Living Wittily

Moltmann and Hope: "Love looks to the as yet unrealised possibilities of the other..."

 

I am all for passion in theology. What is impressive about Moltmann is his awareness that his early theology was partial, tendentious, passionate and committed. To break through the learned complacency of a generation more interested in the anxieties of the present and ways of escaping them, than in genuine risk-taking hopefulness for a more just and peaceful future, Moltmann wote a book concerned with looking at life through the lens of hope, rather than fixing eyes only on the present. More than twenty years ago, as a man in his middle sixties Moltmann wrote in this preface, "The older and more self-critical one becomes, the more one values the ruthless radicalism of one's youth."

These are brave and wise words, indicating a theologian who acknowledges the limits of his vision, and the missed turnings in his journeys, but who does not apologise because all theologies are partial - what is important is the passion for truth, the openness to the new, and the expectations of a Christian standpoint that is future oriented towards the God who comes to us in Jesus Christ, in the power of the Spirit and in the eschaton when God will be all in all. And that hope far from being mere vision, is itself the source of energy, sacrifice and commitment to the Kingdom of the Crucified and Risen and Coming One, as we too seek to incarnate the love of God in Christ, in the embodied practices of those who, as peacemakers and ministers of reconciliation, are called to be and dare allow themelves to be called, the children of God.

No wonder Moltmann finished his preface with words of prophetic assurance: " 'Do not despise the dreams of your youth' says someone in one of Schiller's plays. And as I write the words I am again heart and soul in the visions of Theology of Hope, 25 years ago."

The book finishes wih these words, from a book which remains one of the great contributions Moltmann has made to Christian theology over the past 50 or more years:

 "As a result of this hope in God's future, this present world becomes free in believing eyes from all attempts at self-redemption or self-production through labour, and it becomes open for loving, ministering self-expenditure in the interests of a humanizing of conditions and in the interests of a the realization of justice in light of the coming justice of God. This means, however, that the hope of resurrection must bring about a new understanding of the world."

As regular readers will note - I'm back, new computer, and Microsoft 8.1, the mysteries and frustrations of which make it all the more imperative to have a theology of hope!!!

 

Liberation Theology is the original Gospel - If the Son shall set you free....

Amongst the many debts I owe to Jurgen Moltmann as theologian and disturber of the Christian peace, is his eye for the connection between Trinitarian theology, and the way we structure our lives - in society, in church and in our personal ambitions and lifestyle. A conversation with some students this morning produced another of those enjoyable exchanges - Moltmann's book on the Trinity was tough, at times infuriating, or obscure, they struggled with it, and except for class requirements I think would have given it a body swerve. But they all were glad they persevered, read, wrestled and faced up to Moltmann's theological challenges, and they came away with a changed view of what Christian theology and life can be, what church is, and what it means to talk of the Triune God of love.

In one his less known books, a collection of occasional essays very loosely tied together by the title Experiences in Theology, there is a section of what could almost be called Trinitarian Tracts - 7 pieces amounting to just over 30 pages in total, entitled "The Broad Place of the Trinity". The fifth one, The Trinitarian Experience of God begins like this:

A few years ago, in Granada, Spain, I came across an old Catholic order which I had never heard of before. They call themselves 'Trinitarians', were founded in the eleventh century, and have devoteds themselves ever since to the 'liberation of prisoners'. Originally that meant the redemption of the enslaved Christians from M oorish prisons, but not only that. The arms of the Church of the Trinitarians in Rome, St Thomas in Formis, show Christ sitting on the throne of his glory, while at his right hand and his left are prisoners with broken chains, on the one side a Christian with a crossw in his hand, on the other a black prisoner without  a cross. Christ frees them both and takes them into fellowship, with him, and together. 'Trinity' was the name for this original liberation theology more than eight hundred years ago." (Page 324)

It's interesting he talks of the Arms of the Church - because the m osaic does indeed show the arms of Christ reaching out in welcome and firm grasp in a way that is so radically inclusive it must have raised eyebrows and blood pressure amongst the hardliners about who is in and who is out, when it comes to the Church.

It is a beautiful, subversive, inclusive, uncompromising, boundary-breaking image, of a Love that is also all these things. 

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Jurgen Moltmann quotes Bonhoeffer - "love and remain true to the earth".

Just started this book. In it I find one of my favourite quotations from Bonhoeffer, an essential inclusion in my personal canon of 'Theologians We Dare Not Ignore', quoted by Jurgen Moltmann, one of my most admired theological conversation partners.

Bonhoeffer wrote to his fiance Maria Von Wedemeyer, "God give us faith daily. I don't mean the faith which flees the world but the one that endures in the world and which loves and remains true to the earth  in spite of all the suffering which it contains for us. Our marriage is to be a Yes to God's earth, it is to strengthen our courage to do and to accomplish something on earth."

Moltmann points out that these words were written under a death sentence, and while allied bombing was razing German cities to the ground, "and the blood of murdered Jews cried out to high heaven".

So, Moltmann goes on, "The important thing today is to live this faithfulness to the earth in the crises in which the man made catastrophes to the earth are being heralded. The important thing is to prove this faithfulness in the face of the indifference and cynicism with which people knowingly accept the destruction of the earth's organism and foster ecological death."

Driving up the road from St Andrews I turned off as I usually do to come from Stonehaven to Westhill across some of the shire. In 20 minutes I saw the red kites,those aernonautic show-offs, a yellowhammer sitting on the fence beside the gorse wearing its designer yellow against the golden background. And a field with over a hundred sheep and lambs, and nearer Maryculter an ostrich. Yes, an ostrich. Every time I see it, I'm reminded of a sentence in a book review years ago, used to describe someone who sees what no one else wants to see. In that sense Bonhoeffer and Moltmann are essential theologians because they "stand with head erect amongst the ostriches"!

jurgen Moltmann - "the unquencahble spark of hope..."

Here's Jason's contribution to the Moltmann series.

"Moltmann will always be for me a theologian of hope, not pie-in-the-sky hope but hope grounded in the being of God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, and especially in Jesus' journey into hell and subsequent resurrection":

‘Hope does not only give the power to break out of oppression, like Israel, and to seek the promised land of liberty. Hope also alienates people from their native land, their friendships and their homes, and makes them ready to let these go and to seek something new. By this I mean that hope for an alternative future brings us into contradiction with the existing present and puts us against the people who cling to it. The contradiction to existing reality into which the Christian hope brings believers is nothing other than the contradiction out of which this hope itself was born: the contradiction between the world of the resurrection and the world in the shadow of the cross. If we had before our eyes only what we see, then we should come to terms with things as they simply are, either cheerfully or unwillingly. The fact that we don't come to terms with them – that between us and the existing reality there is no harmony, either friendly or resigned – is the unquenchahle spark of hope for the fullness of life, for righteousness and justice on the new earth, and for the kingdom of God. That keeps unreconciled, restless and open for God’s great day’ –

Jürgen Moltmann, A Broad Place: An Autobiography (trans. Margaret Kohl; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 103–4.

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I'm currently re-reading Moltmann's Church in the Power of the Spirit. Nigel Wright once suggested that this volume is the best account of a Baptist ecclesiology by a non Baptist. I'd like to keep the Moltmann series going for a few days more. So if you want to send an excerpt for posting just email it to me. We'll have one every other day for a wee while longer.

Moltmann on the cry of dereliction - "taking off the shoes of our intellect...."

One of the most stunning elements in Moltmann's theological explorations is the way he takes with utmost seriousness, Jesus' cry of abandonment, and its implications for the inner life of the Triune God. Not everyone is comfortable with Moltmann's theology of divine agonising and his insistence that the death of the Son implies the grievous bereavement of the Father, borne and absorbed into the life of God through the Spirit.

But here is mystery beyond all our efforts at lucid coherence and systematic control. The truth is, no honest grappling with such searing realities should leave us feeling other than uncomfortable - because all honest and prayerful struggle to understand, and adore and surrender should be recognised for what it is - taking off the shoes of our intellect in acknowledgement of Love's eternal and redemptive and patient purpose.

The following comment and poem comes from Chris, a friend I haven't met yet! She has her own poetry blog here and she can also be found at Blethers which you can access on my sidebar. I found Chris's blog when I was chasing theology and poetry stuff last year during my sabbatical, and I liked it a lot. I asked if she'd contribute her poem to our Moltmann week and I'm grateful to be able to share it more widely.

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Sometimes poetry seems to me to be the only vehicle suitable to express an idea or an emotion. This poem arose from my reading of a small part of Jürgen Moltmann's "The Trinity and the Kingdom".

RESPONDING

It is dark, dark night.
Take this cup – suddenly in the dark
it is too awful. But the warm tide
is receding into the dark
and the cold sweat of emptiness
takes its place. The desperate words
fall unheeded on the stony ground.
Withdrawn in a point of light
God has no ears, only pain
and tight-focussed squeezing of the great
love now raw and bright
above Golgotha. The night is past
but dark remains, and emptiness.
A searing cry bruises the great mind
drenched in the pain of loss and
separation – and this is done
for me, this hellish loss, this bruising …
so that I can see, can understand,
am not forsaken. It is too much.
Too much for me. Too much.

© C.M.M.

Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God

"Anyone who suffers without cause first thinks that he has been forsaken by God.  God seems to him to be the mysterious, incomprehensible God who destroys the good fortune that he gave.  But anyone who cries out to God in his suffering echoes the death-cry of the dying Christ, the Son of God.  In that case it is not just a hidden someone set over against him, to whom he cries, but in a profound sense the human God, who cries with him and intercedes for him with his cross, where man in his torment is dumb."

 

Moltmann, J. The Crucified God  (London: SCM, 1974) 252

 

 

"Read Moltmann's The Crucified God for the first time in 1979 and was transformed particulalry by chapter 6 which has continued to shape my life and all my theological thinking."  (Graeme Clark)

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Like Graeme, and I suspect many, many others, I too was theologically reoriented by the power and boldness of Moltmann's The Crucified God. In an unpublished lecture on Atonement, James Denney urged his students to read and become familiar with those books on the death of Christ which had forced the Church to rethink and to think better - books in which, as he said elsewhere, you could hear "the plunge of lead in fathomless waters". The Crucified God is that kind of book, and perhaps one that could only be written by one who so painfully and fruitfully appropriated the terror and suffering of a young German soldier who survived allied bombing when many of those standing closest to him were obliterated before his eyes. Moltmann tells of those experiences in his autobiography A Broad Place. Amongst other things, that volume shows the essential connection between biography and theology, life experience and theological understanding. 

Jurgen Moltmann - A Prayer to the Triune God

God, creator of heaven and earth

it is time for you to come,

for our time is running out

and our world is passing away.

You gave us life in peace, one with another,

and we have ruined it in mutual conflict.

You made your creation in harmony and equilibrium.

We want progress, and are destroying ourselves.

Come Creator of all things,

renew the face of the earth.

Come, Lord Jesus,

and brother on our way.

You came to seek

that which was lost.

You have come to us and found us.

Take us with you on your way.

We hope for your kingdom

as we hope for peace.

Come Lord Jesus, come soon.

Come Spirit of life,

flood us with your light,

interpenetrate us with your love.

Awaken our powers through your energies

and in your presence let us be wholly there.

Come Holy Spirit.

God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

Triune God,

unite with yourself your torn and divided world,

and let us all be one in you,

one with your whole creation,

which praises and glorifies you

and in you is happy.

Amen.

The end prayer from Moltmann's smaller book on pneumatology, The Source of Life. The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life (London: SCM, 1997), 160. This wee book isn't a mere distillation of The Spirit of Life. It has several quite substantial new pieces of lectures and reflections following the publication of the larger volume. I think the last line of this prayer is theologically naive in the best sense of both words - a happy creation. I wish...and so I pray. 

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OK. I enjoyed the Buechner week - and thanks for the comments on my bit of playful prayer-making with Moltmann's titles on Sunday's post. So how about you blog readers who left comments, or others who have favourite passages in Moltmann, providing some food for thought over the next week or so?

Here's the suggestion:

1. Choose a passage from any of Moltmann's 8 books in his Contributions Series - well, preferably from these 8 titles. (Titles are on Sunday's Post). Type it out and email it to me. I'll then format it and post it with your name and the reference for the extract.

2. Don't make the quotation too long - say 200 words at the outside.

3. Feel free to add a brief comment on why it is important to you.

4. I've already got several passages in reserve but much more fun and likely to be more interesting if others contribute as well. Use the email available on the blogsite.

Jurgen Moltmann - Contributions to Theology

Our hope is that the Spirit of Life will rekindle a Theology of Hope, affirming and celebrating God in Creation, so that as the Church in the Power of the Spirit, we may follow the Way of Jesus Christ, The Crucified God, celebrating and living in the Trinity and the Kingdom of God as we await the Coming of God.

A prayer and confession of faith knitting together the 8 Moltmann primary titles from his Contributions to Theology Series.

Works, I think!