Moltmann is gone now, but his theology will continue to provoke and provide.
Recently, famed theologian Jürgen Moltmann passed away at the age of 98. For those unfamiliar with this work or legacy, Moltmann has long been considered one of the world's most respected living theologians. His death will inspire a renewed focus on his long career and work.
Moltmann's theology is incredibly complex because his style and writing habits are such that he is almost always involved in deep conversations with other disciplines and topics such as race, theodicy, feminism, and politics. In the best sense of the word, Moltmann is a critic, taking little for granted and asking deep and penetrating questions about theology. Sometimes, his critiques veer off into heterodox territory (he believed the virgin birth was just a myth), while other times, he took issue with what is not said. Moltmann was critical of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds for focusing too much on the Christological controversies regarding Christ's dual natures. He argued instead that orthodox Christianity should be more focused on Christ as the Way. The creeds do not give us content about what Jesus taught or the Way he showed us to live, argues Moltmann, and this is a great lack for the church and ministry to people.
An illustration of this kind of sensitivity to the Way of Jesus is told by another famous theologian who was a student of Moltmann, Miroslav Volf. In his book Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, Volf writes about an engagement with his professor:
After I finished my lecture Professor Jürgen Moltmann stood up and asked one of his typical questions, both concrete and penetrating: "But can you embrace a četnik?" It was the winter of 1993. For months now the notorious Serbian fighters called "četnik" had been sowing desolation in my native country, herding people into concentration camps, raping women, burning down churches, and destroying cities. I had just argued that we ought to embrace our enemies as God has embraced us in Christ. Can I embrace a četnik—the ultimate other, so to speak, the evil other? What would justify this embrace? Where would I draw the strength for it? What would it do to my identity as a human being and as a Croat? It took me a while to answer, though I immediately knew what I wanted to say. "No, I cannot—but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to." In a sense this book is the product of the struggle between the truth of my argument and the force of Moltmann's objection.
Such was the influence and penetrating focus on living the Way that Moltmann embodied and struggled to teach. Readers of this article might, however, struggle to see the point of reading a theologian who held heterodox views about the virgin birth and the content of the creeds. Is Moltmann a trustworthy theologian? It is a tricky question to answer because it is clear that Moltmann loves Christ and wants us to love him, too. Certainly, he is not an orthodox Lutheran. Some of his views are offensive, others strange, and some far-fetched. Such is the risk and fruit of all thinking theologians who risk putting the things they interpret into words.
Moltmann is concerned with how we love our neighbor, and he invites us to see the world through Christ and his work, which gives us hope. Moltmann's theology is a theology of hope, and while he may not hit all the important points of good doctrine, it would be a mistake to simply ignore his writings, which contain some insightful and thought-provoking aspects of Christian theology and life, particularly about the role of history and the resurrection.
Motlmann's theology of hope is very eschatological, that is, concerned with how Christ's resurrection is part of the Trinity, making all things new in the coming Kingdom of God.
This article cannot trace the diversity and complexity of all of Moltmann's work, so in what time remains, I want to focus on this idea of hope that Moltmann is probably most famous for. But, before we do that, a brief biographical sketch may prove useful to understanding the context in which Moltmann developed his theology.
Moltmann was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1926. He did not grow up religious and was drafted into the German army during World War II. Although he fought in some battles, he soon after surrendered to the first British soldier he came across and spent the remainder of the war as a POW. Eventually, he was shown pictures of Belsen and Auschwitz, and this changed him, troubling him deeply. Although he was not directly involved in the camps, he felt responsible by proxy, having served in the German army. He writes about feeling shame and disgrace. In his POW camp, reeling from these pictures, a chaplain gave him a Bible, which he read for the first time. In reading about Christ, and particularly his suffering and crucifixion, Moltmann felt he had met a God who could understand his shame and identify with his suffering and the suffering of the Jews during the war. Particularly in his resurrection, Christ was inaugurating a new work where suffering was being put away, and this gripped Moltmann. He went on to study theology after the war and became the (now) famous theologian we know.
His breakthrough work was published in the 1960s, and it remains his most popular work, assigned to seminary students across the world. Theology of Hope was a groundbreaking work which stressed that God is a God of promise. For Moltmann, the gospel is not just proclamation, but also promise; it is the promise that God is doing something new in Christ that has never been done before.
Moltmann's theology of hope is very eschatological, that is, concerned with how Christ's resurrection is part of the Trinity, making all things new in the coming Kingdom of God. For Moltmann, Jesus is on a sort of journey that takes on three phases, but really, the first one is what he spends most of his time writing about. In this first phase, the Gospels stress Jesus' Messiahship, which is to say that Jesus is the source of hope for all human history, for to be the Messiah is to be the Savior. It is here that Moltmann is particularly creative. He notes that Jewish scholars have long rejected Jesus because they do not see him as the Messiah and are still waiting. But Moltmann is firm that Jesus is the Messiah. So, what can Christians say back to Jews when this chasm of disagreement exists?
The temptation to despair, to retreat, to resign ourselves to "the way things are" is an evil temptation that, if accepted, trades the hope and promise of Christ for human ways of seeing history.
Motlmann argues that Jesus is still fulfilling the hope of Israel—it is already, but not yet. For Moltmann, Jesus has not yet completed all his work. Yes, Jesus said, "It is finished" on the cross, but that finished work was against death, hell and sin, not for all the work that Christ has to do—which the church is still waiting for. Christ's work will be fully over when he comes again. Key to understanding this is to envision the cross not as something that happens to Jesus in history (Christ only as a victim and sequence in a series of causes and effects) but instead to see the cross as part of the work of God in Christ; a work that is connected to the work to come in the Kingdom that is coming. The Kingdom of God that arrives with Christ's second coming is a new creation, a new era of history. So to the Jews, Moltmann can say, "Just hang on; God keeps his promises to you; eventually, you'll see it, and all your longings and hope will be realized in Jesus."
Theology of Hope is really about hope and promise. We can trust God because of what God has done in the suffering and work of Jesus Christ on the cross and resurrection. The cross stands as a testimony to all the suffering of the world that God is on our side, and we are never alone. The temptation to despair, to retreat, to resign ourselves to "the way things are" is an evil temptation that, if accepted, trades the hope and promise of Christ for human ways of seeing history.
Moltmann sees history through the resurrection. It is central to understanding everything. For him, post-Enlightenment man does not accept the historical accuracy of the resurrection. Theologians and well-meaning Christians have responded to this by being obsessed with the historicity of the resurrection and claims to demonstrate its reality in time and space. Moltmann believes in the historical resurrection:
The efficacy of the Christian faith is dependent upon the reality of Jesus' being resurrected from the dead by God. We have indeed reason to regard the words of Paul in 1 Cor 15:14 seriously: "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and our faith is in vain." With all historical assurance, we can say that, save for Easter, there would have been no New Testament letters written, no Gospels compiled, no prayers offered in Jesus' name, and no Church. [1]
But he is weary of the Christian faith being seen through historical lenses as a product of human verification. In other words, we all know the phrase, "history repeats itself," and so the temptation is to see the cross and resurrection as just another moment in history like all other moments. Dismissal of the resurrection was often on the grounds that it could not have actually happened and that the Gospel writers (at best) were writing what they misunderstood. Formal academic history cannot accept a miracle. Thus, in the 20th century, theology was able to talk about God and resurrection by analogizing it as part of a metaphor or cycle of cosmic history: The resurrection means rebirth, renewal, overcoming, power, usurpation of evil forces, etc.
"History" now means God's work to save the world, and everything in history is caught up and sublimated in this event of resurrection and the Kingdom-coming.
Twentieth-century liberal theology was able to make the resurrection a trope within history. But also—Moltmann argues that Christians, in an attempt to "prove" the resurrection, also bought into the unfortunate notion that the resurrection was just another miracle in a long line of miracles that God had done in the Old Testament. This is a mistake. Moltmann will not have it because, for him, the resurrection has no analogy in history. It is a new thing, a proclamation and promise that all of human history centers upon. Why? Because it had never been done before and had no precedent. So, too, argues Moltman, Christ's work to "make all things new" in his second coming is also totally new. "History" now means God's work to save the world, and everything in history is caught up and sublimated in this event of resurrection and the Kingdom-coming. In the death and resurrection of Christ, God suffers and defeats death, and this is no mere miracle; it is a breach into the operations of human history that not only transforms it but gives it meaning.
In the end, Moltmann invites readers to see their own suffering and pain in this context. Suffering and pain are a part of human life, but they are part of a history that is shared with the suffering Christ. God suffers, too, for us, and through it, makes all things new. Because God is a suffering God, the hope he offers, which is true and real because of the resurrection, is offered to all those who love Jesus. In fact, Moltmann thinks it will be realized (eventually) even in those who now do not know Jesus (they just don't know Jesus yet).
Moltmann might go too far for many, but his stress on promise, his invitation to embrace the hope of the resurrection, his focus on the joy that is here because of where God is bringing history, and his stress on living the Way of Jesus have helped bring back into focus the work of Christ as a central part of theology. He has also connected the resurrection more deeply with eschatology. He has critiqued modern theology for the tendency to deny the historical resurrection while at the same time remaking what "history" is when we talk about it. Moltmann is gone now, but his theology will continue to provoke and provide. And this one thing is certain: Moltmann points readers to Christ and the hope they have in him, and for that, we are grateful.
