#divine weakness

That God should permit victims to suffer and die is an insurmountable scandal. In the midst of such a situation, a believer can only accept the fact that God on the cross is as impotent as the victims themselves, and then interpret such impotency as God's way of being in solidarity with those victims. The cross on which God is placed is the most eloquent proclamation that God loves the victimized of this world. On that cross, God's love is impotent yet believable. And it is from that perspective that the mystery of God must be reformulated.

We cannot be separated from God and God cannot be separated from us, but the difference between God and us cannot be closed; it is a distance that is never crossed between an unconditional solicitation, on the one side, and the conditional responses made by us, on the other side. God is the question to which we should be the answer; God is the problem to which we should be resolution. But we are always giving finite answers to an infinite question, making finite responses to an infinite demand. So, by unconditional I do not mean an ideal that runs to completion, which is a fundamental operation common to both metaphysics and mythologization. The unconditional is not an ideal but an ordeal, an injunction, and a "hope against hope" (Rom 4:18) in the open-endedness of the future.

A theology of the cross, pursued without compromise, requires a deconstruction of the metaphysics of power, of the mythology of heaven on high, and of the politics of sovereignty. Its watchword is the revolutionary texts of 1 Corinthians 1, in which God systematically takes his stand with everyone on the lower end of these binary systems—where foolishness makes a mockery of wisdom, nonbeing overcomes being, and weakness shames power. Unlike the militant mythic hero-gods of antiquity, Jesus forgives his enemies, takes his stand with the oppressed and imprisoned, the outsider, the lost sheep, and so on. The "divine order" that forms around Jesus is anarchic, unruly, topsy-turvy, upside down, bottomup, in short, hieranarchic, foolishness in the eyes of the world.

Could Jesus have come down from the cross had he so chosen? Could he with the merest blink of his eye sent those powerful Roman soldiers crashing against the rocks, shattered the cross to splinters, and called down twelve legions of angels from heaven to rally to his defense? Or was he really nailed there, both hands and both feet, against his will, unable to escape an agonizing fate? How is the invisible God made visible here in all this terrible cruelty? In the classical view, the logos of the cross is found in a Jesus willingly suffering on the cross even while he possessed the power to destroy his enemies. That makes the crucifixion primarily an exercise in loving obedience, humility, and self-restraint, the willing suspension of divine power that could have been unleashed in all its fury—but also a model of obedience to their oppressors for those who suffer. In the high Christology of Thomas Aquinas, Jesus in his human nature was immediately joined to the beatific vision in his divine nature, so that for all the suffering his vulnerable human body endured, the divine nature remained invulnerable, sovereignly, hypostatically joined to and inseparable from the human nature, immune from suffering and untouched by death. That infinite resource, all its power and joy, was fully at his disposal, but Jesus declined to avail himself of it on the cross

The power of God is a dangerous power trip, both a metaphysical illusion and a biblical fantasy, in love with glory as the world knows glory, the law of whose construction is perfectly identified by Kant: it allows a concept to run unimpeded to completion free of empirical constraints. This leads to "divine command" theories of ethics, the dangerous and destructive absolutizing of institutions like the Roman Church (infallibility) or of books like the scriptures (inerrantism), to conundrums about the power of God to square circles or change the past, and to all the confusions of "theodicy," trying to figure out why God does not stop tsunamis before they happen, prevent cancer before it starts, or see to it that cruel tyrants are never born in the first place. It is complicit with obscene visions of God cruelly dashing his enemies to pieces. Worst of all, it culminates in the obscenity of all obscenities, the pathological fantasy of the eternal suffering of the damned in the face of which an unforgiving God, like a deranged and outraged tyrant, his arms folded, and his face fixed forever against those who have offended his glory, eternally refuses to relent, an exquisitely perfect contradiction of the parable of the prodigal son and of the preaching of Jesus on forgiveness. Christians take a perverse satisfaction in reflecting on the cruelty of a Roman crucifixion—the gospel according to Mel Gibson—the slow, torturous death and the awful humiliation. But Roman torturers have nothing on the Christians. They dream of a still more unimaginable torment, an omni-torture, an infinitely worse pain, far more excruciating than the cross itself, and most cruelly of all—the art of torture lies in prolonging pain—the impossibility of death. The Christian fantasy is of inflicting suffering ad infinitum, forever and ever, in comparison with which Roman cruelty is but a trifle that mercifully ends after just a few hours.