Worship in an Age of Sadness Part 6
With Apologies to Barth and Moltmann
We’re going to continue discussing theologies of emotions with looking at the writings of Karl Barth and Jurgen Moltmann, both theologians that wrote in the 20th century. Remember, I am trying to discuss their ideas while showing what they have added and detracted from our understandings of emotions in the Church. I do not want them to come off as negative or saying that these theologians were completely wrong. I just want to understand why we as a Church undervalue sadness while over-value joy. I think we can learn from all of these theologians I have discussed while also offering correctives to their readings of emotion.
Karl Barth
· “Barth understands prayer as centrally petition” (60)
o Prayer has adoration, thanksgiving, praise and confession
o Prayer primarily is asking, requesting, and petitioning God.
· “In prayer, human beings are permitted and commanded to come to God freely with their desires and requests.” (60)
o “Prayer must not become an occasion of self-camouflage or a hiding ourselves from God.”
o “We are not to come to God in prayer pretending to be other than who we are.”
o “Our petitions will reflect our full humanity” and will contain “all of our anxiety, passion, and egoism.”
· “Our petitions to God must not be arbitrary or undisciplined”
o “Whimsical prayers or prayers directly contrary to the revealed will of God would not be genuinely Christian prayers.” (60)
Hang on, we’re going to get technical here:
· Divine Immutability limits Covenantal Relationship (61)
o “The God to whom we pray…is not the God depicted by what (Barth) calls the miserable anthropomorphism of divine immutability.”
· “Barth summons Christian theology to give up the hallucination of a divine immutability which rules out the possibility that God let [Godself] be conditioned in this or that way by [the] creature.”
· “Just as the triune God lives in the eternal community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so God elects to live and act in community ad extra.”
· “As the Living God, God is free to converse with the creature and to allow [Godself] to be determined in this relationship.
Okay, that was a mouthful. What Barth means is that “God wills a covenant relationship with human beings that involves real co-operation,” which is expressed in prayer. “the invitation to pray” is “an invitation to new freedom: the God of free grace chooses to be vulnerable by willing the human creature to relate to God as a free subject and active partner of God.” (61) Barth does not have our prayer become mediated and transformed to God like Augustine has it. Instead, our prayer has us join in the divine conversation as a partner, as someone who is equally allowed to state their mind. A liberal interpretation of Barth here has God change their mind do to input from humanity, but at the least it shows us that God is listening to our prayers and talking back to us as partners.
· Barth’s Christocentric Interpretation of Lament
o “All lament arises basically from the recognition of human morality and especially the threat of separation from God.” (62)
o For Barth, the only thing that humans can do is “cry and sob endlessly” due to the conditions of human existence. (62)
o Like Luther, Barth turns to Christ’s misery on the Cross and claims that no one has felt that level of misery
After discussing my post on Luther with my dad, I am reminded that no one truly has been in Christ’s place. Christ, as Barth and Luther would say, has plumbed the depths of misery to an extent that we have not. However, we must not allow that to negate our sadness. What separates Barth from Luther is that Barth has the categories of “already” and “not yet.” Barth told the gathered mourners at his son’s funeral that “life already shines in darkness, where life already rejoices in the face of death” but that already and not yet allows for us to cry and be joyful at the same time. Barth tiptoes on the line of negating Death while allowing it to be fully present. We mourn while having hope, and grief and hope coexist at the same time. And unlike Augustine, Barth does not hid his grief but lets it show. (64) As Billman and Migliore put it, “we are permitted to groan and cry, tu in our sorrow we do not only sorrow.” (63) We do not grieve like those who do not know hope.
· Barth’s boundaries of lament derive from his understanding of the victory of God’s in Jeus Christ over all sin, suffering, and death.”
o A danger is that in “emphasizing the completeness of the vietory already won in Christ.
o Barth can still minimize human misery “by comparing it with the depth of the suffering of Christ and the victory of his resurrection” as Luther did.
Bringing Barth to Church
Like Luther and Calvin, there are still emotional perils in bringing Barth to Church as well as there are good reasons to bring Barth to Church. I want to bring Barth to Church to tell congregations that they are encountering God not as a wholly Other (though he uses that language) who is indifferent to their joys and griefs, but as a conversation partner. I have written before that it is important for our worship to be an ongoing conservation with God where we feel free to bring to our joys and sorrows to God in an honest dialog. Barth has a lovely discussion about Scripture where he talks about how the text becomes the Word of God only when it becomes an encounter with God. The reading and singing of Scripture become truly meaningful when we have an event where God is present. And our worship and prayer should be like that. Where we truly seek to be present with God. And to do so, we need to be open and honest with God.
Another thing that I have noticed due to Barth’s theology is that we often lose the distinction between “already” and “not yet.” We live in the tension between the moment where God wipes our tears away and when we still have tears. Trish Harrison Warren, in her book on the Compline prayer, discusses the moment where we just bury our heads in Christ and sob with Christ. For Trish Warren Harrison, Christ does not just wipe our tears our tears away, but God cries with us deeply and then wipes our tears away. We still cry with God. Being untied with Christ, contra Augustine, does not mean that we no longer cry, but that Christ now cries with us.
We live in the tension between the life of Christ and the fullness of salvation. Our worship needs to reflect that fact. Barth leans a little too far into the hope of Christ, and as a corrective we do not need to live in the other extreme of not believing that Christ comforts us. We need to understand that we weep and Christ weeps with us, because Jesus knows what it means to be sad. The same can be said of joy. We can be joyous for non-salvific reasons, because Jesus knows the joy that accompanies life. We do not need to live in the Eschaton. We need to live in-between now and the End.
Jurgen Moltmann
Moltmann, who was prisoner of war during World War II, had an encounter with Christ that shaped his theology. He became a Christian in a Prisoner of War camp in Scotland through an encounter with the Psalms of Lament along with the Gospel. He understood Christ as a “divine brother in distress, who takes the prisoners with him on his way to resurrection.” Moltmann came to the realization that Christ understood him because Christ suffered and lamented.
· “Moltmann vigorously contests the traditional doctrines of the immutability and impassibility of God.” (68)
o For Moltmann, if God needs no one, cannot suffer, or cannot die, God is a dead idol who is not worthy of our following our praise.
o “For Moltmann, love and immutability are incompatible. If God loves another, then God is vulnerable to the other” (68)
o God becomes freely “vulnerable to suffering out of love for the world.” (68)
· “if we are to live in a covenant with [the] passionate God, we not become apathetic.”
o “Our whole life would be shaped by sympathy, by compassion.”
o “We would suffer with God’s suffering in the world”
o We would “rejoice with God’s rejoicing over the world.”
o “We would do both at the same time and with the highest intensity because we would love
§ “and with the love of God we would go outside of ourselves.” (68)
· Psalm 22 becomes more powerful in Moltmann’s theology
o “The Psalm is a legal plea” as “the faithfulness, honor, and hence the very deity of God” is “at stake.” (69)
§ Instead of God forsaking Jesus, God is forsaking himself
§ Moltmann changes the verse in Psalm 22:1 and on the Cross to “my God, why have you forsaken yourself?”
· Moltmann roots his understanding of emotion in the Trinity.
o “To understand what happened between Jesus and his God and Father on the cross, it is necessary to talk in trinitarian terms.”
o “The son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son.”
o “The grief of the Father here is just as important as the death of the Son.” (69)
o “The suffering love of God underscores the claim that loss, grief, and the feeling of abandonment are not just experiences of humanity in general or of Jesus in particular but are defining moments of the experience of the triune God.” (69)
For Moltmann, “basically, every Christian theology is consciously or unconsciously answering the question” posed in Psalm 22. (68) The Church needs to feel the forsakenness of God as they live in a fallen world that is not fully liberated by the grace of God. They need to feel and express the frustration and grief that comes from not being liberated from sin. They need to live fully in the “not yet” of Barth. However, “Moltmann does not explore in depth the lament tradition in which” Psalm 22 “and Jesus’ use of it stands. (68) Even though he sees Christianity as “the development of humanity that is capable of suffering and love in the situation of the passion of God,” (69) Moltmann does not go far enough. Even though “theologians like Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Moltmann have led to in the exploration of the meaning of the experience of the suffering for God as well as for creatures” and agree that “divine suffering must not be sentimentalized” they need to go further. (74) For Billman and Migliore, Moltmann does not address the types of institutional and systematic sufferings that womanist, feminist, and liberation theologies address.
Taking Moltmann to Church
Moltmann should teach the Church that emotions, including suffering, are part of God and thus part of the imago Dei. The Christian God suffers not only on the Cross but also with the Church in their life's trials. Since love is not compatible with not having feelings, God must have emotions. For Moltmann, the chief emotion of God is compassion which makes God vulnerable. What I mean there is that God cares for the Church and in that caring, knows that the Church will violate the covenant relationship in some way, causing God to be sad. Further, because God is compassionate, the Trinity opens itself up to feel with and for the Church. That means that when someone is sad, grieving, or in distress, God is in those feelings with them. It is not an intellectual compassion (can such a thing exist?) but a lived and embodied compassion, making God and the Church vulnerable to each other. As Moltmann says in The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, “the voluntary laying oneself open to another and allowing oneself to be intimately affect by [another]; that is to say, the suffering of passionate love” is how God and the Church should interact. Barth calls for something similar when he suggests that divine revelation occurs when we encounter God. Moltmann takes Barth further and says that the encounter makes both sides vulnerable to each other.
For Moltmann, God has a willingness to take people “seriously to the point of suffering with them in their struggles” and being wounded in relationship with them. The music and prayers of the Church should reflect that level of relationship. Often in the songs of the Church, sadness is brought to God so that God can take away the suffering instead of taking our grief to God so that God will grieve with us. Moltmann continues that “The more open-mindedly people live with one another, for one another and in one another in the fellowship of the Spirit, the more they will become one with the Son and the Father, and one in the Son and the Father.” And that is where he starts to go too far for us even though it sounds good on the surface.
Moltmann continues that the Christian hope for the future is one in which all oppressed persons are liberated and therefore sit together at the Eucharistic table of fellowship. In Moltmann’s theology, like Barth’s, there is a way to interpret the fellowship as only being fulfilling if it has moved past the suffering. We must be careful that we do not confuse the “already” and the “not yet.” Likewise, the Church needs to embrace both Moltmann’s theology of hope and theology of suffering without having hope consume or negate the suffering. Hope and sadness can live hand in hand and there are periods of life where one is going to be more prevalent than the other. The Church needs to sing like that is the case.