Word: moltmann
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Moltmann makes his point clear from the very beginning of his work. The Theology of Hope. "Christian faith strains after the promises of the universal future of Christ. There is only one real problem in Christian theology: the problem of the future." As Moltmann sees it, the churches have neglected that central point of Christianity almost completely, looking wistfully back, instead, toward a vanished primordial paradise. "The Church lives on memories," Moltmann writes in a second book, Religion, Revolution, and the Future, "the world on hope...
...Moltmann took his initial cue and much of his underlying philosophy from a highly unorthodox source: Marxist Philosopher Ernst Bloch.* Bloch is an atheist who nonetheless believes that man's hope for the future is the only transcendence in the universe: "Where there is hope, there is religion." Moreover, says Bloch, a hopeful future came into the world with the Bible...
Precisely, says Moltmann. What makes man's future so full of promise is not the modernist's idea of upward, evolutionary progress inherent in man but, quite simply, Christ's death and Resurrection. No matter whether the Resurrection is verifiable as a historical event; that "something" happened to give early Christians their immense hope is evidence enough. In addition, argues Moltmann, while the Resurrection may be "the sign of future hope," the cross itself-through Christ's sacrifice-means "hope to the-hopeless...
Johannes Metz, a German Roman Catholic theologian-of-hope who is working with Moltmann on a new book of political theology, makes a similar assessment of the Christian impact on the world. "The secularity of the world, as we see it today in a globally heightened form, has fundamentally arisen not against Christianity but through it," he writes. "It is originally a Christian event." So is it also, in a strikingly different way, in the thinking of Roman Catholic Theologian Gregory Baum. In a study called Man Becoming, to be published next spring, New York-based Father Baum perceives...
...revolution can we "perceive what God is doing." His fellow romanticist Rubem Alves, a 36-year-old Brazilian Protestant, thinks man must meet the liberating event of Christ's Resurrection halfway, as "cocreator" of his own destiny (a Teilhardian notion) through the processes of political revolution. Moltmann frankly admits that hope leads to revolution, declaring that the Christian community ought above all to favor the poor and the dispossessed. But both he and Alves suggest that Christians should have a moderating influence on revolutionary ideologues, tempering their vainglory, curbing their violence, offering joy, perspective and humor...