The Dynamic Death of God in Moltmann and Balthasar: Toward a Relational Anthropology of Vulnerability

One’s divine conception—or Ultimate Concern—orders perception of all relationalities from the rightful political hierarchy to the proper ordering of one’s own soul. Thus the question of divine impassibility is profoundly important. It can justify the most slavish hierarchies as eternally inviolate or idealize an anthropology of denial and derision to the contingent human soul.

In this paper, we intend to show how Jürgen Moltmann’s rejection of classical divine impassibility can be developed further by Hans Urs von Balthasar, moving Moltmann’s soteriological theodicy (his primary, but hardly sole concern) and social Trinitarianism further into an inter-Trinitarian kenosis which provides us a solid grounding for a transformative relational anthropology. 

This paper will contend that Balthasar’s expansions maintain everything useful about Moltmann’s “Crucified God,” while grounding itself more securely in the eternal being of the Trinity. There we find not only divine solidarity, but redefine human relationality as not merely a power, but the very essence of our being. In this way, we are not only comforted by a certain eschatological hope, but our entire conception of what human being is can be altered, such that new horizons of freedom are opened up and its avenues illuminated—all the while walking the “knife’s edge” of not subsuming God into creation. 

In Part 1, the problem of impassibility will be established, set within nesting problems of how the classical Christian God relates to the contingent in Creation, Incarnation, and Death. The problem sharpens here: how can such a being do anything like what we would name “relating” to a contingent creation? This problem is accentuated by claiming this God becomes a part of contingent creation, whilst maintaining his divinity—Incarnation. The issue reaches its most gutting contradiction when that God is said to have been murdered: Death. 

Here, Moltmann’s cruciform theology will be engaged to demonstrate his argument that a painless God is alien to a creation which is in dialectical relationship with him in its “giftedness”—Original, Continuous, and New. (1) The divine suffers with humanity, so that he may be love and not “stone” and so becomes a human being, purposed for total solidarity, (2) even to the point of welcoming new suffering into the divine being: the crucifixion. (3)

Part 2 will establish how Balthasar might contend that Moltmann was not right enough. Utilizing his unique twist on the traditional social conception of the Trinity’s interior life, Balthasar argues that all the contingency, suffering, and change of the creation can be found, in an archetypal form, within the divine life itself.

In freedom, the Father gathers himself up entirely and, without remainder, gives himself—his deity, his character, his personhood—over to his ever-receiving and ever-returning begotten Son. (4) This is Divinity’s essence, for Balthasar, as life is “genuinely alive insofar as it grows beyond itself and lets go of itself.” Yet, it is also a sort of death by Kenoticism, as “a component of all love and that highest love by which man gives his life for his friends.”  (5) The Son answers across infinite divine “distance”; a “letting-be” that nestles creation within the Trinitarian relations. (6) Incarnation and death follows, as divine inner-life is exteriorized in suffering as more than solidarity, but also divine exposition—and so also human exposition, as well. (7)

Part 3, then, will explore this relational vision of human and divine life, for Balthasar does not essentialize suffering as eternal per se (which Moltmann sought to avoid in speaking of suffering as new), but instead provides us with two keys to human essence and its liberation: “God is love and nothing else” (8) and “Being is equal to giving.”  (9) With a relation to God alike to “a dialect of the standard language spoken by pure form in God,” (10) humans are not merely beings-who-relate, but beings whose entire being is made up of relationships.

Thus, human suffering emerges by refusing the giftedness of relationality; when the “recklessness with which the Father gives himself away encounters a freedom that, instead of responding in kind to this magnanimity, changes it into a calculating and cautious self-preservation.” (11) The entirety of human happiness resides, then, upon gratuitous risk; the same liberatory gamble toward trust and mutuality which God makes towards all creation in imitation of his ever-active Trinitarian relations. 

The entirety of human unfreedom so resides in the instinct toward fear and the denial of our totalized relational nature—and so just as God is “freed” from his stoic impassibility, so too must the human be freed to recognize their own relational nature which finds freedom in the total recognition of all Others as relationally essential to “myself.” Better than the God who accepts suffering into Godself is the God whose very definitive and essential act is the archetypal form of the risk of being. In this vulnerability humans both feel most free and secure, and so also, where all suffering resides when we are violated. From this must emerge a different ethical and political orientation of relational entanglement—in all our sufferings and all our joys—used to explain what makes for, and truly feels, a free and flourishing human life.

 (1) One can only refer here to his entire Ethics of Hope.
 (2) Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, trans. Margaret Kohl (Fortress Press, 1993), 201.  
 (3) Moltmann, 207, 274.  
 (4) Balthasar, TD II, 256; Balthasar, TD IV, 323.  
 (5) TD II, 257; Balthasar, TD V, 84.  
 (6) TD V, 247.  
 (7) Mark McIntosh, “Christology” in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, 186; Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and Trinity” in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, 37; Balthasar, MP, 28; TD IV, 364.
 (8) Balthasar, Epilogue, 93.  
 (9) Balthasar, GL V, 391.  
 (10) Balthasar, GL IV, 406-407; Balthasar, TL II, 84, 180.  
 (11) TD IV, 327-328.