Background
Jöurgen Moltmann was born in 1926 in Hamburg, Germany. His childhood and pre-university education were lived during the years of the Nazi regime.
("This is Jürgen Moltmann's best and therefore most import...)
"This is Jürgen Moltmann's best and therefore most important book. He has substantially changed the central thrust of his theology without sacrificing its most vital element, its passionate concern for alleviation of the world's suffering." -Langdon Gilkey "The Crucified God rewards, as it demands, the reader's patient and open-minded attention, for its theme is nothing other than the "explosive presence" of the sighting and liberating Spirit of God in the midst of human life." -The Review of Books and Religion
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(Jürgen Moltmann formulates necessary questions about the ...)
Jürgen Moltmann formulates necessary questions about the significance of Jesus the Christ for persons today. He offers a compelling portrait of the earthly Jesus as the divine brother in our distress and suffering and points to the risen Christ as the warrant for the "future in which God will restore everything . . . and gather everything into his kingdom." Urging that acknowledgment of Christ and discipleship are two sides of the same coin, Moltmann contends that the question of Jesus Christ for today is not just an intellectual one. Moltmann takes fresh approaches to a number of crucial topics: Jesus and the kingdom of God, the passion of Christ and the pain of God, Jesus as brother of the tortured, and the resurrection of Christ as hope for the world, the cosmic Christ, Jesus in Jewish- Christian dialogue, the future of God, and others.
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(The Way of Jesus Christ discusses the following topics: 1...)
The Way of Jesus Christ discusses the following topics: 1. The symbol of the way embodies the aspect of process and brings out christology's alignment towards its goal. This symbol can comprehend Christ's way from his birth in the Spirit and his baptism in the Spirit to his self-surrender on Golgotha. It also makes it possible to understand the path of Christ as the way leading from his resurrection to his parousia-the way he takes in the Spirit to Israel, to the nations, and into the breadth and depth of the cosmos. 2. The symbol of the way makes us aware that every human christology is historically conditioned and limited. Every human christology is a 'christology of the way,' not yet a 'christology of the home country,' a christology of faith, not yet a christology of sight. So christology is no more than the beginning of eschatology; and eschatology, as the Christian faith understands it, is always the consummation of christology. 3. Finally, but not least important: every way is an invitation. A way is something to be followed. 'The way of Jesus Christ' is not merely a christological category. It is an ethical category too. Anyone who enters upon Christ's way will discover who Jesus really is; and anyone who really believes in Jesus and the Christ of God will follow him along the way he himself took. Christology and christopraxis find one another in the full and completed knowledge of Christ. This christology links dogmatics and ethics in closer detail than in the previous volumes.
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( From its English publication in 1973, Jurgen Moltmann's...)
From its English publication in 1973, Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God garnered much attention, and it has become one of the seminal texts of twentieth-century theology. Following up on his groundbreaking Theology of Hope, The Crucified God established the cross as the foundation for Christian hope. Moltmann's dramatic innovation was to see the cross not as a problem of theodicy but instead as an act of ultimate solidarity between God and humanity. In this, he drew on liberation theology, and he was among the first to bring third-world theologies into a first-world context. Moltmann proposes that suffering is not a problem to be solved but instead that suffering is an aspect of God's very being: God is love, and love invariably involves suffering. In this view, the crucifixion of Jesus is an event that affects the entirety of the Trinity, showing that The Crucified God is more than an arresting titleit is a theological breakthrough.
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(Jurgen Moltmann's Life and work have marked the history o...)
Jurgen Moltmann's Life and work have marked the history of theology after the Second World War in Europe and North America like no other. He is the most widely read, quoted and translated theologian of our time. Now, after celebrating his eightieth birthday, he looks back on a life engaged in the forging a Christian response to the tumult and opportunities of our age. In his autobiography Moltmann tell his engaging and searching life story, from his Hamburg youth in an unconventional parental home up to the "incompleteness" of the present moment. Yet his narrative also sheds light on the creative arc of Moltmann's work, on the journey of his own theological development from its beginnings after World War II through the beginnings of political theology and, most phenomenally, the advent of the theology of hope. A wide-ranging document alert to the deeper currents of his time and ours, Moltmann's work is also an engrossing reconsideration of a life full of intense experience and new beginnings.
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("The following efforts bear the title Theology of Hope, n...)
"The following efforts bear the title Theology of Hope, not because they set out once again to present eschatology as a separate doctrine and to compete with the well known textbooks. Rather, their aim is to show how theology can set out from hope and begin to consider its theme in an eschatological light. For this reason they inquire into the ground of the hope of Christian faith and into the responsible exercise of this hope in thought and action in the world today. The various critical discussions should not be understood as rejections and condemnations. They are necessary conversations on a common subject which is so rich that it demands continual new approaches."
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("This book, which in my opinion is Moltmann's best, can b...)
"This book, which in my opinion is Moltmann's best, can be recommended on the basis that it contains challenging and creative insights that can be used by the discriminating reader in the service of church renewal Moltmann represents the theology of liberation at its best, and those who wish to know more about this theology would do well to study this creative and searching theologian." --Donald G. Bloesch Christianity Today "Moltmann is perhaps unsurpassed among his contemporaries in keenness of insight and rhetorical power." --Daniel L. Migliore, Theology Today "Moltmann presents a stirring vision which every Christian community could well ponder With a missionary emphasis, he seeks to help the reader face the question of the church's identity in the light of the contemporary political, economic, and social scene." --Religious Education
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0800628217/?tag=2022091-20
(Jurgen Moltmann's life and work have marked the history o...)
Jurgen Moltmann's life and work have marked the history of theology after the Second World War in Europe and North America like no other. He is the most widely read, quoted, and translated theologian of our time. His systematic work thrives on the cutting edge of Christian theology in the twentyfirst century, challenging and stimulating a whole generation of theologians to work at theology in different and more comprehensive ways.
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( Modern humanity has accepted a truncated, impoverished ...)
Modern humanity has accepted a truncated, impoverished definition of life. Focusing solely on material realities, we have forgotten that joy, purpose, and meaning come from a life that is both immersed in the temporal and alive to the transcendent. We have, in other words, ceased to live in God. In this book, renowned theologian Jürgen Moltmann shows us what that life of joy and purpose looks like. Describing how we came to live in a world devoid of the ultimate, he charts a way back to an intimate connection with the biblical God. He counsels that we adopt a "theology of life," an orientation that sees God at work in both the mundane and the extraordinary and that pushes us to work for a world that fully reflects the life of its Creator. Moltmann offers a telling critique of the shallow values of consumerist society and provides a compelling rationale for why spiritual sensibilities and encounter with God must lie at the heart of any life that seeks to be authentically human.
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(Winner of Grawemeyer Award In this remarkable and timely ...)
Winner of Grawemeyer Award In this remarkable and timely work - in many ways the culmination of his systematic theology - world-renowned theologian Jurgen Moltmann stands Christian eschatology on its head. Moltmann rejects the traditional approach, which focuses on the End, an apocalyptic finale, as a kind of Christian search for the "final solution." He centers instead on hope and God's promise of new creation for all things. "Christian eschatology," he says, "is the remembered hope of the raising of the crucified Christ, so it talks about beginning afresh in the deadly end." Yet Moltmann's novel framework, deeply informed by Jewish and messianic thought, also fosters rich and creative insights into the perennially nettling questions of eschatology: Are there eternal life and personal identity after death? How is one to think of heaven, hell, and purgatory? What are the historical and cosmological dimensions of Christian hope? What are its social and political implications. In a heartbreakingly fragile and fragment world, Moltmann's comprehensive eschatology surveys the Christian vista, bravely envisioning our "horizons of expectation" for personal, social, even cosmic transformation in God.
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(The astonishing theological creativity of Jurgen Moltmann...)
The astonishing theological creativity of Jurgen Moltmann continues in this new work, a vision of the Christian future, centered in God, God's reign, and God's justice or righteousness. Moltmann here brings together the biblical, historical, and theological elements of a new integrated Christian vision of the world, especially in light of our contemporary understandings of nature and the evolving universe. Anchored in the resurrection of Jesus, such a vision affirms that God is the God of resurrection promise, God is present in justice and righteousness, Jesus is the son of righteousness, and nature can be seen as the site of God's work toward the fulfillment of life. Here is a theological vision that can integrate our faith, inform our worldview, and fuel our life engagements.
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Jöurgen Moltmann was born in 1926 in Hamburg, Germany. His childhood and pre-university education were lived during the years of the Nazi regime.
Abandoning his previous plans to study physics and mathematics, Moltmann returned to Germany to study theology at the University of Gottingen, where the leading faculty (especially Otto Weber) had belonged to the Confessing Church, independent from the national church and opposed to Hitler.
In 1944 he was sent off to war and was captured (in February 1945) by the British. Although the war ended three months later, he was held as a prisoner of war for more than three years in Scotland and England. These were formative years for Moltmann.
Upon graduation in 1952 he became pastor of a parish church in Wasserhorst. His doctoral dissertation, written under Weber and completed in 1957, resulted in a teaching position in a seminary of the Confessing Church at Wuppertal. He says that he took the position uncertain there was anything more for theologians to say after the monumental Church Dogmatics of Karl Barth. But important university positions, for a brief time at Bonn (where Barth had once taught) and then at Tubingen, soon opened for him.
At the dawn of the 1966 the theme of hope was in the air. Politically, there was John F. Kennedy's American "Camelot, " and in Prague there was to appear Alexander Dubcek's "Socialism with a human face. " Religiously, there was the aggiornamento of Pope John XXIII and the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King, Jr. But it was decisively the reading of Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope) by Ernst Bloch-the free thinking Marxist philosopher from the former East Germany (later a refugee to the West, and Tubingen)-that stimulated Moltmann to formulate a "theology of hope. " Bloch argued with persuasive scholarly insight that what is essentially and characteristically human is neither enchantment with the past (Freud and behaviorism) nor preoccupation with the present (existentialism, mysticism, and platonism), but anticipation of the future.
He developed an ontology of "not yet being" in which the future, like a vacuum, draws the present away from the grips of the past and toward an ever new and potentially better future. For Moltmann this was secular confirmation of what scholars had been saying since the turn of this century about Biblical anthropology and eschatology.
From the promises made to Abraham to the message of the prophets, from Jesus' preaching about the Kingdom of God to John's vision of a new heaven and a new earth, an orientation toward the future, with anticipation and hope, is central to the self understanding of both Old and New Testament writers.
Where Biblical thought and Moltmann differ from Bloch is in their insistence that standing on the horizon of the future is not a vacuum but the "God of hope. " Writings Explored Christian Doctrine Moltmann's book Theology of Hope (German edition 1964, English 1967) is probably the most articulate and creative work of theology written during the second half of the 20th century. He was not, however, the only theologian of hope, and he worked in cordial relations with his contemporary from Gottingen days, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and with the Roman Catholic theologian Johannes B. Metz. Furthermore, Moltmann was not the captive of his own popularity as a theologian of hope. His writings explore and contribute to the full spectrum of Christian doctrine.
In The Crucified God (1974) he returned to the theme of his prisoner-of-war days: defeat, despair, and death. He proposed that the cross of Christ is revelatory of the life of God and that, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and historic patripassionism have suggested, "only a suffering God can help us. " But Moltmann insisted that the resurrection of Christ is God's decisive word to us and that this hope requires an appropriate response in social, economic, and political life. Faith shows its "hope for the life that defeats death in . .. protest against the manifold forms of death"-the economic death of the starving, the political death of the oppressed, the social death of the handicapped, the technological death of the war-torn. The theology of hope is, therefore, political theology, defying the forces of death and practicing confidence not in circumstances or in feelings but in the promises of God.
Other works by Moltmann include Trinity and the Kingdom (1980), God in Creation (1985), and The Way of Jesus Christ (1989). In Trinity and the Kingdom, critics noted the surfacing of Moltmann's ideas on tritheism-the idea that each aspect of the Trinity is a separate God-beginning to emerge. Trinity also hinted at panentheism-the view that God and the world are connected-which was becoming part of his theology. This idea was carried further in God in Creationand The Way of Jesus Christ.
During the mid-1966 he achieved international prominence as the leading exponent of the "theology of hope. " This, along with subsequent works in Christology, anthropology, and ethics, established him as one of Germany's most important Protestant theologians of the 20th century.
Moltmann has contributed to a number of areas of Christian theology, including systematic theology, eschatology, ecclesiology, political theology, Christology, pneumatology, and the theology of creation.
He was the recipient of the 2000 University of Louisville and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary Grawemeyer Award in Religion, and was also selected to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 1984–85. His two most famous works are Theology of Hope and The Crucified God. Moltmann also served as a mentor to Miroslav Volf.
("This book, which in my opinion is Moltmann's best, can b...)
(Winner of Grawemeyer Award In this remarkable and timely ...)
(The astonishing theological creativity of Jurgen Moltmann...)
("The following efforts bear the title Theology of Hope, n...)
( From its English publication in 1973, Jurgen Moltmann's...)
(Jurgen Moltmann's Life and work have marked the history o...)
(Jurgen Moltmann's life and work have marked the history o...)
(Jürgen Moltmann formulates necessary questions about the ...)
( Modern humanity has accepted a truncated, impoverished ...)
("This is Jürgen Moltmann's best and therefore most import...)
(The Way of Jesus Christ discusses the following topics: 1...)
He spoke of the guilt and inconsolable grief he felt over the crimes of his country and the necessity of standing up to it all. Then an army chaplain gave him a New Testament with Psalms. His previous experience with the Bible and religion had been indifferent and inconsequential. But, he related that "these Psalms gave me the words for my own suffering. "
This, along with subsequent works in Christology, anthropology, and ethics, established him as one of Germany's most important Protestant theologians of the 20th century.
Influenced heavily by Karl Barth's theology, Hegel's philosophy of history, and Ernst Bloch's philosophy of hope, Moltmann developed his own form of liberation theology predicated on the view that God suffers with humanity, while also promising humanity a better future through the hope of the Resurrection, which he has labelled a 'theology of hope'.
