Introduction Richard Bauckham
In publications spanning fifty years, Jürgen Moltmann has pursued what he calls an adventure in theological discovery. It all began in prisoner-of-war camps in the late 1940s. As a young German soldier faced with the newly revealed horrors of the Nazi regime, he found God in the gift of unexpected hope and in the companionship of the Christ who suffers with us. Over the years he has written frequently of this deep experiential root of his theology, but when, in the 1960s, his first major book, Theology of Hope, became a theological phenomenon (even on the front page of the New York Times), what drew so much attention was the way it seemed to chime with the mood of that remarkable decade. In western Europe and North America, it was a time when unlimited possibilities of radical change for the better seemed within reach. But Christian churches focused on individual salvation beyond this world lacked the theological resources for positive engagement with the secular hopes of the time. Moltmann’s work sought to restore the full dimensions of Christian hope. Sweeping aside the aversion to future eschatology in the German theological tradition, Moltmann showed how the biblical history of promise projects a new future for this world and its history. Within the horizon of God’s coming renewal of God’s whole creation there was plenty of room for proximate hopes of social and political transformation, awakened and sustained by ultimate hope. This was a programmatic reorientation of theology that, in a single move, turned the church toward both the future and the world. Of course, it was far from the only way in which Christians worldwide were recovering an impetus to seek transformation in all dimensions of human life, but it would be hard to exaggerate its influence. I first read Theology of Hope when it was still Moltmann’s only major work. No doubt I was not immune to the optimistic mood of the time, but what impressed and excited me was that Moltmann was not giving theological support to some general notion of hope, still less to optimism. The center of his theology was (and has always remained) the biblical history of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. Against the background of the Old Testament history of God’s promises, Moltmann read the history of Jesus as messianic history, full of promise for the all-embracing kingdom of God. Christian eschatology speaks
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