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Religion, Revolution and the Future
By Jürgen Moltmann
220 pp. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969. $5.95.

Jürgen Moltmann is the most personally attractive and theologically stimulating of the post-Bultmannian continental theologians to visit our

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shores in recent years. This volume is a collection of the articles and addresses that he presented to American audiences during his visit in 1967-68. It does not exactly record the Americanization of Moltmann, but one can see the process beginning. This reviewer met Moltmann but once, several weeks before his return to Germany, and the author he wanted to talk about was Norman O. Brown.

In a preface, entitled "Freedom in Space and Freedom in Time," Moltmann makes a striking and fascinating analysis of the American intellectual climate, designed in part to show why the theology of the future is appropriate to the American experience. His basic point in the preface is that the traditional American drive towards freedom through the conquest of space has come to an end and that today freedom comes by overcoming not space but time-by pressing forwards in time to alter the structures of our society.

This is a stimulating point, largely a Marxist one, and if it were true, then the theology of the future would in fact be a proper theological game to play. But it is apparently a false presupposition, and for several reasons.

(1) The problem of a sacred space is perhaps the most pressing one for an understanding of the religiosity of the young today. They are rebelling against the traditional spaces of profession, family, and church, seeking, in a variety of ways, both internal and external spaces to live in. Drugs, rock music, and the commune all point to this.

(2) This same youthful constituency not only believes in sacred space but deeply disbelieves in time and the future. The psychic blows delivered them by the media explosion, the breakdown of their nourishing symbols, and the Vietnamese war have persuaded them that there is no real future out there, calling, claiming, awaiting for their mark. It is precisely this sense of the destruction of the future that makes communication, educational or theological, so baffling and so fascinating. For these young, to ground both politics and theology in the future is just another trick of the old ones-"Just wait till you grow up, and you'll see that I'm right, and besides, God will be there too, tomorrow."

(3) Moltmann is irrelevant to the American left because he presupposes that the road to radical politics must always pass through Marx (and such latter-day Marxists as Bloch). But the best of the left in America knows that Marx is largely irrelevant (among the Europeans, only Daniel Cohn-Bendit has seen this) because he worked on the model of industrial capitalism as the enemy, and in America, it is clear, the enemy is more subtle and more elusive-not capitalism, but technocracy. And this enemy is not present in capitalism alone, but it is also in the university, the churches, and the White House, State Department, and Department

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of justice. Marx is not taken seriously in America because the problem of the left is not primarily that of changing what is, but of building something new, whether in opposing the war, finding alternatives to marriage, or creating new political parties (as in Mississippi) or new educational patterns (as in the free university movement).

But what all this means is that Moltmann listened carefully in America to those he had occasion to hear, and that he did not have a chance to listen to the undergraduate young. Thus, the theology of the future is not likely to be the theology of the future for all of us. But it is still an interesting and suggestive direction, and, in its own way, important.

Briefly, Moltmann's project has three parts. First, he proposes reading the biblical message wholly in terms of futurist eschatology. We are not surprised, therefore, to note that he can have very little to say about Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom of God as a present reality into which men are invited to enter, here and now.

Second, he criticizes the theology of the Word for its basic inability to liberate itself from the church into the world and suggests that the only proper criterion for theology and faith is praxis. Here is Moltmann at his best, even when we reluctantly have to depart from his too narrowly Marxist interpretation of what praxis entails. "The radical consequence of the criticism of myths," he writes, "is not existential interpretation, but revolutionary realization of freedom within present conditions" (p. 95). Exactly so, and all really good theology is in the process of learning this right now. If Moltmann can teach it to us, fine; it can also be learned from Blake or Malcolm X or Mailer or Norman Brown.

Third, Moltmann's project entails a redefinition of the doctrine of God in terms of the future. Theologically, this is as suspicious as his New Testament exegesis. It entails a linguistic subterfuge in that it tempts us to move from transcendence in the sense of Hegel or Marcuse to a Christian conception of a transcendent God, and this is a transition that is simply not permissible. If I understand correctly the God of Moltmann, completely redefined in terms of the future, this is not the Christian God at all, but an idol, and thus Moltmann may have purchased theism at the expense of Christianty. Now this is a perfectly legitimate operation, if he knows what he is doing; there are those, after all, who have purchased Christianity at the expense of theism.

This is a clear, generous, warm-hearted book. Moltmann is to be reckoned with, and this book is the place to begin with him. He wields a wide net. Any theology that can catch Harvey Cox, Carl Braaten, and a host of gifted Catholic radicals in between must be taken seriously.

I have faulted Moltmann for not listening to the real religious revolution in America, and this will be for many of us a fatal flaw. But this

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does not obscure the fact that the theology of the future is likely to become, if it has not already, the received theology of establishment Protestantism. It is admirably designed to echo the needs of the Protestant entepreneurial classes, for it says "yes" to change and technology. It is likely to become the theology for church renewal, and for the Catholic-Protestant dialogues of today and tomorrow. It is the best, surely, of all the errors possible.

William Hamilton
New College
Sarasota, Florida