Jürgen Moltmann (1926–2024)

A Remembrance

Jürgen Moltmann and Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel in Germany, 1970. Photo: WCC

Jürgen Moltmann was the most influential Protestant theologian of the past half-century. In his many years of teaching and writing, he explored and freshly reinterpreted classical themes of Christian faith in ways that spoke to the harsh realities of human life with all its injustices, sufferings, and unfulfilled hopes. Far from accenting the negative, however, he emphasized the resurrection power of the crucified Lord and the life-giving and life-renewing action of the Spirit of God throughout the creation that ignites fresh hope and builds new community. The impact of his thought on theology and the church has been immense. His writings continue to be studied and debated in theology courses in seminaries and universities worldwide. 

Moltmann’s first major work, Theologie der Hoffnung, published in 1964, opened a new and exciting chapter in Christian theology. As a neophyte instructor in theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, I came across it in a stack of new books in Speer (now Wright) Library while preparing for a sabbatical leave. It impressed me deeply, and I was determined to meet and speak with the author during my year abroad. 

Our first in-person meeting was in 1965 at the University in Bonn where he was then teaching. On the day I arrived, he was giving a lecture in a class on Christian ethics. The subject of the lecture was capital punishment. He argued strongly against it, one of his points being that anyone who defended capital punishment as a deterrent against crime should insist on executions being public events with everyone encouraged to view them, as was the case in the Middle Ages. In conversation with him later that day, it became clear to me that here was a theologian for whom constructive theology and pressing ethical issues were inseparable. 

The English translation of The Theology of Hope appeared in 1967 in an era ripe for change. Vatican II had convened to open the windows of the Roman Catholic Church to the modern world; movements for radical social and political change were erupting in Europe and Latin America. In the United States, there were protests against the Vietnam War, the heating up of the civil rights movements, the widespread student revolution, and the deeply moving “I Have a Dream” speech of Martin Luther King, Jr. In theological circles, the “Death of God” was hotly debated. In this turbulent context, the impact of Moltmann’s book extolling the power of hope rooted in the future-opening promise of God was electric. On March 23, 1968, the first page of the Sunday New York Times had an article titled, “‘God is Dead’ Doctrine Losing Ground to ‘Theology of Hope.’”

Moltmann himself was surprised by the enthusiastic reception of his book. He had earlier shared the feeling of many young theologians of the time that Barth had said everything in his Church Dogmatics. But to Moltmann’s amazement, The Theology of Hope showed that there was more to be said. The “more” included a retrieval of the power of God’s word of promise to disrupt acceptance of given reality and to sow seeds of hope in God’s coming world of justice and peace. It highlighted the event of God’s raising of the crucified Jesus as God’s seal of this promise to all creation, and it spoke of an exodus church whose mission was to take part with confidence in God’s activity of making all things new. The “more” of Moltmann’s book also called for liberation from the notion that Christian hope has to do only with the transformation and fulfillment of personal and private life and has little interest in or responsibility for human life in its social and political dimensions. The Theology of Hope thus offered to its readers a fresh reading of Scripture and a needed recovery of the inseparable bond of the gospel message and Christian discipleship in the service of God’s promised new world of justice, peace, and joy. Aiming to awaken the church from its theological slumbers, and with a focus on the divine promise in Christ, Moltmann wrote, “Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. . . . for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present” (21). 

Moltmann’s theological work did not stagnate in this initial success. In fact, a signature of his theology would become his openness to new challenges and fresh vistas. He read and conversed with biblical scholars, learned from philosophers and social critics, engaged with path-breaking liberation theologians, and traveled extensively to regions of the world marked by suffering and oppression. He remained eager to meet the new challenges and crises that required a response from the church and theology. 

His second major work, The Crucified God, was partly a corrective of what he considered a misunderstanding of his effort to recover the significance of hope for Christian life and discipleship here and now. In The Crucified God, he emphasizes that Christian hope is far from utopian. The central content of the Christian gospel is the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ in their tensive but inseparable bond. In a world of suffering and godforsakenness, talk of the resurrection of Christ severed from his crucifixion becomes mere fantasy, just as pious fixations on the crucifixion of Christ apart from his way of life and his resurrection from the dead often lead to construing the church’s message as a stultifying call to suffer for suffering’s sake.

Moltmann’s turn to the “crucified God” had roots in his own personal experience as well as in his lifelong theological quest for a proper understanding of a theology of the cross. As a teenager in the German army, he had been wounded in combat and had experienced the firestorm of mass incinerations of men, women, and children, leaving him wondering, Where is God, and Why have I been left alive amid all the burning bodies? When he later learned of the horrors of the holocaust, he wanted “to sink into the ground under the burden of shame and guilt.” For him, the quest for faith in God after Auschwitz and in a world marked by suffering and oppression had to focus on the presence of God in Jesus’ own experience of godforsakenness on the cross. To speak of the “crucified God” was Moltmann’s way of affirming: “God is not greater than he is in this humiliation. God is not more glorious than he is in this self-surrender. God is not more powerful than he is in this helplessness. God is not more divine than he is in this humanity” (205). This affirmation required a revolution in the understanding of God, not as impassible as the theological tradition has taught, but as eminently passionate in his suffering but triumphant love for humanity and, indeed, for all creation.

In a dispute between Karl Rahner and Moltmann over whether God could suffer, Rahner bristled at the heresy of patripassianism that he found in Moltmann’s work. To which Moltmann responded that Rahner’s Deus impassibilis is incapable of true love and genuine compassion, for love involves the risk of loss and suffering. Incidentally, in this dispute, Barth would clearly have been on Moltmann’s side, for Barth acknowledged that the early church heresy of patripassionism contained an important truth. 

The theme of the passionate and inclusive love of God for creatures in their suffering from injustice, cruelty, indifference, and death is an underlying credo in all of the subsequent writings of Moltmann. After his trilogy of The Theology of Hope, The Crucified God, and The Church in the Power of the Spirit, came his many later “contributions” to theology in its ceaseless quest for better understanding, including his books on anthropology, creation, the Spirit of life, and his eschatology or vision of the presence of all things in the final victory of God over all the forces of sin, death, and destruction. 

While it is impossible to encompass the scope of Moltmann’s legacy to theology, church, and the wider world in a brief piece like this, perhaps it is sufficient to say that he was a Reformed—but even more emphatically—an ecumenical theologian; he respected the classical theological tradition but knew that it required revisions; he learned much from South American, Black, Hispanic, Korean, and feminist theologians (his wife Elizabeth was herself an outspoken feminist theologian), but he recognized that neither his nor any other theological endeavor is infallible or beyond improvement; he engaged in political theology but resisted the temptation to collapse the life of faith into politics; he was by vocation an academic theologian, but he knew the importance of the life of prayer and the experience of the presence of God in the wonder of creation, in unexpected new beginnings, and in small everyday occasions of mutual care and friendship. 

And a final point: Moltmann was a theologian with a lively sense of humor. In his autobiography, he recalls that before he and Elizabeth were married, she was awarded a doctoral degree in theology before he had completed his own dissertation.  Whimsically, he relates that on that occasion a colleague told him that Elizabeth “had become the first virgo doctissima, and I now counted as ‘prince consort.’” Moltmann’s delight in laughter was an expression of his love of and joy in life here and now and his confident hope in the life to come in the power of the universal Spirit of God.

My own teaching and writing over the years show my indebtedness to the influence of Jürgen Moltmann as they do to that of the writings of Karl Barth and many liberation theologians. Knowing me well, my son once gave me a coffee cup that had printed on its side a quote from Barth: “A theologian who labors without joy cannot be a good theologian.” In spite of their differences, with that Barthian dictum at least, Moltmann, theologian of the passionate, suffering love of God and of Easter joy in the power of the Spirit, would have heartily agreed. 

— Daniel L. Migliore

Daniel L. Migliore is Charles Hodge Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of several books, including the widely read Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology.