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This article questions the adequacy of Moltmann's doctrine of God as the foundation of his view of ethics. More specifically this essay assesses Moltmann's
idea of "God's trinitarian history" as a basis for his conception of "a political
hermeneutic of liberation." The focus of the article, then, is theological ethics;
its underlying concern is the relevance of the doctrine of the trinity for theological ethics.
Preparatory to assessing Moltmann's constructive proposals, an explication sets
forth two of his controlling ideas. First, an analysis of his concept of "political
hermeneutic of liberation" is presented to show that it views history as a process
of suffering and struggle against injustice, a process in which God is "really
present."
Next, Moltmann's idea of "God's trinitarian history" is explained showing
how he uses it to criticize traditional trinitarian and christological formulations
and to affirm that the history of struggle for human liberation is not extrinsic
to Goafs being but part of God's triune reality.
In the final, critical section, an argument is proffered that Moltmann's constructive proposals, while they deserve our attention and respect for the central
issues they address, are seriously inadequate. On the one hand Moltmann's theological basis for ethics is one-sided, because it ignores God as creator. On the
other hand it is deficient, because his doctrine of God renders GocPs power to
save implausible.
I.
INTRODUCTION
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ethical living to bridge the two worlds of God's kingdom and the king
dom of this world. Christian ethical engagement serves, according to this
model, as correspondences in this world's history to the fulfillment
promised in the age to come.
Moltmann criticizes these two models as "idealistic" in contrast to
his own "sacramental" model of Christian ethics. They are idealistic in
die sense that both religion and God's kingdom are viewed as really
distinct from, "above," and separate from the history of human suf
fering.
In contrast, Moltmann views his ethical conception as "concrete." He
wants to speak not of differences between God and world or correspon
dences between God and world but of identifications between God and
world.
Must we not go beyond [these two models] and grasp right from the beginning
God in the world, the beyond in the here and now, the universal in the con
crete, and the eschatological in the historical, in order to come to a political
hermeneutic of the crucified and a theology of real liberations (g.G., p. 297)?
170
Or again:
If one understands the Trinity as the event of love in the suffering and in the
death of Jesus and faith must do this then the Trinity is no self-enclosed
circle in heaven but an eschatological process open for man on earth which
proceeds from the cross of Christ (g.G., p. 235-236).
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IV.
CRITICAL ASSESSMENT
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will be relevant to the powerful, those whose decisions can show responsibility for the created order. When sexual, medical, and ecological problems abound, an ethics of responsibility for the creation ought not be
neglected. An ethics of protest and liberation only, an ethic for the oppressed, which is all that Moltmann's theology of the cross can yield, is
important, but not enough. The ethics of protest must be balanced by
an ethics of affirmation; God the creator is as important for ethics as
the crucified Son.
To avoid misunderstanding, the ethics of responsibility is not the
specific ethical model proposed by H. R. Niebuhr in The Responsible
Self, although it is not contrary to Niebuhr's themes. A more general
point is intended: Christian ethics should include the creation doctrine
as one of its theological premises to ensure that a dimension of our faith
relation to God involves thanksgiving for and responsible use of the
creator's gift of human talent, natural order, material and cultural wealth,
and political power in our possession. With one of its bases in the doctrine of God as Father and in the first article of the creed, ethics can
address God's will to the rich, not just to the poor, to those who hold
power, not just to the oppressed. The possessors of the world's goods
are thereby included positively, not just negatively, within the arena of
God's command.
Moltmann, as shown in the summary of his political hermeneutic of
liberation and his idea of God's trinitarian history, develops his social
ethics from a theology of the cross. This basis, because it focuses exclusively on Jesus Christ, results in making history the horizon of ethical
reflection. As such, the horizon of history is essential to ethics, since
probably every ethics must relate moral action to some vision of the
meaning of historical events and some interpretation of history's outcome. Certainly Christian ethics does. But when history is made the
only horizon for ethical reflection, nature as creation is either ignored
or viewed as a morally neutral stage on which the drama of history is
enacted. Moltmann's appropriation of the trinity doctrine for ethics, it
seems, is determined by Kant's separation of the pure from the practical
reason, despite Hegel's influence on Moltmann. The result is a truncated
ethics.
Another way to describe the insufficient basis of Moltmann's ethic
is to observe how he defines God's Fatherhood. Limiting himself to the
perspective of a theology of the cross, he defines God's being as Father
exclusively from the perspective of the crucified Christ. Christ's unjust
death becomes, thereby, the point of God's identification with history.
God's being as Father, presented solely in relation to the injustice of
the cross, is thus ethically significant only in relation to those who suffer
injustice. This theological move enables Moltmann to develop a vigorous
theology of liberation: God is on the side of the dispossessed and op-
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death, if God as Father, has, through die death of the divine Son, identified Himself with dying and death, what and where in the nature of
God's being are the resources to conquer that dying and death which
are now in God's own eternal being? Moltmann, in The Crucified God,
fails to answer this question, or even to address it directly. Yet an adequate theological doctrine of God is one which not only clarifies how
God identifies with our plight, but is one which also shows how God's
power of being is sufficient for us in our plight.
To assess The Crucified God apart from Moltmann's earlier book,
Theology of Hope, would be a mistake. In both books he is concerned
with a political hermeneutics of liberation. In Theology of Hope, however, the stress is on Christ's resurrection; in The Crucified God it is
on Christ's crucifixion. In both books the idea of God's history is central
In Theology of Hope, the stress is on the future of God's sovereignty in
relation to history, hope for which is born with Christ's resurrection, a
hope which should move Christians to social criticism and action. In
The Crucified God, the stress is on the significance of Christ's death for
the history of God and the history of human suffering. And in both
books the themes of God's history and human hope are linked by the
dialectic between Christ crucified and Christ raised. Rightly, Moltmann
claims that these two books do not contradict but rather balance each
other.
Using the idea of God's history and the theme of the dialectic between the crucified and resurrected Christ, Moltmann unambiguously
asserts God's power to save. But in both Theology of Hope and The
Crucified God, he leaves the ontological problem of God's power to
save unexplained. Where, in Theology of Hope, the issue of political
liberation was dominant, Moltmann's elusiveness about this question
could more easily pass unchallenged. But in The Crucified God, where
he argues that death is, in the confrontation and unity between the
Father and the Son, constitutive of God's being as history, the ontological question of God's power to save cannot be passed over. Christian faith affirms with Moltmann that the God who identifies with our
dying is a God who can save us. But Christian theology requires more
than asserting faith claims; it requires an attempt at least to understand
how this faith claim is plausible. Traditional metaphysical concepts in
theology tried to serve that purpose.
Moltmann acknowledges that to say God died on the cross would
be absurd. Not only would such a statement contradict the traditional
attribute of God's eternity, but it would render Christ's resurrection
impossible. Therefore, at the beginning of chapter six, his major constructive chapter, Moltmann sets aside the phrase "God is dead" in its
denotative sense, although he holds that, as a metaphorical statement,
the phrase has value. Instead of saying that God died when Jesus died,
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