I could easily draw on the work of John Caputo's Weakness of God, but Caputo's work doesn't have the broad pastoral appeal that I think is necessary. That's because Caputo's work is steeped in post-modern deconstruction and Continental philosophy to energize a congregation of Christians. Basically, if you're talking about Derrida or Lacan you're screwed, pastorally speaking. Again, people want a real fight. They don't want a lot of post-modern philosophication.
So I want to turn to a particular reading of the New Testament for laying out what I mean by "the weakness of God". (I'm relying quite heavily on Moltmann's Crucified God, Placher's Narratives of a Vulnerable God and Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison.)
I think any biblical theology about "God's weakness" must begin with Paul in 1 Corinthians 1.18-25:
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate."The weakness of God is associated here with the cross of Jesus. The cross is weakness and foolishness in the eyes of the world, but it is the power and wisdom of God. Paul immediately goes on in the next verses (26-28) to show how the weakness of God is at work among the Corinthian Christians:
Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age?
Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things -- and the things that are not -- to nullify the things that are.The power of God is here associated with things that are foolish, weak, lowly and despised. This is the power/weakness of God in the world, the power manifested on the cross.
In short, the power of God in the world is the power of the cross. The power of weakness, powerlessness, and lowliness.
The power/weakness of God in the world is kenosis, self-emptying donation for others. From Paul in Philippians 2:
In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:The power/weakness of God is manifest in "being made nothing" in the world. The power/weakness of God is found in failure, loss, and humiliation.
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God
something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death --
even death on a cross!
And this power/weakness isn't just about theology. It's about the ethics of the Kingdom, how Christians are to practice the powerlessness and weakness of God. From Mark 10.42-45:
Jesus called them together and said:The power/weakness of God is being the last and the least, the servant and slave of all. In Luke 22, the parallel to Mark 10, Jesus adds the stunning phrase:
"You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you.
Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."
"I am among you as the one who serves."God exists among us "as the one who serves". Servanthood is the power of God. Want to see God? Look for a servant. There you will find God living amongst us. Phrased in the language of 1 John 4, the power/weakness of God in the world is found in love:
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love ... Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.Love is the power/weakness of God in the world. If you love you have been "born of God". If you love you "know God". If you love God "lives in" you.
You add all that up and what you have is a radically different view of God's power. God doesn't exercise top-down power and control from on high. God doesn't "lord over" the world. The power of God works in the opposite direction, from the bottom-up. God's power is the power of the cross, the power of weakness and powerlessness, the power of loving servanthood and self-giving. This is why we must become like little children -- become weak, lowly and despised as those described in 1 Corinthians -- if we are to enter the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom not characterized by top-down power but by being the one in the "last place". And when we step into this loving and powerless way of living we become born of God, we come to know God, and God comes to live in us. As Henri Nouwen has written:
Surrounded by so much power, it is very difficult to avoid surrendering to the temptation to seek power like everyone else. But the mystery of our ministry is that we are called to serve not with our power but with our powerlessness. It is through powerlessness that we can enter into solidarity with our fellow human beings, form a community with the weak, and thus reveal the healing, guiding, and sustaining mercy of God ... As followers of Christ, we are sent into the world naked, vulnerable, and weak, and thus we can reach our fellow human beings in their pain and agony and reveal to them the power of God's love and empower them with the power of God's Spirit.At this point, any number of my sisters and brothers might be "on board" with this vision of God's power and weakness. It's a position that is marvelously summarized by Bonhoeffer:
God lets himself be pushed out of the world onto the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matt. 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering.So far, so good. This is all well-trod territory in theological circles. While some of this formulation might be too strong for some conservatives, most of these texts and this particular trajectory will resonate with any number of Christians of whatever social and political stripe.
So where's the rub? Right here: I think (along with Caputo) that all that can be said about God's power is said by these texts. In other words, God's power is God's weakness. Straight up. There's no hidden Power behind all this weakness. The cross isn't backed up by a reservoir of power. The weakness of God exhausts what it means to talk about the power of God. Caputo writes:
God is the source of good and its warrant. That is the stamp or the seal that God puts on creation; that is God's covenant with us. But God is not the power supply for everything that happens.That's the point at which any number of my conservative sisters and brothers will balk. That is, while they accept at one level the cross of Jesus and the path of servanthood, they don't agree that these are the very definition of God's "power". Behind the cross, they would contend, is power and awesome force, a power and force that can push people around, can push the entire cosmos around, can with the snap of a finger obliterate anything and anyone. God is more than weakness, God is power. Awesome power.
But in his book The Weakness of God Caputo rejects all that. Beyond the cross there isn't a reservoir of awesome force. The power of God just is the weakness of the cross. The cross exhausts what we mean by "the power of God", with no remainder. As Bonhoeffer says, God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which God is with us and helps us. Key those words, "the only way". In this view there is no other power but powerlessness. No other form of control than weakness. And this is the only way. There is no Big Stick, no Big Power Switch sitting in reserve. The weakness of the cross is the only way God rules the world. The. Only. Way.
Another way to say this is to echo the church father, "There is no force in God".
From Caputo (at length):
The strong point about weak theology is that it is a theology of the cross ... The divinity is rather that [Christ's] very death and humiliation rise up in protest against the world, rise up above power. Under power, I include both Roman power and a God of power who has the power to intervene, as if God is like a hurricane who could descend on the scene and send the Roman soldiers hurtling through the air were he of such a mind. The perverse core of Christianity lies in being a weak force. The weak force of God is embodied in the broken body on the cross ...To be sure, I don't come to the exact conclusions that Caputo does (specifically, he thinks God is an "event", not a "being"). But I do think he's closer to the biblical witness when it comes to "the weakness of God" than lots of other theologians (like Boyd). Given my theological concerns about a robust metaphysical account of divinity, I find appeals to divine power lacking, anyway. Because of my thoroughgoing trinitarianism, I find theological accounts of God as solidarity and love more compelling. God is with us in love. And we are called to live as the Imago Dei, standing with each other in love, particularly with the weak and outcast. As Caputo writes:
The power of God is not pagan violence, brute power, vulgar magic; it is the power of powerlessness, the power of the call, the power of protest that rises up from innocent suffering and calls out against it, the power that says no to unjust suffering, and finally the power to suffer-with (sym-pathos) innocent suffering, which is perhaps the central Christian symbol.
The effect of situating God on the side of vulnerability and unjust suffering is not, of course, to glorify suffering and misery, but to prophetically protest it, to give divine depth and meaning to resistance to unjust suffering, to attach the coefficient of divine resistance to unjust suffering ... The call, the cry, the plaint that rises up from the cross is a great divine "no" to injustice, an infinite lamentation over unjust suffering and innocent victims. God is with Jesus on the cross, and in standing with Jesus rather than with the imperial power of Rome, God stands with an innocent persecuted for calling the powers that be to task. The name of God is the name of a divine "no" to persecution, violence, and victimization ...
On this scheme ... the transcendence of "God" does not mean God towers above being as a hyper-being. Rather, God pitches his tent among beings by identifying with everything the world casts out and leaves behind ... God withdraws from the world's order of presence, prestige, and sovereignty in order to settle into those pockets of protest and contradiction to the world. God belongs to the air, to the call, to the spirit that inspires and aspires, that breathes justice. God settles into the recesses formed in the world by the little ones, the nothings and nobodies of the world.
God chose the "outsiders," the people deprived of power, wealth, education, high birth, high culture. Theirs is a "royalty" of outcasts, so that, from the point of view of the aion, the age or the world, the word kingdom is being used ironically, almost mockingly, to refer to these pockets of the despised that infect and infest the world. For this is a kingdom of the low-down and lowborn, the "excluded," the very people who are precisely the victims of the world's power.If I'm right -- that we need a weak God to revolt -- this account of divine weakness provides just such a theological foundation. God is extracted from the complicity of evil. Evil is outside God's control, because it's a cancer that eats at the goodness and love of God that creates the world. Theologically, this account gets me to the same place as Boyd in dealing with the principalities and powers without (1) positing the real existence of angels and demons and (2) positing the importance of free will.
Boyd rightly argues in favor of a plurality of forces in the world in combat with each other. A weak view of God assumes this plurality, that in the world there are a variety of forces often working at cross-purposes. Among these forces is the "weak force of God", the force of love. And insofar as love abides and "rules" then the Kingdom of God is instantiated. Christ is made "King" and "Lord".
Insofar as love is overthrown by force, the Kingdom of Satan is in charge. Waging spiritual warfare, then, is using the tools of Jesus (love, servanthood, self-giving) to establish and expand the Kingdom of God in the face of competing, hostile and evil forces. Spiritual warfare is "binding the strong man" in order to inaugurate, on earth, the Kingdom of Heaven.
And yet, there are plenty of other questions that remain. Specifically: The displays of God's power at the start (Creation) and at the end (New Creation) of the biblical narrative. Creation and New Creation seem to involve a lot of power. So how do we think about these two things in light of this "weakness of God"? That's where I want to turn tomorrow.