Only a God Who Suffers, Dies and Rises Can Help

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from his prison cell,

Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.[1]

While it might appear counterintuitive to some, this conviction about God’s suffering was a sustaining power for Bonhoeffer in his imprisonment at the end of his life. God knows our suffering experientially. To use a word coined by German philosopher Rudolf Lotze, God’s way of being in the world involves Einfühlung—“in feeling.” God takes our pain and suffering into his own being without thereby ceasing to be God.

This account runs counter to many treatments of the doctrine of divine impassibility. Divine impassibility entails that God does not suffer pain or emotional change in response to human suffering.[2] In contrast to this perspective, I maintain that God can and does suffer in his love of a world in pain, albeit not selfishly or involuntarily, or in any way that compromises his constancy of being, perfections, and covenantal determinations.[3]

Regardless of where we stand on the issue of divine suffering, all who adhere to the doctrine of Jesus’ incarnation resonate with the Apostle Paul’s account in Philippians 2: we are encouraged and take comfort from God’s love revealed in Jesus (Philippians 2:1), a love which leads him as God to be poured out in all humility even unto death on the cross (Philippians 2:5-8). We also derive comfort from the fact that God has exalted him in his resurrected and ascended state (Philippians 2:9-11). Here is how Paul presents the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, and its bearing on our lives:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:5-11; ESV).

For the Apostle Paul, who penned these words from his prison cell in Rome, Jesus’ example should serve as the ultimate inspiration for us to consider others as better than ourselves (Philippians 2:3-4). Moreover, I would claim in view of Philippians 2 that faith in this God who cares, who suffers with us, and who is victorious over victimization, is essential to overcoming various forms of trauma. Only a suffering God who identifies with us in our suffering can help. Only a God who rises from and through suffering for us can help. I believe such faith sustained Paul in prison. I believe it can help sustain you and me, too. As with Paul who reached out of his prison cell to care for others, such confidence in the resurrected Jesus’ love can help us be incredibly resilient in our suffering. His victorious love can even move us to consider others better than ourselves and comfort them in their suffering.

This blog post is part two in a series, “How Do You Break Free from Trauma?” Refer here for part one.

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[1]Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, rev. ed., ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967), page 188.

[2]For a discussion of divine impassibility and passibility, see Richard Bauckham, “‘Only the Suffering God Can help’. Divine Passibility in Modern Theology,” in Themelios 9.3 (April 1984): 6-12. It is also worth drawing attention to Slavoj Zizek’s account, “Only a Suffering God Can Save Us.”

[3]In the midst of the differences, my account of divine possibility overlaps at points with the doctrine of divine impassibility: need-based or selfish love, involuntary suffering and compromise of God’s identity and activity were also concerns of the ancient defenders of divine impassibility.