The Crucified God Quotes

“When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man's godforsakenness. In Jesus he does not die the natural death of a finite being, but the violent death of the criminal on the cross, the death of complete abandonment by God. The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment, rejection by God, his Father. God does not become a religion, so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings. God does not become a law, so that man participates in him through obedience to a law. God does not become an ideal, so that man achieves community with him through constant striving. He humbles himself and takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“The knowledge of the cross brings a conflict of interest between God who has become man and man who wishes to become God.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“God became man that dehumanized men might become true men. We become true men in the community of the incarnate, the suffering and loving, the human God.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“The one will triumph who first died for the victims then also for the executioners, and in so doing revealed a new righteousness which breaks through vicious circles of hate and vengeance and which from the lost victims and executioners creates a new mankind with a new humanity. Only where righteousness becomes creative and creates right both for the lawless and for those outside the law, only where creative love changes when is hateful and deserving of hate, only where the new man is born who is oppressed nor oppresses others, can one speak of the true revolution of righteousness and of the righteousness of God.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“When the crucified Jesus is called "the image of the invisible God," the meaning is that THIS is God, and God is like THIS.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“God allows himself to be humiliated and crucified in the Son, in order to free the oppressors and the oppressed from oppression and to open up to them the situation of free, sympathetic humanity.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“The God of freedom, the true God, is... not recognized by his power and glory in the history of the world, but through his helplessness and his death on the scandal of the cross of Jesus”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“A dead man cannot forgive sins. The gospel, as the present forgiveness of sins, assumes the new, divine, eschatological life of the crucified Christ, and is itself the `Spirit' and the present `power of
the resurrection'. Thus according to Paul's understanding, in the 'word of the cross' the crucified Christ himself speaks.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“The theological foundation for Christian hope is the raising of the crucified Christ.”
― Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

“The problem of modern man is no longer so much how he can live with gods and demons, but how he can survive with the bomb, revolution and the destruction of the balance of nature. He usurps more and more of nature and takes it under his control. The vital question for him, therefore, is how this world which he has usurped can be human- ized.36 His main problem is no longer the universal finitude which he experiences in solidarity with all other creatures, but the humanity of his own world.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“In a civilization that glorifies success and happiness and is blind to the sufferings of others, people’s eyes can be opened to the truth if they remember that at the centre of the Christian faith stands an unsuccessful, tormented Christ, dying in forsakenness.”
― Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

“Just as they were formulated to express Jewish or Greek reasons for faith in Jesus, it is possible on principle to formulate new titles to express, say, Hindu reasons or even Marxist reasons for faith in Jesus. This historical openness and variability of the titles for Jesus, to which the history of Christian tradition bears witness, has, however, a point of reference and a criterion. This is provided by his personal name, Jesus, and the history which concluded with his crucifixion and resurrection.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“But to follow Jesus is not to imitate him, for following him does not mean becoming a Jesus oneself. Nor does it mean admiration of a hero and a mystical contemporaneity with him.[48] One follows Christ in one’s own response to the mission of Christ at the present day and in taking up one’s own cross.”
― Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

“To suffer and to be rejected are not identical. Suffering can be celebrated and admired. It can arouse compassion. But to be rejected takes away the dignity from suffering and makes it dishonourable suffering. To suffer and be rejected signify the cross. To die on the cross means to suffer and to die as one who is an outcast and rejected. If those who follow Jesus are to take ‘their cross’ on themselves, they are taking on not only suffering and a bitter fate, but the suffering of rejection.”
― Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

“It can be summed up by saying that suffering is overcome by suffering, and wounds are healed by wounds. For the suffering in suffering is the lack of love, and the wounds in wounds are the abandonment, and the powerlessness in pain is unbelief. And therefore the suffering of abandonment is overcome by the suffering of love, which is not afraid of what is sick and ugly, but accepts it and takes it to itself in order to heal it. Through”
― Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

“He who is of little faith looks for support and protection for his faith, because it is preyed upon by fear.”
― Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

“Here the crucified Christ was seen less as the sacrifice which God creates to reconcile the world to himself, and more as the exemplary path trodden by a righteous man suffering unjustly, leading to salvation. Fellowship”
― Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

“Thus the Eucharist, like the meals held by Jesus with ‘sinners and publicans’, must also be celebrated with the unrighteous, those who have no rights and the godless from the ‘highways and hedges’ of society, in all their profanity, and should no longer be limited, as a religious sacrifice, to the inner circle of the devout, to those who are members of the same denomination. The Christian church can re-introduce the divisions between the religious and the profane and between those who are within and those who are without, only at the price of losing its own identity as the church of the crucified Christ. But”
― Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

“In concrete terms, God is revealed in the cross of Christ who was abandoned by God. His grace is revealed in sinners. His righteousness is revealed in the unrighteous and in those without rights, and his gracious election in the damned. The”
― Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

“from others can ultimately exist for ‘others’, for otherwise he exists only with those who are like him.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

“What does it mean to recall the God who was crucified in a society whose official creed is optimism, and which is knee-deep in blood?”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

“only by Christ is it possible to tell what is a Christian church and what is not. Whether or not Christianity, in an alienated, divided and oppressive society, itself becomes alienated, divided and an accomplice of oppression, is ultimately decided only by whether the crucified Christ is a stranger to it or the Lord who determines the form of its existence.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

“Thus dehumanized man, who must exalt himself, because he cannot ensure himself as he is, in practice uses these religious insights only in the interest of his own self-deification. As a result, they do not help him to achieve humanity, but only give greater force to his inhumanity. The knowledge of the cross is the knowledge of God in the suffering caused to him by dehumanized man, that is, in the contrary of everything which dehumanized man seeks and tries to attain as the deity in him. Consequently, this knowledge does not confirm him as what he is, but destroys him. It destroys the god, miserable in his pride, which we would like to be, and restores to us our abandoned and despised humanity. The knowledge of the cross brings a conflict of interest between God who has become man and man who wishes to become God. It destroys the destruction of man. It alienates alienated man. And in this way it restores the humanity of dehumanized man.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

“This gave rise to the triumphalism of the theocratic state or the state church, which regularly led to the persecution of the Jews and other representatives of unfulfilled messianic hope. A faith which worships Christ as God without his future, a church which understands itself as the kingdom and a consciousness of atonement which no longer suffers from the continued unredeemed condition of the world, a Christian state which regards itself as God here present upon earth, cannot tolerate any Jewish hope beside itself. But is this still authentic Christian faith?”
― Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

“It is true that in a world of high consumption, where anything and everything is possible, nothing is so humanizing as love, and a conscious interest in the life of others, particularly in the life of the oppressed. For love leaves us open to wounding and disappointment.”
― Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition