What Have We Lost Before the Cross?
Jürgen Moltmann opens the preface of his landmark work The Crucified God (1972) with these words: “The Christian life of theologians, churches and human beings is faced more than ever today with a double crisis: the crisis of relevance and the crisis of identity.” This single sentence still cuts to the heart of Christian communities around the world — including the church in our own day.
These two crises are not separate. Moltmann argues that they operate in a complementary fashion. The more theology and the church attempt to become relevant to the problems of the present day, the more deeply they are drawn into the crisis of their own Christian identity. The reverse is equally true. When the church raises its walls to protect its identity, it loses contact with the world and retreats into a ghetto. This is the dilemma the church has repeated across the centuries.
Why Did Moltmann Ask This Question?
Moltmann’s theology was not born in a library. He served as a German soldier in the Second World War and in 1945 voluntarily surrendered to the first British soldier he encountered on the front lines. In the prisoner of war camp, he came face to face for the first time with photographs of the horrors of Auschwitz, and a Bible given to him by a camp chaplain set him on the path to becoming a theologian. He would later confess: “I didn’t find Christ — Christ found me.”
Standing before Auschwitz, where millions had been slaughtered, and Hiroshima, reduced to ashes by the atomic bomb, he could not help but ask: “Where was God?” This was no abstract philosophical question. It was a matter of faith’s very survival. And it was precisely at this point that Moltmann identified the church’s double crisis. Faced with the darkest realities of history, the church had been repeating one of two failures — either losing the gospel in its attempt to communicate with the world, or turning its back on the world in its attempt to preserve the gospel.
The Crisis of Relevance — Gaining the World, Losing the Gospel
The crisis of relevance is the danger of the church diluting the essence of the gospel in pursuit of connection with the world. It begins with good intentions. To reach contemporary people, to engage with culture, to hold onto intellectuals and the young, the church adjusts its language and recalibrates its message. But what Moltmann warns against is the danger of Christianity being captured by the world’s own language in the process.
Nineteenth-century Liberal Theology is the classic case. Accommodating itself to Enlightenment rationalism, it stripped out miracles, reconstructed the historical Jesus, and reduced the cross to a moral example. The church appeared more persuasive, but the heart of the gospel had vanished. It was precisely this collapse of liberal theology that Karl Barth witnessed — and to which he responded with Neo-Orthodoxy.
Nothing has changed today. The moment a church removes the stumbling block of the cross (σκάνδαλον, skandalon) in the name of growth, packaging the gospel as a message of prosperity and success, it may gain relevance but it loses identity. If what people hear in the church is no different from what they hear in the world, that church may no longer be the church at all.
The Crisis of Identity — Keeping the Gospel, Losing the World
The opposite danger is equally real. The crisis of identity arises when the church isolates itself from the world in order to protect its own purity. The walls of doctrine are raised higher, cultural engagement is cut off, and the outside world is treated as hostile territory. At first glance, this looks like guarding the purity of the faith.
But Moltmann’s insight here is sharp. On Fundamentalism he writes: “Fundamentalism fossilizes the Bible into an unquestionable authority. Dogmatism freezes living Christian tradition solid.” The very obsession with preserving identity ends up suffocating the life it seeks to protect.
History bears this out. The medieval Catholic Church dominated the world yet had lost the power of the gospel — a prime example of identity maintained at the cost of the gospel itself. When Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517, it was a cry against a church that had smothered the gospel under the guise of preserving its identity. What Luther sought to recover was precisely the Theologia Crucis — the theology of the cross — buried beneath the Theologia Gloriae, the theology of glory.
The Cross — The Only Center That Resolves Both Crises
Moltmann’s answer is at once simple and profound. The solution to both crises is not a better strategy or a refined ecclesiology — it is the crucified Christ himself. This is the central claim of The Crucified God.
Why the cross? Because the cross is the event in which God entered most fully into the world, and at the same time the act of the one who is most fundamentally God. Jesus died alongside the forsaken, the sinners, the outcasts. No entry into the world could be more complete than this. Yet this same cross is the death of the Son of God. No theological identity could be more foundational than this.
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46, ESV). In this cry Moltmann sees the very heart of the Trinity. The Son experienced rupture from the Father; the Father, in losing the Son, gained us. It is through this break in the relationship that humanity is welcomed in. The cross is the proof that God did not stand apart from suffering — and at the same time, it is the deepest revelation of who God is.
Luther’s declaration at the Heidelberg Disputation (1518) shines with full force here: Crux probat omnia — “The cross tests everything.” Relevance and identity alike must be tested before the cross.
The Double Crisis Within Us Today
Honestly, this double crisis is alive in our churches today — and in each one of us. Some have been chipping away at the sharp edges of the gospel, piece by piece, in their eagerness to connect with the world. Others have turned away from suffering neighbors in the name of preserving doctrinal purity. We all tend to lean one way or the other.
Moltmann’s message is this: return to the cross. Only the crucified God can resolve this dilemma. For the cross of Christ is at once the greatest act of relevance in human history — God entering most deeply into the world — and the highest expression of Christian identity — the deepest revelation of God as God.
Whether in diaspora churches, city congregations, seminaries, or small groups — when we return to the cross as our center, we find ourselves walking that narrow path on which neither the world nor the gospel is lost.
The Path Forward
The Crucified God is not an easy book. But the questions Moltmann raises are not easily avoided. Which crisis does our church find itself in right now? Have we conceded too much in the name of relevance? Or have we mounted the gospel on a display case in the name of protecting our identity?
As Luther said, the cross tests everything (Crux probat omnia). To stand before that cross again — this is the only answer Moltmann offers to the church of our age. And it is the calling given to each one of us who lives in this time.
