Moltmann and the Experience of God

I am rereading a section in Jurgen Moltmann’s The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology (Minneapolis: Fortress 1993).

An excerpt:

Between the Trinity in its origins before time and the eschatological glorifying and unifying of God lies the whole history of God’s dealings with the world. By opening himself for this history and entering into it in his seeking love through the sending of Christ and the Spirit, God also experiences this history of the world in its breadth and depth….

The history of the Son and of the Spirit therefore brings about, even for God himself within the Trinity, an experience, something ‘new’. After the Son’s exaltation the relationship between the Father and the Son is no longer absolutely the same as before. The Father has become ‘another’ through the Son’s self-giving, and the Son too has become ‘another’ through his experience of suffering in the world. Through his love for the Son, who experiences the sin of the world in his death on the cross, God experiences something which belongs essentially to the redemption of the world: he experiences pain. In the night when the Son dies on the cross, God himself experiences abandonment in the form of this death and this rejection. We must add that this is a new experience for God, for which he has laid himself open and prepared himself from eternity in his seeking love. God experiences the cross, but this also means that he has absorbed this death into eternal life, that he suffers it in order to give the forsaken world his life. Because of that he does not want to be glorified in any other way than through the glorification of the one who was crucified, ‘the Lamb who was slain’ (Rev. 5:12; 7:14; 12:10ff.). (pp. 62-63)

I am impressed and amazed by how Moltmann explains and articulates the “experience” of God within the trinitarian context in relation to the world.