No Codependent God

On the insufferable fashion for divine suffering

Holy Saturday seems a particularly good day to point out that at the conclusion of five (that’s right, five) magnificent volumes that survey the theology, imagery and music of the cross through the centuries, Richard Viladesau—after sensitively engaging the perspectives of Bulgakov and Moltmann who argue (to varying degrees) for suffering in God—rightfully resists. He culminates his reflection by showing the classical position of divine impassibility to be vastly superior. You can disagree, of course; but I’d at least spend a few minutes with at least one of these staggeringly well-researched volumes (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), volumes on the cross no less, before you call such a view uncompassionate or naive. Here’s how Viladesau puts it:

God does not need to suffer [as we might] in order to recognize suffering as an evil; nor does God need to be moved [as we do] to attend to others. If God suffers, the suffering would seem to serve no positive function: it cannot move God to be more loving, nor can it educate God about creatures’ situation [which is how it often works with us]. Hence if God suffers with creatures, it would seem God’s suffering “sympathy” must be an instrinsic part of the divine being, and hence an aspect of the Good itself. But wouldn’t that mean that suffering is not really evil? Or, if suffering is an evil, would the affirmation of divine suffering logically lead to affirming that at least some kind of evil, some lack of goodness and joy, is an intrinsic part of the divine? (369)

In other words, if theopaschite theology doesn’t make you at least a little bit sick to your stomach, I’m not sure you’ve understood it. Viladesau continues:

It seems to me that to affirm a “love that wishes to suffer” with regard to God is an instance of anthropomorphic projection. Moreover, it seems to project onto God not a universal human attribute, nor a universal quality of goodness or love, but rather an emotional characteristic of a certian type of personalitgy (cf. William James’s distinction between the “tender-hearted” and the “tough-minded”), and under certain conditions that are not clearly universal. Would not genuine love reject the suffering, and try to end it, rather than increasing the “amount” of suffering in the world by sharing in it?… It would seem that the goal of sympathy must be—or at least must include—the elimination of suffering… How does literally enduring evil along with the suffering help toward this goal? …The desire for a suffering God appears not merely as anthropocentrism, but also as egocentrism” (371).

Ultimately, Viladesau concludes, with art and music as much of his witness as verbal theology, that “the affirmation that ‘God suffers’ is… a statement about an imaginary being that does not correspond to what we can reasonably mean by the word ‘God’’ (366). He explains by exploring the mystery of Holy Saturday:

Christian belief holds that Christ “descended into hell” as conquereor, and ended its power. But the salvific power of the cross is negated if the negativity of the cross—Godless suffering—is made into a quality of God. As Balthasar says, this would signify an unconquered and unconquerable hell. As Boff also saw, if God suffers, then God must be suffering; and this undermines the possibility of any theology of liberation. It is possible to speak of God as being “in” human (and other?) suffering, and of human suffering as being “in” God (note the saptiotemporal metaphor). But if we are speaking of God as God, rather that as “God-in/as-God’s-other,” that is, as God communicates God’s self to be “participated” by others—does it make any sense to speak of God suffering? (Tientai Buddhism attempted to avoid this problem by asserting that there was “some” evil in the Buddha-nature. But is such an evasion possible in a Christian, Muslim, or Hindu metaphysics that affirms that infinity and simplicity of God?) (376)

Some feel the need to submit to the new theopaschite orthodoxy because they feel it is more “pastoral.” But Viladesau points out that in his pastoral work at least, it has not been. “Why would the affirmation of suffering in God do any good to anyone who is in the situation of suffering? Could one not just as well argue… that for those who are suffering, it would lead in a negative direction: despair, rather than hope?” (370). On similar lines, I remember a sermon once preached at Nassau Presbyterian Church where a woman resisted the Moltmannian fashion in the boldest of ways. “When my son was in the ER with an asthma attack,” she told us, “I didn’t just want a God who was in that pit with us. I wanted a God who could get us out.”

Perhaps the saddest things about what Alister McGrath (not approvingly) names the “new orthodoxy” of theopaschism is that classical theology was, and is, already compassionate to the utmost extreme. That tradition teaches that God is not “other” than creation as we typically understand otherness. God is not, as more and more theologians are lately rediscovering, in competition with reality. Accordingly, Rahner can argue that “God can suffer ‘in’ creatures without losing God’s intrinsic impassibility in God’s own being….”

For Rahner, in consonance with the classical tradition, God “experiences” — or rather is—compassion, empathy, and the like, as the transcendent/immanent source of these qualities, not as the one who experiences them in response to God’s creatures. God does not react to human pain as something coming from outside—such an assertion would reduce God to a categorical being. Rather, God inspires and is the cry of pain, the rejection of evil, the instinct to solidarity, and so forth. (374).

I find notion that the God of perfect bliss can also be the cry of pain much more compelling, not to mention compassionate, than Hegel’s claim that “the finite, the fragile, the weak, the negative are themselves a moment of the divine… they are within God himself” (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 468). Hegel has many fine insights; but that’s not one of them.

Christ suffered—really suffered in his real humanity—while somehow remaining divinely impassible. This is a great mystery. Thanks be to the God who not only enters the pit with us, but gets us out.