I spent a while yesterday browsing through the many books of Jurgen Moltmann. The first one I ever read was The Crucified God, published by SCM, London, an early softcover edition in a format they called Study Edition. I read this astonishing book during Lent in the late 1970's as a young minister freshly out of College and not long finished an arts degree in Glasgow which majored in moral philosophy. I was aware even then, that this was a book, and this was a theologian, from whom I would never recover. In every life there are moments of disclosure when we unexpectedly encounter truth at a different level, we hear a voice speaking a different theological dialect, with a strange accent, and for me in the case of Moltmann, speaking our language with imaginative force and with power and precision, informed by both passion and prayer.
The Crucified God is a theological classic, forged out of the high tensile steel of a man who faced death as a young soldier, and was rescued from nihilism and loss of soul as a young POW in Ayrshire, Scotland when he read a New Testament and encountered the living Christ, crucified and risen and present in the very depths of all the hells and all the suffering and dying he had lived through. The Gospel of Mark shattered the chains of hopelessness, despair and bewildered anguish that beset this 19 year old German soldier coming to terms with Nazism, Auschwitz and a shamed nation. Here is Moltmann's own reflection in 2006 on that encounter with the crucified God; few theological classics have such an authentic spiritual provenance, rooted in personal experience, and the title a soul conviction that fuels the rest of this person's life:
Then I read Mark's Gospel as a whole and came to the story of the passion: when I heard Jesus' death cry, "My God, why have you forsaken me?' I felt growing within me the conviction: this is someone who understands you completely, who is with you in your cry to God and has felt the same forsakenness you are living in now. I began to understand the assailed, forsaken Christ because I knew that he understood me. The divine brother in need, the companion on the way, who goes with you through this 'valley of the shadow of death', the fellow sufferer who carries you, with your suffering. I summoned up the courage to live again, and I was slowly but surely seized by a great hope for the resurrection into God's 'wide space where there is no more cramping.' This perception of Christ did not come all of a sudden and overnight, either, but it became more and more important for me, and I read the story of the passion again and agian for preference in the Gospel of Mark.
This early companionship with Jesus, the brother in suffering and the companion on the road, has never left me ever since, and I became more and more assured of it. I have never decided for Christ once and for all, as is often demanded of us. I have decided again and again in specific terms for the discipleship of Christ when situations were serious and it was necessary. But right down to the present day, after almost 60 years, I am certain that then, in 1945, and there, in the Scottish prisoner of war camp, in the dark pit of my soul, Jesus sought me and found me. (from A Broad Place, Jurgen Moltmann, 2008, page 30)
Few world class theologians have written with such personal vulnerability about their own personal encounter with Jesus and their specific journey of discipleship. But some have, and Moltmann is one of that unashamed band of Christian theologians who never settled for the notion that theological thought should be pursued in an objective, detached, intellectual attitude of mind. He writes out of that testimony, and his first major book, Theology of Hope was a book that spoke with direct appeal into the Cold War chill of nuclear threat, international confrontation, and humanity desperate for a braking system that would halt the Gadarene stampede to mutual assured destruction (MAD). Some of the titles of his later books signal the deep theological convictions of the mature Moltman still deciding again and again for discipleship of the crucified God. Theology of Hope, The Future of Creation, Jesus Christ for Today's World, Ethics of Hope, In the End- the Beginning, and so on. And lest you think Moltmann is a heavy hearted prophet most at ease pronouncing the reasons for despair and anxiety, one of his slim masterpieces is called Theology and Joy.
In celebration of Moltmann's contribution to modern theology, and to the lives of countless people who have read his books, heard his lectures, been taught by the deeply dyed discipleship of this German Christian professor, there will be regular blog posts on Moltmann from now till Trinity Sunday. His book The Trinity and the Kingdom of God stands in my library as one of the most provocative and faithful works of Christian theology I've read – and counting the times this book was discussed in classes on Trinitarian theology, I think my re-readings of it is now in double figures!
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