Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology is not a presentation of systematic theology. Rather, the eight chapters of his book are an attempt at reconsidering some of the central doctrines of Christian faith as they relate to our understanding of the God of the Bible, the cross of Christ, and suffering—both human and divine.

The first chapter of the book deals with the issue of the identity and relevance of faith. Moltmann emphasizes that the identity of the church is intrinsically linked to the cross of Christ. And this is the answer to the question of Christian identification with human suffering and the church's relevance to the modern world. Christian theology, namely the theology of the cross, is “relevant only within the framework of human misery and of salvation.”

This brings the author to the discussion of theology proper (chapters 2–6). The discussion proceeds from the idea of the cross as defying its own interpretation:

Modern, post-Christian humanism has done a great service by bringing to the fore once again this original and natural dislike of the cross. In this way it has reminded Christianity, which has made itself so much at home in European civilization, of its original and fundamental alienation.

The theology of the cross is something radically different from mere theism or natural theology. It is something alien to traditional patterns of European thought. This assertion helps Moltmann to formulate the current task of Christian theology:

The task of theology is then no longer that of presenting itself as the self-awareness of Christianity as one of the phenomena of world history, but that of committing itself radically to the event which is the origin of faith in the cross; that is, of becoming a theology of the cross.

According to Moltmann, God cannot be only the object of human discourse. God must be conceived of as a subject who speaks his word. Theology “as speaking about God is possible only on the basis of what God himself says.” And in the cross of Christ, we see God simultaneously as subject and object. On the one hand, Jesus is God, on the other, he is abandoned by God the Father in the crucifixion.

Considering the person of Jesus, Moltmann says that to focus on the understanding of the first person of the Trinity too narrowly as on the historical Jesus, at the expense of his deity, is just as insufficient as to concentrate on his divine attributes to the detriment of human and historical dimensions of his person.

A large space in the book is dedicated to the historical and eschatological trials of Jesus, where the author considers such issues as Jesus and the Law, Jesus and authority, Jesus and God, as well as Jesus’s cross and resurrection in the light of history and eschatology.

The central part of the book (which bears the same title as the book itself) focuses on the issue of God’s suffering in Christ crucified. The cross of Christ represents not only Jesus’s suffering and death but also God’s identification with the suffering of the world. According to Moltmann, “God and suffering are no longer contradictions.” Moltmann challenges the idea of God’s impassibility, one inherited by Christian theology from Platonic thought. Moltmann’s view of the apathetic God of traditional theism as inadequate leads him to conclude that man can now open himself to God’s pathos (suffering) and sympatheia (compassion) . Without resurrecting the ancient heterodoxical idea of God the Father suffering on the cross in Jesus (patripassianism), Moltmann asserts that God...