Moltmann's Trinity

"They Will be just like you and me/ Pretending they're not guessing/ As if we couldn't tell." Blues Traveler, "Trina Magna"


In his much celebrated work, "The Crucified God", Jurgen Moltmann writes, very necessarily, how the move away from the Crucified Christ has impacted "Christian" theology, in all its senses. The crux of his thought is only a return to the Cross can true Christianity live.

"If the cross of Jesus is understood as a divine event, i.e. between Jesus and His God and Father, it is necessary to speak in trinitarian terms of the Son and the Father and the Spirit. In the case the doctrine of the Trinity is no longer an exorbitant and impractical speculation about God, but is nothing other than a shorter version of the passion narrative of Christ in its significance for the eschatological freedom of faith and the life of oppressed nature. It protects faith from monotheism and atheism because it keeps  believers at the cross" (Moltmann, "The Crucified God", p. 246).

He continues, "When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters in the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man's godforsakenness" (Moltmann, p. 276).

Here is a good litmus test whether you may believe and not even know, or not believe and think you do. Simply put, you can be assured you are a follower of the trinitarian God if you know -really know -- that you hate Him. If you understand you hate the God of Israel, you may find the Cross, and through that intersection learn to love Him.

For the Christian, conversion begins by hating God, then self, through illumination of the Law, then forsakeness of self. The vicious circle Paul outlines in Romans 7 becomes our own. "Sin and law urge each other on and bring men to death." (Moltmann, p. 293). Sounding like Girard, Moltmann makes the point that Christainty faith does not believe in a new "idea" of God, but rather in "a new situation of God" with the Crucified Christ (Moltmann, p. 274).

Moltmann quotes Paul Althaus:
"...the full and undiminished deity of God is to be found in the complete helpnessness, in the final agony of the Crucified Jesus... Christology must take seriously the fact that God himself really enters into the suffering of the Son and in so doing is and remains completely God... The Godhead is there hidden under the manhood, only open to faith and not to sight. It is therefore beyond any possibility of a theory. That this is the case, that God eneters into the hiddeness of his Godhead beneath the human nature, is kenosis."

This idea of interpersonal personhood has been expanded by not just Moltmann and Althaus, but Leonardo Buff, Catherine Mowry Lacugna, Wolfhart Pannenberg and others.

Ted Peters, in his must-read "God as Trinity," calls Moltmann's trinitarian theology "perhaps the biggest step away from the substantialist unity of God toward a relational unity in which the divine threeness is given priority." (p. 103). Here he quotes from Moltmann's "The trinity and the kingdom", "God suffers with us -- God suffers from us -- God suffers for us: it is the experience of God that that reveals the triune God."   

Why does this stuff matter? Is it, as, one of all-time favorite artists, John Popper, belches out in "Trina Magna", his apparent attempt to wash-away his Catholic upbringing, "They Will be just like you and me/ Pretending they're not guessing/ As if we couldn't tell." Are the rich history of Catholic thinkers just guessing about the essence of God?

Well, not really. When understood correctly, the whole Bible from front to back is about the Trinitarian God that has, in very definitive and subtle ways, revealed Himself to Jew and Gentile alike. And as Peters points out, "[the Trinity] is thought to be so integral that the idea of the Trinity is being used to sharpen the distinction between general notions of God and the unique Christian commitment" (p.81).

These distinctions are not and never have been abstract, despite the notion of the Trinity sharpening over time. When we hate God, and He loves us back through His suffering for us, this distinct understanding affects how one thoughtfully reacts and acts towards every bit of Creation. While Moltmann's views may be considered pushing the limits of the Christian understanding of monotheism, The Crucified God is a worthy read, and Moltmann clearly a thinker worthy of our attention.