- God suffers in himself: the incarnation was the consequence of “God’s passible pathos towards and empathy with humankind (see John 3: 16);
- The Son of God suffers as a man: Jesus suffers as a divine-human person, what pertains to his humanity also pertains to his divinity; and
- The Father and the Son suffer in their relationship: “the abandonment on the cross which separates the Son from the Father is something which takes place within God himself”.
Weinandy points out that the traditional emphasis in Christian theology has, because of the legacy of Platonism, been on the impassibility of God. He notes that this change in emphasis has been the result of a re-evaluation of scripture brought about, in large part, by the impact of Auschwitz on theology. He cites the frequency with which Wiesel’s gallows story is told in books exploring God’s passibility and paraphrases Jurgen Moltmann to suggest that there “can be no theology ‘after Auschwitz,’ which does not take up the theology in Auschwitz i.e. the prayers and cries of the victims”.
As we have seen those prayers and cries also included the argument with God that is encapsulated in Wiesel’s trial story and Christianity has taken up those prayers and cries too. This protesting dialogue with God can be seen, for example, in the work of the poet-priests George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In ‘Bitter-sweet’, Herbert says that if God is going to be contrary in his relationship with him then he will reciprocate and complain, praise, bewail, approve, lament and love. Hopkins’ poems of lament and protest have been called the ‘terrible sonnets’. In ‘Carrion Comfort’ (which he described as ‘written in blood’) he wrestles with God, while a line from ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’ - “Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,/How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost/Defeat, thwart me?” - could be a summary of Wiesel’s protest within relationship.
Christian theology has also taken up these prayers and cries. Karl-Josef Kushel consciously aims to do theology in the sphere of Steiner’s ‘Easter Saturday’ and by paying attention to the art that arises in this sphere. He notes that, “the rebellion of human beings against God can be their form of prayer; quarrelling their form of saying yes; protest their declaration of love to God”.
Walter Brueggemann is another theologian to have tackled these issues and in ways that are similar to Sacks, as the following description of his Old Testament theology will show:
“A somewhat different ... dialectic is found in his proposed structure for understanding Old Testament theology - the dialectic between the majority voice that is creation-oriented, a voice that assumes an ordered world under the governance of a sovereign God and so serves to legitimate the structures of the universe, and a minority voice that is in tension with the legitimation of structure, a voice embracing the pain that is present in the world and protesting against an order that allows such to be. Brueggemann’s dialectical approach, which assumes an ongoing tension between voices “above the fray” and those “in the fray” is fundamental to his reading of the Old Testament".
Brueggemann’s minority voice, the counter-testimony to the core testimony of the Old Testament, equates to the protest in relationship of Sachs and Wiesel. It is a “radical probe of a new way of relationship that runs toward the theology of the cross in the New Testament and that runs in our time toward and beyond the Holocaust, as Elie Wiesel and Emil L. Fackenheim have seen so well”. Brueggemann views the tension between the core- and counter-testimony as unresolved in the Old Testament and therefore views God as ambiguous, always in the process of deciding “how much to be committed to the common theology, how many of its claims must be implemented, and how many of these claims can be resisted”.
Protest within relationship and ideas of a suffering God are, therefore, common to both Judaism and Christianity. This is only to be expected as Christianity’s roots are in Judaism and, although the influence of Greek thought has undoubtedly been great, the extent to which Jewish thought has been sidelined in Christianity is by no means as great as Sacks implies. In fact, as we have seen, the latter half of the twentieth century has seen a significant revision of the relationship, in part because of the Holocaust, and this has impacted significantly in theology. Finally, the fact that the Hebrew scriptures are such a significant part of the Christian scriptures means that the influence of Jewish thought in Christianity should never be underplayed as, for example, in the template that the Psalms provided to Herbert and Hopkins well before the Holocaust.
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Ralph Vaughan Williams - Five Mystical Songs, Part 2: Love Bade Me Welcome.
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