No God but Jesus

The modern theologian Jurgen Moltmann brilliantly shows the stark choice between the Crucified God and the demonic gods of the world.

“Luther (once said): ‘You might just as well pray to the devil if you have to have any God but Jesus.’ 

For the Christian there is no gradation between the crucified Jesus and the gods, as though God were less evident in the world, world history and world politics, and more evident in Christ. 

This notion of a gradation between a natural theology and a Christian theology can easily be unmasked... 

Between ‘God in Christ’ and the gods outside and in other representations there stands the cross of that God, and with it the alternative ‘aut Christus—aut Caesar’ – (either Christ or Caesar), just as Elijah once posed the alternatives ‘either Yahweh or the Baals’. 

Hence Luther and Zinzendorf did not speak of other gods or other revelations of the same God, but of ‘God and non-God’, of ‘God and the devil’. 

The cross of Jesus marks a divide between the human God (Jesus Christ) who is freedom and love and the ‘counter-God’ who keeps men under his sway and dominated by fear, like demons, and sucks them up into nothingness.  

However, the ‘crucified God’ here cannot be interchanged with the ‘God of Christians’, for by the terms of a psychological or sociological analysis the God of the Christians is not always the ‘crucified God’. 

Only rarely is this the case. 

Even for historical Christianity the cross, if it is understood radically and down to its final consequences, is a scandal and foolishness.”

From the end of chapter 5 in The Crucified God.

The great preacher and Patriarch of Constantinople, John Chrysostom (349-407) preached on Ephesians 1:20-23:

“(The apostle) says not merely “above” but “far above.” 

For God is higher than the powers on high. 

So He led Jesus up there, the very one who shared our lowly humanity. 

He led him from the lowest depth to the highest sovereignty, beyond which there is no higher honour. 

“Above every sovereignty,” he says: not merely compared with this or that.… What gnats are compared with humans, so is the whole creation compared with God.”