The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

‘Every being can he revealed only in its opposite. Love only in hatred, unity only in conflict’.[22] Applied to Christian theology, this means that God is only revealed as ‘God’ in his opposite: godlessness and abandonment by God. In concrete terms, God is revealed in the cross of Christ who was abandoned by God. His grace is revealed in sinners. H

Solidarity with others in meaningful actions loses its creative character if one no longer wishes to be anything different from the others.

‘Change yourself’, some say, ‘and then your circumstances will also change’. The kingdom of God and of freedom is supposed to have to do only with persons. Unfortunately the circumstances will not oblige. Capitalism, racism and inhuman technocracy quietly develop in their own way. The causes of misery are no longer to be found in the inner attitude

Jesus died crying out to God, ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ All Christian theology and all Christian life is basically an answer to the question which Jesus asked as he died. The atheism of protests and of metaphysical rebellions against God are also answers to this question. Either Jesus who was abandoned by God is the end of all theology o

A radical return to the origin of Christian faith in the night of the cross makes this faith homeless not only in an alien, religious world, but also in the syncretistic world of present-day bourgeois Christianity. The

The more the mysticism of the cross recognizes this, the less it can accept Jesus as an example of patience and submission to fate.

Only someone who finds the courage to be different from others can ultimately exist for ‘others’, for otherwise he exists only with those who are like him.

It is clear that theology can no longer find a permanent basis in the general thinking, feeling and action of contemporary society. The reason for this lies less in theology than in the fact that in a pluralist society, what concerns everyone absolutely, and what society must absolutely desire, is more difficult to identify than in earlier and more

Anyone who in these hymns encounters the passion of Christ, and experiences in them the pain of the love of God for himself, knows that he himself is something different from what sorrow and the fear of death, the yoke of slavery and his masters have made and seek to make of him.