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Reason #5: He formulates theology in a way that is truly open.

I mean at least two things when I say this. First, the style of Moltmann’s writings have an open quality to them. I can only describe it by saying that I can become claustrophobic when reading other theologians because they are intentionally leading you down a quickly narrowing corridor. Arguably, there is a kind of beauty to this way of logical reasoning; the downside is that you end up in a small, neatly organized closet. Moltmann does the opposite. He might lead you down a narrowing corridor, but he only does so to shove you at the end into an endless field and an open sky so you can realize how dumb it was to stand in the corridor.

To be fair, this is what some people don’t like about him- he’s not always exact. But Moltmann is more interested in helping us see from a certain “space” (the space of hope, for example) and he wants us to see that space EVERYWHERE. This is why he refuses to write theology in traditional categories. He doesn’t want to write about God Creator and then turn all the other parts of the story on blurry background mode. He wants to think about the act of God in creation and cast the net so far and wide that we end up considering the act of creation present in everything. Where other theologians narrow, Moltmann widens.

Secondly, Moltmann readily acknowledges that his theology is not a closed system, not a finished product, not in any sense complete, but simply a “contribution” to an ongoing conversation. Look- I know some other theologians say this, but then they write a multiple-volume systematic work of theology and sigh when they’ve finished it. Moltmann flatly refused to write systematic theology. He wrote a series of books on a variety of topics that contribute to theology but are not meant to be held as his final word, and certainly not meant to be seen as God’s final word. Theology for Moltmann is always theologia viatorum, theology on the way. We speak of God, but we do so as people who are moving, changing, reaching for God’s coming future.

Because he formulates theology openly, he has been able to dialogue with a variety of people with multiple perspectives- and he has freely allowed them and invited them to influence his own thought. He is genuinely interested in hearing what others have to say; consequently he’s more interested in adapting his theology with new insights from outside voices than he is defending his theology from criticism. He has sought out feminist voices (not least his wife, Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, who is a rock star), liberation theologians, Orthodox and Catholic and Jewish and Muslim conversation partners, environmentalists, the list goes on. And because he’s such an authentically interested listener, he has this amazing ability to set up a place for open conversation to happen between some unlikely partners. Here’s Minjung theology for the ruling classes! Let’s talk about feminist theology for men! (Both of these examples are chapters in his Experiences in Theology.) Moltmann wants theology to be robust conversation, open dialogue, a plethora of voices, an expansive table.

Thanks, Professor Moltmann, for giving us an example of how to live graciously and openly-and yet not without conviction-in a pluralist world. You know how to throw a truly festive theological dinner party.

Reason #4: He gets suffering. And he believes GOD gets suffering.

You may be feeling, as some of Moltmann’s critics have, that any theologian who can wax poetic about hope overflowing everywhere and the Spirit redeeming everything and the Trinity happily dancing away is clearly someone who is not in touch with reality. You could not be more wrong. Moltmann was a former Nazi soldier who spent two years as a POW in a war camp. He’s had his share of suffering. He’s seen his share of atrocities. He’s experienced his share of death. And the very real suffering present in our world is no side matter to him- in fact, his deep and passionate concern for those who suffer is precisely what makes his theology so robust and missional.

Many people seem terrified of saying that God in any way suffers, so when confronted with the crucifixion of Jesus they do their best to get God out as unscathed as possible while still getting what they need from the “transaction.” Not Moltmann. He opted to call a spade a spade by entitling his second major work of theology The Crucified God and spending over 300 pages describing how God suffered, why God suffered, and he even shamed us for avoiding God’s suffering so much. If we follow the suffering God, if we want to be part of God’s future, Moltmann says we have to begin at the foot of the cross where God-forsakenness took on a whole new level of meaning.

If we don’t think God understands our suffering, we haven’t understood the cross. He writes, “Not until we understand (Jesus’) abandonment by the God and Father whose imminence and closeness he had proclaimed in a unique, gracious and festive way, can we understand what was distinctive about his death” (p.149). If we’re to have proper hope, it’s hope in the One who suffered for us in ways that we cannot even begin to imagine.

As he often does, Moltmann poses a question that the majority of Protestant navel-gazing theologians hadn’t considered. While they had spent considerable time and energy talking about what Jesus’ death meant for us, Moltmann boldly asked what Jesus’ death meant for God. (Go ahead and say it with me- WWF smackdown!) And then he wrote these words that forever changed my understanding: “When the crucified Jesus is called the ‘image of the invisible God,’ the meaning is that this is God, and God is like this. God is not greater than he is in this humiliation. God is not more glorious than he is in this self-surrender. God is not more powerful than he is in this helplessness. God is not more divine than he is in this humanity” (p.205).

“To recognize God in the crucified Christ means to grasp the trinitarian history of God, and to understand oneself and this whole world with Auschwitz and Vietnam, with race-hatred and hunger, as existing in the history of God. God is not dead. Death is in God. God suffers by us. He suffers with us. Suffering is in God. God does not ultimately reject, nor is he ultimately rejected. Rejection is within God. In the way hidden in the cross, the triune God is already on the way toward becoming “all in all,” and “in him we live and move and have our being.” When he brings his history to completion (I Cor. 15:28), his suffering will be transformed into joy, and thereby our suffering as well.”

Thank you, Moltmann, for rescuing Jesus’ death from our greedy little individualistic hands and returning it to the hope of the world and everything in it.

This summer Christine Sine has hosted a series of great blogs on everyday spiritual practices. She posted my contribution on the spiritual practice of coloring. Go check it out here, and read the others as well!

Reason #3: He talks about the Trinity in a way that does not make me want to poke my eyes out.

If you haven’t noticed yet, I’m a theology nerd. But let me tell you- even I get supremely annoyed when theologians start theorizing about the Trinity…because what they say is mostly nonsense, and they know it. If you want to see some fancy tap-dancing, ask a theologian to explain to you this whole three-in-one concept without falling into pitfalls of heresy. (Ooooh, I’m sorry Rick, you’re disqualified for that misstep into modalism!)

Moltmann feels our pain. He writes, “It is difficult enough to believe that there is a God at all and to live accordingly. Does the belief in the Trinity not make the religious life even more difficult, and quite unnecessarily?” (The Trinity and the Kingdom, p.1) But Moltmann is not one to back down from a challenge. His contributions to trinitarian theology have been incredibly profound, and there’s no way I can summarize them with justice here. (If you’re coming to the Theological Conversation, sign up for my Moltmann 101 course and I’ll fill you in with more detail!)

Here’s what he doesn’t do: Moltmann’s approach avoids the feel of calculation that plagues much of trinitarian doctrine. He refuses to get bogged down in a conversation about “substance” and other eye-stabbing philosophical ramblings (THANK YOU). He does not create weird mathematical formulas to explain how three and one can happen simultaneously. And, of course, he refuses to do what I consider the cardinal sin of most trinitarian theology- to relegate the Spirit to some sort of directional arrow flinging between the muy importante Father and Son.

In a word, Moltmann has painted for us a trinitarian theology that is brightly and colorfully relational- and not in an abstract, philosophical way but an it-really-matters-to-the-world way. He writes, “The New Testament talks about God by proclaiming in narrative the relationships of the Father, the Son and the Spirit, which are relationships of fellowship and are open to the world” (TK, p.64). The Father, Son and Spirit are known to each other by their relation to each other, and because of their love for the world we are invited into that web of relationships and commanded to embody that kind of mutual love in our own lives and communities. (Notice that in this he not only fixes most trinitarian theological pitfalls but also makes the trinity a matter of missional, redemptive, eschatological importance rather than some doctrine only nerds care to debate. WWF Smackdown!)

Moltmann’s even so bold as to use Jewish monotheistic concepts like the Shema to describe how the trinity upholds the unity of God. With graceful and wise simplicity, he says, “The unity of the divine tri-unity lies in the union of the Father, the Son and the Spirit, not in their numerical unity” (TK p.95). How can that happen? By the Eastern Orthodox concept of perichoresis, which describes an intimate, mutual indwelling between Father, Son and Spirit that resembles a dance. Moltmann says, “The trinitarian relationship of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is so wide that the whole creation can find space, time and freedom in it” (TK p.109). In this relational love, the whole world is nourished.

In describing a relational, perichoretic God, Moltmann also addresses problems of hierarchy that have always, always, always been an issue in trinitarian theology- and an issue that has plagued our forms of government, our institutional church structures and even our everyday relationships. For Moltmann, the trinity is a way of seeing the world that correspondingly inhabits God’s very real relationship of love with the world.

Thanks, Professor. I can put down the ice pick now.

Reason 2: He rescued eschatology from irrelevance.

It’s not easy to talk about the end of the world. Jesus followers have been debating and discussing these matters for over two thousand years with a wide variation of answers. To put these diverse views on a scale, we can say there are two polarizing dangers: One, we can focus so much on what’s coming that we trivialize the present. (You’ve heard that phrase that some people are “of such heavenly mind they’re no earthly good.”) Two, we can focus so little on what’s coming that we trivialize the future.

In the modern period of Enlightenment, eschatology (the study of the ‘last things’) fell upon especially hard times. Theologians argued that no rational thinking person could have faith in a religion based on some superstitious view of what God will do in the future. Rudolf Bultmann famously embodied this understanding when he recast eschatology as something inherently personal and exclusively individualist; eschatology is the event of our own sense of judgment. Others chose to make eschatology a caricature of itself- one with charts and fatalistic predictions. Many of us understandably look at these options and consider giving up on eschatology entirely. The problem, of course, is that Judeo-Christian faith is by very definition an eschatological faith. And it is corporately, and even cosmically so.

Into this overly individualistic, self-indulgent, rational-overdrive environment, Moltmann birthed a theology of hope. He refused to say that eschatology didn’t matter. In fact, he did the opposite. When all other theologians began with creation and (much like their treatment of the Spirit) ended with a few vague paragraphs about eschatology, Moltmann exploded onto the scene by writing his first major theological work through the lens of eschatological hope. He writes, “The eschatological is not one element of Christianity, but it is the medium of Christian faith as such, the key in which everything in it is set, the glow that suffuses everything here in the dawn of an expected new day” (Theology of Hope, p.16).

What of superstition? Moltmann says our question is not “What can I know of historical facts?” but “What may I hope for?” There is a questionableness to all history and all human existence, and our task is to trust in the promise of God, which is above all a promise of redemption.

What of heavenly preoccupation? Moltmann says that a Jesus follower “does not find himself ‘in the air’, ‘between God and the world’, but he finds himself along with the world in that process to which the way is opened by the eschatological promise of Christ” (p.69 TOH).

Thank you, Professor, for showing us the third way between eschatological irrelevance and eschatological hyper-vigilance…and for showing us that redemptive, transformative hope is breathtakingly beautiful.

The Emergent Theological Conversation with Jurgen Moltmann is drawing near! To get us all in the spirit of this landmark event, this week I’ll be doing a series of posts to tell you the top five reasons I love Moltmann.

Reason #1: Moltmann actually cares about the Holy Spirit.
If you have spent any time reading systematic theology, you know that theologians write for pages and pages about God the Creator and go into endless detail about how, technically, Jesus is human and divine and what exactly happened on the cross. And then they proceed to give three paragraphs to the Holy Spirit, primarily using annoyingly trite truisms about the Spirit equipping us with “gifts.”

This might seem just fine for you, but I adore the Holy Spirit. Pentecost is one of my favorite days of the year. And I could not, for the life of me, figure out why no theologian seemed to find the Spirit as important, beautiful and central as I do. In Moltmann I found a theologian who, finally, takes the person of the Holy Spirit seriously- so seriously that if you don’t consider the role of the Holy Spirit, you are missing out on EVERYTHING. How’s that for the Cinderella of the Trinity?! With Moltmann, she finally gets to go to the ball. And she shows up everyone else there, prancing around in her fancy dress, all light on her feet.

The Holy Spirit is the power of God’s redemptive love unleashed into the world. For the love of Saint Peter, why relegate her to the back corner? Liberal theologians have often found talk of the Spirit to be too, um, tacky. Civilized, educated people who want to be seen as serious and thoughtful don’t feel comfortable talking about God having this strange “Spirit” floating around doing who knows what. Conservative theologians also tend to turn their brows up at the Spirit after encouraging people to take a “spiritual gifts assessment” which usually has nothing near the universal scope of the Spirit’s goal. Even some Pentecostals, as much as they love the Spirit, often put her in a box labeled “tongues” and otherwise pay her no mind.

For Moltmann, the Spirit is guiding all of us toward God’s reconciliation of the world. The Spirit is the “divine energy of life.” He writes, “To experience the Spirit is to experience what is divine not only as a person, and not merely as a force, but also as a space- as the space of freedom in which the living being can unfold” (The Spirit of Life, p.43). To live in God’s spirit is to inhabit the space where God’s redemption is made real in the world.

Thank you, Moltmann, for showing us what a robust pneumatology looks like and for saving the Spirit from a life of mopping floors in the pages of theology books.

(Pre- PostScript: Hermeneutics simply means the method/theory of biblical interpretation.)

Hampton sent along a link to the work of artist Lauren DiCioccio in her comment to my Statistics as Art post below. I was so enamored by the picture and concept that I’ve been thinking about it off and on all day. DiCioccio takes old fashion magazine articles and assigns each letter a color, and then paints these little color dots over each character along the page. I think the results are stunning – YOU GUYS, I CANNOT STOP STARING AT IT! – so I bought myself the one pictured above to hang in my office.

Her artistic transformation of this Vogue article about who-knows-what got me thinking about the way we read Scripture- or, more broadly, the way we encounter Scripture. It’s often so hard to know how to restore a sense of wonder to Scripture verses and stories that have become trite and in many cases devoid of meaning or transformative power for us. (Familiarity can breed apathy just as much as the faceless numbers of statistics can.) This is especially true if you’ve been told what to believe about Scripture more often than you’ve actually encountered the stories of Scripture.

DiCioccio has made something like a modern-day version of an illustrated manuscript, which is one of the few things I adore about the Medieval Ages. (Crusades? No. Illustrated manuscripts? OUI.) These Medieval illustrated/illluminated manuscripts did more than just provide context for people who couldn’t read. They also implied that these stories are more than just words; not simply rules or laws but beauty and life abundant. They symbolize a devotion that is not staid but in action, the movement of God that happens in between even those words that may have become for us too familiar, bringing them back to life.

If DiCioccio can make a Vogue article look this beautiful, imagine what kind of transformative, creative power we’d feel if we could imagine Scripture in the same way?

As someone for whom numbers sometimes look like cute little characters that need a name before I pay them any attention, I can relate to the very real fact that statistics often hit us as meaningless. Chris Jordan in Seattle has created some amazing works of art to bring these startling statistics to life. You should go see the entire set, but here’s a preview. Below is a picture of one million plastic cups- the number used on airline flights every SIX HOURS. Maybe I’ll start packing a reusable cup in my purse…

Detail image:

Next week I’m going to tell you the top 5 reasons why I love Moltmann. (Believe me, I could list thousands, but I’ll just give you the top five.) For now, though, I’ll point out one example of Moltmannian genius for you that I like to call WWF Smackdown Moments. These smackdown moments are defined as instances when (in my opinion) Moltmann fixes an entire theological debate in a single leap (or a few sentences)…and then goes off to have his breakfast.

I apologize in advance for greatly simplifying the complexity of this smackdown in its full context, but I won’t bore those of you who aren’t theology nerds. First, a little background- in 1934 Karl Barth and Emil Brunner had a rather famous debate over natural theology. Brunner believed, as a proponent of natural theology, that humanity can see/experience God revealed in nature and that these experiences can lead to faith. He felt Barth’s emphasis on sola Scriptura was overstated and wrote him a letter explaining how natural theology did not necessarily have to be in contest with the Reformed “solas” (sola Scriptura, sola gratia, etc.). Barth’s not-so-subtle answer? “Nein!” He wrote Brunner back with a letter of the same name and asserted that humanity can only know God and come to faith through God’s grace. Thus the debate raged for years, their two opinions polarizing further and further out.

Enter Moltmann, who in his Theology of Hope argued that the entire basis of their argument (which intersects with his re-definition of “history”) was actually misplaced, and therefore both of them were wrong. The problem, in an oversimplified nutshell, was that they were arguing on the proper basis of faith (where does faith begin?), which is an annoyingly self-centered (and modern) question. Moltmann was far more interested in asking a different question altogether- where is this faith headed? Moltmann says, “A natural theology…in which God is manifest and demonstrable to every [hu]man, is not the presupposition of Christian faith, but the future goal of Christian hope. This universal and immediate presence of God is not the source from which faith comes, but the end to which it is on the way” (TOH, p.282).

If you read the pages around this argument, they are so unbelievably hopeful and so properly missional that you cannot help but laugh at the haughtiness of the entire natural theology debate. Why in the world did they waste so much time on such a navel-gazing question when the whole “problem” could be fixed simply by moving the question from the origin of faith to the future goal of faith?!

Barth and Brunner, consider yourselves smacked down. ZING.

Yikes.