Introduction to the Fall 2003 Communio

Fall 2003: Does God Suffer? An Exploration

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Does God suffer? If “suffer” means “suffer in the sense that human beings, or other creatures do,” the answer can only be “No.” God is God, and, as Thomas Aquinas reminds us, nothing can be univocally predicated of God and the creature. And yet, if we take seriously what Scripture tells us about God’s involvement in the history of Israel and, even more radically, in the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus, the question returns again at another level: what does this involvement mean, not only for us, but also for God himself? Can God, without losing his divine transcendence, make his creature’s suffering his own? And, if so, what, if any, are the conditions in God himself that make this assumption possible? Granted that the creature’s suffering is distinctively creaturely and so cannot be transferred tel quel to the divine nature, does it nonetheless correspond to a real event that “happens” in God himself, perhaps in the depths of his intra-trinitarian life?

The Fall, 2003 issue of Communio seeks to address these questions, fully aware of the peril of projecting creaturely suffering onto God’s inner being, yet also in the conviction that genuine theological questions like these—which have arisen in the twentieth-century for a variety of historical reasons: the challenge of Hegelianism; the urgency of the so-called “problem of evil”; an ongoing dispute about the relationship between philosophy and biblical Revelation—deserve the genuine sort of theological exploration the authors presented here seek to give it. Three of the five contributors on the theme Does God Suffer? An Exploration refer explicitly to the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar, who, in their view, has offered at once the most radical and the most balanced answer to the question, “Does God suffer?”

In “The Suffering of God in Patristic Theology,” Michael Figura surveys the theology of the Latin and Greek Fathers on the theme, finding there a firm insistence on the impassibility of the divine nature coupled with an awareness of what, for Figura, constitutes the specifically Christian paradox: “The unsuffering God suffers.”

Jean-Pierre Batut, writing in “Does the Father Suffer?” presents a historical overview of the question of God’s suffering in order to show both the novelty and the deeply traditional character of what is the core of Balthasar’s theology of divine pathos: Balthasar’s grounding of God’s real involvement in history in the intra-trinitarian difference between the Father and the Son.

In “The Divine Drama, From the Father’s Perspective: How the Father Lives Love in the Trinity,” Antoine Birot further explores this intra- trinitarian grounding. According to Birot, a properly Christian understanding of divine transcendence as a matter of God’s trinitarian freedom holds the key to reconciling a genuine pathos with divine transcendence.

Jan-Heiner Tück’s “The Utmost: On the Possibilities and Limits of a Trinitarian Theology of the Cross” develops the Balthasarian intuition of an intra-trinitarian basis for a theology of divine pathos in terms of analogy—and shows how this analogical model responds to the legitimate concerns of, while at the same time transcending, the so-called “theology of complaint” [Klage] defended by Johann Baptist Metz and others, who fear that talk of a “suffering God” too quickly quiets the anxiety of the theodicy-question.

Finally, Christoph Dohmen, in “The Suffering Servant and the Passion of Jesus,” uses a careful exegesis of the fourth of the Suffering Servant Songs in Isaiah to suggest just what the legitimate intuition of the “theology of complaint” is. The substitutionary suffering of Jesus, Dohmen hints, is precisely what reveals suffering to be, not simply an automatic, merely this-worldly, retribution for one’s past deeds, but what it in fact is: a mystery whose “why” can be illuminated only dramatically, which is to say, only in the encounter with the innocent suffering of the “Suffering Servant.”

In this issue’s installment of Spirit and History, “Christ in Contemporary Exegesis: Where We Are and Where We Are Going,” Klemens Stock argues that critical access to the whole Jesus, as he really was, depends upon a willingness to receive the whole of the New Testament’s message concerning Jesus as an inextricable interweaving of what Jesus did and said and of the disciples’ witness to what Jesus said and did. Such attention to the whole in its actual, concrete form, Stock argues, will enable scholars to perceive in the New Testament the outlines of a full-bodied ecclesial Christology (even where there is a seeming paucity of explicitly christological titles and declarations, as in Mark).

Retrieving the Tradition marks the 175th anniversary of the death of the great Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797–1828) with a highly personal appreciation of Schubert’s unique contribu tion to music by philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, who in this piece, simply titled “Franz Schubert,” reveals something of the aesthetic dimension of his own multi-faceted philosophical work.

Finally, we are pleased to publish in Notes and Comments the complete text of “‘We must hold each other’s hands from afar.’ A Correspondence,” which gathers letters exchanged between Herbert A. Kenny and Patricia Buckley Bozell from the late nineties until Kenny’s death in 2002. Distinguished by their wit, their unsentimental and unbitter consciousness of the human condition, and their uncommon delicacy of taste and feeling, these beautifully written letters testify to the unity of humanity and catholicity that marks all truly great men and women of the Church.

AJW

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