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Theology of Hope On its publication in 1964, during the postwar years of ferment and change, Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope made an immediate and astonishing impact. It was to some extent a critical response to the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope,1 which had deeply impressed him. But Moltmann took up Bloch’s “hopes for a world without God” so as to link them with “the God of hope” (Rom. 15:13) of Jewish and Christian tradition. The church had always seen eschatology (the doctrine of the last things) as an appendix, something that clocks in once hope for the world has nothing more to offer. But Moltmann sees the Christian faith not only as hope for the end but as hope and promise from the beginning, a hope and promise based on the resurrection of Jesus. The future hope remains “this-worldly,” because expectation leads to a new setting forth and a transformation of the present, and therefore takes in history. In his autobiography, A Broad Place,2 he later wrote: I believe that three key concepts are essential for every Christian theology of hope: 1. the concept of the divine promise in the Old Testament; 2. the concept of the raising of the crucified Christ as God’s future for the world, in the New Testament; 3. an understanding of human history as the mission of the kingdom of God today.
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