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Every age has its own genius, its own peculiar insight, that comes out of the bowels of its own suffering or its own dreams. Theologians and historians of a later age will see, more accurately than we might, how it was that the twentieth century produced such a Christian thinker as Jurgen Moltmann.
Only a decade before his birth in 1926, Europe was spiraling down from an incredible peak of optimism in its own civility and its lease on the future. Over 10 million soldiers—German, British, French, American, Russian, Italian, and Turkish—lay dead. After the Battle of Verdun, those who bore the "white man's burden" and had announced the "Christian century" awoke to news of staggering casualties, 600,000 lives lost in a single engagement.
Tidal waves of misery and conflict spread through the following decades. Economic collapse was followed by heightened bitterness, greater preparations for war, and the rise of ideologies of race and class that heretofore would have been dismissed as mere superstitions confined to fringe elements in society. Living patterns were disrupted; the delicate fabric of morals and manners was torn.
Philosophers such as Nietzsche had partly convinced Europeans that the replacement of those gentle, but deceptive, "Mediterranean values" was inevitable. Scapegoating on a vaster scale than ever before threatened to destroy the Jews of a half-dozen of what were considered the most civilized nations on earth. The pogroms of the Middle Ages paled in comparison. The slaughter of civilians in warfare moved from being a shocking casualty of high-tech warfare to a routine strategem of modern total war. And today, as the century comes to an end, old scores are still being settled.
The future "theologian of hope" grew up in the midst of this turbulence.
In 1943, Jurgen Moltmann and his entire class of 16-year-old gymnasium students were drafted to stand guard with the antiaircraft guns in Hamburg, waiting for the Royal Air Force. "At first they did not come ... and then they came," and in the firebombing of Hamburg, many of his classmates were killed, including a lifelong friend. Sent to the front, he was captured by the Al lies and spent more than three years in POW camps in Belgium, England, and Scotland. From a Bible given him by an American chaplain he read the Psalms. "These psalms," he has re called, "gave me the words for my own suffering." Whenever he tells the story of how he arrived at the themes of his later famous "theology of hope," he begins with this prison experience where "hope ... made the soul rub itself raw on the barbed wire, making it impossible to settle down in captivity or come to terms with it."1
Released from prison, or "repatriated" as they said then, he decided to study theology instead of mathematics as he had originally planned. At Gottingen, among professors who were themselves emerging from the devastation of war and the revelation of crimes committed in the name of the Third Reich, he pressed forward with questions of why, and indeed, if, there should be hope in the midst of a world that held such suffering, that had witnessed such crimes, and had looked with uncertainty on a future clouded by a nuclear threat.
In the middle sixties, Moltmann be came a principal figure in the recovery of Christian eschatology as a key to theology, especially with his writing of the Theology of Hope (1964; English translation, 1967). He argued that the eschatologies of Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann were false eschatologies. In one way and then another, they dehistoricized the Christian gospel, leaving it without future and thus without hope. Barth had been on the right track when he said in his early writings, "Christianity that is not al together and without remainder eschatological has nothing to do with Christ."2 But he failed to follow through with that early insight. Bultmann had traded a mythical return of Christ for a psychological eternal "now." In both cases the anticipation of God's new work was lost. And ever since Moltmann's midsixties tour de force, along with the work of Wolf hart Pannenberg, it has been more difficult for theologians to ignore the significant part eschatology plays in the work of Christian theology.
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