Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.2007, Side 20

ne “Abba, my dear father”. On the other hand the crucified Christ is the
revelation of the trinitarian mystery of God. Only when we plumb the
depth of this “pain of God” can we grasp the immeasurable Easter jubila-
tion of the “Joy of God” and the whole creation.
Consent and Critique
THE CRUCIFIED GOD became in the best sense of the word contro-
versial. It stimulated people to think about suffering and the Crucified
Christ by themselves. I got strong support from Anglican theologians such
as Kenneth Woolcombe and Richard Bauckham. Agreement came also
from liberation theologians like Jon Sobrino and Leonardo Boff, from the
Korean Minjung-theologian Ahn, Byun-Mu, and to my surprise also from
the orthodox Rumanian theologian Dumitru Staniloae, who found the
pain of God included in the concept of the merciful God.
But what impressed me most were the many personal letters coming
from people in prisons, hospitals and basic [’simple’?] communities in
slums, poor people who have to live in the “shadows of the cross”, sick
people in the “dark night of the soul”, or between the crucified people of
this world. People are still coming to me after 30 years, speaking about
the personal consolation they found in this book. When they cried out to
God, they found the suffering God at their side.
At the end of the war the theology of God’s suffering had already been
outlined by the Japanese theologian Kazoh Kitamori12 and by the theolog-
ian of the German resistance movement, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. ‘Only the
suffering God can help’, wrote Bonhoeffer from his prison cell. It was only
after I had written THE CRUCIFIED GOD that I discovered the inten-
se discussion about the passibility or impassibility of God that had been
carried on in Anglican theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
but had been completely ignored by German theology.
I found the positive influence of my theology of the cross especially in
the Christology of Jon Sobrino, who deepened and sharpened it for the
12. Kazo Kitamori, The Pain of God, London 1965.
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