Abstract
A number of theologians and philosophers have found theodical value in the theme of divine solidarity with human suffering. To further develop this theme, I examine what it would mean to assert that Christ on the cross participated in a representative sample of human suffering. Particular attention is paid to Christ’s cry of dereliction. I argue that if God through Christ identified with the very worst kinds of human suffering on the cross, then the cry of dereliction should be interpreted as indicating an epistemic break between God and Christ, and not merely an attentional disruption. According to this account, Christ’s death cry expressed his temporary inability to grasp the significance of his passion and death. In this way, Christ on the cross suffered the full effects of divine hiddenness, thus sharing with horror-sufferers the experience of meaning-negating suffering.
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Notes
Adams’s notion of horrendous evils recognizes an important aesthetic dimension to the worst kinds of suffering. Healthy human beings are capable of taking the chaotic flux of experiences in their lives and filtering and ordering such data to fit into a comprehensible narrative. Like artists, our ability to ascribe positive significance to our lives and construct meaning and purpose is dependent upon our capacity to aesthetically organize the material of our lives into a meaningful and cohesive whole (1999: 146). A life polluted with horrendous suffering will lack any sensible congruity or coherent narrative; such evils “overwhelm meaning-making capacities, prima facie stumping us, furnishing strong reason to believe that lives marred by horrors can never again be unified or integrated into wholes with positive meaning” (1999: 148). Note, this sort of picture of life-as-narrative is not unchallenged in the literature. For arguments against the Psychological Narrativity Thesis, see Strawson (2004).
The language of Christ’s experiencing a “representative sample” of suffering can be found in Adams (1999: 174).
Note: There are some very complicated theological issues in the background here concerning the interaction between Christ’s human mind and his divine mind, which are simply beyond the scope of this paper.
It does not matter so much whether one takes this to be an authentic historical report of Jesus’s dying words or not, so long as this expression is taken to represent a genuine theological reality regarding the event of Jesus’s suffering and death.
For an extremely helpful survey of the various interpretive options, both historical and contemporary, see McCall (2012: Chapter 1).
Crucial to one’s ability to share themselves with another person, according to Stump, is that they possess psychic integration. A person is psychically divided and thus incapable of sharing certain parts of themselves whenever there is a clash between higher order desires and first order desires, or if that person is self-deceived about their own beliefs and desires (2010: 124). However, it is possible to question whether psychic integration is a prerequisite for the enjoyment of mutual closeness. A person might have clashing higher and lower order desires, but if they are willing to share such conflicting attitudes with another, why think such internal division inhibits mutual closeness? In fact, it seems plausible that the union between two persons can be strengthened when each is willing to share such inner conflict with the other.
Stump argues that the doctrine of divine omnipresence should be understood not only in terms of direct cognitive and causal contact with everything in creation, but also implies that God is always willing to engage in joint attention with any person able and willing to share attention with God (2010: 117).
For this list, I have modified Stump’s terminology, and have also adopted a slightly different list of interpretive possibilities than Stump’s (2012: 4).
McCall (2012) argues further that any view which promotes that the Father in some way rejected Christ, makes a serious ontological blunder with regard to orthodox Trinitarian theology.
Stump argues that the doctrine of divine omnipresence should be understood not only in terms of direct cognitive and causal contact with everything in creation, but also implies that God is always willing to engage in joint attention with any person able and willing to share attention with God (2010: 117). It could be challenged that many devout religious believers seek the sort of joint attention with God that Stump describes, but experience only a feeling of abandonment. Is this due to a disordered will? One is reminded of Mother Theresa, whose personal letters revealed a person who, for decades, felt deserted by God. Stump’s formulation of divine omnipresence seems to imply that situations like Mother Theresa’s necessarily reveal a defect in character—a lack of willingness to share attention with God. Is this plausible? It seems possible that there are things in the world—conditions of oppression and suffering—that could mask God’s attention upon the believer.
More on this below.
Whether or not there are exegetical grounds for such a claim, Bauckham convincingly argues that by alluding to Psalm 22, Jesus’s dying words can at the very least be read as an act of identification with all who suffer in anguish and in incomprehension of the God who fails to deliver (2008: 255–257).
To be absolutely clear: Christ experiences abandonment, but not God the Father. Likewise, it is only Christ who experiences divine hiddenness. The language here purposefully alludes to Moltmann’s own theology of the cross, wherein he is also careful to differentiate Christ’s suffering from the suffering of the Father (1974: 243). However, I have departed from Moltmann and Adams by upholding (or at least not contesting) the Father’s impassibility. It might be objected, then, that in affirming the doctrine of impassibility, I have cordoned off from God the possibility of suffering, and thus the thesis of this paper—that God through Christ on the cross participated in a representative sample of human suffering—is moot. Thus the objection would be that I have equivocated in my use of the term “God” above, for it is actually only the human mind of Christ which experiences suffering; the divine mind of Christ does not actually suffer an attentional and epistemic rupture. I claimed above in footnote three that it is beyond the scope of this paper to engage the literature and debates concerning how best to understand the two natures of Christ and their relation in the hypostatic union. However, completely sidestepping the issue might seem disingenuous given the argument of the paper. To gesture at a reply, then, I venture two theses. First, the question of God’s impassibility can in fact be distinguished into two separate questions. On the one hand, we might ask whether God considered apart from the incarnation is impassible. I have answered in the affirmative. On the other hand, I think it is a rather different question to ask whether God qua the incarnation is impassible. And it is with regard to this latter question that I am more willing to skirt orthodox commitments, bite the proverbial bullet, and affirm that Christ, in his humanity and divinity, experiences genuine suffering—that Christ qua God was not quarantined from the horrendous suffering of the cross. While I cannot spell out the details for such a view here, most generally, it is entirely unclear how God’s assumption of human nature is supposed to do any soteriological work if the divine nature of Christ is entirely insulated from the world and humanity.
Another lurking objection that goes hand-in-hand with the FBO concerns the contrasting accounts of Christ’s crucifixion given by the different Gospels. How does one reconcile the demeanor of the Godforsaken Christ in Mark, with the much-less-troubled and more self-assured Christ portrayed in Luke’s account of the crucifixion? Providing a thorough or satisfactory answer to the problem of inconsistencies between the various Gospels goes beyond the scope of this paper. However, I make two brief remarks here. First, any interpretation of Christ’s death which seeks to find theological significance in the cry of dereliction will most likely run into this problem, and therefore it is not a problem unique to the interpretation argued for in this paper. Second, I would gesture that the hypothesis of Markan priority might give some precedence to the historicity of Mark’s account, while latter Gospel accounts might be said to give a more theological interpretation of the events.
Special thanks to Rebecca Lloyd Waller for raising a version of this objection and stressing the need for a response.
While Adams emphasizes the aesthetic dimensions of horrendous evils, more could be said about the impact such evils have on a person’s emotional economy.
Rath approvingly cites Stump’s interpretation of the cry of dereliction, but takes this interpretation to entail that Christ on the cross lacks a belief that God is present to and loves him (162). However, to suggest that Christ lacks such a belief seems to imply the sort of epistemic break that Stump resists. Regardless, Rath is less interested in the nature of God’s absence in Jesus’s death-cry, than in working out the relation between belief and propositional faith. As such, the interpretation of the cry of dereliction offered in this paper differs significantly from Rath’s in emphasizing the epistemic disruption between Christ and God at the cross, and how this disruption may allow Christ to experience the sort of existential confusion requisite for an experience of horrendous suffering.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the audiences at Ohio Northern University and Wheaton College for helpful discussion, comments, and questions. Thanks also to Eric Wiland, Rebecca Lloyd Waller, Jon McGinnis, Billy Dunaway, Zach Manis, and an anonymous reviewer for constructive comments on previous drafts of this paper. And special thanks to Gina Cordoví for providing extensive editing and feedback on several versions of this paper.
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Bell, W.L. God hidden from God: on theodicy, dereliction, and human suffering. Int J Philos Relig 88, 41–55 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09729-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09729-8