Suffering

Today, whatever the popular view of God outside academic theological circles might be, inside them there is a strong conviction about the suffering of God. In many quarters the idea that God suffers hardly needs to be argued for any longer. But a careful examination is needed of what it means to talk about the suffering of God. On the one hand, many are happy to talk of it without facing up to its full implications; they invoke the theme of a suffering God but defuse it of its explosive effect upon the whole doctrine of God as they fail to follow it through into a theology that embraces divine weakness at the centre. They are puzzled as to why classical theism brought such a weight of argument against the idea of a suffering God because they have made of it something merely sentimental. On the other hand, some conclusions are often drawn from the idea which need cautious questioning. I have in mind two in particular, concerning the weakness of God and the universal scope of God's suffering.

Thus we must attempt to think coherently about a God who is suffering and weak, and yet who remains recognizably God within the Christian tradition of strength through weakness. We must try to think of a God who can be the greatest sufferer of all and yet still be God. Someone might well ask why we should place such a premium upon coherence; might it not be better to have a fragmentary theology which recognizes the mystery in our experience of God? While accepting the limits of all human talk about God, we must I believe face the challenge of those who find the notion of a suffering God to be inadequate as a basis for religious belief. Such an objection need not only come from classical theists. It can also come from a surprisingly different quarter, from those who find any notion of an objectively existing God to be a fatal blow against human freedom. Recently, for example, Don Cupitt has argued that human autonomy cannot be rescued by replacing belief in a cosmic monarch by belief in God as the fellow-sufferer with humanity, since this concept destroys the value of God as a religious ideal: 'The god of the modern patripassian believer is nothing but Humanity ... He is merely the tears and fellow feeling of humanity. There is no salvation in him.' We must then attempt to make coherent a notion of a God who suffers and yet remains a God who can fulfil his purposes.

A second conclusion often drawn from the idea of a suffering God is that if God suffers supremely and universally in this way, he cannot also suffer uniquely in the cross of Jesus. For example, Frances Young has recently argued that if God were present in the suffering of the cross in a way which was at all different from his presence in all men's sufferings, then 'On such a view the reality of God's involvement in other instances of profound tragedy may be overshadowed by the story of the cross rather than illuminated by it.' Rather, she urges, the cross must be taken simply as the 'classic case' of God's presence in the midst of human sin, suffering, and death. But we must ask whether the conviction that God is present in the suffering and death of all human beings is in fact incompatible with the notion that God suffered uniquely and decisively in the death of Jesus. If we can coherently speak of a particular suffering of God in the context of a universal suffering, this itself might contribute some meaning to the traditional concept of an incarnation of God in Christ.

One obvious response to the challenge of reconciling a universal and a particular suffering of God would be to weaken the meaning of the suffering of God altogether. But the task I hope to confront is to speak consistently of a God who suffers eminently and yet is still God, and a God who suffers universally and yet is still present uniquely and decisively in the sufferings of Christ.