Cross and Resurrection: God’s Wonder and Mystery 978-0800698829

Table of contents :
Preface to the English Edition
vii
Preface
ix
Chapter 1
Cross, Resurrection, and Truth
1
Chapter 2
The Essence of the Cross and Resurrection
10
Chapter 3
Characteristics of Our Era
25
Chapter 4
Cross and Resurrection
from the Perspective of Power
40
Chapter 5
Cross and Resurrection
from the Perspective of Powerlessness
52
Chapter 6
Cross and Resurrection
from the Perspective of Brutal Indifference
65
Chapter 7
Cross and Resurrection as Mystery and Wonder
74
Chapter 8
On the Loss of Wonder and Mystery
91
Chapter 9
Sin and Justification
103
Chapter 10
God’s Untimeliness
113
Chapter 11
The Language of Cross and Resurrection
125
Chapter 12
Open Horizons
141
Notes
151

Citation preview

Brief, brilliant treatments of vital aspects of faith and life

Klaus Schwarzwäller presents a trenchant analysis of the modes of power and production and the dependence on reason and theory that have undergirded society since the Enlightenment and of the implications this has had for the Christian faith. As a result, the heart and soul of the Christian faith—the cross and resurrection of Jesus—are seen to be accessible only through expert interpretation. But the character of Christian faith, indeed all faith, is mystery and wonder—“the mystery of the holy and wonder at those things not bound by our laws and possibilities.” The cross excludes our control; the power of the resurrection ensures that the negativity of human life borne on the cross will be overcome.

Klaus Schwarzwäller is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at the University of Göttingen and author of numerous books and articles. Religion/Theology

Schwarzwäller

Schwarzwäller calls the church and theologians to relinquish both their conformity to society and the indifference that power and production create and instead focus on tending to God’s word so that the cross and resurrection, which are opened only to those who are open to them, are again revealed in the fullness of God’s wonder and mystery.

Cross and Resurrection

Finding truth in the reality of faith—

Cross and Resurrection

Selected Titles in the Facets Series The Sacrifice of Jesus Christian A. Eberhart Why Jesus Died Gerard S. Sloyan Spiritual Transformations Karl E. Peters Who Is Christ for Us? Dietrich Bonhoeffer The Call to Discipleship Karl Barth

Cross and Resurrection God's Wonder and Mystery

Klaus Schwarzwäller Translated by Ken Sundet Jones and Mark C. Mattes

Fortress Press Minneapolis

CROSS AND RESURRECTION God’s Wonder and Mystery Originally published as Kreuz und Aufererstehung. Ein Theologischer Traktat (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2000). Copyright © 2012 Fortress Press. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Visit http://www.augsburgfortress.org/copyrights or write to Permissions, Augsburg Fortress, Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440. Unless otherwise identified, scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Cover art: © iStockphoto.com / seraficus Cover design: Tory Herman Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schwarzwäller, Klaus. [Kreuz und Auferstehung. English] Cross and resurrection : God's wonder and mystery / Klaus Schwarzwäller; translated by Ken Sundet Jones and Mark C. Mattes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8006-9882-9 (alk. paper) 1. Jesus Christ—Crucifixion. 2. Jesus Christ—Resurrection. 3. Lutheran Church—Doctrines. I. Title. BT453.S3913 2012 232'.4—dc23 2011034424 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z329.48-1984. Manufactured in the U.S.A. 15

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Contents Preface to the English Edition vii Preface ix Chapter 1 Cross, Resurrection, and Truth 1 Chapter 2 The Essence of the Cross and Resurrection 10 Chapter 3 Characteristics of Our Era 25 Chapter 4 Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Power 40 Chapter 5 Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Powerlessness 52 Chapter 6 Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Brutal Indifference 65

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Chapter 7 Cross and Resurrection as Mystery and Wonder 74 Chapter 8 On the Loss of Wonder and Mystery 91 Chapter 9 Sin and Justification 103 Chapter 10 God’s Untimeliness 113 Chapter 11 The Language of Cross and Resurrection 125 Chapter 12 Open Horizons 141 Notes 151

Preface to the English Edition

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he high quality of Ken Jones’s and Mark Mattes’s sensitive translation has made me fully aware of the difference of the horizons not only between the languages but also between the situations and the mindsets for German- and ­English-speaking audiences. There are a number of points and phrases in my original text that seemed virtually untranslatable into any foreign language. In my eyes, that they have bridged this gap is the foremost merit of this translation. In spite of German allusions or references to items that are not common knowledge in the United States, the English text thus reads clearly and cogently, and the original book’s demanding character remains present and accounted for. Indeed, because of the topic itself and the conditions of our era, the cross and resurrection of Christ do not, like a song on the pop charts, make themselves immediately accessible. They require that we open ourselves to them, or rather, to the Lord. Perhaps this sounds hard or even embarrassing. But it is a common experience that works of art, for example, require our commitment so that we become able to grasp their message. And when we devote ourselves to them, our hearts grow. In the same way, no person of sound mind would assume we could find or meet God as a coincidence vii

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or in passing. To put it bluntly, the people the Lord met never heard him say, “Think of it sometime this afternoon,” or “Have a nice day and, if there is time left, remember me.” Instead, he said to them, “Follow me.” And in contrast to the dime-a-dozen junk we find just about anywhere, Jesus declares the gospel to be a treasure hidden in the field; there it at least takes the trouble of hard digging to gain it. My goal in this book is to make sure that the gospel in the cross and resurrection is a real treasure and that it is valuable enough for us even to struggle for it. We will not be able to prove it like an algebraic equation, but we can be sure of it like a connoisseur is certain of a painting’s quality or like the beloved knows that she or he is loved. We can only hint at these subtle events and hope that we succeed in conveying at least some taste of it.

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he Stuttgart Hospitalhof was the site for the exhibit “The Cross as a Sign” from June 8 to 14, 1992. The invitation to deliver an address on the cross and resurrection in connection with the exhibit provided a chance for me to view the artwork in advance.1 I will never forget that summer day: I was at a loss in viewing the richness of the paintings and sculptures. To a great extent, they did not speak to me. If they had something to say, it was something with which I had been familiar for a long time but now appeared completely alien. If my address were to relate to the exhibit, I would have to take up the difficult and fruitful task of delving into this world. Thus I came to see the cross in a surprisingly new way, and with it the resurrection, as well as their common inner coherence. It was a rocky path upon which the exhibit was gradually made accessible to me and a new perception was opened. It allowed me to reflect on the old insight that the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ open themselves only to those who are open to them. Those who continue to expect that the cross and resurrection must open themselves up will fail to find any access to them—just as art is not opened for mere consumers. The address that arose from the discussion connected with this exhibit forms the basis of this ix

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book. The theme required me to take on the extra work of dealing with the task and methods of current exegetical scholarship whose traditional procedures have proved to be inadequate, as seen in Gerd Lüdemann’s theses on Easter. Especially in view of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the weaknesses and questionability of this scholarly tradition come into glaring light: The methodological instruments are too crude, the horizons too narrow, the fundamental assumptions too paltry, and, as a whole, the manner of questioning too one-sided. When we repeatedly get stuck on particular historical problems (for instance, the actual proceedings in the case against Jesus or the empty tomb), our gaze is diverted and blurred. What the cross and resurrection consist of and encompass thereby becomes covered over or falls completely out of view. Thus a clear boundary of what the cross and resurrection do in fact consist of and encompass is required. But this only happens in passing. I am much less concerned with going beyond the traditional understanding of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ than in seeing their relationship to our own experiences, realities, and quandaries. Yet this also means wrenching them from the grip of ecclesiastical definitions and theological assertions. These seemingly self-evident misappropriations restrict Good Friday and Easter to mere pious edification or diminish them to rationalistic explanation. Above all, they produce a false dichotomy: either they are verifiable and thus real, or they

Preface

are events in the parochial world of a Christian perspective and thus unreal and are at best interesting as religious phenomena. Piety and life are not the only things broken apart this way; reality and faith are also hollowed out. Reality is reduced to facts and logic and thus brutalizes. As a result, because it increasingly withdraws to its “own reality,” faith becomes ghettoized. For some time, both have become familiar on a day-to-day basis as a mania for opposing facts to dogma. Thus our view of what happened on Good Friday and Easter becomes clouded, and their wonder fades into the distance. They become unreal for us, like a pious myth. The exhibit compelled me to speak to the bedrock, thus putting aside sterile alternatives and, especially, opening God’s wonder to us. We will only understand what happened at Golgotha and on Easter eve if we have become fully aware of this truth. Yet this will never happen if we only ask narrowly and stubbornly about what may have actually happened on Good Friday and Easter. As Joachim Ringleben has asserted, it requires that we open ourselves and risk more.2 For him, an increase in our understanding is evoked by dealing expressly with more expansive theological relationships and the theological debate itself. I take a different approach. In my view, our increase in understanding has more to do with bringing Jesus Christ’s cross and resurrection to the fore as God’s mystery and wonder, both as comfort and vexation. Therefore we will need to dispense with the

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ongoing debate in scholarly literature. In its place I have expanded a few points thematically. It is true that this makes a balanced essay impossible. But this balance is an admittedly two-edged sword that can also result in leveling and thus neutralizing what is essential. The exhibit, however, forced this on me. I was provoked precisely by the unity of the works, to the point of their being subjective in an expressionistic way—although, strangely enough, in certain ways also objective. This unity and subjectivity led to a clearly contoured impression of the breadth and content of the exhibit’s theme. If art and science are two very different things, then, because science seeks a balanced approach, it must certainly consider what remains unspoken, though in doing so it speaks even more impressively. But if only a whiff of God’s mystery and wonder have moved us, then it poses the overarching question of whether one can speak about them in any balanced way. Hence, the task of this volume is to explore God’s wonder and mystery in light of the cross and resurrection.

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he cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the heart and soul of the Christian faith. From the beginning, Christianity has confessed them not only as the ground of its faith but also as upheld in this same faith and answerable to it: the cross and resurrection of Christ are absolutely God’s work of salvation. A new era, the time of salvation, has begun with them. Whatever is, was, or will be; whatever happens and whoever lives; all people and all things have their measure and goal in them. Christ’s crucifixion was surely a result of a combined effort on the part of cool and calculating leaders of the Jewish people, the mob that was stirred up by them, and the Roman powers of occupation, who for their part no less coolly pursued their own run-of-the-mill political expediencies. From the beginning, Christ’s resurrection has stood and continues to stand amid the dim light of skepticism and doubt. In other words, Christ’s cross and 1

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resurrection are, to say the least, interwoven with ambiguous historical processes that do not allow for definitive assertions. That is, the Christian faith builds on a foundation that becomes blurred in the twilight of prior history. The Christian’s response to this ambiguity can be taken up in a couple of ways. To this day, the first approach has regarded it as self-deception, illusion, wishful thinking, pious fables, or even, to put a point on it, as a con job, deception, or opiate of the people. From the time of the developing community’s opponents in the first century up through Gerd Lüdemann in the twentieth, it has not been possible to refute this stance convincingly, especially since these opponents have the facts on their side (or rather, Christians have a lack of unambiguous evidence on theirs). The second approach has taken a completely different path from the start: though they recognize the form of God’s mystery, the mantle of the miracle of salvation in it, they do not completely deny the ambiguity. They do not depend on historical conditions, verifications, or other dubious matters. Instead they generate historical consequences, whether they can be demonstrated or not. The two approaches cannot be reconciled. As a consequence, the cross is always “a sign that will be opposed” (Luke 2:34) and, together with the resurrection, provokes reason and snubs experience. This conflict trails Christian faith like a shadow. The abiding counterpoint to the Creed is to pose questions. Thus faith is not untouched—not least

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because it is precisely the Christian faith, a faith grounded in Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, that sets reason free and is expressed in a reality that can be experienced. This is why faith can and indeed does encounter these objections. Nevertheless, Christian faith has spread and remains vital even today. What is more, it has been demonstrated historically that when we use reason and experience as our approach, then it follows that opposition, hostility, and persecution altogether strengthen and confirm faith. Whatever we conclude from this, two things are evident. On the one hand, because Christian faith is grounded in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, it obviously draws on sources that flow beyond reason and experience. On the other hand, matters that are irrational, improbable, or merely made up evoke radical questioning and rabid challenges, which have indeed befallen the Christian faith throughout history, and cannot hold up successfully in the long run. If historical work wants to remain honest and objective, it must reckon with this. At any rate, despite the challenges posed by reason and experience, the affirmation and confession of Christian faith that the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the absolutely universal event of salvation remains undeniably intact. However, the objection or accusation of a lack of historical validity cannot simply be dismissed. Instead, it confirms that history can only be done in “earthen vessels” (2 Cor. 4:7) in which eternal treasure is stored, the hidden cloak of God’s mystery and

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wonder. But who would decide to ground certainty according to either stance? It was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the Enlightenment thinker and combative opponent of the orthodox theologians of his day (and a learned theologian himself), who insisted that we can recognize truth beyond all arguments and proofs through its own physiognomy.1 True to Paul, Lessing, with his challenge in On the Proof of Spirit and Power, responded with an objection to his opponents who wanted to provide proofs for the gospel. He was too prudent, demanding, and experienced not to know that the truth lies in an arena separate from facts, arguments, or proofs. He was too demanding about matters concerning our life to be resigned to proofs from either his desk or a library. Indeed, there is every reason to avoid repeatedly proving Christ’s cross and resurrection historically but instead to subject them to the questions posed by the view of truth and by the proof of the Spirit and power. As any adult knows, truth remains veiled to impudence or, as earlier generations called it, mere hairsplitting. It opens itself only to those who are ready to get tangled up in it. And one cannot force the proof of the Spirit and power. It is first experienced when it becomes apparent. Indeed, it becomes apparent only when we have opened ourselves to perceiving it. In other words, as long as we demand it, the truth neither opens itself to us nor do we share in the proof of the Spirit and power. When we take the stance of challengers

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toward, or even more, consumers of it, then we will go away empty. And above all else, when we want to use the tools of science to take possession of it, we remain outside of it. Hence, when we use these tools to direct the criteria of our thought to an arena where this is not feasible, we proceed naively. (This understanding takes us back to the time before Kant and the Enlightenment.2) In the end, this insight is our so-called postmodernity’s distinguishing mark that we can only conceive of a scientifically accessible and researched facet of our reality. It begins with the bases for science and continues with the inaccessibility of the causes of the origin of the cosmos through to the notorious helplessness of science in the face of evil and even in the face of freedom. In other words, when we stand only on science and trust in it alone, we lose the fullness of reality. At that point we stand far from the truth. This can also be established by looking at the practice of exegesis, which we simply take for granted (and whose problems and deficits Gerd Lüdemann exemplifies in his exacting conclusions and methodical reductions), and which, due to its trivializing accuracy, reduces the Bible to “texts,” “literature,” “sources,” and “documents.” Only in the rarest of cases can we even discern what sort of “text” it is. Nothing needs to be added to Goethe’s observation. Moreover, what is true or not in biblical matters is a fairly odd question. What is true is what is most excellent . . . and what is untrue is absurd, empty.

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Cross and Resurrection . . . Accordingly I consider all four gospels as true throughout, for at work in them is the reflection of grandeur which proceeds from the person of Christ and is of such a godly kind as has never before appeared on earth.3

Our exegesis seems to neglect this dimension. When those who have not experienced this dimension lecture on the Bible—when, for instance, those who have experienced this dimension occupy themselves under the rubric of meditation or in Ignatian exercises with random little biblical “texts” for hours and even days on end without ever exhausting them—it is like blind people talking about color.4 Indeed, their exegesis is fixed to a great extent on accuracy and confuses its corresponding methods of research with the truth. It is only in exceptional cases that their goal is ever attained, let alone surpassed. I still stand on this point. It has long since become normal for us to have everything judged in the court of reason and held up before our eyes for scrutiny. Only what is successfully filtered through the (subjective) tests of our thoughts, expectations, and senses is perceived as and deemed valid. So everything functions according to these rules. Broadcasters are anxiety-ridden about ratings. Manufacturers pander to our imaginations, which have themselves been focus-grouped in advance. Politicians subordinate themselves to opinion polls. Churches crawl into bed with relevance and esteem. In short, nearly every system in almost every field is an assiduous servant in pursuit of

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this Cartesian subject, and they (that is, all of us) are accustomed to this reality and in practice experience it as their just entitlement. So this becomes the self-evident context of our perception. Not so with truth!5 There is a distinction not only between advertising and publicity, between persuasion and propaganda, but also between “texts” and “literature.” For its part, truth makes demands. This means truth is not for sale. It is not at our disposal. It does not simply exist. And it is expensive because it requires something of us. It requires our exertion, discomfort, and a change in attitude. It does not seek us; we have to seek it out. It does not cater to us; we must cater to it. It does not accommodate us; we must adapt to it. It cannot be gained at all without this level of effort. Lessing knew this and loathed everyone who believed that they possessed the truth. He disdained those who presume to corner the market on truth, and he responded to them by arguing that what is important and valuable is not the possession of truth but rather a personal stake in it.6 He knew what he was talking about, and he developed a great reputation not least because of his intercession for truth. Yet his struggle for truth led him away from the cross and resurrection. This is impressive because it conveys dignity and stature even as it embodies tragedy. But we cannot just grab the results of his search for truth without downgrading it to mere merchandise. Lessing would have protested vehemently against this. No, we must repeatedly apply ourselves anew to questions of truth, especially

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with regard to the significance and reach of the heart of the Christian confession. But that cannot happen if we approach the matter as if we are investigators, inspectors, or analysts. If we are to reach a measured conclusion, then we must instead be stirred by Christ’s cross and resurrection and open ourselves to them so widely that we may be touched by them. Otherwise, we will be stuck in the arena of hypotheses, platitudes, or mere taste. Skeptics will have qualms or find their own secret suspicions confirmed that from the outset there is the demand of subjugation to dogmas that have been in place since antiquity, though notoriously they have long been questioned. For that reason, one can counter them with Theodor W. Adorno: “He feels no rancor and does not begrudge the joy of those in either camp who will proclaim that they knew it all the time and now he was confessing.”7 But this answer would be too reductionistic and out of touch to accommodate the contemporary noisy pack who complain about the loss of Christian values and seek a positive alternative. Nonetheless, if we were to demand an actual subjugation right from the outset, then the remainder of this essay would be superfluous and need to be replaced by missionary propaganda for “positive” groups and movements. So, two things are to be stated. First, in the things that concern the core of the Christian faith, I assume at the very least as much substance as I would with regard to a work of art to which I must commit myself so that it may open itself to me. In this case, we must admit that it opens

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up to a person. Apart from this assumption, the consequence would not be worth the paper it is written on—or the reader would be deceived. Second, whatever else could be said of Christian dogmas, they have as much to do inwardly with clarity and contour as they do outwardly in every case. A dogma-free Christianity has the surface tension of a pudding. Besides, however you look at it, in their willingness to oblige wishy-washiness, contemporary expressions of traditional Christianity feed parasitically on dogmas; without them they would quickly decay. Ernst Käsemann set forth a spot-on challenge thirty years ago that continues to be relevant: So, we must be prepared for dogmatic or confessional entanglement from the beginning and cannot turn a deaf ear to the call which reminds us . . . of various historical uncertainties. Thus we advocate a disputed thesis and in the debate have to ground it with divergent points of view as . . . derived anew from the message as a whole. At this point the spirits are discerned.8

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f the innermost essence of the Christian faith is summed up in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, then the character of this faith is to be regarded as mystery and wonder—the mystery of the holy and wonder at those things not bound by our laws and possibilities. It has no theoretical approach, and we must acknowledge that this path merely describes several phenomena and aspects. Only humility, prayer, and faith open up God’s mystery and wonder; that is, I need to expose myself to them. And when I am so exposed, I must renounce posturing and the pretense that I can or am even obliged to penetrate the mystery and explain the wonder in any way. By the same token, I must also bring a critique of reason itself (in its strongest sense) on account of God’s winning back freedom for my reason. As Luther so abidingly put it, I must grasp freedom and care for what is given to us rather than thoughtlessly setting my heart on exploring the giver or the conditions of his possibilities. 10

The Essence of the Cross and Resurrection

It is nevertheless a fundamental conviction of the Christian faith that the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ have taken place in history and are thus spatial-temporal events. More specifically, the cross stands for the ultimate, most distressing, and most painful spatial-temporal limitation to which the creature is subject, that is, death—our annihilation. The resurrection highlights the breaking into this limitation within our spatial-temporal context. Since our sense perception and our capacity for thought are spatially-temporally bound (the truth of Kant’s conception of space and time as forms of intuition) and, conversely, because everything that is spatial-temporal seems to be fundamentally accessible to us, we have the impression that the cross must be opened up to us without further ado. The same holds true for the resurrection, which also occurs in space and time. This s­ patial-temporality is why thinkers like Zwingli have interpreted the resurrection in terms of space and time or Bultmann in an existential-ontological way. In this way, the cross and resurrection become historicized, rationalized, existentialized, or subject to some such groping in the dark. Because of this, we continually overlook the paradox of the mystery of the eternal God present in space and time (and thus contingent or “random”) and at the same time the wonder of God sequestered from the present space and time. In other words, this mystery and wonder (albeit in its own spatial-temporal class) is fundamentally distinguished from all other possible objects of our perception.

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The cross and resurrection, the heart and soul of the Christian faith as the mystery and the wonder of God, burden us with nothing less than realizing in awe both the spatial-temporal presence of God’s mystery and wonder and the difference between Creator and creature. We should not neutralize them by means of a dialectic of time and eternity nor, above all, by absolutely failing to demonstrate their plausibility or, at the very least, the conditions of their possibility. We should instead simply revere them as released from our grasp and thus from every attempt to substantiate them, though this runs counter to our Enlightenment-shaped tradition. It has even gotten to the point where we are ready to believe what amounts to fairy tales, as long as they are scientifically proven (from Paul Möbius’s argument about the “physiological feeblemindedness of women” up through remedial driver’s ed). As long as numbers and statistics verify it, we succumb to almost any myth (to the point of superstition about the general significance of percentiles in standardized test results). We accept all kinds of hocus-pocus—from UFOs to parapsychological phenomena—as long as they are thoroughly probed and profoundly studied.1 But when we deal with those things that have to do with the living God who engages us and breaks into our history, then we feel pressed to conduct ourselves hypercritically, extremely rationally, and full of Cartesian doubt. The bloom as well as the barb in this sort of enlightened approach lies in its obvious

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inconsistency and carelessness, neither admitting what cannot be verified nor constructing life on a sure foundation. While it sounds convincing, it is solely due to a failure in distinguishing between the scholar’s study and everyday life. It grasps at straws, because in life, as in the wild, all these thoughts, questions, and defenses hardly arise in my thoughts as distinct moments. I cultivate a friendship and entrust my secrets and innermost thoughts to my friend—without any guarantee or certainty. I have no guarantee whatsoever that this person will not gossip about or betray me. I take clues from a hint, a wink, or a phone call, and as a result, I respond with a specific posture. Again, when it comes to the decisive matter of hope, though I am neither blind nor uninterested in assurances and inquiries, I manage to realize within this frame what I have in mind, yet with the constant risk of (self-)deception or frustration. I enter into a marriage not because I get either a packet of affidavits and guarantees that are valid until death, prenuptial psychological profiles, certificates of health, or assurances of quality. I do so because, with a truly sound mind, I have an overwhelming impression of this person with whom I wish to share my life from this point on. However, risks are attached. The institution of divorce shows us there is no guarantee of a marriage’s success. No further examples are needed. Whoever does not intentionally repress life is aware that the elementary and undeniable processes of life simply cannot be hemmed in by ratio. We expect with good

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reason that both faith and unbelief are obvious and plausible in certain respects, so that they cannot be decided for on the basis of mere reason alone. There does exist, however, the paradox that even as mathematics deals with faith, religion likewise deals with knowledge. In other words, the warp and woof of enlightened daily life (if it really is enlightened) and especially of science are woven in practice from knowledge and faith, proof and trust, guarantees and confidence, and to think about it any other way is shaky conjecture. So the question about whether we (and Christianity) can build on the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ on the grounds of certainties and proofs only appears to be serious, but is actually a theoretical plank. These grounds of certainties and proofs emerge from a logical fallacy that both life and truth are theoretically accessible, even explicitly apprehendable. As Jost Herbig has rightly noted, what is also supplanted in this is that our scientific picture of the world is not self-evident but rests on conventions. “Specifically the principle that only what is measurable, or objectively verifiable, as open to dispute, based on the worldview of the natural sciences, is grounded in convention, rather than in reality as such. Who can prove that only the measurable is real?”2 It can never be proven in advance whether someone will turn out to be a (good) husband or wife. But at the same time, it becomes both gift and experience, because it is in living their lives together that they turn out to be good spouses. This

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is analogous to faith, which neither arises from wishful thinking nor has the attraction of youth’s blindingly passionate love. Yet faith grows from it so that we are captivated—from the first disciples, who dropped everything in order to follow this wandering rabbi, up to someone like Wilhelm Herr­mann, with his impression of the “image of the inner life of Jesus” that he described as downright overwhelming.3 The matrix for all of this, as Eberhard Jüngel recognized, is Jesus’ parables4—banal little stories, as unremarkable or unexpectedly provocative as the person who told them. Some hear a parable, see the speaker, and shrug their shoulders or become annoyed. Yet others are so overcome that they say, “We have found the Messiah” (John 1:41). Like marriage, a parable’s proof is found only in life and experience. The New Testament has already put it pointedly: “Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own” (John 7:17). When decisions about local affairs are made by a remote administrative authority solely on the basis of information held in the Register of Deeds’ files, those decisions are comparatively more sound than those made in the academic arena or, rather, in its reception rooms. In short, the pertinent question asks about what has overriding capacity and final authority for us here. The cross, on the one hand, is visible. It can be depicted and interpreted in a medium like painting or sculpture. It can be described and its content

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given meaning. It can wear you out through the scholarly pursuit of it or meditation on it. On the other hand, the resurrection lies in the darkness of Easter Eve. Those who were there saw nothing, but those who discovered it arrived afterward. It could not happen in any other way. For what happened there within space and time is that space and time are overcome. This eliminates every possibility of depicting the resurrection. Even so, as many altar paintings testify, we are also so bold as to portray the resurrection. Though we have repeatedly attempted to describe the event with embellishments and legends, it is and remains uniquely indescribable, and inevitably artistic representations are wholly unsatisfying— including the Isenheim Altarpiece where, in spite of its breathtakingly colorful illumination, nothing more in the end is established than a friendly apparition. Likewise, the resurrection also evades both historical and scientific verifiability. Hence, not only are the principles of causality, analogy, and correlation fundamentally denied, but above all God’s miracle of miracles is even too holy to be handed over to mere inquiry, contemplation, or gawking. The only things that can be perceived, portrayed, and verified are merely the conditions and the reports of those directly involved in these events. We are careful to let this opposition simply be one result of the Enlightenment’s tradition of reducing things exclusively to the verifiable. Anthropology, ethnology, and the history of religions, however, teach that “religion paves the way

The Essence of the Cross and Resurrection

into a new dimension of thought,”5 which means, of course, that in order for this new dimension of thought to be granted we must take leave of our familiar (and certainly long outmoded) Enlightenment worldview. But that demands freedom and courage. Because the darkness of the Easter Eve prevents sight, mistrust could germinate. We see this in the New Testament, which at best hints at the circumstances surrounding the resurrection (see Matt. 28:2-10) but respectfully keeps silent about it: it is not only that we have wrestled with malicious suspicions (Matt. 27:63-66; 28:12-15), open scorn (Acts 17:32), or skepticism (1 Cor. 15:12), or even that we refute in advance that a miracle is an event faith creates. All this only makes for confusion for both friend and foe. But also, in the face of this event itself, we must always first and foremost exhaust ourselves with every new approach. A few examples: While Matthew’s resurrection account confirms Jesus in his claim and authority, Easter simply does not untangle the puzzle of the person of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel. The early hymn in Philippians (2:6-11) interprets the resurrection as the confirmation of Jesus Christ’s obedience and his exaltation by God. According to Paul, the end of the epoch characterized by Adam and his sin and death begins with Easter (Romans 3:21-26; 5:12-21; 1 Cor. 15:20-28). Beyond the certainty of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, in the end we find in the New Testament simply a plethora, as it were, of reflections of this mystery—a mystery

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that discloses inexhaustible toil and thus simultaneously always opens new dimensions. Surely the mystery remains and becomes deeper and more unfathomable with each of these reflections. Nothing has changed from that day to this. We repeatedly try to read into Easter in fumbling, shy, precocious, skeptical, or malicious ways. We repeatedly attempt to relativize Easter, from the hypothesis of visions to the hypothesis of projection, to the downright fantastical acceptance of only the appearance of Jesus’ death (in which we take similar pains to produce overly exact proofs from the same sources we do not expressly trust), to the point of reducing it to the mere “meaningfulness” of the cross, and the like. The positions of Wolfhart Pannenberg6 and others, like Jürgen Moltmann,7 that present the historicity of the resurrection can neither weaken any concepts, theses, speculations, or even reductions, nor “clarify” the mystery (which is also absolutely not the intent of either Pannenberg or Moltmann). It is indeed much more valuable as an index of each generation’s work to establish anew this miracle and its provocation within continually new stances in continually new spheres. The miracle is that God overcomes and limits space and time principally for us. The provocation is that this should actually occur, that because of this our world and reality are porous and our perceptions8 and our thoughts at best are relative, fragmentary, and preliminary. Thus it remains that what provides hope in the face of death and perishability, and brings comfort

The Essence of the Cross and Resurrection

from finitude and limitation lies in the shrill dissonance against all the things that make up our life, our thoughts, and our time. To put a point on it, and with a view to religion’s development of new dimensions of thought, every comprehensive scientific view of the world has become obsolete because of Easter. The cross, however, seems to operate on a different basis. The event for which it stands takes place within space and time in a cruelly concrete way. Thus, just like every other spatial-temporal event, it presents itself as immediately accessible. Since this is so apparent, we regularly forget that each event is accessible to us only in connection to its context. Any television viewer knows that any image portrayed in a news report is ambiguous. A shot of a burning house, for instance, could be significant for any town as long as the particular reasons behind it, whether severe weather or vandalism, can be dismissed. It is actually the accompanying report that provides clarity, by which we generally determine that the report is reliable. Indeed, the New Testament is continually challenged in the name of science, which is why we repeatedly shield ourselves from the naked fact when it comes into view in New Testament research on the relationship between the passion and crucifixion. But then we face a dilemma: Historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament results in the . . . consequence that the meaning of the crucifixion is not to be obtained through Jesus himself. Indeed the original community of faith is

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Cross and Resurrection related . . . to a unique, historical event (for the crucifixion of Jesus is not to be doubted historically). But the salvific significance of this event is neither announced, produced, nor suggested by Jesus himself. The Lord’s words, as they have been passed down by the Evangelists, in which Jesus’ passion is presented as corresponding to a divine plan . . . or his death as the substitutionary death for sins, are post-Easter interpretations.9

Because of this, the naked “in itself” that has been historically excised nowadays must be brought into a clarifying relationship through historical reconstruction. However, this approach becomes doubtful, for we must absolutely not assert that the hypothetical reconstructions of relationships performed by science would be more firmly established than those presented in the New Testament. In doing so, research replaces the New Testament descriptions with mere hypotheses. So the cross will simply become all the more puzzling—and become an inexhaustible storehouse for the production of further hypotheses. But that is the unsurpassable advantage of the New Testament in contrast to all historical reconstructions and many other similar attempts: These clarifying and inferred relationships name and draw significance from close (even partially immediate) relationships and bewilderment. (Those who know anything about research know that scientific objectivity is at the very least just as “prejudiced” as New Testament expressions, since it leads into current ways of thinking, experiences, measurements,

The Essence of the Cross and Resurrection

and expectations!) In the same way, in passage after passage, the New Testament is unmistakably steeped in wrestling with the perception and understanding of the event of the cross. According to Matthew and Luke, an enigmatic “must,” grounded only in God’s unsearchable will, is superimposed on Jesus’ way and fate. The author’s approach in the Fourth Gospel provides a stark contrast as it presents the cross as having a dual meaning as Jesus’ being “lifted up” through which his majesty is revealed as that of the Father. Again, throughout Hebrews, Jesus’ crucifixion unfolds linguistically and conceptually as a priestly order and sacrifice, while Paul in contrast uses legal concepts and terms (for instance, Rom. 3) and elsewhere sees in the cross of Christ the fulfillment of God’s curse on every trespass of the law (Gal. 3:13). Amid all these interpretations, it becomes evident that neither the meaning of the cross of Jesus Christ nor a unifying doctrine of it can exist or be at all possible. Opening up its content requires instead that we repeatedly engage ourselves and do so with our previously gained insights. That the brutal execution of Jesus of Nazareth happened long ago in place of the murderer Barabbas and in tandem with two criminals is thus not simply absorbed into mere actuality. Its truth in actuality is mute. However, its effect in history shows that it is literally a world-changing event whose content and consequences, both before and after, transcend comprehension and thus also cannot be exhausted at a distance, so that its unfolding

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still sparks language, art, music, liturgy, and historical writing, as well as reflection, meditation, and poetry. But it is the epitome of wonder and mystery that we can see amid the fullness of these developments and perceptions. Because this fullness as a whole explains nothing; we recognize it instead as something unfathomable that thus leads to unforeseeable dimensions. Reducing the puzzle and demand of the cross and resurrection to either problems of history or to associations with the sources and so on is trivial and merely results in being in the know, as if such historical verification could establish what is substantial here and as if the sole concern is the exacting clarification of an unclear context. It is the nature of the beast that this path can never lead to satisfactory explanations and that this method consequently consists only of erudition reproducing itself. In reality, both the scientific and artistic as well as the meditative and creative ways and means of perception only lead to the cross when they open our eyes to its wonder and mystery and evoke prayer and humility. This is certainly the beginning, which is our admission into the adventure of the way of the cross, of accepting the relativity of everything that exists and the impossibility of accepting a closed view of the world. As God’s mystery and wonder, the cross and resurrection are not to be explained or deciphered. Instead, if they are to open up, they require the trinity for which Luther continually and succinctly pressed: prayer, reflection, and persevering

The Essence of the Cross and Resurrection

in the face of doubt (oratio, meditatio, tentatio). Such prayerful and spiritually contested devotional reflection finds its structure and orientation in reaching back to the Bible and history. Hence Paul boils it down to a brief formula: “Jesus was delivered over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25). Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy encapsulated it thus: “When ­ Christ whipped the natural chaos into shape through the power of the cross, he strode through time and fulfilled it.”10 Although neither proposition sounds completely alien, they still do not ring true to our ways of thinking and speaking. We are not the first to feel the resulting difficulty, the demand that the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ reposition us. Had the church not repeatedly raised them up in a thoughtful and trenchant way, the cross and resurrection either vigorously or through mere assertion would have been opposed in every age and we would have passed over them to get to other items on our agenda. The New Testament itself already reflects this opposition to the cross and resurrection, from the disciples’ lack of faith to the scoffing elicited by Paul’s Areopagus speech, from the squabble over true wisdom in Corinth up through the later persecution of those who publicly confessed Jesus Christ. This opposition to the cross and resurrection holds true in the same way from the time of the ancient church throughout the succeeding centuries. If our age either distances itself from and thus passes over the cross

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and resurrection of Jesus Christ, or deliberately dissents from traditional interpretations by making unfamiliar and, at best, subjective claims for itself, then from a historical perspective our age is not only not new but instead has gradually become the norm.11 What is new in our age is only what contrasts with previous eras. Since our epoch defines our horizons, it behooves us to be aware of it, and all the more so when questions of truth and of the proof of the Spirit and power are being precisely and clearly raised.

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Characteristics of Our Era

W

hat follows is not a detailed theory or even a sketch of the present era, not primarily because of a lack of competence in the topic, but due to a reason connected to the era itself, the conditions of so-called postmodernity. If we were to review the relevant book titles of the last few decades, one thing could not be ignored: our respective time and society no longer allow themselves to come under the rubric of a single theory, description, or even vision.1 Postmodernity appears to possess an essential characteristic that the grand vista is no longer possible. Too many systems (from the single individual up through highly complex institutions) operate simultaneously within emerging, and so underivable, circumstances and objectives. Additionally, the foundations of our biological, individual, and social existence are too self-evidently objects of our production, as if bundling everything into a single whole were still possible. From square one, this bundling as 25

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such would have already altered what is bound together and in so doing would have overtaken itself. Yet this situation has resulted in a characterizable climate. What will now be taken up is a brief sketch of these characteristics. I will defer to what can be remembered as a universal knowledge and will summarize accordingly. It boils down to three characteristics: production and its power, the experience of being managed and manipulated, and globalization. 1. We recognize the first characteristic, familiar to all of us, in those occasional surprises that there is still no remedy to cure our many daily burdens: How is it that we have neither devised nor developed something to counter them before now? From sniffles to rain-splattered glasses, from osteoporosis to exhaust fumes, problems become challenges to be resolved. As a result, the meaning and function of science have been altered. Research as the quest for and the devotion to the truth has become obsolete, for truth has been exchanged for scientific proofs. Truth becomes reduced to what is demonstrable, what corresponds, or what is the case. Consequently, the scientific method, that is, the critical rationalism so typical of our era, revolves around the goal of problem-solving. Free inquiry, for a long time now, has had its social legitimation in either the corroboration and legitimization of modern consciousness (for instance in astronomy) or—above all!—its potential utility. Hence the many-voiced choir, which for example calls for the eradication of fear or suffering, moves

Characteristics of Our Era

us to expect solutions even with regard to limitations inseparably bound to the conditio humana. We see these limitations no longer primarily as life’s tasks but instead as negative things to be surmounted, whose overcoming we will even fundamentally demand. In the same way, the shock that was the catalyst for and lies at the core of the first report of the Club of Rome global think tank (1972) indicates that there are many more vital problems that cannot be solved by prior methods, such as scientific-technical approaches, but only in that we change our own life and habits—including political, economic, and social structures—on this basis. It is apparent that the impact of this shock has not sunk in. Everywhere we look, we are in the same old rut borne along by the unspoken conviction that, if necessary, we will in good time find the ways and means to bring everything back into equilibrium. However, an accompanying gloomy suspicion arises that, unless we bring it about, it may be too late to do anything because everything is already over and done with. In summary, we are in the habit of thinking that we can control nearly everything. When and where appear only to be questions of a particular era. Our consciousness allows hardly any space for and displaces the doubting “if . . . ?” The critical question appears to be dangerous, not least of all in view of the bottom line (and the expected profit), which regularly comes into play, and is therefore slandered as reactionary or scrupulous and the like. So the most shallow sort of neo-decisionism becomes fashionable. We

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fundamentally decide for the new and implement it, literally at random, as long as we believe it will be successful. Of course, this neo-decisionism displays a deeply embedded optimism and an oddly contrasting fatalism that recalls the prevailing mood of the ancient Teutons. It even raises Arthur Koestler’s anxious question of total doubt in ourselves: “The human—a mistake of evolution?” In short, consciousness is defined by the experience that almost everything is possible for us. Thus, power is a characteristic of the climate of our era. Because we realize our power in the mindlessness of what we take for granted, we structure spaces, program the terms of our lives, shift gears (often unforeseeably), and do it all from the ground up. I only remember daily realities such as beer cans, jumbo jets, or computer chips insofar as I connect them to the things they deliver. Yet we are unable to take into account their consequences for daily life, public planning, and industrial decisions like the problems of shaping the market and recycling goods, from the iPod to welding robots, or even to the total control of a glazed-over people. Hence, this power accumulates in those places where we organize ourselves into institutions or other social structures, and what we designate as “structural power” thus arises. Along with this organization of structural power, our sense of omnipotence with all its implications has already seeped into our jargon—from “projects” to “exhaustive prognostications,” from “get a grip on” to “building relationships,” from “debugging” to “sex appeal.”

Characteristics of Our Era

We can see all this from two perspectives. First, this production and the power by which it is generated have long been emancipated from us their initiators and have thereby generated the establishment of their own measure and goal. The unmasked phrases “creation of demand” or “packaging standards” are thus just as significant as talking about “circumstantial constraint” or “conformity to the market.” Talk about service to devices and machines is even more indicative: to be served is the prerogative of crowned heads, and whoever serves is a lackey. Second, our own doing and letting be are increasingly taken out of our own hands. In many respects, the things we can say that we produce ourselves are fewer and farther between, are mediated in many ways, and pass by unnoticed. “The button we press,” writes Robert Musil, “is always clean and shiny, and what happens at the other end of the line is the business of others, who, for their part, don’t press the button. . . . It is how we let thousands die or vegetate, set in motion whole avalanches of suffering, but we always get things done.”2 It is this mediation that increases production and its power. The poet’s insight no longer applies: “And this to man doth grace impart, / For this he reasons, —understands, / That he may feel within his heart / Whate’er he fashions with his hands.”3 We cannot even speak of “alienation” in the sense of Karl Marx. Instead, to a large extent we no longer have anything to do with what we do or let be—at least not in any perceptible or noticeable

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way. We achieve or accomplish something but as individuals are isolated from what we have set in motion. This isolation releases us from the unbearable burden of responsibility. We can do something time and time again without ever having to answer for it personally. We are thus removed from our own reality, which becomes alien to us and we become foreign to ourselves. As a character in one of Ernst Jünger’s novels muses, “Remarkably . . . I’m untouched by scruples if it has to do with killing by clocks and abstract combinations. This can only be because evil . . . is spiritually powerful in me.”4 In the world of our own activity, we have become an enigma to ourselves, detached from our own selves. In this detachment, the world in which we live also becomes an enigma and bewilderment to us. We are increasingly homeless. And so we seek a home in arenas that have nothing to do with production: in magic, the occult, the esoteric, or a feeling of ecstasy—even the high that consumerism brings about. In order to summarize the (necessarily rhapsodic) implications: I say again that production and its respective power, along with the detachment of our own activity from ourselves and with our exile into the produced present, are the first characteristic of the climate of our age. 2. Where production and power prevail, we encounter the experience of being managed and manipulated. Thus we arrive at the second significant characteristic. We feel it deeply: “First it grabs your feet, then / it goes for the mind.”5 The

Characteristics of Our Era

generation that came of age in the late 1960s especially sensed this and rebelled against it. Production and power embodied in the “establishment’s” arrogance and omnipresence challenged those who refused merely to be a compliant mass—whether through management or manipulation. In order to achieve a fundamental breakthrough, they sought to employ much imagination and engagement to open up the structures of ever bolder power and ever more vacuous productivity. The outcome is well-known. It is just as apparent that the state’s apparatus generally operates in tandem with the economic classes and, to some extent, the criminal classes as well. It is penetratingly—and barely independent of the current political system—exploited by those governing for the construction of a comprehensive monopoly on power, which increases the dependence and marginalization of the governed through a corresponding expansion of administration and the mechanisms of manipulation. Public and secret cartels, the so-called multis (multinational corporations), international crime syndicates, all with the economic and political clout of their manifold billions in profits guarantee further and wider dependence, marginalization, and capitulation, as does the lack of political parties in many countries. Of course, it is not only the governed, the managed, and the fleeced who prove themselves to be generally powerless and unable to produce; but those who govern, manipulate, and fleece are as well. In the face of insurmountable conflicts of

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interest, political parties find themselves on the verge of being unable to maneuver. Along with syndicates and cartels, they increasingly run up against unforeseeable public sensibilities and social dissent. For the sake of the possibility of profit, economic superpower must itself bow to a certain social discretion. In an uneasy way, the powerlessness of those who control the state is illustrated by the situation in the reunified Germany, for instance, or in the erstwhile Yugoslavia. The so-called “grill parties” (a sort of inquisition executed by the representatives of rating agencies) lay out the boundaries of the nearly omnipotent managers of these combines. An authentic powerlessness crops up where production is realized by means of force. Neil Postman justifiably writes about the “great loop of impotence.”6 The executors of production and power have their own activity pulled from their grasp. Goals have a life of their own. As globalization shows, in certain cases, unexpected consequences fundamentally transform what has been brought into play and cause it to lose transparency. It leads to all kinds of nonsense. As an illustration (something ripe for satire!), a major automobile manufacturer claims the reason that it uses trains to transport its products is to take pressure off congested highways! All in all, in light of the parasitical nature of political parties, and with respect to television programs, or in the powerlessness of arguments over and against the influence and interests of the powerful, and so on, there is

Characteristics of Our Era

hardly an arena of life in which each of us is not ensnared by the experience of being managed and manipulated (and which we all encounter in the same way): traffic jams on the freeway, pesticidepoisoned produce, the inanity of authorities in the face of officially unforeseen concerns. If we repeatedly experience ourselves as sacrificed, we must accept that we are not able to exercise influence. In fact, by necessity, all of this is out of our control. It could be different or even better because of productivity. But it is what it is, and “we can’t do anything about it”: we are compelled by the superior force of ubiquitous structures. We sense them with every step and stride. They envelop us. They either open or close paths and possibilities for us. Still they remain removed from us like a distant rumor. In the end, we adapt through conformity, escaping through “a walk in the woods” (Ernst Jünger)7 or “refusal” (Herbert Marcuse),8 experimenting with revolt in protest movements or civil disobedience, attempting the revolution, or joining in the great capitulation. In a word, we experience our sphere of life as completely boxed in. Real choices are no longer available but are already snatched up and planned by powers and institutions. Thus we can see loss of power and our experience of powerlessness as the second characteristic of our social climate. 3. When we are caught in the tension, as it were, between production and powerlessness, between power and weakness, and thus, in one way or another, withheld from our own doing and

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letting be, questions arise: How are we to live by that measure? How shall we think of ourselves and our age? These questions bring forward the third characteristic. We can arrive at some clarity through an illustration from daily life. “Globalization” is the current buzzword and applies to the market—literally, at present, it deals with and establishes goals, measurements, conditions, and values. In order to accommodate ourselves to globalization, we embrace the demand for flexibility. Everything has to conform to it, that is, to the market itself: rhythms, relationships, families, marriages, insights. It bears down on us in the same way that the mythical powers of antiquity did. This is how the Sphinx of Thebes beleaguered people and cruelly tormented them. Escape is just as unfeasible as liberation—at least not through our own capacity. Under the rubric of similar though intangible givens that are precisely described as “trade,” “medicine,” “management,” “industry,” “globalization,” individuals in this kind of mythic stature become indistinguishable from their conduct and thus also dissipate into an abyss of abstraction that can even be documented statistically. Still, it is inevitable that, along with my indissoluble actual person, some kind of spatial-temporal doppelgänger arises. Neither has anything to do with “me.” Daily life proves it: whether I cross the street with a green or red light, whether I sell men’s apparel or junk cars, whether I reveal my preexisting conditions to my medical insurance carrier or keep

Characteristics of Our Era

them completely secret, it is all insignificant. Certainly, if I have “bad luck,” I am “caught” and must “cough up money” for it. Still, what does that have to do with me? That’s how it all works. That it has anything to do with me is just a pain. Similarly, in view of all the other relationships that life presents (like politics, careers, education, or the behavior among the insurers and the insured), we can accurately point to analogous structures. But this means that we are nevertheless simultaneously and continually aware of the possibilities of production and power. People with road rage who blast their horns; politicians who pursue personal interests; careerists who screw their colleagues; drivers who milk their insurance after an accident; the public, which is harassed by forms and red tape mandated by a perfunctory administration; the consumers, dealers, and used-car mafia who skimp on the products of their particular businesses: They all perceive their possibilities, travel their own roads, insert themselves into the commands of prevailing power, in order to make their own way and their own lives. The more we muddle through these things, the more the system functions. And because the system functions in this way, both what I do and what I leave be are inseparably mixed with the universal ebb and flow and so—once again—are neither perceived nor able to be perceived as mine or to be mine. It is also evident, for example, that when many otherwise sensible people with good judgment in their driving habits get behind the steering wheel,

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they begin thinking like wild boars. Likewise, it is also clear that many highly moral contemporaries cannot spot a swindler in managerial or financial positions. Even more, it is evident that countless people of discernment became willing servants of the former East German secret police, whose tricks and treachery were foreign to them. These people distanced themselves from the state and its institutions even if they did not challenge or stand opposed to them and nevertheless consciously wanted to do no one harm. For there is hardly anything to do, even in terms of the particular “I” if at all, and it is foolish to think that that I can and should identify myself with it. No. I’m only playing along with it, and in the sphere of my possibilities, I consciously make use of that which increases power or possibility for me. The way we usually look at this type of behavior is along the lines of Martin Heidegger’s “thrownness,” which we perceive in relationships. Provided I do not allow myself to fall into resignation, I encounter its predominance in the decision to do something in order to be myself, and above all simply to feel something—from the rowdiness of young people who remove themselves from the dictates of an administrated world, to sex tourism in the Far East, as well as the harbingers of death played out daily on our streets as the free course of free citizens venting both power and powerlessness, right up through digital day trading on the stock exchange.9 In the end, in all this, I nevertheless become a mockery of myself. For between

Characteristics of Our Era

power and weakness, I am infinitely indifferent and express it in my behavior, in what I do and in what I let be. But principles have no place where such comprehensive indifference rules the field and the values to which we adhere are as inconsequential as the air. In fact, great institutions like the state and the church demonstrate this indifference paradigmatically. Indeed, doing and letting be are accomplished increasingly by rules, as they give preference to the force field of ­power-weakness: life brutalizes.10 Thus we can generally characterize our collective memories (again rhapsodically) as either brutal indifference or indifferent brutality. So the third characteristic of our climate comes to the fore. This designation implies no moral judgment but is exclusively a label for the implied contents. I once found it expressed well on a large placard on the wall of a house in Erfurt at the time of the German reunification (1991). And now ALL of this is supposed to be it . . . The Stress of work or the employment agency fulfilling orders in subaltern service damaged sense of solidarity working, because after all you need the money Life, because the heart still beats MARRIAGE—constrictive stuck to each other Moral barriers Pious lackeys of God Numbness Indifference everywhere Cancer

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Cross and Resurrection Scandals over tainted goods Destruction of our common foundations for life The butchering of the tropical forests Ozone Severe weather MOTIONLESSNESS

This brutality is in direct proportion to the comprehensive alignment of production with profit and efficiency, and the indifference matches the powerlessness that breeds apathy and hopelessness. Both arise out of the experience that our doing and letting be still have scarcely anything to do with us ourselves. If we are sufficiently to grasp the three characteristics of our era’s climate as described, then it is obvious that apart from the questions of truth both prior to our era and now (especially in their traditional significance and explanation), the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ already appear to be unimportant und meaningless, hardly a proof of the Spirit and power that lies beyond our horizon. Yet not only that, with the withdrawal of our activity away from ourselves as sketched here, our sin would have no locus and our righteousness can only be thought of hyperpersonally as a social and political goal. But above all, a suffering and risen Son of God for us is absolutely missing from this milieu. It connects to nothing; a futile relationlessness appears in its place. We no longer look to the one of whom Pilate said “Ecce homo,” but rather to Auschwitz or to the impotent daily sacrifice at the

Characteristics of Our Era

hands of brutally executed power rampant in the world. In regard to Jesus Christ, if newspapers raise the question of whether the church should close its houses of worship and sell them, if church leaders in view of this proclamation seriously bring up marketing, and if they allow their congregational rosters to be thinned out by consulting firms for the sake of efficiency, then the factual unimportance of the cross and resurrection in society and church is readily apparent. The Christ who strides through time presents himself thus as an insanity that we overlook sans cliché. Where, then, can we ever experience anything of the cross and resurrection in the sphere of life? And if what we encounter in the word of the cross and resurrection are mere stances, then how can we conceive of any proof of the Spirit and power?

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Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Power

I

f we are going to take up the cross and resurrection from this perspective and establish any affinity with it, then we cannot simply assume that Jesus Christ in his cross and resurrection meshes with a reality, negatively seen, like a lid on a cooking pot. Such an approach crops up in a highly pompous way in Wolfhart Pannenberg’s anthropology and Jürgen Moltmann’s Christology. It can be as flat and banal as what could once be seen in the work of the evangelist Werner Heukelbach (“you too need Jesus”) or in a more contemporary idiom in Dorothee Soelle’s Christ the Representative. In any case, we then employ a correspondence between the two that we assume from the start. To put a point on it, these “correlations” (Paul Tillich) are the results of wishful thinking. Instead, we will be surprised to see that the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ do not end up isolated and unconnected with respect to the familiar things that come to mind. This is true, 40

Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Power

however, as long as we do not distort them or try to make them appear beautiful, and especially if we renounce filling the gaps and ironing out the rough spots. It is precisely the strange severity and austerity of the New Testament’s description whose features clearly carry it above and beyond both pious traditions and modern relativizing. What follows deals with the cross and resurrection from the perspective of power. My thoughts are patterned after Jo Schöpfer’s sculpture “Untitled” (1992, 72 x 48 x 1.6 inches), which was shown at the Stuttgart Exhibition I reference in the preface. The work consists of eight concrete slabs, which in their arrangement appear to be simultaneously a cross and not a cross. There is nevertheless no doubt about its inner logic: of course it is a cross. Yet this cross is aloof, hard, and dismissive, something upon which everything that craves explanation and access must be battered or broken. No, we must hammer at this cross and hammer long. We have to work at it. We have to grapple with it. And it rebuffs us. And because it rebuffs us, we have to want it, and indeed we have to want it anew again and again. Otherwise it remains a set of concrete slabs that frustrates us. It is the cross in and for a world of concrete and steel, a hard and uncommunicative world, in which only mass production is evident, in which everything relinquished to it becomes marketed, snatched up, sold at a discount, and discontinued. It is a world in which everything substantial must remain opposed, removed, and secured, and where we must be taken up by the

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cross and goaded out of thoughtless consumption in order to engage it. As I have argued, from the beginning, the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ were neither timely nor themselves accommodating to anything further in existing relationships. In this respect, the impression that the cross and resurrection would be code for foolishness, about which we can pass over and do our daily business, is not only not new but has instead belonged to the cross and resurrection from the start. Paul expresses it pointedly when he writes (translated a bit freely), “But we preach Christ crucified, a provocation to the Jews and pure nonsense for thinkers” (1 Cor. 1:23). As we have already suggested, the resurrection appeared unbelievable from the beginning, “an idle tale” (Luke 24:11)—which is how even the disciples took it! In their own time, the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ were already alien to thought. The New Testament uses completely different signs to express explicitly the lack of relationship that already existed in its time. John’s Gospel establishes it laconically: “He [Jesus Christ as the light of the world] was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him” (John 1:10-11). The mystery and wonder contained in the cross and resurrection have spread into every time and place so that the task of bearing out and mediating the tension in our own present already exists. This tension is characteristic of

Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Power

faith. Where it is absent, it goes slack, if it is not extinguished completely. But where the tension is present, it nearly destroys us and continually compels us to try to reach an equilibrium. So the cross and resurrection must either fit into our own present with our common problems and peculiarities or else become so pertinent that “a new dimension of thought” is opened by them. It has been this way from the start. From early on, nascent Christianity identified the enigmatic body of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53 with Jesus (see Acts 8:32-35). Among other things, it meant that he would be so uncomely that his mere appearance would be embarrassing and would lead people to avoid having anything to do with him (Isa. 53:2-3). In certain ways, this embarrassment could also represent the disciples’ experience: the one whom they regarded as sitting on the throne of David was not finally vindicated in his claim but was nothing more than an abandoned, oppressed, and pitiful fellow. Jesus proved to be powerless at the time of his arrest. None of the power of God, who was so near to him and whom he called “my Father,” could be seen. Like an unmet debt, the claims and great words remained unfulfilled. In view of his failure and death, on his path of discipleship and in his words, Jesus the loser nearly became a caricature of himself. The four Gospel writers accurately captured the disciples’ discouraging experience. In Matthew, we see Jesus in Gethsemane declaring that he could have asked the Father for six legions of angels to

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rescue him. In Mark, Jesus allows himself to be recognized as the Christ in his trial before the high priest and adds, “ ‘You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power,’ and ‘coming with the clouds of heaven’ ” (Mark 14:62). In the Lukan tradition, the two thieves represent the poles between which the passion event takes place (Luke 23:39-43). In John, Jesus is properly portrayed in his rebuke of Pilate, who insists on his power: “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11). Indeed, the progression of events agrees with the slanderers, mockers, despisers, and unbelievers: his words and claims are not borne out. To say that he is a king or that he himself is God is disclosed less as an eccentric declaration and more as utter foolishness. Having fundamentally erred in calling out “Hosanna” at the entry into Jerusalem, the disciples’ exceedingly deplorable flight is a reasonable reaction to the situation. Accordingly, Peter’s denial is consistent: the events prove that he is now stuck on a sinking ship. It means that he now has to save his own skin. The shock must have hit hard. The report of the disciples going to Emmaus is likewise depressing: “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). Alas, he had not done it. Instead, he had been liquidated by the ruling powers and could no longer provide hope. A chapter closed here. What remained was dejection. And if two centuries later, as a mark of contempt, a Roman drew a picture on a wall of an

Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Power

ass-headed person being crucified to whom Christians pray as their God,1 then it accurately portrays the literally unbelievable nonsense of a God who allows his own creatures to nail him to a cross. In its naked reality, Jesus’ cross thus presents itself first and foremost as a dismantling of the one who hangs from it and simultaneously of the God in whom he trusted and for whom he risked. It says that the way out and back is barred, along with a way of escape into a supernatural, divine realm full of majesty and power. There is no—metaphysical—“beyond.” There is no benevolent Father operating behind the scenes in the world and history who finally reaches out to the poor in their last moments and who miraculously intervenes from the midst of hiddenness as the refuge and blessing for those who testify to and trust in him. The world that comes to the fore is remarkably this-worldly, almost existentially perceived. Decisions are made here and now in the given situation (and under truly less-than-ideal political and social conditions, both in the past and present) and without the perspective of a supernatural settling of the score. They are nailed down so concretely that Jesus’ claim comes to nothing. “The cross is the end of power, the negation of might.”2 This perspective reveals a barren landscape, which is bleak at best and hostilely indifferent. Where this cross is raised, God is removed and offenders are robbed of their dignity. The one who hung on the cross did not die in dignity like Socrates or in brave contempt of pain and death like any Spartan youth responding

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to his overseers without wincing even as he was disemboweled by foxes hidden under his tunic. Instead, the one who hung on the cross cried out. He did so in his ultimate God-forsakenness and died a wretched, miserable death as a wretched, miserable creature. If this event occurred “for us” (as the New Testament in many ways emphasizes), then it also follows that those who get mixed up with and connected to the God whom Jesus trusted, and do so as unconditionally as he did, are lost and will perish. Fundamentally, they have nothing for which to hope. They must expect to be handed over deplorably and reduced to mere creatureliness. The cross marks the reality of hard, irreducible God-forsakenness without expecting any kind of comfort. It marks a lostness neither offset nor diminished. When you look at it this way, the cross justifies the power of both the producers and the powerful: only those who have power, only those who possess the necessary rigor and capacity to produce, can achieve established goals. Nietzsche’s Übermensch is borne out in advance. His (highly ambivalent) denial of the cross is already alleged in the New Testament itself. “He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to” (Matt. 27:43). In the face of God-forsakenness, faith in God and the choir of scorn have been matched together ever since Golgotha. Indeed, it was easy to say: “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matt. 27:25), which sounds so terrifying to our ears, and which Bach (disconcertingly!) set to music with

Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Power

such authentic clamor in the St. Matthew Passion.3 Pilate put forward a failure who had inflated himself with blasphemy and was now publicly at the end of his options! The assertion that the Jews affirmed Jesus’ charge of being a prophetmurdering people (Matt. 23:30) has been used in the church’s history to depict their blindness as a bleak example of bedazzlement. It is indeed astonishing not only how realistic but also how secular, unreligious, and distant from every pious feeling is the evangelists’ portrayal of the passion and cross of Jesus Christ. A painful reality thus arises in which the reader is grasped by what played out within Jerusalem and before the city gates. The alleged Son of God suffered, was condemned, and died on a cross. It is this, this superficial event, that impresses in its portrayal and style. This alone. Nothing else beside it or behind it. In order to grasp Easter’s dimensions, we must take note of the severity of the evangelists’ presentation as they actually recognize the power of the powerful and the producers without a resorting to a pious “but . . .” Jesus’ resurrection is thus a kind of affirmation: everything about power, the powerful, and production that rages in the cross— whatever will display its potential and superiority here—none of it has any duration, and it must yield. Even when these things are over and done with, the facts concluded, there remains an “afterward,” and this “afterward” has the capacity to overcome all powers—including that of death. And

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if early Christianity found the courage to confess Jesus as “Lord,” then it confessed the gloriously unveiled power of God from the standpoint of Easter: Jesus Christ and he alone is lord, ruler, regent in heaven and on earth. This confession was also intended politically. While this group was initially constituted as powerless, this confession was used to gauge the extent to which they could dispute the rank and title of the Roman emperor, either blindly or with solidly grounded certainty! They knew what they were doing. The resurrection therefore epitomizes that this powerless one whom God has judged and abandoned is thus the powerful one: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt. 28:18). Again, note the Gospel writers’ earthiness and realism. Every attempt to refrain from penetrating the resurrection itself is a chaste endeavor. The resurrection is indescribable. We must go beyond every esoteric and relinquish any attempt to establish a kind of world above or beyond the resurrection and to make that view accessible for pious voyeurs who want to peer into God’s world through the resurrection event. Nothing of the sort will do. Even when we deal with the resurrection, we remain in our world’s grip. We are stuck in the normal ebb and flow of space and time without some kind of enveloping, unassailable, or unique perspective granted by a guaranteed “beyond.” These things are a postlude and prelude played out in the here and now. Those who encounter the resurrected one, who want to experience the truth of

Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Power

his resurrection, must not erect sacred places on the way, nor immerse themselves or perform special rituals in order to achieve ecstasy. The resurrected one comes instead in everyday relationships and within the givens of daily life to this or that person and simultaneously to still more people and is thus simply there—factually, contingently, in the normal course of events, and without aplomb. With his resurrection, Jesus contradicts the power of the powerful and the producers not in another world separate from ours but rather in this world, where the power of the powerful and the producers still rages unceasingly. Thus the void that lies at the core of power and the powerful is fundamentally displayed, and their control is brought into question. Everything is stamped as “perishable goods.” In the history of Christianity, we see repeated attempts to specify the ontological significance of the cross and resurrection for our world. Behind these attempts lies the insight that Jesus’ cross and resurrection have fundamentally changed our world. Still, every stab at an ontological conception must lead to error. We avoid the impertinence of a new way of thinking when the resurrected one is reckoned on the basis of the world and time and therefore continues to participate in what he has overcome and left.4 The resurrection also proclaims that Jesus Christ is not a component or factor of our reality, but that we and our world, along with all power and all the powerful, are subject to him. “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and his

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Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever” (Rev. 11:15). This destroys every ontology and conceptualization and can only be perceived as the equally dramatic and unique, twilit event that (within the unchanging, ongoing daily agenda of our world and time) God, in the person of the resurrected one and in the face of power and the powerful, makes us realize from time to time that he reserves for himself the right to raise up, overturn, and transform the realities created by God. Paradoxical consequences arise because the same Jesus Christ is present in the cross and resurrection, and because we cannot separate the cross and the resurrection from each other: it is the powerless one who overcame all powers, the crucified one who sprang forth from the bonds of the grave, the God-forsaken one who shows himself as divine and eludes all human grasp. Our Easter hymns would be misunderstood if we were to detach the weakness of Good Friday from his triumph. No, the one whose name is “above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (Phil. 2:9-10) is and will remain the one who is powerless, betrayed, and condemned. Those who call on him have nothing with which they can oppose power and production—neither the almighty Father in Heaven performing a miracle in the decisive moment nor a Big Brother at their side (“Jesus is Victor!”) who crushes all enemies. (If this were true, we would no longer need the Lord’s Supper.) As Hans-Walter Krumwiede notes, “The

Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Power

cross exposes the questionable nature of humanity’s power. It nevertheless imparts no insight into divine meaning in history. Instead, it wastes that power in the hiddenness of the suffering of Jesus Christ.”5 It is certain that on account of Jesus’ cross and resurrection, all power and productivity are incapable of bringing forth what is lasting or valuable and in and of themselves have no permanence. Thus, a proposition that literally deals with the redemption of my corpse: If according to this assertion I myself undergo a breakdown (and that unequivocally), then I must also completely be set free solely by the hope in the sacrificed God.6 From the perspective of power, everything comes together in a singular way in the cross and resurrection. As it is realistically described in its brutality and ability to succeed, what finally appears to be questionable is power: Jesus Christ, seen no less clearly in his powerlessness, is suddenly raised in supernatural triumph. All things considered, the triumphant Lord, who reclaims all power in heaven and on earth for himself, meets up with just a few randomly scattered people and leaves behind a small, colorful, checkered band, which like their Lord himself was and remained powerless but, in short order, nevertheless proved to be the substance that penetrated the whole world.

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Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Powerlessness

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e can now take up the cross and resurrection from the perspective of the second characteristic of our age: powerlessness. As we recall, we experience powerlessness not only as being surrendered to powers and productivity but also at the same time as a paradoxical shadow of power. Those who are forged by power and powerlessness continually find themselves positioned as one tool to be hammered on by another. After what we have said about power and powerlessness, we should expect that things concerning Jesus Christ would happen in a similar way, as they in fact do. All four Gospel writers show a clear descent into Jesus’ crucifixion. Martin Kähler brought it to the fore in a passage that has subsequently often been cited: “Somewhat provocatively, one could call the Gospels passion stories with a detailed introduction.”1 Kähler was fully aware that his remark was subject to repeated (and significant) criticism of its pointed formulation. These critics attempt to 52

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smooth over the fact that from the beginning the Gospels are brought into tension, so to speak, and the denouement of that tension clearly arrives at Golgotha. So from the moment he appeared, Jesus provoked the world, especially the powerful and the leaders of the people. His hands wielded no instruments of power. Of course, he was capable of doing miracles, and as the sources show, he performed them to an unusual extent. We can see, however, a diminishment of his powers with the lack of success in his hometown of Nazareth. The people were certainly taken by him, yet the passion narrative describes the masses as fickle and superficial. The faithful around Jesus are no agents of power, given that countless women were included among them, which society in that era certainly did not consider a strength. Beyond this, it is doubtful whether anyone ever has or could have behaved fully in accordance with the Lord; the Gospels even include a critique of the disciples. In short, if we examine the details realistically, it is certain that Jesus stands alone. This solitariness is underscored by the temptation story in which he goes into the wilderness for a (symbolic) forty days in solitude and asceticism in order to prepare himself for his epiphany. We can try to discern a hidden meaning in this wilderness sojourn, either psychologically, as Jesus entering a “latent phase” (Erik Erikson) or historically, as evidence, perhaps, of Christ’s being connected to Qumran. Yet for all that, such an attempt remains not only speculative but also misses the point. For

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Matthew (the style of Mark and Luke’s formulations is reserved), this is temptation by the devil, in the midst of which God’s Spirit led Jesus. The question of what might have happened between Jesus and the tempter in wilderness solitude provokes modern consciousness, which wants to know whether anyone is in a position to make an absolute claim. So the temptation story is regarded as a pious legend, a religious morality tale, or a devotional depiction. Though we can scarcely refute it, we could still go on and on without ever getting around to answering the primary question of how and why this legend can be constructed in just this way or can have been maintained and accepted. But as far as that goes, the answer is clear. The fact that Jesus withdrew into solitude for a distinct period before his appearing is to be perceived and described in light of the experience of his life, work, and appearing. The evangelists thus follow the principles of ancient historical writing. Unlike modern ones, which attempt to reconstruct the course of events from the most precisely recorded individual facts possible, these ancient principles are not analytic. So what follows from them is not history as such but is altogether shaped by the historian who thus presents an overall picture. By sketching the subsequent description of the details on the basis of an overall picture, ancient historiography makes a countervailing move. With this contrasting position, the problem of the modern scientific understanding of truth is apparent. We can clarify

Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Powerlessness

matters with an analogy to a clock: ancient writers begin with the clock and describe its individual components as those of the clock. By contrast, modern writers attempt to take on these components—though the components do not in and of themselves belong to a clock. Instead, modern writers must arrange them and fuse them together; that is, they must as such also have previously had them in view, or they must be intuitively compelled by them. We can see characteristic distinctions in the fine points of how this is done: modern writing of history maintains its status and pathos through its most possible exactitude and detail—with the corresponding weakness that where there is uncertainty in particular individual data, the connecting threads are construed by means of controllable and, thus, especially logical conclusions. But all logic is notoriously mocked by life and history. In contrast, the ancients keep the coherences, the possible affinities and types, in view. For instance, in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, individual names (Philip or Peter or Silas, for example) repeatedly represent more relevant parties or further comparable events. From our perspective, the flipside here is the missing historical reliability of the particulars. There thus exists a fundamental difference in both sides’ perception of truth. There is a presentday common experience analogous to this difference in the dispute between “alternative” and “clinical medicine.” What the other side argues as

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right and true is seldom considered, or is considered dull. For both views of medicine respectively stand for a fundamental viewpoint and in this are thoroughly equal. Each stance has its limits; we become increasingly sensitive to the limits of the modern approach. Nonetheless, nearly a half century ago, one scholar already recognized that the more deeply we penetrate musculature, the more puzzling it becomes.2 In view of (1) the naive self-understanding in which modern exegetical research regards itself as “historical,” (2) the criteria of modern historiography, and (3) above all the modern conception of logic that operates as universally binding and sufficient,3 it is important to keep at the fore the distinction between the ancient writing of history and the relativity of both research traditions. There are two aspects to Jesus’ experience of his own character: First, by no means did he take his own path. Instead, the path he took would be marked out by God himself, and he traveled it in complete unity with God, thus led by the Spirit of God alone. Second, whatever happened and whatever situation arose, neither the tempter nor anyone else could find any way to use him. It is especially true of the three great temptations themselves encountered by anyone who strives for something: the unlimited provision of bread (hence, the effortless satisfaction of the masses), the demonstration of a miracle (hence, the proof of supernatural power), and the boundless provision of the elements and resources of lordship (hence,

Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Powerlessness

the free grasp on literally everything and everyone). Jesus declined these things for himself. He knew, and lived in light of the fact, that “one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4, based on Deut. 8:3). In his lived-out trust in God and in his unique direct relationship with God, he knew and demonstrated that “your will be done” and for himself strictly renounced the divine power to perform a miracle, that is, using it for sensation and show. Instead, he took upon himself betrayal and the disciples’ abandonment, along with judgment, suffering, and death, so that he would neither be unfaithful to the First Commandment in even a single atom of his being nor weaken in his assertion that God was his one and all and that, apart from God, nothing in his life mattered or had meaning. That is the impression that Jesus Christ calls forth in his life and that is embedded in his contemporaries’ understanding. So these distinctive aspects were already there in the preparatory solitude of the wilderness sojourn. To put it abstractly, even there, it was recognizable that “the Spirit of the Lord was upon him” in advance and from the beginning because “he has” publicly “anointed me” (Luke 4:18). With that call, Jesus did not take the usual path but instead took God’s path. He was naturally alone in this and lived in the powerlessness of one who does not belong to our world. The doctrine of Jesus’ sinlessness can be clarified on this basis. It does not really deal with

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questions like whether or not Jesus experienced any problems with puberty or tantrums. These matters do not apply. (To use Robert Musil’s term, Jesus was no “do-gooder”!4) Rather, the assertion is established conceptually and abstractly that, from beginning to end, Jesus lived his life and acted fully and finally subject to God.5 In being led by God’s Spirit and without giving an inch to the tempter, Jesus is alone and is essentially distinct from everyone around him. On the basis of conventional reckoning, he is powerless, a religious fanatic. His unimportance is underscored by world history ignoring him; he was passed over by contemporary non-Christian sources. At the same time, of course, Jesus is strong, even powerful in a noteworthy, experiential way. What goes forth from him comes from within him; there is something impressive and challenging about him that simultaneously elevates and extracts him. When the Gospels do occasionally depict him with legendlike embellishment (as when, in Luke 4:29-30, people wanted to seize him and he simply walked through this mob of enemies), it seems much more like the experience of an aura, which apparently enveloped this powerless man, so that they were instead curiously impeded by him. Thus they also seemed to notice this aura when they took possession of him, made him pay for his power and might, and humiliated him in order to reduce him to a mere tortured, bloodied creature. Pilate’s supposed declaration “ecce homo” (whatever its intent) summarizes a kind of impression

Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Powerlessness

of the aura that was unavoidable for both him and for those by whom the true conditions in our world in the flesh were scourged. (Those who presume that this report is merely a construct and a type of the same kind of portrayal only prove that they do not have access, for example, to reports about concentration camps and penal institutions, interrogation chambers and torture rooms.) In short, it begins to sound like the language Ulrich Meister uses to describe his modestly fashioned Messing cross included in the Stuttgart exhibit: “Its contours appear to embrace the poorly defined as if there were still something else there that surrounds it.”6 What this aura, this apparently curious power, establishes for Jesus has already been noted, though it can be expanded on. John’s Gospel succinctly says, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me” (John 4:34). So the puzzle of his person and thus the New Testament is made precise: even as far as his physical existence is concerned, Jesus lived out of and was constituted by “fearing, loving, and trusting God above all things” and following God’s will in unhindered and unlimited devotion. Nevertheless, this devotion to God is not stubborn, fanatical, or zealous; it is far more than a coincidence (and also not to be imposed on Paul, who would not have understood Jesus on the basis of an immortal fairy tale, which would distort his gospel) that, on the basis of the New Testament, freedom becomes increasingly thematic and that our concept of freedom (even when it is reduced

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to trivia) does not hearken back primarily to the Greek polis but has its roots in the New Testament. This is, incidentally, one of many examples of how the gospel opens new dimensions of thought. Their stylization and ornamentation notwithstanding, the Gospels certainly let it be known that Jesus released the people with whom he dealt. So distinctive was his claim, “Something greater than Solomon is here” (Matt. 12:42); so authoritative was his appearance, “But I say to you . . .” (Matt. 5:22 and elsewhere); so unambiguously does he establish the eternal fate of a person in relation to himself, “Those who are ashamed of me and my words . . . of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father” (Mark 8:38); so bluntly does he cut off wavering and hesitation, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead!” (Matt. 8:22); so apodictic was he with both blessings and curses, “Blessed are you . . .”; “Woe to you . . .”; in short, so unambiguous, pithy, and immediate were his being and speech, so obviously powerful was his call of people into his discipleship (and behold, they actually followed!), and so clearly did he raise up discipleship as the criterion of a relationship to God, that he continually maintained his dignity in the face of his opponents, did not reduce it to a programmatic or pedagogical object, and renounced every form of manipulation and profiteering. It is not only Mark’s Gospel that hands on a curiously prevailing distance between Jesus and the disciples—those who accompanied him during

Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Powerlessness

the time of his appearance. Their lack of understanding becomes more and more clear. They are apparently neither indoctrinated nor controlled. Their encounter with Jesus, perhaps his demand to discipleship, certainly bound them to him, though this connection did not take them directly into the being of his person and freedom. It granted them, insofar as they allowed it, something of the independence that Jesus himself demonstrated. Those at all familiar with a religious movement or a pseudo-sect’s training program will be deeply surprised that Jesus would have had such confidence in the power of his word and appearing that he ventured to free his disciples rather than train them. He did not hesitate to establish faltering, untrained, and uncultivated people within his universal witness, and in doing so he dispensed with recording his thoughts, teachings, and commands or thus bequeathing an authentic version of them. Nothing of the sort! The one thing that he truly appeared to go after and that he also then actually achieved was his arrest and liquidation. Above all, it is precisely in John’s depiction of the passion and crucifixion that Jesus himself is shown to be the authentic actor who was and remained the actual master of the event up to the last minute. This man, whose death has been repeatedly presented in art in its brutal absurdity, had power, and in spite of his liquidation, he neither contradicted nor did away with this power. In this respect, Easter was no (additional) miracle but was instead the manifestation of the

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insurmountable power of the one murdered on the cross. It is thus legitimate for the church to lean toward the phrase “rising up” and diverge from the New Testament’s reference to Jesus’ “being raised up” (by God). Accordingly, the crucified one is expressed as (in Luther’s Christmas carol) the one “whom all the world could not enfold” (Evangeli­ sche Gesangbuch #23, verse 3). We have a similarly impressive and significant scene in which the resurrected Jesus suddenly appeared in the midst of his disciples who had “gone underground” and were now huddled together behind closed doors (John 20:19). Once more, the stylization and ornament are not to be overlooked, and they are once more the precise means of expression itself. As this little scene shows, Christ’s disciples are terrified and have every reason to hide in fear. It is not a great miracle that occurs, a triumphant spectacle in which the Lord himself appears in his divine power and splendor, makes an inviolably great impression on those who are his, and is installed as their advocate and representative in a festive ceremony clear even to the most clouded eyes. Nothing of the sort; a crown is unimaginable here. What occurs is nothing more than this: the liquidated Lord reveals himself, shows himself to be unbound by death, space, and time, and comes to comfort and empower his own. Everything is on the sly; it happens in the hiddenness of the isolated, in the undocumentable fog. But the remarkable did occur and has occurred relentlessly since then.

Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Powerlessness

Something of this power, which appears so clearly yet mysteriously in Easter, can be experienced in the world and in time through people who are weak, who are prone to error, who tempt as much as they are tempted, and are, not least, sinful. It is a power so distinct, uncomfortable, and demanding in its apparent inefficiency that, from then on and ever again, those who bear it into their day are ridiculed, threatened, tormented, pursued, and wiped out and, not so rarely, even by the church itself. To make it even clearer, we can take up the case of Pastor Paul Schneider, the “preacher of Buchenwald,” who during his horrible time of suffering in the concentration camp precisely brought to bear so much of this kind of power on the guards and executioners that it repeatedly provoked the full force of their brutality anew. You see, they only created dread and destruction, while he nevertheless mediated power for life and for survival. His gruesome martyrdom set loose possibilities that would never be considered on the basis of any well-founded human measure. He is no exception. Again, a noteworthy vagueness is established. It is not only that these things elude precise historical grasp without being unbelievable or implausible, but also we must above all recognize that Jesus Christ’s conspicuous powerlessness arises not from a lack of strength or total weakness. As I have sought to describe it, powerlessness here is less a fate to be suffered than it is a way of behaving: it is a way of life, as it were. This way of life can be

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clearly defined as devotion and freely chosen servitude. So this powerlessness is not symptomatic of loss of power, but instead arises from power. Whoever wields power in this way grows out of power. Certainly Jesus Christ wields renunciation in this same way and does it for the sake of those who belong to him, at least insofar as they follow him. As his passion and death demonstrate, this renunciation is real. Nevertheless, power that is demonstrated so impressively and widely becomes recognizable at the very place where the obliteration is accepted without self-abnegation: here we encounter a powerlessness that endures and from that point on cannot be overcome.

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n spite of significant differences between then and now, by referring directly to the New Testament we can connect with the third characteristic of our time. Both similarities and differences come to the fore when we take a look at the Gospels. Their familiar report of the exclusion of certain people and groups naturally has aspects and a context that are not analogous to the realities of our time. It begins with the fact that these people lived in a closed society. In such a society, it is a given that there are people who do not belong: lepers, the possessed, collaborators, and foreigners, as well as those of mixed standing like prostitutes and tax collectors or the religiously suspect like Samaritans. They remain on the periphery. The parable of the Good Samaritan underscores how normal it was for a person to be marginalized, literally to be left on the roadside. Conversely, the Samaritan’s recurrent depiction indicates that the social fabric 65

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is rent when people overstep these boundaries, which is completely understandable. It is helpful to make comparisons elsewhere in the ancient world. Stoic philosophy certainly preached fraternity, although we can surely see why this preaching necessarily fell short. For example, it was self-evident that when Cicero expounded with such moving pathos on the state and the fulfillment of duty that, as a free man, thus one fully human, he professed to exert no or hardly any bodily effort: services and tasks are provided for in basic possessions, powers, and slaves. Naturally, the slaves were not taken into account when the things that benefit and dignify us as people were considered. Where the boundaries were not as apparent between free men and slaves, at the very least the boundaries between rich and poor were still apparent in this culture, as the Corinthian misunderstanding about the Lord’s Supper illustrates (1 Cor. 10–11). Thus we should not overlook the fact that each closed society provided a certain identity, tasks, and relationships in which security was found and sharp boundaries were necessarily implied. Renouncing these implied boundaries would have destroyed the social fabric and led to destabilization. In order to clarify the distinctions between then and now, however, these constructs were incomparably different, and the social fabric was never jeopardized as it has been in our time as when, for example, the French priests who earned their living in factories in order to connect with working-class people and their circumstances were

From the Perspective of Brutal Indifference

reminded by the Vatican to toe the line. So too the church transferred Father Don Mazzi to another congregation when his work in a suburban slum threatened to be successful in improving not only the lives of the people there but even the conditions of life. What each did could thus be compared to a situation where a pastor nonchalantly makes the parsonage function in order to meet a congregation’s acute needs but that provokes conflict between the pastor’s right to serve and the guidelines for use of the parsonage. The difference is obvious: preservation of the social milieu versus enforcement of secondary principles; vital necessities versus validation of a specific status. As always, then, we should not overlook parallels. What Jesus’ contemporaries regarded as scandalous behavior, indeed fundamentally destructive behavior, is probably unimaginable for us. He took on people who were apparently complete outsiders as though they were his own. He allowed himself to be touched by a notorious “sinner,” specifically a prostitute, and even held her up as a model before his highly respectable and distinguished hosts (Luke 7:36-50). Counter to social and hygienic protocols, he allowed people who posed a danger to draw close to him (Mark 5:120). He pulled a backslider and collaborator out of the gawking crowds and straightaway established him in a position of honor by visiting his house (Luke 19:1-10). He even called a tax collector into his circle of disciples (Matt. 9:9-13). In short, he is available to all and thus relativizes every ranking.

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Hence, with all its consequences, he lived what he taught, especially the epitome of his teaching and appearing that pricks the human conscience like a needle: loving God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. Moreover, regardless of the kind of government, both are regarded as problematic and dubious in both eras and, with respect to what underlies the state, are seen as virtually dangerous if not subversive. On the one hand, this love of God and neighbor implies that, over and above ideas and ideologies, authorities and programs, the goals of the state or positive laws are continually subject to God alone (whom we can neither grasp nor make further claims on). On the other hand, they are also subject to the next best and next worst fellow human beings, our neighbors, certainly regardless of their political or social class. From the time of Peter’s assertion (Acts 5:29)—indeed, since Antigone’s stance against Creon (so penetratingly depicted by Sophocles)—in whatever shape it takes, the appeal to God is an unbearable challenge for any ruler and so, conversely, gladly exercises itself as a priestly rule. Since people are regarded as actual people and not as arranged on the basis of value or good civil conduct, the regulations of those who rule are relativized. All this provokes the potential for brutality—even official brutality. The so-called double-love commandment is a roadblock on the path of withholding ourselves from God and our neighbor; for the claim still remains even where indolence holds sway. It

From the Perspective of Brutal Indifference

cannot be done away with by even subtle means: thousands of pages have been published about who the neighbor is, how love of self and neighbor relate to one another, and whether there is a hierarchy of neighbors. It is as if Jesus had not overcome the lawyer’s utterly checkmating, vexing question, “And who is my neighbor?” by turning it on its head in his parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-36), or as if he had not made it obvious in the Sermon on the Mount and had not demonstrated undivided devotion to God and God’s will in his own actions and with them carried out divine infinite love to us, God’s skewed people. In any case, indifference and brutality lie in wait for us in any temporally conditioned instance. Time and again, the devotion of faith and true humanity are thus offensive and are often seen as provocative. Likewise, we counter them again and again with what is new and often enough with what is obvious: this devotion has interrupted the indifference that lies hidden beneath our veneer of peace and legality, and still does. They have unmasked the brutality that conjures up highly touted goals and noble values, and still do. Thus Jesus’ popularity made him simultaneously suspect and hated by the leaders of his people. The more intensely he helped people, the more their numbers increased and the less evil could be ascribed to him. He was either approached with trick questions, with which he demonstrated his fidelity to the law by tossing accusations back at his original interlocutors, or with evil slanders (“Look, a glutton and a drunkard,

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a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” [Matt. 11:19]). He thus became more and more unbearable. Gerhard O. Forde repeatedly pinpointed both how revolutionary Jesus was in his exclusive bond with God and in his care for the lost and how it correspondingly led to Jesus’ liquidation as a firebrand and one who made trouble for the prevailing order. His execution must have happened in a “quite legal and proper” way,1 thus showing that he will be unbearable and impermissible for every imaginable order. Indeed, this would also be true for either church or state, for business or science: if we put the image of Jesus Christ before them, then every order will be brought into question, if not undermined. We cannot turn away from it; naturally, nothing relative can have any standing before the yardstick of the absolute.2 But Jesus Christ is neither “the absolute.”3 nor an idea. He is a person and as such is entrusted with the depth of all existence. Similarly, his placing simply everything within the scope of the double-love commandment, especially our not following him (the direct evidence of which brings us directly under the weight of justification), is just as provocative as it is threatening. Whether then or now, Jesus Christ regularly transforms indifference into a single-minded partisanship—against him. No one lays bare the wretchedness of indifference with such impunity and as impressively as he did, for example, in the parable of the sheep and goats (Matt. 25:31-46). The small-mindedness and calculated tunnel vision of

From the Perspective of Brutal Indifference

the condemned come immediately and painfully to the fore in the unmasked counter questions. In response to “I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink” (Matt. 25:42), they ask, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty?” (Matt 25:44). We do not forgive such unmasking. When it happens, there can be only one answer, and we have actually said it: “Take him away! Crucify him!” But then the resurrection announces that continued existence has and will only have an order and constitution that emerges from an undivided devotion to God’s will. Therefore, all orders and systems, all conceptions and organizations of which we know and which exist on earth (and without which nothing could happen), are provisional, defined as perishable. The resurrection is thus the fundamental dispute against all claims to validity and especially to the ultimate validity or irreversibility of every order and system, even to the structural form of the church as a church for the people. It proclaims that in time, and against time, and for all eternity, only “the love of God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:39) has validity and permanence. But this love overcomes all brutality and is not indifferent to humans. The cross and resurrection bring to light the oppressive reality of brutal indifference and indifferent brutality—as well as their restrictions, particularly those that strive to cast the weary status quo in concrete through systematic injustice, even in an ecclesiastical “power cartel,”4 and especially

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where the restrictions remain established as dictators. To make it tangible, I would be careless to fail to note that the German thousand-year Reich lasted a mere twelve years and that the construction phase of the eschatological Communist society did not last even a single century. For people who fall into the grist mill of injustice, even one year of this is already too much, far too much. We surely know how few days it takes for a massacre to be committed or for people’s souls to be tortured out of their bodies. The cross and resurrection, on the contrary, offer the hope and confidence that love will triumph even for those languishing under sometimes decades-long injustice. As the book of Revelation so comfortingly describes it, Christ alone will wipe the tears from our eyes (Rev. 21:4). With his resurrection, he, whose death so provocatively and comfortingly relativizes both our world and its institutions, rises over what exists, specifically over every expectation. Thus the brutal indifference, which for its part characterizes our time and its climate, has in itself been made indifferent. That is to say, Christ’s cross and resurrection destroy them in the same way because they grant a perspective: the perspective of a life as a human being. From this perspective, neither the might of the powerful nor the weakness of powerlessness have any weight, neither the indifference of the systems and institutions that arbitrarily classify and dispose of us nor the brutality of its beneficiaries and guardians establish the definitive facts. Instead, standing over and above everything

From the Perspective of Brutal Indifference

is God’s love made concrete on the cross and its transforming power made concrete in the resurrection. From that point, it holds true and can be experienced: whoever is rooted in it and lives on its basis may indeed fail, as Jesus Christ did (even if this powerlessness is prevalent), and it may result in enmity and persecution just as it did for the Lord. Still, although they remain subject to the factual givens of their own time, such people are independent of them and are open to new dimensions of life. First, the existing conditions no longer predetermine norms and goals; the crucified and risen one does instead. Second, such people can also unsettle the prevailing powers just as Jesus Christ brought about a revolutionary way through his mere appearing. Third, they suffer loss without being defeated in the knowledge that, as Luther put it, God is his salvation and will not utterly abandon the singer and his song. God helps him in the life and death [!!] and grants him victory. Though all the gates of hell and the whole world rage and rave, God in the end will be our salvation. . . . The word of God abides forever.5

This is how we need to think of Christ’s resurrection: these things are by no means decided by our failures and death. Rather, what already abides is God’s aforementioned definitive “after that . . .” established in his word and confirmed in the sacraments. It is this that provides the power and perspective to detach from existing conditions and so risk everything. It is truly not the path of glory.

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R

emember my mention of a cross in the Stuttgart exhibit fashioned by Jo Schöpfer from slabs of concrete? Production and power are broken on the cross as though on a concrete wall. Because of the cross, powerlessness and weakness are exposed like a naked wall. It stands in the middle of indifference and brutality like an austere memorial. Failure, impact, and wreckage are expressed in each of these aspects. As Jörg Baur notes, “Inasmuch as every no is enacted in Christ’s cross, it also negates the misused potency of the world as its own possibility.”1 We can go further: every condition is broken on this hard reality and comes to naught—including religious expectations, ecclesiastical goals, and theological traditions. Christians and atheists together are in a head-on collision with the cross.2

This has been forgotten in a history that has been shaped by Christianity. Instead, the Christian West 74

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recognizes the cross and its content as a symbol of shared value, agreed-upon goals, standardized language, as well as a consistent culture in itself. Traditionally the cross has symbolized Europe and its expansion across the globe. People are hardly aware that Christianity arose in Palestine, or that Syria and Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia, were the so-called cradle of Christianity. That mythical “center” has been thoroughly Europeanized3 and cultivated in Europe, and its loss has been vigorously lamented for more than a half century. That the cross could stand for destruction, decay, and unobtainable diversity is still commonly regarded as unthinkable, although the so-called dialectical theology of the 1920s had already emphasized a diastasis between cross and tradition. In the meantime, this was already needed in the midst of the kind of widely overlooked obtuseness that, for European and especially German Christianity and Christian culture, the cross is not their point of unity but the point of difference, the place where paths and languages diverge and traditions are splintered or ossified. It is especially evident in art. From Baselitz to Tàpies, from Rocha to Knaupp, from Waldemar Kuhn’s multidimensional scrap-crucifix in the chancel of the Church of the Holy Spirit in Em­merich to Ursula Querner’s crucifixion grouping in front of the east wall of the St. Thomas Church in Helmstedt: what they all have in common is what they assert. When we encounter a number of representations of the cross offering the

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opportunity for theological critique, then we likewise must remain respectful in the multiple presentations without regard to their various artistic qualities. They must be acknowledged as expressions of perception or experiences of the cross of Christ in our time and in our reality. More precisely, the conspicuous diversity of presentations (it would be foolish to revert to rampant subjectivity) gives the impression that a centering point and unity can no longer be built on the basis of the cross, which has become a “stumbling block” in which the abysmal contingency of human existence in general finally breaks open (and should no longer be covered up). Specifically, we live in an unholy, torn, and lost world. It is precisely this world into which the God-man comes, this world in which and for which he suffered and died on the cross, not to establish a cultural or ecclesiastical “center,” but to establish the reign of God. The cross is therefore no longer exclusively or even primarily a cultural symbol. The insight here is that the cross is indeed a symbol of death and the embodiment of failure. However, without realizing it, churches and theology use it as an affectation rather than as a confession. Even so, to a great extent the cross remains for them an important “in fact” on whose heels the decisive, all-overpowering “yet” of Easter closely follows. It misses the point that the power of salvation and truth gets lost in this dishonesty. This is certainly understandable. Christianity has often and long enough had stirring accusations and great dishonor aimed its way,

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since even its central stance is that of a symbol of enmity toward life.4 Indeed, this accusation found much support in defining the word Christian. If we listen to the primary accuser, Friedrich Nietzsche, we hear that the cross itself will thus not be so severely criticized. He also picked this up specifically in the unveiled directness of his negative approach, especially in his assumption that the new person is born through the fervor of suffering, a bursting forth of the new from an earlier, painful death. Our corresponding counterargument to Nietzsche’s explanation of this position must be that the cross has a wider grasp and broader dimensions than Nietzsche’s vision has and, as a matter of fact, could ever have. Because Jesus Christ surrendered himself to the cross, he did not sacrifice a single visionary sunrise. Instead, in his death he bore humanity’s calamity, misfortune, and injustice, the negativity of our lives and the rupture of our world. There he conclusively marked the limits of power, weakness, indifference, and brutality. There the denial of life, enmity toward it and its destruction, were expressed as a denial by God, defined as trespass, and taken from us. “By his bruises we are healed” (Isa. 53:5). This is the healing power of the truth in whose witness Christianity is communicated: the fullness of our life is called forth in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We cannot overcome, dislodge, or thrust aside the reverse, the shadow side, the negativity and the suffering.5 (Indeed, perhaps the temptation for the church in the present, where

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questions about values and morals are asked on all sides, is to link salvation with what is positive.) They are expressly thematic and in the cross are kept in view and cannot be overlooked. This life called forth in the cross and resurrection is a life that arises from its conquest, a life beyond the capriciousness of power that subjugates us, a life rising from the lostness of weakness and ruin under brutal indifference and on which the cross stands. Before it can even be seen as a problem, it overcomes what theodicy previously asserted and simultaneously conditioned as its aporias. (I consider the question of theodicy to be theoretical. Accordingly, there is a categorical distinction, on the one hand, between lamenting, questioning, or crying in dismay or suffering and, on the other, asking about God’s true nature and righteousness.) This does not occur as information, such as the traditional particulars that everything depends on Christ or that he underwent unique suffering and pain to a degree inaccessible to the rest of us, as if the decisiveness of the matter could ever be addressed through quantification and comparison. What is seen more clearly here, as Jürgen Moltmann and Eberhard Jüngel have argued,6 is the concept of suffering and negativity happening in Jesus Christ’s cross as taken up into God’s being and divine history. Accordingly, they have realized that we, as the lost, and thus as the godless and broken, the unrighteous and failures, indeed stand at the midpoint of our turning to God: “When the world was lost, Christ was born” (from the carol,

Cross and Resurrection as Mystery and Wonder

“O du Fröhliche . . .”). And what is brought to bear is the severity, even the brutality and the enigmatic inaccessibility, of the cross of Jesus Christ: when we are broken and experience suffering and death, we are at a point at which God himself does not draw away but in which he gives himself over for us. This suffering is what constitutes the mystery and wonder of the cross. Thus it only has a standardized effect when we are already made uniform or otherwise aligned. It is reflected, however, within the diversity and fullness of real human life. Because each and all, everyone and everything, are gathered together, canceled out in their negativity, and thus can (and may!) be brought forth in this most characteristic reality of their tribulations specific to every life, then each and all may both find and show their own face. There is nothing reckoned as sin in advance or relativized as (irrelevant) personal peculiarities, reproached as specific guilt, or flattened into an infinitely abundant universal human suffering. No, what burdens and disfigures us can and must be expressed individually and without reserve. Our doubts run rampant when we do not expressly name, complain about, lament, or curse it: How can we comprehend, how can we ever cope with what is seen, accepted, and definitively limited in the crucified one of God as viewed on the cross? Thus it is necessary that our manifold miseries be broken open so that the cross is surrounded by the fragments and splinters of damaged life.

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Thus we can see that if the crucified one could not miraculously forgo trouble, misery, and threats, then neither will we when we face the same things. Still, just as the crucified one receives language and sight through the negativity accomplished by our hands, we too are wholly in our Creator’s hands. This is the sense in which we sing, “In thee is gladness amid all sadness. . . . Jesus is ours! We fear no powers, not of earth or sin or death.”7 The poet Matthäus Apelles von Löwenstern writes, “From now on no misfortune can harm us . . .”8 And Paul Gerhardt says, “Let yourself be at peace and let your life rest in God . . .”9 All such satisfactory experience is written in the knowledge that nothing will be easier. And if it should prove differently, then life and a new dimension of it are won. If we ask what this experience means and makes possible, in our day it is that the cross cannot stand alone. Even though the cross belongs to God’s own Son, failure is failure and neither comfort nor hope endures. The mere cross of Jesus Christ would be and will remain a single cross, one among many thousands in the Roman Empire. Yet Jesus’ crucifixion could have been remembered and handed on only in restricted circles unless something happened that subsequently transformed this particular cross: Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.10 The Christian faith arises from this. Because of the resurrection, Jesus’ life and words garnered interest, were collected, and recorded. The New Testament assumes the resurrection. On account of it, the first

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Christian confessions took shape, baptisms were administered, and the Lord’s Supper was celebrated. Because of the resurrection, people had unshakable faith, endured rejection and persecution, initially by their own people, the members of the Jewish faith and nation; yet later, the world was evangelized in and through it. In short, the resurrection is the decisive event. In this light, Paul was brought soberly and precisely to the point of saying that if Jesus Christ remained dead, then the Christian faith is built on sand and its representatives would be deceived deceivers (1 Cor. 15:17-19). By now, the declaration of Jesus’ resurrection has taken on enormous proportions, and what has been built on it over the course of centuries and millennia is almost breathtaking. It is worth noting that it hardly disturbed the believers that it occurred in the darkness of Easter morning and that it provoked unfaith and suspicion from the beginning. It appears they were unwaveringly certain of the resurrection.11 But this is only thinkable if the corresponding experiences hold true. To put it a bit crudely, from the beginning it was not a matter of a dead person “coming back” but was instead about people bodily encountering the one who died on the cross and was buried, and an event that evoked the many-faceted experience of his living in the present. Thus they lived and experienced from square one what the Enlightenment figure Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (unsuccessfully) proposed as a possible argument to his orthodox opponents of his time:

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Yes, it has “sparked” and has repeatedly done it ever since. Naturally, it can be explained as the result of the autosuggestion of religious overexcitement—so that what counts in human life simply couldn’t be “explained” in this way and is accordingly dispensed with!13 The opposite is not provable. This means that truth cannot be demonstrated in the face of doubt. Its dignity excludes this. From the beginning, the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is clear: on the cross, it is God who has both established the one who died, failed, and lost and revealed his divine dignity. Thus, by virtue of the resurrection, the striking severity of the cross is the “no” to the powers of death and destruction, even as it is the (excluded) flip side of the validation of life in love and humanity. The resurrection attests that the path that brought Christ to the cross is God’s enduring path. The resurrection verifies that the crucified one is indeed “the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16) and that as such he also has power over death. Without the resurrection, there is only catastrophe and futility, only the affirmation of the godless status quo. Without it, Jesus’ path would prove to be a foolish false path

Cross and Resurrection as Mystery and Wonder

of the power of the powerful, the weakness of the powerless, and the brutality of indifference. Without it, Jesus’ path and denouement would be nothing more than one among millions and millions of human catastrophes. Now that Easter has come to pass, the life, words, and deeds of the one who died on the cross are forever established in their power and validity. Easter puts a seal on a life broken on the adverse severity that was defined for Jesus on the cross and will yield a new wholeness. It comes from God, and God alone, solely as the event of the resurrection itself and thus excludes us, our plans, and our manipulations. The power of the resurrection first ensured that the negativity of human life borne on the cross would be overcome, transforming this symbol of death into a sign of hope. This expression of life’s discord is transformed into the embodiment of a full, justified life. In short, because of the resurrection and because of it alone, the cross affords comfort, confidence, and power. The opposite is also true: it is a step that Christianity persists in approaching hesitantly and as a rule often only takes on account of a drastic need for assistance in the face of distress and threat. So, thanks to the power of the resurrection, the path of Jesus Christ, which brought him to the cross, is the path that confirms life. That is, after the resurrection of Christ, senselessness and death do not extinguish his cross as a sign and goal of life among us as independent of existing powers. As tradition sees it, fulfillment and salvation are only to be found in the way of the cross. In view

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of the splintering of our (formerly closed) traditions about the cross, it means that Christianity, academic theology, and the established ecclesiastical bodies are not just opened, but they are also surrendered. It occurs in such a way that we might be muted by this cross, our most holy value be forfeited, and our own goal-setting fail miserably. So if we are to have grounds for hope, new paths and dimensions must be opened for us—paths with a future, although at the same time paths full of trials, temptations, and even bitterness, as well as dimensions that demand and alienate. The resurrection confirms the cross and indicates our place under it: our established goal is the cross. The resurrection is God’s own “after all . . . ,” unattainable for us, unanticipated; and in the height of tribulation, the way of the cross brings only more longing, pleading, and even crying. We must pursue a vital question present since the time of Galatians. Ulrich Luz asks, “Who finally decides about the proper interpretation of Christ and thus about the boundary between him and the ‘other’ [namely, the inauthentic] Jesus?” and adds, “The resurrected one is indeed the living Lord who participates in the Spirit. Could this indicate that in every historical situation we must always seek and define anew the church-dividing distinction between him and the ‘other Jesus’?” He leaves open the question of whether an answer has been clearly given. Indeed, if the crucified and resurrected one has been grasped dogmatically and his cross and resurrection have been defined

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exactly and brought to light “properly,” then we have turned Jesus into an abstraction and denied his cross and resurrection as wonder and mystery. It all becomes stuff we can possess, measure precisely and repeatedly. On the contrary, if we first take up the New Testament so that we for our part likewise engage in an unpredictable process, then (as said above) we are worked to the bone by Jesus Christ’s cross and resurrection. Thus, a new reclamation and confirmation of our faith results in recognizing the “other Jesus” and setting limits against it. That is, everything is initially open here. We cannot know in advance whether we are capable of making an apt distinction but must discover it on the way. If we conceive of it in advance, we are merely doing bookkeeping. In the same way, it is clear that the mystery and wonder of the cross are incomparable. They cannot be inferred from themselves but become recognizable to us in the resurrection. What the dimensions of the event at Golgotha open and confirm is that the God-man died there. His death was neither by chance nor a result of those who hold power but happened instead by God’s intent. His path and self-sacrifice are valid and efficacious for every time and place. His word and will are God’s own. These things cannot be apprehended in the cross alone. For example, if we isolate the cross from the resurrection because, in contrast to the resurrection, it is historically plausible, then we have removed the foundation of the Christian faith. At best, what remains is to take the person, path, and

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fate of the crucified one as a model of humanity and piety. Whoever knows the Old Testament or anything about ancient Judaism knows that we did not need another model in Jesus: there were already examples enough. But if we do not recognize it as that of the crucified one, thus of the hopeless failure oppressed by the powers of the age, then the resurrection for its part remains misunderstood. The disciples’ misunderstanding of Jesus’ resurrection prediction, especially as Mark stresses, is completely plausible: the resurrection is not only improbable but can also be neither expected nor simply hoped for. Death is death. It marks the limit of every wish and yearning. And the cross is the cross: right away, it seems like tasteless cynicism to say that the one who hung on the cross must have been able to triumph. If we fail to consider this, then we treat the resurrection as a mere miracle, robbing it of its seriousness and meaning. Or to speak of it abstractly, we turn the resurrection in this case into a space-time possibility and thus may deal with it in equal measure as hocus-pocus, magic, or priestcraft. Its mystery and wonder can be grasped only if it remains clear that such an event cannot happen at all, that it is impossible.14 In truth, though, the one who created heaven and earth certainly still has the power and capacity to do the impossible. For the sake of integrity, we must enter the empty tomb. A majority of scholars think that the relevant New Testament reports are not to be taken literally but have instead been composed

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to express the reality of the resurrection and the identification of the entombed with the resurrected one. Three things can be said about this. First, with respect to history, anything not subject to proof cannot be excluded. For a long time, the nuclearenergy industry has similarly asserted that should the impossibility of a worst-case scenario ever happen, it certainly could be dealt with over the course of many millennia. There are reasons for this perspective. Then on April 26, 1986, came Chernobyl, and in the Spring of 2011, another nuclear crisis caused by an earthquake and tsunami in Japan! Second, the resurrection is something fundamentally different from reanimation: God directed neither the reviving of Jesus Christ nor the preservation of his identity in his (decomposing) corpse. And third, we can now clarify what was indicated earlier. The resurrection, its meaning and content, lie on a completely different plane than the question of whether or not the grave remained empty. In this case, nothing has been decided. I personally confess to be split on this question. On the one hand, for me the empty grave would be a welcome confirmation. Yet, on the other hand, in light of millions of people who have been gassed and burned or incinerated in a nuclear explosion, it is extremely comforting to receive the assurance that God is not dependent on our bodily remains in order to resurrect us into life as identical persons. What difference do Jesus Christ’s cross and resurrection make as mystery and wonder? It is that they are inaccessible to curiosity and naked

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grasping and that they distance themselves from mere chatter and pious-sounding words. Likewise, neither of them can be emptied or worn out but rather remain peculiarly resistant. To say it positively, for their part, the cross and resurrection have the power to grant to our world and time their substance and goal, lending them value and direction, all of it without compulsion. We can skip over and leave them unobserved, just as we can skip over and leave unobserved what has come to an end on the cross. He allowed it to happen and walked into disaster. Of course, ignoring it has altered and can alter nothing. It certainly remains that he has changed the world, and this (silent) transformation in his cross and with his resurrection independent of space and time remains effective by virtue of his presence among us—as the German children’s carol says: “[He] stands at your side silent and unrecognized, so that he might truly lead you.” We can also characterize this mystery and wonder in a paradox: the cross announces that Jesus Christ is a failure with respect to our world, its laws and realities. His resurrection announces that from that point on, we with our laws and realities fail him. And as certainly as he had to fail, so truly will we fail him—working either for our salvation or damnation. Both will be revealed in that which the cross impresses on us: death. On the one hand, he will be the one who receives “the wages of sin” (Rom. 6:23), that is, the derisive end to all striving for happiness, permanence, and renown, the brutal summary of which brings everything into

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focus. On the other hand, even when things are difficult or bitter, he is the homecoming to God and an entrance into life. Miracles that speak audibly do exist. They are headline-making and provide the fodder for conversation, as we indeed see in the regularly aired television programs that captivate us. If even half of what is broadcast is true, then there would be plausible grounds to believe in miracles. Even these miracles have their mystery, which under scrutiny certainly turns out to be a mere puzzle: “How is it possible, how could this ever happen?” We can ponder, theorize about, or discuss them. In the end, depending on our tastes and worldview, we all find our own solutions or remain in a shoulder-shrugging skepticism. The cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ and what can be said about them are quiet miracles. Suspicion, explanation, and speechifying still set forth the resurrection as such as completely relativized. More to the point, quiet miracles are and remain especially quiet because, whenever they become notorious, they invite scholarship (especially theology) to deal with them factually. In the end, we would rather declare the Pythagorean theorem false than allow something to remain that could be seen as a miracle. Therefore, quiet miracles demonstrably consist in that they are neither obvious nor established in the laboratory; rather, they are misjudged or exaggerated banal occurrences that we elevate as exclusively religious. It is true even in the details, for they are not of

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this world (and so stay quiet). The world cannot provide them. Still, something radiates from them that has no place in our world, with its laws and possibilities, and is thus literally “utopian.” Hence, the cross and resurrection are not enigmatic but mystery-laden. The reality that grasps us is known in them. They can only be perceived and experienced in devotion and worship.

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On the Loss of Wonder and Mystery

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ne pays homage to wonders and bows before mysteries. But this has become foreign to us. Because we are used to being courted as consumers, we know that every possible power manipulates us. After a while, we either close ourselves off from it in mistrust or react idiosyncratically to every expectation of being devoted to what is unknown, let alone of worshiping it. It is our experience of mystery that when we think something is mysterious, particularly in institutions, then scandals, corruption, or inhumanity occur. Shifting from worshiping to unmasking is not just a question of survival but of ethics. And we know that (alleged) miracles either occur in the dim though fascinating light of the occult and are thus enigmas or are produced scientifically and are thus exempt from examination. Self-respect demands that we do not bow down here but, rather than humbly persevering for an answer, we test it critically and become the shaping influence ourselves. 91

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Everyday experience indicates that there is more: a life void of wonder and mystery brutalizes. Without mystery, sexuality is mere sex— unutterably banal. Without wonder, life is merely biological processes to be utilized ad hoc, from cloned sheep to harvesting organs from brain-dead people. But it ultimately boils down to the precise nature of science. To put it bluntly, under our current conditions, we are stuck between choosing the pestilence of wonder and mystery’s misuse and the cholera of their destruction. Against this background, Jesus Christ’s cross and resurrection might be regarded as wonder and mystery. Wonder and mystery, where they still have space and significance for us, are exhausted and are thus laden with injustice and dishonesty. Institutions like churchly structures that exist especially for the sake of wonder and mystery have widely become in our eyes objects of childish ridicule as they seek to wield influence, provide continuity, or struggle just to survive. They use the usual worldly means, like clinging to hollow-sounding words, content, and traditions to do it, with the resulting manifold uncertainty of those entrusted to them. Lost in all this are an earlier importance and reliability that have their own integrity and that, according to Augustine’s own testimony, had the substance to establish faith in the gospel.1 Thus Miroslav Volf prudently speaks to what in his judgment is “the inability . . . to transmit the Christian faith effectively.”2 When secular, everyday life constricts us, then in the face of daily pressures and threats, the

On the Loss of Wonder and Mystery

church also clings to what it has (to the point of cramping) and so becomes irrelevant to our time. The ecclesiastical community, as we know it, isolates from people their milieu and demands a measure of lockstep and accommodation of them which makes it impossible to move free and unfettered in the world. Additionally, this is why consistent repetition and stereotypical statements lack . . . connection to the world. The blind thus receive hearing so that the lame can walk. On behalf of the proletariat, the bourgeois preside uncomprehendingly over salvation, and the proletariat are deluged with a bourgeois shalom.3

Something doesn’t jibe here at all. We have the impression that everything, as it were, is pushed to the front lines at the very least to forestall its final (foreseeable) bankruptcy. To say it without metaphor, in spite of every forced trendiness and internally aware of their power yet externally presenting themselves as humble, our churchly structures have for the most part withdrawn from the present and cultivated their unique existences, on whose continuity everything relies. Wonder and mystery are reduced in this way to the hardiness of these institutions. But academic theology is the institution whose function, as I once put it, is to be “the church’s good memory and bad conscience.” In the mainstream, however, it is able to deal reasonably well with mystery and wonder, with adoration and humility, but mostly without experiences or references to life and is thus distanced and disconnected from them. For in our view, scholarship, which accords

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itself the highest value, offers itself as thoroughly superior to the First Commandment. That is how this distance and disconnectedness with wonder and mystery become complete, and hence prayer and humility have the rug pulled out from under them.4 Summa summarum: by human standards, in academic theology, the green wood is so dried up that we can no longer hope that “the sap will drip from a hewn trunk.”5 This is the horizon within which the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ are addressed. In other words, the language of cross and resurrection sends us into ghost towns, into long forsaken habitations. The temperate mind advises us to shun this language. And experience teaches us that we will almost certainly wear ourselves down with it, and for nothing. So we hardly understand that our way of operating comes to naught in the resurrection (see above chapter 7): in a time characterized by the producer’s might, the weakness of the powerless, and the brutal indifference of an entire society, all of which we experience in our personal lives, our attention is distracted by other things. Nevertheless, where religious needs arise or the question about what abides and has value crops up, it is with reason that we do not first turn to the church as was once the case. Instead, each of us is individually informed at any given time about the fullness of possibilities and benefits for ourselves. In this way, the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ might come into view, though as “undogmatically” as possible and as purely conceptual, so

On the Loss of Wonder and Mystery

that they do not nail anything down (“spiritual not religious”). Otherwise, it happens through humans by means of language and forms that evoke an authentic impression of mystery and wonder. We cannot make this happen. Unless we are internally defined by the cross and resurrection and externally keyed to it, our general perception will never suspect that the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ do in fact bear the wonder and mystery of God’s own self. Here, mere words have as little value as do explanations. From the outset, both words and explanations contradict the cross and resurrection as something to be esteemed conceptually. There is no common ground here that can be elucidated and encountered through argument or (possibly) through conviction, which is both the constant error and the seduction of every fundamental theology. Yet these are two sides of the same coin. The alternative can be bridged only through our own existence. We now understand why the apostles initially made no attempt in their missionary preaching to convince their hearers of the reality of the resurrection of Christ through neutral arguments, and certainly not by providing documentation that wholly impartial observers had seen the empty tomb. . . . Thus there is obviously no bridge by which one can cross over to the certainty of Easter by means of neutral observation. For those who still remain outside this reality, everything (!) which the first witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection said must necessarily appear to them as an experience—like any other idea about death devised on this side of the line of death, such as an

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Again, this is not doable. Still, we can balk at it or shut ourselves off from it, not least of all by means of absolutizing scholarship and the scientific method. It certainly follows that it is at the very least highly difficult to mediate the sense and content of theology—especially as a science! And if, as Heike Schmoll notes, “it is obvious that theology in many cases does not succeed in demonstrating its feasibility in relation to academia,”7 then we must ask whether it would even be possible, if and when God’s wonder and mystery are given lip service, though it continually and obviously offers its sacrifice on the (supposed) altar of science.8 It is no coincidence that for some time now perceptive scholars have raised the question of whether the reasonable, genuine shape of theology should not instead be wisdom.9 In any case, from the perspective of wisdom, it would be possible to express the wonder and mystery of God in appropriate words and certainly do this without slipping into irrationalism, pious platitudes, or a mythological fog. This means that wisdom is broader than science. It is capable of taking up and grasping relationships and circumstances, drawn essentially from scientific concepts such as constancy, the soundness of distinctions, and the limits of rationality, and even mystery, wonder, or salvation. And it is wisdom rather than science that

On the Loss of Wonder and Mystery

enables us without compulsion to relate God and daily life to each other appropriately. This perspective of wisdom even makes it possible to overcome the dilemma of theology, that is, the disjunction between scholarly work and personal piety. But insofar as theology is distanced from wisdom, it will remain mired in this dilemma between scholarship and piety. In the long run, it will not only gamble away its plausibility in the casino of science but also further abet the making of the wonder and mystery of God appear suspect. The upshot is that the quest for orientation and value, for what is essential, and for what is delivered from the tentacles of science, is ever more lodged in the magical, occult, or syncretistic realm. Again, the impression of authenticity cannot be produced or made, but that does not hinder the sense of what is essential. It follows that once we regularly lost wonder and mystery (not only in our era but also even in theology and the church), we started to follow an inverted path: we need to find our way back to the mystery and wonder of God through the perception of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ and simultaneously realize that Jesus’ cross and resurrection are known not primarily when they are observed, dissected, or “explained” but when they become illuminated for us as God’s mystery and wonder that lead us to humility and prayer. If that were actually to occur, then truth’s specific face would be clarified and the proof of the Spirit and power would thus happen with barely any assistance or manipulation.

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Otherwise we would (rightfully) deny humility and prayer. As I have argued above, it would certainly be necessary for us to give up and commit ourselves to God’s mystery instead of remaining in the obligatory stance of service-demanding consumers who look over to a distant world from the point of view of a Cartesian subject. But on what basis? This is now an unavoidable question. For being caught up in the cross and resurrection indeed implies dealing with them as presented here. But if neither sin nor righteousness before God, neither our lostness nor our salvation, are themes that move us or even disturb us, and if the natural chaos has long yielded to them a contrived world (which does not conform to the form that Christ creates but instead adheres to the missing word where, in the end, they become that which he has been), then it forces the question of whether we should even engage in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the wonder and mystery of God. It is not clear what God’s mystery and wonder could mean for someone to whom they have nothing to say. Again, we arrive at the point of departure where we do not generally bow down or pray. For it seems like nothing can make us do this. But when something relevant appears, then it proves to be most highly relative in a global market of possibilities, and we do not pray to something relative. Wonder and mystery have been used up, and “God” is just another word. From fundamentalism to the fad of syncretism, many of the reactions of the church and theology

On the Loss of Wonder and Mystery

to this situation were plainly quashed and are transparently questionable. We still grope after and ask about what else is relinquished. What is left in this most vexing of predicaments is to recall anew the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ— hoping that they will open a newly marked path, yet being so prepared and armed in our hearts that we may still endure the kind of vexing and wearisome deep-seated quest and questions that Luther calls Anfechtungen. He experienced it as torture, yet for him this Anfechtung stands along with prayer and meditation as indispensable in dealing with the Holy Scriptures. In his translation of Isaiah 28:19b, he says, “For only Anfechtung teaches us to tend to the word”10 and in the margin he notes: Anfechtung makes good Christians, Romans 5. Tentatio probationem (“Anfechtung [brings] testing” [according to Rom. 5:3-5]). Untested people are merely inexperienced speculators. What would they know? Yet they seduce all the world.11

There is a good measure of spiritual experience in this observation. To that end, rather than looking for a way out, it encourages a patient “tending to the word.” This does not happen without consequences. From Augustine to Luther, from Barth to von Rad, it is a commonplace that theology has only had authority (including spiritual authority) when it has tended to the word, and only then. Nevertheless, we will only truly “tend to the word” when we surrender the position of the Cartesian subject, a hermeneutic stance in which

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our interpretation is independent of and over the word. This bears consequences. By the Middle Ages, “kneeling” theology had already been transformed into what Hans Urs von Balthasar once designated as “sitting” theology: in the place of theology as reflected in the wisdom of piety, it devolved into pure scholarly reflection, which became elevated over the insight of faith.12 Nowadays, we can see that this path has exhausted itself; anymore it has turned into an end in itself and a blind alley, or else scholarly trivialities or one-upmanship. It is high time to go beyond the movement carried out earlier and get up, so that we shift from sitting on our backsides to getting on our feet, and out of the scholar’s study into the world where we live. Thus no program is called for, but instead a necessity that grows out of the gospel of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The gospel demands that from now on, on the basis of prayer (kneeling) and scholarship (sitting), we stand and accept responsibility for it in the world in which we live. When we no longer approach the gospel from a trailblazing stance or as a simple demonstrable witness of the proof of Spirit and power, we find ourselves instead included within it and come to recognize ourselves as part of it. At that point, both prayer and humility can break out of the confines of the form and structure of our work within the church, with its private chambers of study and struggle, and can discover its place and form in the world we live in. Thus we can find

On the Loss of Wonder and Mystery

a substantive theological scholarship and, not for the last time, win back the Bible. Then, instead of using and standing in judgment over the Bible, we allow it to lead us into God’s wonder and mystery and thereby attain the language of truth. This may bring to mind Karl Marx’s formula in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change the world.” But along these lines, there would arise only an ideology that either coins a kind of activist political hermeneutics or leads to a sort of evangelicalism and proselytizing. All the same, I am certainly not talking about management. Instead, this concerns accepting Luther’s fundamental impetus as to how the specific character of the gospel is realized: theology is aimed at proclamation, which means the gospel—and therefore theology—strives for expression within life. When Luther left the cloister, he not only recognized the world and everyday life as the only authentic arena of “salvation,” that is, the life of faith, but he also subverted the fundamental structure of medieval society: the distinction between the ecclesiastical estates of clergy and laity, with the monastic vocation as a state of perfection, especially the distinction between their respective levels of holiness. The preface to the Smalcald Articles shows that he was aware of this subversion.13 In this way, his functionally based division of labor undermined the earlier sacramentally and ontologically based division of labor. It was done on the basis of particular vocations (hence of

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particular calls) to specific estates and with specific tasks. The “call and estate” and their relationships and conditions began to exert what Philipp Melanchthon called politia Christi,14 and thus to live the faith. In numerous places, especially his catechisms and the treatises on authority, Luther concretely worked out what vocation affirms. For him, there was thus precisely neither the (pious or political) “translation” of a theological insight into practice, nor did he cling to scholarly or piously pure ideas. The distinction here came to the fore paradigmatically when Luther dealt with the 1521– 22 Wittenberg disputes over images and the form of the Lord’s Supper. In his famous Invocavit Sermons, Luther countered activism (especially Karlstadt’s), defined what was spiritual, and adopted the methods of love and protection of the neighbor for ordering structures. The standards and methods that grew out of Luther’s experience in the cloister and university (and, thus, from kneeling and sitting) also apply today. The implementation of the entire shift from kneeling to sitting to standing should thus be serious and authentic. Along with the “transition” from kneeling to sitting, we must also practice kneeling anew; otherwise, the prerequisites for standing and sustaining a stance are missing. This has absolutely nothing to do with a program. As things stand, it would indeed be well if we were able to describe how these things are surrendered today. This is the direction for what follows.

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hen we “tend to the word,” we butt up against the previously cited formula: “[Jesus] was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25). Because both come from a context that no longer seems to speak to us today, the words sin and righteousness have become foreign to us. We need not be intimidated by this. If we do not avoid this lost language but rather come closer to it, then we can see that the executed one is by no means detached from our time. If it is true that Jesus Christ suffered and died on the cross for the sake of our sins, and further that he overcame and abolished our sins in his resurrection, then the opposite conclusion can be drawn. What precisely constitutes “sin” is everything that caused his suffering, that led to his crucifixion, and that ultimately would be settled on Easter through his legitimacy and validity. This is a fundamental assertion. It deals with the concept 103

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of sin rather than with a precise definition.1 The word sin is as little amenable to definition as the word life. Rather, sin becomes recognizable when we collide with the cross and the settlement of accounts in the resurrection. More precisely, the cross and the resurrection clearly reveal that we are embroiled in and are killed by sin. What comes to light is that we are inescapably implicated in everything entailed by the conditions of production and power, powerlessness and weakness, brutal indifference and indifferent brutality. As we have seen, we dispossess ourselves from top to bottom and thus get robbed of our own doing and leaving be—and our own selves. We nevertheless seek to wriggle free of ourselves in terms of individual feelings, strive for self-fulfillment, and seek an individual path, which is the last bastion of actual certainty (and in this way isolate ourselves in an ultimate loneliness). So we live in between a tree and its bark, and we find ourselves, as Werner Elert once said, “in a cage in which we were placed without being asked.”2 If for some time we have not belonged to ourselves, then we must still account for our omissions and commissions; that is, as always, we must still take responsibility for ourselves. So “sin” means that as both an innocent and guilty person, I am simultaneously trapped in destructive relationships and thus completely avoid myself both as an I and a me. I am simultaneously a plaything of the powers and responsible for myself. I am an indifferent, abstract, statistical measurement, though at the same time a beating heart.

Sin and Justification

We should clarify that the Bible invariably sees us as sinners, and though it is unacceptable from the moral perspective, it is appropriate to regard both the Stasi-thugs and their victims in a common downfall and distress. As always, who could ever not be caught up in sin, and who could claim in self-defense that they were without guilt before God? However, “sin” shows itself to be much more than guilt or trespass. Certainly it is also that, but more than anything it is burden, power, fate. Our misfortune is that in our creaturely humanity we are wounded, distorted, bent, and, certainly, regulated by sin. But for all that, even as it comforts and makes us free, the harsh sounding “no” of the cross, presented by Jo Schöpfer's “Untitled” (see chapter 4 above), repels and even alienates. Because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, everything is at an end and no longer has a say. As Hans-Stephan Haas once so beautifully put it, as a “saved person,” I “will be distinguished from my sins” by virtue of Golgotha and Easter.3 In the cross and resurrection, I am promised a condition of powerless freedom that runs counter to power; in the face of a brutal and indifferent scenario that treats me as completely irrelevant, I have unalterable value. Again, diving into the cross and resurrection admits us into everything that the content of the power of an already accomplished event makes it possible for us to experience. We must look through the lens of God’s confirmation of the way and work of Jesus Christ in the resurrection, and we must look through it at our situation, where we have before us both death

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and God’s powerful “nevertheless”—that is, where we meet the cross. The mark of the Christian life is that “it is through many persecutions that we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). The sacraments establish and impress upon us that we are baptized into the death of Christ (Rom. 6:3-4)— and so “we believe that we will also live with him” (Rom. 6:8). More precisely, being baptized delivers us up to the cross—whatever it will mean for each life. It is just this being delivered to the cross that establishes our hope in the resurrection. And the Lord’s Supper as “communion” in the body and blood of Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 10:16-17) is also precisely a communion in his fate and the announcement not of his resurrection but of his death “until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26). That is, the entire context of the Lord’s Supper focuses a Christian on a discipleship of the cross and its pointlessness. What keeps us from sinking into despair arises from communion with his way as much as with his person: if Christ rises after ruin and God-forsakenness, then we are certain of new life by virtue of this communion. But this is our future only if we follow the path that leads to the cross. Like Jesus, we experience being completely thrown upon God. He remained alone and had to suffer, die. Because we are brought into the cross and resurrection of Christ, a path of happiness simply is not open to us. To quote Käsemann, “Jesus’ disciples should not deceive anyone about this, that discipleship to the crucified one, if measured by the usual earthly means, may be regarded as neither

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inviting nor uncomplicated.”4 Rather, the path is much more the narrow way of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 7:14).5 From now on, we receive a full life at God’s leading in the power of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, always bound up with both difficulties and danger. As the erstwhile German Chief Justice Freisler said at the time, Adolf Hitler and his minions could not tolerate Count Helmuth James von Moltke, a lawyer versed in international law and active in the German resistance movement, because he did not regard Hitler’s orders as “from beyond.”6 In so doing, von Moltke basically withdrew from the entire apparatus. This deed alone inherently brought the regime into question and was unacceptable. So von Moltke straight away had to be sentenced to death, and he knew it. Whoever assisted the Jews was regarded as “less than human,” whoever saw or regarded members of the Red Army Faction, the 1970s German terrorist group, not as enemies of the state but as fellow humans, or showed sympathy for the enemies of the classes in socialism as it was practiced, likewise discovered that a devotional act for the sake of God is a scandalous hazard. In view of the consequences, even when undramatic, the question remains whether it is not too high an expectation to follow this narrow path. The possibility of following the narrow path does not seem to be merely theoretical. The history of Christian piety largely presents itself as excessively demanding. It is not enough simply to object to the Reformation’s quest to reclaim the

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freedom of a Christian. Certainly there are two aspects to this. First, in the entire history of Christianity, beginning with Jesus’ disciples, people who came to this path experienced and spoke of it as fulfillment, liberty, and empowerment. Second, in the same way, where it concerns us and our lives, we must be wrapped up in this path too. It lies beyond consumption or leisure. But this observation requires a closer look. Jesus went on his way with God as his Father and was loved and sustained by him as a Son. Likewise, this means he was wrapped up in the cross and resurrection, faithfully relying on God, and that as who one is. Since the cross would be borne for us, then whatever our identity or position, whether snared or bent, and whether burdened by much or little, the path of one who travels to the cross is narrow. Although the path establishes the person who travels it, it is not the person who is decisive here but rather that we actually follow this way. Where that occurs, we find ourselves, as traditionally expressed, to be disciples. The word discipleship is misused nearly as much as sin, simply taken as a claim for a rigid code or as the mantle of penetrating piety. It calls forth a whole catalog of behaviors, even ways of thinking, that demand fulfillment. Instead, these tedious explanations attempt to regiment matters that are personal. As German physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker writes: Right after the war my understanding of the church returned to normal when I learned to value ­everyday

Sin and Justification life. I owe a debt to American Christians who took the decisive step and moved quickly to help our country. Colleagues in academia, old friends (with exception of Teller) initially sought to determine whether our conduct under the Nazis would make us ineligible for a new partnership. And who could blame them for that? But the Christians knew that “we are altogether sinners.”7

To know others as sinners means respecting them as people and meeting them on their own terms, especially as they live out of the same crucified and risen one’s love. This is a wonderful snapshot of “discipleship”! Likewise, it is a little flash that illuminates God’s salvation and the measure and goal for everyone and everything, even as it interprets them, not least of all, as a further unfolding of a new dimension in thought. Discipleship as the way God leads to the cross is thus not simply a path of brave self-renunciation or pious heroism. It can also remain drab. It is exceptional not because of special deeds. It lies in human living and abiding under God’s guidance. Thus the theme of justification immediately arises from the resurrection. According to the biblical understanding, it is real in that in the midst of our entanglement in power, weakness, and brutal indifference, we simultaneously are and remain in discipleship and also live and function through it. We gain the “freedom of a Christian” through it and out of its impulse and energy enter into righteousness. Because of Jesus’ resurrection, the way of the cross, though hidden, is raised up as efficacious,

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so that no cross, failure, or disaster will debase or make our path of discipleship meaningless. Luther summarizes it precisely, though disconcertingly, and certainly with greater clarity: “God helps him in life and death.”8 The power of the resurrection is experienced in the path of discipleship that grants independence even from oneself, in contrast to death and its threats, and transforms it into a passage to ultimate fulfillment, integrating life as a whole. Thus we can understand that though it can be hidden, the concept of righteousness changes within actual events as seen in the lives of Janusz Korczak, who together with his pupils went to die in a concentration camp; Maximilian Kolbe, who chose to starve to death in a Nazi prison in order to save the life of a fellow prisoner; Heinrich Grüber, who openly ran an office to help Jews escape Nazi Germany; Kurt Gerstein, who became a member of the SS in order to undermine the organization; Albert Schweitzer, in his altruistic mission, and Camillo Torres, the Columbian priest and liberation theologian. Christianity has always known that, as holy things, God’s mystery and wonder are not to be grasped after. Thus Christianity has established and emphasized a limit to grasping after them: we do not take mystery and wonder unto ourselves, but God alone grants them to us. Since God grants, establishes, and confirms us in mystery and wonder, we confess and pray from the very beginning using God’s own name: God the Holy Spirit. As Jesus said in his farewell discourse, this is the one

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who leads us into all truth (John 16:13), into the truth of the mystery and wonder of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It by no means concerns content or historical sequences. It concerns humans moved and grasped in their hearts by God the Holy Spirit—and leaves them to God. So now we can determine whether theology has been found to have moved from sitting to standing in such a way that it can recognize explication as always a preliminary work, both for itself and for its own achievements. It is (no longer) enough to reach beyond the results of research and insights into a fundamentally fictional division of labor, so to speak, handed to the church so that the church can fulfill it, that is, to persist in a pure academic realm as if the Holy Spirit had not forced us out of it. Theology’s activities and results must themselves gain shape and contour through the structure of the Spirit’s work and its adherents; or rather, they will emerge, provided they grow by means of tending to the word. One possible shape for this sort of theology is provided by Michael Trowitzsch: It is the case with theology that it is a thought process which interprets itself rather than imposing itself. It is as much removed from the quest for agreement as it is from a fear of disagreement, a structurally . . . broken thought, but which itself comes under conditions and also other spoken thoughts which are held in store throughout difficult moments of fracture. . . . Evangelical theology can accomplish the kind of thinking that bears these tensions, thinking that closely holds together brightness and depth within a

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With this perspective, we can begin the first steps toward an intrinsically theological reflection whose own activity involves thinking in light of the wisdom of Israel, especially the vanity (in the modern twofold sense of the word!) of all knowledge that Ecclesiastes brings to our attention, and the insight that collectively permeates wisdom. Thus, in a modern revision, the urgent question of God and the divine will would be grounded above all in wisdom and insight. There exist countless (and worthy) theological books on either topic. Nevertheless, if only in a rudimentary way, where and when would this theological matter be taken seriously through theological work as such? Within the most brilliant characteristics of our scholarly tradition, the vanity of a secondary backdrop of a nearly pure “in itself” (An-sich) can only be avoided when scholarship in what at best appears to be an unscholarly approach finds its way back to its content, that is, to the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ as God’s wonder and mystery. Again, these things remain obscure to research and explanation; only worship and humility are open to them and transcend all scholarship.

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e hardly know what God’s wonder and mystery mean anymore. What is worse, God’s wonder and mystery are not only lost but also stand at such cross-purposes to the present (including theology and the church) that we can no longer relate to them. We can see this by looking at this parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matt. 13:44). This well-known parable no longer announces God’s mystery and wonder to us. It is unusual for us humans to sacrifice everything in order to win a share of it, even in the church. For some time now, much of Christianity has thought of this treasure in terms of shareholder value rather than sacrifice. So for us, this parable lies two thousand years distant from Jesus’ erstwhile expression of his own view of his influence as a proclaimer and bringer of the kingdom of God; and theology would meticulously 113

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tackle what it means. In a word, the parable stands at a distance from us and no longer speaks to us. But is this parable the only place where this happens? If we read the witness of the Persian martyrs, we can see whole worlds separating then and now. He thought especially about the boys and girls who were ready to endure their struggle and severe anguish: scar tissue [from tearing of the flesh], mutilation, burning and thousands of other sufferings. They laughed, danced, and rejoiced. They stuck out their tongue to be cut off, their limbs to be flayed, crushed, and submitted to various other torments. They bent their heads for decapitation in joy and firm hope and thus were courageously crowned.1

We are hardly able to imagine such an attitude; what happens in Sudan or Pakistan, in Burma or Indonesia, is so far away that it is hard to imagine the same thing happening to us. That is God’s predicament with us. Indeed, God lets us taste the best; still, this would never be our first choice. Those who stand for the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ might as well offer us flat beer, which, of course, nobody wants. In our midst, God’s mystery and wonder are untimely. So it becomes nearly impossible to abandon oneself to the Holy Spirit, and the wonder and mystery to which the Spirit leads are lost to our age. What is alien and repulsive is that the bloody drama of the cross, the suspect miracle of the resurrection, and the God-man Jesus Christ are at any

God’s Untimeliness

rate required to save us and reconcile us with God. When theologians reflect on it, even they consider it “blasphemy”2 to say that Christ’s passion was willed by God. This wonder and mystery are widely thought to be, in a pejorative sense, mere “dogma,” that is, an assertion to which one must assent as true. At this point, I will not dwell on the fact that this sort of repellent sentence actually sums up in short formula the outcome of agitated wrestling, fervent faith, and spiritual experience. Even if we grant this, the expectation, even the claim, remains that we come into direct contact with and are immediately harmonized and reconciled with God. Thus, as Christians and theologians, we want to tear out our hair. We act as if the confession of Jesus Christ as truly God and truly human, and the trinitarian and christological dogmas toiled over in the ancient church, were not conceptually established so that in Jesus Christ we could and must deal with God immediately because he dove completely into our whole earthy mess in order to be near to us and be found by us.3 We could add with good reason that for over two thousand years, Jesus Christ was given heed and taken note of and is still found to be so solely on the basis of that which distinguishes him from all other people and what the ancient dogma thus conceptualized: “truly God and truly human.” Still, this does not alter our situation, which is not without parallel. From early on, the way and work of Jesus Christ provoked questions. Medieval theology especially

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reflected on why God would become human, whether this would also have happened apart from the fall, and whether God, already having come among us, could not also have appeared in a different form. Thus alert minds posed difficult, uncomfortable questions. It was already tested many centuries ago by those of the highest acumen in order to make precise “nonconformist” questions about what would be handed on as God’s wonder and mystery. Certainly we have notoriously come to a completely different answer in our time. Back then, the wonder and mystery of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ led to the surprising discovery that humanity has been raised up by God, and God alone, and allowed a glimpse of the radiance of divine glory. We understood that in God’s power and love, heaven has been opened up for us through Christ’s cross and resurrection in the midst of the muck and most mundane aspects of the world. Not least, this answer took shape in the Gothic cathedrals that measured out and presented it to us (through the specific play of light, among other means), taking an almost inexpressible exaltation and making it visible and able to be experienced. In order not only to grasp this insight but also to express it in these kinds of enormous houses of God upon which many generations often built, we need a strongly grounded foundation. I have tried to be explicit with this distinction: we must ask about and test our foundation with the highest acumen, and we must ask these questions both

God’s Untimeliness

of the past as well as of the present time. Yet we stand before the cross and resurrection with our feeling of life and everything of which our perception and thoughts consist, and we look for a (possible) analogy within present experience and reality. By contrast, those who proceeded from the cross and resurrection let themselves be sparked by it and allowed their experience and reality to be cast in a new light—literally into every cathedral. This distinction is nonnegotiable. Likewise, it would be interesting to ask how it came to pass that such an intellectual and impartial time could be penetrated in a way that the path to heaven, to our eternal home, would be opened up in the face of every temporal burden and worldly difficulty by means of the cross and resurrection of Christ. This is especially true in the face of radical thinkers like William of Ockham, who objectively maintained the possibility that God could have become a stone or an ass instead of becoming human, or of a more recent era when a thinker would even claim “God is dead.” If the cross is the epitome of the love and nearness of God, of human lostness and guilt, of the transitoriness and the unutterable toil of life, then the resurrection is the ensign of humanity’s elevation to God, of the overcoming of lostness and guilt through God, of the everlasting blessed life in God. Despite being intellectualized, the christological dogma of the ancient church (so difficult and complicated to understand) attempted to impart this certainty and finally apprehend it with a rational

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clarity so that, rather than allowing either wishful thinking or pious enthusiasm to prevail, we stand instead on solid ground. Indeed, we counter that approach: Where can we find sustainable knowledge about God alone and his will? Apart from the Son of God, where can we find reliable certainty about God’s love and the forgiveness of our guilt apart from the passion and cross of Christ? And apart from the resurrection of Jesus, where would we find any guarantee that we are raised to God and that our death is the beginning of life in God’s glory? And we have appropriately countered it and are certain of it. Of course, in the so-called darkness of the Middle Ages, one thing did not happen:4 God and Jesus Christ were not separated from one another, nor was this permitted in any way. To say it formally, the unity of the Father and the Son was maintained. We can put it this way: by assuming the existence of the wheel and renouncing the academic possibility of reinventing it in an artificial “as if,” we likewise tended as little to how the early church accomplished such reinvention in its lofty exertions of thought in the face of dangers, trials, and strife, and formulated it as dogma. The Trinity was recognized in its unity, and Jesus Christ was directly seen as God on this basis, so that the problem of Jesus Christ as an independent person alongside of God never arose for medievals. This separation of God and Jesus Christ is, however, a problem for us. If this fact is neither trivialized nor suppressed, then what it evokes is

God’s Untimeliness

still relevant. Despite all that has transpired—the church’s schism, the Thirty Years’ War, the Enlightenment, the age of science and technology—we are barely postmodern.5 These experiences explain nothing, but simply announce that the times have changed. But that is trivial. What is at the core of this difference and change? Among other matters, it is unquestionable that, in spite of what has been handed down to us in, with, and under our daily interchange with the ancient church’s concerns, we have lost this sense of a Trinitarian unity and have no place for it in our reality. Thus its conventional value is gone, the traditional orientation has had its day, and the earlier foundations (including traditional theistic metaphysics) are shattered. Modern dogma arises in its place. Since then, what obviously prevails without limit and has validity is that which can be (scientifically) proven, and which can only be confirmed with (scientific) objectivity. This dogma, if it is actually taken seriously (by applying it to life), would thus bring about the end of marriage, free inquiry, and all hope. Hence, no one in their heart seriously believes it, certainly not genuine scientists.6 But this dogma is unquestioningly taken to be a valid measuring rod. If the wheel’s existence cannot be verified, however, the wheel would almost need to be reinvented!7 In any case, the result is (a) God, (b) God becoming human, (c) a resurrection from the dead—even (b) becoming human through (a) God’s work!— being beyond proof and outside science and hence mere “dogma,” that is, without the content of reality

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and truth. Dogma thus stands counter to dogma. Of course, there is a significant distinction: Christian dogma is not to be believed but rather leads to the belief in that which no dogma can comprehend. This distinction especially illuminates dogma’s genuine place in liturgical worship as confession, praise, and reverence. That is why, if they are not to become an end in themselves but instead confess and lead to God, discussion and dispute over Christian dogmas is possible, even necessary. By contrast, every modern dogma notoriously has selfesteem as its end; but self-esteem does not permit a single bit of questioning. Even worse, it is precisely through science, and the technology arising from it, that the fundamental givens of humanity and life in general become open to manipulation and are thus questionable. What results is that science takes the place of truth! As science seeks security and support from the things that make the quest necessary, an objective schizophrenia arises. The short-circuiting that results is what paradoxically safeguards the stability and incontestability of this dogma. If, apart from the standard of comparison by which proofs are situated and positioned for the range of decisions demanded of us daily (about Christianity, value systems, or traditions) are not seen as useless, they are simply either obsolete or insufficient. Above all, Christianity, value systems, and traditions have long offered nothing accepted as universally valid, as self-evident horizons of perception and explanation. Religion (along with worldviews and value systems) has become a

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thoroughly private matter. Only science (as it portrays itself) is still capable of offering a universally accepted sphere of reference.8 But what can actually be maintained, as in the Middle Ages, and stands without being short-circuited or seriously disputed? Since the ­ cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ no longer serve in that way, many things could be conjured up. For René Descartes, it was thought itself, yet we have not only experienced the relativity of this thought but also that it is incapable of guaranteeing either life or reality, which both reach far beyond its horizons. For the Enlightenment, it was reason, yet we have experienced the kinds of blindness and perversion of which it is always capable. For the German industrial revolution in its early rapid expansion, it was the history that supported its own present, yet we have experienced how ambiguous and immeasurable history is and how hopelessly we can be fixated by it. For positivism, it was the facts themselves, yet we have long since known that pure facts are dogmatic postulates without real correspondence. And for the so-called postmodern era, in the particular results of our choices and decisions in their manifold exchange and in our own modification of them, the institutions and means appear to be the real factors. Thus what is certain for us is only our own feelings: but these can be pioneering or deceiving, and we are isolated by them. Moreover, it would be remarkable how scientific proofs and confirmations alone are unstintingly

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taken up and doled out as real in this landscape, if they did not concern those things that we can know and would have to know differently and better, partly because essential matters can never be scientifically discerned, partly because commitments to interests or what we pretend to be neutral methods increasingly put science and truth in opposition to each other. Such a situation is simply astonishing, and we should be repulsed by it. In reality, it is a symptom of need to have neither abiding grounds nor sufficient orientation. This lacuna is why there is no alternative to the dogma of the exclusive reality of scientific proofs. In certain ways, it is even indispensable, given that it seems possible to achieve a social consensus solely on the basis of science. Thus the distance between us and the Middle Ages has become a chasm. The time when the impressive cathedrals from Sienna to Strassbourg and from Chartres to Salisbury were built was neither comfortable nor secure. Both the era’s knowledge and the confirmation of it were gained through the overarching experience (often enough painful and oppressive) that nothing here below is truly secure and that our world is a hotbed of sinister powers seeking to enslave us and from which we are incapable of freeing ourselves. It was evident that continuity and security could only be found in God. But this was neither Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s God of theodicy nor Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher’s God, whom despisers experienced through the medium of culture.

God’s Untimeliness

But it was God, who thanks to a birth by a human mother is immediately near to us, who in the crucified knows suffering and whose resurrection and ascension into heavenly glory allow divine light to shine on us. This was the anchor found to be reliable and lasting in the Middle Ages. Tempi passati—what once had power to place thought, resources, and labor in service to the monumental building projects expressing both piety and bourgeois sensibility has become parenthetical and our cultural asset. However, if what once provided a foundation pertaining to Christian confession and throughout eternity were true in the Middle Ages, then it must also prove true today. For it is not enough to relegate to the past or to what is distant9 that for which Lessing already struggled and thus reclaim for the present the “nasty broad ditch” that had burst open. So the acute question about the proof of the Spirit and power is certainly raised to a new level. Aware of the word in the midst of affliction, we must demand that “current theology” be courageous enough to take the step of giving itself over to the Spirit so that, whether or not the Spirit would prove itself through theology that seeks or explains, the Spirit does it instead “where and when it pleases” (Augsburg Confession, article 5). As already indicated, the gestalt of wisdom must be recovered; to continue kneeling and sitting would be to remain further fixed in the aporias of the past. Johann Baptist Metz’s remark indicates that theology can by all means fulfill and have its

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place as wisdom in the university: “In the humanities the sphere of life intrudes into the sciences.”10 Above all, theology as wisdom forces the realm of science to acknowledge that we are human, creaturely, and presumed to be lost before God. This implies not only an ethic but also a critique of science and a relativizing of prevalent scientific theory. So the knowledge and insights of the theology of kneeling and sitting are indispensable: kneeling allows devotion and prayer, opens God’s wonder and mystery to us; sitting allows us to put our confidence in the ways of the Spirit, especially the way the Spirit with its own proofs calls to faith those whom the Spirit desires. If we are thus resurrected, God does indeed call or let us be. It may be that God, who can raise up stones as children (Matt. 3:9), establishes God’s own proof through untimely means and through somewhat eccentric humans who leave their run-of-the-mill lives and shamefully go beyond the church and theology. We can look to their behavior to determine whether we tend to the word and, in the midst of trials, are open to the Lord and the untimeliness of his works and ways or whether we remain in and refuse to abandon our own old trajectory. In this way, we can see whether we are in the truth, so that the genuine activity of his appearance will be recognized.

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The Language of Cross and Resurrection

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ased on what has been said, we must deal with the language of truth, about which we have become uncertain. In part, this uncertainty is due to the erosion of the word in the present Babel over language. It is clear that our world has become fragmented into countless disconnected worlds, each with its own jargon. Still, the crucial foundation for language of truth lies deeper and comes to the fore in the issue of the language of the cross and resurrection. I must interject that manifold languages exist. In one of his best-known lines, the German poet Eugen Roth puts a point on it by saying, “The one who reads the paper learns.” Newspapers allow us to experience what happens both near and far in the world, and they are produced to be sold. This characterizes their language and distinguishes it, for instance, from the language of science, which is concerned with using the most exacting precision and controls to establish, describe, and explain the 125

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natural world. Thus, in each particular instance, a characteristic diction results. Again, think of the language of administration, the execution of the existing legal order and rules within the givens of an active life. A specific tone is even reinforced. Each of these (and other) languages also serves the goal of grasping as clearly as possible what exists or what happens within its respective aspect, thus cultivating reality within a particular relationship. Other languages have different goals. The language of poetry opens unknown spaces and enters into new ones. The language of fiction allows hidden worlds to be known. The language of politics presents or even compels circumstances toward specific goals or visions. In short, these languages are not descriptive; rather, they virtually open things up. This opening up is manifest especially where language creates a new reality. From the time of Johann Georg Hamann’s work, we have known that this language cannot be reduced to a “performative speech act.” Language works in this way when it announces what is literally incredible: freedom out of bondage, bringing equality to unequal relations, or the right to participate in power. In a sense, these are fostered by Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, the slogans of the French Revolution, and the Communist Manifesto. The constitution of reality occurs through language, even, for example, through the promise of “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding” (Phil. 4:7), and it would be experienced immediately in the call: “We are the people!”1 The

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language of the new speaks to and expands existing reality in all kinds of ways. Religious language specifically opens up new dimensions. Within the (usual) linguistic associations, it bears on matters that at least do not originally belong in this connection but are instead alien to it or even shocking—as is particularly obvious in the prophets. Because this language is to be heard and remain vital, it has an enduring appeal to or even unreasonable demand for discovering related analogies within the mundane and the lived. It thus leads to a quest for new dimensions2—one sense of preaching. Augustine serves as a grand example. When he explained God as triune, he discovered specific analogies, the vestigia trinitatis (“vestiges of the Trinity”), in our inner composition (memory, awareness, will; lover, beloved, love; spirit, knowledge, love). It follows, then, that in certain sections of his great theological treatise on the Trinity, De Trinitate, he offers up various and sundry psychological observations and reflections (simultaneously making Augustine a psychologist of the highest order) and impressively makes “internal geography” accessible. The extent to which religious language can straightforwardly shape reality is negatively indicated in the former Lutheran tradition that obviously felt compelled to cultivate almost everything in the relationship of sin/forgiveness of sin and law/ gospel and thus zeroes in on such complex reality. Living language contains a variety of layers, among which we continually shift. (For instance,

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we unconsciously have different conversations around the supper table and in the supermarket, with friends and with strangers, and the like.) This raises the issue of what unites these layers into one language, that is, what the language carries and how it grasps the whole. In the worst case, it is merely given (and thus arbitrarily manipulable and indeed manipulated) vocabulary as such, for example, the jargon of political parties, the “language of Canaan,” or scientistic cant. By contrast, where language has power and is true, it creates from its foundation, carries it, and unifies on that basis, because it has power to do so—a power that is not manufacturable but instead arises from truth. Certainly this is not the language of force but rather of humanity. Yet our bitter experience teaches us that humanity not only is indefinite but also always becomes and is questionable; in other words, humanity for its part requires an abiding foundation. What immediately comes to mind here are Hamann’s fundamental theses that language is from God because God has externalized God’s own self through it. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy used Shakespeare and Goethe as strong evidence in arguing that the language of humanity is derived only from the language of the Bible. While we cannot expand on it here, we will proceed by saying that the spheres and dimensions are to be simply demarcated. If Jesus Christ’s cross and resurrection are absolutely dependent on God’s holy deed—indeed are the wonder and mystery of God, and do grant

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existence and life—then they must demonstrate it linguistically. Further, they have created a language whose power has continually broadened and thus changed reality, and still does, proving its power by continually opening up new dimensions. Hence, the unmistakable language of truth corresponds to the unmistakable face of truth. Yet that cannot remain hidden. Although such an assertion would be too broad and vague, the language of the New Testament is precisely the language of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Making distinctions and nuances within this language would reduce this (thoroughly proper) assertion. We must therefore ask what in the New Testament is specifically the language of the cross and resurrection. So beginning with external impressions, the language of the cross is relentlessly realistic. When we dig into it, we can recognize that the four passion accounts, especially in those moments where they take their time, are fairly meager in their descriptions. The absolutely painful, unjustly brutal event is presented matter-of-factly. Pathos is missing. When they cite Jesus, the words are simple—as is his speech itself. The Gospels’ presentation does not linger on trivialities. They report only important matters dealing with the truth of the events. Everything is as plain and simple as the words say and as the Gospels report, from Jesus’ agonizing prayer in Gethsemane to his final cry, from the flight of the disciples to their disheartened walk to Emmaus. The Gospels neither make

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judgments nor set values. What is handed down as miraculous neither wraps the events in a supernatural aura nor attempts to resolve matters. They neither devalue nor provide a moral accent to the cruelty or the denial that they note. The events are as they are. Though it may be a bit crude to say it, this is pure prose. As Luther said in a Table Talk about the Bible, “There are only few words, though the content has the highest importance: For there the Holy Spirit speaks. And they are nevertheless completely simple events.”3 Incidentally, the New Testament expresses the cross in a variety of ways. It assumes that it did happen and, likewise, that its meaning revolves around its having happened. Thus we encounter it in comprehensive formulas (like the repeatedly cited Rom. 4:25), or also in the reflective emphasis on a single characteristic (as in Hebrews). As a rule, the language here is always a matter of fact or, more pointedly, without ornament. Perhaps we stumble over the dryness of the New Testament language of the cross of Jesus Christ because the fullness of the (beautiful) passion hymns in our minds gets in the way. This sparse language need not be “followed up on” in order to bind the conscience, be depicted, or evoke piety. The Pauline “for you were bought with a price . . .” (1 Cor. 6:20) establishes and does not extort, as did the unspeakable text beneath the painting of the crucified that led to Count Zinzendorf’s conversion: “This have I done for thee, what hast thou done for me?” And when Paul says, “[He] became obedient

The Language of Cross and Resurrection

to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8), he indeed stresses the ancient hymn, but he does not fuss over it. In short, if we listen, we can discern a stinginess even here. This characteristic of biblical language can be surprising, even amazing. As it was self-evident for the redactors of the New Testament and their congregations, this depiction of the mundane way of coming into God’s presence and being expressly related to God’s will corresponds precisely to this reality in it. Yet we become impatient with our own fussy reflections: How can we discern such special language that opens or even creates reality? How can we encounter this language that breaks open and expects what truly cannot be put into words? And when exactly will previously unknown dimensions burst open? What is extraordinary is precisely that the witnesses, by all appearances, did not coin the language that asserts that he who died on a cross “truly . . . is the Son of God” (Matt. 27:54). It is common, daily language, reduced to the most essential. “The words are few.” How does it work with the resurrection? To summarize, from the outset, people stammer solemnly before it. How else could it be? No language could predict this event. It is simply beyond anything humanly possible or thinkable. But now that it has happened, we can justifiably only stammer about it with pictures and analogies, disconcertedness and doubt, but above all can merely speak as if in shock. Likewise, if there is anything that bestows credibility on the witness to Christ’s resurrection,

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it is this language. It does not arrive noisily, triumphantly, or certain of victory. It is certainly solemn (for it naturally does not deal with just anything), but also sparse, and thus strangely vague. Here we grope visibly. If it is even possible, from an “objective fact of salvation” (as said in the nineteenth century), we become still more broadly distanced from it than we would with an outright denial. The propositions are colored by doubt and unfaith. Simply repeating an ideal formula yields hardly any certainty. First Corinthians 15 is an example of how unstable this is. Paul’s sermon on the Areopagus, moreover, shows that speaking about Christ’s resurrection immediately leaves us wide open and unsupported. Even in the face of strong faith (and robust self-awareness), a great word lies distant in this sort of situation. Insofar as it can be clearly and distinctly expressed, there is much here that must be seen objectively. The trumpeting of the street evangelists has no place here. Naturally, we recognize not only God’s validation in Easter but also God’s triumph and revolution, which can be seen in a variety of ways. If Matthew’s words in his final chapter, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. . . . And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:18, 20), are a truly lofty pledge, these words still do not resound. They do not commission. The aura of the Byzantine Cosmocrator is missing in them. More to the point, these expressions of the resurrection are thoroughly restrained.

The Language of Cross and Resurrection

This restraint forces the question of how this language that opens new dimensions and creates reality abides. The resurrection will be reported, have significance, be interpreted and referred to, and be designated, and all of it as if it were a mere historical event. In any event, as we have seen before, it establishes a particular uncertainty and vagueness as a linguistic anomaly. Of course, this is not the same thing as the kind of language that could truly have the power to open the new. In view of the resurrection, we realize that there is no unique language that comes to the fore. This diagnosis reminds us that the entire New Testament, to speak cautiously, is not written in a unique language but rather in so-called Koine Greek. Indeed, although it would be an exaggeration to draw a parallel between Koine Greek and “street Latin,” it is still certainly neither a literary nor a “polished language.” It is, rather, an everyday and colloquial language, steeped in the Palestinian milieu with various Semitic constructions. More to the point, it is the language of the market and the neighborhood. It suggests nothing momentous and hardly suggests God’s wonder and salvation. However, the Koine Greek of the New Testament has a linguistic potency. Many modern languages, including German, have generally first become standardized and literary because of the translation of the New Testament and the entire Bible (insofar as the New Testament already includes the Old Testament as the Bible of both Jesus himself and early Christianity). It is an astounding paradox

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that even today we create the language of truth and humanity from the Bible and thus from the New Testament. Moreover, since the New Testament in Koine Greek designates something that the language of truth and humanity hardly grant a priori, it is still a particularly sure footing for our experience of it. Like the rest of the Bible, the New Testament is earthly, even earthy, related to a full, daily life and its conditions. Indeed, we can certainly affirm that it was written by people not greatly educated and who on the whole had “little social standing” in our eyes. They write for everyone and thus for those who for their part live not in philosophical leisure or in pious study of the text but rather within the demands of daily life. This leads to the earthy pithiness of the New Testament language. We can more clearly see this in the failure of the 1975 German revision of the Luther Bible. This rendering was generally done in a scholarly fashion; however, scholarship depends on evidence and acknowledges the responsibility to set forth its propositions. Thus, in any case, although a quite well-grounded translation emerged, it generally hindered things, mainly by stepping forward into the open, into the unverifiable, into something of the sort of which the proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus Christ consists. Whoever sets forth the reasons, presents the past or at least its content, but certainly not the future. The future can be grasped above all through the hazardous business of faith, precisely by our proclaiming God’s promise and

The Language of Cross and Resurrection

reign. This revision denies this, though, of course, with reasons! Its language is a worthy exemplar of an uninspired school assignment.4 So we end up with a version of the New Testament fit for church, school, and home, hence for piety, for the educated, and for historical consciousness. For a long time now, the New Testament has belonged to a pious tradition and to a transmitted cultural legacy and has been treated accordingly; therefore, it lost content and repute. Unlike the 1975 revision, the spare, earthy language of the New Testament5 is not anchored by good reasons. Unlike a serious translation of the New Testament, the revision is not linguistically balanced word-for-word and ­sentence-for-sentence. By contrast, the New Testament’s language emerged—but from what? It emerged from the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As such, it has upset the world. A new age has arisen. This new age no longer orients itself primarily to God’s great deeds in the past. Much more, it is foundationally oriented to the exaltation of the Lord, who “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and whose kingdom will have no end.” Its matrix lies in Ernst Bloch’s formula, “A is still not B.” And so everything is aligned with that which the cross and resurrection have brought about and guaranteed, namely the ultimate dominion of God, “the rule of God” (“kingdom of God”), accomplished through the crucified and resurrected one. To speak of God’s rule is to perceive everything that exists in this light.

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A peculiar contrast is presented in such mundane, earthy language from the living one who is himself presented so mundanely in his temporal relationships. It does not seem to jibe with the overarching newness; likewise, the misuse leads us to expect a completely different type of language. We would regard this language as neither excessive nor unfitting if it were not merely incidental but, instead, thoroughly hymnic, rapturous, ecstatic, even solicitous, inviting, and persuasive, insisting on the wonder, the majesty we have come to expect, and “the revelation,” as we say in modern times. This corresponds just as deeply to our conception of Christianity’s historic forms of speaking. So it is odd that the same thing could grow out of the sparse language of the New Testament. But something still does not scan, and our experience bears it out. For example, the Christmas story is not eroded in its retelling year after year. Neither is the St. Matthew Passion, which people heard from Johann Sebastian Bach two dozen times, and which abides in its bare text, independent of the music, and is similarly “indestructible.” Nevertheless, this sparse daily language is powerful in its simplicity; it repeatedly has the power literally to lead to new reality, a language opening undreamed-of dimensions of reality. How is this to be understood? Just this: Jesus Christ was a simple man, one of the countless nomadic, wonder-working rabbis of his day. He traveled throughout Palestine, especially Galilee, went up to Jerusalem, was arrested,

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tried, and sentenced there. He gathered followers around him, occasionally inspiring the masses. But in the end, he was alone, dying a miserable death. But in the midst of this, it was pronounced to his followers that God had raised him from the dead and elevated him to heavenly glory. He is said to be the Son of the living God and our redeemer. His essence and truth, therefore, were seen and indicated in his full biography, though only partly recognizable. Since he now is spoken of in a straightforward way, and since his cross and resurrection are reported and given meaning with such notable starkness, both correspond to his image and his appearing. Since this language is the measure of his image and appearing, then it empties itself, as he emptied himself (see Phil. 2:7). The language of this divestment corresponds not only to the reality of the one crucified and risen but also by and large—and above all—concentrates on him and on that which for his sake is important and merits attention in light of him. In all its individual characteristics, it relinquishes what is its own. This relinquishment is not done in any special way; the distinction is that nothing at all is “done” here. Instead, who the crucified and risen one is thus becomes open and ready to receive so that it enlightens, becomes recognizable, brings a new significance, and establishes a new age in and through this language. It is a humble language, establishing where Jesus Christ is active and recognizable, that is, in the everyday life of

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lost people and their reality. Because this reality is established, particularly in its realism, this world of everyday lost human beings in the midst of their unholiness and disruption is affirmed as the world in which and for the sake of which God’s mystery and wonder are reality.6 Thus our world and we who are lost are recognized through this language as upheld in God’s grace and provided a future through Jesus Christ’s glory, hidden in both his cross and resurrection. The upshot is clear. The language of the cross and resurrection creates a new reality (as does the New Testament as a whole), since by being realistic and dauntless it takes seriously what exists, and indeed it takes seriously the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the locus of life. In its lackluster starkness, it allows for recognizing the crucified and risen one, his emptying as well as his exaltation, his mistaken identity as well as his glory, and above all, for recognizing him as the one who went his way for us. As such, this is the turning of the age, the absolutely new dimension. The more clearly we experience this, the more unafraid we are to attend to our sphere of life and to express or spell it out with our questions (stammering them if necessary) without retouching or polishing up the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ for us lost ones. Hence we can conclude: The language of truth is unpretentious, realistic, drawn from everyday life, and all in all the language for lost people. Its expression allows the wonder and mystery that are

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appropriate to God to appear in the everyday world of lost people. Thus it embeds reality in the relationship to God’s love for us and for s­alvation-laden activities in our world and, through it, breaches the limits and horizons of reality. For all that, it proves itself to be the language of devotion to God. We thus need to face the core reason for the notable linguistic uncertainty of theology and the church: the lack of devotion and trust in the one who leads to a future that he will still create, possibly even through our speech.7 But we have always evaded it and have stood on what exists, is established, and is substantiated. Thus the fallout is that our language is so steeped in academia that it is the rare exception when our speech reminds us of the Bible, even though we quote it. This language is as exact as a precision drill bit, as sterile as a surgical instrument, and as crisp as a highdefinition display: in such language, love becomes frigidity, grace a mere concept; even wonder and mystery become mere words, and if it does not sound strange it is totally out of place. It is created from evidence and documentation, and it constructs a cage built from a logically sanctified, scientifically compatible world. Even the official language of our ecclesiastical adjudicators rarely opens up the new but is characterized by conjuring up a reality of a decrepit, bygone world, and is eager to suggest its vitality in the present. Hence, the language of theology and the church is far too often powerless and constrained—without risk or confidence. It is bloodless and dark. It does not

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fling open reality. It does not compel us to discern new dimensions but instead with influence from both science and piety closes up reality. In a linguistic sense, it is apathetic. Again, opening up new dimensions requires that we go beyond the movement from kneeling to sitting and advance to standing. It is not only insufficient to refer to the language of truth, much less demonstrate it, for in surrendering the witness to the truth and its language to this, we consign it to the status of a cultural asset or museum piece and, thus, to death. But, above all, we thereby contradict ourselves. With this sort of language, we also squander the gospel of Christ’s cross and resurrection. Instead, we encounter them and understand ourselves through them when we are grasped by their language and are ourselves created by them. And this goes beyond mere chatter.

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ven if church adjudicators sometimes refer to it internally, the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ have ceased to be their language. To a great extent, it has become a foreign language, far from a language of trust-filled devotion to God, to God’s wonder and mystery. So we should not ignore the fact that the era of traditional ecclesiastical adjudicators is at an end. This is not because they are not up to date—their Lord was known for that, as has been the church from its inception. This era is over because rather than living in devotion to it they primarily organize and manage the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ among us as institutions. (The question of whether institutions in general are capable of living in devotion is just as open as it is wide-ranging.) As we have seen, they suffocate the language of the cross and resurrection of Christ. As Walter Jens has said, it degenerates into “homiletical Esperanto”1 or even into delivering an advertising-tinged jargon, in which those charged 141

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with delivering God’s wonder and mystery parcel it out like pocket change. Just as theology will have to break with the posture of sitting that has become so comfortable, so too must adjudicators break with the traditional form of organization; they should not leave the talents entrusted to them buried in academic studies and church offices without garnering dividends. Conventional church structures and the (unlimited) surrender to scientific aspects and horizons suffocate devotion. And the split between the spiritual and the institutional on the one hand is added to the split between the spiritual and scientific on the other, so that assumptions about what is spiritual inevitably atrophy. For it is nothing less than the presence of the holy God, of God the Holy Spirit among us, that can neither be assumed nor even goes without saying. Rather, we should pray for it and receive it in thankfulness and reverence. Because we so consistently disregard the Spirit, we still have to worry about our persistence in history and the present, without future, without new horizons, and with the resulting consequences. The question of whether there is a movement in today’s church that corresponds to getting up from a sitting position is as unavoidable as it is tempting. When the question crops up, it easily tempts us to remain in the status quo, since the future (that is, the very new) has merely become a part of our planning, calculation, and projects and is thus usurped by our activities and horizons. This primarily means that at the moment only

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the negative response is possible: we can no longer function as before. In contrast, the vexation inherent in this negative response (cf. Isa. 28:19) should be an opportunity to pay attention to the word with all the intensity required. Just as with theology, this kind of thinking is only given serious consideration when the prevailing positions are abandoned. Still, the goal is not to draft a new shape of the church, but solely to make this realization possible and that it not be suppressed by the factors, problems, and dilemmas of the status quo. Martin Luther asserted that “the Church is ruled by the Spirit of God and the saints are led by the Spirit of God.”2 Because this observation gets at the very core of the question, it must be established theologically. We by no means define the empirical church by its structures and offices or are identified through them, but it happens instead by means of the Holy Spirit’s work, the Spirit who leads into the truth of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This has an immediate effect on the structures, that is, on our shape. In order that all institutions and their forms be defined as preliminary and perishable in light of Jesus Christ’s cross and resurrection, we must then realize it both theologically and ecclesiastically in our tending to the word (“above all things!”) and in devotion to God’s leading. No one can claim God’s Spirit by virtue of an office. This is not to say that offices and functions are not needed in the church as a living, spiritual

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organism. The consequence is obvious, as we have long since noticed within our adjudicatory structures, though it is widely neutralized by those structures. At this point, we have to realize how serious an undertaking this is: tending to the word must be taken up by ecclesiastical officeholders, along with professional theologians and the people as well (the so-called laity)3 in their paths and in their relationships, that is, in walking the path of devotion and discipleship in largely unfamiliar and unorthodox forms. Experience teaches that it will require new ways and means. After all, the superiority of church structures that appeared in the second half of the twentieth century are solidified, at least factually, in the church’s ways of operating today. At the same time, these modes of operation assert that church officeholders have a higher spiritual (rather than professional) competence by virtue of their office. Thus, from the beginning, it is assumed that in steadily tending to the word, we recognize only what corresponds with what we are used to and in the same way develop our theology according to this state of affairs. This very state of affairs, however, means that we have in principle not considered the possibility that God’s leading could go beyond the church and theology into arenas that seem questionable and completely novel—a theological blunder! So, simple, serious tending to the word should already set this movement beyond the church and theology into motion. This motion would not only

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lead to submitting the existing structures, such as “church administration”4 or ecclesiastical officeholders, to a spiritual examination, but above all the church must actually take up this tending as standard operating procedure rather than committees, officeholders, or theologians. Such a church would neither structure itself by offices and hierarchies nor remain unstructured. Such a church would disregard contemporary questions no less than those posed by yesterday’s answers. It would realize that it is itself responsible for the whole and certainly does not speak only for itself. The plurality of the effects of and reflections on Christ’s cross and resurrection would operate so that its manifestation would correspond with and have its context in the cross and in it alone. A corresponding theology would arise that no longer exchanges an interpretation with a specific form of historical work or presumes to be able to make God’s wonder and mystery more objective (or considers itself able to enclose them). At the same time, this sort of church would provide the indispensable context for its “standing” and, as we might expect, in this context would be organized anew with wisdom as a necessary core. We are fully aware of the problems raised here: theology versus church, office versus congregation, preachers versus parishioners, structures versus free operation of the Spirit, official functions versus cooperative work in individual cases, among others. We cannot deal with all of them here, but even if we could, we would remain right

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there in the old, once again attempting to draw future structures out of theological study and through ecclesiastical adjudicators, with committees, various commissions, and the like. No, these important questions instead demand that the manner in which they are adopted and put into effect would be marked by tending to the word. Of course, we should recognize that difficulties will pile up, starting with the question of who should even organize it and how. Above all, we need to reckon with the oppressive unpleasantries that arise, because theology in its strictly scientific perception and attitude has for decades neglected to do its work in dialogue with the “laity,” and in the discharge of their office church officials have no less frequently abandoned relating freedom and love to the delicate balance between their office and justice. Most likely, these omissions will yield disastrous results. But is this any legitimate reason for refraining from the task with which we are charged? We would never have a church or Christmas if the Lord were this rational and responsible. He would stay in heaven with the Father—and we would still be lost. Jesus Christ’s resurrection and glory assume his ignominious trembling on the cross, not simply as a factual but a necessary premise (“the Messiah should suffer these things,” Luke 24:26) of his assumption (or taking on the task) of trembling and the perishing of the old in all its aspects. Due to his conviction that those who would save their souls must lose them (Matt. 10:39; Luke 9:24; John

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12:25), Jesus’ way itself turns out to be the “principle” of God’s glory—a way the church is by no means exempt from. If the early church had removed itself from Jesus’ way, then by human standards Christianity would not exist. It certainly is not appropriate to toss everything overboard willy-nilly from now on. This would be mere enthusiasm. Instead, we should be more concerned with recognizing and dismissing the lie in which our church officials are rooted and by which they are nearly suffocated: they build on grounds and foundations other than those maintained and proclaimed theologically. But to do this would mean tending to the word so that, above all, the word with its implications and consequences is held over everything. If this were to be established in the church as a fitting and worthy priority, then we would again hear Luther’s phrase ringing forth from our lips, his “theology of the cross” that lies in the deepest recesses (and is least understood), “the word they shall allow to stand” (“A Mighty Fortress”). How can we “allow the word to stand”? Here is one way: New visions cannot arise from old structures, new values will not be created from old assumptions, new leadership does not often emerge from the ranks of the old elites, who are the most imprisoned by the old system and options. A new vision must come from new places . . . Where there is no vision, the people perish . . . literally.5

Additionally, attending to the word first and foremost simply requires a beginning as unplanned

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as it is unconventional. There is reason to suppose that something akin to this has been afoot in a variety of places for a long time. Of course, it has no chance vis-à-vis existing structures, so it inevitably sinks into objective frivolity and becomes an object for finger pointing and pity or is opposed as heresy. Thus it is crucial to avoid stomping on this sort of seed through officiousness; instead, it must be nurtured and allowed to sprout. We must not be dogmatic spoilsports asserting every requisite sensibility for theological correctness. In Luther’s understanding, pure teaching is the gift of authentic proclamation of the gospel and is certainly not a value or a goal. So what does it matter if a plurality arose from this that is just as off-putting and surprising as the exhibition of the cross mentioned in the foreword? “What does it matter? Just this, that Christ is proclaimed in every way” (Phil. 1:18): this is what Paul thought, and we have a pretty good sense of the impressive fruit that resulted from his work. We can at least imagine a humble beginning in which both synodal and ecclesiastical officials resolutely denied their (already distinctly unbiblical) consistorial tradition and understood themselves primarily as clearinghouses for creating space, light, and attention for every seed. To say it plainly: attending to the word does not avoid what we already suspect has happened here and there; it is a structural question and is to be taken up as such. There is reason to fear that nothing will come of this serious tending to the word, that this will be

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suspect as pious introversion, trashed as a theological luxury, or scorned as an expression of alienation from the world. Indeed, what we should fear is that over time we would hold it in contempt through stakeholding—the illusion of feasibility, impatience, and fear—and could neither establish nor exert any influence on it. A church that heeds the Lord’s biblical command to “make disciples of all nations” can scarcely admit the peace and power of actually doing this tending, or ever perceive its fruits, not to mention await their ripening. In its perceived “responsibility” for nothing less than the whole world—indeed, even “the creation”—the church is apparently busy with and has been working at capacity on other, more important things. Serious tending to the word nevertheless finds its way back to that which created the Christian faith and the New Testament and has grounded the church: the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In our tending to the word, we will perceive the cross and resurrection as God’s wonder and mystery, we will worship in humility, and we will moreover be granted with language. As it is with everything growing out of Christ’s cross and resurrection and continually called forth by them, tending to the word is totally open and unpredictable and, in any case, cannot be produced or achieved.

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Notes Preface 1. For a complete presentation of the exhibit’s pieces, see the exhibition catalog, Das Kreuz als Zeichen in der Gegenwartskunst, ed. Helmut A. Müller (Ostfilden/Stuttgart: Dr. Cantz’sche Druckerei, 1992). 2. Joachim Ringleben, Wahrhaftig auferstanden (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1998).

Chapter 1: Cross, Resurrection, and Truth 1. Gotthold Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and Power,” in Lessing’s Theological Writings, trans. Henry Chadwick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1956), 51ff. 2. To be sure, as Kant wrote in a note in the preface of the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), “Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit. Religion through its sanctity, and law-giving through its majesty, may seek to exempt themselves from it. But they then awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination” (trans. Norman Kemp Smith [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965], A xii, p. 9). But Kant neither intended it in a (positivistic) sense of demonstrable facticity nor in a (rationalistic) sense of conclusive provability. He was quite aware that it falsifies God, freedom, and immortality because they are be grounded on verifiability. This is the background of his famous remark in the foreword to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith” (B xxx; p. 29); that is, the establishment of the fundamental limitation of reason and its possibilities for valid scrutiny. 3. Conversation with Eckermann, March 11, 1832. The author does not provide a source. 4. Hans Joachim Iwand’s disciples praised him for teaching them to live out of the word, which sustained them when they were tossed into the Gestapo prison at Königsberg. When we suppose that what a conservative estimate of about 80 percent of e­ xegetical

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Notes work consists of (namely, historical and literary inquiries) would have appreciable meaning in view of the word (out of which humans do and can live, even under extreme duress), we find an unshakeable dogmatism at work. 5. Compare the following from my article, “Wahrheit und Religion” in Religion und Wahrheit, Festschrift for Gernot Wiessner (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998), 297–313. 6. “Eine Duplik I” 1778. WW 6, 96. 7. The final sentence in the foreword of Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), xxi. 8. Ernst Käsemann. “Die Heilsbedeutung des Todes Jesu nach Paulus,” in Hans Conzelmann et al., Zur Bedeutung des Todes Jesu. Exegetische Beiträge, 2nd ed. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1967), 11–34 (here 14). With few exceptions, I have generally appealed to what Käsemann in his assertion appropriately attributed only to Paul. (It is because of this context that I have not noted it accordingly.)

Chapter 2: The Essence of the Cross and Resurrection 1. “In the Middle Ages gullibility was based on lack of knowledge. Because nowadays we are dependent on recirculated hearsay processed by the media, we are ready and willing to believe any charlatan who sounds convincing. We know too much; we understand too little.” Michael Ignatieff, Der Spiegel, May 19, 1997, 192. 2. Jost Herbig, Im Anfang war das Wort. Die Evolution des Menschlichen, 2nd ed. (Munich: Hanser, 1985), 186. 3. See Wilhelm Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God, trans. J. Sandys Stanyon, ed. Robert T. Voelkel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 73. 4. Eberhard Jüngel, Paulus und Jesus, 5th edition, (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1979), especially 177ff. 5. Herbig, Im Anfang war das Wort, 187. 6. See Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 2:343ff. 7. See Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions, trans. Margaret Kohl (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 235ff. 8. We can clarify the limits of any perception on the basis of a well-known example: Sometimes two completely different stories about a marriage arise when the two separate spouses describe it. Here, it is a passport to subjectivism to think that is only geared to the facts and is an occasion for doubting their trustworthiness.

Notes Still it never requires a recognized theory of knowledge but only a certain realism in regard to the insight that we hardly ever get to reality with this specific template, that is, of “object/subject,” “facts/meanings,” and the like. Naturally the difference in the example also has to do with subjectivity. Though it is decisive that, in view of the plurality of which reality consists, the measure of the human does not extend beyond a mere snapshot. 9. Schrage, “Das Verständnis des Todes Jesu im Neuen Testament,” in Ernst Bizer et al., Das Kreuz Jesu Christi als Grund des Heils, 2nd ed. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1968), 49-89 (here 51–52). 10. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts 1 (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1963), 239. 11. This was taught as the norm in the church’s first three centuries.

Chapter 3: Characteristics of Our Era 1. This can be shown in detail. We are no longer in a position to define works of art, public welfare or nature, science or health, and the like. The fullness of that which art or nature consists can no longer be encompassed by a single concept, nor does it allow itself to be grasped within a single definition. The upshot is that we simultaneously live in diverse worlds that cannot be harmonized. 2. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 696. 3. Friedrich Schiller, “The Song of the Bell,” trans. Edwin Ellis Griffin (London: Hutchins and Crowsley, 1886), 12. 4. Ernst Jünger, Heliopolis. Rückblick auf eine Stadt (Tübingen: Ernst Klett, 1949), 378–79. 5. Reiner Kunze, “auf dem vormarsch,” in auf eigene hoffnung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1989), 81 (“Erst fassen sie fuß, dann / nach den köpfen”). 6. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985), 69. 7. Ernst Jünger, Der Waldgang (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1951). 8. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, trans. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 2002), 66–67, in relation to Alfred North Whitehead’s slogan in Science in the Modern World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 92. Here it is an epistemological category, which Marcuse then uses politically. 9. Thus on the Internet we make split-second computerized reactions to stock movements in order to achieve the highest possible speculative profit. So from square one, we never deal with

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Notes what sorts of stock they are, what lies behind them, and what buying or selling them means for the firms and their workers. 10. We also experience this brutalization because there is neither taboo nor limit to the reach of science. Whether in prayer or probing the genome, in coitus or classical music, the disciplines of biology, sociology, psychology lay into them and ban what is uniquely human from the characteristics that distinguish them: nuances, overtones, gradations. From the perspective of contemporary science, it is completely justified and even necessary, but even this is problematic, even alarming. It is certainly not in the quiet of a hermetically sealed chamber that we conceive the question of how, without damage (if that is even possible), we can we win back what has been melded into the diction of science and thus been brutalized. Indeed, it is implied by the question of the humanity of contemporary as well as future science.

Chapter 4: Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Power 1. Depicted in Thomas F. Mathews, The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 51, cf. 48. 2. Adolf Schlatter, “Das Kreuz Jesu unsere Versöhnung mit Gott,” in Gesunde Lehre. Reden und Aufsätze (Velbert: Freizeiten Verlag, 1929), 8. This little essay’s keen insight (camouflaged by an edifying tone) conceives the background self-manifestation of God in his divine majesty precisely in the powerlessness of the cross. 3. If we suspect this cry to be anything less than antisemitic, then it is an indication not only of deep confusion but also of a defect in our understanding of history. This would be a completely ahistorical misconstrual of the execution of the death penalty both in the past and in modernity as no isolated process of elimination by the state but rather as an act of the entire legal community, wherein it saw its responsibility and, aware of its legitimacy, expressed with this cry its agreement with the sentence pronounced on Jesus. The cry itself is a conventional form of a self-condemnation that can be implicitly extended (“. . . if this one should be innocent!”) so that we feel completely free of injustice or guilt. That we err—fatally—is part of the puzzle of the sacrifice of God’s Son, which can be no less easily penetrated or even resolved than the wreckage at the denouement of an ancient tragedy. That this call would be misused historically in an antisemitic way in history is a basis for alarm in the face of pious delusion. Still, if this misuse becomes an occasion to find antisemitic tendencies in the text, then we must recognize that we are rationalizing plainly

Notes and ahistorically, with the consequence that God’s mystery has no meaning. But as with God himself, this not only remains opaque but, negatively speaking, is also dangerous and enigmatic. Even in this respect, as Otfried Halver put it with sarcasm and complete scorn in his last sermon, God is simply no “dear little God,” with whom one plays “pattycake” (Predigt als ‘Publikumsbeschimpfung’ in Gottesdienst und Öffentlichkeit, Konkretion 8, ed. P. Cornehl and H. E. Bahr [Hamburg: Furche, 1970], 17–25). 4. To make the traditional ontological and completely philosophical point, the duplication of reality as Christian faith naturally has an important basis: it is expressed by it and establishes that God’s acts and governance do not occur arbitrarily but rather out of a divine (that is, ultimate, no longer questionably adjustable) necessity. Yet we can see that this is a purely theoretical solution to the problem. To be exact, faith lives and is created by neither theory nor theoretical guarantee but by the act of God alone: God the Holy Spirit. Our Western tradition generally prefers a careful theory of the Holy Spirit. 5. Hans-Walter Krumwiede, “Usus legis und usus historiaum,” in Kerygma und Dogma 8 (1962): 238–64 (here 247). 6. Compare Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Isabel Best, Lisa E. Dahill, Reinhard Krauss, and Nancy Lukens, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, ed. John W. de Gruchy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 8:478–79: “God would have us know that we must live as those who manage their lives without God. The same God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34!).The same God who makes us to live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God, and with God, we live without God. God consents to be pushed out of the world and onto the cross; God is weak and powerless in the world and in precisely this way, and only so, is at our side and helps us.”

Chapter 5: Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Powerlessness 1. Martin Kähler, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ, trans. Carl E. Braaten (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964), 80. 2. Albert von Szent-Györgyi, “Das Versprechen der medizinischen Wissenschaft,” in Das umstrittene Experiment: Der Mensch, ed. R. Jungk und H. J. Mundt (Munich: Schweitzer, 1966), 217–25 (here 220). 3. This can be clarified by Wolfgang Schrage’s assertion cited above in chapter two, note 13. Schrage is an exegete and refers

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Notes to what modern exegetical work operates and offers with a claim of historical correctness. However, in this correctness we fail to attend to the rhetorician Walter Jens’s observation: “The attempt to make the one who was completely divine and completely human into a mere human . . . was what the evangelists wanted to present as doomed to failure.” See “Die Evangelisten als Schriftsteller,” in Republikanische Reden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 33–44, 40. The upshot is that exegesis forces the evangelists into a Procrustean bed of their own assumptions and methods and remains related to the problem of how to glue together the resulting shards in some kind of meaningful sense. This obviously indicates a limit. Girard notes it clearly: “The exegetes never see that they who pledge to explain us and to understand are already understood and explained through the text” (ibid., 220). 4. “Do-gooder” was introduced ironically in contrast to the ne’er-do-well in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1978), 1275. 5. Comprehensively developed by Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, trans. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), § 94, 385–89. 6. See above chapter four, note 1. For an illustration, see Das Kreuz als Zeichen, pp. 52–53.

Chapter 6: Cross and Resurrection from the Perspective of Brutal Indifference 1. Gerhard O. Forde, “The Work of Christ,” in Christian Dogmatics, ed. Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 2:1–99 (here 90). 2. Theodor W. Adorno’s reproach to Schiller: Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1951), 190. 3. “The absolute” is in fact an example in Ernst Topitsch’s sense of an “empty formula.” It does not allow itself to be thought. Rather, since we too would merely think it, we would also have literally relativized it. Theologically speaking, “the absolute” would be God hidden in his majesty, the completely hidden God (Deus in maiestate absconditus), over against which Luther (always!) advises caution. 4. I have described a similar instance using the phrase “the holy denunciation.” See Klaus Schwarzwäller, Um die wahre Kirche. Ekklesiologische Studien. Kontexte 20 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), 73–84. The (no longer documented) outcome of the case indicates that, in the Landeskirche, infringement pays. The superintendent, whose promoters did not know what was hap-

Notes pening, misused the office and was elevated to a higher office as bishop. 5. “The Beautiful Confitemini,” Commentary on Psalm 118 (1529–1530), in Luther’s Works, ed. Helmut Lehmann and Jaroslav Pelikan, vol. 14, Selected Psalms III (St. Louis: Concordia, 1958), 78 (D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Briefwechsel [Weimar, 1930–1985], vol. 31, bk. 1, p. 135, line 29ff.).

Chapter 7: Cross and Resurrection as Mystery and Wonder 1. Jörg Baur, “Weisheit und Kreuz,” in Zugang zur Theologie, Festschrift for Wilfried Joest, ed. F. Mildenberger and J. Track (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979), 33–52 (here 45). 2. And to be sure from the beginning: “Despair ends at the cross of Jesus because pride ends there at the same time, the audacity of the rebels along with the darkness of the pious, the distance from God along with the sacred domain. . . . Those who want to make themselves transcendent, indeed those who are not protected by a Christian mask, end before the God who humbles himself.” Ernst Käsemann, Die Heilsbedeutung des Todes Jesu, quoted in ibid., 23. 3. Correspondingly, “the Christian West” as a goal, idea, or value is calamitous. It is a misunderstanding (of self) sundered from its roots, which ignores the fact that Europe is different and includes more than what is spoken of simply as the West. Though they belong to Europe, Bucharest and Sophia, Kiev and Moscow, do not belong to the West! In his 1799 work Die Christenheit oder Europa, Novalis conflated Europe and Roman Catholicism as one and complained about the schism between Wittenberg and Rome. Yet he failed to consider the great schism between Rome and Constantinople in 1053! For all that, a Christianity that expresses itself as limited to Europe (thus, to Constantinople and Rome) is an amputated, parochial, and unecumenical Christendom. We can see how obvious it has become in Dostoyevsky, who portrayed his fictional characters’ travel to foreign countries in the West— Germany, France, Switzerland—as travels to “Europe.” [Translators’ note: Schwarzwäller alludes to Hans Sedlmayr’s 1948 book Verlust der Mitte 1948 (Ulstein, 1995) where Sedlmayr not only deplores the loss of the center in Europe but also shows Europe’s decline as a consequence of it. This booklet was important for all who feared the decline of the so-called Christian West (“Christliches Abendland”), which would then be followed, as they saw it, by chaos, Communism, atheism, and moral devastation.] 4. Gerhard Streminger asserts, “But in a religion which is marked in this respect by such a stark pessimism and whose central

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Notes symbol is not something like the sun but is rather an instrument of martyrdom which must constantly remind us of our Savior’s suffering and our guilt, it will be difficult to establish the assumption of the existence of a beneficent and merciful God.” See Gottes Güte und die Übel der Welt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992), 47. 5. Perhaps the temptation for the church in the present, where questions about values and morals are asked on all sides, is to link salvation with what is positive. 6. Compare Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, trans. Margaret Kohl (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 235ff.; Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, trans. Darrell Guder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 185ff. and 343. 7. Evangelical Lutheran Worship #867. 8. Evangelische Gesangbuch [EG], 502. 9. EG, 371. 10. So because the risen one appeared to him, Paul could develop his theology of the cross and concentrate on the crucified one and on him alone (1 Cor. 1:23; 2:2). In short, playing off the theology of the resurrection and vice versa distorts the theology of the cross in every instance. It is certainly no coincidence that Luther, the theologian of the cross in our tradition, wrote no passion hymns but instead Easter hymns. 11. If it, as it is repeatedly (and quite correctly) asserted in the debate about the resurrection, deals not with a single event as such but rather with a proof of God’s power to create and of his affirmation of life, then the danger of a distortion arises instead. Jesus’ resurrection becomes merely an example (without analogy) of this power, which for its part amounts to a principle about it. In both cases, the error lies in the approach. As observers, we come near to it and order what is perceived. Certainly this falls short of God’s wonder and mystery—and produces the corresponding problem (as the biblical portrayal shows). It is obviously difficult to allow God’s mystery and wonder to stand without analyzing, situating, or categorizing them and instead to worship them and from the midst of worship to obtain the relationship, if even in an intellectual way. 12. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Editorial Commentary on the ‘Fragments’ of Reimarus, 1777,” in Lessing: Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. H. B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 62–63 (translation altered). 13. “Over against such facile, pallid ways of treating these extremely difficult and weighty concepts, which are particularly likely to baffle the beginning student of contemporary theology, what is really important is to grasp the problem in its own clear and definitive meaning.” See Ernst Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, trans. David Reid (Rich-

Notes mond, VA: John Knox, 1971), 57. At my first dance I danced slow waltzes to a hit song with the lyrics, “Love is just a fairy tale / Love is only an illusion . . .” We can hardly prove what such a reduced world takes as real to be imaginary. This is what makes so tiresome the controversy with the tradition mentioned in the foreword. 14. The graphic arts have expressed it in many ways: in Matthias Gruenewald, for instance, not only in the Isenheim Altar’s crucifix but also in the predella’s corpse, or in Hans Holbein the Younger’s Christ in the Grave. Dostoyevsky commented that “supposing that they saw this tortured body, this face so mangled and bleeding and bruised (and they MUST have so seen it)—how could they have gazed upon the dreadful sight and yet believed that he would rise again? Here the thought steps in, whether one likes it or no, that death is so terrible and so powerful, that he who conquered it in his miracles during life was unable to triumph over it at the last.” See The Idiot, trans. Eva Martin and Constance Garnett (Plain Label Books, 1914), 965.

Chapter 8: On the Loss of Wonder and Mystery 1. His famous proposition, “For my part, I should not believe the gospel except as moved [commoveret] by the authority [auctoritas] of the Catholic church” (Against the Epistle of Manichaeus 5.6, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 1, ed. Philip Schaff [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956], 4:131), has a larger context: the authority that is indispensable for any belief is fundamentally based in the gravitas and the trustworthiness (that is, in the quality) of the church. See On the Profit of Believing (De utilitate credenda) 9.21; 16.34; 17.35, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 1, 3:347–66. 2. Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 19. 3. Johannes Christiaan Hoekendijk, Die Zukunft und die Kirche der Zukunft (Stuttgart: Kreuz, 1964), 38, 104. With just a few changes in key words, what was formulated almost forty years ago could describe the present. 4. Ernst Benz rightly calls it a “rationalization and intellectualization of all content of faith,” in Norm und Heiliger Geist in der Geschichte des Christentums in EB 43, 1974, 137–87, 137, cf. also 138ff. 5. Goethe, Faust 2.3, “Inner Castle Yard,” 9545. 6. Karl Heim, Die Auferstehung der Toten (Berlin: Furche, 1936), 9 (emphasis added). We can note the clarity with which Heim, a theologian familiar with physics, sixty years before Lüdemann’s assertion, thoroughly established (to paraphrase it) a purely scientific method of observation and procedure as unavoidable.

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Notes 7. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 2, 1997. 8. “The Beautiful Confitemini” in LW 14, 78. 9. Dietrich Ritschl, Zur Logik der Theologie (Munich: Kaiser, 1984), 141, 342. Compare also Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl (San Francisco: Harper, 1985), 2. 10. Luther’s rendering is thus free: the somewhat difficult halfverse allows room for play in its translation. It literally reads: “And there will be only quaking, allowing insight to arise from the message.” 11. WADB 11 I, 91. 12. In that way the emancipation of science as counter to God’s Spirit arrived, in contrast to what prevailed earlier: “According to Gregory of Nyssa the entire scientifically knowable world is subordinate to the Holy Spirit” (and not only according to Gregory!). Staats, ibid., 260 (see above, chapter two, note XX). 13. See Book of Concord, trans. Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 299, lines 10ff. 14. See Apology 4, par. 189, BSLK [AQ: Please provide full publication info for BSLK since there is no abbreviations page.]197, 45–58, which was replaced in the quarto edition and not included in the standard English editions. Politia means the civil order; perhaps we can translate the word best here with “reality of government” (Verfassungswirklichkeit).

Chapter 9: Sin and Justification 1. Otherwise “sin” would become a merely theoretical thing with which only insiders deal. For the following, see my article: “Sünde—Schuld—Fehler,” in Kerygma und Dogma 45 (1999): 21–47. 2. Werner Elert, Der christliche Glaube. Grundlinien lutherischer Dogmatik (Hamburg: Im Furche-Verlag, 1960), 90 (emphasis in original). English translation: The Christian Faith: An Outline of Lutheran Dogmatics, trans. Martin H. Bertram and Walter R. Bouman (n. p., 1974), 53. 3. Hanns-Stephan Haas, Bekannte Sünde. Eine systematische Untersuchung zum theologischen Reden von der Sünde in der Gegenwart (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlagsgesellschaft, 1992), 254. 4. Ernst Käsemann, “Unterwegs zum Bleibenden. Bibelarbeit über 1 Korinther 13:1-3,” in Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag Berlin 1977, Dokumente (Stuttgart: Kreuz-Verlag, 1977), 84–102 (here 85). 5. We misunderstand this narrow way if, within the entire context of the Sermon on the Mount, including the overarching Beatitudes at the beginning, we fail to see the certitude that God per-

Notes ceives what is hidden, the encouragement to be care-free because God himself cares for us, and so forth, along with the general demand for total devotion (“be perfect,” Matt. 5:48) and faithful surrender to this God, which appears between 5:20 and the socalled antitheses, the “woe passages” in 5:48. 6. Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, Briefe (Berlin: K. H. Henssel, 2006), 75. 7. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Der Garten des Menschlichen. Beiträge zur geschichtlichen Anthropologie, 6th edition (Munch: Hanser, 1978), 590. 8. “The Beautiful Confitemini,” in Luther’s Works, ed. Helmut Lehmann and Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia, 1958), 14:78. 9. Michael Trowitzsch, “Evangelische Theologie und Wirklichkeitsaneignung,” in Wissen als Verantwortung, ed. H. P. Mueller (Stuttgart: Kolhammer, 1991), 101-12, 111.

Chapter 10: God’s Untimeliness 1. “Das Martyrium des Mar Giwagis,” cited in Bibliothek der Kirchenväter, ed. O. Bardenhewer et al., vol. 22 (1915), 266. 2. Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions, trans. Margaret Kohl (San Francisco: Harper, 1990), 177. 3. So it is patently ignorant of theologians to dismiss the question about whether or not this dogma agrees with Scripture. Such a question is about as smart as asking whether freeze-drying occurs in nature, as if this concept did not simply express this natural phenomenon! Naturally, we could discuss the appropriateness of our concepts, semiotics, and the like. The dogmas of the ancient church thus naturally sound so strange because their discourse establishes biblical expressions in a specific linguistic and conceptual relationship. Problems first arise when we confuse text, dogma, and faith; however, suggesting these kinds of conceptual errors as a critique of dogma is to miss noticing the cold. 4. Naturally, we could point to belief in witches and demons, fear of comets, etc. We need but only look at the Gulag Archipelago, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, or the fabricated “clean” torture in Algeria in the 1950s, and above all that which led to similar sorts of things, as genuine indicators of our age, to say nothing, for example, of the modern superstition about numbers (in science or economics). Incidentally, Jesus Christ himself is a virtual refutation of this (somewhat obtuse) superstition. Even today, he also moves and even stimulates unbelievers, although by now he is quantite negligeable, hardly measurably existent in a quantifiable, statistical way, and he removes every proof in those places where

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Notes he moves and challenges. Hence, modernity has objections to both the medieval and our own reality. More to the point, stereotypes belong to the sociology of knowledge. 5. Not to mention related matters such as theories about secularization, which not only in form but also in content transform Christianity into a purely worldly mode; or the resulting theories of individualization where even religious content is appropriated in an individual-biographical manner; or even (in another arena) the subsystem model, which cultivates religion within the overall social system or the church as part of the system with a highly complex relationship to the whole. We must clearly note that all these designations explain nothing but are instead purely descriptive: they delineate the space that should make a possibly conclusive description of the givens possible. 6. For research arises from intuition about what is unproven, even unthought, perhaps even unsubstantiated! Because it is a self-evident platitude, apart from this dogma we can understand that marriage, hope, and everything essential for life are in general possible only as they correspond to a sphere beyond what is indicated by this dogma (and only there). 7. Or does something completely different also lie behind it? See the depiction in Andre Gide’s novella The Return of the Prodigal Son (Die Rückkehr des verlorenen Sohnes), in which the younger brother is simultaneously pushed out and drawn back to the house. 8. We can see this fragmentation in the increasingly blurred boundaries between science and industry, science and business, and science and politics, among others. Plainly, science is ever less “objective,” ever less free, yet increasingly defined by the times and bound up with interests. Thus, its establishment of goals is compulsively reduced to an all-consuming positivistic scientific theory of methodically correct operations. So it is universally useful (for example, the main point of a knife is that it cuts, but it is indifferent to what or whom it cuts!), and in its universal utility the theory has universally served tyrants and slaughterers of people in all their disciplines at least since the middle of the twentieth century. 9. This is also true with respect to the doctrine of justification, which in recent years has been intensively dealt with among confessional traditions and which specifically and at great cost needs to be imparted to the present, thus proving that the fad lost its place among us. Many of these mediating attempts are brilliant but simultaneously problematic. Two matters arise through them. First, the problems and perspectives of the sixteenth century in relation to the present are different to the point of incompatibility. Second, it is our corresponding task to announce God’s justification in the

Notes present and in view of our current perceptions of problems, and thus to formulate it new throughout. 10. Johann Baptist Metz, “Verantwortung der Theologie” in Wissen als Verantwortung, ed. H. P. Müller (Stuttgart: Kolhammer, 1991), 113–26 (here 114).

Chapter 11: The Language of Cross and Resurrection 1. This it was what the masses called out on their way through Leipzig in the fall of 1989, thus sweeping away the Communist regime in East Germany. 2. Arising from this are the justice and inner logic of prooftexting, to which we occasionally resort and which strikes us as troublesome. This is even present in Scripture, for example, when the New Testament refers back to the Old Testament. This also forms the background for much later textual insertions like Isa. 6:12ff.: they note that the new is awakened by the respective expressions and by insertion attribute it to the original text. That is, the insertion is a (former) form of adscription. Sadly, the exegetical research on this is notably insufficient and, moreover, is still biased by, among others, the categories “real” and “later addition,” through which the distinction becomes blurred and the adscription is brought into twilight. 3. Cited in Bonner Ausgabe, Luthers Werke in Auswahl, ed. Otto Clemen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1929), 8:59, num. 467 (March 1533). 4. In part, this is simply childish. So, for example, Romans 8:38 is used instead of Luther’s “I am certain . . .” just as it is literally used against nearly every other instance of the phrase. The same thoughtlessness lies at its base as the philologically correct translation “and make disciples” in Matthew’s last chapter, which disregards it thoughtlessly (or with secret premeditation?), so that the present connotation is of making and manipulating. We could learn from Luther that correct translation can be false and that what is daring can be exact and appropriate. 5. Hymns and liturgical formulas naturally create exceptions, as, for example, Ephesians 1:1-14; Philippians 2:5-11; or 1 Corinthians 11:23-26. 6. In so many ways this precisely captures the idealistically misunderstood and Gnostic, that is, anthropo-sophist misuses of John’s Gospel (John 1:1-18). We have seen the glory of the word, since the word became flesh. We recognized the dignity of Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of the Father in that he was in the world and came to his own, remained alien here, and, in the end, was stamped out.

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Cross and Resurrection 7. This may sound presumptuous, yet it corresponds to the task and tradition of the prophets whose proclamation “creatively effectuate” events (Gerhard von Rad, Theology of the Old Testament, trans. D. M. G. Stalker [New York: Harper and Row, 1965], 2:92, cf. 69), just as accomplishing God’s will immediately through their testimony, and forgiving and retaining sins, was granted to the disciples. Indeed, it is the basis for all proclamation, by which it is plainly categorically distinguished from information, propaganda, indoctrination, or persuasion, among others. Augustine grasped it precisely within his answer to the objection that the elect who were chosen by God before all time were no longer subject to brotherly rebuke. Conversely, it may be exactly this which (in my words) brings to fullness and establishes the election.

Chapter 12: Open Horizons 1. Walter Jens, “Die christliche Predigt: Manipulation oder Verkündigung?” in Republikanische Reden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 13–32 (here 21). Esperanto is an artificial language, based on word roots common to the major languages of Europe, invented in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof. 2. “Bondage of the Will,” in Luther’s Works, ed. Helmut Leh­ mann and Jaroslav Pelikan, vol. 33, Career of the Reformer III (St. Louis: Concordia, 1986), 85. 3. “Laity” in the sense that they are shaped neither theologically nor in some other churchly way. In other words, they have all spiritual rights, in contrast to the Roman Catholic understanding, in which the laity are fundamentally distinguished from priests because they are not ordained. 4. Remember, according to the Augsburg Confession (XIV) “church orders” take place within the ordered vocation for the sake of public proclamation of the gospel (and administration of the sacraments and the keys) as the office of the church (article V), the perception of which defines the office of bishop and pastor (Article XXVIII). So “church order” means service for the gospel, by which the church lives and is defined. In the same vein, Luther notes that the church “cannot be better ruled and preserved than if we all live under one head, Christ, and all the bishops [that is, bishops and pastors]—equal according to their office (although they may be unequal in their gifts)—keep diligently together in unity of teaching [that is, proclamation], faith, sacraments, prayers, and works of love, etc.” (“Smalcald Articles,” Part II, article 4 in the Book of Concord, 308:9). 5. Jim Wallis, Soul of Politics: Beyond “Religious Right” and “Secular Left” (New York: Harcourt Trade, 1995), 161 and 176.

Brief, brilliant treatments of vital aspects of faith and life

Klaus Schwarzwäller presents a trenchant analysis of the modes of power and production and the dependence on reason and theory that have undergirded society since the Enlightenment and of the implications this has had for the Christian faith. As a result, the heart and soul of the Christian faith—the cross and resurrection of Jesus—are seen to be accessible only through expert interpretation. But the character of Christian faith, indeed all faith, is mystery and wonder—“the mystery of the holy and wonder at those things not bound by our laws and possibilities.” The cross excludes our control; the power of the resurrection ensures that the negativity of human life borne on the cross will be overcome.

Klaus Schwarzwäller is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at the University of Göttingen and author of numerous books and articles. Religion/Theology

Schwarzwäller

Schwarzwäller calls the church and theologians to relinquish both their conformity to society and the indifference that power and production create and instead focus on tending to God’s word so that the cross and resurrection, which are opened only to those who are open to them, are again revealed in the fullness of God’s wonder and mystery.

Cross and Resurrection

Finding truth in the reality of faith—