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Christianity Today, March, 2007 |

Reflections

Suffering God

Quotations to stir heart and mind.

posted 3/05/2007 08:58AM

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HE WAS DESPISED and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity. … Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
Isaiah 53:3-5 (NRSV)

THERE IS GOOD biblical evidence that God not only suffered in Christ, but that God in Christ suffers with his people still. … It is wonderful that we may share in Christ's sufferings; it is more wonderful still that he shares in ours.
John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ

HAS NOT GOD in Jesus Christ become radically open to the life of the world and become vulnerable to human sin and suffering? In the light of the gospel story, God is not impassible, but passionate, suffering love. If God is love, then receptivity, vulnerability, and suffering are not strange to God's being. God is free to love and thus free to experience the suffering of the world.
Daniel L. Migliore, The Power of God

UNLESS GOD is on the balance and throws his weight as a counterbalance, we shall sink to the bottom of the scale. If it is not true that God died for us, but only a man died, we are lost. But if God's death and God lie dead in the opposite scale, then his side goes down and we go upward like a light or empty pan. But he could not have sat in the pan unless he became a man like us, so that it could be said: God dead, God's passion, God's blood, God's death.
Martin Luther, quoted in the Formula of Concord

IT IS A GOOD THING to learn early that God and suffering are not opposites but rather one and the same thing and necessarily so; for me, the idea that God himself suffers is far and away the most convincing piece of Christian doctrine.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

GOD not only participates in our suffering, but also makes our suffering into his own and takes death into his life.
Jurgen Moltmann, in Theology Today

A THEOLOGY that embraces the idea that God cannot suffer has to answer the question: Can God love? Abraham Heschel rightly said that the essence of Hebraic prophetic faith is that God takes the people of his covenantal love so seriously that he suffers for their actions.
Dennis Ngien, in Christianity Today

GRANT, O LORD, that in your wounds I may find my safety, in your stripes my cure, in your pain my peace, in your Cross my victory, in your Resurrection my triumph, and a crown of righteousness in the glories of your eternal kingdom.
Jeremy Taylor, The Westminster Collection of Christian Prayers

Related Elsewhere:

Other Lent, Holy Week, and Easter reflections include:

Lenten Inventory (February 1, 2004)

His Body, His Blood (June 2005)

Good Friday (April 3, 2000)

Jesus' Cross (March 1, 2004)

Crucifixion (March 11, 2002)

Holy Week (April 1, 2006)

Holy Week (April 23, 2001)

Cross and Resurrection (April 1, 2003)

Easter Sunday (April 3, 2000)

He is Risen (April 1, 2004)

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March 2007, Vol. 51, No. 3

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ElephantAndCross

Posted: March 05, 2007 2:37 PM

Bill Roach: "For if God is affected by an outside source it means that there is a cause of potency within the nature of God. Which means there is a creator for the Creator." I'm not entirely sure what the first sentence means but if you are saying that denying impassiblity entails that God is a contingent being, I think you're mistaken. I'm not sure how you've arrived at that conclusion. Still, it seems that you are actually talking about immuatibility, which is closely related to impassibility. Immutability does, indeed, entail that God's relationship with humans cannot be dynamic. If there can be no change in his being whatsoever then there can be no dynamic interaction with individuals. I don't quite understand how anyone maintains that God is atemporal and immutable. After all, the second person of the trinity did take on a human nature. There is some obvious "before and after" to his life (contra atemporality) and some obvious change to his nature (contra immutability).

Trevor

Posted: March 10, 2007 4:18 PM

God made us in his image, and if there was not something inherently good in suffering (and only God is good) then he would not have made us able to suffer just like Him. Just think about how important it is to mourn with those who mourn and to celebrate with joy with those who rejoice. What a flat idol of a god our God would be if he was so abstracted and divorced from us that he did not suffer just as any person (Person in his case) would. Just because we refer to Him as a Person with a capital "P" to show our respect for His Majesty does not make him any less of a full person.

William

Posted: March 05, 2007 12:03 PM

God by definition is not beyond coprehension. Have you ever heard of analogy? Does that comment or thought of God in which you made go beyond comprehension? That is a contradiction. It is better to believe that God is known in so far as Act to act is known. It does not mean that one's knowledge is exhaustive, but what can be known is known via analogy. Second, it is a red herring to say that the 3 A's are wrong without proving it. This was held by all the creeds, Fathers, medievals, reformers, and contemporaries. You have to prove them wrong. Bill has offered a very strong refutation, in which you did not respond to his comment on God is Pure Actuality with no Potentiality. If you can prove that God's being is not the same as his essence, then ok di-polar theism wins the day. But you need to respond to Aquinas in the summa if you are going to win that argument. Also, he does not mean that all of God is caused, but only the suffered part. So again you have a caused part in the Uncasued.