"The symbol for the religion of slaves is the cross, the kind of punitive death reserved for slaves. Is it necessary for this symbol of suffering, of failure, of dying, to stand at the midpoint of the Christian religion? Has not an overemphasis on the cross in theology and piety resulted in the fact that a 'God who justifies misery' was and is worshipped in society?
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[The] question whether love requires the cross in order to be authentic appears to me to be posed falsely... the cross is neither a symbol expressing the relationship between God the Father and his Son, nor a symbol of masochism which needs suffering in order to convince itself of love. It is above all a symbol of reality. Love does not "require" the cross, but de facto it ends up on the cross. De factor Jesus of Nazareth was crucified; de facto the crosses of rebellious slaves under Spartacus adorned the streets of the Roman Empire. The cross is no theological invention, but the world's answer, given a thousand times over, to attempts at liberation. Only for that reason are we able to recognize ourselves in Jesus' dying on the cross. We observe the ideology of the rulers who supported the prevailing order. We see the brutality and sadism of the soldiers, who had a hand in it, following orders. We are confronted by the behavior of our friends. All these are possibilities for our behavior toward the stricken. And when we ourselves are struck by affliction, then we can try to learn from the story of Jesus... But de facto love ends up on the cross and within visible reality God chooses to act paradoxically.
Love does not cause suffering or produce it, though it must necessarily seek confrontation, since its most important concern is not the avoidance of suffering but the liberation of people.
'There is no sorrow that is alien sorrow' says Simonov. That is not a sentence stating observable facts. It is a wish, a kind of hope that lives on the presupposed brotherhood of all mankind. It cannot be proven why there is no alien sorrow, no distant sorrow that does not concern us. Every proof for such a sentence makes it poorer and smaller. It is not deducible. it is much rather something one lays on the conscience of a thinking and feeling being. Wherever there is suffering, that is a concern of yours. That those who suffer belong together, not to be separated from the others, that pain cannot be parceled out into friends and enemies, that is part of the religion of slaves. There is no alien sorrow, we are all a part of it, we share in it.... Suffering tolerates no neutrality, no Pilate-standpoint.
... A person actually has a share in the life that is no longer his but in which he participates. The saying of one condemned to death, 'I shall die, I shall live,' will then apply to all, even those who never learned to say it themselves in their life. There is no alien sorrow, there is no alien resurrection."
Dorothee Sölle Suffering (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975) 162-165; 172-174
Dorothee Sölle (1929-2003) was a Lutheran liberation theologian, and she has always been a low-key favorite of mine since first reading her critique of Christian Masochism in Fall of 2009. She's one of the few theologians who I think successfully pulls off balancing Lutheranism and Liberation Theology. But she does so in a way that is definitely unconventional - particularly from the Lutheran end - and gets into some really interesting work with mystics and rabbinical figures....
[The] question whether love requires the cross in order to be authentic appears to me to be posed falsely... the cross is neither a symbol expressing the relationship between God the Father and his Son, nor a symbol of masochism which needs suffering in order to convince itself of love. It is above all a symbol of reality. Love does not "require" the cross, but de facto it ends up on the cross. De factor Jesus of Nazareth was crucified; de facto the crosses of rebellious slaves under Spartacus adorned the streets of the Roman Empire. The cross is no theological invention, but the world's answer, given a thousand times over, to attempts at liberation. Only for that reason are we able to recognize ourselves in Jesus' dying on the cross. We observe the ideology of the rulers who supported the prevailing order. We see the brutality and sadism of the soldiers, who had a hand in it, following orders. We are confronted by the behavior of our friends. All these are possibilities for our behavior toward the stricken. And when we ourselves are struck by affliction, then we can try to learn from the story of Jesus... But de facto love ends up on the cross and within visible reality God chooses to act paradoxically.
Love does not cause suffering or produce it, though it must necessarily seek confrontation, since its most important concern is not the avoidance of suffering but the liberation of people.
'There is no sorrow that is alien sorrow' says Simonov. That is not a sentence stating observable facts. It is a wish, a kind of hope that lives on the presupposed brotherhood of all mankind. It cannot be proven why there is no alien sorrow, no distant sorrow that does not concern us. Every proof for such a sentence makes it poorer and smaller. It is not deducible. it is much rather something one lays on the conscience of a thinking and feeling being. Wherever there is suffering, that is a concern of yours. That those who suffer belong together, not to be separated from the others, that pain cannot be parceled out into friends and enemies, that is part of the religion of slaves. There is no alien sorrow, we are all a part of it, we share in it.... Suffering tolerates no neutrality, no Pilate-standpoint.
... A person actually has a share in the life that is no longer his but in which he participates. The saying of one condemned to death, 'I shall die, I shall live,' will then apply to all, even those who never learned to say it themselves in their life. There is no alien sorrow, there is no alien resurrection."
Dorothee Sölle Suffering (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975) 162-165; 172-174
Sölle does theology a little bit differently from most 20th century Lutheran theologians. Sölle's work is often described as "theopoetics." And her poems are certainly breathtaking. She also often lifts up voices I wouldn't necessarily lift up (Thomas Müntzer sticks out like a sore thumb in Suffering, among others - for reasons I'm sure I'll rant about some other time). But on top of that she unflinchingly lifts up voices that we need to hear - foundry and factory workers in West Germany, oppressed folks in Chile and Vietnam. People whose suffering we, or our wider society, might believe is "justified." And she forces us to read their words in a new way. Sölle sets out to make us uncomfortable - she sets out to provoke us - and this is a gift. It is good for us to sit in discomfort and honestly wrestle with those we would find an excuse to ignore - even that raving scoundrel Müntzer. Even his suffering, we will see, is pertinent to Christ's suffering. Even if he was a wicked revolutionary and theologian who led his own, and many who weren't his own, into death for his own sense of glory (another time, another blog entry).
We have to remember that Sölle wrote in the wake of Nazi Germany's fall. She saw the heresy of the German Church, and the ways that Lutheranism was compromised from within. She saw what happened when the German Lutherans would simply listen to themselves and ignore the voices of the marginalized, the destroyed, and those who thirsted for justice and righteousness until their deaths. So I think it's intentional and fitting that she lifted up the voices that her theological peers would be be quick to reject, and reappraise them from the perspective of the oppressed. It was essential for her to lift up the voices of those whom we have the easiest time rejecting and reveal Christ among them. Because when Christians see Christ is there, it forces us to reckon with them in a new, and possibly holy way. It gives us the chance to love our enemies.
The passage I quoted for today's blog is my favorite part of this text (though each chapter has something that would take my breath away and make me snap my fingers). First off, she acknowledges the peril that a casual and lazy theology of the cross always encounters: justifying the suffering of people who are worse off than the theologian. Popular theology often makes us pretend as though our suffering makes us holy ("it's just my/their cross to bear"), when it usually just creates a weird self-satisfied sanctimony and victimization complexes among the suffering, and uncaring monsters among unrepentant wrongdoers. A lazy theology of the cross (and a lazy theology of God's sovereignty) pretends that the way things are are the way they are supposed to be. That in turn makes us really good at calling disempowered people and victims of tragedy sinners, and really bad at addressing sin in the way that the Old Testament prophets did. It closes us off to the possibility that we could be wrong, and it closes us off to the freedom and gift of repentance.
As Christ, Paul, and every generation of competent theologians (including Sölle) has pointed out: we don't sin because we're free, we sin because we're sinners. But we are also the people who Jesus Christ loves, and the people whom Jesus Christ has come to save. Love gives us the freedom of a different way of life, and love has the power to bring what is living out of what is dying. We actually need salvation, and we actually need repentance if we want to live in any way that even resembles true living and not just breathing, eating, and farting for a few years. Breathing, eating, and farting are far more than "just" breathing, eating, and farting with repentance and compassion. Trust me on this.
Sölle makes it clear that a life of repentance lives in confrontation with death, and sorrow. Not in evasion, or ignorance, or fear of it. That doesn't mean trying to die on every hill you can make a stand on. But it does mean knowing where you stand, and it means helping people discover where they stand. Sometimes it even means being hated for the sake of love. It means making friends, and not strangers.
As Sölle points out (paraphrasing the poet Konstantin Simonov), there is no alien sorrow, and there is no alien resurrection. God belongs with the suffering, and the suffering belong to God. They are not strangers to us. Indeed, everyone who gets run over by the world is not a stranger to us. We recognize the man on the cross in them. They are where Christ was, and Christ is. When Christ rises from the dead it is for the sake of all the sorrowful. God actually intends to be with those who need God. We cannot prove this, but we can hope in it. This hope produces solidarity and action. It produces works like those Christ did in his earthly ministry. It leads us to be with those who need us. In solidarity with the suffering, we discover Christ and the Church.
So, if you're looking for someone who gets suffering, wants to help us get better at suffering, and is a guide to friendship with people who we're not otherwise likely to be friends with; if you want to read theodicy without nonsense, and a theology of the cross with some unexpected citations; if you need some discomfort in your comfort, read some Dorothee Sölle.
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