Lately, I have been thinking about Ivan Karamazov. As one of the three protagonists of Dostoevsky’s The Brother Karamazov, Ivan, the intellectual, represents humanity’s striving to move beyond God. Ivan envisions a post-religious world dominated by the rationality of human reason. While God may have had his moments, the use-by date of God has long since expired. Ivan asks, “how can one look upon the world and confess faith, love, and admiration of God?” The world has been forsaken by God. The human plight is so abysmal, Ivan had no choice but to reject the God that rejected the world. Of course, the rejection of God left a moral vacuum. A vacuum that left Ivan to opine, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”
For quite sometime Christians have used this conclusion as an argument against an atheistic morality. The argument goes: With no moral arbiter, there are no moral absolutes. If there are no moral absolutes, everything is relative. If everything is relative, it is impossible to evaluate ethical choices in any meaningful manner. As Ivan put it, “everything is permitted.”
Although atheistic ethicists have fought to counter this argument, there is some truth to it. In a 1946 lecture on Existentialism and Humanism, French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called the aforementioned quote by Ivan Karamazov as the “starting point” of all existentialist thought. There is no determinism in which we can appeal. Nor may we describe a person’s choice with reference to nature. Instead, humans are radically free to do whatever he or she wants. And as a radically free creature, it is only the individual who is ultimately responsible for his or her actions.
In what would bring Dostoevsky sadness, it appears Ivan has won. It does not take much imagination to believe we live in a time and a place where everything is permitted. Looking beyond the random acts of violence that occur ever day, we might point to the radical inequity of resources where some eat and drink wastefully and many more go without basic necessitates. In the United States, our pets are treated better than many people the world over. Let us not forget the increasing polarization of ideologies. One wonders if it is possible to engage constructively in any political dialogue, especially when the final arbiter is me. Add this all up and I can’t help but hear Ivan Karamazov and feel sympathy: how can we honestly look at the world and affirm the existence of God?
In November of 1969, six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter were murdered in a university in San Salvador. As they dragged the bodies back into the building they pulled one into an office, bumped a bookcase, and dislodged a book which became drenched in blood. The name of the book: The Crucified God by the German theologian Jurgen Moltmann. When reflecting upon that horrible incident, Moltmann found it reassuring that it was his book that was soaked in an innocent man’s blood. For a profound, rich, and complex book, the thesis is simple: only a crucified God can provide relief, hope, and salvation for a world stained by radical individualism and ceaseless violence. For Moltmann himself, it is the words of the martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Only a suffering God can help.”
Ivan Karamazov sees a world abandoned and forsaken by God. In the world’s godforsakeness, Ivan saw no alternative but to reject the very existence of God and turn to himself.
As a theological work, The Crucified God is an extended meditation on Jesus’ last cry from the cross “My God, my God why have you forsaken me.” In the cross of Jesus, the Godhead experiences death. There is a death within God.
There are many explanations for Jesus’ death. In one version, he died as a blasphemer. In another, he died as a political dissident. But in another, Jesus died as the godforsaken. On the cross, Jesus was the true innocent suffering the sins of humanity. And what did he find in his suffering? A God who looked the other way. On the cross, Jesus was utterly abandoned by God the Father and exemplifies a Godforsaken world.
But Jesus’ death upon the cross was more than the death of God who became flesh. The death Jesus died upon the cross was a death “within God”. Within the triune life of God, the Godhead experienced death. In the Trinity, the second person Jesus Christ suffered death and abandonment. Yet, the first person of the Trinity, God the Father experienced the heartbreak and loss of his only beloved and begotten son shamefully murdered upon the cross.
On the cross and within the life of God we fix our eyes on Jesus who suffered and experienced our own Godforsakeness. But on the cross and within the life of God we also encounter the Father who suffered and experience the loss of his only begotten and beloved son. When we approach God in faith, we approach a God who identifies and experiences the heartbreak and suffering of this world. God takes it upon Himself and suffers along with us. In the suffering of God, we have a God who helps and saves and transforms this present age.
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