walz_1976
author: Walz, Erwin G.

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THE USE OF MOLTMANN'S THEOLOGY OF HOPE

IN PARISH PREACHING

by

ERWIN G.

WALZ

—

A

D

THE USE OF MOLTMANN'S THEOLOGY OF HOPE

IN PARISH PREACHING

BY

ERWIN G. WALZ

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF MINISTRY

CALIFORNIA GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY

1976

Approved by

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PREFACE

My work as parish pastor brings me into a day-to-day concern

with preaching.

In the seminary the "sermon" was defined for me as ''the

exposition and applica?ion of a porfion of God's Word." After fourteen

years in one congregation I am constantiy challgnged Qith fhe fask of

Having something fresh and‘helbful to say that will "expose'" the message

"

of Fhe Gospel énd

ap?ly" it to the needs of the hearers. kPreéching has

not become easier over the years, but my acquaintancé with déd's Word

and the needs of people has increased.

In our day a sense‘of hopelessness has enve}oped the m}nds and

hearts of people in our chu;ches and society in'general. A theology of

hope, based solidly on Scripture and aware of the hurts and burdens of

people, could conceivaply bé of immense help to those-chayged yith

leading worship and preaching. It has been my strong desife in

preparing th%s dissertation to'acquaint myself with a Sqripture—based

theology of hope thgt I can share with ogp pgéple week—tofweek. It is

my fond hope that the results of this study will also providg some

practical help for other pastors who share with me the high privilege of

being present-day "se;vants of Christ and stewards @f the ﬁys;eries of

God!" (I' Corinthians 4:1):

My gratitude is here warmly expressed to the California Graduate

School of Theology for stimulating me to undertake this task; Fo Dean

Barrvaeitzel for his initial encouragement to develop this.topic; to

Dr. Butrus Abd-al-Malik for his patience and help as my advisor; to my

11

dadi

dear friend and former! pastor, .Lt. Col. Ji Karl Jung, for his

enthusiastic support throughout the whole project; to Julie Earick for

the use of her books on contemporary poetry and songéi;to thé{Church

Council of Redeemer Lutheran Church for its gracious provisioﬁ of a

study leave to pursue this work; and--last but not least--to my dear

wife Viyian for her faith in my ability to complete suc§ a task and for

her meticulous effort in typing the final copy of the‘disséftatiqni

Above all, I want to acknowledge the steady influence of the Holy Spirit

who moved mé to begin this project andrenabled me to bring it to

completion!

TABLE OF

CONTENTS

Page

ii

PREFACE

e

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Chapter

1

INTRODUCTION .

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.

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THE PROBLEM

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LIMITATIONS OF THIS STUDY

REViEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

°

2.

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THE CONTEMPORARY SEARCH FOR HOPE

°

'REFLECTIONS.OFlSOME MODERN WRITERS

THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY IN AN AGE OF

°

13

TECHNOLOGY

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e

17

S

A STUDY OF BIBLICAL REFERENCES TO HOPE

HOPE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

L,

22

HOPE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

.

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.

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26

THE.EMERGENCE OF "THE SCHOOL OF HOPE"

°

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28

THE INFLUENCE OF ERNST BLOCH c

METZ

29

A SUMMARY OF THE WRITINGS OF JOHANNES B.

JURGEN MOLTMANN'S PLACE AMONG THE HOPE

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32

THEOLOGIANS

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IDEAS FROM CALVIN AND LUTHER THAT ARE REFLECTED

35

IN MOLTMANN'S EMPHASIS .

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39

5

JGRGEN MOLTMANN AND HIS THEOLOGY .

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39

HIS BACKGROUND

43

TEACHERS WHO INFLUE&CED HITME e

iv

Chapter

Page

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(1]

S

UMMARY OF HIS MAJOR WORK,

THEOLOGY

OF HOPE

4/

°

50

Eschatology and Revelation

Promise and History

°

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o

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59

The Resurrection and the Future of

Jesus Christ

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68

Eschatology and History

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89

Exodus Church

.

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101

6

DEVELOPMENTS IN MOLTMANN'S THEOLOGY ACCORDING TO

.

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108

LATER BOOKS, ESSAYS, AND LECTURES

"THE CRUCIFIED GOD"

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108

The Identity and Relevance of Faith

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109

The Resistance of the Cross against its

Interpretations

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109

Questions about Jesus

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1.1

111

The Historical Trial of‘Jesus g4

114

The Eschatological Trial of Jesus

The Crucified God

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1145

Wéys towards the Psychological Liberation of

Man

118

Ways towards the Political Liberation eof Mankind

119

HMANII

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120

ESSAYS AND LECTURES

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.

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123

"Religion, Revolution and the Future"

123

"The Experiment Hope'"

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124

7

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF MOLTMANN'S THEOLOGY

OF HOPE

126

126

HIS EMPHASIS ON THE HORIZONTAL F ot e S SR s

e

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128

THEYUSEs QF BHE fUTURE TENSE

THE FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH

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1529

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Page

Chapter

NEED FOR

130

wFVELOPMENT OF TRINITARIAN EMPHASIS . . .

131

LACK OF THE NOTE OF CELEBRATION

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OF HOPE

8.

HOW A PARISH PASTOR CAN USE MOLTMANN'S THEME

IN HIS PREACHING

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134

BY THIS

HOMILETICAL POSSIBILITIES PROVIDED

THEOLOGY

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134

134

The God of Hope

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135

The Person of Christ .

.

136

Tbe Work of the Holy Spirit

The Second Coming of Christ

o

1537

138

Christian Faith

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1.39

Christian Joy

139

What It Means ;o be Human

140

Law and Promise

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142

Following Jesus

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142

Bearing One's Cross

143

Christian Discipleship

144

Christian Atheism

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144

The Church .

The Mission of the Church

145

146

Baptism

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147

The Lord's Supper

Death

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147

148

The Resurrection from the Dead

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149

STUDY OF SEVERAL SERMONS BY MOLTMANN

149

"God Is Different," based on Isaiah 55:6-11

"The God of Hope," based on Romans 15:4-13 .

] 57

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Chapter

Page

"Look, Everything Has Become New,' based

on

IT Corinthians 5:17-21

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155

"The Return of Christ," based on

Matthew 24:1-14

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157

SUGGESTED.SERMON OUTLINES EMPHASIZING OUR

CHRISTIAN HORER 0 #orvi s

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159

k-

CONCLUSION

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165

BIBLIOGRAPHY

.

167

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

THE PROBLEM

This dissertation wrestles with a very real problem. O

ur

society, with all its material

s educational, and technical advantages

over previous sqcieties, is in the grip of a feeling‘of despair

regarding the future.

The popplation explosion and a dwindling supply

of resources are causing an increasing number of pedple to lead a

démeaning and deprived existence.

Thousands of peoplé are in the grip

of hunger and starvation.

‘Ciyilization has not been ahle to solve the

threat and onslaught of war.

Industry has benefited humanity but

increasing demands for production have caused pollution of natural

resources and environment, as well as impersonalness in human relations.

Human greed anq misﬁse of power have eroded the people's confidence in

business and governmental leaders.

The church, with its vast spiritual

and human resources,

has not proved itself very effective in the face of

society's needs.

In fact, generally speaking, the church still seems

more interested in saving itself than in redeeming society.

In light of these circumstances we are raising the questioﬁs,

"Is there hope for the future?

If so, what is its basis and how can a

message of hope be formulated and communicated to modefn‘society?" In

approaching this second phase of the problem we turn in our study to a

modern "scho?l of hope"

with partiéular emphasis upon the writings of

it

Jurgen Moltmann.

We will examine his major works available in the

English language, includiné an articulation of his thgology and several

sermons in which he communipgteg his'theology to worshipping commu-

nities.

In keeping with the ultimate purpose of this dissertation, we go

on to call attention to homiletical éossibilities in tbe theology of

hope and provide suggested sermon outlines for consideration by the

modern parish pastor.

LIMITATIONS OF THIS STUDY

The material available in the field of hope theology is indeed

great.

Although we have given consideration to other proponents of "the

school of hope," it has been necessary to limit ourselves primarily to

the chief Protestant proponent of hope theology.

Even here I was

limited to Moltmann's works that have been translated into English.

Throughout the course of the study the focus has been on

material that Fan be used by the parish pastor in his work of preparing

sermons. Although we have attempted to provide as varied and extensive

a treatment of the theology of hope as possible, we have consistently

tried to work within the scope of the topic under discussjonr

Even though it would have been possible to provide entire

sermons incorporating the principles of hope theology, we are limiting

ourselves to what will be seminal suggestions for the task of the modern

preacher.

Each pastor can then adapt his message to the type of

audience he must envision as he prepares to preach.

We have provided

outlines that incorporate the main thoughts in the biblical text

together with suggestions for a devglopment of each main point.

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

After the plan for the study was developed, it became clear that

there was a vast amount of literature related to this field of study.

é great number of modern songs, plays, essays, and poetry deal with

feelings of despair, death, meaninglessness, and hopelessness.

We have

been able to include only a few samples of this kind of literature ;hat

fit the purpose of the dissertation.

In the area of hope theology there are many sources that

influenced members of the school of hope, there are numerous writings

by proponents of hoﬁe theology, and there are many books and essays

that analyze, evaluate, and build upon this modern theological movement.

We have ipcluded only those works that met the purpose and remained

within the scope of this project. The bibliography, hogever, provides

many sources that can be investigated by Fhe reader who is interested

in a wider acquaintance with literature in this general field. -

The personal involvement in this research and writing has been

both a strenubus and a stimulating task.

New vistas of helpful

knowlédge have been discovered and a whole new excitement to keep well

informed regarding modern developggnts in theology has begun to grip

me

It is my sincere hope that the availability of the results of this

study, as contained in this dissertation, will help stir up new interest

in Christian theology and provide some fruitful suggestions for further

study and research on the part of the reader.

Chapter 2

THE CONTEMPORARY SEARCH FOR HOPE

The word "hope" is defined in Webster's dictionaryl as "trust,

reliance;

desire accompapied by expecfation of or belief in fulfillment;

someone or something on which hopes are ce#tered

; something hoped for."

By that definition,

hope is a quality which many people have lost and

for which they are eagerly searching at the present time. Social

scientists characterize our age as one of anxiety and despair rather

than hope.

This kind of mobd islfallow ground for a theology of hope.

It is our purpose here to offer some sample reflections of contemporary

thought and feeling as expresséd by modern writers and to sketch briefly

the search for identity which describes our modern dilemma. We do this

to provide a background for a serious consideration of a theology of

hope!

REFLECTIONS OF SOME MODERN WRITERS

Walter Lowenfels, editor of The Writing on the Wall, introdﬁces

108 poems of protest with these comments in the preface which‘heb

entitles "What Time Is It?"

Poetry (or any other art) relates to the question: What time is

3t2

There's no mystery about the answer today.

We are all hung up

on the hot line between atomic catastrophe and h

uman triumph.

""Oh

1Webster's Seventh New Colle

Mass.

G. & C. Merriam Co.,

giate Dictionary (Springfield,

1965), p. 400.

4

dear!

Oh dear!"

said the White Rabbit as he looked at his watch,

"how late it's get

book.

ting." That's what our poets are saying in this

Ours is a great time to be alive--n

T

ot becausev"happy days are

here'

or coming--but because we are the first generation absolutely

certain that tomorrow will not be like today.

If it is, our coun-

try's tomorrow is heading toward a silent atomi

c graveyard.

For poets, of course, there will always be a red-hot inferno

here and now because things are as they are--not as they should be.

That's the theme of this anthology--resistance against the world the

way it is.

0

°

°

Poems project the future, the

y show how it feeis to beihuman in

the ice age of an automated world

°

One of the poems in the book is.by Bérbara Gibson entitled

"Thinking About the Unthinkable." Her mind is filled with desﬁair

because she sees death all around her. She represegts the mood of many

in our day.

fhe killing is unthinkable. Thinking

about killing is unbearable.

Babies

are born and are killed and we

think about it.

"About it"

is not it, is not enough, is not

unbearable enough, is still

thinkable.

Stillborn is enough,

but being born and then killed is more

than enough, is unthinkable.

?

Enough

is enough.

We are thinking

abéut the

unthinkable, killing.

It is unbearable.

We bear

babies and we kill them.

The babies

are thinking about us, somewhere where

they are, killed, unborn.

They

are thinking that we are dead.

Because

we keep thinking and we keep bearing

the unbearable.

It is enough.

It is too much to bear.

It is

unthinkable.

But we kill and

we become dead and we make dead

and we are killed and we think and are thought of

and it is unbearable.

:

We do not

want to sink down into despair

2Walter Lowenfels, ed., The Writing on the Wall (Garde

N

Y,

Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969), pp. xiii and xvi.

n Cit?,

but we are,

We must not sink down

there but we are there already,

I think.

That is why we keep thinking

about the unbearable and bearing

the unthinkable.

That is because

the unborn, stillborn, born but killed

babies think ill of us.

We cannot stand

their 111 will.

The force of their thinking

about us is sinking us down into despair,

is drowning us in our guilt.

Tell me

how to get out of this, someone.

I need someone to help me get out of this poem,

We need

some baby somewhere perhaps.

someone to help us get out of this despair

we are sinking into and out of this thinking thing

we've gotten into and all this unbearability

and out of this poem.

Help us

get out of this killing, somebody.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti has produced a book of'poetry which he

entitled A Cdney Island of the Mind. Of the title he writes, "“The title

of this book is taken from Henry Miller's Into the Night Life. It is

used out of context but expresses the way I felt about these poems when

I wrote them--as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island‘of

the mind, a kind of circus of the soul."4 1In one of Ferlinghetti's

poems he graphically expresses the noncommunicative attitude that goes

with depression:

3

In Golden Gate Park that day

a man and his wife were coming along

thru the enormous meadow

which was the meadow of the w&rld

He was wearing green suspenders

and carrying an old beat-up flute

in one hand

while his wife had a bunch of grapes

which she kept handing out

individually

3Lowenfels, pp. 38-39.

4Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind (New York

New Directions Publishing Corp., 1958), p. 8.

to various squirrels

as if each

were a little joke

And then the two of them came on

thru the enormous meadow

which was the meadow of the

world

and then

at a very still spot where the trees dreamed

and geemed to have been waiting thru all time

for them

they sat down together on the grasé

and ate orangés

without looking aF each:oﬁher

without looking at each other

.and put the peels

in a basket whichvthey seemed to have

without looking at each other

btought foy that purpose

And then

he took his shift and undershirt off

but kept his hat on

sideways

fell asleep under it

and without saying anything

And his

wife just sat there looking

at the birds which flew about

calling to each other

in the stilly air

as if they were questioning existence

.

or trying ;o recall something forgotten

But then finally

she too lay down flat

and just lay there looking up

at nothing

yet fingering the old flute

which nobody played

and finally looking over

at him

without any particular expression

except a certain awful look

of terrible depressiond

Anne Sexton's book df poems entitled Live or Dievis introduced

by her with the statement that "

they read like a fever chart for a bad

SFerlinghetti, pp. 20-21.

8

case of melancholy."® she quotes André Gide: '"Despite every resolution

of optimism, melancholy occasionally wins out: man has decidedly

botched up the planet.”"’ One of her poems, '"The Addict," tells of a

daily dose of capsules to stay in shape for death.

THE ADDICT

Sleepmonger,

deathmonger,

with capsules in my palms each night,

eight at a time from sweet pharmaceutical bottles

I make arrangements for a pint-sized journey.

I'm the queen of this condition.

I'm an expert on making the Erip

and now they say I'm an addict.

Now they ask why

Why !

‘-

Dén't they know

that I promised to die!

I'm keeping in practice.

I'm merely staying in shape.

The pills are a mother, but better,

every color and as good as sour balls.

I'm on a diet from death.

Yes, I admit'

it has gotten to be a bit of a habit--

A,

blows eight at a time, socked in the eye,

hauled away by the pink, the orange,

the green and the white goodnights.

I'm becoming something of a chemical

mixture.

That's dt!

My supply

of tablets

has got to last for years and years.

I like them more than I like me.

Stubborn as hell, they won't let go.

It's a kind of marriage.

It's a kind of war

where I plant bombs inside

of myself.

6Anne Sexton, Live or Die (Eoston: Houghton Mifflin

HL966)Y, ¥ ply it

Company,

14

7Sexton, P et

Yes

Etry

to kill myself in small amounts,

an innocuous occupation,

Actually I'm hung up on it.

But remember I don't make too much noise,

And frankly no one has to lug me out

and I don't stand there in my winding sheet.

I'm a little buttercup

in my yellow nightie

eating my eight loaves

in a row

and in a certain order

as in

the laying on of hands

or the black sacrament.

It's a ceremony

but like any other sport

it's full of rules.

It's like a musical tennis match where

my mouth keeps catching the ball.

Then I lie on my altar

elevated by the eight chemical kisses.

What a lay me down this is

with two pink, two orange,

two green, two white goodnights.

Fee-fi-fo-fum—--

Now I'm borrowed.

Now I'm numb.3

Adrienne Rich has written a book of poems published under the

title Leaflets.

In one of the poems, "The Key," she brings out the

feeling of something missipg from life, being on a continuous search,

and never quite reaching what is desired:

THE KEY

Through a drain grating, something

glitters and falters,

glitters again.

A scrap of foil,

a coin, a signal, a message

from the indistinct

piercing my indistinctness?

8Sexton, pp. 85-86.

10

How long I have gone round

and round, spiritless with foreknown defeat,

in search of that glitter?

Hours, years maybe.

.The cry of metal

on asphalt, on iron, the sudden

ching of a precious loss,

the clear statement

of something missing. Over and over

it stops me in my tracks

like a falling star, only

this is not the universe's loss

it is mine.

If I were only colder,

nearer death, nearer Eirth, I might let go

whatever's so bent on staying lost.

Why not leave the house

locked, to collapse inward among its weeas,

the letters to darken and flake

in the drawer, the car

to grow skeletal, aflame with rust

in the moonlit lot, and walk

ever after?

0 God I.am not spiritless,

but a spirit can be stunned,

a battery felt going dead

before the light flickers,

and I've covered this ground too often

with this yellow disc

within whose beam all's commonplace

and whose limits are described

by the whole night.9

Michael E. Eliot Hurst of Simon Fraser University has produced

a volume on the modern city entitled I Came to the City.

He wants his

students to see the city as an entity, a social and cultural place, an

economic place, a political place, a place with particﬁlaf networks of

9Adrienne Rich, Leaflets (Néw York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.,

1969), pp. 34-35.

11

communication and movement. He explores the urban landscape through

essays, photographs, and poetry. One of the poems, written by Roger

McGough, brings out the impersonalness of urban life and serves as a

propﬁecy of what the future of the city could become.

MOTHER, THE WARDROBE IS FULL OF INFANTRYMEF

Mother, the wardrobe is full of infantrymen

i did, i asked them

but they snarled saying it was a man's life

Mother, there is a centurion tank in the parlour

i did, i asked the officer

but he laughed saying queen's regulations,

piano was out of tune anyway

Mother, polish your identity bracelet

there is a mushroom cloud in the back garden

i did, i tried to bring in the cat

but it simply came to pieces in my hand

i did, i tried to whitewash the windows

but there weren't any

i did, i tried to hide under the stairs

but i couldn't get in for civil defence leaders

i did, i tried ringing Candid Camera

but they crossed their hearts

i went for a policeman but they were looting the town

i went out for a fire engine but they were all upside down

i went for a priest but they were all on their knees

mother don't just lie there say

something please

mother don't just lie there say

something please

Many of the modern songs bring

out the feeling of human

lostness.

Silence consists of poems and

The book entitled Sounds qf

songs about loneliness.

Betsy Ryan is

the editor.

We want to quote two

of the songs as modern expressions of loneliness.

The first one is by

two of the Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney:

lOMichael E. Eliot Hurst, I Came to the City (Bbston: Houghton

Mifflin Company, 1975), p. 354.

12

NOWHERE MAN

He's a real Nowhere Man,

Sitting in his Nowhere Land,

Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.

Doesn't have a point of view;

Knows not where he's going to.

Isn't he a bit like ygu and me?

Nowhere Man, please listen,

You don't know what you're missing,

Nowhere Man.

The world is at your

command,

He's as blind as he can be;

Just sees what he wants to see,

Nowhere Man, can you see me at all?

Doesn't have a point of view;

Knows not where he's going to.

Isn't he a bit like you and me?

Nowhere Man, don't worry.

Take your time; don't hurry.

Leave it all ti

a hand.

?

11 somebody else lends you

He's a real Nowhere Man,

Sitting in his

Nowhere Land,

Making all his

nowhere

plans

for nobody,

Making all his

nowhere plans

for nobody,

Making all his

nowhere

plans

for nobody.

The other modern song we offer

here as a sample expression of

the emptiness and meaninglessness many

feel is by Will Holt:

HOW I FEEL

Hard to tell you how I feel

Everything is so unreal

Lord, but life is a hard thing to get to.

Saw my shadow on the wall

Saw my love

nowhere at all

Saw my life

as a hard thing to get through;

When you're

born they carry you

When you're

gone they bury you

11Betsy Ryan

» ed. Sounds of Silence (New York: Scholastic Book

Services, ¥1972) ¢ iph

12

13

In between you're on your own

Hard to stand there all alone.

Someone's crying down the hall

Dying cries they tell it all

Lord, this life is a hard

iging to live

And harder still to leave.

After this brief review of current poetry and songs we are left

with the feeling that Jesus' words of long ago apply very forcibly to

our times:

"When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because

they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shépherd."13

THE éEARCH FOR IDENTITY IN AN AGE OF TECHNOLOGY

Drama;ic strides have been made by modern man in the conquest of

his envirénment.

The words God addressed to man at cfeation have taken

on fantastic‘reality in the twentieth century! "Be fruitful and

multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have doyinion over the

fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living

thing that moves upon the earth.

nlé

Predictions of future technical mastery of the material world,

the life processes, and space are mind-boggling.

Keen observers of the

human condition, however, find that we cannot say that man has mastered

himself and the mystery of his own being.

Walther Zimmerli rightly

states,

In the midst of all his technical prowess, he is more than ever

engaged in the search for himself.

In the last century he could

rest secure in a world held together by the great designs of

idealist philosophy, but in our day he has been frightened out of

this refuge.

The terrible awakening of the postwar years created a

new hearing for the existentialist dnderstanding of man with its

experience of anxiety and vulnerability. What is there about the

12Ryan, p. 45.

13Matthew 9:36;

ldgenesis 1:28.

14

nature of man?

death

Is it not pecularly marked by an existence toward

s 4 transiency in which man can

only be said really to live in

the decision of the moment?

historical life beyond the mo

Is there any real continuity to

ment of decision?ld

It is with this kind of background that the question of a future

for mankind musF‘be asked anew.

Is there a future and a hope for

mankind?

Science and technology present man not only with vast possi-

bilities but also with threats to his existence.

This mqod of modern

man seems ready for a message of hope.

///A Frenchmap, Jacqpeerllul, in his book Hope in Time of Aban-

donment,

begins with a detailed analysis of the illnesses ofvmankind at

this time in history.

His diagnosis can be summarized-by saying that

mankind is without hope today.

Near the beginning of his book he says:

We are living ﬁhrough the experience of a closed world.

Never

have there been so many openings

most stupefying, lightning-

> sclentific breakthroughs by the

like extensions of technology, the

secularization of thou

ght and of civilization, the opening of doors

to "the cosmos"; yet n

so impotent.

ever has man felt so closed in, so confined,

With the help of intermediar

ies he participates in the

great human adventure.

He watches television.

He sees the first

steps of "man-in-himself" on the moon.

But he is not man-in-

himself,

He is the white-collar unit

» this man in a gray suit whose

life mechanically unwinds like the pe

rforated roll of an old player-

piano.

Each turn of the roll is a

year and, when deposited every

December 31 on the preceding year,

obliterates it.

The notes played

on the piano are the sum of his programmed deeds.l6

Ellul says people have lost hope in the future so they try to

concentrate on the present moment.

The person of this age no longer has

a fixed, sane

» and reliable point of reference by which to direct his

activities and his life,.

He finds it difficult to arrive at some

judgment of what he himself is doing and what is being dbne‘around him.

lSWalther Zimmerli,

Man and His Hope in the 0ld Testament

(London: SCM Press, Ltd

LT R T

16Jacques Ellul, Hope in Time of Abandonment,

C. Edward Hopkin,

trans. (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 3.

s

1s5

He no longer has a clear and certain criterion for distinguishing the

good from the bad.

What he is being offered is a compass gone berserk

andllights misplaced in the fog.

When values have been reversed the person can no longer put any

credence in values,

There is no fixed landmark for knowing where he is

/}n a telling statement he

and so he can no longer entertain a hop%,-

7

shows how the feeling Qf futility grips youth and adults:

The only difference between the adults wi

thout a future and the

young people without a

conceal from themselves

project 1s that the former are at pains to

what they are living, while the latter

display it brazenly and

make it a rule of life.

When the young

forcefully affirm the irrational

» the more so when they live it and

operate in the communal manner,

when they reject morality as

something without foundation and

dead, a source of hypocrisy, when

they reject reason as stiff, cold

» inept, and in fact senseless,

when they take the plunge into th

e wellsprings of life and claim to

open up the secrets of a marvelou

s new world, then what they are

really doing is unmasking the act

ual situation of every person in

this society.

They: are revealing this irration

al which I tried to

emphasize above:

the contradiction between that which exists

objectively and th

e way man live

s it, experiences it, and feels 1t

this man who, the more he is sat

lack,

iated the more he complains of a

the more he is reassured the

more he is afraid, etc.

These are basically irrational be

havior patterns.

In ordef to

ward off his insecurity,

this man dives with his. head down into

every religion and belief

®

He accepts every myth.

But he doesn't

want it said openly.

He wants to

maintain his dignity as a fully

evolved man of the twentieth centu

ry.

If he goes to a fortune-

teller and anxiously studies a horoscop

This irrational has not been laid b

e, he will do it in secret.

are

by youth intentionally,

but their own irrational attitude is itself

a laying bare of the

inner conflict.

They are

adults which we are.

> in point of fact, the children of the

They have revealed to us the cause of our

inmost condition.

they announce that

Bearers of the future because they are young,

they are without a future because their fathers

have lived without

a future,

The young,

for their part, glory in

et

They cancel continuity and immerse t

hemselves in the present. 7

Our brief look at man in search for identity does not make

pleasant reading.

Nevertheless, we need a picture of the emptiness of

17E11u1, pp. 14-15.

16

human hearts before we sense‘the desperate need that exiéts for hope.

It is at such a time as this that a "school of hépe" has come into

being.

These theologians are being given an eager hearing by many who

want to perceive and share.a message of livipg hope in Qur day.

Chapter 3

A STUDY OF BIBLICAL REFERENCES TO HOPE

Hope is a dominant theme of thé Bible.

Both the.01d Testgment

and the New Testament make many references to it. The Bible can

rightfully be called "the book of hope." When St.

Paul, addressing the

Gentiles, describes their former condition,

he uses fhe phrase "ﬁaving

no hope and withoﬁt God in the world.

b §

"l The same apostle, in another

letter,

names hope as one of‘the purposes for which the 0ld Testament

was written:

"For whateyer was written in former days was written for

our instruction, that by steadfgstness and by the encou?agement of the

scriptures we might have hope."2

Dr.

Robert L. Ottley, in a discussion of hope,3

.refers to it as

a Scriptural virtue, like faith and love.

He feels that in both Teéta;

ments hope is based on the revealed character of God;

0

(a) as omnipotent

and able to fulfill his promises;

(b) as specially pledged to be Savior

and Sanctifier of his elect people;

and (c) as the righteous moral

Governor and Judge of mankind whose ways are destined to be finglly

vindicated.

The Bible uses the idea of hope as a desire closely related to

.

faith.

Hope is a desire for some future good

s accompanied by faith in

1Ephesians 251 2:

2Romans 154445

3Robert Laurence Ottley, DD,

"The Christian Hope,"

Encyclo-

pedia of Religion and Ethics (1913),

Vol. VI, pp. 779-780.

157/

18

its eventual realization.

The object of both faith and hope is some-

thing ﬁhat is not seen. However, whereas faith can be dirécted toward

an object in the past, present, or future, hope is directed only to the

future,

The faith of the 0ld Testament was that God would glorify

Israel, and the Gentiles through Israel.

The hope of the New Testament

is summed up in the faithful expectation Qf the second coming of the

glorified Chriét. Christianity was summed up by the Apostle Peter as

"the hope that is in you."4

In his article on hope, DF. Robert L. Ottley5 has some important

comments based on the Bible's treatment of this subjegt. We ﬁere

briefly summarize what he has to say. The objects of hope differ

somewhat in the two Testaments.

The hopes of primitive men for mérely

temporal gooé were doubtless chastened and purified by the discipline of

calamity so that hope became spiritualized.

The gospel is the religion

of a "better hope" because through it men for the first time enter into

intimate fellowship with God.

Hope is an expectation of spiritual

blessings already realized and potentially conveyed to men in Christ.

The object of hope is the highest good. In the Synoptic Goépels, the

summum bonum is the Kingdom of God; in the Fourth Gospel, eternal life;

in St. Paul's epistles, the righteousness of God; in Hebrews, access to

God and unrestricted feliowship with him. All these are different

descriptions of one supreme blessing, namely, that spiritual state which

results from the very presence of God in the human spir;t. So, in a

reél sense, God himself is the supreme object of human hopé.

It is of interest and of see?ing pertinence to our treatment of

41 Peter 3:15,

S0ttley, pp. 779-780.

19

the subject of hope as emplqyed in the Bible to mention that Dr. Ottley

mentions two chief vices opposed to hope: (a) presumptioﬁ, which‘is an

excess of hope and forgets that the promises of.God are not uncondi-

tional, and (b) despair, which springs from lack of confidence in God

and servile fear.

He points out that ;he Hebrew word for despair is an

uncommon one (for instance, Ecclesiastes 2:20 and Job 6:26). The Greek

word for despair occurs in the New Testament only to be dismissed as not

in keeping with the Christian faitﬁ (II Corinthians 4:8).

HOPE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

The idea of hope in the 0ld Testament is conQeyed by several

Hebrew words &ith related meanings, rather than words clearly meaning

"hope." Inxfact, Walther Zimmer1i® points out that two: lexicons’

conclude that for the verb '"to hope" only a single Hebrew equivalent is

identified, namely sbr in the intensive stem.

This verb is twice

verified as having the meaning "to inspect, examine" in the basic stem

form.

In the intensive stem the verb has the accent of "waiting,

hopeful watching."

There are six examples of this usage.

In Ruth 1:13

it should be translated "waiting."

In the other five instances the

emphasis is on "hopeful watching," as in Psalm 145:15.8j Hebrew nouns

meaning 'hope" are somewhat more numerous.

6Walther Zimmerli, Man and his Hope in the 0ld Testament

(London: SCM Press Ltd., 1971), pp. 4-5.

L. Koehler-W. Baumgartner, Lexicon in Veteris Teétamenti libros

(Leiden, Germany, 1953), and F.

Brown, S. R. Driver and C. A. Briggs,

A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the

.Old Testament (Oxford, England,

1907, reprinted 1953 and 1957).

8Cf. also Psalm 104:27; Psalm 119:166; Isaiah 38:18; and

Esther 9:1.

20

Zimmerli's research'has made clear that we need to be aware of

the double usage of the word "hope"':

It will be well if first we briefly consider and make clear the

double usage of the word "hope" as this is apparent even in any

brief introductory explanations of the word.

The verb "to hope" and

the noun "hope" derived from it point first of all to a human act

similar to love and faith.

It is an attitude of expectancy which,

as the extra-biblical understanding of elpizein demonstrates, can be

dealt with in a purely formal manner quite apart from its object,

receiving in many cases further content for good or i1l by the

object toward which it is directed.

On the other hand the noun hope

can take on such strong content from the direction in which a man

hopes,

that his attitude passes over into that which is the object

of hope.

For example, when a shipwrecked sailor, driven by the sea,

catches sight of a life-boat and knows that "this boat is my hope,"

then all reference to the subjective state of mind of the sailor

struggling in the sea is lost.

The hope of the man in the water is

here so fixed on the approaching instrument of salvation that every-

thing else retreats and he identifies that which exists outside

himself as his hope, that is, as the peculiar object and content of

his hope.

Thus statements about hope move linguistically back and

forth between these two possible understandings and can in

individual cases be confined to one or the other:

hope as an

attitude within man and hope as something which approaches man,

which is projected toward this attitude in man to the point that all

thought of his own mental processes is forgotten.

From his excellent lexicographic study, Zimmer1ilO draws somé

important conclusions which we would like to summarize in this para-

graph. The 01d Testament beyond doubt knows something about hépe and

speaks of it in various places.

However, the 0ld Testament does not

have the clearly fixed terminology for "hope" and "to hope" as in the

New Téstament words elpis and elpizein. The nearest thing to é fixed

concept for "hope" in the 0ld Testament would be the two substantives

tiquah and tohelet.

Various aspects of the meaning of "hope" exist side

by side. 1In the foreground is the aspect of waiting and ta?rying

(derivations of the roots quh, y@l, ébr). Viewed as a/human attitude,

hope is a waiting, an existence toward that which is to come.

The word

9Zimmerli, Dot 4%

10Zimmerli, pp. 7-8.

24

qwh includes the note of eternal strain.

The word yhl, "to wait," does

not project this kind of tension.

It rather presupposes the condition

of "not yet" in which a man waits for what is coming and is oriented

toward the event of its coming.

The word @kh also appears to have this

emphasis. The word 'aharzt,

"the end," by way of contrast, brings to

full expfession the note of the "future moment." The object toward

which hope reaches lies at the end of a time.span characterized by the

tension of waiting and involves something of result and goal. Another

kind of étress is-brought oﬁt by the words bittahon, "trust," and

kiglah, "conf?dence."

Here there is the suggestion thatbman, when he

hopes, gives himself over to what is coming,.places his trust in it and

holds out foF it, wins for himself certitude and even certainty.

Zimmerli closes his fine vocabulary study of the 0ld Testament

with this statement:

- 0ld Testament faith reckons with the future.

It is more than

just a coincidence that it is precisely the people of the 01d

Testament, who far more than any other experienced death and the

threat of death again and again, who never gave up hope in the

future.

The' country which has arisen in our time under the name

"Israel", labels its national anthem with the word tiqwah, "hope".ll

Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Rengstorfl? provide comments of perti-

nence to our study of 0ld Testament references. They point ouF that

hope in the 0ld Testament is always looking for something good. As long

as man lives he hopes.l3 To have hope and to have a future are an

indication that a man is in the state of well-being. This Hope is fixed

llZimmerli, Pl 0

12Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Heinrich Rengsforf, "The Concept of

Hope in the 0ld Testament," Bible Key Words (1971), Vel..V, pp. 8-13.

13They cite Ecclesiastes 9:4 which reads, "But he who is joined

with all the living has hope, for a 1i

ldon !

i

ving dog is better than a deadA

22

on God.

It can be said that God is the hope and the confidence of the

godly.14 while at first Goq'

s help is expected to relieve actual

trouble,

it is considered more and more to be the eschatological help

which brings all troubles to an end.l5

. We conclude this study of the idea of hope in the 01d Testament

by listing references which the Revised Standard Versidp of the Bible

translates "hope," "hoped," "hopeless,"

or '"hopes" according td Nelson's

2

Concordance:16

"Hope

"

8:13

"Ruth 1:12; Ezra 10:2

; Job 3:9, 4:6, 5:16, 6:19, 7:6,

JLILBILE

11:20

135S

14:7

14:19

17:15,/19:10

27:8

Psalms 9:18

8317

i85 22

39:7

42:5

62:5

s 41:9;

78:7, 116+1T,

119:43

49

655

89:655 75 14

146:5

81

114

116

147

166

130:5

s 313

147!

b

Proverbs 10:28

11"

13:12

19:18

b

23:18

26:12, 29:20; E

s 24548

Jeremiah 14:8,

cclesiastes 9:4; Isaiah 8317552025

+p38:18, 5115

14:22, 17413, 29410, %81%17 507

Lamentations 3:21,

24, 29; Ezekial

19:5, 37:11; Hosea 2:15; Zecharia

hi9:172.

"Hoped":

Esther 9:1

"Hopeless"':

; Psalm 119:74; Isaiah 20:6.

Isaiah 57:10; Jeremiah 2:25.

"Hopes'':

Psalm 62:10; Jeremiah 23:16; Zechariah 9:5.

HOPE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

The Greek words for ﬁope iq the New Testament are elpizoo and

elpts.

The verb elpizoo means "hope, hope for;

hope in, expect."

The

noun elpis means "hope

> ground or basis of hope; what is hoped for."17

14Two good examples of this are Jer

emiah 17:7 ("Blessed is the

man who trusts in the I

ord, whose trust is in the Lord.") and Psalm 71

("For thou, O Lord

» art my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth.")

In substantiation of t

his point Bultmann and Rengstorf cite

the following passages:

Isaiah 25:9, 26:8

31:16f.; Micah 7:7

;5 and Psalm 46:2.

s 30:15, 51:5; Jeremiah 29501805

16Nelson's Com

(New York: Thomas Nels

plete Concordance of the Revised Standard Version

on & Sons, 1957), pp. 844-885.

l7Barclay J. Newman, Jr., A Concise Greek-

English Dictionary.of

the New Testament (London: United Bible Societies,

1971), p. 58}

23

There is a fine word study in the Theological Dictionary of the

New Testament18

on which the following remarks are largely based,

although adapted»fOr our particular purpose.

The New Testament concept

of hope is essentially determined by the 01d Testament.

Only where it is

a matter of secular hope do we see the element of expectation charac—

teristic of the Greek world

s and always in such a way ;hat iﬁ is expec-

tation of something welcome.

The Gree% word elpizein means expectation

with the nuance of counting upon.

An example of this is Luke 6:34, "And

if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive,

what credit is that

to you?

Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much‘again."19

There is a stronger accent on hoping in Luke'23:8; Acts 24:26,

27:20; and even more clearly in Romans 1524 1 Cor?nthians 16:7;

Philippians-2:19, 23; Philemon 22; II John 12; and III John 14. I

n

I Corinthians 13:7 hope, like love,

is obviously directed to men,

although for Paul this attitude rests on the corresponding.relationship

to God

> as shown by the natural transition from the one to the other in

verse 13.

Hope fixed on God embraces at once the three elements of gxpec—

tation of the future, trust, and the patience of waiting.

According to

Romans 4:18, when we can no longer count on controllable factors we have

to trust in the divine futufe.

The term elpizein has the element of

sure confidence in such passages as I Corinthians 15:19; II Corin-

thians 1:10; Philippians 1:20; and I Peter I

The main stress is on

18

Gerhard Kittel, ed

Lot)

Geoffrey W. Bromile&, trans.

Dictionary of the New Testament

Theological

(1971), Vol. II, pp. 517-535

°

l9See also I Corinthians

3:14; and Acts 16:19.

9:10; II Corinthians 8:5; I Timothy

24

patient endurance in Romans 5:4-5; I Thessalonians 5:8; and Hebrews

bl

Christian hope rests on the divine act of salvation accomplished

in Christ.

Since this is an eschatological hope, hope itself is an

eschatological blessing.

The waiting which is part of elpis is effected

by the Holy Spirit as the gift of the last'time. It rests on the pistis

(faith) in the act of salvation (Galatians 5:5).

Being in elpis in

Romans 8:24 is immediafely afterward described as being borne along by

the prnewna (Spirit), verse 26.

It is interesting to note that the word eZpis is almost

completely lgcking in John. As hope dirécted to the future consummation

it occurs only in I John 3:3.

What is denoted by elpis can be included

in pistis, "faith, trust, belief"20 and this is characteristic of John.

The fact that elpis is not found in Revelation can cause astonishment

only if we fail to realize that the idea of hope is included in the

concept hupomonee, "patient endurance, steadfastness, perseverance.'2l

Where the Jewish emphasis is strong the element of waiting for

the eschatolbgical future is prominent. This is somewhat paradoxical

since the Christian elpis is itself an eschatological blessing because

it sees the 0ld Testament,hope fulfilled in the mission of Jesus.

This

appears most clearly in Matthew 12:2122 and I Peter 1:3. This is also

seen in passages like Colossians 1:27 and I Timothy 1:1 where Christ is

described as our elpis.

Dr. Robert L. Ottley includes some helpfgl and sﬁmmary remarks

21

20Newman, Pias L4BE

Newman, p. 189.

22Here Isaiah 42:4 is referred to Jesus.

25

about references to hope in the New Testament when he writes:

The hope of the Christian is a

"good hope" (II Thessalonians

2:16), a "blessed hope" (Titus 2:13

)s a "hope of glory" (Colossians

1:27), a "hope of righteousness

" (Galatians 5:5), of "salvation"

(I Thessalonians 5:8)of

eternal life" (Titus 3:7).

It is an

expectation of spiritual blessin

conveyed to man in Christ.

gs already realized and potentially

Nay, Christ Himself is "our hope"

(I Timothy 1:1), the living pledge that the divine

promises of life,

immortality, and glory will find their fulfillment

for all who are

lovingly united to Him.

because it is an earnest

His resurrection is the ground of hope

of the fulfillment of man's destiny

(T peter 1:3, 21).23

We conclude this stﬁdy of references to hope in the New

Testament with a listing of words translated "hope,” "hoped,"

and

"hopes" in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible‘as given in

Nelson's Concqrdance:24

"Hope'':

Matthew 12:21; Luke 6:34

; John 5:45; Acts 2:26, 16:19,

17:27, 23:6, 24:15, 26:6, T 2732005 2

8:20; Romans 4:18, 5:2, Siehs, 5,

81220, 24, .25 § 1 2N Lo5chg 12, 136 24

;3 I Corinthians 910, 13 1635,

165 197 16 e

Galatians 5:5; Ephesians 1:18

IT Corinthians 1:7, 10, L35 32 00 5 14F 11021 58 13:6;

s 2:12, 4:4;/Philippians 1:20, 2:19,

2:23; Colossians 1:5, 235217

3 I Thessalonians 1:3, 2:19, 4:13, 5:8;

IT Thessalonians 2:16; I Timo

(Elasy BEBTL A Sladld 41055k 5 Tituswili:2,

2:13, 3:7; Hebrews 3:6, (GRILIE

L85 19, :7:19

» 10:23; I Peter 1:3, 1.3%

21 = 3 SN o hn LLeN2s TS Johnt 16:04.

"Hoped":

I8 Petiern 8i5t.

Luke 24:21; Acts 24:26; Ephesians 1:12; Hebrews 11:1;

"Hopes"':

L ohn 373,

Romans 8:24;‘1 Corinthians 13:7, I Timotﬁy (825741

230ttley, pp. 779-780.

24Nelson's Complete Concordance of the Revised Standard Version

(New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1957), pp. 884-885.

.

&

\Chapter 4

THE EMERGENCE OF "THE SCHOOL OF HOPE"

Walter Capps uses the term "school of hope" whe?, in his book,

The Future of Hope,l he spegks of those people who today hold an

attitude that is preoccupied with the future. He feels tha# the

specifics of that interest in the future were inspired by a book, Das

Prinzip Hoffnung; written during thg 1940's by Ernst Bloch.2 Other

books that are a part of th;s movement are future oriented. They use

image language to show that hope and imagination are tied togéther. The

Western world has been receptive toward these investigations, proposals,

and discussions of the future. There have been a consi&erable number

of symposia or "hope conferences" recently.

Walter Capps further points

out that the World Couﬁcil of Churches chose as its theme for thg 1968

international conference in Uppsala, Sweden, the biblicalvstatement,

"Behold, I make.all things new."

One reason for the emergence of a "school of hope" is that

people everywhere in this nuclear age seem to realize that the human

future dare not be allowed to become a product of accident, cﬁance, or

arbitrary will.

"Men sense that unless the future can be planned,

unless human responsibility possesses a creative function with_respect

lWalter H. Capps, The Future of Hope (Philadelphia: Fortress

Press, TROIZ AN 5 Spre A1,

2Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip ﬁoffnung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1959).

26

27

to that future, there may be no future at all for mankind,"3 Industrial

managers are aware of the fact that we need more than technology to

build a good future for mankind.

Contributors to the book The Dynamics

e e Sl o

[¢)

f Change say,

Because we have now arrived at a stage in our development

5/ e

shortly will arrive there, where

our most pressing problems are not

technological, but political and

social--we can achileve the world

that we want by working together

at it

Another reason given for the

emergence of the school of hope is

the recent stress in biblical'theology upon eschatology and apocalyp-

ticism. Eéchatoiogy is seen again as uniqge to the early Christian

kerygma (proclamation). It.brings back the idea that the'Chfistian

life is a pilgrimage toward a.longed—for destination.

A third stimulus to thg emergence of the schoo% of hope is the

increased acceptance of process philosophy.

This attitude moves away

from the "other-worldliness" of much of Christian thinking to an

openness to time and change.

It is a willingness to take "this world"

more seriously.

It is felt that this brings us nearer to the funda-

mental direction of New Testament Christianity.

An interesting feature of the school of hope is that it finds an

affinity with some of the principlgs of Marxism. Walter Cappg sgmma—

rizes these parallel lines of emphasis in the following paragraph:

At bottom, many of the roots of Marxism are the same as those of

the school of hope.

Both accept Feuerbach's criticism of religion,

for example, especially the side of it which judges "other-

worldliness" to be an obstacle to human progress. Both sense that

the perpetuation of the heaven syndrome has served to keep men poor

3Capps, Pritd

4Don Fabun, The Dynamics of Chan

Had B S1\9.6.78) 550 Dis 105

ge (Englewood Cliffs: Prent?ce—

28

by reconciling them to their earthly poverty.

Both believe that the

restriction of salvation to the life beyond the grave implies the

obviation of human hope.

Each is sensitive to the plight of the

underprivileged.

And each proposes that the underprivileged cannot

be emancipated unless they are also rescued from de

pendence upon

obsolete theologisms.

Each repudiates the privatization of the

benefits of religion.

Each associates salvation with

of corporate alienation,

an overcoming

an alienation which is apparent in societal

class conflicts.

Yet each judges traditional patterns of Christian

belief to be a source--rather than a medi

same alienation.?>

ator or moéerator—-of that

~We turn now to a brief study of three of the most prominent

figures involved in the school of hope:

Ernst Bloch, a Marxist

revisionist; Johannes B, Metz, a Roman Cathoiic representative of the

movement; and Jurgen Moltmann, the Protestant propongnt of this

movement, thse major works will be treated at considerable length in

the next two chapters.

THE INFLﬁENCE OF ERNST BLOCH

Ernst Bloch is présently on the philosophical faculty of the

University of Tﬁbingen.

He is one of the most listened-to Marxist

theorists,

He speaks for a revised form of Marxist tradition.

These

revisions, for which he is largely responsible, have made that tradition

more attractive to those who speak on behalf of the Christian faith. It

is of interest to note that Walther Zimmerli introduces his book on hope

in the 0ld Testament’ by saying that Bloch's passionate utterances about

the "principle of hope" have compelled the student of the 0ld Testament

to give a fresh account of the basis of statements abogt hﬁpe in the

Bible.® Knowing Ernst Bloch has caused theologiaps to have their own

5Capps, Pold:

bWalther Zimmerli, Man and his Hope in the 0l1d Testament

(London: SCM Press Ltd., 197155 ip-aiac.

.

29

tradition refreshed

He provides imaginative horizons which have not

been present in such resourceful comblnations.

Theologians have been

enabled to perceive possibility in the Marxist Stratagem instead of

nothing but fear-evoklng threats,

Bloch makes extensive use of .the Exodus theme,

To him man is a

hoping animal with a desire for a home which is not yet.

His pilgrimage

is a kind of mystique of transcendence which is always rooted in the

world of ever-

restive change.

He uses images in keeping with the apoca-

lyptic mode.

Ludwig Feuerbach another Marxist

had disapproved of

daydreaming because he considered it 2 substitute for work

Bloch sees

daydreaming as an instrument for reconcillatlon.

He is also much more

open to dlscussion with religious thlnkers than were his predecessors.

Walter Capps is among those who feel that there mlght not be a school of

hope, or even a theology of hope, if it were not for the work of

Ernst Bloch.’

A SUMMARY OF THE WRITINGS OF JOHANNES B. METZ

Johannes B. Metz isg dean of the Catholic faculty and professor

of theology in the University of Munster,

West Germany.

He is the

foremost spokesman within the school of hope.

He is not satisfied with

simply theorizing about the future,

He feels that the future comes

through creative militant action,

To him "

the future is essentially a

reality which does not yet exist, which has never been:

the 'new' in

the proper sense of the word.

"8 L e Seées pure contemplation as referring

to what has already come into existence or still exists,

This is not

7Capps, p. 19

8Quoted by Capps, p. 25

30

sufficient regarding the future in his estimation.

The relationship to

the future is an operative one for him.

Metz claims that the Christian has no more knowledge of the

future than others.

Only a creatively actional stance will mediate the

future.

This requires the role of "suffering servant" or the "being for

others'" which Bonhoeffer stressed.

[

Like other hope theclogians, Metz

has a distinct political tone .in his proposals.

He agrees’yith Marx's

statement that philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various

ways but that what is necessary is to change it.

His is a theology of

change. This is a revolutionary principle and is by.its very nature

anti-establishment. This gdes‘farther than the reform and-renewal

called for ?y the Vatican Council which used the key word "aggiorna-

mento,'

'

which refers to the revitalization of a Iong~sthnding reality.

Revolution, on the other hand,>calls for a mechanism which accelerates

the death of an existing system.

Vatican II with its proposals‘for

church renewal has allowed Metz to spend his energies in the direction

A

of political concerns.

He feels that the privatization and individu-

alizing of religion tends to neglect the socio-political world.

Metz has given much attention to modern man's inability to

conceive of salvation as being something "above him' rather than under-

standing it more realistically to be out in front of him as a prospect

for mankind's good.

He feels that an active, operative, even revolu-

tionary orientation to the future is necessary if a be;ter world 1is to

be accomplished. He feels that the Christian fai;h beloﬁgs to this

context, that all of it must be reqast with sensitivity to this context,

and that current biblical scholarship confirms the primacy of this

contextual framework.

Based on biblical materials, Metz outlines his

31

creative,

militant eschatology in terms of the ways in which Christian

hope is formative in building the promised city of God.

He says the

realization of the vision of hope is dependent upon an.alleQiation of

oppressive social conditions.

"Salvatioﬁ, properly conceived, has

reference to the realization of justice in society and peace throughout

the world,

"9 ine believes with Bonhoeffer that what makes a Christian

is a

"style of life" rather than something cognitive, mental

Si O

intellectual.

He contends that brotherly love is the stance necessary

for a sensitivity to things future.

His biblical basis is I John 3:14,

"We know that we have passed out of death to life, because we love the

brethren."

How does Metz see the role of the church in his emphasis on

action?

He wants it to be the agency which carries out: the necessary

criticisms against present-day society instead of being a haven for

those who are cultivating personal salvation strategies.

He feels the

church is in a position to do this because it has no particular social

ideology of its: own.

In his essay on "Religion and Society in the Light

of a Political Theology" he writes:

In the pluralistic society, it cannot be the socio-critical

attitude of the church to

proclaim one positive societal order as an

absolute norm.

It can only consist in announcing in and to this

society the message of a critical, liberating content.

The church's

task here is not the elaboration of a system of social d

octrine, but

of social criticism.

The church is a particular institution in

society, yet presents a universal claim.

If this claim is not to be

an ideology, it can only be formulated and

urged as eriticism.

In short, Metz places Christians under the obligation to join

alter H. Capps,

Time Invades the Cathedral (Philadelphia:

vFortress Bressis 197235 .

78.

10Essay included in Capps, The Future of Hope, pp. 152—153._

32

worship of God with action toward the realization of freedom, peace, and

justice in the world

JURGEN MOLTMANN'S PLACE AMONG THE

HOPE THEOLOGIANS

Jurgen Moltmann is presently professor of theology at Tubingen

University where he received his doctorate.

He has served on the

faculty at Bonn University and has been visiting professor at Duke

University.

His book Theology of Hopell had an important part in

launching the hope movement.

In his preface to Origins of the Theology

of Hope, M. Douglas Meeks writes:

It is difficult to imagine any theology in the near future which

could function without being consciously or unconsciously influenced

by Jurgen Moltmann's "theology of hope."

It can be said that he has

created a distinctive sensibility for current theological debates.

Perhaps it will be said in the future that he has initiated a new

theological era

By appropriating and reinvigorating many repressed themes of the

biblical and church traditions, Moltmann's theology has opened up a

vast new era of theological reflection and has pointed the way to

new options in the practice of Christian faith

Moltmann himself

has indicated the corrective, experimental, and heuristic nature of

his theology

For him,

heology is a science which assists

Christians in dwelling in the particular memories and promises of

our past as we focus on what God has promised in his future in order

to transform our present in correspondence to that future.

With

this confluence of eschatological and practical orientations, the

theology of hope augurs a significant transformation in the task of

theology as a science.

Moltmann was influenced greatly by Karl Barth and Dietrich

Bonhoeffer,

Both of these men saw man and the world split between what

is and what ought to be.

Moltmann sees clearly that if religion is to

survive it needs to do so at the expense of Western culture and not by

llJurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, James W. Leitch, trans.

(New York: Harper & Row, 1967).

12y, Douglas Meeks, Origins of the Theology of Hope (Phila-

delpha: Fortress Press, 1974), p. xiii.

»

33

forming a partnership with it.

He sees the New Testament as an apoca-

lyptic book.

Of the New Testament and its relationship to Moltmann's

theology Walter Capps writes:

It is an apocalyptic book because the first Christians were an

apocalyptic and eschatological community.

Moltmann noted this, and

he seized upon the correlation.

The theology of hope seems to have

been born, then, when Jﬁrgen Moltmann fashioned the instrumentation

with which to tie a dominant twentieth century mood to earliest

Christianity.

He detected their common apocalyptic and eschato-

logical sources.

He found in the New Testament the materials by

which systematic theology ,could be reconstructed according to the

thrust of mid-twentieth century, postwar religious aspirations.l3

Moltmann: has alsb been influenced by writings of Marxists,

especially Feuerbach and Bloch. He too has much sympathy for oppressed

peoples.

He‘shares the conviction that oppression is the direct result

of heirarchical thinkingvand that the heirarchy serves as an instrument

to maintain the authority of the highborn, well-positioned, and fortu-

nately endowed.

He agrees with Feuerbach's interpretation that the

heirarchical "God" is employed to support the oppression of the poor.l4

Moltmann understands his theological position to be an articu-

lation of an old emphasis in Christianity. Although he makes much of

the New Testament, he.goes all the way back to the prophets Isaiah and

Jeremiah.

He draws most of his historical cues from the great

historian, Adolf von Harnack, of the University of Berlin.

As Harnack interﬁreted the ﬁistory of the Christian church,

there was a radical difference in the motivations which pervaded the

first Christian communities and those which came to prevail after

that initial period had come to an end.

Harnack believed the

difference was one of fundamental intention, and also of basic

temperament.

The earliest Christians had been living in the expec—

tation of the kingdom of God; however, after.generations had gone by

13Capps, Time Invades the Cathedral, p. 46,

14

Capps, p. 49.

34

without witnessing the realization of the kingdom, their counter-

parts in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries tended to give more

attention to the perpetuation of the institutional: church.

The sign

of that shift was the systematic interest that Christians devoted to

matters of belief, thought, and social structure.

In Harnack's

view, the simplicity of the Christian kerygma, the gospel whose

central feature had to do with the coming of the kingdom of God, had

eventually given way to concern for "Christianity" (the phenomenon

which occurred when Greek thought and language forms were imposed

upon New Testament religious affirmations).l5

With Harnack, Moltmann sees Luther as a force trying to recover

the purity and simplicity of the earlier kerygma after it had been in

bondage to formal and systematic portrayal for so many qenturies.

Luther was one of the champions of fundamental, neo-primitive Chris-

tianity. Other heroes have kept the truth alive‘thrOugh the éenturies.

Moltmann likes to say that the vision of the first Christians did not

disappear after the first commgnity was replaced by others; it merely

went underground. It has flourished there until today ;hen it has once

again surfaced in very dramatic fashion.

To Moltmann it is a sign of hope that oppressed peoples are ndw

participating in an exodus.

He sees the church's main function to be

the challenging of the status quo so that life can be kept flowing and

free.

His writings set forth a program of social action and cultural

work. The church is to prevent any instituﬁional stabilizing‘of.things.

It is to be the vanguard of the future movement. It is to form and

guide change.

The kerygma of the New Testament is for him a "political

hermeneutic."

The gospel of the early Christian community was not an

optun for suffering people, but a protest against real affliction.

For

him the cross is a confirmation of the reality of suffering against

which the resurrection is an event of protest.

15Capps, Time Invades the Cathedral, pp. 51-52.

»

35

When we understand the cross of Christ in this connection as an

"expression" of real human affliction, then the resurrection of

Christ acquires the significance of the true "protest" against

human affliction.

Consequently, the missionary proclamation of the

cross of the resurrected one is not an opium of the people which

intoxicates and incapacitates them, but the ferment of new freedom.

It leads to the awakening of that revolt which in the "power of the

LA

resurrection,

as Paul expresses it, fecllows the categorical

imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a being who

labors and is heavily laden.

Paul has done this for his time, when

religion and idols repressed mankind, with the gospel of free

justification.

The theology of hope, as it finds expression in Moltmann, is a

The world is in

theology of the cross, a theology of suffering.

subjection.

He turns again and again to Romans 8 where the creation is

pictured as groaning in travail, waiting its time of adoption, having

been subjectéd by the Creator in hope, a hope which is attached to

something not yet seen.

IDEAS FROM CALVIN AND LUTHER THAT ARE REFLECTED

IN MOLTMANN'S EMPHASIS

Moltmann frequently quotes two of the Reformation giants, Calvin

and Luther.

We' offer here some excerpts from their writings that stress

facts brought out in Moltmann's theology.

The first two passages are

selected by William F. Keesecker from Calvin's Institutesyof the

Christian Religion.

The first is under the heading of "Hope":

Although, therefore, Christ offers us in the gospel a present

fullness of spiritual benefits, the enjoyment thereof ever lies

hidden under the guardianship of hope, until, having put off

corruptible flesh, we be transfigured in the glory of him who goes

before us.l7

l6J{;rgen Moltmann, Religion, Revolution and the Future,

M. Douglas Meeks, trans.

P.

96.

(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,.1969)

17William F. Keesecker, ed., A Calvin Treasury.

Selections from

Institutes of the Christian Religion (New York: Harper & Brothers,

196191 P 61

36

Under the heading of "Death'" Keesecker lists the following from

Calvin's writings:

Whatever kind of tribulation presses upon us, we must ever look

to this end:

to accustom ourselves to contempt for the present life

and to be aroused thereby to meditate upon the future life,

°

°

°

But let believers accustom themselves to a contempt of the present

life that engenders no hatred of it or ingratitude against God.

Indeed, this life, however crammed with infinite miseries it may be,

is still rightly counted among those blessings of God which are not

°

°

°

to be spurned.

And this is a much greater reason if in it we

reflect that we are in preparation

» SO to speak, for the glory of

the Heavenly Kingdom,l18

Hugh Thomson Kerr, Jr., quotes Calvin on the ?elationship

between faith an& hope:

Hope is no other than an expectation of those things which faith

has believed to be truly promised by God.

Thus faith believes the

veracity of God, hope expects the manifestation of it in due time;

faith believes him to be our Father, hope expects him always to act

towards: us in this character; faith believes that eternal life is

given to us, hope expects it one day to be revealed; faith is the

foundation on which hope rests, hope nourishes and sustains faith.l9

In his A Compend of Luther's Theology, Kerr offers selections

from Luther's writings under the title of "The Christian Hope'':

Looking at the Christian community with the eye of human reason

and reflectdion, no more wretched, tormented, persecuted, unhappy

people are in evidence on earth than those who confess and glory in

Christ the crucified.

In the world they are continually persecuted,

tormented and assailed by the devil with all manner of w

retchedness,

misfortune, distress and death.

Even to their own perceptions, it

seems as if they surely are forgotten and forsaken by God in the

sight of mankind.

For he allows them to remain prostrate under the

weight of the cross, while others in the world, particularly their

persecutors, live in the enjoyment of honor and fortune, of

happiness, power and riches, with everything moving to the

fulfilment of their desires.

The Scriptures frequently deplore this

condition of things, especially the Psalms, and Paul in First

Corinthians 15:19 confesses: "If we have only hopgd in Christ in

18Keesecker, pPp. 63-64,

f.

19Hugh Thomson Kerr, Jr., ed., A Compend of the Institutes of

Christian Religion by John Calvin (Philadel

Christian Education, 1939), p. 94.

phia: Presbyterian Board-of

37

tshi s kel

we are of all men most pitiable."

Now, assuredly this state of aff

airs cannot continue without

end; it cannot be God's intention to

permit Christians thus to

suffer continually whi

le they live,

dead.

to die because of it and remain

It would be incompatible with

his eternal, divine truth and

honor manifest in his Word.

God of the pious, of them who

For there he declares he will be the

fear and trust him, and gives them

unspeakable promises.

Necessarily,

then, he has planned a future

state for Christians and for non-

unlike what they know on earth.

Christians, in either instance

Later under the same heading of

"The Christian Hope," he quotes

the

following statement:

Those who are not Christians w

evils, in the contem

ill find small comfort, amid their

plation of future blessings; since for

them all

these things are unc

ertain,

famous emotion called hope,

Although much ado is made here by that

of human comfort

by which we call on each other,,

in words

» to look for better times, and continually

plan

greater things f

or the uncertain future

Even as Christ teaches conce

» yet are always deceived

rning the man in the Gospel

9

Luke xii,

who said to his soul,

"I will pull down my barns, and b

and will say to my sou

o8 Soult

uild greater;

thou hast much goods laid up

for many

years; take thine ease, eat,

drink, and be merry.

But God said unto

him, Thou fool,

this night thy soul shall be requir

then whose shall

ed of thee; and

those things be which thou hast pr

ovided?

So is he

that layeth up tr

easure for himself

> and is not rich toward God."

Nevertheless, God has not so ut

terly forsaken the sons of men

that He will not grant them some me

asure of comfort in thig hope of

the passing of evil and the coming

of good things.

Though they are

uncertain of the future, yet they h

ope with certain hope, and hereby

they are meanwhile buoyed up,

lest falling into the further evil of

despair, they should break dow

some worse thing.

n under their present evil, and do

Hence, even this sort of ho

pe is the gift of God;

not that He would have the

attention to that firm hop

m lean on it, but that He would turn their

e, which is in Him alone.2l

Two selections which Kerr places under the heading bf

"The Last

Day"

seem appropriate to quote for our purpose here,

I hope that the day is near at hand when

God will appear, for all thin

the advent of the great

gs everywhere are boiling,

burning{

moving, falling, sinking,

groaning, 22

When at the last da

y we shall live again, we shali blush for

shame, and say to ourse

lves:

"fie on thee, in that thou hast not

been more courageous, bold

3 andvstrong to believe in Christ, and to

2OKerr, PP. 236-237,.

21Kerr, p. 240.

22Kerr, Da 205

38

endure all manner of adversities, crosses, and persecutions, seeing

his glory is so great.

If I were now in the world I would not

stick to suffer ten thousand times more." 3

Although these references to Calvin and Luther are necessarily

brief

they help to demonstrate that much of Moltmann's theological

thought is based on Reformation theology

23Rerr, p. 248

.

Chapter 5

JGRGEN MOLTMANN AND HIS THEOLOGY

We come now to a high point iﬁ this dissertatiog as we take up

the work of the modern theologian, Jurgen Moltmann.

We will take a

brief look at his background,vexamine the emphasis of three of the

teachers that influenced him most, summarize his major book, and then

call attention to other books of his that are available in English,

HIS BACKGROUND

There is very little ipformation on the backgroPnd of Moltmann.

We must content ou;selves with rather incidental references made to this

N,

phase of his life in several books.

In his Foreword tb Origins of the

Theology of Hope he refers to life in his parents' home in this way:

With the eye of memory I see myself as a boy gazing out of the

window of his parents' home upon the forests which cross the distant

horizon of northern Germany.

There the flatlands are wide and the

heavens broad.

There the horizon is a boundary which does not

confine but rather invites one to go on beyond.

That boy was filled

with curiosity about what was on the other side of the horizon.

It

was from that early experience of the distant horizon that he

developed this yearning for what lies beyond, for what is new and

different.

The horizon beckoned him to set out and travel--as

Nietzsche, Gadamer, and Husserl put it--and the beckoning of the

horizon has continued to fascinate him.

There was something of the

religious about this long-ago experience.

God is the one who

accompanies us and beckons us to set out.

In the same Foreword he gives us some insight into motivations

IM. Douglas Meeks, Origins of the Theology of Hope (Phila-

delphia: Fortress Press, 1974), p. X.

39

40

for his emphasis on hope when he describes his experience in a prisone?

of war camp.

It would certainly be of interest to know more about the

circumstances that brought him there and the length of fime referred to

in this statement:

As 1 continue to look back I see a young prisoner of war

interned in an English camp.

His horizon there is the barbed wire,

even though the war had been over for some time.

His path is one

which curves in a circle around the edges of the barbed wire.

Freedom lies beyond--out there where people live and laugh.

To be

sure, this prisoner was not in a morgue, as was Dostoevski in

Siberia,

Externally, at any rate, the internment camp was bearable.

But hope rubbed itself raw on the barbed wire!

A man cannot live

without hope!

I saw men in the camp who lost hope.

They simply

lay down, took ill, and died.

When life's hopes flounder and crack

up, a sadness beyond comforting sets in.

But on the other hand,

hope disturbs and makes one restless.

One can no longer be content

with his situation, with the way things are.

Every little thing

becomes a prison.

One lives only for repatriation.

That's all one

dreams of.

One becomes moody, impatient, often cynical,

One cannot

live--often, not even survive--without hope.

But even this hope

becomes the prisoners' tormentor.

Hope turns their’ suffering to

pain and their imprisonment to torment.

The prisoner experienced an

inner conversion when he gave up hope of getting home soon, and in

his yearning he rediscovered that deeper "hope against hope." Hope

made him free to accept, even laugh at the barbed wire, and to

discover in his fellow prisoners human beings whose company he

enjoyed, with whom he could be happy even in suffering.

An American

periodical once stated that the theology of hope was born in a

prisoner of war camp.

Autobiographically speaking, I believe it

may have been correct.

But the hope that was born there was not

that painful, disturbing hope, but rather a deeper, liberating hope

which works through love.

The third personalbreferenge regarding his background deals with

his feelings after he returned home following the war and took up his

studies in theology.

Still lookingbback, I see myself as a young student of theology

who had returned home in 1948 with the hope for a new, more humane

Germany, and for a liberated, liberating church of Christ.

This

student sat at the feet of Gerhard von Rad, Ernst Kasemann,

Hans Joachim Iwand, Ernst Wolf, and Otto Weber at the University of

GOttingen.

There he imbibed the theology of the Confessing Church,

2Meeks, PP. x-xi.

41

inspired by Karl Barth and preserved throughout the years of

struggle between the church and the Nazi state.

The survivors of my

generation came into the lecture halls from hospitals and prisoner

of war camps inwardly shattered, their flesh bearing all the marks

of war.

A liberal, bourgeois theology would never have gotten

through to us.

But we learned the origin of the Christian faith in

the suffering of him who was crucified and in the liberating power

of the risen Christ.

That is what gave us ground to stand on, what

gave us a critical consciousness over against religious illusions

that merely bore the name of Christian.

During the post-war period

we were, politically speaking, opposed to the restoration of things

as they had been.

So far as the church was concerned, we turned to

renewal movements.

I experienced the difficulty of this struggle

between restoration and renewal out of the true origin while I was

the pastor of a small congregation.

At that time restoration meant

a denial or suppression of the memory of Germany's terrible past,

and of the many accommodations of the church to the rule of the

Beast.

Renewal meant for us the acknowledgment of our guilt and a

new hope born of forgiveness.

We could withstand the crucifying

experiences of life only through faith in the vicarious suffering

and death of Christ our brother, and in the freedom conferred by

his resurrection.

That is what made us so Christocentric. - Barth's

theology was simply the first and most enlightening formulation of

faith in such experiences.

That is why we didn't become Barthians,

but with gratitude went beyond him toward the eschatological, toward

the theology of the cross, and toward a politically critical

theology.3

Maryellen Muckenhirn in The Future as the Presence of Shared

Hope refers to Moltmann as "a brilliant figufe among younger Eurbpean

theologians" and says he "has been called 'the theologian of hope. '"4

She goes on to tell us that

His first academic appointment came in 1958 as Professor of

Systematic Theology and History of Theology at Wuppertal.

Subsu-

quently, he held posts at Bonn University and is currently at

Tubingen University.

During the 1967-68 academic year he was

visiting professor at Duke University, North Carolina.

Dr. Moltmann is co-editor of Evangelische Theologie, Verkun-

digung und Forschung, and Begegnung mit Polen.

He is a member of

the Synode der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland, of the

Marxismum-Kommission, of the Oekumenische Arbeitskreis, and of the

3Meeks, pp. xi-xii.

4Maryellen Muckenhirn, ed., The Future as the Presence of Shared

Hope (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), p. 9.

42

Paulus-Gesellschaft.?

Another very moving reference to himself came out in a panel

discussion between himself, Emil Fackenheim,

and Johannes Metz with

Walter Capps as moderator.

We include it bere because it expresses some

deep personal feeling;'of the man whose theology we are studying. The

title of the panel discussion was

"Hope--After Auschwitz and Hiroshima?"

When I learned of the theme "Hope--After Auschwitz and

Hiroshima?" I decided for my par

t to be completely silent here,

because I am a German and I am a

theologian, and I have no answer to

this, no explanation,

no justification, only a deep feeling of

shame,

It is very difficult and terrifying to live with the dead of

Auschwitz if you are a German, that is, to live with guilt, and with

such an amount of guilt that it cannot be overcome with repentance,

When I paid a visit to Poland and saw the places of execution, I

heard the silent crying for God and his comin

g--nothing more.

For

my part, I would like to enter into the commu

nity of those who have

No answers, but questions, and who have n

CIYi

o explanations, but only a

When going throu

gh this experience I felt like I wanted to

sink into the floor,

because it is impossible to go' through this

experience and have a standpoint anywhere.

The feeling is one of

sinking into nothingness,

Then I was

perhaps, of Christ's descent into hell

reminded of the meaning,

> and I thought about the hope

for the resurrection of the dead, and

for justice, and this spoke to

me.

Since pgrsonal notes are rare in the numerous writings of a

theologian like Jﬁrgen Moltmann,

it may be of interest to the reader for

us. to include a final reference of this type here.

It 1sbcontained in

the Foreword to Walter H. Capps'

book, Time Invades the Cathedral.

Here

Moltmann expresses some of his feelings regarding the limitations of his

work, as he sees it

s, and gives a brief description of inadequacy Be as a

theologian feels in the presence of God:

The theologians of hope know perfectly well that their theology

5Muckenhirn, 12 )

bWalter H. Capps,

The Future of Hope (Philadelphia: Fortress

Press, 1971), PP. 95-96.

43

is at best a passageway, a bridge, a transitional stage

s possibly

even a tiny light on the path from exodus to the promis

ed land.

They do not presume to think that what the

needs to be said.

y are saying is all that

Their theology--to use an analogy--may give the

soup its savor, but it is not the whole broth.

Their emphasis on

hope must therefore remain open to fresh evaluat

ions of remembrance.

Their political theology,

while intended as an antidote against

pious withdrawal into the private life of the believer,

does not

mean to exclude the indispensable

‘personal dimension which belongs

to faith itself.

Their activism is dire

religious and secular,

cted against apathy, both

but not against joy in living, adoration,

meditation,

and ascetic ways of life.

Hence there are bound to be

further surprises in store as this part

icular theological style

continues to take new turns.

Capps makes some perceptive sugges-

tions along this line.

I should like to close with a brief personal note.

Ernst Bloch's

Das Prinzip Hoffnung has, of course,

made a deep impression on me

and I am greatly indebted to its auth

or for many insights.

But the

theology of hope was in my thoughts—-

and writings--long before that.

After all

s studying under Hans-Joachim Iwand, Ernst Kgsemann, and

Arnold van Ruler was bound to have an effect on me.

One cannot

judge a theologian exclusively in terms of his mentor

s, but neither

ical

expression,

should one judge him wholly in terms of his philosoph

While that is

incidental matter.

vimportant too, it is a ?glatively

A real theologian is like Jacob wrestli

Jabbok.

ng the angel at thé

Rilke put it this way:

How small, that with which we wrestle,

But how great, that which wrestles with us.

3

It always seems to me as if the theme and subject matter with whic

theology has to do is "that which wrestles with us,” and that we

theologians are like Jacob:

we emerge from the struggle beaten and

limping.

That is why our best theology is

"

that Greater One.

"imperfect,

shattered by

And that is why theology is at best only a direc-

tional indicator, p

ointing to the mysterious God who draws us to

him, drives us on, and continually

eludes all our concepts, images,

and symbols.

Deus semper major!

TEACHERS WHO INFLUENCED HIM

In an effort to study a great theologian like Moltmann we need

to give consideration to the genius of his teachers.

Ihe heart of the

theology of hope is the dialectic of reconciliatipn. It is a theory-

practice aimed at the reconciliatiop of thdse realities which are most

TWalter H. Capps, Time Invades the Cathed

ral (Philadelphia:

Fortress Press, 1972), pp. xiii-xiv.

44

extremely separated:

man and God, man in history, and man in nature.

The conceptuality of this dialectic for Moltmann comes from Karl Barth'

and Ernst Bloch.

They are giants of an epoch.

On the other hand, the

theological vision of theology as eschatology comes from Moltmann's

three great teachers at Gsttingen:

Otto Weber, Hans-Joachim Iwand, and

Ernst Wolf,

They are the visionaries, the guides, the map makers, and

the enticers to the journey,

without whom the theology of hope would not

have been launched, according to M. Douglas Meeks,8

The influence of Barth, the great revisionist of modern

Protestant theology, and Bloch, the great revisionist of Marxism, is

constantly apparent in the theology of hope. They provide the element

of freshness and surprise in Moltmann's theology.

The significance,

5

achievement

s and open questions of Barth's theology are. well summarized

by James Smart:

Barth's eschatological perspective has relativized all theol-

ogies including his own.

Because God is a living God he is

constantly moving on beyond us in his deal

ings with our world,

hastening toward his goal.

with him.

We have to be ready and willing to move

The goal of the entire movement has already been revealed

in Jesus Christ, but that gives us no final answers to our theo-

logical questions.

Rather, it sets us in motion toward the goal in

response to the promise of God that we have heard in Christ.

We can

never take possession of the word of God in our theologizing because

to possess it would be to have mastered God himself in our human

The outcome of

categories, which would be the ultimate blasphemy.

this is that Barth's theology has been constantly in motion, not

like a ship sailing before the wind but more like a

ship tacking

against the wind.

Moltmann gives credit to Bloch's writings for bringing togeﬁher

the loose threads of a biblical theology, of the theology of the

8Meeks, P EalSE

9James D. Smart, The Divided Mind of

Modern Theology, Karl Barth

and Rudolf Bultmann, 1908-1933 (Philadelphia:

P

227

Westminster Press, 1967),

45

apostolate and the kingdom of God

» and of philosophy into a pattern for

a tapestry in which everything matched for him.

He also gives credit to

Bloch's

"principle of hope" for conceptualizing the Christian doctrine

of hope and helping it acquire a plan and mode of action.

Bloch is a

Marxist atheist who is enthralled by the Bible and its God. For him,

philosophy is preeminently a theory of the practice of revolutionary

transformation.

From his point of view the revolution cannot be carried

out without a constant reference to a transcendent reality.

For this

viewpoint Bloch was dismissed in 1961 from his chair in Leipzig

University by his fellow Marxist

scholars with the agcusation, "The

philosophy of.hope is religion."”

Bloch is passionately devoted to

making hope, utopia, and the future primary concerns of philosophy.

Hope is thué the key to the meaning of human existence and to the

transformation of the present.

His whole philosophy is directed toward

bringing nature and history into a dialectical process on the way toward

their "home of identity."

Even thaugh Moltmann has been greatly influenced by Barth and

Bloch he is neither a Barthian nor a Blochian. What is most distinctive

in the theology of hope cannot be found in either man.

He is able to

criticize and move beyopd Barth and Bloch. The basic tenor of his

theology developed prior to his acquaintance with Bloch and out of a

highly critical reception of Barth.

Moltmann sets out to accomplish what Barth intended but for

various reasons was unable to accomplish, namely, the goal of

drawing all of Christian theology out of its own peculiar subject

matter and thus making it eschatological and therefore dialectical.

The thou

ght of Bloch is tremendously fascinating for Moltmann

insofar

as it can collaborate in this task.

When the "

principle of

hope" is a detriment to this goal, Moltmann does not he

sitate to

refute and refuse Blochian philosophy.

lOMeeks, pia= 195

.

46

In a search for thosg éources on the basis of which Moltmann has

radically criticized Barth and Bloch, we must turn to his thtingen

teachers.

He began his university study of theology at thtingen in

1948.

Here we have the most important fact in the genesis‘of the

theology of hope. 1Its real progenitors were the three thtingen

professors: Weber (1902-1966), Iwand kl899-1960), and Wo;f (1902-1971).

All were nurtured in the spifit of Karl Barth.

All were leaders in the

Confessing Church's struggles against compromises with the National

Each insisted that the church convict

Socialism of thevThird Reich.

itself of co-guilt for the catastrophes of this century.

All were

convinced that theology responsible to the church would have to become

eschatological if it would have any identity over against the postwar

society. Tﬁey felt that the task of theology was polemically to say

something new, both judging and promising, to this increasingly secular

and technological society out of the eschatological traditions of Bible

and church.

We are ﬁependent on M. Douglas Meeks for a good summary of the

kind of influence these three teachers brought to Moltmann. Meeks did

intensive study in this respect and has much to offer by way of specific

influences these men brought to Moltmann.

In Origins of the ?heology of

Hope he develops

the points which are given only in summary here:

Weber's ecumenical spirit is alive and expansive in Moltmann's

theology and in his service to the world church.

During the last

ten years the theology of hope has played a major role in the great

conferences of the WCC and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.

Iwand developed lasting relationships with the churches of Eastern

Europe and was a leading figure in keeping open the lines of commu-

nication with Marxist thinkers in Communist countries after the

Second World War.

This influence was felt directly in Moltmann's

participation in the Marxist-Christian dialogue of recent years.

Wolf constantly urged academic theologians to stay in touch with the

practice of the church so that ghey could not only criticize the

47

church but also give an account to the church's criticism of them,

He labored to bring together biblical, historical, and systematic

theology into a common dialogue with secular disciplines, especially

social history and social philosophy.

Passionately keeping alive

all these pursuits of his three teachers has made Moltmann's

theology distinctive and compelling in the contemporary setting.

His faithfulness to his teachers in these points is a greater factor

in the newness o

philosopher!

f his theology than is his dependence on a Marxist

Moltmann's teachers all struggled to overcome the traditional

law tendency of German Protestantism by a critical practice of the

Reformation traditions.

Weber was a representative of the Reformed

tradition and its emphasis on covenant, theocracy, election, and

continuity in history; Iwand and Wolf were practitioners of the

Lutheran tradition and its emphasis on cross and resurrection, the

hiddenness of God, justification by faith, and discontinuity in

history.

As- they fermented in the theologies of Weber, Iwand, and

Wolf, these significantly different traditions yielded their own

peculiar eschatological perspectives.

The dialectical juxtaposition

of these different perspectives is responsible for much of the

creative»tension in Moltmann's theology.

Mo¥tmann's theology was shaped by the continuing dialogue of the

student with his teachers.

This took place through Moltmann's concern

with historical theological research in Reformed eschatology, with a

criticism of German Idealistic and Enlightenment influence on Protestant

theology, and with a new eschatological emphasis in social ethics.

We

turn now to a close look at Moltmann's theology as it is set forth in

his most famous book.

A SUMMARY OF HIS MAJOR WORK, "THEOLOGY OF HOPE"

It will be our purpose here to provide a digest of each chapter

in Jurgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope. This will acquaint the reader

with the main theses of this leading Protestant propoqent of hope and,

we trust, enable the reader to assess the merits of this.theology.

(Many of his references to German books and periodicals are too

llMeeks, pp. 20-21.

48

incomplete to include in fgotnotes or in the bibliography.)

The introduction to Theology of Hope is entitled '"Meditation on

Hope."

Eschatology has long been called the "doctrine of the last

things" or the "doctrine of the end."

These last things are events

which will one day break upon man, higtory, and the world at the end of

time:

Christ's return in glory, judgment of the world, consummation of

the kingdom, general resurrection of the dead, and the new creation of

all things.

Relegating these events to the "last day" robbed them of

their directive,.uplifting,Aand critical significance for all the days

which are spent here.

In actual fact, eschatology means the doctrine of the Christian

hope which eﬁbraces both the object hoped for and also the hope inspired

by it.

From first to last{ and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity

is eschatology.

It is hope, forward-looking and forward-moving, and

therefore also revolu;ionizing and transforming the present. The

eschatological outlook is characteristic of all Christian proclamation.

Christian eschgtology sefs out from a definite reality in history and

announces the future of that reality, its future possibilities, and its

power over the future,

Christian eschatology speaks of Jesus Christ and

his future.

"He is our hope" (Colossians 1:27).

Hope's statements of promise, however, must stand in contra-

diction to the reality which can at present be experienced. Eyerywhere

in the New Testament the Christian hope is directed towards what is not

yet visible,

Eschatology must formulate its statements of hope in

contradictiog to our present experience of suffefing, evil, and death,

Christian faith does not flee the &orld but it strains after the future.

It is only in following the Christ who was raised from suffering, a god-

49

forsaken death, and the grave that it gains an open prospect in which

there is nothing more to oppress us, a view of the realm of freedom and

joy.

Hope is the inseparable companion of faith.

Hope is nothing

else

than the expectation of those things which faith has believed to

have

been truly promised by God.

Without faith's knowledge of Christ,

hope

becomes a ﬁtopia and remains hanging in the air. But without hope,

faith falls to pieces,

becomes a fainthearted and ultimately a dead

faith.

Hope finds in Christ not only a consolation in suffering, but

also the pro;est of the divine promise against suffering. That is why

faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest

, not

patience but impatience.

Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up

with reality as it is,

but begin to suffer under it and to contradict

it.

There is no pleasant harmony between us and reality because of our

unquenchable hope.

This makes the Christian church a constant distur-

bance in human society.

It is the source of continual new impulses

towards the realization of righteousness, freedom,

and humanity here in

the light of the promised future that is to come.

Lf faith depends on hope for its life, then the sin of unbelief

is manifestlyvi}ounded in hopelessness. Temptation then consists not so

much in the titanic desire to be like God, but in weakness, timidity,

and weariness, not wanting to be what God requires of gs. That is the

sin which most profoundly threa;ens the believeri Hopeléssness can

assume two forms: (1) presumption{ a premature, self-willed antici-

pation of the fulfillment of what we hope for from God, and (2) despair,

the premature, arbitrary anticipation of the nonfulfillment of what.we

50

hope for from God.

Both forms of hopelessness rebel against the

patience in which hope trusts in the God of the promise.

They demand

either fulfillment "now already" or "absolutely no" hope.

Christian eschatology, then, sees a world full of all kinds ofv

possibilities, namely all the possibilities of the God of hope.

Whére

in faith and hope we begin to live in the light of the possibilities and

promises of this God, the whole fullness of life discloseé itself as a

life of history and therefore a l1life to be loved.

Expectation makes

life good, for in expectation man can accept his whole present and find

joy not only in its joy but also in its sorrow.

The Christian hope is

directed towards a new creation of all things by the‘God of the resur-

rection of Jeéus Christ.

Eschatology and Revelation

The discovery of eschatology and its ineffectiveness.

One of the mos;

important events in recent Protestant theology was the discovery of the

central significance of eschatology for the message and existence of

Jesus and for early Christianity.

This discovery had its beginnings at

thelend of the nineteenth century in Johannes Weiss and Albert

Schweitzer,

The recognition of the eschatological character of early

Christianity made it clear that the automatically accepted idea of a

harmonious synthesis between Christianity and culture was a lie.

In

this world with its assured and axiomatic re;igious positions in the

realm of thought and will, Jesus appeared as a strangef with an apoca-

lyptig message that was foreign to it.

Johanpes Weiss did pioneer'work here. In 1892, he wrote: "The

kingdom of God is in Jesus' view an absolutely supraworldly factor which

51

stands in exclusive contrast to this world."12 He realized this would

make Jesus no longer appear as a moral teacher of the Sermon on the

Mount but rather as an apocalyptic fanatic with his eschatological

message.

Weiss wrote, "He has nothing more in common with this world

he has one foot already in the next,"13 However, after his sally into

the no-man's-land of eschatology, Johannes Weiss returned again to the

liberal picture of Jesus.

Albert Schweitzer followed a similar procedure.

He took

seriously the foreignness of Jesus and his message as compared with all

the liberal nineteenth century pictures of Jesus.

The startling thing

about Schweitzer's work is that he had no eschatological sense at all

The consequences which he drew from his discovery of the apocalyptic of

Jesus were aimed at the final conquest and annihilation. of what he

considered an illusionary eschatologism.

In his first edition of

The Quest of the Historical Jesus he wrote:

There is silence all around

The Baptist appears and cries:

"Repent, for the

Kingdom of Heaven is at hand."

Soon after that

in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man

comes Jesus, and

lays hold of the

wheel of the world to set it moving on that last

revolution which

is to bring all ordinary history to a close.

It

refuses to turn,

and He throws Himself upon it.

Then it does turn;

and crushes Him.

Instead of bringing in the eschatological condi-

tions, He has destroyed them.

The wheel rolls onward, and the

mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong

enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to

bend history to His pur

That 1is His

Eose, is hanging upon it still,

victory and His reign.

So the "wheel of history,'" symbol of theeternal recurrence of the same

12 5o0hannes Weiss, Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes

[n.p., n.n.] (1892), p. 42.

13Weiss, pailids

Léplbert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (New

York: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 368-369.

»

52

cycle, takes the place of ;he eschatological arrow-flight of history.

After the first World War the founders of "dialéctical theology"

took the eschatology that had thus been suppressed by idealism and

condemned to ineffectiveness and set it in the center not only of

exegetical but now also of dogmatic.sgudy. In 1933, Karl Barth said in

The Epistle to the Romans, "If Christianity be not altogether and

unreservedly eschatology, there remains in it no relationship whatever

to Christ."15 1n this understanding, however, the eschaton, breaking

transcendentally into history, brings all human history to its final

crisis.

This makes the eschaton into a transcendental eternity, equally

near to all the ages of history and equally far from.all of them. So

men became tﬁe victims .of a transcendental eschatology which once again

obscured rather than developed the discovery of early Christian escha-

tology.

This development of early Christian eschatology becomes the

inescapable task of modern theological thought, if the discovery of the

eschatologi;al message of early Christianity is to be properly under-

stood and is to involve consequences for theology and for the existence

of the church. Mol tmann comeé to alcfucial point in his thought when he

writes:

Now these forms of thinking, in which the real language of

eschatology is still obscured today, are entirely the thought forms

of the Greek mind, which sees in the Logos the epiphany of the

eternal present of being and finds the truth in that.

Even where

the modern age thinks in Kantian terms, this conception of truth is

at bottom intended.

The real language of Christian eschatology,

however, is not the Greek logos, but the promise which has stamped

the language, the hope and the experience of Israel.

It was not in

the Zogos of the epiphany of the eternal present, but in the hope-

glving word of promise that Israel found God's truth. That is why_

15kar1 Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, E. C. Hoskyns, trans.

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 314.

53

history'was here experienced in an entirel

open form.

y different and entirely

Eschatology as a science i

s therefore not possible in

the Greek sense,

nor yet in the sense of modern experimental

science, but only as a knowledge in terms of hope, and to that

extent as a knowledge of history and of the historic character of

truth.

These differences between Greek

thought and that of Israel

and Christianity,

between logos and promise,

between epiphany and

apokalypsis of the truth have today been made

clear in many fields

and by various methods.,

°

°

°

In order to attain to a real under-

standing of the eschatological

message, it is accordingly necessary

to acquire an openness and unde

rstanding vis-a-vis what "promise"

means in the 0ld and New Testam

ents, and how in the wider sense a

form of speech and thought and hope that is determined by

promise

experiences God, truth, history and human nature.

It is further

necessary to pay attention to the continual controversies in which

the promise-centered faith of Israel found itself

»,~in every field of

life, engaged with the epiphany-based religions o

f the world about

it, and in which its own truth came to light.

The controversies

continue also through the New Testament, espec

ially where Chris-

tianity encountered thg Greek mind.16

Christian eschatology in the language of promise will be an

essential key to the unlocking of Christian truth.

The.loss of escha-

tology--not merely as an égpendix to dogmatics, bpt as the medium of

theological thinking as such--has always been the condition that makes

possible the adaptation of Christianity to its environment and

» as a

result of thisi the seif—surrender of faith. When, in its social form,

Christianity installed itself as the "crown of society”" and its

"saving

center," it lost the disquieting, critical power of its eschatological

hope.

Promise and revelation of God.

Theological inquiry into the relation

between "promise" and '"revelation" needs to develop a view of the

revelation of God which is eschatological insofar as i; seeks to

discover the language of promise. God reveals h;mself iﬁ thé form of

promise and in the history that is‘marked by promise. The examination

16Jﬁrgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, James W. Leitch

s trans.

(New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 40-41.

.

54

in the ffeld of comparative religion of the special peculiarity of

Israellte faith 1s today bringing out ever more strongly the difference

between its "

religion of promise"

and the epiphany religions of the

revealed gods of the world around Israel

For the Reformers the gospel

is identical with Promise,

Faith is called to 1ife by promise and is

there essentially hope, confidence, and trust in the God who will not

lie but will remain faithful to his promise,

It was only when theology

began to employ a concept of reason and a concept of nature which were

not derived from a view of the promise,

but were not taken from

Aristotle

3 that the problem of revelation appeared in its familiar form.

Transcendental eschatology.

The spell of "transcendental eschatology"

governs the idea of self—revelation in both Barth and Bultmann.

This is

the underlying view of eschatology that dominates the concept of

"self-

revelation of God"

as found in Barth and the understanding of revelation

as the

"disclosure of authentic selfhood"

as found in Bultmann.

In both

of these views revelation does not o

)

pen up a future in terms of promise,

nor does it have any future that would be greater than itself

Revelation of God ig then simply the coming of the eternal to man or the

coming of man to himself

The classical philosophical form of transcendental eschatology

is found in Immanuel Kant,

Its basic features recur wherever Kantian

thinking is found in the revelational theology of modern times,

For

Kant there can be no such thing as an intellectual knowledge of the

"last things

since these "objects"

lie wholly beyond our field of

vision,

The ideas of the last things have therefore to be ethically

examined and considered in the sphere of the moral reason.

In this

view,

then, eschatological perspectives are com

»

pletely irrelevant for

55

the knowledge of the world of experience. The condi?ions of possible

experience which were understood by Kant in a transcendental sense must

be understood instead as historically flowing condi;ions.

The theology of the transcendental subjectivity of God.

For Karl Barth

God cannot be proved, neither from the cosmos nor ftom-the depths of

human experience.. God proves himself through himself. Dogmatics should

begin with "God said." His revelation is‘the proof of God given by God

himself.

No one reveals God but himself alone.

Who this God is, is

first learned from his revelation. God cannot be c?mmended and defended

in his self-revelation. He can only be believed. God is.thé revealer,

the act of fevealing, and the revealed.

The theol;gy of the transceﬁdén#al subjectivity of man." According to

Rudolf Bultmann, man is by nature in quest of himself.

In and with the

question raised by his existence there arises the question of qu. The

statements of Scripture arise out of existence and are addressed to

existence. Fo% him the self-revelation of God finds its measure gnd

development in the disclosing of the authenticity and selfhood of man.

God is objecéively unprovable and so is his action and revelation. He

proves himself to the believing "self." Bultmann could say éhaﬁ escha-

tology has wholly lost its sense as goal of history and so is understood

as the goal of the individual human being. Preaching and faith méke up

"revelation." Not in what the word of proclamation says or in what it

points to, but in the fact that it "happens," addressing, accosting,

appealing,

The active event of revelation is itself the presence of the

"eschaton,”" for "to be in the moment" of proclamation and faith is the

"authentic being" of man.

In that case faith would itself be the

3

56

practical end of history and the believer would himself already Bé

perfected.

If it is precisely believers who wait for the redemption of the

body, on the ground of the eschatologically understood "earnest of the

Spirit" who is the Spirit of the raising of the dead, then in so doing

they make it known that they have not yet attained ;o,identity with

themselves. In hope aﬁd confidence they are living to that end and here

defy the reality of death.

If faith awaits the "redemption of the

body," a bodily resurrection from the dead, and the annihilation of

death, then it begins to

see itself in a profound bodily solidarity with

the "earnest expectation of the creature" (Romans 8:19-21), both in its

subjection to vanity and in the universal hope.

"Progressive revelation"

and the eschatology of salvation history.

Another way of understanding God's revelation has been called

"progressive revelation." This view sees the history of the wofld aé

revelation.

Thg Bible is read as a history book, as the divine

commentary upon the divine acts in world history.

It was the stért of a

new, eschatological way of thinking, which called to life the feeling

for history. The mistake of this method is seen in the fact Fha; it

sought to discover fhe eschatological progressiveness of salvation

history not from the cross and the resurrection but from other "signs of

the times." So revelation became a predicate of history and "hiqury"

was turned deistically into a substitute for God. The real concérn of

this theology of salvation history was to show that revelation haé a

face towards world history and eschatology.

Although the idea of

salvation history is philosophically'anachronistic and theological¥y

deistic, it does preserve the question of the eschatological future

»

57

outlook whiéh the Christian revelation holds for a world involved in

history.

The decisive question is whether "revelation" is the illumi—

nating interpretation of an exiéting,

obscure life process in hiétory,

or whether revelation itself originates,

drives, and directs the process

of history.

"History" as indirect self-revelation of God.

Another attempt to free

theological consideration of the "self-

revelation" of God from @he

fetters of the reflective philosophy of transcendental subjectivity is

found in a volumé that came out in 1961,

It is Offenbarung als

Geschichte by W. Papnenberg,

R. Rendtorff, U. Wilckens and T. Rendtorff.

It starts out not from the proof of God from existence,

but from ;he

proof of God from the cosmos,lor by showing that the qu?stion of God

arises from consideration of the question of reglity as a whole,

History as a whole is thus revelation of God.

Since it is not yét

finished

> 1t is only in the light of its end that it is recognizable és

revelation.

The full self-revelation of God takes place not at the

beginning but a; the end of the revealing‘history. This theology of

universal history obviously intends to extend and supersede the Greek

cosmic theology.

The place of the cosmological proof of God-fwhich

argued from

"reality as cosmos" to the one divine arche and so provided

proof of a cosmological monotheism—-1s taken by a theology of history

which argues back in the same way from‘the unity of "

reality as history"

to the one God of history.

The world will one day be theophany,

indirect self-revelation of God zn toto.

Becaugse it is not yet S0,

reality is open-

ended towards the future and all knowledge of God and

the world has an eschatologically quglified "provisignal"

characte?.

58

One particularly difficult point in this method.is the thesis

that the raising of Jesus from the dead is the anticipétion and

forestalling of the end of univefsal history.

In this apocalyptic of

universal history also the theological significance of the cross 9f

Jesus recedes in favor of his resurrection,

Between the expectations of

late Jewish apocalyptic and of‘Christian eschatology sténds the cross of

Jesus,

The contradiction of the cross permeates also the whole.

existence,

life, and theolqgical thinking of the church in the world,

As we leave this viewpoint of revelation it needs to Be.emphasizedbthat

the theologian is not concerned merely to supply a different interpre-

tation of the world, histor&,

and human nature but to transform them in

expectation_of a diviné tfansformation.

The eschatology of revelation.

It is the influence of.Greek methods of

thought and inquiry that causes the revelation of God in the biblical»

scriptures to be understood as the "

epiphany of the eternal present."

Tﬂis does not dgscribe the God of the exodus and the resnrrection.

Christian theo%

£

p

ng speaks of "revelation" when, on the g;ound of the

Easter appearégéés of the risen Lord

» it perceives and proclaims ;he

identity of the risen one with the crucified one.

Jesus is recognized

in the Easter appearances as what he really was. That is the ground of

faith's

"historical” remembrance of the life and work, claims and

sufferings of Jesus of Nazareth.

The messianic titles all anticipate at

the same time the not yet apparent future of the risen'Lord. The Easter

appearances and revelations of the risen Lord areAmanifestly understood

&

as foretaste and promise of his gtiil future glory and lordship.

Jesus

B

is recognized in the Easter appearances as what he really will be. If

it is towafds hig own future and promise that the revelation qf thg

59

risen Lord is open, then its.openness to the future surpasses all

subsequent church history and is absolutely superior to it.

Toward the close of his chapter on

"Eschatology and Revelation"

Moltmann defines the place of the believer in God's revelation:

The man who is the reci

pient of this revelation of God in

Promise is identified, as w

hat he i

s-=—and at the same time differ-

entiated, as what he will be.

for he is not yet freed from c

‘He comes "to himself"--but in hope,

ontradiction and death.

He finds the

way of life--but hidden in the promised future of Chris

t that has

not yet appeared.

Thus the believer becom

hopes.

es essentially one who

He is still future to "himself"

and is promised to himself,

His future depends utterly and entirely

on the outcome of the risen

Lord's course,

Christ.

for he has staked his future on the future of:

The event of promise does not yet bring him to the haven

of identity,

but involves him in the tensions and differentiations

of hope, of

mission and of self-emptying....

It makes him ready to

take the pain of love and of self-emptying upo

n himself in the

Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead a

dead....

He gains himself b

nd who quickens the

y abandoning himself,

He finds life by

taking death upon him.

He attains to freedom by accepting the form

of a servant,

That is how the truth that points forward to the

resurrection of the dead comes to him.

Promise and History

Epiphany religi?ns and faith in terms of promise. The study of the

history of religion in Israel and the surroﬁnding oriental worldvreveals

that Israel achieved a syncretism between the religion of the nomad and

of the Canaanite peasant.

"Syncretism" is here used to refervto-the

struggle which is kindled in various historic situations by various

matters about which conflict arises and

s Precisely from the various

tensions,

we are enabled to recognize the peculiarity of the contegding

parties.

Here in the Israel of Palestine the kinetic élements of.the

old nomad religion meet the static elements of the peasant religion of

Canaan.

Nomadic religion is a religion of promise.

The nomad does not

l7Moltmann, pp. 91-92,

»

60

live within the cycle of seedtime and harvest but in the world of

migration.

The gods of the nations are locally bound.

The trans-

migration God of the nomads, however,

is not bound territorially and

locally.

He journeys along with them.

He is himself on the move.

The Israelite tribes took the wilderness God of promise with

them from the wilderness along with the corresponding understanding of‘

existence and the world

s retained them in the land amid the totally new

experiences of agrarian life, and endeavored to undergo and to master

the new experiences in the land in the lighg of the God of promise.

Oriental culture had stones,

waters, trees, groves,‘and mountains that

were sanctified by hierophanies.

It was striking that Israel was little

concerned to.understand the essential meaning of the

"appearances" of

Yahweh in Eerms of

such hallowing of places and times. . For Isragl the

"appearing" of God

is immediately linked up with the uttering of a word

of divine promise.

Thé effect is that the hearers of the promise

become incongruous

with the reality around them as they strike out iﬁ

hope towards the promised new future.

Where the bands of Israel enter the land

» they receive the land

and the new experiences of settled life as

"fulfillment of the promise."

This is an essentially different assurgnce»of existence from what Israel

found in the land and fertility cults of Palestine,

It is from promise

that there arises that element of unrest which allows for no coming to

terms with a present that is unfulfilledi

Under the ggiding star of

Promise this reality is not experienced as a divinely stabilized cosmos,

but as history in terms of moving oP,

leaving thiﬁgs behind and striking

‘out towards new horizons as yet unseen.

The word of promise.

If promise is the key word of Israel's "religion

.

61

of expectation,”

then we must now explain what we have to‘understand by

"promise”

and more specifically the "promise of God."’

(a) A promise is a deéla

reality that does not yet exi

st.

ration which announces the coming of a

°

°

°

If it is a case of a divine

promise, then that indicates that the ex

pected future does not have

Present, but arises f

to develop within the framework of the P

ossibilities inherent in the

promise.

°

o

rom that which is possible to the God of

®

3

(b)

The promise bind

of history.

°

e

°

S man to the future and gibes him a sense

The future which it discloses

is made possible

and determined by the promis

ed fulfilment.

°

°

°

(c)

The histor

does not consist in

y which is initiated and determined by promise

cyclic recurrence,

but has a definite trend

towards the promised and out

standing fulfilment,

°

°

°

(d)

word has

If the word is a word of promise, then tha

t meané that this

not yet found a realit

y congruous with it, but that on the

contrary it stands in contradic

experience now and

tion to the reality open to

_heretofore.

°

°

°

(e)

The word of promise

therefore always creates an interval of

tension b

etween the uttering

and the redeeming of the promise.

In

so doing it provides man with

a peculiar

area of freedom to obey or

disobey,

to be hopeful or resigned.

°

°

°

:

(£)

and surpr

The fulfilments can very well contai

n an element of newness

ise over against the promise as it w

as received.

°

°

®

(g)

The peculiar character of the 01d Te

seen in the fact that the

stament promises can be

ha

promises were not liquidated by the

istory of Israel--neither

by disappointment

nor by fulfilment--but

that on th

€ contrary Israel's ex

periences of history gave them a

constantly new and wider interpr

etation.

°

°

°

The God who is

recognized in his promises remain

s superior to any fulfilment that

can be experienced.l

The experience of history.

Beneath the star of the promise of God it

becomes possible to experience reality as

"history."

The stage for what

can be experienced, remembered, and expected as

"history" is set and

filled, revealed and fashioned by promise.

Only where Yahweh had

revealed himself in his word and acts did history exist for Israel.

This means,

however, that the experience of reality as'history was made

possible for Israel by the fact that God was revealed to Israel in his

18Mo1tmann, pp. 103-105.

62

promises and that Israel saw the revealing of God again and again in thg‘

uttering of his promises.

The events that are ekperienced as "historic" eventg give a

foretaste of the promised future,

The overspill of promise means that

they always have a provisional character.

They intimate and point

forward to somethinglwhich does not yet exist in its fullness in itself.

The stories of Israelite history--the histories of the patriarchs, of

the wilderness,

of David--are treated as themes pregnant with future.

Since the ‘history that was once experienced contains an element

that transcends histor

y in its pPastness and is pregnant with future,

and to the extent that

history must again and

this is so, two things follow:

first, this

again be recalled and brought to mind in the

present, and secondly,

it must be so expounded to the present that

the latter can derive f

rom history an understanding of itself and

its future path and can

also find its own

the working of God's promises.19

plage in the history of

Revelation and knowledge of God.

How does God become knowable, if his

revelations are esséntially promises which open up new, historic, and

eschatological horizons for the future?

God reveals himself as "God"

wheré he shows himself as the same and is thus known as the same. The

presupposition for the knowledge of God is the revealing of God‘by God,

To that extent God remains Subject and Lord even of the process of man's

knowing.

In proving his faithfulness in history, he reveals himself.

The essence and the identity of the God of promise lies not in his

absoluteness over and beyond history,

but in the constancy of his

freely chosen relation to his creatures,

God reveals himself in his name, which discloses tﬁe mystery of

his Person to the extent that it discloses the mystery of his faith-

19%01tmann, pp. 108-109.

»

63

fulness. The name of God and the promises contained in the name of God

also tell us something "about” God, for in them he gives surety for his

future,

They tell us who he will be.

God is not first known at the end

of history, but in the midst of history.. Knowledge of God is then a

knowledge that draws ug onward--not upward--into situations that are not

yet finalized but still outstanding.

To know about God-is always at the

same time to know ourselves called in history by God.

The guarantee Qf the promise's congruity with reality lies in

the credibility and faithfulness of him who gives it. Hope does not

merely hope personally "in him" but has also subs;an;ial hopes of his

lordship, his.peace, and his righteousness on earth. Otherwise/hope

itself could unobtrusively change into a kind of fulfillment and there

would be noéhing more in which our hopes could be fﬁlfilled.

Promise and law.

The promises of God create an interval of tension

between their being issued and their coming to pass. This raisesvan

important question about directions for the filling out of this interval

and the existenée thus constituted in it.

Originally promise is

combined with obedience.

It is necessary to arise and go to the place

to which the promise points, if one is to

have part in its fulfi}lment.

Whoever receives the promises enters into

a covenant with God; The

obedience which the injunctions demand springs from firm confidence and

is a natural consequence of the promises. To "keep" the covenaht which

God has founded means both to "keep" the words of the promise and #fo

keep his commandments."

We "keep" the promises when "with all our heart

and all our strength" we trust and hope in them and do not doubt.

Not

only disobedience is punished by not experiencing the fulfillment but so

64

also is resignation,

weariness, and departure from the living hope.

Despondency and despair are sin.

The commandments of the covenant are

the ethical reverse of the promise itself,

The non-

realization of promises upon which we had depended, the

distress tha

t arises when the

protection and guidance of the God of

promise fail to come,

possible:

makes the following theological reflections

(a)

God lies,

had not kept them.

They were his promise and his covenant, but he

brook

"Wilt thou indeed be unto me as a deceitful

» as waters that fail?"

(Jer. 15:18, RV),

(b)

God is faithful.

comes to pass.

He does not deny himself.

What he says

Therefore if it does not come to pass,

it was not

the promise of God, but the lie of false prophets.

History itself

proves them to be false prophets.

Reflections of this kind were

manifestly often brought forward ev

en against the charismatic

leaders of Israel,

(c)

The reflection turns a

gainst the sorely tried, or even

already disappointed man himsel

f.

The reason for the withholding of

the fulfilment,

for the distance and absence of God and for his

judgment,

lies in man,

whether because he has departed from the hope

in the God of the promi

se and fallen into idolatry (the golden calf)

or the worship of other

injunctions of the comma

gods, or because of his disobedience to the

ndments.,

Promise in the eschatology of the prophets.

The concept "eschatology"

has become hazy since the rediscovery of the eschatological character of

the words of the Bible witnesses.

In orthodox dogmatics it referred to

theslast'article, often unrelated and supplementary.

In dogmatics and

exegesis today it has acquired various‘meanings, according to the par-

ticular material to which it is applied:

simply "future," "extending

beyond thé present," "last age,

" "transcendent," "directed towards a

final goal," or "finally valid." VAmong 0ld Testament scholars the

dispute narrows down to whether the term applies to hopes within

history, or whether the term should be reserved fqr prophécies which

speak of the end of history as suchf

It is hard to establish the points

2OMoltmann, pp. 122-123,

65

at which we can say, "Here prophetic promise ends, and there eschatology

begins." We can say that thosg promises and expectations are eschato-

logical which are directed towards a historic future in the sense of the

ultimate horizon.

What part

of the promised future is the ultimate fgture is

determined by the perspecﬁive in which the viewer sees ‘the time that is

now void but will

then be filled.

It is possible for eschatological

perspectives to expand and for that which appeared to one generation as

"ultimate" to be seen by a later generation as within history and

surpassable,

But when and how do hopes for history'become hopes that

are to be called "eschatological"? When does a promise become an

eschatolog%cal promise?

The crossing of the first decisive frontier for- Israel was its

mastering of agrarian‘culture when its tribes occupied Canaan. The

second major frontier was crossed when Israel mastered the great experi-

ences in the world history of the seventh and sixth centuries, when

Israel perished as a nation and yet survived in the religious sphere.

Here faith in the promise underwent t;emendous expansion.

In the

message of the classical prophets it developed into prophetic escha-

tology.

Their message arose in the shadow of the increasing menace from

Assyria, Babylon, and Persiq. They interﬁret this history of collapse

as Yahweh's judgment on his apostate people.

The threat that the history of the attacking peoples will bring

Yahweh's judgment upon Israel marks a decisive universalizing of the

divine actionm.

This threat of uniyersal judgment is as early as Amos:

God judges all wrong, including that among the peoples>who do not know

his law.

Consequently the God who uses the nations to judge his

66

apostate people is also thgir Lord and will also be their Judge.

If he

uses these nations to judge Israel according to his law then he will

also judge these nations according to his law.

On its political deathbed Israel brings the nations, as it were,

into the hands of its God and into his future.

By this very means

Yahweh's threats and promises for the future are set free from their

restriction to the one specific people and its particular future in

history, and become eschatological.

The moving horxizon of the

assurances for the future given by the God of promise, once it is

extended to embrace "all peoples', then reaches the utmost bounds of

human reality as such, and becomes universal and so also eschato-

5

logical.21

The prophets' message of judgment nevertheless points onge more

also to a different future, to a day of Yahweh, which will arise out of

the night of judgment. It can be conceived as a ju&gment that paves the

way for sométhing finally new. It consists of visions of the end, of

the unheara-of new salvation that is on the way, of the new covenant, of

the coming glory of Yahweh in his sovereignty over all the earth.

This

universalizing of judgment, which involves all the peoples, makes thg

coming salvation of Yahweh eschatological in its breadth and unrestrict-

edness. Seeé as part of the missionary task of Israel--being a light to

the Gentiles and a witness for Yahweh in his controversy with the gods

of the nations--they are still Israelo-centric eschatologies. However,

the more the new saving action of God that is to come outstrips all

analogies from the history of Israel's dealings with its God in past

experience and tradition, and the more the judgment that begins with

Israel moves on through the history of the nations, the more clearly

there appear‘the first signs of a universal eschatolégy'of mankind.

But in the message of the prophets there still remains at first

21Moltmann, p. 129.

67

one boundary--death

As long as death is felt to be the natural

boundary of life, God remains a God of the living

But if the death-

boundary is understood-as a judgment of Yahweh, then his power extends

also beyond death

The dead

too, can be recognized as included within

Even death itself is seen as a

the realm of his promise and glory.

transformable possibility in his hand and no longer as a fixed reality

that sets a limit to his working.

Thus the term "eschatological" would

now have to be used for a promise whose horizon of expectation surmounts

and overcomes all experiences of the total judgment of God in life and

death

The historifying of the cosmos in apocalyptic eschatology

It is

difficult to explain the phenomenon of late Jewish apocalyptic and its

contents.

Is it a legitimate continuation of the prophetic message or a

falling away from the prophetic faith in the promise?

The futuristic

and eschatological outlook is common to both the prophets and the

apocalyptists.

However, there are distinctions:

(a)

Apocalyptic cherishes a religious, deterministic view of

history.

The temporal sequence of the aeons is settled from the

start and history gradually unfolds a plan of Yahweh's.

In the

prophets, however, there is no trace of the idea that the eschata

have been firmly determined since the beginning of time.

(b)

In apocalyptic the factor standing over against the God who

acts in history is the "world" that lies under the power of evil.

In the prophets, however, we have "Israel and the nations."

(c)

The apocalyptic expectation is no longer directed towards a

consummation of the creation through the overcoming of evil by good,

but towards the separation of good and evil and hence the

replacement of the "world that lies under the power of evil'" by the

coming "world of righteousness'.

This shows a fatalistic dualism

which is not yet so found in the prophets.

(d) The judgment is not seen as something which in the freedom

of God can be recalled and which can be averted, if it may be, by

repentance, but as an immutable fate that is assuredly coming, as a

fatum irreparabile.

(e)

The prophets stood in the midst of the people of Israel and

thus also in the midst of its history.

The apocalyptists stand in

68

the post-exilic congregation of the righteous of Yahweh.

(£)

The prophets in their predictions quite openly took their

stand in their own historic present.

From that standpoint they

The apocalyptist, however,

unfold their historic perspectives.

veils his own place in history.2

The question arises whether apocalyptic thinking does not

ultimately show signs of nonhistoric thinking.

However, the apocalyptic

picture of history is firmly rooted in the historic thinking of Israel

and bound up with the prophetic eschatology.

Apocalyptic contains

perceptiblg traces of‘the distant God of deism. Yet there is always a

note of exhortation to be found.

It is the exhortation to persevere in

the faith of the righteous.

The Resurrection and the

Future of'Jesus Christ

Gospel and promise. When we examine the revelation‘of God as seen in

the New Testament, we discover that there is no clear concept of

revelation. The gospei éf the revelationbof God in Christ is in danger

of being incomp}ete if we fail to notice the dimension of promise in it.

But how is "promise" proclaimed in the New Testament as compared with

the 01d Testament history of promise?

The approach to Christology hasvbeen sought in Christian

dogmatics along different lines. We here select two basic tybesras

illustrations of the problem.

(1)

Since the shaping of Christian

dogmatics by Greek thought, it has been the general custom to approach

the mystery of Jesus from the general idea of God in Greek metaphyéics:

the one God, for whom all men are seeking on the ground of their

experience of reality, has appeared in Jesus of Nazareth.

The mystery

22Moltmann, pp. 133-134,

.

69

of Jesus is then the incarnation of the one, eternal, original, true,

(2)

and immutable divine Being.

In modern times the approach to the

mystery of Jesus has often been from the general view of the being of

man in history. The actual experiencing and conqeiving of the existence

of man as historic, the radical disclogure of the historic character of

human existence, came into the world with Jesus. Both app;oaches to‘

the mystery of Jesus set out from the universal in order to find its

true expression in the concrete_instance of his person and his history.

The

Neither approach necessarily takes the 0ld Testament into account.

approach of Jesus to all men, however, has the 0ld Testament with its

law and its ?romise as a necessary presupposition.

It is important»for theology to take seriously the following two

(1)

It was Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,

propositioné:

the God of the promise, who raised Jesus from the dead.

Who the God is

who is revealed in and by Jesus, emerges only in his difference from,

and identity with, the God of the 0ld Testament.

(2) Jesus was a Jew.

Who Jesus is, and what the human nature is which is revéaled by him,

emerges from his conflict with the law and the promise of the 01d

Testament.

In these two propositions, the path of theological knowledge

leads irreversibly from the particular to the general, from the historic

to the eschatological and universal.‘

In Jesus Christ the God of Israel has revealed himself as the

God of all mankind.

The path leads from the concrete to the universal.

Christian theology has to think along thie line.

The'concrete, unique,

historic event of the crucifying and raising of Jesus by Yahweh, the God

of promise who creates being out Qf nothing, becomes general through the

universal eschatological horizon it anticipates.

70

On the other hand, if theology takes seriously the fact that

Jesus was a Jew, then this means that he is not to be understood as a

particular case of human being in general, but only in connection with

the 0ld Testament history of promise and in conflict with it. Only when

the real, historic, and religious differences between peoples, groups,

and classes are broken down in the Christ event in which: the sinnef is

justified, does there come a prospect of what true humanity can be and

will be.

The God of the prémise. In the New Testament God is known and described

as the "God of promise." Hi§ essence is not his absoluteness as such

but the faithfulness with which he reveals and identifies himself in the

history of his promise as "the same." His divinity confists in the

constancy of his faithfulness. 'The word which reveals God has thus

fundamentally the character of promise and is therefore eschatolbgical

in kind. The life, work, death, and resurrectiqn of Jesus are thgrefofe

not described after the pattern of the appearance of epiphany gods but

D

in the categories of expectation that are appropriate to the God of

promise.

Just as for rabbinism and apocalyptic the figure of Abraham as

the example of righteousness becomes the focal point of the inéerést in

the promise, law, and righteousness of God, so also Paul sets this

figure in the center of his exposition of gospel and promise. Paul

links the traditional Abrahamitic promises with the promigse of life and

obviously understands "life" no longer in the context of possessing the

land, being fruitful and multiplying, but as "quickening of the dead"

(Romans 4:15, 17). As in Judaism, so also he is certain that God keeps

71

his promises.

Yet the ground of this assurance is new:

because God has

the power to quicken the dead and call into being things that are not,

therefore the fulfillment of his promise is‘possible.

However, if the

promise of God is bound to law, then the promise is invalidated:

it

then depends no longer on the power of'the God who has promised but on

the power of the man who obeys.

If the true heirs of Abraham, the father of tﬁe promise, are

those in whom the Abrahamitic promise giveslproof of itself in the

Christ event in the power of the God who justifies men and creates life

out of death, then that is the end of the Jew's precedence over the

Gentile in thg history of salvation. What was promiéed to Israel is now

valid for all believers, both Jews and Gentiles.

The promise is no

longer exclgsive but becomes inclusive. It becomes ﬁniversal. In the

gospel the 0l1d Testament history of promise finds more than a

fulfillment which does away withvit; it finds its future. The gospelAis

not to be understood as antiquating the promises of Israel or even

putting an end to them.

In the ultimate, eschatqlogical sense of these

promises it is in fact identical with them.

Paul and Abraham. How are we to regard the connectién between gospel

and promise and thus in a wider sense also the relatioh between the New

and the 01d Testaments?

Two radically opposed conceptions suggest them-

selves: the continuipy can be understood in terms of a view of history

as history of salvation, or the discontinuity can be undgrstood iﬁ terms

of an existentialist interpretation of ﬁhe gospel.

A view of the continuity in terms of history of election or of

salvation understands the gospel as the fulfillment of the history that

72

has preceded it. The event of Christ accordingly ﬁannot be taken by

itself as an isolated fact.

It always requires the witness of the

history which it fulfills, i1f its significance as an event of universal

eschatological salvation is to be intelligible.

An existentialist interpretation of the discontinuity, on the

other hand, takes "history" out of the light of the p:omise and sets it

in the light of the law.

"History" is here understood as a genealogical

force.

The

It becomes the epitome of transience and degeneration:

element of continuity between Abraham and the believer is not to be

regarded as a "product of historic development," but can only be under-

stood as "a rgtrospective projection of faith," which is not demon-

strable by historical science and must therefore itself again be an

object of faith. Regarding this view, it is no doubt true that Paul

rejects the idea of the Jews' genealogical connection with Abfaham being

in itself soteriological.

Yet what he puts in its place is hardly a

picture of Abraham as projected by Christian faith.. The continuity

with the Abrahamitic promise can therefore be taken neither as a product

of historic development nor as a retrospective projection of faith.

The promise finds in fhe gospel its eschatological future, while

the law finds its end.

The '"newness'" of the gospel is thus not "totally

new

1"

It proves its newness by asserting itself against the old,

Just as the

against human nature in the_context of law, sin, and death.

promise is validated in the gospel, so also the 0ld Testament, inasmuch

as it is witness to the history of the promise, is véliaated and renewed

in the New Testament. What the Scr%pture that was."written in former

days" (Romans 15:4) offers must therefore contain possibilities and a

future to which present hope éan be directed.

73

Fulfillment ecstasy in primitive Christianity and the eschatologia

erucis.

The promissory character of the gospel can be seen not only

from the language used especially by Paul and in Hebrews, but it shows

itself still more plainly in the conflicts in which Paul was involved

with various tendencies in primitive Christianity. While Christianity

remained within the sphere of Judaism, Christians tookvan.eschatological

view of the Christ event and of the gospel.

Here within the bounds of

the Jewish expectations they understood themselves as the '"renewed

covenant" of Israel. It>was only the move into the Gentile world that

When the church

compelled them to a new understanding of the gospel.

consisted of bqth Jews and Gentiles, it could no longef understand

itself as the '"renewed people of God" but now only as the '"new people of

God.ﬂy The cﬂurch could no longer understand itself as a Christian

synagogue, but it also had to avoid the misunderstanding of being a

Christian mystery religion!

The view of the Christian faith as a mystery religion took

palpable form in.that ecstatic Hellenistic fervor with which Paul finds

The Christ event can here be understood

himself embroiled in Corinth.

in a wholly noneschatological way as epiphany of the eternal bresent in

the form of the dying and rising Kyrios of the cultus.

Baptism into the

death and resurrection of Christ then means that the goal of redemption

is already attained, for in this baptism eternity is sacramentally

present.

All that now remains for him 6n earth is to exhibit his new,

heavenly nature in freedom. In the sacramental and spifitual presence

of Christ, resurrection from the dead is already iﬁparted to the

receivers and is eternally present fo them. It is plain that the

ecstasy of Christian mystery religion has its presupposition in an

74

apocalyptic ecstasy which was a feature of primitive Christianity. It

perceived in the experience of the Spirit the fulfillment of long-

awaited promises.

What are the consequences of this view of presentative escha-

tology as the presence of eternity?

The event of promise, which is what

the life, teaching, dying, and raising Qf Jesus were held to be, now

becomes an event of redemption, which can be subsequently repeated in

the cultus in the form of a mystery drama.

In place of the hidden Lord

of the world, who. in truth is as yet only designated as such and whose

return in glory to assume earthly power is still awa;ted by the church,

we have the Lgrd who now already reigns over all forces and powers and

thus over the world hitherto dominated by theﬁ. With this view came

alsgga waniﬂg of theological interest in the cross. History thus loses

its eschatological direction.

It is not the realm in which men suffer

and hope, groaning and travailing in expectation of Christ's future for

the world, but it becomes the field in which the heavenly lordship of

Christ is disclosed in church and sacrament,

The cross becomes a

timeless sacrament of martyrdom which perfects the martyr.and unites him

with the heavenly Christ.

In this context Paul's passionate polemic against Hellenistic

ecstasy in‘Corinth_acquires an abiding significancé, as do also his

correctives to that Hellenistic type of Christian theology which after-

wards became standard., His criticism had two focal po;nts: (1) There

is an "eschatological proviso" which he maintains.against'this‘fulfill—

ment ecstasy; it consists of "relicg of apocalyptic theology'" which

assert themselves in his view of the resurrection of Chriét, the

sacrament, the presence of the Spirit, the earthly obedience of the

75

believer, and of course in his future expectations; and (2) there is his

theology of the cross, in which he opposes the ecstasy that abandons the

earth on which that cross stands.

Both of these objections can be

called the eschatologia cructis.

The polemic in which Paul attacks Hellenism is marked both by a

new recognition of the significance of the cross of Christ and also by

a new recognition of a truly futuristic eschatology.

The apostle's

anti-ecstatic struggle, however, is in the last and deepest analyéis

fought out in the name of apocalyptic.

This is not the old Jewish

apocalyptic but means his own apocalyptic, which is kindled by an

eschatology of the cross and is therefore hostile to every eschato-

logical ecsFasy of fulfillment. For Paul, baptism is the means of

participation in the Christ event of the crucifixion and death of

Christ.

Fellowship with Christ is fellowship in suffering with the

crucified Christ.

The baptized are dead with Christ, if they are

baptized into his death. In the power of the Spiriﬁ who raised Christ

from the dead, they can obediently take upon them the sufferings of

discipleship and in these very sufferings await the future glory.

Christ is risen and beyond the reach of death, yet his followers are not

yet beyond the reach of death.

It is only through their hope that they

here attain to participat%on in the 1ife of the resurrection.

Faith does not come to its own in becoming radically unworldly.

By hopeful outgoing into the world it becomes a benefi; to the world.

By accepting the cross--by taking upon it the tr;als and.struggles of

obedience in the body and surrendering itself to the pain of love--it

proclaims in the everyday world the future of the resurrection, life,

and the righteousness of God.

The future of the resurrection comes. to

.

e,

76

it as it takes upon itself the cross.

Thus the eschatology of the

future and the theology of the cross are interwoven.

city

"

The reason why the Church-of Christ has here no "continuing

is, that it seeks the "city to come" and therefore goes forth

without the camp to bear the reproach of Christ.

The reason for its

here having no continuing city is not that in history there is

nothing that continues at all.

In the eyes of Christian hope the

epithet "transient" belongs not only to the things which we

generally feel are destined to pass away, but it sees as transient

those very things which are generally felt to be always there and to

cause the transience of all life, namely, evil and death.

Death

becomes transient in the promised resurrection.

Sin becomes

transient in the justification of the sinner an

S

for which we'have to hope.

d the righteousness‘

The "death of God" and the resurrection of Christ.

Christianity stands

or falls with the reality of the raising of Jesus from the dead by God.

Paul is clearly taking over a basic form of the primitive Christian

confession when he says in Romans 10:9, "If you éonfess'with your lips

that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from

the dead, you will be saved." It"is‘the recognition of the fisen Christ

that gives rise to the church's recognition of its own commission in the

mission to the nations.

The question, "What can I know of the his-

torical facts?" cannot here be separated from thé ethical and exis-

tential question, "What am I to do?" and from the eschatological

question, "What may I hope for?" Only when concerted attention is‘given

to these three questions does the reality of the resurrection disclose

7

itself,

When the question of the reality of the resurrec?ion is raised

today, then it mostly takes the form:

"In what sense is

"Is he risen?"

he risen?"

It can only be a question which embraces the whole modern

23M.oltmann, p. 165,

»

77

experience of the world, of self, and of the future--a question whicﬁ we

ourselves constitute with our whole reality.

The statement of Hegel and

Nietzsche, "God is dead," is not merely a statement of philosophical

metaphysics or of/theology, but is one which also seems to lie at the

foundations of modern experience of self agd the world, and to provide

the ground for the atheism that characterizes the methods of science.

Only when along with the knowledge of the resurrection of Jeéus

the "God of the resurrection” can be shown to be "God" in terms

of the "death of God" that has become familiar to us from history,

from the world and from our own existence--only then is the procla-

mation of the resurrection, and only then are faith and hope in the

God of promise, something that is necessary, that is new, that is

possible in an objectively real sense.

The historical questionvof the resurrection of Christ and the question-

ableness of- the historical app?oach to history. The first question

regarding the reality of the resurrection of Christ wili always be

concerned with the fact which is reported and proclaimed by the Easter

witnesses,

Since this fact is reported as an event--namely, as the

"raising of Jesus from the dead by God"--the question as to the reality

of this event will in the first instance take the form of a historical

question.

They spoke of a fact and an event whose reality lay for them

outside their own consciousness and their own faith.

The Easter narra-

tives themselves compel us to ask about the rgality of the evént of

which they tell.

It is solely the reality of the fact declared and

proclaimed that must correspond with their declarations and their

proclamation.

The questions as to the certainty of the reality which underlies

the proclamation of the resurrection have taken the form of historical

24Moltmann, p. 168.

.

78

examination.

The controversy between the disciples and the Jews was

concerned with the question:

has God raised him from the dead according

to his promises, or can God according to his promises not have raised

him?

The modern controversy on the resurrection, however, is concerned

with the equestion whether resurrection is historically possible.

IE it

is true that the experiences of history on the basis Qf which the

concépts of the historical have been constructed have nowadays an

anthropocentric chafacter, then it is plain that on this presupposition

the assertion of the raising of Jesus by God is a "historically'" impos-

sible and therefore a "historically" meaningless statement.

It is.generally acknowledged that historical'understanding

nowadays is always analogical understanding and must therefore always

remain within the realm of what is understandable in terms of analogy.

The omnipotence thus attaching to analogy presupposes that there is

always a common core of similarity, on the basis of which the differ—»

ences can be sensed and perceived.lﬁln face of this basing of historical

understanding on a metaphysical definition of the core of history,

Christian tﬁeology finds itself in grave difficulties as it seeks to

reflect upon the proclamation of the resurrection.

Theology has the possibility of constructing its own concept of

history and its own view of the tale of history on the basis of a

theological and eschatological understanding'of the reality of the

resurrection.

The resurrection of Christ is without parallel in the

history known to us. But it can for that very reason ﬁe'regarded as a

"history-making event" in the lighF of which all other history is

illumined, called in’question, and transformed. As the church is

engaged with its surrounding society in a struggle for the truth, so

79

theology, too, has a part in the missipn of the church. It must engage

with historical world views in a strugglé for the future of the truth

and therefore also in a battle for the reality of the resurrection of

Jesus.

The approach of form-criticism to the Easter narratives ?nd the

questionableness of its existentialist interpretation.

The critical

examination of the resurrection narratives in regard to their historical

correctness, which has been usual since the Enlightenment, has been

transformed by fo?m—critical examination of the narratives. The form-

critical method is originally a sociological method. From its stand-

point the Easter texts present themselves primarily as kerygma, as

proclamation by the church in faith and to faith. It w?s no longer a

question of the historicity of the statements in the old sense of

historical criticism.

It was now a historical question of the motives

and forms of the statements themselves, and of the changes undergqne By

these motives and forms. Still, the insight into the fact that in‘

these texts we have to do not with historical reports but with testi-

monies of faith on the part of the primitive Christian church is also a

historical insight.

The important question for theology arises only when the results

of the form-critical analyses of the primitive Christian message are

removed from their own historic ground and theologically grounded in

a different reality from that of which they speak, when the enquirer

has no desire at all to know how things really were, but only how

the believers saw them and how they represented them in terms of

their faith, when the texts are no longer taken as statements about

a reality, but are understood only as expressions of the Church's

faith.

Do these pieces of witness and of proclamation have their

ground in a new self-understanding of the existence of the witnesses

and proclaimers?

Is the kerygmatic character of these statements

grounded in a revelational commission which can no longer be grasped

historically?

The form-critical approach clearly provided the

possibility of conceiving these statements as grounded elsewhere

&

»

80

than in the reality of the events to be proclaimed--the possibiiity

of understanding them no longer as "statements about' something, but

as "expressions of" personal or corporate faith. -This change of

subject has come about through the alliance between form—critical

research and dialectical theology, especially in existentialist

interpretation since the twenties.

If the reality of the resurrection is not to be conceived as a

historically accessible reality, then it can of course still become real

for man in another sense of the word "reality."

The resurrection of

Christ becomes for him a reality which affects him in the question-

ableness of his own existence and faces him with a decision. ‘The

"reality" of the'resurrection encounters us as word of God, as kerygma,

to which we can no longer putvthe question of its historical legitimacy,

but which asks us whetber or not we are willing to believe. That the

resurrection actually took place is not thereby denied, but does not lie

within the field of interest. Of vital interest to our'existence, on

the other hand, is the Easter faith of the witnesses and the under-

standing of existence which emerged in primitive Chrisfianity asva new

possibility for human existence.

/

It is An undeniably true insight that the Easter narratives are

not meant to be "narratives", but to be proclamation directed to

faith, and that the reality of the resurrection of Jesus is

inseparably bound up with the witness of universal missionary

proclamation; but it is an insight that can lead in the way just

indicated to no longer enquiring into the historical legitimacy

of this proclamation, but putting in place of that an existential

verification of it to heart and conscience or to a historic self-

understanding in terms of a general historic questionableness of

human existence.

The transition from form-critical research to

existentialist interpretation often proceeds by the following

stages:

1L

The place of the question, "What do the accounts in

substance say?"

is taken by the question, "Who speaks in these

accounts?"

2. Once it has been estab}ished that thé Church in these

25Moltmann, pp. 183-184.

81

accounts and in the forms assumed by them is expressing its relation

to Jesus, there follows the further question, "How does the Church

understand its relation to Jesus?"

3

Once the Church's christological conceptions of Jesus have

been established, the next question is, "How does the Church under-

stand itself?"

Then its understanding of Christ is grounded in its

understanding of faith, and its understanding of faith is grounded

in its self-understanding and is understood as an expression of the

self-understanding that is sought by all men.

Christology is then

the variable, anthropology the constant.

.

e

This whole approach in terms of

reality" as a reality

which concerns existence leaves out of account the fact that these

texts speak of God and his action on Jesus, and purposely so speak--

that they speak of the world and the future and certainly do not

mean all this merely as an "expression

of a new self-understanding.

The existentialist interpretation examines the texts in order to

find the "meaning" of what they say, and takes it for granted from

the start that this meaning is existential truth and not factual

truth.

This is today no doubt a "meaningful" way of appropriating

what was then proclaimed, but is not at all in harmony with its own

original intention.?2

The reality which stands behind the proclamatory reports must

plainly be of such a kind that it compelled proclamation to all peoples

and the continual formation of new christological conceptions.

I1f we no

longer ask merely how the church preached and to what changes the form

of its proclamation was subjected, but why it spoke as it did and what

provoked its proclamation, then we are on the road to raising the

historical question in a new way and seeing the existential truth of

faith as grounded in the factual truth of what is to be believed

Only

missionary proclamation does justice to the historical and eschato-

logical character of this event.

The eschatological question as to the future horizon of the proclamation

of the risen Lord

In the resurrection narratives experience and

judgment manifestly take place within a decidedly eschatological horizon

26Moltmann, pp. 186-187

82

What

of expectations, hopes, and. questions about the promised future.

is spotlighted in the resurrection appearances is expounded in terms of

the earlier promises.

This exposition in turn takes place in the form

of prophetic proclamation of the future of Christ which was spotlighted

in these appearances.

Christian eschatology differs from 0ld Testament faith in the

promise, as also from prophetic and apoéalyptic eschatology, by being

Christian eschatology and speaking of "Christ ahd his future.”" It is

related in content to the person of Jesus of Nazareth and the event of

his raising.

It speaks of the future for which the ground is laid in

this person and this event.

Christian eschatology is at heart Chris-

tology in an eschatological perspective.

What God madg manifest, according to the statements of the

Easter narratives, was not the course of history,\nét the secrets of the

higher world of heaven, not the outcome of the future world judgment but

the future of the crucified Christ for the world.

When Jesus is

described as "the firstfruits of them that slept,”" then that goes beyond

the bounds of apocalyptic inasmuch as it means that the raising of the

dead has already taken place in this one case for all.

It means, too,

that the raising was performed not on one faithful to the law but on one

who was crucified.

Cpnsequently, future resurrection is to be expected

not from obedience to the law but from the justification of sinners and

from faith in Christ;

The Christian hope for the future comes from obsérving a

specific, unique event--that of the resurrection and appearing of Jesus

Christ. To recognize the resurrection of Christ means to recogpize in

this event the future of God for the world.

Christian eschgtology»

83

examines the inner tendency of the resurrection event

s asking what

It

rightly can and must be expected from the risen and exglted Loxd.

recognizes as the outer tendency,

or as the consequence of this

tendency, its own mission:

"The gospel must first be preached to all

nations" (Mark 13:10).

One could say that Christian eschatology is the study of the

tendency of the resurrection and future of Christ and therefore leads

immediately to the Practical knowledge of mission.

The Christian

consciousness of history is not g consciousness of the millenia of all

history, in some mysterious knowledge of a divine plan for history,

but

B k) missionary consciousness in the knowledge of a divine

commission,

‘It is therefore a consciousness of the contradiction

inherent in this unredeemed world and of the sign of the cross under

which the Christian mission and the Christian hope stand.

It is only in this context,

human nature” arises--the

too, that the question of "true

question of what makes man to be

true

man--and is answered by

the disclosure of a

way, a promise and a

future in which "

the truth" comes to man and

into the truth.

he himself is brought

Communion with Christ,

the new being in Christ,

proves to be the way for man to become m

an.

In it true human nature

can be sought in it.

emerges, and the still hidden and unfulfilled

future of human nature

This is an openness of h

the world and towards

the future--an openness

uman existence towards

and kept alive by that

grounded

manifested

openness of the revelation of God which is

announced in the event

this event points beyon

of the resurrection of Christ and in which

things, 27

d itself to an eschaton of the fulness of all

The identity of the Lord who appears as risen with the crucified Christ.

Nowhere is the actual pProcess of the raising of Jesus described in a

historicizing or mythological way.

It is covered by a term ("raising

from the-dead"

) for which there is no basis in experience hitherto and

27Moltmann, p. 196.

84

elsewhere.

What "resurrection of the dead"

really is, and what

"actually happened"” in the raising of Jesus,

is thus a thing which not

even the New Testament Easter narratives profess to know,

They use the

term "raising"

to express not only a jydgment about something that

happened to Jesus but at the same time also an eschatological

expectation,

The disciples’

proclamation that he was raised from the dead

does not arise fr9m peculiar powers of imagination or from a unique kiﬁd

of inspiration.

It arises from the comparing of the two contradictory

experiences which they have of Christ.

The experience of the cross of

Jesus means for them the

experience of the god-forsakenness

of God's ambassador--that is, an

absolute nihil embracing also God.

The experience of the appearance

of the crucified one as the living

Lord therefore means for them the

experience of the nearness of God i

n the god-forsaken one, of the

divineness of God in the crucified

totality which annihilates the tota

and dead Christ--that is, a new

1 nihil.

The two experiences

stand in a radical contradiction to each othe

r,

nothing and everything,

godlessness and the divi

like death and 1life,

how can it be possible t

nity of God.

But

o identify both experien

ces in one and the

same person without resolvin

and making it of no account?

g either the one experience or the other

The Easter appearances involved not only visions but also

auditions as well,

Without the speaking and hearing of words it would

have been unlikely--indeed impossible-~to identify the one who éppéared

with the crucified Jesus,

It is surely a fact.that the appearances

themselves hardly provided the possibility of identifying the one who

appeared with the one who was crucified..

So we have to loqk for whaf

was said by the one who appeared.

What he said must have contained

something in the nature of a self-identification ("It is Ay

We can

28Moltmann, p. 198.

85

call this a self-revelation of Jesus.

The Lord who is believed and

proclaimed at Easter therefore stands in‘continuity with the earthly

Jesus who had come-and been crucified--a continuity which must

repeatedly be sought and formulated anew and can never be surrendered.

The identity of Jesus can be ‘understood only as an identity in,

Bgt not above and beyond, cross and resurrection--that is, that it must

In that

remain bound up with the dialectic of cross and resurrection.

éése the contradictions between the cross and the resurrection are an

inherent part of his identity.

What happened between the cross and the

Easter appearances is an eschatological event which has its goal in

future revelation and universal fulfillment.

It points beyond itself,

and even beyond Jesus; to the coming revelation of the glory of God.

Then Jesus identifies himself in the Easter appeargnces'as the coming

one, and his identity in cross.and resurrection points the direction for

o

coming events and makes a path for them.

The appearances of the risen Lord were experienced by those

involved in service and mission to the world, not as blissful experi-

ences of union with the divine Being appearing here.

His appearances

were vocatory appearances by which the men involved were éet to follow

the footsteps of the mission of Jesus. The perceiving of the eveﬁt of

resurrection which took place in him thus led by logical necessity to a

Only when his

perception of their own mission and their own future.

history is thus seen as determined by the eschaton, and only when our

own consciousness of history takes the form of a consciousness of

mission, can the raising of Jesus from the dead be called "historic."

The future of Jesus Christ.

If we ask what the future of the riseg

Christ contains by way of promise and expectation, we discover promises

»

86

whose content is already 1lit up in certain outline by the prophetic

expectations of the 0ld Testament but whose form is determined by the

words, the suffering, and the death of Christ.

Knowledge of the future

has its stimulus nowhere else than in the riddle of Jesus of Nazareth

His future, in the light of which he can be recognized as to what .he is,

is illuminated in advance by the promise of the rightecusness of God

the promise of life as a result of resurrection from the dead, and the

promise of the kingdom of God in a new totality of being.

The future of righteousness.

Righteousness means "being in order,

standing in the right

relationship; it means correspondence and harmony and is to that

extent akin to "truth."

But righteousness also means "being able to

stand,"” having subsistence, finding a basis on which to exist, and

is to that extent akin to existence as such.

Righteousness in the

Old Testament does not mean agreement with an ideal- norm or with the

logos of eternal being, but describes a historic communal rela-

tionship which is founded on promise and faithfulness.

When Israel

praises the righteousness of God, then it thankfully remembers his

faithfulness to his covenant promises as it has taken practical

shape in the history of Israel

Yahweh's righteousness is his

faithfulness to the covenant.

"

That is why his righteousness

"happens,

and why one can '"tell" it and trust in it for the future

and expect''"salvation

from this righteousness.

In trusting in

God's faithfulness to this covenant, and in living in accordance

with his covenant in promise and statute, men do right by God and

are set right.

They are set right not only in relation to God, but

also in their mutual relationships and in relation to things,29

The righteousness of God is the essence of the stability and the

ground of the subsistence for the whole creation.

Without his justice

and faithfulness nothing can exist

but everything is swallowed up in

nothingness.

Hence God's righteousness is universal

With the coming

of the righteousness of God we can expect also a new creation.

In the New Testament the divine righteousness is understood by

29Moltmann, pp. 203-204

87

Paul as God'

s faithfulness in communal relationships,

as an event

brought about by God and as an event from which theré arises a new

creation and a new life,

Paul sees this divine rightedusness as

revealed in the gospel (Romans 1:17) and grasped in faith.

This divine

righteousness has its ground both in the event of the cross and in that

of the resurrection.

Theldivine rigbteousness which is here revealed

finds its measure not in the sin it forgives but in éhat new life in

the glory of the risen and exalted Christ which it promises and to which

it points.

The divine righteousness is present in faith and in baptism,

yet in such a way that it is engaged in a process which will be

completed only at the paroﬁsia of Christ.

Justification ﬁéans not only that the unjust is given a right tq

stand before God and to enduré‘the judgment, but it has' also a theo-

logical meaning--namely,

in this event God attains his rights over

against his creation,

If in the justification of the sinner God attains

to his rights, then this justification is the beginning and fore-

shadowing of»hfs sole lordship.,

The future

of life.

What sort of expgctation of life and what sort of

experience

of death were quickened by the promises of Israel?.

e

is surprising that for lon

dreams

g the Jews had no thoughts or

about the last agony.

They were as much a this-worldly

people

as the Greeks, and yet

vigorously determined by futur

their life was incomparably more

e goals.

All dead things represented for Israel the acme of uncleanness,

All pollutions of this kind involve exclusion from the service of God.

30Quoted in Moltmann,

Prinzip Hoffnung (Frankfurt:

Theology of Hope from.Ernst B

loch, Das

Suhrkamp, 19590 " p.. 1323

88

The dead are cut off from God and from living communion with him.

Being

able to praise God and being no longer able to praise him are here

synonyms for fhe antithesis of life and death.

Death cuts man off from

God by separating him from his promises and his praise.

The hopes of

resurrectign did find a place on the periphery of the 01d Testament and

in the apocalyptic of late Judaism.

According to Ezekiel 37:11, the

people of the promise can now recognizé themselves only in the piéture

of dead bones, i.e., of hope that has come to nothing, and then are

given to hear the prophetic message of a new promise of life by Yahweh:

"Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shal live"

(Ezekiel 37:5). This promiées a creative act of Yahweh upon his people

beyond the bounds of the temporal and the possible.

I; is a promise

that has no conditions and no presuppositions, a promise of life from

the dead on the ground of a creative act of Yahyeh ex nithilo.

In the context of these expectations, Jesus' death is experi-

enced and proclaimed as god-forsakenness, judgment, curse, exclusion

from the promised life, reprobation, and damnation.

His resu;rection

must then be understood not as a mere return to life as such but as a

conquest of the deadliness of death.

Jesus'

resurrection was not seen

as a private Easter for his private Good Friday but as the beginning and

source of the abolition of the universal Good Friday.

It means

following the intention of God by entering into the dialectic of

suffering and dying in expectation of eternal life and of resurrection.

Just as the urge of promise is towards fulfilmenﬁ, as the urge

of faith is towards obedience and sight, and as the urge of hope is

towards the life that is promised and finally attained, so the urge

of the raising of Christ is towards life in the Spirit and towards

the eternal life that is the consummation of all things.

This

eternal life here lies hidden beneath its opposite, under trial,

suffering, death and sorrow.

Yet this its hiddenness 1s not an

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89

eternal paradox, but a latency within the tendency that presses

forwards and outwards into that open realm of possibilities that

lies ahead and is so full of promise.

The future of the kingdom of God and of the freedom of man.

The real

heart of eschatology is doubtless to pe found in the promise and expec-

tation of what is known as the "kingdom of God" and the "lordship of

God."

Bound up with the expectation of the lordshipvof God is the

expectation that his people, mankind, and all that he has made will

attain to salvation, peace,bhappiness, and life. Faith in his lordship

finds its expression in the confession that Yahweh is king

(Judges 8:23).

In the nomadic period of the Israelite tribes wé find

the idea that Yahweh is the Leader who goes before his people and rules

them by leading them as a shepherd.

God's lordship originally means lordship in pro;ise, faith-

fulness, and fulfillment.

In the idea of the lordship of God, two

elements are combined:

remembrance of his historic lordship and confi-

dence in it anq expectation.of his universal lordship in which the world

and all nations and things become. his universe.

In the New Testament

the

"kingdom" is obviously a central concept--especially in the synoptic

tradition.

The message, acts, miracles, and parables of Jesus before

Easter are described asv"the kingdqm of God." The peculiar feature of

his proclamation of the kingdom lies in the fact that entry into the

kingdom is bound by him to the decision of the hearers and their

attitude to his own person.

Eschatology and History

31Moltmann, DPis 21:37

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90

Criticism and crisis,

Modern man's epochal experience of history is

grounded in the experience of infinltely new and overwhelming possi-

bilities which cannot be mastered by the Customary methods of his tradi-

tions,

It is in terms of crisis that history becomes perceptible to

him.

Historical criticism of his traditions is the offspring of this

consciousness of crisis,

All reflection on

"history” by historians,

sociologists, and philosophers of history on the continent of Europe in

the nineteenth century has behind it the earthquake of the French

revolution and before it the incalculable consequences of that event

°

With it there came an awareness of the totally historic character of

life as the total criticalness of man's world.

"Crisis" has ever since

become the theme of historical research and the bas1c concept of

reflectlon on the philosophy of history.

The sense of history, the interest in history,

and the necessity

to understand history always rise in critical times of unrest,

New

possibilities that were hitherto unknown and unsuspected begin to dawn

on the horizon:

The crisis becomes one of universal world history and

affects the whole existence of man and his world

Every crisis throws

up the question of the historic future,

This means that for the present

a decision has to be made which finds no precedent in the past and for

which traditional custom no longer provides any rule,

The decision

which is forced upon the present must arise from our dream of the

future,

Since 1789, the land of "

utopia"” no longer lies somewhere

beyond the seas,

but by means of the belief in history and the idea of

progress it is shifted to the future which is possible.

For the first

time

history is subjected to the influence of an apocalyptic millenar-

lanism and an apocalyptic enthusiasm of spirit

for which the end is

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91

other than the origin, and. the goal greater than the beginning, and the

future more than all the past. -

The historical method. Without "method" no assured knowledge can be

attained. Historical methodology therefore embraces principles_for

historical research and principles fér the critical control of their

results,

Certain minimum requirements from the concept of science

associated-with natural science have been introduced also into the

science of histqry:

(1) The science of history is not art, fiction, or

legend, but the concept of truth which underlies it is that of a veri-

fiable truth of fact;

(2) the historical correctngss of our knowledge of

history,

however, presupposes that our insights are controllable; (3)

this controllability, however? Presupposes that histori?al objects can

in principle be reconstructed; and, (4) historical science, too, works

with definite hypotheses, plans, approaches, and outlooks, by means qf

which the events are illumined and perceived as events.

The hiﬁtorical method is applied critically to the traditions

and the historical sources.

This sort of destructive criticism of the

traditions of an event, however, is itself always bound up with the

historian's own power of picturing and imagining how things may "in

fact" have been.

This means that historical criticism is always bound

up with historical heuristics.

The historical approach must regard bast

history in that historical detachment in which it can be objectively

examined.

This, understandably enough, becomes more difficult the more

it is a question of "contemporary history."

For here the object is not

firmly established but is still in the state of flux.

At bottom, all

history is "contemporary history."

The historian's object is thus

92

engaged in a twofold movement which derives first from the process

character of all past life and secondly from thg continual change in

the man who contemplates history and is himself éubject to historic

development.

Historical heuristics.

The historical method does not only work with

destructive criticism of past pictures of history, in order to inves-

tigate the "bare" facts, but must itself approach the source material

with its own problems and plans.

The natural scientist in his exper-

iments must isolate his object, eliminate factors which do not enter

into the question, and disregard other problems if he is to attain

unequivocal fesults. This is very difficult ;n the case of historical

objects because here we have always to do with highly é?mplicated

structures whose isolation destroys the fact of their being s0 multi-

fariously conditioned.

When historical science moves on from isolated, individual facts

to more general statements embracing historic processes, then there

arises the problem of the forming of historical concepts.

These

concepts acquire their binding force from the standpoint and perspective

of the moment.

Therefore they cannot claim to reflect the historic

processes as such but are heuristic modes of contemplating historic

processes and means of explaining and understanding them.

One such means is the "historical law."

An event becomes

explicable when its causes can be seen.

We can certaihly argue from

effects to causes but hardly ever from causes to effects.

Hence the

really historic factor lies in the'concept of possibility rather than in

that of necessity:

we never find all the possibilities turned into‘

93

unequivocal necessities.

Thus the concept of causality too can have

only heuristic significance.

Another conceptual means of grasping connections is the

discovering of "tendencies."

It means that the stringency of the

causality of natural science is renounced, and the transition in

historic movements is described not as a transition from causa to

effectus but from possibility to reality. What stagds between possi-

bilities and realized realities is not a causal necessity but tendency,

impulse, inclination, trend, and specific leanings towards something

which can become real in certain historic constellations.

E. Rothacker has recommended as a means towards the grasping of

historical complexes the concept of "style." What is called "historical

thinking" in the emphatic and passionate use of fhe term has indeed its

primary aim not in the establishing of facts but in grasping as

congenially as may be the appearances of the immanent logos, the styles

in which these facts arrange themselves.

This involves the anthropo-

logical and sociological connection of acts and events with the "envi-

ronment" in the experiences of the moment and in the current views of

life.

In much the same way the concept of "structure" attempts to

grasp the social institutions in which histbry was accepted and mastered

at a given momént, by seeing them as the world of the orders and

expressions of life that.exercised their influence on‘higtory. This

framework of ideas leads on to the history of "forms."

It examines not

so much the individual statement as once made but rather the Sitz im

Leben provided for the statements by religion, law, culture, pqlitics,

and art.

94

Lastly, the concept of the understanding of existence is also a

heuristic medium of this kind.

Here the phenomena of past history are

interpreted and brought to consciousness on the basis of the possibil-

ities of man's understandings of existence.

The historian is then not

so much interested in the events themselves and their causal or

tendentious connections with other events but rather im the historic

character of the several existenées that have been and in the possi-

bilities of human existence.

Summarily, it is not due merely to‘the defective range of the

human mind that history remains dark to it.

This is due to history

itself, which has not yet reached its end and therefore cannot yet be

resolved i?to historical knowledge. It is knowledge only in a proleptic

or fragmentary way.

Historiology.

The question of historical heuristics leads of itself to

the problem of the philosophy of history. But how can a philosophy of

history be possible in the Greek sense of.knowledge and of science?

J. Burckhardt says the essence of history is change, yet change is the

direct opposite of essence.

We see an often unconscious transition from

historical heuristics to philosophy of history. Ranke was cgns;antly in

search of a "general bond" of history.

In a similar way, Ferdinand

Christian Baur attempted to comprehend history as a universal whole.

For Johann Gustav Droysen, the realm of the historical method is the

cosmos of the moral world.

To see this moral world in its development

and growth, in its successive movements, is to see it as history.

For

Wilhelm Dilthey, history is a human scienée, and the human sciences rest

on the relationship between life, expression, and understanding. éll

95

;

¥

expressions of life stand in a sphere of community.and are under

standable only in such a sphere.

Martin Heidegger sets out from the

view of history contained in Dilthey's philosophy of life.

For him the

"basic weakness" of thus seeing history in terms of the philosopﬁy of

life lies in the fact that "1ife" itself has not been taken as an

ontological problem.

ngming up this brief review of the philosophy of histor;bthat

emerges from historical heuristics, we find that the definition, compre-

hension, and understanding of history inevitably,brings about at the

same time abrogation, negation, and annihilation of history. Whén the

primary question is that of the origin, substance, and essence of

history, t@en the concrete movements, changes, crises, and revolutions

which constitute history are related to some factor that does not

change, always exists, and has equal validity at all times.

An escha-

tology of history, however, which revolves around the concepts of the

new and the future, would be in a position to take history as history,

to remember and expect it as historyand thus not to annihilate history

but t? keep it open.

Eschatology of history--philosophic millenarianism.

It was the theo-

logical evaluation of "time" resulting from the expectatibn of the

arrival of the promised fﬁture of God in terms of Jewish and Christian

messianic thought that first opened the Greek mind for the prgblem.of

history and for the philosophic idea of a purposeful, irreversible, and

unrepeatable process of history.

The combining of both spheres of truth

and both ways of thinking brought about the decisive transition in Greek

thinking from the static to the dynamic, from substance to function?

96

from the eternal present of being to the open possibilifies of the

future, from the metaphysical glorification of the casmos to the sense

of mission that transforms the world.

In recent years all historians and thinkers on history have

possessed a sense of mission,

9

a belief in a history thét is meaningful

and a faith in the great task of mankind.

Modern views of history can

no longer renounce the governing idea of a "universal history or world

history."

It can be said that only where a knowledge of mission

supplies the sense of a future and a purpose is there room for the

concept of the uniqueness of events and of a meaningful future.

If

there are no prospects at all then history becomes pointless. The

understanding of history, of its possibilities fpr good and evil, of its

direction and its meaning lieé in the field of hope and can be acquired

only there.

Death and guilt as driving forces of the historical outlook.

One

historian said correctly,

"To me the great historic events of the past

always seem like frozen cataracts--pictures that have stiffened in the

cold of vanished life and keep us at a distance.

"32 5o why do we do it

and why do we not rather flee the shédowy realm of the past?

-Underlying

all history is the fact that history is memory.

Our faculty of remem—

bering matters of history is always selective.

Remembering and

forgetting are inéérwovgn in each other.

Historical science has a task

of criticism and purification.

R. Wittram has called éuilt the secret

motor which keeps the movement going, mostly hidden,

always at work, the

32Reinhard Wittram, Das Interesse an der Geschichte

(Gsttingen:

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958), Py 51

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97

real perpetuum mobile of world history.

In everything that is remem-

bered as guilt there lurks SOmething which is not yet over and done

with.

The past becomes determinative for the burdens and tasks of the

present,

What is true of guilt with regard to "history as memory" is also

true regarding death. This is always the hardest and the most certain

fact of past history.

The historian's reawakening of the dead, which

takes place only "in a manner of speaking," means anticipating escha-

tology and projecting upon history the last act of hiétory. The "reason

in history" has a messianic light and shows things with all their flaws

laid bare and ready for redemption.

it yill no longer be possible to regard the past only archaeo-

logically and take it merely as the origin of the particular present,

The past will have to‘be examined in regard to its own future. All

history is full of possibilities--possibilities that have been profited

by and not profited by, seized and blocked.

Past ages will have to be

understood from' the standpoint of their hopes,

It is the open future

that gives us a common front with earlier ageg and a certain contempo-

raneity which makes it possible to enter into discussion with them, to

criticize and accept them. The dialectic of past bappening and present

understanding is always motivated by anticipations of the future and by

the question of what makes the future possible.

The peculiarity of the hiéto;ian's universal concepts. As long as our

reality has not yet "completed" itself and not yet become a rounded

whole, a metaphysic of the historical universe in the sense of the Greek

logos is impossible.,

All the historian's universal concepts therefore

98

prove to be elastic concepts which themselves belong to history and make

history. The universal concepts, which themselves belong to history aﬁd

are used by histo;ians in an effort to grasp what man is, what the world

is, and so on, arise only supposedly and only wrongly from abstraction.

In actual fact they contain the note of prophecy and of mission towards

the future land of the 'realized generic concept." Thgy always contain

a futuristically anticipated eschatology.

What "world" history is, is decided by what is desired and hoped

forras the one, future world. What the history of "mankind" is, is

decided by what mankind one day should be énd will be. Both are

directly related to present mission. Thus there exjst'only histories on

the way to yorld histofy, but there is not yet a world history. The

lines on which these histories are on their way towards: world history

are all maintained by the consciousness of having a mission towards

world history.

The hermeneutiqs of Christian mission. Among the presuppositions of a

rational Christian theology, hermeneutic reflections on the principles

of the understanding of biblical texts have today repléced the old

proofs of God which once constituted the prefatory remarks fo; what

Christianity says of God.

This, however, is not by any means the end of

these proofs of God which demonstrated the existence and nature of God.

On the contrary, they recur in all their conceivable forms in the

hermeneutic reflections in which the exposition and preaching of the

biblical witness to God and his actions are formulated today.

The traditional proofs of'Cod can be divided into three major

groups: (a) the proofs of God from fhe world, from the cosmos or ?he

99

history of reality; (b) th‘e proofs of God from human existence, from the

soul or from the self-

consciousness of man's necessafy ability and

obligation to be a self; and (c) the proofs of God from "God," the

proofs of the existence of God

> or of the quest of God, from the concept

or name of God.

These three possibilities have their corresponding

results in the principles of hermeneutics, exegesis, aﬁd the scientific

treatment which that involves in our dealings with history and with the

historic witness of the Bible.

All proofs of God are at bottom anticipations of that eschato-

logical reality in which God is revealed in all things to all. They

assume this reality as already present and as immediately perceptible to

every man._

The hermeneutic principles develope@ from them take the

presence of God which can be demonstrated, experienced

s° Or perceived

from and made it the point of reference for the exposition of the

historic witness of the Bible,

The key to the hermeneutics of the historic witness of the Bible

is the "future of Scripture."

All the biblical scriptures are open

towards the future fulfillment of the divine promise whose history they

relate.

The point of reference and the aim in the exposition of the

biblical witness is not something universal which lies at thé béttdm of

history or at the bottom of existence and keeps everything moving, but

the concrete, present mission of Christianity towards the future of

Christ for the world.

God is revealed in this mission as the God ﬁho

calls and promises.

The dominant question of all anthropology--who or what is man?

who am

I?--does not arise in the biblical narratives from comparing man

with the animals or with the things of the world.

It arises in the face

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100

of a divine mission which transcends the bounds of the humanly possiblg.

Man attains to knowledge of himself by discovering the discrepancy

between the divine mission and his own being. Hence the answer received

to man's question about himself and his human nature runs:

"I will be

with thee."

The theory of world-transforming, future—seekiﬂg missionary

Practice does not search for eternal orders in the existing reality of

the world but for possibilities that exist in

the world in the direction

of the promised future.

The call to obedient

molding of the world would

have no object if this world were immutable.

The man who is summoned by

the divine promise to the fransforming of the

world falls outside the

sphere of Greek cosmic thinking.

He has here

"no continuing city," for

he seeks '"the coming city of God."

For him, the world can be changed by

the God of his hope and to that extent also by the obedience to which

this hope moves him,

His experience and his expectation of history is

both opened up and tied down by the future promises of the God hé

believes,

We can speak of "the tradition of the eschatological hope."

Christian proclamation begins with the raising of the crucified Christ

and his exultation to be Lord of the coming world of God.

Christian

proclamation is not a tradition of wisdom and truth in doctrinal

principles nor is it a tradition of ways and means of living according

to the law. It is the announcing, revealing, and publishing of aﬁ

eschatological event.

Christian proclamation shares with the 01d

Testament tradition its orientation toward the future.

e

The new aspect in the Christian proclamation, however, lies in

its universal mission to all peoples.

Christian "tradition" is mission

3

101

that moves forward and outward.

It does not ride the line of the

generations from father to son but spreads outward to all men.

It is

not through birth, but through rebirth, that faith is propagated. The

Christian mission has no cause to enter into an alliance wi;h roman-

ticist nihilism against tﬁe revélutionary progressiveness of the modern

age and to present its own tradition as a haven of traditionalism for a

contemporary world now grown uncertain and weary of hoping.

We cannot

turn our backs on the open horizons of modern history and return to

perpetual orders’ and everlasting traditions.

We must take these

horizons up into the eschatological horizon of the resurrection and

thereby disclose to modern'history its trug historic character.

Exodus Church

Modern society and the cult of the absolute.

We now raise

the question

of the concrete form assumed by a live eschatological hope

in modern -

society.,

Here the title "Exodus Church" is meant to focus

attention on

the reality of ‘Christianity asrthat of the '"pilgrim people

of God" as

to him

described in.the Epistle go the Hebrews: 'Let us go forth

outside the camp, bearing abuse for him.

For here we have

no lasting

city, but we seek the city which is to come."33 What does

this mean for

the social shape of Christianity in modern society and for the task it

has there to fulfill in the field of social ethics?

When we speak of

"church" and "Christianity" we mean the whole body of believers iﬁ'every

aspect of their 1lives. Christianity must contingally présent itself in

the weekday obedience and the worldly callings of Christians and in

33Hebrews 13:13-14.

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102

their social roles as wgll as be the company that gathers around the

word and sacrament in divine woréhip.

The weekday obedience has receded unduly into the background in

the movements of the modern evangelical cburch towards reform.

From the

standpoint of sociology this is undefstandable,

but ffom the standpoint

of theology it is unintelligible.

It is precisely at this point where

it must be decided whether Christians can become an accommodating group

or whether their existence within the horizon of eschatological hope

makes them resist accommodation and their presence has something

peculiar to say to the world.

By "modern societyh

we mean the society that has eétablished

itself with the rise of the modern industrial system,

This society

considers itself neutral.towafd matters of religion and questions of

value.

Modern society hag emancipated itself from the classical concept

of religion.

From the days of the Emperor Constantine and until farr

into the nineteenth century, the Christian church possessed a clearly

defined character in public social life.

The Christian faith had become

the religion of society.

Modern society, however, acquired its nature

center.

and its power precisely through its emancipation from this religious

This society,

in contradis;inction to all previous societies,

restricts itself to such social relationships as bind individuals

labor.

together in the satisfying of their needs by means of their dividgd

Everything else that makes up a man's life--culture

s religion,

tradition, nationality, morals, etc,

--is excluded from the necessary

social relationships and left to each man's individual freedom.

The Christian church has lost the character of cultus publicus

to which it had been accustomed for more than a thousand yeérs.

It

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103

became something which in its religious forms it never was and which,

from a theological standpoint based on the New Testament, it can never

seek to be, namely, a cultus érivatus. The cult of the Absoiute is no

longer necessary for the integration of society.

Even though the church

no longer has to represent the highest goal of society, it can be

assigned other roles in which it can be effective.

This allows the

church infinite possibilities of variation.

Religion as the ;ult of the new subjectivity. The primary concepti@n of

religion in modern society assigns to religion the saving and preserving

of personal, individual, and private humanity.

"Islands of meaning" are

sought in a world which, while it is certainly not meaningless, is

nevertheless nonhuman. As a rgsult of the fact that al} things and

conditions can be manufactured by dint of technique and organization,

the divine in the sense of the transcendent has disappeared from the

world of nature, history, and society.

The world no longer offers man a

home and an ab?ding shelter. The world is surrendered to the reason of

man. Our '"neighbor" comes on the scene onlf in personal encounter but

not in his social reality.

It is the man within arm's length or at our

door who is our neighbor but not man as he appears in the soc;al‘and

juridicial order.

A cultural saving of humanity by means of cultivating and

deepening our subjectivity in constant metaphysical reflection, in

art

and religion, is romanticist escapism as long as social conditions

are

not changed.

A theology which settles faith in the "existence" of

the

individual is a theology which from the viewpoint of sociological

science stands at the very place to which society has banished the

cultus privatus in order to emancipate itseif from it.

104

Religion as the cult of co~humanity,

The second role in which modern

society expects religion to be effective consists in the transcendent

determination of co-humanity as community.

Since the beginning of the

industrial revolution the romanticist reaction to the conditions that

seem to rob man of his humanity has clung again and again, and in ever

new forms, to the idea of "community." This ideé of coﬁmunity, which is

held to promise the saving of culture from technical civilization, has

its origins in romanticism.

It is found in the Communist Manifesto as

the revolution's goal in a "free association of free individuals."

The

idea of community is found with sociaily critical and socially thera-

peutic intent also in Roman.Catholic social teéching. However, in the

course of ghe progress of industrial society this ideal of community has

also lost its revolutionary power and been integrated into the indus-

trial system.

In the circle of his friends, his intimate colleagues,

neighbors and children, at home, in the choral society, and in the local

community, it is as if man's businesslike and inhuman outlook were

suddenly blown away.

Through small groups the church can have its place

and carry out its function.

Here it can become a refuge of the inner

life, away from the supposedly "soulless" world of affaifs,

Conditions

in the vast industrial complexes transcend our intellectual range and

can no longer be mastered morally.

Religion as the cult of the institution.

A third role in which modern

society expects the Christian religion to be effective is, surprisingly

enough, once more to be found today in the institution with all it

involves in the way of officialdom agd official claims. Industrial_

105

society in the highly industrialized countries is today again consolif

dating itself in new institutions.

This institutionélizing, however,

brings about at the same time by an inner logic the suspepsion of the

question of meaning.

The Christian religion is left alone and unopposed

onsthelsfiilolidioiE ideologies and world views.

Modern man is prepared to

delegate to the church as an institution the problems fegarding his own

believing decision and leave ;he detailed questions td theological

specialists,

If Christianity, according to the will of him in whom it

believes and in whom it hopes, is to be different and to serve a

different purpose, then it.must address itself to no less a task than

that of brgaking out of these socially fixed roles.

It must then

display a kind of conduct which is not in accordance with these.

This

is the conduct which is impqsed on every Christian and every Christian

minister.

If the God who called them to life should expect of them

something other than what modern industrial society expects and requires

of them,

then Christians must venture an exodus and regard their social

roles as a new Babylonian exile,

It is achieved by breaking through

social stagnation.

Hope alone keeps life--including public, social

life--flowing and free.

Christianity within the horizon of the expectation of the kingdoh of

God.

Christianity has its essence and its goal not in itself and not in

its own existence.

fIEts li§es from something and existslfOr something

which reaches far beyond itself,

The risen Christ calls, sends,

Justifies, and sanctifies men and in so doing gathers, calls, and sends

them into his eschatological future for the world.

As the promise of

106

an eschatological and universal future, the word of God points beyond

itself, forward to coming events and outward into the breadth of the

world to which the promised coming events are coming.

The word of God

is itself an eschatological gift.

In it the hidden future of God for

the world is already present.

It is present in the form of promise and

awakened hope.

Baptism, too, is "ahead of itself."

In baptizing men into the

past death of Christ, it seals men for the future of the kingdom that is

being brought by the risen Christ.

Likewise, the Lord's Supper is not

to be regarded in terms of ﬁystery and cult but‘eschgtologically. The

congregation at the Table is not in possession of the sacral presence of

the Absolute but is a waiting, expectant congregation seeking communion

with the coming Lord.

The Christian church which follows Christ's mission to the world

is engaged also in following Christ's service to the world.

Its

existence is completely bound to the fulfilling of its service.

For

this reason it is nothing in itself, but all that it is, it is in

existing for others.

The Christian church is not to serve mankind in

order that this world may remain what it is but in order that it may

transform itself and become what it is promised to be.

It»aims at

reconciliation with God, at forgiveness of sins, and abolition of

godlessness.,

But salvation must also be understood as shaiom in the 01d

Testament sense. This does not mean merely salvation 9f the soul,

individual rescue from the evil world, comfort for the tfoubled

conscience but also the realizatiog of the eschatological hope of

Justice, the humanizing of man, the soctalizing of humanity, and peace

for all creation.

107

The calling of Christians in society.

The coming lo#dship of the risep

Christ cannot be merely hoped for and awaited.

The life of the body,

including also social and public life, is expected as a sacrifice in

day-to-day obedience (Romans 12:1-2),

The hope of the gospel has a

polemic and liberating relation not 6nly to the religi?ns and ideologies

of men but still more to the practical life of men and to the

relationships in which this iife is lived.

The Reformers' rediscovery of the "universal priesthood of all

believers"

made'it plan that the call of the gospel is issued‘to every

man.

Everyone who believes and hopes is called and has to offer his

life in the service of God.

The call according to the New Testament is

once for all,

irrevocable and immutable, and.has its eschatological goal

in the hope to which God callé us.

Our callings, however, are historic,

changing, changeable, temporally limited

» and therefore to be shaped in

the process of being accepted in terms of cail, hope, and 1love.

This

world is not the heaven of self-

to be in Idealism.

realization, as it was said

This world is not the hell of self-estrangement,

as it is

world is

said to be in romanticist and existentialist writing. The

not yet finished, but is understood as engaged in a

history.

It is therefore the world of possibilities, the world in

which we

peace.

can serve the future, promised truth and righteousness and

This is an age of dias

pora, of sowing in hope, of self-

surrender and sacrifice,

for it is an age which stands within the

horizon of a new future.

Thus self-expenditure in this world, day-

to-day love in hope,

becomes possible and becomes human within that

horizon of expectatio

n which transcends this world.

The glory of

self-realization and the misery of self-

estrangement alike arise

from hopelessness in a world of lost hor

izons.

To disclose to it

the horizon of the future of the crucified Chris

Christian Church. 3%

t'is the task of the

34Moltmann, pr 3381,

.

Chapter 6

DEVELOPMENTS IN MOLTMANN'S THEOLOGY ACCORDING TO LATER BOOKS,

ESSAYS, AND LECTURES

Moltmann's major work is Theology of Hope. This book brought

him to the attention of the theological world.

Since then he has

written several other books and essays.,

He has also become a popular

lecturer,

We include here a digest of his second most important book,

The Crucified God

» and a brief summary of his book on anthropology, Man,

We call attention to, and ﬁake some brief comments also on,

two collec-

tions of essays and lectures, Religion,

Revolution and the Future and

The Experiment Hope.

"THE CRUCIFIED GOD"

Moltmann in this book stresses the theology of the cross. This

theology began ‘with Paul, leaped forward to Luther who gave it explicit

expression, and is present today in the persecuted churches of the poor

and the oppressed.

Taking seriously the theology of the cross means to

go beyond a concern for personal salvation and inquire about the liber-

ation of man in the demonic crisis of society.

It means to take

seriously the claims of Reformation theology to criticize and reform.

Moltmann feels this is the reverse side of the Christian theology of

hope,

whose starting point is in the resurrection of Christ.l He

lJ{irgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, R. A. Wilson and John

%

Bowden, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 3-5.

108

109

intgnds to make the theology of hope more concrete by stressing the

theology of the cross.

The Identity and Relevance of

Faith

Moltmann stresses the need for the church to change in order to

exist for the humanity of man in changed circumstance§; He uses the

term "oriticali political theology'" to emphasize having the church spend

itself for others.

It will be necessary for Christians to have the

courage to be different and to identify with the cross of Christ. This

will bring contradiction, resistance, and opposition.

Personal, inner change without a change in circumstances and

structures is an idealist illusion

» as though man were only a soul

and not a body as well.

But a change in external circumstances

without inner renewal is a materialist illusion, as though man were

only a product of his social circumstances and nothing else.

Christian identification with the crucified Christ means soli-

darity with the sufferings of the poor and the misery of both the

oppressed and the oppressors.

This makes a theology of the cross a

practical theory.

The cross of Christ represents not merely the death

of Jesus but also God's identificationAwith the sufferings of the world.

The Resistance of the Cross

against its Interpretations

There has always been resistance to the cross by making it a

symbol of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

It is the really

irreligious thing in the Christian faith. Even the disc?ples all fled

from their master's cross.

Roman humanism 1ookeq on it as unrespectable

and perverse. The crux of the cri;icism of Feuerbach and Freud is the

2Moltmann, Pl 235

110

Cross.

Radical Christian faith, however, can only mean committing

oneself without reserve to the "crucified God."

There is nothiﬁg so

scandalous and unpopular as theb"religion of the cross,"

even among

"coreligionists" in one's own circle.

It is a symbol which leads out of

the church into fellowship with the oppressed and abandoned. On the

other hand, it is the symbol which calls the oppressed'and godless into

the church and through the church into fellowship with the crucified

God.

The church has produced "the cult of the cross,"

making ChrisF

present in the sacrifice of the mass.

The church suppressed pagan

sacrificial actions and cultic drama but replace& them with its own

cult. Jesgs died "once for all."

His death is not a sacrifice that can

be repeated.

Cultic religién'must be replaced by the spreading of the

word of the cross and the practical following of Jesus.

Through his own

abandonment on the cross Jesus brihgs God to those who are abandoned by

God

Through his suffering he brings salvation to those who suffer.

Through his death he brings eternal life to those who are dying. The

church has abused the theology of the cross in behalf of those who cause

suffering.

Too often peasants, Indians, and black slaves have been

called upon by represen;atives of thg dominant religion to accept their

sufferings as "their cross" and not rebel against them.3 Jesus'

sufferings and humiliation came from his preaching of a kingdém of

sinners and tax

unconditional grace and from his table-fellowship with "

coliectors."

By becoming a "friend of sinners apd tax collectors" he

made their enemies his enemies.

3Moltmann, Pt 49.

111

Questions about Jesus

Christian faith basically lives only as a profession of faith in

Jesus.

Wherever Jesus is acknowledged as the Christ of God there

Christian faith is to be found.

But who was Jesus of Nazareth?

The

more his divinity was emphasized the more difficult it became to demon-

strate that God was of one substance with Jesus of Nazéreth.

TS

possible to interpret Jesus as the perfect man to those who by tradition

are already Christians but hardly to pagans and post-Christian atheists.

Modern Jesuology cannot reconéile the resurrection with e&ents in the

physical world and finds it impossible to take into account Jesus'

abandonment by God.

Therefore attention is turned away from his death

and céncen;rated on his life and preaching.

The events which took'place around Jesus and at.his word are

signs of the messianic age.

His office is upheld by the future of the

kingdom which is inaugurated in and around him.

Thevquestion about

Christ is one of being questioned rather than of questioning.

He asks

the question, "Who do you say that I am?" Tﬁis

question aroused

memories of figures in the past like Moses, the

prophets, and the

Baptist.

It aroused the expectation of Israel.

We should let Jesus

change and correct our ideas about God and man.

By confessihg Jeéus as

the Christ,

faith also confesses that his future is real.

It antici-

pates the future in which Jesus is proclaimed worthy as the Lamb that

was slain% and as the time when

"God will wipe away every tear from

their eyes.'?

The Historical TrigI of Jesus

4Revelatlo

R evelation 7:17.

sl

In this chapter Moltmann attempts to understand Christ in the

light of his life and ministry.

By "trial" he does not mean simply his

appearance before the Sanhedrin or Pilate but his struggle for the truth

of God in which he was a witness and his trial in the judgment of God in

which his witnesses speak up on his behalf.

The crucified Christ is the

key for all the divine secrets of Christian theology.

His preaching was

eschatological preaching like that of Paul. Jesus preached the kingdom

In the one case the

of God; Paul preached the righteousness of God.

future is just beginning and in the other case it has already begun.

Jesus preached the traditions of contemporary Judaism.

His announcehent

of the kingdom of God was so novel it led to his crucifixion.

The

content of his preaching also showed this change:

he proclaimed the

righteousne;s of God as the law of grace. His preaching was tied to his

own person and with his hour, and his hour with the hour of his kingdom.

The historical and hermeneutic question is how Jesus who

preached became Christ who is preached.

The basic christological

question is how.the dead Jesus became the living; the crucified, the

This eschatological

resurrected; and the humiliated, the exalted.

mystery lies in the faithfulness of God who manifests himself to be the

same in the abandonment and in the resurrection of Jesus.

Scarcely any historian now doubts that Jesus of Nazareth lived

at the beginning of our era.

The question of the meaning of his death

His life and death are accessible

on the cross, however, remains open.

to us in the sources only in the context of the interpretations in which

his death was understood and recounted.

His death cannot be understood

without his life. His life cannot.be understood without the one for

whom he lived, his God and Father, and the gospel of the kingdom fqr the

113

poor for which he lived.

Jesus was accused of blasphemy because in his

preaching he put himself above Moses, claimed the right to forgive sins,

and proclaimed the kingdom of God open to those outside the Law--those

justified by grace.

Through his own poverty, lowliness, and abandonment

the righteousness and grace of God comes to the poor,

lowly, and

abandoned.

His execution must be seen as a necessary consequence of his

conflict with the law.

As a result, the theological trial of Jesus

after Easter turns on the question of righteousness.

It is a contest

between gospel and law,

righteousness by faith and by works, énd between

the justification oflthe godless and the justification of the righteous.

Jesus' proclamation of God'

s law of grace affected not only the Phar-

isees and ?ealots but also the cultic and political religious founda-

tions of the Pax Romana and the archaic conceptions of righteoushess

held by all men.

Socrates and Zealot,

Stoic, and Christian martyrs died calmly.

Jesus'

death was different.® e need to see his death not only in

relation to human authorities but also in relation to his God and

Father.

Jesus died with the signs and expressions of a profound

abandonment by God.

Anyone who lived in such direct fellowship with

God could not regard his being handed over to death on the cross as a

human misunderstanding but was bound to experience it as rejection by

the very God whom he had dared to call "my Father." This made it the

torment of hell.

In the theological context of what Jesus preached he

must have felt that the deity of God was at stakg as thoﬁgh he were

crying out, "My God, why hast thou_forsaken thyself?"

"The cross of the

6See Hebrews 5:7, Mark 15:37, Psalm 22:1, and Mark 15:34.

114

Son divides God from God to the utmost degree of enmity and distinction.

The resurrection of the Son abandoned by God unites God with God in the

most intimate fellowship."7’

The Eschatological Trial of Jesus

In this chapter Moltmann attempts to achieve an understanding of

Jesus in the light of the eschatological faith which proclaims his

resurrection and so proclaims him as the Christ. .The risen Christ s

the historical apd crucified Jesus and vice versa.

The union of Jesus

with God and of God with Jesus was constituted for primitive Chris-

tianity by that eventvwhich it originally.and rightly called "

the resur-

rection of Jesus."S Jesus' resurrection from.the dead was never

regarded as a private and isolated miracle for his authentication but as

the beginning of the general resurrection of the dead

, ;s the beginning

of the end of history in the midst of history.

In this senselit was the

beginning of the eschatological transformation of the world by its

creator.

Jesus' historical crucifixion was, therefore, understood as

.

the eschatological event of judgment and his resurrection as a hidden

anticipation of the eschatological kingdom of glory in which the dead

will be raised.

So in the history of the unrighteous world there are

already anticipatory revelations of his future.

Easter faith can never mean that the dead Jesus returned to this

life, which leads to death.

Lazarus, who was raised by Christ, died

again.

The symbol of "resurrection of the dead" means a qualitatively

new life which no longer knows death and therefore cannot be a contin-

7Moltmann, P 1520

8Note especially Romans 10:6 and I Corinthians 15:1.

»

115

uation of this mortal life.

Resurrection life is not a further life

after death, whether in the soul or the spirit, in children or in

reputation.

It means the annihilation of death in the victory of the

new, eternal life, as Paul declares in I Corinthians 15:55,

The new

wofla of the righteousness and presence of God has already dawned in

this one person in the midst of our history of death.

""Whereas Jewish

apocalyptic says that men should wait for 'the resurrection of the

dead,’

Easter faith says that men should believe in 'the resurrection of

Jesus from the dead.'"®

Early Christians understood ;he resurrection as a preparatory

and preliminary action of God in Jesus

for the good of themselves and

the world.,

His resurrection qualifies

the one who has been crucified as

the Christ and his suffering and death as a saving event for us and for

many .

God himself was active with his

own being in the dying Jesus.

He

suffered with him.

God suffered in Jesus, God himself died in Jesus;,

for us.

God is on the cross of Jesus

Y"for us.”

Through that he becomes

God and Father ‘of the godless and the

godforsaken.

The true God is

therefore not recognized by his power

and glory in the world but thrbugh

his helplessness and his death on the

scandal of the cross of Jesus.

Moltmann says,

"For Christ's sake I am an atheist in respect to the gods

of the world and world history, the Caesars aﬁd the political demigods

who follow them."10

The Crucified God

Moltmann goes on to develop the consequences of this theology.

He feels that without nej insight into the Christian faith Christianity

9Moltmann, prg il

lOMoltﬁiann, p. 195.

3

116

will not achieve any public eredibility in the human and social problems

of our divided world. The '"death of God" theology has compelled theo-

logians to begin with christology and so speak of God in relation to

Jesus.

A trinitarian approach to the death of Jesus allows us to affirm

that the Father suffers with him on the cross but not in the same way.

When the crucified Jesus is called the "image of the invisible God" it

is meant that this is God, and God is like this.

God is not more

glorious than he is in his self-surrender; Jesus' death cannot be

understood "as the death of God" but only as death in God.

The origin

of Christian theology is only the death on the cross in God and God in

Jesus' death. Moltmanq says that most previous statements about ''the

death of Goq" have lacked the trinitarian dimension. With the Christian

message of the cross of Christ SOmethiﬁg new and strangé has entered the

metaphysical world. Faith must think of the suffering of Christ as the

power of God and the death of Christ as God's potentiality.

Conversely,

it must think of freedom from suffering and death as a possibility for

man.

No Christfan eschatology is possible without the knowledge of the

God who creates from nothing and raises the crucified Christ.

Metaphysical atheism sees an unjust and absurd world of trium-

phant evil and suffering without seeing the countenancg of a God. It

says belief in the devil is more plausible than belief in God.

The peak

of metaphysical rebellion against the God who cannot die is a freely-

chosen death, suicide.

A God who 1is incapable of suffgring is a being

who cannot love either

He is a loveless, uninvo;ved beihg. Protest

atheism will arrive at

its own trugh if it recognizes man--erring,

loving, and suffering,

unrighteous and protesting against injustice--and

sees that in his human

experiences he is greater than all gods and

117

idols.

A radical theology of the cross cannot give any theistic answer

to the question of the dying Christ.

Nor can it give an atheistic

answer.

For Christian theology, God and suffering are no longer contra-

dictions, as in theism and atheism, but God's being is in suffering and

suffering is in God's being itself because God is love.

Moltmann feels that misunderstanding of the crucified Christ

stems from a weakly Christianized monotheism which so many Christians

hold.

This general religious monotheism, he feels, is a permanent

occasion for protest atheism.

The doctrine of the Trinity became

isolated speculation and a mere decoration'forvdogmatics after the

Middle Ages.

The theological concept for the perception of the crucified

Christ 'is the doctrine of the Trinity.

The material principle of

the doctrine of the Trinity is the cross of Christ.- The formal

principle of knowledge of the cross is the doctrine of the

Trinity.

The suffering and dying of the Sén, forsaken by the Father, is a

different kind of suffering from the suffering of the Father in the

death of his Son.

To understand what happened between Jesus and his God

and Father on the cross it is necessary to talk in trinitarian terms.

The grief of the Father here is just as important as the death of the

Son

The Fatherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlesshess of the

Father.

The deep community of will between Jesus and his God and Father

is expressed precisely at the point of their deepest separation, in the

accursed death of Jesus on the cross.

The doctrine of the Trinity

becomes a shorter version of the passion narratiye of Chfist.

The relationships in the T;inity between Father and Son are not

llMoltmann, Pp. 240-241.

118

fixed in static terms once and for all but are a living history.

It

begins with the sending and delivering up of the Son,-coﬁtinues with his

resurrection and the transference of the rule of God to him.

It only

ends when the Son hands over this rule to the Father.

There is no

loneliness and no rejection which he has not taken to himself and

assumed in the cross of Jesus.

The godforsaken and rejécted man can

accept himself when he comes to know the crqcified God who is with him

and has already accepted him.

v

Ways towards the Psychological

Liberation of Man

Here Moltmann asks the question, "Who is man in the face of the

rejected Sqn’of Man who was raised up in the freedom of God?" This

leads into a dialogue with the anthropological science which is also

concerned with the therapy of sick men.

Here he first refers to the

psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud whose criticism of religion is important

for critical theology.

We need a psychological hermeneutics of the word

of the cross. ‘The theology of Paul and the Reformation speaks of the

liberation of man by faith from the obsession of works.

Psychological

hermeneutics discovers a point of correspondence to this obsession in

the obsessive ideas and actions of sick people and seeks to free them

for love and for unrestrained sympathy with life.

Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis in the.therapy of sick

individuals. Although he was very careful in transfe:ripg the patterns

of individual illnesses to society, he kept their determining conditions

under constant investigation.

This caution is less detectable in some

of his followers.

The transference of patterns of individual illnesses

to society as a whole is no more meaningful than the transference of a

»

119

critique of society to an individual case.

There is no thregt to man which arouses more ﬁostility than to

threaten his idols or those of his group.

People like himself support

him,

He needs this support to suppress his anxiety.

People who differ

from him disturb him because they question his idols and laws,

his

world.

The crucified ng renounces the privileges of An idol. I

n

becoming weak, impotent,

vulnerable, and mortal, he frees man from the

quest for powerful idols and protective gompulsions and makes him ready

to accept his humanity, his freedom, and his mortality.

Man can open

himself to suffering and love.

Ways towards the Political

Liberatiqn of Mankind

In this chapter Moltmann says psychological hermeneutics of 1life

need to be supplemented by a corresponding political hermeneutics. What

are the economic, social

» and political consequences of the gospel of

the Son of Man who was crucified as a "rebel'?

The freedom of faith is

lived out in political freedom.

Political hermeneutics calls especially

for dialogue with socialist, democratic, humanistic, and antiracist

movements,

In the democratic movement the church can discover a parable

of its own brotherly christocracy and conversely offer itself in its

ecumenicai fellowship as a model for correspondences in social politics

and international politics.

Imperialistic religions are completely monotheistic in order to

lend religious support to the central authority.

Patriotic religions

are for the most part polytheistic because each fatherland has its

special gods.

In socialism the political religions tend towards

pantheistic materialism.

Capitalism in turn displays primitive forms of

120

fetishism, involving gold and possessions,

Early Christianity was persecuted as godless and hostile to the

state by both the Roman authorities and by pagan philosophers.

Christian apologists were therefore all the more zealously concerned to

rob these charges of their force and'to present the Christian religion

as the religion which truly sustained the state,

Recollection of the

fate of the crucified Christ and his followers retreated into the back-

ground.

Christian theology must adopt a critical attitudg towards

political religions in society and in the churches.

It must seek to

demythologize state and society.

The crucified God is a stateless and

classless God.

This does not mean that he is an unpolitical God. He is

the God of the poor, the oppressed, and the humiliated.

Just as there are psychological pattern formations which make

men ill, so too there are hopeless economic, social

, and political

pattern formations which drive life toward death.

Liberation must be

sought in all these areas in every specific situation.

The cause of

liberation is not established but is constantly in process and is only

comprehended by participatory, dialectical thought.

"MAN"

Under this titlel2 Moltmann asks, "What is man?"

Man is here

compared with animals, with other men, and with God.

He writes,

"Christian anthropology is an anthropology of the crucified Lord: it is

in relation to this 'Son of Man'

that man recognizes his truth and first

l2Jl'1'rgen Moltmann

» Man, Johﬁ Sturdy, trans. (Philadelphia:

Fortress Press, 1974).

121

becomes true man."l3 According to one reviewer,

He examines a variety of secular definitions and holds each one

in turn up to the light of the love of the crucified Christ.

Looking at answers proposed by biological, cultural, religious, and

Christian/anthropolgy, Moltmann finds in the first three categories

valid, if limited, answers, and in the context of these disciplines

he underscores man as a being whose very nature drives him to a

constant,

future-oriented redefinition and completion of himself

Moltmann challenges the established church as well as secular

definitions of man.

Man no longer lives so much in the realm of nature but

increasingly in the surroundings of his own works, organizations, and

techniques.

In the course of his release from the uncomprehended

powers of nature, man comes at once into a new dependence upon his own

works and organizations.

Technical progress is regarded as identicail

with human progress.

It is believed that everything that can be done

also should be done, just because it is technically possible to do it.

Finally, it is believed that maximum technical efficiency and unlimited

economic, technical, and military growth in strength are values in

themselves.

Following the crucified Jesus creates the distance of Christians

from this

passing world" which one can only have

as if one had it not

"

(I Corinthians 7:29)

Following the crucified Jesus also creates the

strength for the incarnation of love in those possibilities which one

has or finds.

This love grips this life as if it were everything and

yet at the same time knows that that which is is not all there is.

It

finds God in the concrete, and yet it knows that everything concrete is

transcended by God

13Moltman, Man p, 20

l4Marianna Forde, "Man," Dlalog, Vol. 14, No. 4, Fall 1975,

ppis 3113198

1522

At the heart of the book lies an excellent dialog with Marxismi

These anthro-

plus a critique of other contemporary "images of man."

pologies contain models of the humanity after which men inquire in their

experience of inhumanity.

They also offer doctrines of salvation.

Moltmann sees no point in exclu@ing the evaluations, norms, and

doctrines of salvation from anthropology as many scholars do.

In his final chapter Moltmann argues that God is the criticism

of man. This stands in opposition to the basis of the modern anthro-

pocentric understanding of the world, according to which man is the

criterion of God.

Only through knowledge of God can man break through

the "images'" of himself, which he uses for self-divinization, and become

truly humaq.

Man becomes human when he is put in a position to leave his

self-deifications and his worship of idois.

Who puts him in this

position?

The recognition that God has made our fate and our guilt his

own in the way of Jesus, the recognition that the future of man has

already begun in the crucified Son of Man.

He reconciles man and

liberates him from pride and énxiety, which have always been the sources

off idolatry.

This freedom we call faith.

Man can give himself up to this unredeemed world with love,

humility, and patience without having to be afraid of losing himself,

and without the)compulsion of having to realize himself. Here is where

the distinctive nature of the Christian possibility for man lies. Life

in hope means being able to love and being able to love in particular

the life which is unloved and rejected.

Reconciliation and hope are

spread by concrete, personal, and social love.

The deepest possibil-

ities for human man in an inhuman world lie ultimately in a creative,

123

reconciling, and hoping love.

ESSAYS AND LECTURES

"Religion, Revolution and the

Future"l>

This volume consists of a groﬁp of essays that were delivered in

the United States by Jurgen Moltmann from September 1967 to April 1968.

During this time he was Visiting Professor of Systematic Theology at

Duke Divinity Scﬁool. He traveled to almost every major region of the

nation and visited many of the large academic and urban centers.

This

book comprises a portion oflthe lectures and essays yith which Professor

Moltmann introduced himself and his thought to the American continent.

They were written for many different occasions but all share the common,

practical intent of re-Christianizing religion in terms of revolution

andlthe future.

He shows genuine awareness of the intellectual, social,

and political conditions of American society.

Space w?ll not permit us to comment on each of these lectures.

However, it may be of interest to list the titles so that the reader can

ascertain the scope of Moltmann's cogcern and have some direction in

discovering treatment of areas that migﬁt be of personal inte?est. The

ten chapters are entitled: What Ié "New" in Christianity: The Category

"Novum" in Christian Theology; Religion, Revolution and the Future; The

Revolution of Freedom:

Christians and Marxists Struggle for Freedom;

Toward a Political Hermeneutic of the Gospel; New Frontiers of Chris-

tianity in Industrial Society; God in Revolution; Hope and Confidence

15Jﬂrgen Moltmann, Religion, Revolution, and the Future,

M. Douglas Meeks, trans. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969). .

124

A Conversation with Ernst Bloch; The Future as New Paradigm of

Transcendence; and Hope and History.

"The Experiment Hope"16

This new book contains essayslby Jﬂrgen Moltmann published ten

years after the German publication of Theology of Hope.

0f the

countless movements appearing in the 1960's, Moltmann's theology is one

of the very few still relevant to the practice of Christians in the

world.

Regarding this new volume of essays the translator says:

The lasting value of the essays collected here is the

development of Moltmann's "theology of hope" (1) in a new historical

and social situation and (2) according to .the internal fermenting of

its subject matter.

From the beginning Moltmann viewed his theology

as experimental.

He didn't mean this in the sense that theology

should try something new every time the winds change.

He was rather

proposing that theology find a practical correspondence to the fund-

amentally experimental relationship of God with the world and of the

Christian mission with history.

"Experiment," in this sense,

belongs to the language of promise and covenant.

It points to a

reality in which all things are open to the future and on the move

and whose final transformation is already expected and provisionally

embodied in the present.

In the midst of God's experiment with his

creation and Christianity's experiment with the other history-making

events of human history only one thing is utterly certain and beyond

all doubt:

the faithfulness of God to himself and to his Word of

promise.

In continuity with the promissory traditions of the Bible,

such a theological perspective is able to live through time

precisely because it does not adapt to the times.

Some of the themes in these essays may at first seem far removed

~

or even contradictory to the theology of hope.

These new phases of the

experiment of hope do not represent a refusal or even a correction of

the theology of hope as much as a development of certain more or less

latent elements of the theology of hope.

They can be viewed as

16J3rgen Moltmann, The Expériment Hope, M. Douglas Meeks, trans.

(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975).

l7Moltmann, Pp. ix-x.

»

125

connecting links between Moltmann's two major books, Theology of Hope

and The Crucified God.

One can see here the developmént of a theology

of the process of the Spirit and the church.

The present collection of

writings shows the growth of Moltmann's thought in the direction of a

trinitarian theology which is focused in the theology of the cross and

aims at a "pathic" anthropology.

We have space here only to give the reader the range of topics

treated by Moltmann.

We do this by listing the chapter titles which are

quite descriptive of the material covered:

Christian Theology and Its

Problems Today; Where There Is Hope, There Is Religion; Ernst Bloch and

Hope without Faith; Introduction to the "Theology of Hope'"; Jewish and

Christian Messianism; The Crucified God and the Apathetic Man;

Dostoevsky and the Hope of Prisoners; Political Theology; The Ethic of

Calvinism; Racism and the Right to Resist; The Theological Basis of

Human Rights and of the Liberation of'Human‘Beings; The Humanity of

Living and Dying; Bringing Peace to a Divided World; and On Hope as an

Experiment: »A Postlude.

Chapter 7

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF MOLTMANN'S THEOLOGY OF HOPE

For me, the reading of Jargen Moltmann's books, lectures, and

essays has been both fascinating and baffling.

He presents a Christian

theology that seems to me to have marvelous possibilities. Much of what

he is saying is intended to be corrective of previous theologies and

understanding of the Christian hope. Moltmann is known as a diaiec—

titian.

He is able to resolve.contradictions like life and death in the

course of his theology.

Sometimes this dialectical presentation is

difficult to follow.

It has been a struggle for me to Fry to understand

this rather complex theology, but certainly the struggle has been

eminently worthwhile.

The writings of this theologian are becoming more

numerous,

We want here, however, to select several aspects of this

theology and reYiew thém, making some comments and raising some

questions.

HIS EMPHASIS ON THE HORIZONTAL

Moltmann, in his writings, stresses the fact that God is out

ahead of us.

He states that the original proclamation of the early

church gradually was replaced by an gmphasié on formalism and personal

salvation.

He remarks from time to time that the Chriétian faith must

be de-privatized, meaning that its emphasis should not be so much on

personal salvation but on moving out into the world and identifying with

126

1827

oppressed and deprived people. Even though this seems to be an attempF

to correct an emphasis of the past, it neglects an embhasis also on the

necessary dimension of one's personal relationship to God.

This "horizontal" approach to the Christian faith parallels

modern process philosophy.

Thgt philosophy emphasizes God ahead of us

so much that it seems to lose sight of the fact that God is also with us

now and that we can be grounded in fellowship and a faith relationship

with him.

There seems to be a downgrading of the vertical dimension in

a believer's life because of the emphasis on the horizontal.

Walter

Capps in his evaluation of hope theology speaks of these two tendencies

as "Religion A," the vertiéal dimension, and "Religion B," the hori-

He Qrites:

zontal dimgnsion.

"Religion A" has cultivated sensitivity to the ‘sort of —

transcendence which is defined in contrast to all things natural.

"Religion B" is trained to look for whatever transcendence there is

in things as they are.

Individual or personal salvation, in the

+

first, derives from the awareness that beyond common human

experience--or beneath, behind, or above it--rests a permanence

whose reality is threatened only by man's failure to recognize it.

In the second, human salvation depends upon corporate resource-

fulness in facing and overcoming both the threat and the reality of

nonpermanence.

Hence, the disposition which moves toward a

transcendent '"otherness" also exhibits particular interest in the

well-being of the individual; frequently it attempts to characterize

the integrated, healthy, or whole personality by means of religious

and devotional terminology.

The second disposition, more often than

not, seems almost willing to forego the priorities placed upon

individual salvation, or to subsume them within a sensibility which

assumes socio-political upheaval, intellectual unrest, and cultural

transformation to be persistent religious necessities.

We mention this emphasis in the theology of hopé because we feel

that both of these aspects of the Christian faith need to be stressed.

They need to be in tension with one another and élso, at times, in

ljalter H. Capps, Time Invades the Cathedral (Philadelphia:

Fortress Press, 1972), pp. 115-116.

128

cooperation with each other. We do not mean to imply that Moltmann is.

=

not aware of this but simply are saying that in his pfesentation this

aspect of the Christian faith seems neglected, and, therefore, it can be

pointed out that it also needs to be fully considered for a well-

balanced theology.

THE USE OF THE FUTURE TENSE

In his book, Theology of Hope, Moltmann begins with an excellent

study of the term "eschatology."

He indicates that in thebpast this has

either been understood to refer only to those things which will come to

pass at the end of history,or it has simply been a kind of appendix to

Moltmann writes:

Christian QOCtrine.

In actual fact, however, eschatology means the doctrine of the

Christian hope, which embraces both the object hoped for and also

the hope inspired by it.

From first to last, and not merely in the

epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and

forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming

the present.

The eschatological is not one element of Christianity,

but it is the medium of Christian faith as such, the key in which

everything in it is set, the glow that suffuses everything here in

the dawn of an expected new day.

Throughout the course of his wfitings Moltmann places so much

stress upon the future that it seems neéessary here, in an analysis of

his theology, to mention that one must not neglect the other feﬁses,

namely, the past and the present. This emphésis causes

S. Paul Schilling, in his review‘of Theology of Hope, to say:

In its concern to correct past errors, the theology of hope is

endangered by a one-sidedness of its own.

The claim that the future

is "the only real problem" in theology is dubious at best.

The

nature of God's past and present action also demands investigation,

2J‘drgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope,

James W. Leitch, transi

(New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 16.

.

129

which can hardly be limited to the implications of that action for

the future.

To use Pauline language, faith and love as well as hope

abide, and while both of them are intimately related to hope neither

can be reduced to it.

The case for hope can be convincingly made

without downgrading other concerns of Christian belief.

Walter Capps has also noted this tendency among the theologians

of hope. He says that since their statements are often dialeqtiéal they

sometimes tend to be one-sidedf

When abstracted from their dialectical counterparts, the conten-

tions of hope theology are often overstressed and one-sided.

For

articulated

example, the Christian faith can simply not be properly

by reference to one time temse exclusively.

The "category" of hope

can never gather together all that must also be said about faith and

love.

And apocalyptic awareness is not the only viable religious

mode.

Furthermore, the New Testament is not an '"apocalyptic book"

exclu

time.

Zively, and cathedrals are not necessarily antithetical to

THE FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH

There is in Moltmann's theology a rather frequent reference to

the church.

These statements often express a justified impatience with

the church.

However, there seems to be a definite necessity for a

development

of ‘the function of the church within the framework of the

theology of

hope.

The reference seems more often to be to believers

rather than

to the institution of the chufch. Surely if the implication

of mission, as theology of hope presents it, is to be implemented, then

a well-organized church will need to carry this task forward.

M. Douglas Meeks has seen the lack of this element in Moltmann's‘

theology of hope:

3"Theology of the Future," S. Paul Schilling, Interpretation,

Vol. XXII, No. 4, October 1968, p. 483.

4Walter H. Capps, pp- 131—132.

130

The crucial question'which should be addressed to the theology

of hope comes at the point of the concept of the church and

What bears or embodies

political theology.

The question is this:

the Christian mission which is set in motion by the eschatological

act of God?

Is there not a necessity of ecclesiological mediation

for a political theology?

From the vantage point of the eschaton there is a tendency in

the theology of hope to assimilate the total reality of the church

to the action of mission.

As a "community of eschatological

salvation,

"

its gathering as well as its sending out must be spoken

of in terms of eschatological expectation (Otto Weber).

The Word

which is proclaimed and the sacraments which are celebrated in the

church do not point to anything within the church but set it on the

way toward what is expected.

The church is nothing within itself;

it exists completely for the reconciliation which is God's shalom,

the realization of the eschatological hope of justice and of the

humanizing of man.

Surely if the vision of the theology of hope for mission on the

part of the churches is to be fulfilled it will require a healthy

church. By_"healthy church" we mean here one that is strong in its

faith-relation to God and in its ministry of the members to each other.

Only in tﬁat way can it effectively carry forward its mission of trans-

forming society with a view to the future hope.

NFED FOR DEVELOPMENT OF TRINITARIAN EMPHASIS

Mol;mann has received criticism for his emphasis upon Chris-

tology to thé exclusion of the place of the Father and the Spirit in the

theology of hope.

It seemed that he gave a great deal of emphasis to

the Father as well as to the Son, but there really has been little in

the way of a treatment of the work of the Holy Spirit in the writings

that were available to me.

Nevertheless, Moltmann stresses the

importance of a trinitarian approach.

M. Douglas Meeks, Origins of the Theology of Hope (Phila-

delphia: Fortress Press, 1974), pp. }60—161.

131

To understand what ‘happened between Jesus and his God and Father

on the cross, it is necessary to talk in trinitarian terms.

The Son

suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son

The grief

of the Father here is just as important as the death of the Son.

The Fatherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the

Father, and if God has constituted himself as the Father of Jesus

Christ

then he also suffers the death of his Fatherhood in the

death of the Son.

Unless this were so, the doctrine of the Trinity

would still have a monotheistic background

Here is a rather typical instance of Moltmann's call for a

trinitarian approach to the suffering, death, and resurrection of

Christ

Nevertheless, he very seldom makes reference to the work of the

Holy Spirit.

It may well be that by this time he is also developing

this aspect of his theology.

We can only hope so and look forward to

that element in this exciting theology.

LACK OF THE NOTE OF CELEBRATION

It has been pointed out by others that much of Moltmann's

theology is rather somber.

My reading has given me the same impression.

True, it deals with death and then with the joyous and certain victory

over death that will come in the future.

However, the whole presen-

tation seems to lack a sense of the joy that springs from this kind of

hope

Harvey Cox puts it well when he writes:

I would like merely to suggest--and not try to devise any

theology about it here--that there is another element in our

contemporary cultural and indeed religious sensibility which is

extremely important, and which both of these movements [theology of

hope and radical theology] have overlooked

That element is the

sense of comic hope

the note of celebration, of mirth, of joy, of

affirmation of life, even of gaiety, even though there does not seem

to be much empirical evidence that would support our gaity or

celebration in the world around us.,

I had a striking experience of this when I accompanied some

6Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, R. A. Wilson and John

Bowden, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), P. 243.

»

132

divinity students to the induction center in Boston for an induction

refusal.

In fact, they are now beginning to call it the induction -

refusal center of Boston.

Previous induction refusals had been very

grim, serious, and scary affairs.

Everyone was scared.

The army

inductors were just as scared as anyone else.

At the last one,

however, a young man who was refusing his induction, got some of his

friends to bring along a rock and roll band, the girlfriends made

some bread and passed out jam, balloons were in evidence, mini-

skirts, and banners, and the whole affair took on the air of a

celebration.

Something changed.

The induction was again refused,

the witness against the war was made, the hope for a better world

without war and without killing was stated.

But, at the same time,

something else was stated which seems to be missing both in the

theology of hope and especially in the radical theology:

a kind of

celebrated affirmation of the flesh, a joy in the here and now which

does not preclude hope and criticism, and suggestion to those at the

induction center and to those involved in the demonstration that

when one is celebrating and kissing and loving the flesh, one does

not burn it with napalm.

I would like to see a theology which is a

rediscovery of the celebrative aspects of life, the goodness of the

flesh, the wonderful gift of joy, and which at the same time does

not become lost in a wallowing in that discovery, but also affirms

our hope for the future.

I think this is possible.

I think there

are traces of it in Moltmann's theology.

traces of it in Moltmann himself.

There are.a lot more

Inclusion of the above quotation leads me to regommend to any

reader who would like several evaluations of Moltmann's theology of hope

to secure The Future of Hope.

In this book Moltmann presents an essay

entitled Theology as Eschatology.

Several American theologians then

respond. The book contains their stateﬁehts that are reactions to

Moltmann's presentation.

Then in the final chapter Moltmann himself

makes a response to what.these Americans have said about his presen-

tation.

This last chapter is entitled Towards the Next Step in the

Dialogue.

This is a valuable volume for anyone who would like to give

further evaluation to the theology of hope.

Moltmann's theology is refreshing and exqiting. He presents God

7Frederick Herzog, ed. The Future of Hope (New York: Herder

and Herder, 1970), pp. 79-80.

133

as the God of hope.

He grounds our Christian hope in the resurrection

of Jesus Christ. He certainly has thought through manj'of the impli-

cations of his basic premises.

I am one of those who is highly appre-

ciative of our access to this theology.

My appreciation stems primarily

from the fact that this is a theology based on the biblical revelation,

that it struggles with some of the major actions of God on behalf of

mankind, and that it suggests to the church specific steps that it needs

to take to engage the world in a transformation of society that is in

keeping with Christian theology.

Chapter 8

HOW A PARISH PASTOR CAN USE MOLTMANN'S THEME OF HOPE IN HIS PREACHING

Christian theology deals with concepts of God. 'Jurgen Molt-

mann's theology does this very commendably.

It is based primarily on

the revelation of God in the Scriptures.

It has much to say to modern

man. The finest.medium of communicating theology to the members of the

church is the sermon.

It is our purpose here to make a beginning in

translating Moltmann's theology into messages that can be given where

the church gathers to worship.

Our first step is to survey Moltmann's

two major Qorks, Theology of Hope and The Crucified God, with the

purpose of finding concepts that offer possibilities for the pastor in

his preaching.

We will summarize some of Moltmann's comments on these

concepts that are useful for sermons under several headings.

As

Moltmann says, .'Sermons belong in a worship service and a living

community."l It is our hope that this effort will lead to some fruitful

preaching where God's people worship,

HOMILETICAL POSSIBILITIES PROVIDED

BY THIS THEOLOGY

The God of Hope

He is a God with future as his essential nature.

‘This is

brought out in the experience of the Exodus and in the prophetic

lJ{irgen Moltmann, The Gospel of Liberation, H. Wayne Pipkin,

trans. (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1973), p. 10.

134

135

writings of Israel.

Moltmann sees him as the God whom we "cannot real;y

have in us or\over us but always before us,

who encouhters\us in his

promises for the future."? We cannot "have"

him but can only await him

in active hope.

The God of the exodus and of the resurrection promises

his presence and nearness to him who follows the path on which he is

sent into the future,

This God is the source of new tﬁings that are to

comes

a new future

His name is a wayfaring name, a name of promise that discloses

» @ name whose truth is experienced in history inasmuch

as his promi:

se discloses its future possibilities.

He is therefore,

as Paul says, the God who raises the dead and calls

into being the

things that are not (Rom. 4:17).

This God is present where we wait

upon his promises in hope and tran

sformation.

When we have a God

who calls into being the things that are not,

then the things that

are not yet, that are future, also become "thinkable"

because they

can be.hoped for.3

God's essence is not his absoluteness but the faithfulness with

which he reveals himself in the history of his promise. His divinity

consists in the constancy of his faithfulness,

He is revealed in the

New Testament as the "God of promise" (Hebrews 1023 Q=139 (UThe

word which reveals God has thus fundamentally the character of promise

and is therefore eschatological in kind,"4

Paul believed that because God has the power to raise the dead

and call into being things that are not (Romans 4:17), the fulfillment of

his promise is possible.

Because God raised Jesus from the dead, the

fulfillment of his promise is certain.

The Person of Christ

In Jesus Christ the God of Israel has revealed himself as the

2Jurgen Moltmann, Theolo

gy of Hope, James W. Leitch, trans. (New

York: Harper & Row, 196508 plali6

°

3Moltmann, pe’ 30,

4Moltmaﬁn, P 143

136

God of all mankind.? The risen Christ Zs the historical and crucified

Jesus,

The first creeds we know of speak of "Jesus the Lord"

(Romans 10:9) and "God who has raised him from the dead" (I Corin-

thians 15:1) in the same breath.

They combine a formula about a person

with a formula about a work.

Primitive Christian recollections of Jesus

were determined from the start by the experience of his resurrection

through God.

As a merely historical person he would long have been

forgotten because his message had alfeady been contradicted by his death

on the cross.

His historical crucifixion was understood as the eschato-

logical event of judgment and his resurrection as a hidden anticipation

of the eschatological kingdom of glory in which the dead will be

raised.6

The Work of the Holy Spirit

The.believer is given not the eternal Spirit of heaven but the

eschatological "earnest of the Spirit, !

This Spirit has raised Christ

from the dead énd will quicken our mortal bodies (Romans 8:11).7

It is the Qork of the Holy Spirit to enable us to enter into the

dialectic of suffering and dying in expéctation of eternal life and

resurrection.

Paul calls him the "life-giving Spirit" who ratsed yp

Christ from the dead, dwells in those who recognize Christ and his

future, and shall quicken our mortal bodies.

The Spirit is a pledge of

Christ's future of universal resurrection and life,

The Spirit gives

5Moltmann, Theology of Hope, p. 141.

6Jlirgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, R. A. Wilson and John

Bowden, trans. (New York: Harper & Row,

1974), pp. 160-163.

162,

7Moltmann, Theology of Hope, p.

»

537

the believer freedom and opens the way to eternal life for him.

He

leads us into the "fellowship of the sufferings of Christ" and into thé

love which exposes itself to death because it is upheld by hope.8

The Second Coming of Christ

Parousia for the Greeks meant the epitome of the presence of

God, the epitome of the présence of being.

The parousia of Christ, however, is conceived in the New

Testament only in categories of expectation, so that it means not

braesentia Christi but adventus Christi, and is not his eternal

presence bringing time to a standstill, but his "coming", as our

Advent hymns say, opening the road to life in time, for the life of

time is hope.

With this understanding the believer does not simply take the

day as it gomes but looks beyond the day to the things which according

to the promise of him who is the creator ex nihilo anq raiser of the

dead are still to come.

The hope for the parousia does not bring time

to a standstill but opens the way for time and sets history in motion.

It does not tone down the pain caused us by the nonexistent but means

the adoption and acceptance of the nonexistent in memory and hope. Hope

makes us ready to bear the "cross of the present." Where in faith and

hope we begin to live in the light éf_the possibilities and promises

of this God, the whole fuilness of life discloses itself as a life of

history and therefore a life to be loved.10 In this perspective we can

have agape, a love for the different, the unworthy, the worthless, the

lost, the transient, and the dead.

The church along with the whole creation groans for its

8Moltmann, Theology of Hope, pp. 211-212.

9Moltmann, oy Sl

lOMoltmann, pp. 32-33.

138

redemption from the powers of annihilation in the future of Christ

(Romans 8).

The imperative of the Pauline call to neﬁ obedience is not

merely a summons to demonstrate the new being in Christ but also the

coming of the Lord to judge and to reign.ll

The raising of Jesus did not complete all that needs to be done,

The end of death's dominion is still ahead.

All opposition to God will

be overcome in that future reality of which Paul says that "God will be

all in all" (I Corinthians 15:28),12

Christian eschatqlogy‘speaks of the future of Christ which

brings man and the world to light.

It is not man's goodness or world

history that brings Christ to light.

He guides time to his day.

"The'

return of Christ dqes not come 'of itself,' like the year 1965, but

comes from himself, when and és God will according to his p):omise."l3

Nowhere in the New Testaﬁent does the

"end of the world" bring about the

second coming of Christ.

The New Testament looks fqrward to the very

reverse, namely, that the second coming of Christ will bring the end of

destruction and persecution in the world, 14

Christian Faith

Belief and obedience are possible in the midst of a world of

contradictions because of our hope.

Faith does not come to its own in be

coming radically unworldly,

but by hopeful outgoing into the world i

t becomes a benefit to the

world.

By accepting the cross, the suffering and the death of

Christ,

by taking upon it the trials and struggles. of obedience

llMoltmann, Theology of Hope, p. 162.

leoltmann, pi= 1637

13Moltmann, p. 194

14Moltmann, The Crucified God, p. 21.

139

in the body and surrendering itself to the pain of love, it

proclaims in the everyday world the future of the resurrection, of

life and the righteousness of God.l5

Christian Joy

According to Moltmann, hope b;ings man happiness in the present.

In fa;t, he calls hope '"the happiness of the present."l_6 It can

pronounce the poor blessed; receive the weary and heavy laden, the

humbled and wronged, the hungry and dying, because it perceives the

parousia for thep.

Expectation makes life good, for in expectation man can accept

his whole present and find joy not only in its joy but also in its

sorrow, happiness not only in its happiness but also in its pain.

Thus hope goes on its way through the midst of happiness and pain,

because in the promises of God it can see a future also for the

transignt, the dying and the dead.l?

Over against this happiness, hopelessness is hell.

The hope

that is staked on the one who can create Qut of nothing becomes the

happiness of the present when it embraces all things in love. It

abandoﬁs nothing to annihilation but brings to light how open all things

are to the possibilities in which they can live and shall live.

What It Means to be Human

It is the Christ event that first gives birth to what can be

theologically described as "man," "true man," "humanity'"--"neither Jew

nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female"f

(Galatians 3:28).

Only when the real, historic and religious differences between

peoples, groups and classes are broken down in the Christ event in

15Moltmann, Theology of Hope, p. 163.

16Moltmann, Pt 1324

17Moltmann, P 32

140

which the sinner is justified, doe

g there come a prospect of what

true humanity can be and will be,l

"True human nature" arises when the truth comes to man and he is

brought into the truth.

Communion with Christ proves to be the way for

man to become man.

Here true human nature emerges and the still hidden

and unfulfilled future of human natufe can be sought. .This is an

openness toward the world and the future which is grounded énd kept

alive by the openness of the revelation of God announced in the event of

the resurrection of Christ.l19

All antﬁropology asks, "What is man?" The question arises in

the face of a divine mission which tfanscends the bdunds of the humanly

possible.

Moses raises this question when he is called (Exodus 3:11).

Isaiah raises the same questign in the face of his call (Isaiah 6:5).

Jeremiah has a similar experience (Jeremiah 1:6).

Self;knowledge comes

about in the face of the call of God which demands the impossible of

man !

This knowledge comes about when man discovers the discrepancy

between the divine mission and his own being.

He learns what he is and

what he should.be, yet cannot of himself be.

Man's question is then

answered with the words, "I will be with you."

It tells a man what he

will be and can be in that history and future to which the migsion leads

him. 20

Law and Promise

Paul was certain that God keeps his promises.

He saw unbelief

in the theology of Torah in which the power of the promiée towards its

18Moltmann, Theolongof Hope, p. 142,

l9Moltmarm, p. 196.

2OMoltmann, Ps 285.

141

fulfillment

is bound to the fulfilling of the law.

If,

however, the promise of God is bound to the law, then the

is invalidated:

promise

it then depends no longer on the power of

the God

who has promised, but on the power of the man who obeys.

But the

wrath of God will be revealed upon all who leave the law

unfulfilled or transgress it.

Hence law and promise are mutually

exclusive, just as glorying in the works of the law and glorying in

the God who justifies sinners and quickens the dead are mutually

exclusive.

The law does not have within it the power of the

promised life and of the resurrection, but exposes life to death and

leads it to death.

The law does not have within it the power of

justification, but the

power to expose sins and to make them

exceeding sinful, 2l

For Paul‘the righteousness of faith and the validation of the

promise in the raising of Christ belong together.

WIEit dis the

adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the

promise is void'" (Romans 4:14).

If, on the contrary, the promise is set

in force by God, then it confgrs righteousness by faith: If it is of

faith, it is by grace.

If we seek to attain the inheritance made to Abrahém by

fulfilling the law, then we will lose this inheritance. Throhgh the‘

promise God showed himself to Abraham as gracious.

"For if the

inheritance is by the law, it is no longer by promise; but God gave it

to Abraham by promise'" (Galatians 3:18).

The true heirs of the promise

and children of Abraham are those who are partakers of the prgmise by

faith in Christ (Galatians 3:29).

The gospel makes the Gentiles

partakers of the promise in Christ (Ephesians 3:6).22 1In the gospel,

the 0ld Testament history of promise finds its fulfillment and its

future.

21Moltmann, Thedlogy of Hope, p. 145-146,

22Moltmann, p. l46.

142

Following Jesus

The idea of following Christ has been neglected in bourgeois

Protestantism because it no longer wished to recognize the suffering

church.

It established itself in a situation of apparent harmony with

the "Christian world." Only when the church and society were in

conflict did anyone have the experience of consciously‘foilowing Christ

and understand once again what it means to be crucified with him.

The

gospels represent faith as a call to follow Jesus.

The call to follow

him is associated with Jesus' proclamation of suffering (Mark 8:31—38).

The call was a direct ;ppeal, "Follow me!" (Mark 1:17; 2:14). It meant

It is a call into

breaking all links with one's family, job, and self.

the future of God which is now beginning in Jesus.

This requires a

break witﬂ the world which is-passing away. Like Christ, we are to be

ready to be rejected by men. He was aiso rejected by God but we suffer

and die in fellowship with Christ.

This makes following Jesus joyful.23

"Christian identification with the crucified Christ means solidarity

with the sufferings of the poor and the misery both of the oppressed and

the oppressors."24

Bearing One's Cross

The cross in the church symbolizes the contradiction which comes

into the church from the God who was crucified "outside."

The symbol of

the cross in the church points to the God who was crucified not between

two candles on an altar but between two thieves in the place of the

23Moltmann, The Crucified God, pp. 54-56.

24Moltmann, D25

143

skull where the outcasts belong, outside the gates of the city.

The

cross is thus a symbol which leads out of the church into the fellowshib

of the oppressed and abandoned.

To make the cross a present reality in our civilization means to

put into practice the experience one has received of being liberated

from fear for oneself; no longer to adapt oneself to this society,

its idols and taboos, its imaginary enemies and fetishes; and in the

name of him who was once the victim of religion, society and the

state to enter into solidarity with the victims of religion, society

and the state at the present day, in the same way as he who was

crucified became their brother and their liberator.

Christian Discipleship

Baptized believers can, in the power of the Spirit who raised

Christ from the dead, take upon themselves the sufferings of disciple-

ship.

In these very sufferings they await the future glory.

Through

their hope £hey here attain to-participatiqn in the life of the

resurrection.

Their everyday life becomes the sphere of true service

to God (Romans 12).26

The coming lordship of Christ goeé beyond waiting. This hope

sets its stamp on life, action, and suffering in society.

The earthly

life in social and public life is expected to be a sacrifice of day-to-

day obedience (Romans 12).

The hope of the gospel has a liberating

relation not only to the religions and ideologies of men, but.even more

to the practical life of men and the relationships in which this life is

lived.27

As the Reformers rediscovered, the "universal priesthood of all

25Moltmann, The Crucified QOd, p. 40.

26Moltmann, Theology of Hope, p. 161.

27Moltmann, pp. 329-330.

144

believers" makes it plain that the call of the gospel is issued to eve?y

man.

Everyone who hopes and believes is called and has to offer his

life in the service of God.

Christians are called to fan out into the

world in their earthly callings to serve human society.28

Christian Atheism

The true God is notbrecognized by his power and glory in the

world but through his helplessness and his death in the scandal of the

cross of Jesus. -The gods of the power and riches of the world and world

history belong on the other side of the cross.

It was in their name

that Jesus was crucified.

If the crucified one is the "Son of God,"

then Pharaoh and Caesar are no longer "God's sons" though this may be

what they call themselves. Welcan use a very pointed e;pression and

say, '"For Christ's sake I am an atheist," that is, an atheist with

respect to the gods of the world and world history, the Caesars and

political demigods who follow them!29

The autﬁority of God is no longer represented by those in high

positions, the powerful, and the rich but by the outcast Son of Man, who

died between two wretches.

Christiap theology must adopt a critical

attitude toward political religions in society and in the chu;ches. The

political theology of the cross must liberate the state from the

political service to idols,30

The Church

Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up wifh reality as it

28Moltmann, Theology of Hope, pp. 330-331.

29Moltmann, The Crucified God, p. 195.

30Moltmann, P 327

3

145

is but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it.

The objection to

hope arises from the religion of humble acquiescence‘to ;he present.

Hope makes the Christian church a constant disturbance in society.

It makes the Church the source of continual new impulses towards

the realization of righteousness, freedom and humanity here in the

light of the promised future that is to come,

This Church is

It

committed to "answer for the hope" that is in it (I Peter 3:15).

is called in question "on account of the hope and resurrection of

the dead! "(Acts 23:6).

Wherever that happens, Christianity embraces

its true nature and becomes a witness of the future of Christ.31

The Mission of Fhe Church

Christian eschatology sees the mission of the church as a

consequence of the resurrection of Christ.

"The goépel must be

published among all nations" (Mark 13:10).

Christian eschatology leads

immediately to the practical matter of mission. The Cﬁristian

consciousness of history is a missionary consciousness in the knowledge

of a divine commission.

It is conscious of the contradiction inherent

in this unredeemed world and of the sign of the cross under which the

Christian miss?on and the Christian hope stand. Knowledge of Christ and

knowledge of his mission and future coincide.

So also self-knowledge

and the knowledge of being called into his future coincide. 32

Christianity has its essence and goal not in itself and its own

existence but lives from something and exists for something which

reaches far beyond itself.

To learn the secret of its existence we must

inquire into its mission.

If we want to fathom its essence we must

inquire into that future on which it sets its hopes. The risen Christ

31Moltmarm, Theology of Hope, Do 22}

32Moltmann, pp. 194-195.

146

calls, sends, justifies, and sanctifies men and sends them into his

eschatological future for the world.

The church lives by the Word of

God which is proclaimed and which sends.

This word points beyond itself

to coming events and into the breadth of the world to which these events

are coming.33

The Christian church which follows Christ's miésion to the world

is also engaged in following Christ's service to the world.

Its

existence is completely bound up in the fulfilling of this service.

It

exists for others. The church does not serve mankind so this»world may

remain what it is but in order that it may transform itself and become

what it is promised to be.

The church takes the society with which it

lives into_its own horizon of expectation of justice, life, humanity,

and sociability.34

Christians exist, act, suffer, and speak in the present, with

the open Bible in their hands, as it were. Whoever closes the Bible

in order to speak more effectively and contemporaneously no longer

has anything new to tell his age.

Whoever breaks off the conver-—

sation with the present in order to read the Bible more effectively

finally merely engages in sterile monologues.35

Baptism

Paul taught that baptism is the means of participation in the

Christ event of the crucifixion and death of Christ.

Fellowship with

Christ is fellowship in suffering with the crucified Christ.

The

baptized are dead with Christ but attain participation in the resur-

33Moltmann, Theology of Hope, pp. 325-326.

34Moltmann, pp. 327-328.

35Frederick Herzog, ed., The Future of Hope (New York: Herder

& Herder, 1970), p. 157.

147

reétion of Christ by a new obedience which unfolds itself in the‘realm

ol resurrection.36

Baptism, like the church, is "ahead of itself."

In baptizing

men into the past death of Christ, it seals men for the future of the

kingdom that is being brought by the.risen Christ.

Only an eschato-

logical church has the right to perform the act of baptism.

It must

be open toward that which still lies ahead,3’

The Lord's Suppér

The Lord's Supper‘needs to be seen eschatologically, like

baptism.

The congregation at the table is not in possession of the

Absolute but is a waiting, expectant congregation seeking communion with

the coming Lord.

The communi;ants are a community of those who, on the

ground of the resurrection of Christ, wait for the Kingdom of God and

whose life is determined by this expectation.38

Death

For the Jews death meant being cut off from God and from living

communion with him.

Being able to praise God and being no longer able

to praise him are synonyms for the antithesis of life and death.

Hopes

of resurrection found a place on the periphery of the 0ld Testament and

in the apocalyptic of late Judaism.

Ezekiel expounded the power of the

God of promise whom even death cannot rob of his due.

He speaks of a

creative act of Yahweh beyond the bounds of the temporal and the

possible (Ezekiel 37:1-14). Here for Israel the idea of "raising the

36Moltmann, Theology of Hope, p. 161.

37Moltmann, P 326.

38Moltmann, P. 326.

148

dead" is formulated within the framework of the religion of promise.

Even beyond death this God will achieve his judgment in both righteoué

and unrighteous.39

The Resurrection from the Dead

Jewish apocalyptic says that'men should wait for "the resur-

rection of the dead."

Easter faith says that men should believe in "the

resurrection from the dead."

Believers no longer live in this

unredeemed world of death.

In that one man, the future of the new world

of life has already gained power over this unredeemed world of death and

has condemned it to become a world that passes away. Through faith in

the risen Jesus, men already have true life in tﬁe midst of false life,

This is true only for those who live in communion with the one who was

crucified by that false life. The future has already bégun. Jesus

proclaimed, "The Kingdom of God is near at hand." So on basis of his

resurrection from the dead the early church proclaimed, '"The day is ét

hand"” (Romans 13:12) and "The end of all things is at hand"

(I Peter 4:7).. The "night" of false life, unrighteousness, and the

unredeemed world is "far spent."40

"Resurrection of the dead" excludes any idea of a reyivification

of the dead Jesus.

Easter faith can never mean that the dead Jesus

returned to this life which leads to death.

In that case he would have

had to die again like Lazarus. "Resurrection of the dead" means a

qualitatively new life which no longer knows death and therefore cannot

be a continuation of this mortal life.

"Christ being raised from the

39Moltmann, Theology of Hope, p. 208-210.

40Moltmann, The Crucifieq Gdd, pAial 7,

3

149

dead will never die again’” (Romans 6:9).

Resurrection life is not a

further life after death.

It means the annihilatioﬁ of death in the

victory of the new, eternal 1life (I Corinthians 15:55) .41

A STUDY OF SEVERAL.SERMONS BY MOLTMANN

It was a delight to discover a book of sermoné by Moltmann

available in English.

This offers us an opportunity to see how he

translates a complex theology into messages that appeal to.the

worshipper and ‘conveys to him the treasure of the gospel.

According to my conviction, scholarly theology has for its

target the sermon just as every recognition of truth aims at a

practice which will change false reality.

A theology of hope has

for its goal a practical liberation of men

from the chains of sin,

of law, and of anxiety;

its desire is to provide concrete liberation

from the demonic circle

of oppression, of exploitation, and of evil

death.

Though not the only means, the sermon is one of the best

for liberating the internally and exter

nally oppressed man for

faith, love, and hope.

We will here give the sermon topics, the.biblical texts, and the

major ideas Moltmann uses in several of his sermons included in his book

entitled The Gospel of Liberation.

"God Is Different," based on

Isaiah 55:6-11

"Seek the Lord as long as he may be found,"

demands the prophet

and thereby says two things:

whoever does not seek persistently also

will find nothing; where nothing is to be found,

there we also have

nothing to seek.

Seek God so long as he is to be found, for theré is a

time in which he is not to be found and gives no further answer. The

AlMoltmann, The Crucified God, ép. 169-170.

42Moltmann, The Gospel of Liberation, pp. 10-}1.

.

150

misunderstanding of the géneral religious faith in God is that God is

always there, eternal, unchanging;

that he does not fun here and there

as we do when we are in a hurry;

that he lives in hea§en like a great

king in his palace.

For the prophets of Israel, however,

God is quite different than

this "Other."

He is a living God who leaves us and seeks us,

If he

comes near to us, then it is time to seek him,

If he is far, then we

cannot seek him but must remain where we are.

If he announces that he

is coming near,

" then it is time to pay attention and to seek him, to set

out and go to'meet him.

Was there a time in Israel when the Lord was

not to be found, when a leéden heaven overwhelmed everything? The

prophet h%mself lived publicly in such a time (Isaiah 40:27; 49:14),

That was the lamentation of the captive,

‘the dispersed,’ the humiliated,

and the abandoned from Israel in the Babylonian exile.

This questioning faith is like a groping in the dark. Ii lies

in God, when we are brought thus into sorrow, into exile,

into solitude,

and into questions without answers.,

Many people today are of the

opinion that this is indeed the last word about our situation in our

time.

But the lesson of Deutero-Isaiah,

the salvation-prophet of the

forsaken in Babylon, is different.

Hear the word of God in the time of

God.

The time of God is the end time, ;hg end of exile, the end of

silence, and the end of forsakenness.

This is also the hour of the gospel of the anointed of God, who

has come in our flesh,

in our questions, in our pain, until the last cry

on the cross.

In the coming of the Crucified, God himself approaches.

We can begin anew.

We can 1lift our heads out of thé mire of self-

depreciation.

Why ?

Because freedom approaches wherever God comes. The

IS

world is no longer changeable but can be transformed

It makes sense,

therefore, to knock on the still closed doors.

The prophet

having

heard a saying of God, has a vision.

While he announces it, he begins

to act, and that is enough for us.

There are these early signs, omens,

and promises in which a new future of God and man and also of the world

makes itself known

The saying in which the coming God approaches is, first of all

a harsh contradiction:

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither

are your ways my ways, says the Lord."

We know that God is different.

He is by no means the fulfillment of human thoughts and the heavenly

guarantee of human ways.

The disturbing, incomprehensible, and actually

entirely other in this contradiction of

God, however, is that God, once

again, is entirely other than we think

that he is different

Our

thoughts are thoughts of judgment.

The

thoughts of God however, are

thoughts of giving and of joy.

Out of this contradiction--of the joy of

God as over against the self—Judgment of man--springs then the vision of

a new creation'of God through the effecting, creating word of his deed.

It will not return empty but will do what pleases God,

Empty-returning words we know well enough

There are also

succeeding words which bring about something new.

Parents hear the

requests of their children and often fulfill them.

However, there are

more unheard cries and requests in the world than there are ears to hear

them or hands to fulfill them.

The productive word with which God

creates what he wants is another thing.

It is the word of a new

creation out of nothing.,

Faith in God who creates new life out of

nothing is a faith that transforms death and life,

Whoever trusts in

the final success of the creating and saving word of God cannot give up

.

152

anything or write off anyone, even though all experience hits him in the

face.

He begins to love.

According to the saying of God which the prophet announcés to

the men in exile,

he then comes again himself to speak with a noble

vision,

The captives return home to the land of freedom.

Joy abounds

and peace accompanies them,

The exodus from captivity into freedom is

no event of grim battle but of contagious joy which the whole creation

echoes,

To me it appears that here the cosmic dimension of men's liber-

ation has been paraphrased in images.

Thus, according to Paul, the

entire waiting creation yearns for the revelation of the children of

God.

There is no redemption of the soul without a liberation of the

body.

There will be‘nb exodus out of the night of God's obscurity for

man without a new habitable cfeation coming out of this world of chaos.

Our quéstion, however, is what shall I begin? Where shall I

begin?

(1) Seek the Lord and call on him.

The passage into freedom

begins with calling,

praying, and questioning after God.

Whoever prays

in this way, as the prophet iptended

H gains a foretaste of freedom where

he is and becomes free himself.

(2) The godless should leave his way.

One can actually leave the haughtiness and bitterness against God and

join in the joy of God.

One sees the man next to him with different

eyes, with the eyes of the joy of God.

(3) The evildoer must return to

the Lord.

Grasped by the joy in God, he is no longer tied to his

crimes but free because he is loved,

"The God of Hope," based on

Romans 15:4-13

There are many gods in the religions of the nations and many

idols in our lives.

But these are gods without hope and idols withéut

»

-~

153

future.

The God of the Bible, however, is the God of hope. He

encounters us in his promises and attracts us into his rich future.

We can say further that the God of hope is the God of freedom.

He breaks through defenses of anxiety and the walls of care.

He breaks

into the boundary of our soli;ude in which we have hidden so that no one

will come near us.

He despises the difference between black and white,

poor and rich, educated and uneducated.

He seeks men--poor, suffering,

hating and ugly, cramped and stunted men--and accepts them as they are.

That knowledge makes us free and is a source of support. This God of

hope is the boundless God.

Whoever hears of him, ;hinks of him, prays

to him is g?asped by hope.

Whoever obtains what this hope promises

stops at nothing,

has no rest until all boundaries are broken, until

every corﬁer of the earth and every impulse of our bodies are permeated

with the promises of God and free and ready to obtain his joy.

Naturally we would gladly be more hopeful in our work and more

confident with our fellowmen,

but there are simple limits, limits of

strength

» in the possibilities qf others, and of hard reality.

Certainly some go out "beyond the 1limits"

of the church and their home

into foreign lands--missionaries in India and Africé.

Some become

doctors and engineers in developmental help.

Certainly many go "over

the boundary"

from Sunday worship and Christian custom and do something

unexpected in politics.

But mostly one sees nothing special being done

by those who are called by the God of hope

» no boundaries being stepped

over,

but rather the painful observance of boundaries aﬁd competition in

that society where they live.

It‘is not the great evil we do but the

good we omit that condemns us.

So many doubts and considerations come to us in this way.

‘Hope

154

is indeed the obtaining of all understanding and powers for the

promising future. Doubt is only a hope which has lgét its object and

which now begins to devour itself.

But where can we learn that hope

again?

Paul gives us two very simple things:

(1) We learn hope in the

Bible, and (2) We may hope since Christ has received us.

(1) We can go out‘into the world in order to.iearn fear. We

encounter it in the small unpleasantness of the ordinary day, in human

insufficiencies, and in sickness.

This is why we read the Bible--in

order to learn hope in vexation, monotony, fear, and the daily degra-

dations.

Paul says:

"Whatever was written in former days was written

for our instruction, that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of

the scrip?ures, we might have hope" (Romans 15:4). The Bible is the

textbook of hope.

The best presupposition for the theology and church

of today to understand it correctly is this:

every page and every word

is concerned with the burning question, What may I hope?

(2) In order to hope we need to be loved a little and have the

knowledge that there is one who hqpes in, waits on,

answers for, and

believes in us.

"Accept one another just as Christ has accepted you,

to the praise of God," Paul states.

With the resurrection of Jesus,

God has accepted us, just as one accepts and brings to honor something

which is lost and believed forgotten.

He is the God of hope because he

has hope for us and practices the patience of hope with us. Whatever

may always be wrong with us, we are the hope of God in Fhis world. He

makes us hope because he has patience with us——boundless, untiring

patience.

For what does this hope hope?

It hopes for all men.

That is

what Isaiah meant:

"The root of Jesse shall come to rule the Gentiles,

155

and in him shall they hope."

How can we believe without having faith

and without hoping for the Indian, the Chinese, the ﬁuddhist, and the

Communist?

Where Christianity begins to accept men, that is,

to hope

for all men, pray for all men, and recognize that all are responsible,

there begins the infection of the heathen with hope.

This hope goes for all, namely, for the peace Sf the entire

dismembered creation.

If hope is to go to that point, how can we look

on peacefully when there is enmity,

hate and contempt; degradation and

offense in this'creation?.

Mission is then also the infection of public

life in society and politics with hope.

Whoever makes a man laugh again

unlocks for him the heaveniy kingdom.

Whoever gives a man patience

infects hip with hope.

Whoever accepts a man as he himself is accepted

by Christ loosens his tongue for praise.

"Look, Everything Has Become New,"

based on II Corinthians 5:17-21

Paul was no visionary,

no optimistic fanatic who viewed every-

thing through fose-colored glasses.

What reason can he have, therefore,

for this shocking assertion that we and everything around us have become

new?

It is as if he were to lead us before a mirror which we had never

before known

> @ mirror in which we see ourselves with different éyes,

and which shows us our new face.

TS the»mirror of the crucified

Chirdisits

Is anyone in Christ? He forgets himself, for he experiences

himself as loved, accepted

sy reconciled--as a new creature, as a creation

of love.

The old has passed away.

He no 1onger_needs to seek himself,

for today and tomorrow and in eternity he is found.

Whoever learns to see himself thus in the mirror of the cross

also obtains new eyes,

He sees his neighbors and his surroundings

156

differently.

In so doing, he sees the world as free--free from sin,

free from anger, and free from evil death. Look, evérything has become

new

In the death of Christ, the protest of his anger against evil has’

become the sacrifice of love for the malicious and the forsaken.

Let

us therefore already do today what shall be tomorrow,

The world is no

longer a hopeless case. 1In the final time there ére no longer any

hopeless cases.

One can become hope for the other since God through

Christ became hope for us all.

Nevertheless many among us will still say, "It could be that one

who is right in Christ and believes quite firmly can experience this

and see the world with suéh enlightened eyes, but who is already in

Christ?" We must not falsely attribute this certainty to ourselves.

It

does not come from men, but,‘as Paul continues, "All this is from God."

Whét did God do there in that man whose last word cried out, "My God,

why have you forsaken me?" He took our contempt upon himself, my

coldness of heart also. He took the sufféring of the world on himself,

and my sadness also.

"He has made him who knew no sin to be sin for us

so that we become through him, the righteousness of God."

God reconciled the world in Christ. Thus all whb live and die

in this world are included. No one is excluded. God lets ué pértic—

ipate in the reconciliation of the world.

He does not make us accusers

of other men.

He makes us agents of reconciliation in this society.

Reconciliation cost ‘God dearly, as the cross of Jesus makes clear.

It

demands--as is seen in the life and death of Paul--the full use of a

life which lives no

longer to itself alone but stands in the service of

a greater one.

The

world is reconciled and therefore it can be changed,

say those who hope.

.

157

"The Return of Christ,"

based on Matthew 24:1-14

Two things concern all of us daily:

first, the future of God,

for we believe in hope and expect the fulfillment of all our prayers.

At the same time, we are concerned about the future of the earth on

which we live and work, love and suffer with others.

How can we bring

both together:

community with hope in God and community with the

sorrows of the earth?

The first thing which springs before our eyes out of the small

Synoptic Apocalypse is the wide scope of questions of the disciples.

They agk about the setting up of the kingdom of Christ.

They ask about

the end of a world from need, tears, pain, and sin,

Whoever enters into

the commudity of Jesus always learns both emotions at tbe same time:

the passion of hope that makes us joyful because the kingdom of God is

near and the painful sorrow of love, experiencéd in solidarity with

oppressed humanity.

It is difficult for us today to bring the hopes of

Christian faitp and our sorrow for the fate of the earth into one common

denominator. Many minds go their separate ways here.

One believes in

God but ignores the world as if it weré nothing. The other involves

himself politically and socially in the.history of the earth and

disregards God as if he were nothing.

When the disciples found the messianic hopes for heaven and

earth fulfilled in Jesus, they were converted.

Today men are not

converted to the hopes of Christ if the Christians théy'see have not

already been converted to the suffering of humanity.

But how should we

live with this certainty of the fﬁture in history?

It means first: do not Zet.yourself be led astray.

There.will

be many Vho come and say, "I am the Christ, the leader, the.libe?ator.”

158

They will say, '"We bring to you the fulfillment of all desire. God 15

not helping you; leave him and join our movement."

Therefore remain

with Christ.

Remain fools of the great world hope of God.

Secondly:

do not let yourself be frightened.

Nation will rise

up against nation and kingdom against kingdom.

There will no longer be

anything firm in the political, social, indeed even the cosmic order.

Premature despair is something we are not permitted.

The end does not

lie in the feap befofe which nothing on earth is certain. Not the

catastrophe but the messianic kingdom of Jesus is the end.

Hold firmly

on to hope.

Nothing is yetllost.

In the second part'of Jesus' speech, the terrors of history and

the future.of the Christian church itself importune.

From the fate and

the future of the world, the emphasis turns to the fate and the future

of the disciples of Jesus.

"You will be hated by all nations for my

name's sake."

What Israel often experienced as a people of God in a

godless world comes now to Christians.

The church offers no security

either. It tob is not yet the place of shelter nor the end of history.

False prophets will enter among them and lead them astray.

They do not

like the fact that Jesus has not abolished the law but has instead

fulfilled it with better righteousness.

Thoughts of the future emerge again in the warning, "He who

endures to the end will be saved.”

There is salvation.

It lies in

persevering with Jesus until the end, until the kingdpm_of Christ. We

persevere in the love of Christ for the degradedvand the wronged.

We

bring friendliness into a world of cold indifference.

Perseyerance

until the end, that means going on ahead with the message of freedom and

of the kingdom, penetrating to all places and circumstances with the

.

159

conviction that the end is the kingdom of Christ. Cﬁristian hope is

thus the hope of a love which takes the sorrow of humanity upon itself

and looks for the kingdom where "peace and joy laugh."

SUGGESTED SERMON OUTLINES EMPHASIZING OUR

CHRISTIAN HOPE

We have listed some homiletical possibilities that na:urally

arise out of the theology of hope.

We have examined a few of Moltmann's

sermons in which he presents his theology in simple and provocative

form, based solidly on biblical texts.

We now offer some sermon

outlines that a parish pastor may find helpful in conveying Christian

hope to the members of a worshipping congregation.

A

"Keep Your Hope Alivei" based on Hebrews 10:23—25

Our hope is based on God who is faithful to his promises.

i

He showed his faithfulness in his covenant with Israel.

He opened the way into his fellowship through the work of

Christ.

Our

We need not waver in our confession of hope in God today.

hope is expressed by works of love to each other.

We gather at worship to encourage and strengthen each

other.

N

We minister to each other with love and good works.

Together we look toward the future which God will bring!

JEL

"Christ Is the Lord of Al1!"

based on Romans 10:5-1

A.

We are saved through what Christ has done!

3.

If we were saved by keeping the law, we could by such

goodness ''ascend to heaven to bring Christ down."

The gospel reveals Christ and the true way of salvation.

Salvation can be accepted in a very simple way!

The

salvation Christ won is for everyone!

Faith in Jesus is the way to freedom from sin for

4

everyone.

Christ has broken down the distinction bétween human

beings.

§

Our hearts and hands need to be open to all people!

a.

As Christians we are to go to the oppressed and the

oppressors, the well-to-do and the indigent.

b

As we confess Jesus as Lord, they become acquainted

with the gospel.

Cc

We have the command of our Lord to go to all thé

world with the gospel!

160

JLIEIE

"The Holy Spirit Makes Us Children of God," based on

Romans 8:9-17

A.

il

The Spirit leads us into fellowship with Christ

The Holy Spirit dwells in the believer.

2

He enables us to belong to Christ.

3.

By his power we will be raised from the dead even as he

raised Jesus

a.

Now from dead works

b

In the future from physical death

B.

The

Spirit assures us that we are God's children.

He removes fear and gives us the spirit of sonship.

He makes us heirs with Christ.

%

He leads us into suffering with Christ.

a

We suffer '"with Christ" as we take up the burden of

helping the oppressed.

b.

We can labor in the hope that we will be glorified

with Christ in the future!

IV.

"Christ Will Destroy Death!" based on I Corinthians 15:20-26

A

Christ is the first of those to be raised from the dead

1

Death came on the whole world through Adam's sin

ad.

b

With it came all kinds of evil and suffering.

While on earth we bear this suffering with others.

Christ's resurrection signals our resurrectlon from the

dead.

a.

This event gives promise of a glorlous future,

b

We will share in his resurrection glory!

B

L

Christ will raise those who belong to him.

This event is still in the future--when he comes.

2

3

He will then destroy every rule, authority, and power.

The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

a

This hope enables us to do battle against all enemies

of humanity.

b

In the midst of suffering we are promised the victory

Christ will bring!

"Faith Is Deeds Done in Hope," based on Hebrews 11:1-4

A

Faith is assurance and conviction regarding our hope for the

future.

1

The creation of the world by the Word of God is a matter

of our faith.

2

Far greater things are promised by God for the future.

a

The resurrection is our surety of God's future

action.

b

We believe that all evil will be destroyed.

Faith is action undertaken at the command of God.

it

2

Abel expressed his faith by offering his best to God.

Our faith must be exercised by obeying the commands of

God.

a

We are to show love to those we meet in everyday

life,

b

We have joy in service because of our hope in God s

promises.

161

VI

"Patient Hope Brings Joy!" based on James 5:7-11

A

We live in the certainty that the Lord is coming!

lﬂ

This is like the farmer who waits patiently for a crop.

2

We can practice patience because we have hope.

a

Grumbling against each other only brings God's

judgment.

b.

We serve our oppressed neighbors with joy.

C

Knowing the Judge is at the door gives us patience.

We know the Lord is compassionate and merciful

1

The prophets are examples of patient sufferers.

a.

Elijah

b

Jeremiah

i

Job's steadfastness brought him happiness.

Knowing God can make all things new enables us to live

out our lives with joy.

WL

"Christ Makes Us Truly Human," based on Ephesians 3:1-12

A.

We share our humanity with everyone for whom Christ died

1L

He laid down his life so that Jews and non-Jews might no

longer be separated

2

Paul here calls this a great '"mystery

revealed by the

Holy Spirit.

a.

We humans raise barriers of race, economic status,

culture, and language,

b

God knocks down such barriers.

Cc

At the cross of Jesus we are all equal--humans with

weaknesses who need the grace of God.

We

discover our humanity in God's call to publish the gospel

to

the world.

1

Paul knew he had been called to preach the unsearchable

riches of Christ to the Gentiles.

a

He realized his human inadequacy.

b

By God's grace and power he was able to carry out

this task!

2,

People whom God has called in the past felt inadequate

a.

Moses said,

"Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?"

(Exodus 3; 11)

b.

Isaiah felt his humanness when God called him

(Isaiah 6:5).

3'

We sense our true humanity when we hear God's call

a

God calls us worthy through what Christ did at the

Cross.

b

To each of us God is saying, ''Go, make disciples.

(1)

It is impossible in our own strength.

(2)

We discover how much we need God‘s help--how

human we are.

VIII

"Faith in Christ Makes Us Right with God," based on

Galatians 3:16-29

A

Paul found that the Galatian Christians reverted to

dependence on works for salvation (Galatians 3:1-5).

B

God's promise of salvation to Abraham was based on falth

1

The law did not come until 430 years later.

162

I1f salvation came by works of law the promise would be

void!

a

Romans 4:14

b

Galatians 2:20

3z

The law was given to show us our need for grace!

a

Romans 3:20

b

Romans 7:7-10

We are all children of God by faith in Christ

It

This applies to Gentiles as well as to Jews.

2

Faith in Christ makes us heirs of the promise made to

Abraham!

3

In the gospel the 0ld Testament history of promise finds

its fulfillment.

IX

"Following Jesus Today,'" based on Mark 8:31-38

A

Jesus assumed the cross because he loves us.

il

It was a shock for the disciples to hear what would

happen to him!

2

Peter rebukes Jesus for talking this way!

3.

There is still resistance to associating suffering with

Jesus

4

It is important that we know what kind of Savior we have.

B.

Jesus calls us to deny ourselves and take up

a Ccross

1

His hearers were to understand the close.

relationship

between his suffering and the way we are

to live.

2

Losing one's life for the sake of Christ

and the gospel

saves one's life.

3

One aspect of following Jesus today is our attitude

toward him and his words now!

Hope Affects Everyday Life," based on Romans 12:1-8

A

Christ's love calls us to present our bodies to God as a

living sacrifice.

Paul has laid the foundation of our hope in Romans,

Chapters 1-11.

We are called to live '

'transformed" lives.

This will be living proof of God's goodness.

Our

gifts are to be used for the benefit of our neighbor.

e

We are

one body in Christ.

The exercise of our gifts is an expression of our faith

and hope

Our everyday life is the sphere of our true service to

God

XI

"For Christ's Sake I Am an Atheist," based on Matthew 22:15-22

A

Devotion to religious and political idols is atheism.

B

The religious authorities rejected Jesus.

1

Here they try to develop an accusation against him

a

They plotted to.get him to say something wrong

b

They speak deceptively--with a compliment.

Later these religious leaders bring about Jesus

cruci-

fixion

Even religious men can be against God

163

4,

Christ alone is to be worshipped, even though false

religious authorities would call us "atheists."

C.

Political authorities are limited in what' they can do.

i

They are to maintain order and supply physical needs of

people.

Jesus acknowledgés the need to pay taxes.

;

Political authorities can exercise power and authority

that seem stronger than God's in this world.

4.

The state joined the church in crucifying Jesus.

D.

Only Christ deserves our worship.

l'

All lesser authorities are idols.

2.

We worship him alone even though political authorities

may consider that "atheism."

KILILA

A.

"The Church Must Declare Its Hope," based in I Peter 3:13-17

Christians hold Christ as Lord in their hearts.

1-

They need to be prepared to defend the hope which they

hold,

e

Testimony to Christ is to be given with gentleness and

reverence,

e

Suffering may follow, but let it be for doing right, not

wrong.

B.

Christians are under commission to proclaim Christ to the

world.

l.

They wait for his future in patient hope..

23

3.

They conduct themselves in a Christlike way.

They are under obligation to publish their hope in Christ

to all nations (Mark 13:10).

4,

They show confidence in Christ's future by the service

they render to others.

XETE,

A.

"Baptism Unites Us with Christ," based on Romans 6:1-11

Baptism

identifies us with Christ who died for us.

1

His

death frees us from sin.

2

His

death to sin was "once for all."

B.

Baptism

identifies us with Christ who was raised from the

dead.

A

We will participate in the resurrection

resurrection promises us.

whicﬁ his own

20

Baptism is "ahead of itself" in that it seals us for the

future of the kingdom of Christ.

S

Only a church that believes in Christ's coming kingdom

has the right to baptize.

XIV.

"Holy Communion Is a Foretaste of the Future,”" based on

Matthew 26:26-29

A.

Jesus gave his supper to the disciples beforé his cruci-

fixion and resurrection.

.

it

He related the bread to the breaking of his body.

24

He related the cup to the shedding of his blood.

3

What he would do for them would provide the forgiveness

of sins,

164

B

He spoke at his supper of the "new" banquet in his Father's

kingdom.

1

2

Holy Communion points to the future Jesus has promised.

A congregation at Communion is a community waiting for

the coming of its Lord.

3

The life we live is determined by the ‘expectation which

Communion inspires.

XV.

"Christ Gives Us Victory over -Death!" based on I Corin-

thians 15:51-58

A

Death for Jews of 0l1d Testament times meant bein

from communion with God.

g cut off

1

2

They thought the dead could no longer praise God.

Death for the Jews cut one off from God's promises.

3

Ezekiel's picture pointed forward to a creative act of

B

God giving promise of life after death (Ezekiel 37:1-14).

Jesus' resurrection assures us of victory over death.

1

Death is the consequence of sin.

2

We will be raised to a new quality of life--not a restor-

ation to this life ("imperishable," "immortal)

e

3

.

Death will be completely overcome!

4

We can give steadfast labor in Christ's service now

because of our hope for the future!

>

Chapter 9

CONCLUSION

The study of Moltmann's theoiogy of hope for Fhis dissertation

has been a much more difficult task that.I surmised! At the outset,

the possibility of a study of hope in these times of anxiety was indeed

an exciting prospect.

The preparatory reading proved to be very

interesting.

The greatest difficulty came in trying to understand and prepare

a digest of Theology of Hope and The Crucified God.

This may be due to

several factors:

(1) Moltmann is exceedingly well read and covers many

different fields of study inldeveloping his theology (pgilosophy,

metaphysics, mythology, anthropology, etc.); (2) his arguments are often

based on European sources that were not available to me in English;

(3) the sentence structure is often involved and lengthy,. fequiring

0

frequent reading to grasp; and, (4) having to work from a translation of

the German made it somewhat more difficult.

There was frequently

material in Moltmann's theology to get me excited and keep me going.

Then again there were those instances when the argument was hafd to

follow and the way through became exceedingly difficult.

One of the really delightful aspects of my acquaintance with

Jurgen Moltmann's writings stems from a study of his sermons. Even

though he is very thorough and complex in his expression of the theology

of hope, his sermons are beautifully adapted to the average hearer or

165

166

reader. He communicates in a charmingly simple and warm style. His

messages are firmly based on Scripture, and the progress of thought is

easy to follow.

It has become a firm conviction thgt my reading and study of

this theology cannot be limited to several months.

It will require

years for me to reach a full understanding of the thought of Moltmann.

A good beginqing has been made, and I now have the motivation to g0 on

in my study of the theology of hope and other theologies as well. It

is my firm intention to keep abreést of further developménts in hope

theology.

I am sure that this emphasis will be a regular part of my

preaching.

In fact, it has already become a new Qimension in my sermon

work.

Tgroughout this whole project I have been aware' of the quiet

nudging of the Holy Spirit toward its completion!

He has given me the

courage and wisdom to continue.

I fondly hope that he will touch the

mind and heart of any possible reader of this dissertation and convey

to him abundant hope for the fﬁture that God has promised!

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PERIODICALS

Frei, Hans W.

"The Theology of Hope:

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Christian Century 87,

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In:erpretation,

Vol. XXII, No. 4, October 1968.

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