The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition

The dialectical principle of ‘revelation in the opposite’ does not replace the analogical principle of ‘like is known only by like’, but alone makes it possible. In so far as God is revealed in his opposite, he can be known by the godless and those who are abandoned by God, and it is this knowledge which brings them into correspondence with God and

Of course the mysticism of suffering can easily be perverted into a justification of suffering itself. The mysticism of the cross can of course praise submission to fate as a virtue and be perverted into melancholy apathy. To suffer with the crucified Christ can also lead to self-pity. But faith is then dissociated from the suffering Christ, seeing

Fundamentalism fossilizes the Bible into an unquestionable authority. Dogmatism freezes living

Thus the Eucharist, like the meals held by Jesus with ‘sinners and publicans’, must also be celebrated with the unrighteous, those who have no rights and the godless from the ‘highways and hedges’ of society, in all their profanity, and should no longer be limited, as a religious sacrifice, to the inner circle of the devout, to those who are member

this mysticism of the cross on the part of the oppressed is in fact an ‘expression of misery’, and is already implicitly a ‘protest against misery’, as Marx said. In essence, however, it is something more, and something quite different, which was not recognized by Marx: the expression of human dignity and self-respect in the experience that God cou

is true that the Eucharist or the celebration of the Lord’s Supper recalls and makes present the death of Christ ‘until he comes’ (I Cor. 11.26), but in the form of ‘proclamation’, not in the form of the ‘repetition’ of Christ’s death on the cross.

the question of identity comes to a head only in the context of non-identity, self-emptying for the sake of others and solidarity with others.

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.

And the traditional Christian praise of poverty cannot be Christian if it simply gives a religious blessing to the situation of the poor, promising them compensation in heaven, so that on earth the poor become poorer and the rich become richer.