A Universal Suffering Demands a Universal Answer
On Jurgen Moltmann, Awareness, and 20th Century Suffering in a Technological Age
It’s not that earlier generations of religious folks didn’t consider how suffering affects us. It’s just that they didn’t assume it needed a universal technique to resolve it.
As a reminder, on June 19th, we’ll be having our next book group for supporting members over The Rule of Benedict. I’ll be sending details out later this week.
The 20th Century Turn: Suffering Like Never Before?
The last two weeks have been covered with remembrances of 20th century theologian Jurgen Moltmann: everyone from divinity schools to theology blogs to the New York Times posted obits and memories. Like many who went to seminary in the late 1990s/early 2000s, Moltmann’s work was everywhere: one of my former professors studied with him for a time, and there was a time when my shelves had most of his corpus on them1. Whatever one might make of his theological achievements, the memories posted were warm ones of Moltmann as a genuinely warm and generous theologian, one who was shaped by the events of World War 2 in a profound way, and through Moltmann, would shape an entire theological generation.
If you’ve never heard of Moltmann before, he was theology famous, which is not the same as regular person famous, but like very industry-specific famous. I can’t do justice to the themes of his work, but I think
does a good job of summing up the basic contours of Moltmann’s contributions below.There’s much to take up in Moltmann’s work—the claim that God changes in substance in response to suffering chief among them—but I want to key in one particular aspect. Central to the emergence of Moltmann’s popularity was the assumption that the 20th century occasioned the kind of mass suffering which called into question 1900 years of theological reflection about the relation of God to suffering. From Fuller’s post above:
The 20th Century saw more human slaughter and suffering than anyone could have anticipated. The growth of democratic nation-states, the free market, and the Industrial Revolution did not bring a century of peace but rather one of war and unimaginable suffering. After the dropping of the atom bombs and the horror of Auschwitz, viable Christian theology became a problematic endeavor. At no other time in recorded history were humans more aware of just how vile we can be as a species. To talk about a loving and sovereign God seemed more and more laughable. If the church cannot address the actual world and its genuine horrors, then it should just shut up.
I find this point to be particularly interesting, and particularly instructive in terms of why Moltmann’s work got so much traction. It’s not so much that earlier Christians didn’t ask the question, but the proliferation—and indeed, the awareness—of the scale of suffering is what occasioned Moltmann’s work, and from him, shifts within Christian theology as whole after Moltmann. This is interesting for a few reasons:
Reflection on the relation between God and suffering was not new. Without delving into the centuries-long debates over whether God’s nature undergoes change2, either in the incarnation or in response to the suffering of creation, it’s simply not the case that Christians weren’t invested in the question of God’s relation to world suffering. For centuries, world-altering diseases occasioned responses from theologians and ordinary Christians, seeking answers to the “why is everything dying” question in relation to God.
The assumption, however, remain that 20th century mass suffering is new. Here, the question is “in what way is the suffering new, to the degree that everything needs to change?” Here, we need to be careful, for two reasons:
Suffering and its effects are intimately personal and not always structural: what breaks one person open will not be that which breaks another, and any pastoral response begins with the presumption that there is someone before me that is deeply in pain. It does no good to deny that suffering, when experienced, really isn’t there, though there may be good reasons to discuss what should be done in response to particular suffering: vengeance is not justified in the face of wrongs done and suffered, even if compensation and some kind of reconciliation is.
Suffering and its effects are not made more or less important because of sheer numbers. This is a place that I find the arguments of Moltmann verging on dangerous territory: if we say that the game has changed because of the scale of suffering, it’s saying that suffering only matters when it gets to a certain number. One or two meaningless deaths might be fine, but tens of millions is enough to evoke a theological crisis? It is not that scale doesn’t produce something different in terms of horror or trauma, but that’s different than saying that scale makes suffering matter to the point that things have to change. Either one life is sufficient to make the point, or it’s not.
With that throat-clearing aside, the claim seems to have some grounds. In accounts like Fuller’s, we typically find invocations of the Shoah as grounds for revising traditional accounts of God’s relation to suffering, coupled with the sufferings of hundreds of millions in migration, climate catastrophes, wars, political regimes, and abuse. And yet, before this were Roman empires, plagues, floods, globe-trotting influenzas and small poxes, mass extinction events, and civilizational disappearances. As terrible as the 20th century’s events were, what seems to be in play, then, is not necessarily scale but awareness.
So much, then, seems to turn on the awareness of mass suffering. I want to say that Moltmann would agree with the caveats I raise above, and wouldn’t want to say that something has changed because of the scale of suffering, but because we are just simply more aware of the intimacies of human suffering: through mass medias of radio, newspaper, television, and the Internet, we are entreated to various kinds of sufferings intimate and political, in overwhelming ways. Simply knowing that suffering is happening somewhere makes it harder to have a piety which remains immune from what you now can’t unknow.
To sum up—earlier generations were not unaware either of the question of God’s presence to suffering, and were not persuaded that scale matters in the question. So, it seems that awareness of it shifts the needle to needing to revise a doctrine of God’s nature to account for the sheer magnitude of suffering.
Here’s what I want to posit: this very formulation was only possible 1) in a world of mass technologies, and 2) this shapes the kind of responses that we think suffering needs.
Big Suffering Needs Big Solutions? The Legacy of 20th Century Theology
The emergence of the 20th century as the “mass age” is a well-studied phenomenon. From Jose Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, which articulates the concept of the “mass man”, to Marshall McLuhan’s work on the age of mass communication, the 20th century was one in which the elevation of the whole world was a preoccupation.
We find it in the struggles between democratic and Communist polities—each of which articulated their aims on the basis of what provided the greatest good for all of their constituents. We find it in the struggle between libertarian and Keynsian economics—each of which argued for how best to account for individual freedoms and elevation of society as a whole. We find it the rise of postcolonialism and the birth of new nations, in the emergence of World Christianity, in the democratization of the Internet and the rise of personal computing.
This pervasive and inescapable presumption of the 20th century was one in which the world rises or falls together. On the face, this is a deeply theological truth: whereas in one man all fell, in Christ, all are raised up3. But transmuted into a technological key, it affects the kinds of world we think appropriate to a theological truth. And, once suffering becomes an object of awareness to all, it demands in turn a kind of response appropriate to all.
This takes place in two discrete, but interrelated ways:
The theological. As Fuller lays out in his own work, the line between process theology—that God’s nature changes in line with the nature of created reality—is the most logical outcome to Moltmann. For not only does process theology draws together the universal presence of God to the universal nature of change and the universal presence of suffering in such a way that theodicy is entirely abolished. God can literally not be absent from suffering, because God’s nature is everywhere tied to all reality.
But if this kind of response is only possible in a world which was already knee-deep in mass responses to suffering, then it comes hand in hand with a different movement.
The technological. Any response to suffering at the theological must be paired with a response at the most global level. It is no accident that this mass age also birthed the United Nations, the Hague, global relief charities. And alongside this came a new interest in universally available technologies as central to any notion of elevation of the masses: the aim of elevation of the world belongs hand in hand with technologies available to all: indoor plumbing, followed by landlines, cellphones, birth control. The histories of all of these technologies are histories which are only possible against a backdrop of universal expansion—not with an aim at homogeneity, but with an aim toward universal access.
I make no judgments here about whether it is in fact good for all people to have access to a bathroom: I think it’s a good thing! The point here is that the theological imagination about God’s presence to suffering, and the emergence of a mass age, go hand in hand, and particularly, a technological imagination as the means by which one can supply this universal good of suffering relief.
The questions which are worth asking in the wake of Moltmann’s death are legion, and his attention to the suffering of the world is indeed exemplary. But what I want to draw our attention to is that the prevalence of his theological move has another face to it: the assumptions of the technological as the appropriate means for manifesting a theological vision ordered around the relief from suffering.
For the 20th century also saw the rise, along with mass movements, with the rise of bureaucracies of scale, with the rise of mass relief programs, of global relief organizations, of universal technological pushes to alleviate poverty, hunger, and disease. These, it seems, are not incidental, but intrinsic partners to the kind of world-encompassing vision that Moltmann’s theology requires: to have a God capable of being intimate to all human suffering requires a requisite way of paying attention to all of it, and to delivering relief at scale.
Whether the theological chicken laid the technological egg or came forth from it is beside the point. The two faces are like the god Janus, looking backward to the 20th century’s carnage, and saying “never again”, while looking forward to the 21st century and asking what it means to make that confession real. But ideas have consequences, and while I may think that process theology has very little runway left, the technological assumptions which it traveled with are with us for some future yet to come.
This is no longer the case, for reasons I’ll detail momentarily.
Two excellent places to begin reading on these very old debates are this short explainer by Matthew Barrett, but more in depth, this book.
1 Corinthians 15:22.