God on the Gallows

Since his appointment 40 years ago as rector of All Souls Church, Langham Place, London, John R. W. Stott has increasingly influenced the direction of evangelical thought. He introduced “scholarly evangelism,” insisting that a person could and should be both a Christian and an intellectual. And more recently, through the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity and through his two-volume Involvement (Revell, 1984, 1985), he has stressed the importance of social awareness and social action for the integrity of Christian faith.

Now Stott has produced what may be his most important theological work, The Cross of Christ (InterVarsity Press). In its 384 pages, Stott addresses multiple aspects of the Atonement with his characteristic depth and clarity. In preparing the study, Stott was struck that (until two very recent books) no comprehensive book on the Cross had been written for thoughtful (but not scholarly) readers for 50 years. In The Cross of Christ, Stott hopes to rescue the great biblical concepts of substitution, satisfaction, and propitiation from misunderstanding and neglect. But in the following excerpt, he soothes the raw nerve of our pain with the Cross’s message of the God who suffers with us.

The real sting of suffering is not misfortune itself, nor even the pain or the injustice of it, but the apparent God-forsakenness of it. Pain is endurable, but the seeming indifference of God is not. Sometimes we picture him lounging, perhaps dozing, in some celestial deck chair, while the hungry millions starve to death. We think of him as an armchair spectator, almost gloating over the world’s suffering, and enjoying his own insulation.

The Cross smashes to smithereens this terrible caricature of God. We are not to envisage him on a deck chair, but on a cross. The God who allows us to suffer, once suffered himself in Christ, and continues to suffer with us and for us today. The Cross of Christ is the proof of God’s personal, loving solidarity with us in our pain.

Since the Cross was a once-for-all historical event, in which God in Christ bore our sins and died our death because of his love and justice, we must not think of it as expressing an eternal sinbearing in the heart of God. But Scripture does give us warrant to say that God’s eternal holy love, which was uniquely exhibited in the sacrifice of the Cross, continues to suffer with us in every situation in which it is called forth.

Can God Suffer?

But is it legitimate to speak of a suffering God? Are we not impeded from doing so by the traditional doctrine of the divine impassibility?

The Latin adjective impassibilis means “incapable of suffering” and therefore “devoid of emotion.” Its Greek equivalent apaths was applied by the philosophers to God, whom they declared to be above pleasure and pain, since these would interrupt his tranquillity.

The early Greek fathers of the church took over this notion somewhat uncritically. In consequence, their teaching about God sometimes sounds more Greek than Hebrew. It was also ambivalent. True, they knew that Jesus Christ the Incarnate Son suffered, but not God himself. Ignatius wrote to Polycarp, for example, of the God “who cannot suffer, who for our sakes accepted suffering,” that is in Christ. Similarly, Irenaeus affirmed that by reason of Incarnation “the invisible was made visible, the incomprehensible comprehensible, and the impassible passible.”

And it is true that they knew the Old Testament authors wrote freely of the love, pity, anger, sorrow, and jealousy of God. But they added that these were anthropomorphisms, which were not to be taken literally, since the divine nature was unmoved by all emotions. Gregory Thaumaturgus in the third century even wrote that “in his suffering God shows his impassibility.”

These and other ancient church fathers were wanting above all to safeguard the truths that God is perfect (so that nothing can add to or subtract from him) and that God is changeless (so that nothing can disturb him). We today should still maintain these truths. God cannot be influenced against his will from either outside or inside. He is never the unwilling victim of either actions that affect him from without or emotions that upset him from within.

As Archbishop William Temple put it, “There is a highly technical sense in which God, as Christ revealed him, is ‘without passions’; for he is Creator and supreme, and is never ‘passive’ in the sense of having things happen to him except with his consent; also he is constant, and free from gusts of feeling carrying him this way and that.” Nevertheless, Temple rightly went on to say that the term impassible as used by most theologians really meant “incapable of suffering,” and that “in this sense its predication of God is almost wholly false.”

It is true that Old Testament language is an accommodation to our human understanding, and that God is represented as experiencing human emotions. Yet, to acknowlege that his feelings are not human is not to deny that they are real. If they are only metaphorical, “then,” in the language of Vincent Tymms, “the only God left to us will be the infinite iceberg of metaphysics.”

Infinite Concern

The passionate God of the Hebrew prophets is a sharp contrast to this metaphysical iceberg. We may be thankful to the Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel who in his book The Prophets calls attention to their theology of God’s pathos (feeling). Old Testament “anthropo-pathisms” (which ascribe human suffering to God) are not to be rejected as crude or primitive, he writes, but rather to be welcomed as crucial to our understanding of him: “The most exalted idea applied to God is not infinite wisdom, infinite power, but infinite concern.” Thus, before the flood Yahweh was “grieved” that he had made human beings, “and his heart was filled with pain,” and when his people were oppressed by foreigners during the time of the judges, Yahweh “could bear Israel’s misery no longer.”

Most striking of all are the occasions when through the prophets God expresses his “yearning” and “compassion” for his people and addresses Israel directly: “I have loved you with an everlasting love.… Can a mother forget a baby at her breast?… Though she may forget, I will not forget you.… How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel?… My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused.”

The Feelings Of Jesus

If God’s full and final self-revelation was given in Jesus, however, then his feelings and sufferings are an authentic reflection of the feelings and sufferings of God himself. The gospel writers attribute to him the whole range of human emotions, from love and compassion through anger and indignation to sorrow and joy. The stubbornness of human hearts caused him distress and anger. Outside Lazarus’ tomb, in the face of death, he both “wept” with grief and “snorted” with indignation. He wept again over Jerusalem, and uttered a lament over her blindness and obstinacy. And still today he is able “to sympathize with our weaknesses,” feeling with us in them (Mark 3:5; John 11:35, 38; Luke 13:34f.; Luke 19:41ff.; Heb. 4:15).

The best way to confront the traditional view of the impassibility of God, however, is to ask “what meaning there can be in a love that is not costly to the lover.” If love is self-giving, then it is inevitably vulnerable to pain, since it exposes itself to the possibility of rejection and insult. It is “the fundamental Christian assertion that God is love,” writes Jürgen Moltmann, “which in principle broke the spell of the Aristotelian doctrine of God” (i.e., as “impassible”). “Were God incapable of suffering …, then he would also be incapable of love,” whereas “the one who is capable of love is also capable of suffering, for he opens himself to the suffering which is involved in love.” That is surely why Bonhoeffer wrote from prison to his friend Eberhard Bethge, nine months before his execution: “Only the Suffering God can help.”

Worthy of special mention, as a doughty opponent of false views of the divine impassibility, is the Japanese Lutheran scholar Kazoh Kitamori. He wrote his remarkable book Theology of the Pain of God in 1945, not long after the first atomic bombs had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was inspired, he tells us, by Jeremiah 31:20, where God describes his heart as “yearning” or “pained” for Ephraim, even as “broken.” “The heart of the gospel was revealed to me as the ‘pain of God’, ” he writes. To begin with, God’s anger against sin gives him pain. “This wrath of God is absolute and firm. We may say that the recognition of God’s wrath is the beginning of wisdom.” But God loves the very people with whom he is angry. So “the ‘pain’ of God reflects his will to love the object of his wrath.” It is his love and his wrath that together produce his pain. For here, in Luther’s arresting phrase, is “God striving with God.” Says Kitamori, “The fact that this fighting God is not two different gods but the same God causes his pain.” The pain of God is “a synthesis of his wrath and love” and is “his essence.” It was supremely revealed in the Cross. For “the ‘pain of God’ results from the love of the One who intercepts and blocks his wrath towards us, the One who himself is smitten by his wrath.” This strikingly bold phraseology helps us understand how God’s pain continues whenever his wrath and love, his justice and mercy, are in tension today.

The Cross And The Destitute

During the second half of this century, there have probably been two outstanding examples of human suffering—the first being hunger and poverty on a global scale, and the second the Nazi Holocaust of six million Jews. How does the Cross speak to such evils as these?

It is reckoned that one billion people today, because they lack the basic necessities of life, may rightly be described as “destitute.” Many of them eke out a pitiful existence in the slums and shantytowns of Africa and Asia, the barriadas of Spanish Latin America, and the favelas of Brazil. The penury of the people, the overcrowding in their ramshackle shelters, the lack of elementary sanitation, the virtual nakedness of the children, the hunger, disease, unemployment, and absence of education—all this adds up to a horrific tally of human need. It is not surprising that such slums are hotbeds of bitterness and resentment; the wonder is that the sheer inhumanity and injustice of it all does not breed an even more virulent anger. Rolf Italiaander imagines a poor man from one of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, who climbs laboriously to the colossal statue of Christ 2,310 feet above Rio. The poor man speaks to “the Christ of Corcovado”:

“I have climbed up to you, Christ, from the filthy, confined quarters down there … to put before you, most respectfully, these considerations: there are 900,000 of us down there in the slums of that splendid city.… And you, Christ, … do you remain here at Corcovado surrounded by divine glory? Go down there into the favelas. Come with me into the favelas and live with us down there. Don’t stay away from us; live among us and give us new faith in you and in the Father. Amen.”

What would Christ say in response to such an entreaty? Would he not say, “I did come down to live among you, and I live among you still?”

This is, in fact, how some Latin American theologians are presenting the Cross today. In his Christology at the Crossroads, for example, Prof. Jon Sobrino of El Salvador develops a protest both against a purely academic theology that fails to take appropriate action and against the traditional, mournful “mystique” of the Cross that is too passive and individualistic. Instead, he seeks to relate the Cross to the modern world and its social injustice. Was God himself, he asks, “untouched by the historical cross because he is essentially untouchable?”

Provided that Professor Sobrino is not denying the fundamental, atoning purpose of the Cross, I do not think we should resist what he is affirming. Here is his summary: “On the cross of Jesus God himself is crucified. The Father suffers the death of the Son and takes upon himself the pain and suffering of history.” And in this ultimate solidarity with human beings God “reveals himself as the God of love.”

God On The Gallows

What, then, about the Holocaust? “After Auschwitz,” said Richard Rubinstein, “it is impossible to believe in God.” One Sunday afternoon, in a subcamp of Buchenwald, a group of learned Jews decided to put God on trial for neglecting his chosen people. Witnesses were produced from both prosecution and defense, but the case for the prosecution was overwhelming. The judges were rabbis. They found the accused guilty and solemnly condemned him.

The trial and verdict are understandable. The sheer bestiality of the camps and the gas chambers, and the failure of God to intervene on behalf of his ancient people, in spite of their frequent and fervent prayers, has shaken many people’s faith. I think 1986 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Wiesel can help us understand this puzzle. Born a Transylvanian Jew, Wiesel has given us in his earliest book, Night, a deeply moving account of his boyhood experiences in the death camps of Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald. “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke [of the crematorium].… Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.… Never shall I forget those moments which murdered God and my soul, and turned my dreams to dust.…” A bit later Wiesel wrote: “Some talked of God, of his mysterious ways, of the sins of the Jewish people, and of their future deliverance. But I had ceased to pray.… I did not deny God’s existence, but I doubted his absolute justice.”

Perhaps the most horrifying experience of all was when the guards first tortured and then hanged a young boy, “a child with a refined and beautiful face,” a “sad-eyed angel.” Just before the hanging Elie heard someone behind him whisper, “Where is God? Where is he?” Thousands of prisoners were forced to watch the hanging (it took the boy half an hour to die) and then to march past, looking him full in the face. Behind him Elie heard the same voice ask, “Where is God now?” “And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is he? Here he is—he is hanging here on this gallows.…’ ”

Wiesel’s words were truer than he knew, for he was not a Christian. Indeed, in every fiber of his being he rebelled against God for allowing people to be tortured, butchered, gassed, and burned. “I was alone—terribly alone in a world without God and without man. Without love or mercy.” Could he have said that if in Jesus he had seen God on the gallows?

God With Us

There is good biblical evidence that God not only suffered in Christ, but that God in Christ suffers with his people still. Is it not written of God, during the early days of Israel’s bitter bondage in Egypt, not just that he saw their plight and “heard their groaning” but that “in all their distress he too was distressed” (Exod. 2:24; Isa. 63:9)? Did Jesus not ask Saul of Tarsus why he was persecuting him, thus disclosing his solidarity with his church? It is wonderful that we may share in Christ’s sufferings; it is more wonderful still that he shares in ours. Truly his name is “Emmanuel,” “God with us.”

But his “sympathy” is not limited to his suffering with his covenant people. Did Jesus not say that in ministering to the hungry and thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the prisoner, we would be ministering to him, indicating that he identified himself with all needy and suffering people?

I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the Cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time, after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wretched, brow bleeding from thorn pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his.

There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the Cross, which symbolizes divine suffering. As P. T. Forsyth wrote: “The cross of Christ … is God’s only self-justification in such a world” as ours.

John R. W. Stott is president of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity in London, England. The institute helps clergy and laity interpret the Bible, understand the modern world, and relate the two in terms of discipleship and mission.

John R. W. Stott (1921 – 2011) is known worldwide as a preacher, evangelist, author, and theologian. For 66 years he served All Souls Church, Langham Place, in London, England, where he pioneered effective urban evangelistic and pastoral ministry. During these years he authored more than 50 books, and served as one of the original Contributing Editors for Christianity Today. Stott had a global vision and built strong relationships with church leaders outside the West in the Majority World. A hallmark of Stott's ministry was his vision for expository biblical preaching that addresses the hearts and minds of contemporary men and women. In 1969 he founded a trust that eventually became Langham Partnership International (www.langham.org), a ministry that continues his vision of partnership with the Majority World Church. Stott was honored by Time magazine in 2005 as one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World."

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