Testimony is always more persuasive, more human, less argumentative, less concerned with point scoring and logical victories as a form of personal witness, perhaps because testimony and witness point beyond ourselves to the One of whom we testify, and to whom we bear witness. Thus what is at stake isn’t the otucome of an argument, but the reality of our experience. Unless theology arises out of the church’s witness to the Gospel, and unless Christian theologians are able to speak of God from experiences of God’s presence and absence, then theological discourse will be ‘academic’ in the least useful sense of that badly abused word.
In Christian terms, academic theology at its best is a form of prayerful reverent study, a reflective dwelling in the essential and crucial realities of our existence, as those to whom God has come in the glory and grace of Jesus Christ. Jurgen Moltmann is an academic theologian in this sense; his writing and teaching combine personal testimony, Christian witness and what he calls speculative systematic theology. Speculative but disciplined by the constraining cords of the biblical, ecclesial and doctrinal traditions of Christian faith, in all their changing continuity and diversity.
I guess one of the reasons I read Moltmann both avidly and critically, is that even when his ideas and speculative suggestions are wide of where I think the mark is, I never doubt that he is seeking to faithfully and truthfully understand more of the love and grace of God in Christ crucified. His emphases on eschatology and the future Kingdom’s ‘nowness’ (my word), his passionate belief in the passion of God, his willingness to be caught out in inconsistency if new thinking leads him to review and revise earlier positions, his refusal to ignore the political implications of faithfulness in following Christ today; these and much more, make me pause, ponder and if necessary, dissent. And yes, he admits that what he offers are contributions to systematic theology rather than a finished systematic theology with a tidy overarching comprehensiveness. But Moltmann so often has said what needs saying, and what pastors need to hear. I still remember the coincidence of reading The Crucified God at Easter while accompanying several families through terminal illness and bereavement.
As a pastor, for me serious theology, yes academic theology, has always mattered, because human life and people’s deepest experiences deserve our best thought. People’s perplexities, their struggles to understand, the sheer effort just sometimes to go on being faithful, deserve from us that attentiveness to truth and such sensitivity to human longing and hurt, as only grows in minds and hearts patient of God’s incomprehensible ways, and impatient with all ad hoc paperback solutions to those problem areas of our lives where what we seek is not solutions, but God. Just God.
All of which is by way of saying Moltmann’s theological story, told through his life, and his life told through his theology, is yet another important ‘contribution’. The now characteristic mixture of testimony, theological exposition as familiar themes are revisited and further summarised, and with the occasional page or two where eyebrows go up and I want to politely, but appreciatively, dissent.
Something of what I find so attractive about Moltmann’s spirit is the humility and gratitude to God that is the low background music of this book (and of a number of the others). Here’s just one such doxological hint:
Ricoeur for his part convinced me about the ‘logic of undeserved overflow’ in Pauline theology, implicit in the phrase ‘how much more’ with which Paul extols the overmastering power of grace over against sin, and Christ’s resurrection over against his death on the cross. (page 107)
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