How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God: 

Part IV: The Theology of Hope

As I left Concordia College for Chicago, people would ask me “Are you sure you want to go to seminary? Are you sure you want to be a pastor?”, and I would simply say. “I don’t know. But I am going to find out, one way or another!”

 

I graduated from Concordia, a few days later I married Pauline Peterson in her hometown of Bismarck, and off we headed to Mt. Cross Lutheran Bible Camp, near Santa Cruz, California, where I would serve as Program Director for the summer. It felt good to be in the Bible camping community again, which was the first of several “pushes” toward my confirming a life in the church, studying theology and learning how to incorporate the insights of faith into the life of the world.

 

At seminary you don’t get to gently stick your toe into the water. It is a baptism of total immersion. You take courses in Old Testament, New Testament, Church History, Practical Theology (preaching, teaching, pastoral care, etc.), and, my favorite, Systematic Theology, where you work on “constructing” your own spiritual and theological view of God and the world.

 

This may surprise you, but going to a seminary in the ELCA is not an indoctrination into what you are supposed to believe and do. It is rather a place to search, ask questions, study what the great theologians and biblical scholars of all ages have thought and written and then enter into intense discussions with your teachers and fellow students. 

 

As I took Old Testament courses, I soon learned that most of my teachers believed what I had sensed, that Christianity is not a repudiation of Judaism, but a fulfillment of it, bringing Gentiles (non-Jews) into the covenant that God had established with Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Jeremiah. The simplistic view that the Old Testament is all law, with grace arriving only in the New Testament, is inaccurate. The First (Old) Testament is filled with grace, love, forgiveness, compassion and the presence of God. 

 

In my New Testament courses, I finally was able to get beyond an almost singular focus on the “Christ of Faith” that is inherent is the Cosmic Theology of sin and redemption I referred to earlier, and I was able to begin to study the teachings and deeds of the “Jesus of history.” 

However, what really set a theological fire under me was, under the tutelage of Dr. Carl Braaten, diving into the study of the history of theology in the church, up to the present moment. And that present moment contained a new theology that would radically transform my view of God, church and world: Jurgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope, published in 1964. This is no whimsical “power of positive thinking.” Rather, this theology begins with the suffering, pain and injustice of the present world and looks not to the past, but to a new future of healing and deep hope based on God’s vision for the world. As I put it in my recent book:

 

While much theology tries to “repristinate” the past and return to a Garden-of-Eden paradise, the Theology of Hope looks not to the past, but to the future to find meaning, direction and, yes, hope and inspiration. God continues to come to us from the future, giving us new visions and revelations of what can be. God’s Kingdom is already present among us through the coming of Jesus, the Christ, but its fulfillment remains in the future. Thus, when someone states, “but it has always been that way,” the Theology of Hope responds, “But it doesn’t have to always be that way.” God is at work relentlessly to show us new ways to approach the struggles of the world. Our task, then, is to remain open to revelation. [Freed to Love and Live Again, 57]

 

Moltmann came to this theological understanding through painful experience. He was raised in a non-religious family, studying the classics of literature and science. As a young man he was drafted into the German army during World War II, eventually was captured by the British and then spent three years in a prisoner-of-war camp. Not only did he carry with him the horrors of the war he had already experienced, but in the prison camp he was shown pictures of “the concentration and extermination camps at Belsen and Auschwitz. The initial disbelief among the German soldiers soon gave way to a grave realization that they had indirectly participated in these horrors. As Moltmann recounts in his book The Source of Life, “The depression over the wartime destruction and a captivity without any apparent end was exacerbated by a feeling of profound shame at having to share in this disgrace.” [Douglas Koskela, “Remembering the Future,” Response, Seattle Pacific University, Fall, 2008]

 

His way out of his despair and hopelessness began when a chaplain gave him a copy of the Bible. He was confused by much of what he read but was very moved by the Psalms of lament and the Passion of Jesus. Referring to the gospel of Mark, Moltmann writes: “When I came to Jesus’ dying cry, I knew: ‘There is your divine brother and redeemer, who understands you in your god-forsakenness.’” He continues, “The experiences of the life of a prisoner have left a lasting mark on me: the suffering and the hope which reinforce each other. When one grasps the courage of hope, the chains begin to hurt, but the pain is better than the resignation in which everything is a matter of indifference.” [Moltmann, How I Have Changed, 13]

 

When Moltmann was finally released from prison, his next task was to find a church and theological movement to join. He wanted no part in the many churches who had capitulated to, and thereby supported, the Nazi movement. Although he was impressed by those who had signed the Barmen Theological Declaration which declared a clear “no” to Hitler, and the “Christ alone” theology of Karl Barth that tries to separate faith from politics, he joined those who “wanted to give positive answers to the political possibilities and cultural challenges of the post-war period.” [Have Changed, 14]

 

As Moltmann begins to construct his theology, he works from both the suffering and hope he had experienced in captivity, beginning with the experience of hopelessness:

 

Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante's hell is the inscription: "Leave behind all hope, you who enter here." That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. [Theology of Hope, 32]

 

What is the anecdote to the despair and hopelessness we all feel at times? For Moltmann, it is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but understood in a new light, not leading to passivity, but to love, compassion and action, including political action.

 

Believing in the resurrection does not just mean assenting to a dogma and noting an historical fact. It means participating in this creative act of God’s … Resurrection is not a consoling opium, soothing us with the promise of a better world in the hereafter. It is the energy for a rebirth of this life. This hope doesn’t point to another world. It is focused on the redemption of this one.

 

Faith sees in the resurrection of Christ not the eternity of heaven, but the future of the very earth on which his cross stands. It sees in him the future of the very humanity for which he died. That is why it finds in the cross the hope of the earth. [Hope]

 

Koskela explains the understanding of resurrection that undergirds Moltmann’s theology:

 

The resurrection is a powerful word of promise that stands in contradiction to our present experience of suffering and death. Yet this is not a promise that we await passively. On the contrary, we move forward in the light of hope toward the transformation of the world that God will bring. “To believe,” Moltmann writes, “means to cross in hope and anticipation the bounds that have been penetrated by the raising of the crucified.” [Ibid.]

 

With this understanding in mind, one enters loving action:

 

That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present. . . Hope is lived when it comes alive, when we go outside of ourselves and, in joy and pain, take part in the lives of others. [Hope]

 

It would be difficult to exaggerate what a profound effect the Theology of Hope had on my life and vocation. Here was an understanding of God not as a passive judge distant from our suffering, but as one who enters our suffering with us, being present with us in that suffering, crying with us in it. This description of God began to make it possible for me to feel close to God again, as I had in my youth. 

Secondly, here was an understanding of redemption--not as escape from this world with a focus on life after death--but as a deep and powerful engagement with the pain of this life. This theology takes seriously the life and mission of the historical Jesus of Nazareth, who lived a life and founded a movement that welcomed all, based on inclusivity, forgiveness, love, acceptance, solidarity and compassion.

 

Year later, when I would study the Theology of Liberation, one of its proponents, Rubem Alves, wrote these words about the suffering and hope upon which Moltmann built his theology:

 

The two, suffering and hope, live from each other.

Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair,

hope without suffering creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness . . .

Let us plant dates,

even though those who plant them will never eat them.

We must live by the love of what we will never see.

This is the secret discipline.

It is a refusal to let the creative act be dissolved

in immediate sense experience

and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren.

Such disciplined love is what has given

prophets, revolutionaries and saints

the courage to die for the future they envisaged.

They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope.

-- Rubem Alves

 

As I sit at my desk in my early 70’s, the same theology that gave me “hope” in my early 20’s continues to call me into active love today. As Moltmann put it so well:

 

As time goes on, we become old, the future contracts, the past expands. . . But by future we don't just mean the years ahead; we always mean as well the plenitude of possibilities which challenge our creativity. . . In confrontation with the future, we can become young if we accept the future's challenges. [Hope]