Does God Suffer?
Weinandy, Thomas G. & Cavadini, John C.
in Christ affected God's divine nature it would mean that it was someone other than the eternal impassible Creator who was experiencing human suffering. Weinandy comments, "Strange as it...
...This to me is the real problem of native...
...Consistent ethic Luke Timothy Johnson does offer some salient points in his critique of Pope John Paul II's theology, which he describes as "abstract" and idealistic...
...Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered...
...In the end, some might well agree with Johnson...
...May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catemodern sexual ethics...
...Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists...
...Weinandy is at his best in his discussion of the classical notion of the "exchange of properties" (comtnunicatio idiomatum), that is, the predicating of divine and human attributes to one and the same person, the Son incarnate...
...he roared at us several times, as the other customers continued nonchalantly to converse...
...Jeanne Knoerle's survey of Catholic education overlooks none of the questions and complications that make up its history from the mid-nineteenth century to Ex corde ecclesiae (and the problems posed by the mandatum for theologians...
...This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed...
...The authors were apparently limited to about fifteen pages, yet some produced small masterpieces that highlight ways in which American culture has shaped our Catholicism...
...I think perhaps with more admiration about an incident recounted in a letter to the New York Review of Books by an Israeli who survived the occupation of Poland...
...It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard...
...Until the critics of Humanae vitae address this, John Paul II will continue to win the philosophical argument while much of the population simply ignores him...
...But if God is not impassive in the face of human suffering, God does remain, nevertheless, "impassible," in the classical sense that the divine nature is not subject to change or loss and God is not subject to suffering arising from such change or loss...
...The Catholic Church in the Twentieth Century Renewing and Reimaging the City of God John Deedy, editor TheLiturgical Press, $24,95,244 pp...
...Those advocating a passible God, Weinandy claims, have "locked suffering within God's divine nature, [and] in so doing, locked God out of human suffering...
...Only a thorough renewal of "the church's sense of mission and purpose" will win the next generation's loyalty...
...Weinandy worries that contemporary theologians are losing their taste for the "scandal" of the Incarnation as the "culmination and summit of biblical revelation...
...They will worry that all 42 the precise language about the Incarnation is simply a way of narrowing down the relevance of divine suffering to Christians, a way of reasserting a triumphalist anti-Judaism which, if it did not itself generate the Holocaust, at least prepared the attitude toward the Jews that made such a horror thinkable...
...Where do we stand now...
...Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility...
...Jon Nllson_______________ he title of this book makes a promise that only an encyclopedia could fulfill...
...What might have been learned...
...It is truly the Son of God who truly is man and so suffers truly as man...
...For example, Johnson's focus on the use of the rhetoric of self-control causes him to miss the larger point: many of us who follow church teachings do so joyfully and find that it has brought greater, not lesser, pleasure and happiness to our lives...
...This is true enough, but I wonder if Johnson has really offered an alter44 chetical address" was to support, as I suggest, Humanae vitae...
...A different subtitle, something like "Case Studies in Inculturation," would better describe the main issue that cuts across the best essays...
...God's sorrow and grief, though real and not merely metaphorical, do not arise from divine suffering...
...Roger Landry and Jennifer Popiel offer testimonies concerning the joy brought to couples who are introduced to papal teaching on sexuality or who practice natural family planning...
...It is the ahistorical suffering of the divine nature which is actually the stuff of myth...
...Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy...
...Its actual scope is narrower: not the whole church in the whole world, but Roman Catholicism in the United States over the past hundred years...
...Too often the "so what...
...Otherwise, claims that Christians, through baptism, experience "the true spiritual circumcision," and that Christians differ from non-Christians "not simply in degree but in kind" will confirm the fears of anyone espousing the passibility of divine nature...
...He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope...
...Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960...
...He was built like a defensive end, shirtless except for a sweatstained leather vest, intricately tattooed, and evidently hallucinating under the influence of the nearly empty bottle of Jose Cuervo Tequila which an unprincipled bartender had surrendered to him much earlier...
...I would not be surprised to find them multiplied...
...Ultimately Weinandy seems concerned not so much with banning all talk of God's suffering as with cautioning against the loss of a whole theological vocabulary—of natures and persons, substance and essence—that permits the precise distinctions required for a full portrayal of the mystery of the Incarnation...
...Matthew Kowalski makes the point that allowing artificial birth control would lead inevitably to abortion, since for people whose sexual activity already excludes the thought of having a child, "abortion becomes the natural solution...
...But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids...
...Thomas Weinandy certainly agrees that a God impervious to human suffering is not worthy of respect...
...John C. Cavadini nathema for centuries, the claim that God suffers is commonplace in many contemporary theologies...
...In many ways the book could serve simply as an introduction to classical Trinitarian and Christological doctrine, creatively explained and developed in the light of contemporary questions...
...If natural family planners, surprised by pregnancy, are then open to God's will concerning a birth, why should we assume that those using condoms who are surprised whould then seek an abortion...
...Still, following the lead of John Paul II, Weinandy could better balance assertions of the uniqueness of Christian revelation with reminders that God's covenant with Israel is irrevocable...
...The author replies: Derek Jeffreys and Roger Landry think that I have misrepresented Pope John Paul II because I did not take into account his other writings on the subject of human love, or grasp the "purpose of a catechetical address...
...Some would call this a myth...
...Harleys...
...So the book is a collection of essays, a sort of reference work on the topics it covers, rather than a developed and detailed response to its originating questions...
...MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B...
...Catholics have lost the sense of social and cultural solidarity that marks their authentic tradition...
...What was learned...
...Displacing the suffering of God from the incarnate person of the Son to the divine nature seems to make that suffering more uniformly accessible since it elides a belief in Christ or connection to the church, Christ's body...
...God will hear you...
...I have no more objection to those who choose this path than I do to those who choose celibacy, in or out of marriage...
...JENNIFER POP1EL Green Bay, Wis...
...Paul Hottinger asks why I don't work at all this stuff I said needed doing, since the pope is a busier guy than I am...
...It was easy to accede...
...For example, Barbara Kraemer shows how the unique blend of developments in American society and within the church itself have not only transfigured the modes and ideals of vowed religious life but continue to pose fundamental questions about its future...
...Yet she also notes that the world of the exegetes has become too much a world unto itself...
...In what way is God's image connected to the human body...
...We are more in tune with one another's desires...
...Weinandy comments, "Strange as it may seem, but not paradoxically, one must maintain the unchangeable impassibility of the Son of God as God in order to guarantee that it is actually the divine Son of God, one in being with the Father, who truly suffers as man, that is, that it is truly God who knows now from experience what human suffering is...
...But this means that the suffering that God experiences is our suffering, not a special divine version of it occurring in the divine nature...
...But if these are the pope's sentiments, why is there no trace of them in the multiple addresses making up Theology of the Body...
...Perhaps it's the general intellectual numbness of coming off a hotly contested election with its high polemics, but I find personal reflections by such sensitive narrators more persuasive these days than the closely reasoned certainty of experts...
...But even in his analysis, a dismissal of current theology would have to involve a serious attempt to confront the realities behind the church's teachings...
...Weinandy further claims that if, to the contrary, God's sorrow and grief were expressions of suffering in God, their reality would be diminished, not increased...
...No wonder important features like the liturgical revolution, the transformation in the role of the laity, the influence of bishops like Gibbons and Spellman, and the struggles of African-American and Hispanic Catholics for recognition as equal partners in their own church get no essays of their own...
...The book's answers to these questions remain cloudy because its sixteen contributors worked independently...
...As Creator, God is not a creature but the one on whom all creatures depend, and as such God's involvement with creatures is both more intimate and more significant than that of any creature...
...A passible God is no different from a creature...
...To attribute suffering instead to the divine nature is actually to make God more remote from us...
...Just a small point in response to Popiel: I think that I called the pope's theology "deductive," whereas I would prefer a theology that was more "inductive...
...He goes beyond traditional claims that God's sorrow and grief are merely metaphorical, affirming they are true and actual...
...As couples, we communicate more, not less...
...Weinandy's book is such a compelling treatment of central Christian doctrines that one is eager to see his thesis formulated in a way that presents no temptation to those who might be inclined to repeat the sins of the anti-Jewish past...
...Jeffreys connects my poor grasp of the pope's overall position with my suggestion that the church may be in danger of colluding in genocide...
...I think of Jan Korski skiing across the Alps, a consecrated host in a pendant on a chain around his neck, to tell the Allies who couldn't have cared less what was happening at Auschwitz...
...This is what humankind is crying out to hear, not that God experiences, in a divine manner, our anguish and suffering...but that he actually experienced and knew first hand, as one of us—as man—human anguish and suffering within a sinful and depraved world...
...This lack of coordination is a drawback...
...Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution...
...What went right...
...Marvin, S.D...
...A God impassive in the face of the human suffering witnessed in the twentieth century, impassive in the face of the Holocaust, seems, with Camus, to be an "eternal bystander," unmoved by human suffering and so incapable of sympathy and love...
...Incarnate in Christ, however, God not only truly sorrows, but also truly suffers...
...If one more author had been recruited to write a synthetic presentation of the lessons gleaned from these studies, this book would be even more useful...
...Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality...
...But there are other stories, voiced by people of equally deep faith and love for the church but with quite different experiences, and I would like them to be heard as well...
...Since God is incapable of loss or gain, God has no possibility of self-interest either in creating or in any relations with creatures...
...5 McGowan, by juxtaposing the general chaos of India's earthquake with the particular and personal moral challenge of a public interrogation, managed, for me at least, to convey how bewildering our world is and how great events find reflections in our everyday life...
...Since Alleva's own concerns have to do with the verisimilitude of the Left Behind series as thrillers, he is certainly entitled to be selective in his quarrels...
...This, it seems to me, would go beyond repetition of the platitudes about access to a lover's body and the benefits of sexual enjoyment to a discussion about the real experiences of people who have made a serious attempt to conform to doctrinal standards...
...But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth...
...Weinandy is at once genuinely traditional and genuinely creative, an admirable balance increasingly rare in contemporary theology...
...In Christ, God truly enters into radical historical solidarity with human suffering...
...marian burkhart New York, N.Y...
...WE BRAKE FOR GOD Riders for Cod The Story of a Christian Motorcycle Gang Rich Remsberg Afterword by Colleen McDannett University of Illinois Press, $34,95, 263 pp...
...Cort maintains that the principles of contemporary socialism are virtually identical with Catholic social teaching...
...Carroll's irony The ultimate irony of James Carroll's theories [see Robert Wilken's review of Constantine's Sword, "Dismantling the Cross," Janurary 26] about the inevitability of Christian anti-Semitism is that those Christians who risked their lives to save Jews did so not in spite of their faith but because of it...
...I wonder what the mystics would say about this...
...Weinandy reminds us rather that it is a mystery, susceptible of precise expression if not explanation...
...God actually experiences something new and knows first hand—as one of us mortals—suffering and anguish within a fallen world...
...While he celebrates the pioneers (Merder, Wattson, Willebrands) who laid the groundwork for Vatican II's breakthrough, he also underscores the Catholic church's still unmet special responsibilities in the quest for the full, visible unity of the Body of Christ...
...rather, they manifest and express the fullness of God's unchanging, "completely altruistic, all-consuming, and perfect love for his creatures...
...D 43 who foEow the church's teachings on sexuality...
...Michael O. Garvey tie summer night a few years ago, as my brother and I were having a couple of beers in a local biker bar, I became uncomfortably aware that a conspicuously enraged patron at a nearby table was demanding our attention...
...Thomas G. Weinandy University of Notre Dame Press, $22.95,312 pp...
...Thus, work for justice must take the socialist 40 NO, NOT EXACTLY Does God Suffer...
...Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent...
...I am pleased to hear them...
...Johnson wants church teaching to be based in ordinary life experience, but let him consider this basic problem: If a population of 1 million couples is using artificial birth control, one year the normal failure rate will result in at least fifty thousand unwanted pregnancies...
...Even with a narrower scope and the appropriate disclaimers, the book's enterprise is still quixotic...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Large families & ideas I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus...
...The moral, as he sees it, is that the church has found a place in America but that place is too cozy...
...question hovers over the exegetes' conclusions...
...The Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of the Word of God are God's answer to the problem of evil, and so a properly precise portrayal of the Incarnation—not the attribution of suffering to the divine nature—is the appropriate Christian defense against the charge that God is an eternal bystander...
...By the way, though certain passages of the book of Revelation are commonly used to support interpretations of the Rapture, the notion itself is drawn from 1 Thessalonians 4:17...
...Even worse, such a God appears complicit in human suffering, since he observes it without passion and is not moved to intervene...
...Why doesn't the professor provide a consistent ethic of sexual behavior taking into account the experience of married people, homosexuals, and those who are single "yet whose erotic desires find no legitimate or sanctified expression...
...I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers...
...Disappointed As someone who believes in Humanae vitae but also agrees there is room for further development in this teaching, I found Luke Timothy Johnson's essay disappointing...
...But Christians reading the New Testament as a source of divine revelation may demand more of a proposed exegesis than that it be sincere and interesting...
...They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us— Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well...
...Robert hannon Fairbanks, Ark...
...What is pertinent is a reexamination of the moral issue in light of medical disaster, not a reexamination of the pope's entire corpus to justify the church's present stance...
...Finally, in regard to the Theology of the Body, I found one of Johnson's principles rather hard to accept: "Human bodies are part of God's image and the means through which absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us...
...Key here is the distinction between creature and Creator...
...A God who does not suffer seems to be a God who is not passionately involved with the world...
...And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically...
...His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view...
...Trying to cover the major aspects of twentieth-century American Catholic church life in one volume is like trying to cover a cathedral with a kerchief...
...As Creator, therefore, God's actions toward creatures are not undertaken in order to ease God's suffering or to guard against the possibility of divine loss, and thus only belief in God as impassible Creator is belief in a God of perfectly altruistic love...
...Alleva's rapture It is irenic of Richard Alleva ["Beam Me Up," January 12] to seek no quarrel with the idea of the Rapture or even with the LaHaye-Jenkins interpretation of it...
...Its continuities with pre-Enlightenment traditions of biblical interpretation, its ability to contribute to broad and basic theological and ecclesiological reflection, and the nourishment it offers to the faith life of the church itself have become thin and weak...
...Two Johns, Cort and Haughey, offer the most provocative contributions...
...JULIAN IRIAS Davis, Calif...
...Disclosure statement: the latter John is a colleague and good friend of mine...
...I'm still looking for answers...
...REV...
...Patricia McDonald traces Catholic biblical scholarship from its European and Protestant tutelage to the full maturity of professional credibility...
...For Weinandy, "only an impassible God, and not a passible God, is truly and fully personal, absolutely and utterly loving...
...An old woman on a crowded trolley in Warsaw, at a time and in a place where one could trust almost no one, replied to the anti-Semitic diatribe a fellow passenger was delivering by saying, "Hush up...
...Jeffrey Gros demonstrates his claim that the revolution in the church's ecumenical posture and the postconciliar progress toward church unity are nothing short of "amazing" and "marvelous...
...Is Johnson sure that "absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us" from our bodies...
...This is die central truth of the communicatio id.ioma.tum, the suffering of the Impassible...
...He may have been trying to provoke us by denouncing the most revered of all motorcycle brands in a sort of biker's version of epater le bourgeois, but what31 MORE AMERICAN THAN CATHOLIC...
...Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record...
...Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W...
...Further, if the suffering of God 41...
...he bellowed, and, to our considerable relief, passed out on the laminated tabletop...
...Maybe I will...
...My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes...
...They never met nor, it seems, did they ever confer...
...I have no reason to think I would have had such courage...
...Although we are far too close to the twentieth century for any definitive assessment (as Deedy, a former managing editor of Commonweal, acknowledges), it is never too early for attention to the main questions it asks: "What took place...
...My brother and I had begun to agree upon a discreet, or even panicked exit when the drunken biker disgorged, among other things, the rest of his thought: "Harleys suck...
...Each study stands alone, even though each is part of the same story...
...What went wrong...
...David O'Brien's title, "Catholic Youth: The Presumed Become the Pursued," sums up the story he tells...
...Weinandy presses us here: Are we really ready to give up the claim that God truly and uniquely experiences human suffering as a real, particular human being and so in true solidarity with us...
...I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
