Bogoslovska smotra, Vol. 81 No. 2, 2011.
Review article
From the Necessity of Impossibility to the Choice of Love Theodician Searching as a Question of God's Being, on the Example of Moltmann's Teachings about God
Marija Pehar
orcid.org/0000-0002-8083-1896
; Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
General human experience of pain and suffering raises the general human question of the sense of suffering. Furthermore, for believers, this question leads to the unavoidable question of justifying God in regard to the fact of suffering. Why suffering and pain? How can God watch our suffering? Is he moved by the pain suffered by those he created out of love? That is why the question of suffering is an authentic and unavoidable theological locus. Based on the thought that this was the true space, Jürgen Moltmann recognises the interior being of God himself as the true locus of his searching. Deepening his doctrine of God, he searches for the only true answer to the meaning of suffering - a theological one. This article presents Moltmann's teachings about God under the aspect of looking for an answer to the question of suffering. In the course of that, the article recognises and presents some interior rules of his overall theology. The article first gives some familiar fundamentals and interconnections of Moltmann's theology. Subsequently, however, the article also recognises and uncovers new paths within theodician searching, for example in Moltmann's turn to mystical theodicy. The article shows that Moltmann's newer explorations do not answer the old question (why suffering?), but rather opens up a new question (where is God in suffering?). This question is, according to Moltmann, more appropriate to the need of the suffering man, and is answered from within the very being of God, the interior determination of God as love. This answer offers man a sufficient measure of understanding, but it also calls on him to place his own life at the service of a Messianic perspective so that, already in the here and now, it might become an engagement against evil and all forms of suffering.
Keywords
theodicy; suffering; God's suffering; God's love; mysticism; Moltmann
Hrčak ID:
69796
URI
Publication date:
28.6.2011.
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