The Theology of Hope

The twentieth century was a time of unprecedented industrial and technological achievement. It was also the bloodiest in history. A single scientific endeavor could raise man to unprecedented heights or debase him to horrific cruelty. Aerospace engineering, for example, forever transformed both the way we travel and the way we conduct war. Such a paradox of progress and massacre drove German theologian Jürgen Moltmann to forge one of the most influential theologies in recent times: the theology of hope.

Moltmann, who died last June at the age of ninety-eight, made headlines in a 1968 New York Times article entitled: “God is Dead Doctrine Losing Ground to ‘Theology of Hope.’” Read by theologians and laymen alike, Moltmann’s book Theology of Hope resonated with a world torn between the extremes of boundless optimism in the human capacity for progress and outright despair in the human capacity for evil. The turn of the twentieth century was a time of unbridled optimism in the Western world, and Christianity reflected this confidence. But after two devastating world wars and the advent of the nuclear age, optimism gave way to stark humility. The world was rudely reawakened to the reality of sin.

Moltmann received a copy of the Bible while being detained in a British POW camp. He and his fellow prisoners were shocked at photos emerging from concentration and extermination camps in Belsen and Auschwitz. They could not but feel remorse for the atrocities committed by their own people. Many of Moltmann’s fellow prisoners simply gave into despair. But Moltmann found a new source of hope in the lamentation psalms and the passion narratives of the Bible. “I began to understand the assailed Christ because I felt that he understood me,” Moltmann recounted. He argued that we must acknowledge the suffering and injustice of this world if we are to discover true hope. Only by facing mankind at its worse can we feel the force of—and give witness to—God’s promise to heal it. When Moltmann read the words, “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?” in both the Old (Ps. 22:2) and New Testaments (Mk. 15:34), he discovered a divine brother who felt the same as he did amid the post-war destruction, and this saved him from self-destruction.

The bedrock of Moltmann’s reflection on hope is God’s promise. Christian faith is lived in witness to the promises of a God who can and will make all things right. These promises are revealed most clearly in the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Moltmann recognizes that our present experience is completely out of alignment with the future that God will bring to creation. But whenever this experience tempts us to flee from the world in passive resignation, the Cross reminds us that we are not alone in our suffering. Just as the young Moltmann found strength to press forward when he read about the God who encounters us on the Cross, so we are called toward a new future even though the world is not what it should be.

Moltmann makes it clear that the ultimate basis of Christian hope is the resurrection of the crucified Jesus. This resurrection is a powerful word of promise that stands in contradiction to our present experience of suffering and death. Yet this does not mean that we should wait passively for the fulfillment of this promise. To the contrary, we move forward in the light of hope toward the transformation of the world that God will bring. “To believe,” writes Moltmann, “means to cross in hope and anticipation the bounds that have been penetrated by the raising of the crucified.”

Moltmann argues that hope is the active expectation that God will heal and transform the world. Hope does not mean the denial of suffering or injustice, nor does it mean that human beings are able to heal creation apart from the power of God’s grace. Hope, rather, is based on what God has promised to do in the future, and hope thus calls us to witness to those promises in the actions of healing and justice in the present day. When we are tempted to lose heart because of what we see in the present, we are called to remember the future that God has promised and press forward in hope.

The primary criticism of Moltmann’s theology of hope has centered on his seemingly exclusive focus on the future and lack of attention to what has already come to fulfillment in Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. Moltmann’s general response to this criticism was that it is precisely in what Christ has already realized that the attention of the believer should focus on the future. Moltmann insisted that the “already”—effected by the realization of the New Covenant—should never distract us from the absolutely essential “not yet.” In other words, God’s promises do not offer a vague expectation of what is to come, but a certainty that it will come. Our response to those promises is obedience, and that is precisely what motivates our action in the world today. The Spirit has been given to us precisely to make us “groan” for the redemption of creation (cf. Rom. 8:26-27). This perspective, Moltmann insisted, summons us to serve the world here and now because God does not act from outside us but through us, and more specifically through our expectation of what is to come, our readiness for it, and our obedience to God’s promise that it will indeed come.

Another aspect of Moltmann’s theology that has caused serious concern is his suggestion that God the Father suffered with Jesus in the latter’s earthly passion. This raises a red flag of “patripassianism” which the Church has declared a heresy. Defenders of Moltmann have claimed that he had good reason to toe the line of patripassianism since he desired to shed full light on the meaning of Christianity in a post-Holocaust world.

Moltmann proposed hope as the essential lens through which we can recognize that Christianity offers something that secular optimism does not, and that ultimately the Gospel is the only antidote to despair. But precisely what kind of antidote the Gospel offers has been a matter of controversy among theologians. In fact, this controversy was the background for a shocking protest at the University Tübingen in 1968 when a student stood up in class and ripped the microphone away from a colleague of Moltmann named Joseph Ratzinger. The controversy revolved around the way in which hope is oriented toward this world and toward the next; how hope shapes the Christian expectation of the fulfilment of God’s promises; or how, in plain terms, we are to understand eschatology. The debate is quite complicated though not unimportant. Elected to the papacy as Benedict XVI, Ratzinger penned his final contribution to the debate in a magnificent encyclical letter entitled Spe salvi (“Saved by Hope,” 2007), well worth reading or re-reading in this Jubilee Year.

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