This appears in the current issue of 'The Tablet'. It's a great read. Anyone who studied theology in the 60s and 70s read or tried to read Moltmann's book on Hope.
A giant of post-war Protestant theology says that in spite of the climate crisis and the growing threat to democracy, in the end people will act together to avert catastrophe
Across the table in the bar of his central London hotel, Jürgen Moltmann is holding the cardboard drinks menu pressed up against his face. It is, I should explain, nothing to do with failing eyesight. The professor emeritus of systematic theology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, one of the most widely read Christian theologians of the second half of the twentieth century, is at 93 in remarkably good physical and mental health, as he had demonstrated the previous evening when delivering the prestigious Charles Gore Lecture in Westminster Abbey.
No, this towering figure in the Protestant Evangelische Kirche in Germany is improvising in order to find a way to explain, with an ingenuity that – to put it kindly – is not always the hallmark of academic theologians, his belief that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, with the result that we cannot see Him. Sensing that it sounds a bit vague, he reaches out for the menu that sits unused on the table between us to demonstrate, holding it so near to his face that he cannot possibly focus on it.
“So close that He also influences and inspires us,” the professor says from behind his improvised mask. And then he peeps round it, with a broad smile, and quotes St Augustine: “He said, God is interior in my soul, so self-understanding is understanding of God, because in my soul is the mirror of the image of God, and in the mirror I recognise myself and God.”
That same beguiling description of God had also come up in his lecture, which took as its theme “A Theology of Hope for the Twenty-first Century”. Serried ranks of Anglican bishops, deans and deacons added splashes of colour to a large audience, which was held spellbound while the professor, sitting down rather than standing to deliver his text, in a rare concession to advancing years, took us through the threats to our world – terrorism, new nationalism, nuclear Armageddon, and the emerging catastrophe of climate change.
His uplifting analysis, though, had borrowed from a resonant line by the eighteenth-century German Romantic poet, Friedrich Hölderlin: “Where there is danger, salvation also grows.” With a slow-paced, heavily accented, sometimes quiet delivery that was nonetheless captivating, and had his audience quite literally on the edge of our seats, determined to catch every word, the professor had managed to offer – as his title promised – a message of hope. That we don’t know if humanity will survive the current threats is a good thing, he had said, framing the question as, “Is humankind to be or not to be?”
No, this towering figure in the Protestant Evangelische Kirche in Germany is improvising in order to find a way to explain, with an ingenuity that – to put it kindly – is not always the hallmark of academic theologians, his belief that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, with the result that we cannot see Him. Sensing that it sounds a bit vague, he reaches out for the menu that sits unused on the table between us to demonstrate, holding it so near to his face that he cannot possibly focus on it.
“So close that He also influences and inspires us,” the professor says from behind his improvised mask. And then he peeps round it, with a broad smile, and quotes St Augustine: “He said, God is interior in my soul, so self-understanding is understanding of God, because in my soul is the mirror of the image of God, and in the mirror I recognise myself and God.”
That same beguiling description of God had also come up in his lecture, which took as its theme “A Theology of Hope for the Twenty-first Century”. Serried ranks of Anglican bishops, deans and deacons added splashes of colour to a large audience, which was held spellbound while the professor, sitting down rather than standing to deliver his text, in a rare concession to advancing years, took us through the threats to our world – terrorism, new nationalism, nuclear Armageddon, and the emerging catastrophe of climate change.
His uplifting analysis, though, had borrowed from a resonant line by the eighteenth-century German Romantic poet, Friedrich Hölderlin: “Where there is danger, salvation also grows.” With a slow-paced, heavily accented, sometimes quiet delivery that was nonetheless captivating, and had his audience quite literally on the edge of our seats, determined to catch every word, the professor had managed to offer – as his title promised – a message of hope. That we don’t know if humanity will survive the current threats is a good thing, he had said, framing the question as, “Is humankind to be or not to be?”
“If we know that we will not survive, we will do nothing. If we know we will, we won’t do anything either. Only if the future is open to both possibilities, we can do what is necessary.” And God was front and centre of the professor’s hopeful message. “His eternal Yes to creation will,” he had told us, “reaffirm our existence in spite of ourselves.”
It was quite a coup for the Westminster Abbey Institute to lure Professor Moltmann over to England to speak as part of its spring programme. His scholarly credentials within and without Protestantism are second to none, his awards many, and his books – notably 1964’s Theology of Hope and 1972’s The Crucified God – still have an influence that stretches far beyond academia. His long ecumenical commitment in particular is demonstrated by his close friendships with Jon Sobrino and Hans Küng, not to mention the period in the mid 1960s when he was also a contemporary and co-editor of the journal Concilium, with one Joseph Ratzinger, then a fellow academic at Tübingen.
Have they remained friends? “No,” he shakes his head a little sadly. “With Hans Küng [another colleague at Tübingen at the same time], yes, but with Joseph Ratzinger, no.” Did he enjoy working with him? “He wasn’t always easy,” he says. “There was an anxiety in his heart.” In the wake of the student demonstrations at the university in 1968 – part of Europe-wide unrest of the campuses – Fr Ratzinger decamped to less volatile Regensburg, in his native Bavaria, and switched allegiances to the more conservative journal Communio. It is clearly not a subject Professor Moltmann feels entirely easy discussing.
It was quite a coup for the Westminster Abbey Institute to lure Professor Moltmann over to England to speak as part of its spring programme. His scholarly credentials within and without Protestantism are second to none, his awards many, and his books – notably 1964’s Theology of Hope and 1972’s The Crucified God – still have an influence that stretches far beyond academia. His long ecumenical commitment in particular is demonstrated by his close friendships with Jon Sobrino and Hans Küng, not to mention the period in the mid 1960s when he was also a contemporary and co-editor of the journal Concilium, with one Joseph Ratzinger, then a fellow academic at Tübingen.
Have they remained friends? “No,” he shakes his head a little sadly. “With Hans Küng [another colleague at Tübingen at the same time], yes, but with Joseph Ratzinger, no.” Did he enjoy working with him? “He wasn’t always easy,” he says. “There was an anxiety in his heart.” In the wake of the student demonstrations at the university in 1968 – part of Europe-wide unrest of the campuses – Fr Ratzinger decamped to less volatile Regensburg, in his native Bavaria, and switched allegiances to the more conservative journal Communio. It is clearly not a subject Professor Moltmann feels entirely easy discussing.
Born in Hamburg in April 1926, he grew up in a godless household. “My father was a secular teacher of Latin, German literature and history. My grandfather was a Grand Master of the Freemasons,” he recalls. In February 1943, along with other 17-year-olds, he was drafted into the German army and posted to the anti-aircraft batteries in his home city as it suffered wave after wave of RAF attacks.
“Forty thousand people died,” he reports simply and unemotionally. “And I cried for the first time to God, ‘Where are You?’ That was my question. Not, ‘Why have You allowed this destruction?’ I was not asking theological questions. I was crying for rescue.”
The following year, posted to the Klever Reichswald forest on the front line, he became separated from his platoon during an Allied offensive. “I hid myself in a bush and the next morning, when I saw an English soldier, I stood up and said, ‘I surrender.’ I expected him to shoot me, but he took me to his HQ, where a compassionate lieutenant gave me his plate of baked beans. I have loved baked beans ever since. They taste of life.”
He was despatched to Britain as a prisoner of war. “I remember the ship passing under Tower Bridge in London. It was the door to my three years in Scotland and England.” The experience proved life-changing. It gave him an abiding love of the British. “In Scotland, we were building streets in [the coal-mining town of] New Cumnoch and we were treated by people there with such a profound hospitality and solidarity it made us into human beings again,” he says. Later he moved to Norton Camp, near Mansfield, run by the YMCA with the aim of training and sending home a new generation of German teachers and Protestant pastors. It was here, he recalls, that he began to read theology.
“I felt forsaken by God, and all good spirits, but there I was given a Bible and read first the Gospel of Mark, where I came to Jesus crying out, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ I felt the brotherly love of Jesus. He took up my suffering for God.
“Forty thousand people died,” he reports simply and unemotionally. “And I cried for the first time to God, ‘Where are You?’ That was my question. Not, ‘Why have You allowed this destruction?’ I was not asking theological questions. I was crying for rescue.”
The following year, posted to the Klever Reichswald forest on the front line, he became separated from his platoon during an Allied offensive. “I hid myself in a bush and the next morning, when I saw an English soldier, I stood up and said, ‘I surrender.’ I expected him to shoot me, but he took me to his HQ, where a compassionate lieutenant gave me his plate of baked beans. I have loved baked beans ever since. They taste of life.”
He was despatched to Britain as a prisoner of war. “I remember the ship passing under Tower Bridge in London. It was the door to my three years in Scotland and England.” The experience proved life-changing. It gave him an abiding love of the British. “In Scotland, we were building streets in [the coal-mining town of] New Cumnoch and we were treated by people there with such a profound hospitality and solidarity it made us into human beings again,” he says. Later he moved to Norton Camp, near Mansfield, run by the YMCA with the aim of training and sending home a new generation of German teachers and Protestant pastors. It was here, he recalls, that he began to read theology.
“I felt forsaken by God, and all good spirits, but there I was given a Bible and read first the Gospel of Mark, where I came to Jesus crying out, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ I felt the brotherly love of Jesus. He took up my suffering for God.
At the centre of it has always been the subject of hope, and it remains both his passion and his hallmark. But, at the end of his lecture in the abbey, when he was asked whether there could ever be “good nationalism”, he referred to
Germany today, and warned that “the spirits of the past are coming up again”.
Has that dented his hope? The far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) party, which polled one in eight votes at the 2017 federal elections, is, he tells me, nothing more or less than “the political arm of the Nazis. It hates migrants, it hates Jews, it hates politicians.” Yet he remains confident that the democratic institutions of modern-day Germany will stand firm against the AfD threat.
And, likewise, he refuses to be too down-hearted by his beloved Britain’s exit from the European Union.
Has that dented his hope? The far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) party, which polled one in eight votes at the 2017 federal elections, is, he tells me, nothing more or less than “the political arm of the Nazis. It hates migrants, it hates Jews, it hates politicians.” Yet he remains confident that the democratic institutions of modern-day Germany will stand firm against the AfD threat.
And, likewise, he refuses to be too down-hearted by his beloved Britain’s exit from the European Union.
“It is deplorable and has changed Europe already, but people of Britain, of Europe, of the world, will learn that humanity means brotherhood and sisterhood in solidarity. When the level of the seas rise, when the level of the Hudson River in New York rises to flood Trump Tower, people will learn that we have to act together in the face of catastrophe.” As evidence of what he sees as a fundamental part of our God-given nature, he points to how the world has reacted to the threat posed by the coronavirus. “We are working globally in solidarity against this.”
His seemingly indefatigable hope does, however, stumble a little when it comes to ecumenism. He starts off with a note of optimism. “There has been so much progress since I attended a Student Christian Movement conference in Swanwick in 1947 while I was still a prisoner of war. My Church has made a treaty with the Anglican Church on Baptism and the Eucharist, and the Churches in Germany are on the long road from being state Churches to being free Churches.”
It is when I ask about Catholic participation in this process that he retreats a little. “Theologically,” he judges, “we were better off 30 years ago, when at Tübingen we had a common working group of the two [Protestant and Catholic] faculties of theology. That no longer exists.”
He suddenly looks sad. In an effort to get us back to hope, I mention Pope Francis, but Professor Moltmann is not persuaded. “His declaration following the Amazon synod is a disappointment. He wants not to ordain viri probati or female deacons. He will lose the women, and without the women you cannot keep the Church alive.” It is a sobering insight into how sympathetic leading figures in other denominations are reacting to the recent turn of events in Catholicism.
The professor is incapable, though, of remaining sombre for too long. He has five grandchildren and two great grandchildren to accentuate his predisposition to hope – though his wife, the distinguished German feminist theologian Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, died three years ago. Plus, he tells me, he has a trip coming up to his “beloved” Nicaragua, where he established the first Protestant university in the capital Managua.
Does he ever contemplate retirement? I suspect the answer already. “Instead of sitting in my chair and looking out of the window, I prefer to travel and visit the places that I love.” And the secret to being so active and engaged and curious in your nineties? He shrugs, as if to say it is none of his own doing. “God,” he replies.
His seemingly indefatigable hope does, however, stumble a little when it comes to ecumenism. He starts off with a note of optimism. “There has been so much progress since I attended a Student Christian Movement conference in Swanwick in 1947 while I was still a prisoner of war. My Church has made a treaty with the Anglican Church on Baptism and the Eucharist, and the Churches in Germany are on the long road from being state Churches to being free Churches.”
It is when I ask about Catholic participation in this process that he retreats a little. “Theologically,” he judges, “we were better off 30 years ago, when at Tübingen we had a common working group of the two [Protestant and Catholic] faculties of theology. That no longer exists.”
He suddenly looks sad. In an effort to get us back to hope, I mention Pope Francis, but Professor Moltmann is not persuaded. “His declaration following the Amazon synod is a disappointment. He wants not to ordain viri probati or female deacons. He will lose the women, and without the women you cannot keep the Church alive.” It is a sobering insight into how sympathetic leading figures in other denominations are reacting to the recent turn of events in Catholicism.
The professor is incapable, though, of remaining sombre for too long. He has five grandchildren and two great grandchildren to accentuate his predisposition to hope – though his wife, the distinguished German feminist theologian Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, died three years ago. Plus, he tells me, he has a trip coming up to his “beloved” Nicaragua, where he established the first Protestant university in the capital Managua.
Does he ever contemplate retirement? I suspect the answer already. “Instead of sitting in my chair and looking out of the window, I prefer to travel and visit the places that I love.” And the secret to being so active and engaged and curious in your nineties? He shrugs, as if to say it is none of his own doing. “God,” he replies.
Professor Moltmann delivered the Charles Gore Lecture on A Theology of Hope as part of the Westminster Abbey Institute’s spring programme. For further information, visit www.westminster-abbey.org/institute
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