Jürgen Moltmann, the German scholar acknowledged as “the most widely read Christian theologian of the past 80 years,” died on June 3 at the age of 98. In one of history’s ironies, the former teenage soldier passed away the very week that the world commemorated the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion that would assure the defeat of his homeland, Germany. In a further irony, Moltmann is remembered for his “theology of hope,” which he developed in a prisoner-of-war camp.
Moltmann was planning on a career in quantum physics until Hitler’s war broke out. At age 16 his entire high school class was drafted to assist the anti-aircraft batteries defending Hamburg.
What began as a schoolboy adventure turned into a horror show as waves of U.S. and British aircraft fire-bombed the city, killing almost 40,000 civilians. He saw his friends incinerated, and he only survived by clinging to a piece of wood in a lake surrounded by fire. Two questions haunted him: “Where is God?” and “Why am I alive and not dead?”
Serving on the front lines in 1945, he soon realized that he and other poorly trained recruits were mere cannon fodder to keep Hitler alive for a few more months. Hands in the air, he approached a trench full of startled British soldiers and said in English, “I surrender!” From there, Moltmann spent the next three years in prison camps in Belgium, Scotland, and England.
When the Third Reich imploded, exposing the moral rot at its center, he saw how other German prisoners “collapsed inwardly, how they gave up all hope, sickening for the lack of it, some of them dying.” As he learned the truth about the genocidal Nazi regime, Moltmann felt an inconsolable grief about life, “weighed down by the somber burden of a guilt which could never be paid off.”
Moltmann had no religious background. He had brought two books with him into battle—Goethe’s poems and the works of Nietzsche—neither of which nourished much hope. But an American chaplain gave him an army-issue New Testament and Psalms. “If I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there,” the prisoner read. Could God be present in that dark place? As he read on, Moltmann found words that perfectly captured his feelings of desolation. Had not Jesus himself cried out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” He became convinced that God “was present even behind the barbed wire—no, most of all behind the barbed wire.”
Moltmann also found something new in the Psalms: hope. Walking along the perimeter of barbed wire at night for exercise, he would circle a small hill in the center of the camp on which stood a hut that served as a chapel. That hut became for him a symbol of God’s presence in the midst of suffering, and out of that symbol grew hope.
Later Moltmann was transferred to an educational camp in England run by the YMCA. The local population welcomed the German prisoners, bringing them homemade food, teaching them Christian doctrine, and never adding to the burden of guilt the prisoners already felt over Nazi atrocities. “They treated me better than the German army,” Moltmann said.
Upon release, Moltmann began to articulate his theology of hope. Humanity exists, he concluded, in a state of contradiction between the cross and the resurrection. Surrounded by evil and decay, we nonetheless hope for restoration, a hope illuminated by the “foreglow” of Christ’s resurrection. Faith in a God who has promised to make all things new can transform the present—just as Moltmann’s own hope of eventual release from prison camp transformed his daily experience there. Reminiscing, he mentioned three things that helped lift the darkness and give him hope: a cherry tree blossoming in the prison camp, the humanity of the Scottish workers, and the Bible he received from the chaplain. “These three things convinced me to love life again.”
On a visit to Virginia in 2015, I spent an evening with Moltmann, who was lecturing there. I was surprised by his charm and his wry sense of humor. He made some witty comments about US politics, and talked easily about popular culture and current events. Clearly, he sought to apply theology to real-world issues in our broken world.
Through all of Moltmann’s dense theological works run two themes: God’s presence with us in our suffering and God’s promise of a perfected future. If Jesus had lived during the Third Reich, Moltmann noted, very likely he would have been shipped with other Jews to the gas chambers. In Jesus, we have lasting proof that God suffers with us, as Moltmann explains in The Crucified God.
At the same time, Jesus gives a foretaste of a future time when the planet will be restored to God’s original design. Moltmann describes Easter as the beginning of the “laughter of the redeemed…God’s protest against death.” A person without future faith may assume from the suffering on this planet that God is neither all-good nor all-powerful. Future faith allows us to believe that God is not satisfied with this world either, and intends to remake it.
Only the final defeat of evil will allow the kingdom of God to take shape in all its fullness. In the meantime we establish settlements of that kingdom, always glancing back to the Gospels for guidance. Moltmann notes that the phrase “Day of the Lord” in the Old Testament inspired fear; but in the New Testament it inspires hope, because those authors have come to know and trust the Lord whose Day it is.
In a single sentence Jürgen Moltmann expresses the great span from Good Friday to Easter. It is, in fact, a summary of human history— past, present, and future: “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him.”
Leave a Comment