other primates.  Human beings:
·        have an eternal soul.
·        are bearers of reason.
·        possess free will and inhabit a moral order.
·        can actualize their potentiality.
·        have a taste for the Infinite.
·        can know the truth, do the good, and appreciate beauty.
·        understand justice and law as their highest good.
·        know God to be the foundation of truth, goodness and beauty. 
Theologies of glory understand that human and divine being stand on a continuum with human being either participating in divine being, or instantiating properties normally associated with the divine.  Theologies of glory can be stronger or weaker to the degree to which they instantiate divine being or divine attributes.  My favorite expression of a theology of glory comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson whose poem “Worship” has these memorable lines:
This is [He], who, deaf to prayers,
Floods with blessings unawares.
Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line,
Severing rightly his from thine,
Which is human, which divine.
The line between the two is difficult to draw because human beings are the embodiment of the highest aim of God, and God is the projection of the highest sentiments of humanity.  Thus, it is a challenge to know where the one leaves off and the other begins.  
Human beings are created in imago dei and, although this divine image is now tarnished by the waywardness of sin, it still shines forth weakly within human hearts.  Accordingly, human beings, through greater or lesser degrees of effort and divine succor, must work to polish up that which is now tarnished.     
An historically important theology of glory was bequeathed to us by a famous philosopher living over 400 years before Christ. The Greek philosopher Plato claimed that while the human soul bears the marks of the divine world from which it fell, e.g., indestructibility, simplicity and eternity, and while its essence is to be without a body, it has unfortunately been joined to matter in the veil of tears of this life.  At death, however, the sickness of the soul’s involvement with the body is healed as it sheds the corporeal forever and lives in eternity beyond the temporal.   Throughout the ancient world, the Greek idea of the immortal soul formed the intellectual backdrop on which Christ’s death and resurrection were understood. 
While time does not permit me to sketch out representative theologies of glory in the western tradition, one must at least point to a dominant early one: Neo-Platonism.  This philosophy held that all things are ultimately ONE and that this ONE in the course of history flows out of itself into Nous, then into the World-Soul, and finally into the alienated world of matter. Salvation demands that material men and women become more spiritual as they are freed from the corruption of the flesh and returned to the ONE from which they have been separated but to which they essentially belong.  Christian variations emphasized that God sends grace which is infused in believers so that they might become more spiritual and return to God.   
By the sixteenth century, Neo-Platonism had waned, but the impulse of the theologian of glory remained. The idea was that God gives human beings particular laws and that humans must act in accordance with those laws in order to be close to God.  To act in accordance is to be just; to not act in accordance is to be unjust.  In Luther’s time it was widely thought that as a person is just when he acts in accordance with divine law, so is God just when he rewards likes for likes.  God’s justice demands He punish sin and save the sinless. 
However, because humanity is not sinless, God had to give grace that either makes the believer sinless enough for God not to punish, or which “covers” sinners such that if somebody makes some small effort towards God, an effort within the power of the person (‘fac quod in se ipsum’), God does not deny His grace (‘facienti quod in se est Deus non denegat gratiam’).  God justly acts to reward the sinner who has worked merit congruent with his or her ability (meritum de congruoas if he or she had actually worked a merit worthy of salvation itself (meritum de condigno).  Because of Christ, the wretched faltering steps towards God the believer makes in this life are regarded by God to be as if they were worthy of salvation.    
It is not important that we follow all the specifics here. The theological tradition is rich in reflection on the nature of justification.  Suffice it to say that, for Lutherans, a person’s justification and salvation are coninstantiated.  Conceptually, it is impossible for one to be justified and not saved, or for one to be saved and not justified.  Accordingly, it is a necessary truth that ‘x is justified just in case x is saved’.  A theology of glory understands that proximity to God is a function of the worldly instantiation of properties that perfectly and properly apply to God.  
II
What then is a theology of the cross?  While a theology of glory understands the presence of God as a worldly manifestation of properties like those of God, a theology of the cross finds the divine presented sub specie contrario, that is, underneath its contrary.  Thus, a theology of the cross finds God where one least expects to find God: in weakness, in suffering, in death, in finitude.  Whereas the theologian of glory locates God in the divine apathei of detachment, peace and impassibility, the theologian of the cross finds God in despair, suffering, and emotional turmoil.  
In 1518, 35 year-old Martin Luther gave a presentation at the Augustinian monastery in Heidelberg in which he provided a classic distinction between a theologian of glory and a theologian of the cross.    
(19) Non ille digne theologus dicitur, qui invisibilia Dei per ea, quae facta sunt, intellecta conspicit.  (20) Sed qui visibilia et posteriori Dei per passiones et crucem conspecta intelligit.   [(19) That person is not worthy to be called a theologian who perceives the invisible things of God as understood through things that have occurred.  (20) But who understands the visible and “back side” of God through the perception of his passion and cross.]3 
The theologian of glory in thesis 19 is one who looks at how the world is in order to get a clue about how God is. Since God is like the world in that both are measured by goodness, the better the world is, the better or closer the divine source and goal of existence itself is. This theologian expects to find God where there is maximum goodness.  Luther says that this theologian of glory is not worthy to be called a theologian. 
Rather, the one worthy to be called a theologian is he or she who understands that what can be known of God is available only by looking at the cross.  The theologian of the cross finds God precisely where one would not expect Him to be found: in His ignoble suffering and death on the cross.    
The ancient notion of the anologia entis claims that there is an analogy between the being of God and the being of the world.  When the world is a particular way, then God must be a particular way.  But the one who searches for God in this way always misses Him, says Luther.  Instead of moving from how the world is to how God is, the theologian of the cross finds God in how the world is not.  She finds God in how Christ is!  God is not discerned by looking lovingly at the world, but by looking at the One who, by his crucifixion and death, looked lovingly at us.  God is found in Jesus Christ and only there, and this is precisely not where we would expect to find him. Luther says it clearly in thesis 21:
 (21) Theologus gloriae dicit malum bonum et bonum malum, Theologus crucis dicit id quod res est.  [The theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil; the theologian of the cross calls a thing what it is.]4   
While the theologian of glory sees through creation and finds God at the ground or source of it, the theologian of the cross finds God revealed in the desolation of the cross.  While the theologian of glory uses analogy in order to reason to what God is like, the theologian of the cross admits that God remains hidden in his worldly actions, and that He reveals Himself only when and where he wills it: on the cross and in the proclamation of that cross. The theologian of the cross proclaims God’s presence in the midst of His apparent absence.  
Instead of the soul being liberated by divine grace to fly closer to God, the theologian of the cross declares the death of the soul and the dissolution of the self.  While the theologian of glory assumes some continuity between the divine and human, the theologian of the cross exploits their discontinuity.  The old being dies and the new rises and takes its place.  It is not that the eternal essence of a man needs readjustment, it is rather that the old Adam in us is put to death and the New man in Christ is constituted in his stead.  There is no perdurance of individual substance across the domains of the old and new.  
III
So we have now sketched the salient difference between the theology of the cross and the theology of glory.  What is the problem?   Clearly, the cross is unpopular and does not fit well into the intellectual and cultural horizon of our time. Could we not say, in fact, that there is a “crisis of the cross” in our time?  Few any longer understand this distinction.  Theologians who should know better tacitly yet assume a profound relation between moral goodness and the divine.  It is as if one climbs up one’s own ladder high enough one can jump over to heaven itself!  Why is it that we find theologies of glory plausible?  Is it that we no longer understand the distinction between the theology of the cross and that of glory?
I don’t believe that the crisis is found in our not seeming to understand this crucial distinction. Lutherans from many different theological trajectories seem to grasp it. The problem, I shall argue, is that certain moves within Lutheran theology have made it difficult to state meaningfully the truth-conditions upon which the distinction between the theology of the cross and the theology of glory must ultimately be grounded.  How is it that this is possible? 
Theology is a discourse, and like other kinds of discourses, it is concerned with meaning and truth, the realm of semantics.  Classically, the semantics of theological propositions was assumed to be more or less realist. Terms like ‘God’ were thought to refer to a determinate being, while relational terms like ‘creates’ referred to a relational property of that divine determinate being by which that being brought that complex state of affairs referred to by ‘world’ into being.   Prima facie, to say that a person does not deserve to be called a theologian who “looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were perceptible in those things that have actually happened," is to deny the statement claiming that there is some divine being such that humans perceive something of the existence and properties of that being by perceiving some set of events within the universe.  
At this point it is necessary to make things very precise.  The theologian of the glory palpably holds that there is a divine being, and there is a universe that is not divine but created by that divine being, and there are sentient human beings such that these beings can perceive some set of events in the universe, and their perception of this class of events within the universe rationally justifies these human beings to hold that a particular set of properties is instantiated by that divine being.  I shall term this the epistemic formulation of the theology of glory because it refers both to events and the perception or the knowing of those events.   Let us make this even more perspicuous: 
(1)  There is some such that is divine, and some such that is the universe, and is not y, and there are some such that perceive events E in y, and z are rationally justified to hold that has property set S on the basis of z’s perception of E in y.   
Those holding to (1) are theologians of glory, while those denying (1) are not.  This much is clear.  Luther would hold that theologians of glory and theologians of the Cross constitute an exclusive disjunction.  Accordingly, not to be theologian of glory is to be a theologian of the cross, and vice versa.  This epistemological formulation concerns states of knowing and is a weaker formulation of the theology of glory than the following: 
(1’) There is a divine being and a universe distinct from that being, such that a particular class of events within the universe is manifest if and only if a particular cluster of properties is present within the divine being. 
This ontological formulation of the theology of glory can be clarified as follows:  
(2)  There is an x such that x is divine and a y such that y is the universe, and is not y, such that property set P obtains in y if and only if property set S obtains in x.  
It is this stronger ontological formulation of which I am most interested.  It is crucial now to notice that the theologian of the cross can deny (2) in either of two ways I will call (3) and (3’). 
(3)  It is not the case that there is an x such that x is divine and a y such that y is the universe, and is not y, such that property set P obtains in y if and only if property set S obtains in x.  

(3') There is an x such that x is divine and a y such that y is the universe and is not y, such that it is not the case that property set P obtains in y if and only if property set S obtains in x.  
Clearly, (3’) does not simply deny the entire ontological formulation, but rather a part of it.  Accordingly, one affirming (3’) would claim:
(4) There is a divine being and a universe distinct from that being, such that it is false that a particular class of events within the universe is manifest if and only if a particular cluster of properties is instantiated by that divine being. 
The theologian of the cross affirms the existence of God and a universe distinct from God, but nonetheless denies the analogy of being, that is, that the presence of a set of events in the universe is tied to the instantiation of divine properties.  Any covariance in property distributions across the temporal and eternal is denied.  A world of perfect moral order does not a better God make, nor does a perfect God make a better world.  The cross forever undercuts the natural human proclivity to identify God as the mathematical limit of the maximization of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. 
At this point a dizzying variety of senses of the epistemological and ontological formulations might be investigated as to their meaning in order to make possible precise senses undergirding Luther’s thesis 19.  However, this is not the issue about which I am concerned.  What I am concerned with is that my semantic formulation here presupposes a particular ontological contour, a contour that much of Lutheran theology no longer assumes. 
IV
Since the time of Kant academic theology on Lutheran soil has denied both the epistemological formulations and ontological formulations of theology of the cross.  Why is this?  I believe it is because it has assumed that God is not a substance that in principle can possess properties or be engaged in important kinds of relations – particularly the relation of causality.  But if God is not a being having properties, then what is God? 
Schleiermacher famously claimed that God is the whence of the feeling of absolute dependence.  Fichte talked of God as the infinite striving of the ego in positing the non-ego, and ultimately the world as the backdrop of moral striving.  Hegel understood God to be the Absolute Spirit coming to consciousness of Godself in time through human consciousness: God is God in Spirit coming to consciousness of itself through relating to what is seemingly other to it.  Ritschl and his school downplayed metaphysical assertions about God and spoke only of the effect of that which is other than the world.  Barth was strongly opposed to the liberal theology of Ritschl, Harnack and company, and spoke of God as the totaliter aliter, the “wholly other” of human experience.   God is thus “wholly other” than being, just as He is “wholly other” than non-being.  Other theologians have spoken of God in such ways as the infinite fore-grasp of the illimitability of Being in every act of thinking particular being (Rahner), or as a type of being of God such that God is not being God (Scharleman), or as a primal matrix (Reuther).  
The problem here is that even if one could clarify what it is that one is meaning by “God being God only when God is not being God” or God as Henry Nelson Wieman’s “primal event,” it is not clear why such diverse referents should be called by the same name, nor is it clear what exactly could be meant by Luther’s thesis 19 when the referent of ‘God’ changes so radically under different interpretations. 
The problem here is that theologians have not paid sufficient attention to the “depth grammar” of their statements.   ‘Jack fishes from a bank’ means quite different things when ‘bank’ means ‘an institution allowing the deposit of money’ on the one hand, and ‘that which abuts a creek’ on the other hand.   While the surface grammar of ‘God is in Christ reconciling the world to Himself’ can be held constant in various languages in which the locution is used, the depth grammar, the propositions actually expressed or the states of affairs actually named vary greatly across theological schools. 
What I am talking about is the need to specify clearly semantic models for theological statements.  Such models would include the domain of those entities about which we are speaking, and predicates which clearly delineate to which entities they properly apply. What theological model is specifiable either for the ontological interpretation of the theology of glory or its theology of the cross denial if God is not a substance – that is, a being that perdures through time – and God cannot be causally related to any entities within the universe? 
V
Imagine a Bultmannian view of things where there is no being having divine properties or attributes and no being that is the second person of the Trinity that actually has the properties of divinity and humanity.  Further imagine a Bultmannian view of things in which the proclamation of certain locutions is itself a performative use of language in which existential empowerment can occur in the listener.  On this view of things, the semantics of the statement ‘Christ is raised from the dead’ does not refer to a state of affairs in which there is a particular being such that this being had the property of death then afterward life.  The semantics instead has meaning on the basis of transformed existential horizons in its hearing.  
While Bultmann could speak of a theology of the Cross, and could even accept Luther’s thesis 19, he would not be meaning by that either the epistemic or ontological formulations given above.  He would be meaning by it something quite complicated pertaining to horizons of expectation and empowerment in a succession of historical beings having particular existential constitutions.  Perhaps we might rework (3’) into (3’’) as follows:
(3'’) Although there is no x such that x is divine and a y such that y is the universe and is not y, one can use locutions like ‘God’s power is found in weakness’ in order to effect a particular existential empowerment, or ground a use of proclamation language to effect existential empowerment, in some sentient hearer S, such that S is empowered in the face of fundamental anxieties to still discern some future open for S, that is that S’s facticity is not wholly determinative of S’s being. 
The attempt to specify the distinction between the theologian of glory and the theologian of the cross is not easy at all for the Bultmannian who has abandoned traditional semantic theological models. 
We have no time here to work any of this out, but the point should be clear enough. In the absence of a traditional, realist semantics of theological language, it is very difficult to state clearly the distinction between the theologian of the cross and the theologian of glory.  However, the last 200 years of academic theology has tended not to work with a realist semantics for theological language.  It has indeed tacitly rejected semantic realism, the assertion that theological statements have truth values even when we are in no position evidentially to ascertain their truth.  On the rejection of a semantics that talks about states of affairs and property instantiation, then how might one characterize what a theology of the cross is?  Is it merely an expression of existential orientations or psychological attitudes?  Does it not then merely reduce to human expressions of engineering our futures or allowing our future to bestow itself graciously upon us?
Much more needs to be said to establish this clearly, but maybe this can get the ball rolling.  My contention is that the distinction between the theology of the cross and the theology of glory cannot be sustained if a realist semantics is not presupposed.  However, for almost 200 years a realist semantics has not been presupposed.  Therefore, the distinction is no longer clear to us.  This is the scandal of the theology of the cross.  It is a formal, not a material scandal.  The necessary condition for the latter scandal is for the former scandal to be assuaged.  Since I believe in the theological importance of the material scandal, my hope is ultimately to undercut the ground on which the formal scandal appears to rest. 


[1] ‘Cross’ here means the entire narrative of the crucified and risen Jesus.   See Gerhard Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1997), 1.  
[2] WA 5, 176:32 (Operationes).  
[3] WA 1, 350:17-20. 
[4] WA 1, 350: 21-22. 


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