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In The Coming of God we find Moltmann returning, at an important milestone in his career (he celebrated his 70th birthday in 1996, a year after he retired from his long-held chair in theology at Tubingen), to the topic of Christian eschatology with which he began. But he returns to the topic in a quite different way. This follows a series of "systematic contributions to theology" that began in 1980 (ET, 1981) with The Trinity and the Kingdom, a doctrine of God. This first volume was followed with his Gifford lectures, God in Creation (1985); a volume on Christology, The Way of Jesus Christ (1989; ET, 1990); and another on the doctrine of the Spirit, The Spirit of Life (1992). Now, in this volume, a study of Christian eschatology in reference to its more traditional categories (resurrection, the kingdom of God, the Judgment, and the glorious return of Christ), we are reminded of why he began, and why, during all these years since Theology of Hope, he has sustained his focus on the hope engendered by the promise of the Christian gospel.
In Moltmann, it is the large sweeping lines of thought that both surprise the reader and energize the writing. He has not forgotten being caught up in the tragic gotterdammerung of Germany's Third Reich, the fiery ordeal that mostly destroyed his city, or the protracted days in Allied camps for prisoners of war. But at the same time, he sees the continuation here of multiplied ages of suffering humanity, the continent of Africa emptied of large populations to feed the avarice of Europeans gone mad over the prospects of fortunes in the New World. This was accompanied by the destruction of Native American communities, by their drastic depopulation and displacement, by the growing power of a nation that saw itself with a Manifest Destiny to occupy the land as Israel occupied the land of the Canaanites and Amalekites.
The reason we often do not recognize these multiple disasters, disasters of such unimaginable scale, of the modern age is that they were habitually represented to us in a more positive form. But the "theological justification of 'the modern world' with its intentions and hopes overlooks," Moltmann says, "the victims on the underside of history—in the Third World, in nature, and among women." These "political eschatologies" assume a purpose in history (and the purpose is necessarily an eschatological justification); but they also turn history into a struggle for power. The Western assumption that "progress" provides reason to take an optimistic view of history also encourages those who are oppressed by those whose destiny is "manifest" to take the view that power and violence is also their remedy. Moltmann quotes the proverb, "Better an end with terror than a terror without end" as the re verse image of the publicly acclaimed mythologies that justify the prolongation and use of power by those who have it. Popular mythologies such as this have their theological counterparts:
The apocalyptic eschatology which Bultmann considered "mythical" is more realistic than his faith in the inexorable onward course of history. The belief that things will "always go on" and that no end is in sight—at least not for us—is one of the fairytales of "the modern world," the fairytale of its endlessness and its lack of an alternative. This is secularized millenarianism. Anyone who declares "the modern world" to be his millennium, his "golden age," in which it is only a matter of refining the methods of power ... is really making the world for other people "the beast from the abyss," "the whore of Babylon," the voracious "dragon" of Revelation 13; and that person is actually preparing the modern world's downfall.
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