“For the cross to truly cost God, wouldn’t it make him less-than-God afterward?”
“Wouldn’t it affect him in some irreversible way?”
These were some of the questions asked during the fifth session of our course Theology: the Basics (salvation being the topic of the hour). “What happened to Jesus on the cross,” one student asked: “how was it costly to God?”
To give you a little background, we’d been discussing theories of the atonement, such as St. Anselm’s Satisfaction Theory and the Medieval Ransom to Satan theory. Each theory is unique, but they gesture toward the same idea: the cross cost God something.
The inquisitive student queried further: “For the cross to truly cost God, wouldn’t it make him less-than-God afterward? I mean: for it to truly cost God something, wouldn’t it affect him in some irreversible way?”
This got me thinking.
First, it got me thinking of a book I’d read the year before: the Crucified God by Jürgen Moltmann. Therein Moltmann devotes unflinching attention to how the Cross is (or should be) foundational for all of Christian theology. The whole book is well worth a read, but one theme in particular stands out. At the cross, reasons Moltmann, God is paradoxically, unimaginably separated from Godself. Yes, I said it: separated.
As Jesus quotes the words of Psalm 22:1 (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”), God the Son is abandoned by God the Father. At the very same ‘time’, it seems, God the Father is bereaved of his only Son (God the Word). In stupefying fashion then, on the cross, Moltmann argues: God is separated from God.
Thinking apart from the cross for a moment (if we can even do that!), Father, Son, and Spirit exist together in unbreakable union. From eternity past the Godhead has coexisted in interdependent mutuality and harmony. On the cross, however, it seems that this Trinity was effectively broken, ruptured, torn asunder (for a time; cf. 1 Cor. 15:1f).
As we were discussing this, flexing our flimsy intellects with varied success, I couldn’t help but hear one word in the quiet recesses of my (exhausted) mind: trauma... trauma. What God experienced on the cross was nothing less than trauma.
According to theologian Deanna Thompson (now in her fourth remission from cancer; see one of her recent books here), trauma is suffering that remains. To experience trauma, she says, is to experience something so cataclysmic, so category-shifting, so overwhelming, that afterwards one is never quite the same.
Theologians such as Thompson, Shelly Rambo, Nancy Eiesland, and others, have pioneered this new field of theology. They are sourcing their reflections on God from the traumatic, existential impact of the cross. God, such theologians claim, has experienced a sort of trauma. On the cross, God was so pierced, shaken, and distressed, that afterwards he was never quite the same.
About three years ago, I experienced an episode of trauma. It was much, much less serious than what God and countless others have experienced, but it was trauma all the same. I awoke in the wee hours of the night, heart racing, sweat streaming, and my perception of life was at once different. Little did I know, I was experiencing my very first panic attack, which led to a long season of counseling, psychological diagnoses, and prescription medications. Even after something so small, I’ve felt a little different ever since.
The student from before had asked if God was deficient or perhaps something-less after the cross. My mind, however, went somewhere else...
God is not, I think, anything less, nor has he fundamentally changed (in nature). What God is now (after-the-cross), is just a little more human.
The original human pair, Adam and Eve, it says, “became like God” (cf. Gen. 3:5) when they ate from the fruit of the tree in Eden (immediately “knowing good and evil”). God, it would seem then, “became like us” when he ‘ate’ from the fruit of the cross (=death/separation).
To die, in its ‘real’ sense, is to be separated, disconnected, cut-off from the life-giving womb of community. Such separation, fragmentation, disconnection... God experienced in Godself (for a time). The wounds of divine trauma, the holes in Christ’s hands, the cracks in God’s heart, will never fully go away. And that doesn’t make God less-than-God. It makes him like one of us.
God has experienced trauma and he has never been the same since. The God we know, therefore, is not a woundless or compassionless God. No. Rather, he is a traumatized God.
He is the God who was fragmented so that we could be made whole. He is the God who bears wounds, so that someday he could heal ours. He’s the God who knows what it’s like to be lost, abandoned, alone.
And he’s the God who beckons us all to “come home... come home... come home.”
Jonah Bissell
Associate Pastor
*The artwork displayed above is a crucifixion scene from the Syriac Rabbula Gospels (dated 586 AD). This, therefore, is the earliest crucifixion scene we possess from any New Testament manuscript.