In April 2016, I packed my belongings into a station wagon, bid farewell to my hometown of Christchurch, New Zealand, and headed four and a half hours south to Dunedin. I had hoped to start my doctorate in theology there immediately, but my examination kept getting delayed and I had no idea if I’d be admitted or not. The limbo made me increasingly restless. Nearly thirty years in the same damp, gray, and windy city, further tainted by a years-long unrequited love and two breakups – not to mention the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 – was all the encouragement I needed to get the hell out of there.

The transition was bittersweet. The prospect of spending three years reading and writing in theology was sweet, and it became more concrete in the presence of the campus’s expansive modern library and august Gothic Revival buildings. But knowing nearly no one was bitter. One evening, when taking what should have been a relaxing walk home through the Dunedin Botanic Garden, I was so overcome with loneliness that I ducked into the bushes until I could stop crying and put on a brave face for the remainder of the journey. I missed my church and my friends. Looking back, I was probably going through some form of depression.

The contrasts only intensified. I met Chloe within a few days of moving down, and we became instant friends (who would later get married). I got a job in a restaurant opposite my apartment, giving me some income and a healthy way to spend my time for the next few months while waiting for my examination results. On the outside, things were good, exciting even. On the inside, though, my mind was fracturing. Intense, unwanted, and simply confusing thoughts confronted me: Why not start screaming obscenities on the bus? Why not run this cheese grater through my cheeks? Why not bike into the path of that truck?

I had known thoughts like this in my last months in Christchurch, but now they were growing more insistent, and though I had no interest in following up on them, I was beginning to lose the ability to distinguish between what I had to do and what I could choose not to do. Their insistence threatened compulsion.

Chloe and I had been hanging out nearly every day since meeting. Then one night, the subject of marriage came up. Like Chloe, I definitely hoped that was where we’d end up eventually, though I wanted to take things a little more slowly. So I told her. She closed up, taking my hesitation as disinterest. I felt mildly uncomfortable in turn, but as the silence persisted, I began to lose grip on reality. Ironically, just after her having expressed interest in a lifelong commitment, the anxieties of past rejections flooded in so that rejection was all I could feel in her response. I jumped up and ran toward the balcony in her room before whirling around and coming to a stop. I had no desire to throw myself through the glass and onto the street below, but there was a compulsion within me that was strong and difficult to resist. A few seconds later, I found myself getting hit in the face – by my own fist. If I could say no to the worst, it seemed, I at least had to make concessions for the symbolically destructive.

Photograph courtesy of the author.

In the midst of my panic, I urged Chloe to call the police. They turned up in a few minutes, and I immediately asked them to put me in handcuffs, putting a barrier between me and the hands I felt I couldn’t trust anymore. The police drove me to the emergency psychiatric services, where I got some counseling and some prescription medicine. Within weeks, I was also getting regular professional help.

But something changed in me that night, and not for the better. The intrusive thoughts that had previously only been an imagined threat had now materialized in my actions. What was to stop me acting on them again? I spent the next three days terrified of myself and the overwhelmingly violent potential I felt within. Anything could trigger the thoughts and the compulsion I felt to act on them: a sudden loud noise, research stress, the memory of my actions that night. A year or so later, I reached another low when I threw a chair into a window while home by myself. It was about 10 a.m., and I called the ambulance for fear I’d attack myself with the broken glass. But I had already taken some prescribed sedatives, and I managed get out of the danger zone and make my way to my office to sleep on the floor until the evening, when my brain had cooled off. Even today, after eight years, the “episodes” haven’t completely stopped. They’re milder now, however, and I can often see them coming soon enough to mitigate or even prevent them with the right exercises.

Not least, I’m still navigating these experiences as a Christian. Does what Paul writes to the Corinthians apply to me in my lack of self-control? “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it” (1 Cor. 10:13). What if I had fully given in to my self-destructive compulsions on one of my worst days? Or was it the Spirit who preserved me from going that far?

I thought of the possessed boy in the Gospels whose symptoms remind me of my own. The demon, his father told Jesus, “often cast him into the fire and into the water, to destroy him” (Mark 9:22). Was there an analogy between this boy’s ailment, his speedy deliverance at Jesus’ hands, and my psychiatric issues? Was my faith too weak to receive anything?

Moreover, I imagined what others might think when they saw me acting out. Look at that grown man, hollering and flailing his arms like a giant three-year-old. And my imagined scorners are right to an extent. Paul again: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15). Sometimes, somehow, though, I’ve managed to resist the compulsions, collect myself, and carry on. I don’t have to do these things, so why not just ignore the thoughts and spare others the uncomfortable performance?

Popular wisdom will locate God in the kindness of others over this period. Emergency services and medical workers, who really have found their vocation. Strangers, who offer me water and consoling words. Friends, who listen without judgment, and check up on Chloe (though we soon learned I was only a danger to myself, not her). Chloe, who continues to love me though she can’t fix me.

All this is true. But the pain and frustration remain despite every kindness.

Perhaps it was also divine providence, then, that I started my doctorate around the same time. This meant I got to spend a good chunk of the next three years reading books and articles that grappled with the problem of human suffering and divine goodness. The theologian Jürgen Moltmann was the subject of my dissertation, and he was no stranger to this theme, even if his own story was nothing like mine.

Toward the end of July 1943, British and American aircraft led a ten-day offensive on Hamburg, Germany. Code-named “Operation Gomorrah,” it sought to reduce the city to ashes by firebombing military, economic, and civilian targets. On the first night of the raid, though equipped with anti-aircraft guns and advanced radar systems, the city was caught by surprise when the circuitous route taken by the Allies succeeded in misdirecting its defenders. This was also the first time the British had trialled “Window” in the field: aircraft released bundles of foil strips into the air, overwhelming German radar systems with false blips, thus rendering them useless.

Hamburg Operation Gomorrah, July 1943. Photograph by Prisma by Dukas Presseagentur GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo.

The operation was an enormous military success; in humanitarian terms, it was a catastrophe in which 45,000 people succumbed to the bombs and subsequent firestorms. “What happened there,” one historian goes so far as to say, “is more accurately compared to Hiroshima or Nagasaki.”footnote

One resident, Jürgen Moltmann, was seventeen when the assault began. Tasked with manning an anti-aircraft gun, he recalls:

An explosive bomb hit the platform where we were standing with our useless firing device. The mass of splinters destroyed the firing platform and tore apart my friend Gerhard Schopper, who was standing next to me…. During that night I cried out to God for the first time in my life and put my life in his hands…. My question was not, “Why does God allow this to happen?” but, “My God, where are you?”footnote

This initial experience of the horror of war would leave a lasting impression on the young man.

In 1945, Moltmann was taken to a Scottish prisoner-of-war camp. He and his countrymen were forced to grapple with their complicity in the Holocaust when photos from Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald were pinned up inside their huts. “Slowly and inexorably the truth seeped into our consciousness, and we saw ourselves through the eyes of the Nazi victims.”footnote

It was here that Moltmann was given a Bible, which previously he had only ever considered a source of quaint but hardly transformative wisdom and tales. Initially, he didn’t know what to make of it. But when he came to the psalms of lament, something sparked. He returned to them over the next few nights before reading through the Gospel of Mark: “When I heard Jesus’ death cry, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ I felt growing within me the conviction: this is someone who understands you completely, who is with you in your cry to God and has felt the same forsakenness you are living in now.”footnote And with this, the hope for a new life and a new world began to kindle within.

Moltmann was soon released, allowing him to return to Germany. With his newfound faith, he began studying to become a pastor, which he always saw as his primary vocation, despite his later renown as a theologian. In 1964, his first book, Theology of Hope, shook the German and Anglophone theology worlds when he argued that contemporary theologians had misunderstood Christ’s resurrection as merely a disclosure of what was already true in eternity, rather than being a divine intervention that genuinely changed history’s course. The book proved buoyant on the waves of the optimistic sixties as readers found in it a religious analog to the secular vision of progress. Nonetheless, when in both secular and religious worlds faith in progress began to fade toward the end of the decade, Moltmann found himself returning to the wartime roots of his faith.

Jürgen Moltmann, 2003. Photograph by Agence Opale / Alamy Stock Photo.

In 1972, The Crucified God was released, taking one of Martin Luther’s epithets for Christ as its title. Shifting his focus from humanity’s future in God, Moltmann turned to the inexplicable sufferings that contrast with, complicate, and, for some, even negate Christian hope. How can such a future be possible when God has allowed, for example, the annihilation of six million Jews to take place in “Christian” Europe, under his watch? Moltmann’s purposes were hardly apologetic. He spoke primarily as a pastor, albeit in the idiom of academic theology. And he spoke implicitly from his own experiences of godforsakenness.

For Moltmann, any attempt to justify egregious suffering with the promise of a heavenly bliss that will make it all OK in the end is not only an offense to the victim but a grave misunderstanding of Christian faith and its witness to Christ’s crucifixion. Moltmann quotes the autobiographical novel Night by Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel. In one scene, the camp is gathered to watch a hanging. The two men being executed die quickly, but a third victim, a boy, struggles for half an hour before finally dying. A man in the crowd exclaims, “Where is God now?” No one answers. But Wiesel responds in his head, “He is hanging there on the gallows.” According to Moltmann, “Any other answer would be blasphemy.”footnote For him, Christ’s crucifixion is God’s decisive entry into human suffering – and not in order to explain or justify it, but first to suffer in solidarity alongside human beings. Only then can we also speak of hope.

These claims obviously present numerous difficulties. Moltmann is attempting to talk about two very different things that are both unspeakable – God and the Holocaust. The first is beyond human comprehension; the second defies any kind of transcendent meaning-making, let alone from Christians. I’ll admit that even after completing my studies and returning to Moltmann’s writings over the subsequent years, I still don’t know what to make of many of his contested ideas. And being of a different generation and cultural context, with its own challenges and responsibilities, forming strong opinions on the specifics of Moltmann’s theology was never my priority.

Still, the reflections Moltmann offers on God and suffering, shaped by his own story, have continued to speak to me as I process my experiences with mental illness, and I’m sure they can speak to others too. There are two things in particular that Moltmann’s work has brought home to me. The first is that human pain is real. This might seem a truism, but it’s not something that’s always understood or appreciated in Christian circles. How many popular hymns or worship songs allow us to really sing out our pain and sit with it, without hurrying us into proclamations of triumph? When was the last time you went to a funeral that explicitly addressed death’s unjust reign, or where people could exclaim, “Why, God?” Yet Christ himself cried out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” and the disciples were left alone and defeated with this these words for three long days before they knew hope. When Jesus – God become human – took up the cross, he was saying to us: I feel your pain, and I know it’s real.

The second thing Moltmann has helped me see is the nature of God’s presence in our pain. Christian faith affirms that God is always present with us in some way, regardless of circumstance: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20). Or: “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them” (John 14:23). Was it different for Christ himself, who cried out to his Father on the cross?

“My God, why have you forsaken me?” is taken from the opening line of Psalm 22, invoking the deep tradition of lament in divine abandonment that runs as a thread through the Old Testament, the Psalms especially. Some have argued that Christ was only citing this tradition in order to make it obsolete: on the cross, he assumed our abandonment by God so that we no longer have to undergo it ourselves. I’m sure many today would agree: God is with us whether our life currently looks more like heaven or hell. No great suffering, not even death, can separate us from him. Others will express honest doubts: they want to believe God is with them but often struggle to do so. Still others will go further: God has abandoned us as he did Job and the psalmists, as he did Jesus on the cross.

Claims of divine abandonment usually assume that God could intervene in our suffering but fails to do so. He could have prevented the deaths of Job’s children; he could have stopped Christ’s crucifixion (Mark 14:36) – and any number of evils experienced in our time. It is not that God isn’t present in some way. Indeed, Christians throughout the centuries have held on to God’s presence amid great suffering because for them, his presence gives the internal hope, faith, and resolve that accompany them through their pain, regardless of their external circumstances.

What does this discrepancy between internal presence and apparent external absence look like in light of the cross? For Moltmann, Christ is present to us precisely in his abandonment. No answer could satisfy us when it comes to the question of why God doesn’t intervene to eliminate pointless and egregious suffering. Rather, God’s response to us in our pain is the gift of suffering alongside us. God is present not simply in the mental resources to stick it through, but in our mental, physical, and spiritual anguish, in which he joined us on the cross. “Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested” (Heb. 2:18).

Thoughts such as these have been a considerable source of comfort for me in my confrontations with the enemy within, and in picking up the pieces after each episode. I can certainly sing of hope for the times I have had the mental resources to pull through. But I have also known God’s absence in the times his intervention in my mental life has not been discernible, in my apparent inability to resist violent compulsions despite the promise of the Holy Spirit. Paradoxically, this absence has helped me to see his presence in my pain even more clearly – in his suffering in solidarity on the cross.

After The Crucified God in 1972, Moltmann regularly published books and articles. He never reached the same dark depths, though the theme of suffering remained close to him and made a perennial return in his subsequent writings. At the same time, his earlier theme of hope remained central to his work and, along with joy, accompanied him into his old age. His last book published in English was Resurrected to Eternal Life: On Dying and Rising (2021). Jürgen Moltmann passed away at the age of ninety-eight on June 3, 2024.

Footnotes

1. Keith Lowe, Inferno: The Fiery Destruction of Hamburg, 1943 (Viking, 2007).
2. Jürgen Moltmann, A Broad Place: An Autobiography, trans. Margaret Kohl (Fortress, 2008), 16–17.
3. Moltmann, A Broad Place, 29.
4. Moltmann, A Broad Place, 30.
5. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Fortress, 1993), 274.