Jesus, words from the cross, and ways to explain: the cry of dereliction between Arabic-Christian apology and Mark W. Thomsen.

Swanson, Mark N.

Mark Thomsen was never one to shy away from paradoxical expressions. His favorite title for Christ was "the Cosmic Crucified" (1)--which presents a puzzle, on the face of it. How can one be "cosmic" in any meaningful sense while nailed to a cross? But that is precisely the question that Thomsen wanted his readers and hearers to ponder as they prepared to proclaim good news among the nations. Of course, a love of paradoxical expressions is by no means a new thing in Christian tradition. One could argue that "the Cosmic Crucified" is present, if not in quite such epigrammatic form, in a famous passage in the letter to the Colossians: the one "in whom all things hold together" is the one who was "making peace through the blood of his cross" (Col 1:15-21, a passage that has often inspired talk of "the Cosmic Christ"). (2) In the second Christian century, the apologist Melito of Sardis could declare:

   He was ... carried in the womb by Mary,
   and clothed with his Father; treading
   the earth and filling heaven ...; wanting
   food..., and not ceasing to nourish the
   world.... He stood before Pilate, and sat
   with the Father; he was fastened to the
   tree, and held the universe. (3)

Thomsen's love of paradoxical expressions does not stop with "the Cosmic Crucified." The Cosmic Crucified reveals the (Almighty?) God who is vulnerable, who suffers with us. (4) And with regard to the terrifying word from the cross normally known as the "cry of dereliction"--"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"--Thomsen's commentary is as follows: "God was hidden as one who chooses not to be 'God'." (5) In the present short essay, I will focus on this cry of dereliction and a few of its lesser-known commentators, in an attempt to highlight some features of Mark Thomsen's witness and missionary engagement.

These two sides of a single vocation--the witness and the missionary engagement--can sit in a certain tension with one another. On the one hand, we knew in Mark Thomsen the witness to the Cosmic Crucified who delighted in unapologetically paradoxical language that presents the mystery of incarnation and redemption in its most radical form. On the other hand, we knew him as the missionary called to offer an explanation {apologia) for the hope that was in him (1 Pet 3:15) in encounters with people of other faiths, Muslims and Buddhists in particular. Both the witness and the missionary are on full display in his writings, especially Jesus, the Word, and the Way of the Cross. Now, unapologetic witness and credible explanation are both Christian duties, but they can work at cross purposes: the witness may be unintelligible; the explanation may fail as faithful theology. Thomsen himself recognized the tension and the difficulty this created, especially with regard to the Christian-Muslim encounter: "the God revealed and known through Jesus, the Cosmic Crucified, is not acceptable to most Muslims with whom we wish to engage. For most Sunni Muslims, suffering is not appropriate to the divine." (6)

What is striking to me in Thomsen's work is that he always strove in the first place to be a faithful witness, clinging to striking formulations of the hiddenness and vulnerability of God made known in Christ, without any attempt to tone them down in order to make them easier for "other peoples of faith" to hear. At the same time, he never backed away from the engagement with these "other peoples of faith," but actively sought it for himself, for those who looked to him for leadership, and for his denomination as a whole.

The examples that follow are taken from the Arabic Christian theological heritage, a vast corpus of material that Mark Thomsen encouraged and enabled me to study when I was a relatively young LCA/ELCA missionary to the Middle East in the 1980s and early 1990s. (7) These Arabic-speaking authors lived in contexts in which Christians were called to bear witness to and to explain their faith in an intellectual and spiritual environment shaped decisively by the Arabic language of the Qur'an and the faith and practices of Muslims. As a kind of case study in witness and apology (and in tribute to Mark Thomsen, who wanted to bring these medieval voices into a contemporary conversation), let us take a look at what a few of them had to say about Jesus' cry from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Witness and apology in Arabic

The history of debate about Christs cry of dereliction in the Arabic Christian-Muslim conversation begins almost as early as that conversation itself. For the Muslims' scripture, the Qur'an, Jesus is a prophet and apostle of God, a member of a company that reaches its culmination in the mission of the apostle Muhammad, the "seal of the prophets." Jesus is therefore a revered figure but he is not the Son of God, not divine, not one of a Trinity; to make such claims is a reprehensible confusion. For many Muslim controversialists, the cry of dereliction, along with Jesus' agony and prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, provided biblical evidence for their conviction that Jesus was merely human (and not divine); furthermore, such accounts showed them that, even according to the Gospels' own witness, Jesus was averse to his death by crucifixion (rather than freely accepting it). (8)

As a result, Christian theologians who wrote in Arabic had to address themselves to the question of Christ's agony in the Garden and his cry of dereliction from the cross, attempting to give them interpretations consistent with their claim that Christ was the truly divine (as well as truly human) Son of God who freely underwent crucifixion for the sake of the redemption of humankind. These attempts took a variety of forms. (9)

1. al-Jami ivujiih al-iman ("The Gatherer of the Aspects of the Faith")

One early example comes from a late ninth-century compilation called al-Jami' wujuh al-iman or "The Gatherer of the Aspects of the Faith." We do not know the name of its Chalcedonian author/editor. Chapter 17 of this compilation consists of a series of answers to thirty-three questions about the Gospels, the eleventh of which has to do specifically with Christ's word, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (10) The author begins his answer by recounting the Fall of humanity into sin and idolatry, to which God responded by "sending to them his Son, born from among them from his maidservant." He then illustrates the work of Christ with a little parable:

   A son was born to a king from his
   maidservant. The birth, nourishment,
   and growth of the king's son took place
   at [the home of] his mother, among his
   maternal uncles.

   The people of the kingdom rebelled
   [against the king] and refused obedience
   for a long period of time. There was no
   one among them who dared to seek the
   king's good pleasure for himself and for
   others, because of their offences and
   rebellion against him. But the king's
   son, who had been born among them,
   had pity on them and showed them
   mercy. He acquired a worn-out garment
   from those of the peasants, and put it
   on over his vesture. Then he came to
   the king, entered into his presence, and
   said: "O my Lord, how long will you
   avert your face from me?" And he made
   intercession and entreaty with him on
   behalf of [the people]. (11)

The author now immediately applies this parable to the work of Christ.

   Because the people were abandoned,
   their souls [trapped] in their error,
   and because they had no possibility,
   no intellect to guide them to entreating
   and imploring their Creator for his
   good pleasure towards them, therefore
   Christ our Lord became a human being.
   He was a servant in all the ways
   that servants serve their lords, and in
   his humanity pronounced on behalf of
   humankind what was required of them.
   And he said, "My God, my God, why
   have you deserted me?" He did not say
   that on his own behalf, but on behalf
   of the people who had been abandoned
   in their error. (12)

There are aspects of this understanding of Christ's words from the cross of which Mark Thomsen would have approved. Christ is the incarnate Son of God who is in solidarity with sinful human beings, identifying with them and accomplishing for them what they are unable to accomplish for themselves. So far, so good. And yet, the author preserves some distance between Christ and the rest of humankind: Christ speaks on their behalf--but not on his own behalf. And so, the "cry of dereliction" is not really a cry of dereliction at all, but rather a cry that makes representation on behalf of others. (13) It was not Christ who experienced abandonment; rather, it was sinful humanity that had been abandoned to its error. Christ acts in solidarity with suffering human beings, indeed, suffers with human beings--but there is still a slight reserve in the "com-" of the Crucified's compassion. Christ is "with" people in their humanity, but not in their estrangement. (14)

2. Habib Abu Ra itah, Fi l-tajassud ("On the Incarnation")

Another ninth-century Christian apologist in the Arabic language was a Syrian Orthodox theologian named Habib Abu Ra itah, who hailed from the town of Tikrit in Iraq. (15) In his treatise "On the Incarnation," (16) Habib responded to a number of questions that were typically raised by Muslim questioners. These included a question about Christ who had "appealed for help (istaghatha) and sought rescue from death" (where istaghdtha is shorthand for the cry of dereliction). Habib begins with a standard Christian argument: Christ's agony and fear "is a verification of his Incarnation." (17) So far, so good.

But then Habib's argument takes what for us today is a disturbing turn: not only did Christ's cry from the cross verify the reality of the Incarnation, it also "established his argument against Satan and against the Jews who carried out his crucifixion and death." (18) Reading a little further into the text, we discover that this is part of a response to a dilemma-question that was regularly used by Muslim controversialists: "[Christ's] crucifixion and death: did he undergo it willingly or unwillingly?" (19) For many this seemed to be a knock-down argument, for if a Christian responded "Unwillingly," then Christ was clearly not divine. But if a Christian responded "Willingly," then it could be said that his crucifiers had simply fulfilled Christ's will, and therefore not only had no guilt, but were deserving of reward! We see clearly in the background to this the unexamined and unquestioned Christian assumption that "the Jews" were to blame for and guilty of the death of Christ. (20) The Muslim's dilemma-question is constructed in such a way as to take advantage of this assumption: it seeks to force Christians to choose between two conclusions--either that Christ was too weak to resist crucifixion and was not God, or that the Jews deserved reward rather than guilt for crucifying Christ--neither of which Christians would be willing to concede.

In his response, Habib does nothing to challenge this basic framework, but rather works within it and responds to the questioner with what is, in itself, an interesting grammatical move. A noun like "crucifixion" (21) is, in fact, ambiguous: it can refer to Jesus' crucifiers' act of crucifying him, as well as Jesus' experience of being crucified. The two can be judged in different ways. On the one hand, Jesus freely accepted being crucified, since "by it he saved the world and delivered them from the error that held sway over them." (22) On the other hand, at the same time, Jesus disapproved of his crucifiers' act of crucifying him--his cry from the cross is evidence of that. Here, Jesus' cry "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me" is not so much a cry of dereliction as a cry of aversion to what his crucifiers had done--in order to establish their guilt. In the end, Habib had responded to a polemical sally with anti-Jewish presuppositions in a way that simply magnified those presuppositions.

3. Al-Makin Jirjis ibn al- 'Amid, al-Hawi ("The Compiler")

It is something of a relief to turn to another text: a passage that I recently stumbled across in an Arabic-language theological/ecclesiastical encyclopedia known as al-Hawi ("The Compiler"). It is composed by a fourteenth-century Coptic priest, physician, and civil servant named Jirjis (George). At a certain point in his career, Jirjis retired from the world, became a monk, and eventually (in the 1390s) produced his massive compilation. (23)

Jirjis's chapter on the crucifixion (Book 1, Part 3, Chapter 1) begins with an essay written especially for Christians who did not fully grasp the benefits that flow from the Cross of Christ. (24) In the course of that essay, Jirjis presented a section on the benefits of the cross for various categories of people--including the Jews. (25) They benefited in that the crucifixion was a fulfillment of Scripture, in particular, of Psalm 22. Here, we find the lines "they pierced my hands and feet" (verse 16b, LXX) and "they divide my clothes among themselves/and for my clothing they cast lots" (verse 18). Of whom was the Prophet David speaking here? Clearly, Jirjis says, not of any past prophet, but rather of the expected Messiah, who would be crucified and deliver his body to the death of the cross. And then he goes on:

   When [Jesus] was crucified of his own
   wise will, he raised (26) his voice to the
   people that was drowning in ignorance
   and said: "The prophecy spoken by
   the Holy Spirit upon the tongue of
   your king and prophet David--the
   prophecy which begins 'My God, my
   God, why have you forsaken me?'--has
   been fulfilled."

   If the matter were not so, then we would
   be compelled to say that Christ (to
   whom be glory!) called to his Father for
   help in escaping from the cross, and that
   he asked him why he had abandoned
   him, and what was the reason that necessitated
   his abandonment. But that is
   laughable discourse--no devil believes
   this, let alone the believers and those
   who are acquainted with Christian
   ways of expression! [Christ's] saying
   "Why have you forsaken me" while
   on the cross cannot be understood as
   a cry for aid to his Father, which could
   be understood under the aspect of a
   request for information: "Why is this,
   and why have you forsaken me, and
   what necessitated this event?" These
   are all expressions of someone who is
   ignorant of the reason for what is happening
   to him. But, he (to whom be
   glory!) is exalted above such fairy-tales!
   That [cry, "My God, my God, why
   have you forsaken me"] is nothing but
   an allusion addressed to the Jews so
   that they might recall what was said in
   this Psalm, and to teach them that the
   fulfillment of the prophecies had arrived
   and taken place, so that no further end
   was to be awaited. (27)

In other words, according to Jirjis, Christ was not talking about himsel for his experience from the cross. Indeed, it is nearly blasphemy to think that Christ could ask the question "Why?" as one who honestly did not know the answer; not even the devils are that stupid! Therefore, the cry of dereliction is not a cry of dereliction at all, but rather an act of giving a biblical reference. It is as if Jesus were saying: "Remember the Psalm that begins, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.' Look it up! Read it! Then you will understand what is happening here, that the scriptures are being fulfilled."

Confession and explanation

These brief samples of Arabic Christian discourse may be enough to give an idea of the difficulty of speaking about Christ's cry from the cross in an environment in which Christians were continually challenged to defend their confession of Christ as Lord and God. There is certainly an element of confession in all these samples: their authors insist that Christ's cry from the cross is part and parcel of the divine economy of the Incarnation for the salvation of humankind. But, the simple confession that the one who cried out from the cross was the Incarnate Son/Word of God come to save the world was not enough in their environment; some sort of explanation seemed to be called for. Habib found an explanation by exploiting a dilemma-question regularly asked by Muslims--and managed to use the cry of dereliction to affirm and sharpen one of that question's presuppositions, namely, that the Jews were to be held guilty for Jesus' death. Jirjis and the author of al-Jami' did not latch on to some already existing piece of Islamic discourse in this way. However, they seem to have decided that acceptable explanations for Christ's cry within the Islamic environment needed to keep God on the one hand, and the experience of dereliction on the other, separate. And, they found explanations that fit the bill. Jirjis' Christ was giving information, not actually asking "Why?" of the Father (a possibility at which he simply scoffs). Rather, Christ was always in perfect control. The Christ of al-Jami', like the disguised prince in its parable, was interceding on behalf of others who experienced dereliction, but not for himself.

The way of the cross

Mark Thomsen chose a way other than that of apologetic explanation. He confessed "the Cosmic Crucified," the one in whom "God was hidden as one who chooses not to be 'God'," and allowed those statements to stand without explanations that might soften their paradoxical character by putting some distance between God and suffering. But Thomsen did not leave matters at that. Instead of formulating explanations for Christ crucified (like those Arabic theologians above), Thomsen called for conforming lives to Christ crucified. The truth of the confession of the Cosmic Crucified is not to be found in analyses, but in lives lived in faithful conformity to Christ. The "word of the cross" must inform and lead to the "way of the cross." And at this point, Thomsen in fact comes close to many of the medieval Christian theologians who wrote from within the Islamic world, in the Arabic language. They regularly insisted that a critical witness to the truth of Christianity is the lives of its adherents. In a study of a number of ninth-century theologians, including Habib, I once wrote as follows:

   The Christian life, they remind us, has
   a particular shape: not of reliance on
   violence, but of turning the other cheek;
   not the pursuit of wealth and status,
   but of self-giving and contentment;
   not of license, but of discipline of the
   appetites; not of zeal for tribe, but of
   embrace of all nations. (28)

Several centuries later, the monk Jirjis added his witness--throughout his encyclopedia, but also in his essay on the benefits of the cross. After speaking about the benefits of the cross for all people, for the Jews (of which we read a snippet above), and for the Christians, he returns to a general benefit: the power of the sign of the cross. (29) When I first encountered this passage, I remember pausing with some apprehension. I did not know what to expect next. So often in Christian history, the "power of the sign of the cross" has been explained in military terms, in keeping with the story of Constantines vision of the cross with the legend: "In this, conquer"! This interpretation had staying power, even in unlikeliest of places. For example, an Arabic debate text set in the court of the great Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun has a Christian bishop make the claim that "no king departs to battle his enemy [taking] with him the emblem of the cross, except that with victory and triumph he would have possession of his enemy.". (30) But the monk Jirjis has nothing like this. For him, the sign of the cross gives power over the Devil--and, through the reminder of Christ's self-giving, patience and strength to endure through persecutions, even "to the extent of the shedding of blood." (31) Here, the benefit of the cross is strength for a cruciform life.

In the end, for the medieval theologians presented here and for Mark W. Thomsen, the most effective demonstration of the power of the cross does not consist in words, whether paradoxical or plausible, but in lives transformed.

(1.) Thomsen's 1993 book, The Word and the Way of the Cross: Christian Witness among Muslim and Buddhist People (Chicago: DGM/ELCA, 1993), is dedicated "To all who witness to Jesus, the Cosmic Crucified."

(2.) See, for example, Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), chapter 5, "The Cosmic Christ."

(3.) Melito of Sardis, Fragment 14; ed. and trans. Stuart George Hall, Melito of Sardis: On Pascha and Fragments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 81-82. Emphasis added.

(4.) The vulnerability of God is a key theme in Thomsen's writing. See Mark W. Thomsen, Christ Crucified: A 21st-Century Missiology of the Cross (Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2004), 19-38, or idem, Jesus, the Word, and the Way of the Cross: An Engagement with Muslims, Buddhists, and Other Peoples of Faith (Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2008), 26-55.

(5.) Thomsen, Jesus, the Word, and the Way of the Cross, 42.

(6.) Ibid., 55.

(7.) I will always remember Mark Thomsen with gratitude for his encouragement and, through the Division for Global Mission of the ELCA, material support of my doctoral studies at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI) in Rome.

(8.) For the ninth-century convert to Islam 'All al-Tabari, for example, the cry of dereliction refutes the claim that "Christ is the eternal creator;" from his Refutation of the Christians, ed. I.A. Khalife and W. Kutsch, "al-Radd' ala-n-Nasara de All at-Tabari," Melanges de l'Universite Saint-Joseph 36, fasc. 4 (1959): 115-148, here 124, lines 11-12.

(9.) Bibliography for all the authors and texts mentioned below can now be found in: David Thomas et al. (eds.), Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History (Leiden: Brill, 2009-).

(10.) Manuscript British Library (BL), Oriental 4950, folios 102b-103b. The translations below are Mark Swanson's. For an introduction to Chapter 17 as well as its 11th question, see Sidney H. Griffith, "Arguing from Scripture: The Bible in the Christian/Muslim Encounter in the Middle Ages," in Scripture and Pluralism, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan and Thomas E. Burman (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 29-58, here 47-56.

(11.) BL or. 4950, ff. 102b-103a.

(12.) Ibid., f. 103a.

(13.) The author goes on to point to examples in the psalms where David speaks the words--but speaks them on behalf of Christ.

(14.) it is worth pointing out that such an interpretation is common in the Western Christian tradition, at least for the first millennium; see Ulrich Luz, Matthew 21-28: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 545-546.

(15.) Tikrit is now part of Iraq's Sunni heartland and is known as the hometown of Saddam Hussein, but in the ninth century it was an ecclesiastical center for the Syrian Orthodox Church.

(16.) See Sandra Tonies Keating, Defending the "People of Truth" in the Early Islamic Period: The Christian Apologies of Abu Ra itah (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 217-297, here 284-295 ([section][section] 73-84). The translations given here are Mark Swanson's from the Arabic text.

(17.) al-tahqiq li-td annusihi, where ta' annus literally means "becoming-human." Ibid., 284 ([section] 73).

(18.) Ibid.

(19.) Ibid., 288 ([section]77). The dilemma-question is very common in ninth-century Christian-Muslim controversy, but the underlying problematic appears much earlier in the history of the church. For example, see Bernard Blumenkranz, Die Judenpredigt Augustins (Basel: von Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1946), 190 (in a section titled "The Responsibility for the Crucifixion") in reference to Augustine.

(20.) Note that the Muslim polemicists were taking advantage of a Christian assumption. The Qur'an criticizes those who boasted of having killed "the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, God's apostle," but then goes on to say "they did not kill him nor did they crucify him" (Q4:157).

(21.) Salb, which is a verbal noun (related to salib, "cross"); Habib also mentions another verbal noun, qatl, "killing."

(22.) Keating, Defending the "People of Truth, "(288-295); the quotation is at p. 290 ([section]79).

(23.) An edition of this was published in Egypt by a monk of the Muharraq Monastery, The Theological Encyclopedia known as al-Hawi of Ibn al-Makin [in Arabic], 4 vols. (Cairo: Dayr al-Muharraq, 1999-2001).

(24.) Ibid., vol. 1, 304-322.

(25.) Ibid., 316-318.

(26.) Changing one letter to correct a'lana to a la.; ibid., 317, line 15.

(27.) Ibid., 317-318.

(28.) Mark N. Swanson, "Apology or its Evasion? Some Ninth-Century Arabic Christian Texts on Discerning the True Religion," in Christian Theology and Islam, ed. Michael Root and James J. Buckley (Eugene, Ore,: Cascade Books, 2014), 45-63, here 63.

(29.) al-Hawi, vol. 1, 320-322.

(30.) Wafik Nasri (trans.), The Caliph and the Bishop. A 91' Century Muslim-Christian Debate: Al-Md mun and Abu Qurrah (Beirut: CEDRAC, Universite Saint Joseph, 2008), 215, verset 377, translation slightly adjusted.

(31.) al-Hawi, vol. 1, 320-321.

Mark N. Swanson

Harold S. Vogelaar Professor of Christian-Muslim Studies and Interfaith Relations, Associate Director of Center of Christian-Muslim Engagement for Peace and Justice, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago