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Toward a Theology Of Hope
By Carl E. Braaten

"The debates that have gone on between Schweitzer, Cullmann, Bultmann, Dodd, Jeremias, etc., have . . . only [yielded] answers to the historical question: What did Jesus or the early church happen to hope? They have not taken up the question of what it means for man to hope at all, whether to be human is to have hope, and therefore in what way eschatologies from the past may be addressed to man today, offering him the ground, guidelines, and goal of his inevitable hoping."

IN his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant stated: "The whole interest of reason, speculative as well as practical, is centered in the three following questions: (1) What can I know? (2) What ought I to do? (3) What may I hope?"¹ Modern philosophy since Kant has preoccupied itself almost exclusively with the first question, the epistemological question, to a much lesser extent with the second, the ethical question, and hardly at all with the question of hope, the self-transcending movement of man towards his future. If this is generally true in philosophy, it is nearly equally the case with modern theology. Theology since Kant has been exhaustively methodological; the introductory section of dogmatics usually called Prolegomena became a lengthy effort to give the Christian faith proper epistemological credentials. Karl Barth's Prolegomena, running to over 1,300 pages, must be seen as a thorough-going theology of revelation that answers the acute epistemological concerns that the nineteenth century refined. Paul Tillich also wrote his Systematic Theology to a great extent in light of Kant's

Carl Braaten is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. He is co-editor, with Roy A. Harrisville, of The Historical Jesus and the Kerygmatic Christ (1964), and author of History and Hermeneutics (1966).
¹ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1934), p. 457.

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first question: what can I know? Its controlling purpose was apologetic.

Whenever it appeared that theology was not succeeding in making a good case for itself at the level of Kant's first question, there were those who came forth to suggest that religion in general and Christian faith in particular have nothing to do with the question of knowledge. Religion or faith arises in connection with Kant's second question: What ought I to do? Religion is reduced to the practical level of ethics. In fact, Kant himself was perhaps the chief stimulus behind the Ritschlian tendency to interpret religious statements as judgments of moral value. At the present time this translation of religious language into ethical propositions has won some new advocates, notable among whom are William Hamilton and Paul van Buren. Christianity is basically an expression of what those who are somehow or other stimulated by Jesus of Nazareth intend to do.² Since Christianity is now transformed into the practical issues of moral existence, it is relevant to secular man even though the living God of the Bible is dead.

I

With all these past and present theological investments in Kant's first and second questions, what has meanwhile happened to his third question? Post-Kantian philosophy has not bothered much with it. Kant's doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which provided the answer to his own question about hope, has been disregarded as a case of bad philosophy and bad theology. Most modern philosophers would say of a fellow philosopher who would still teach a doctrine of "life beyond death" something similar to what Goethe once said of Kant's doctrine of radical evil: "Even Kant, who, throughout a long life, has tried to cleanse his philosopher's cloak from various disfiguring prejudices, has now deliberately allowed it to be stained with the shameful idea of radical evil, in order that even Christians will be drawn to kiss the hem of his garment."³

² R. B. Braithwaite, a philosopher of language analysis, tries to interpret religious statements as a declaration of loyalty to a certain set of moral principles. Religious statements are not only emotive (A. J. Ayer) but conative as well. He believes that a conative explanation of religious assertions is in fine accord with the spirit of empiricism. In the light of the theology of hope that we describe in this essay, it is precisely such an accord which spells its death as an interpretation of religious statements. R. B. Braithwaite, "An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief," Classical and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, edited by John Hick (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 429.
³ Quoted from Emil Brunner, The Mediator, trans. by Olive Wyon (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1947), p. 128.

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However, it isn't only Kant's peculiar version of immortality from which philosophy has "cleansed" itself; no doctrine concerning the hope of man for a future beyond death has survived. Even to assert the meaningfulness of asking the question about hope for an "absolute future"⁴ or total fulfillment may be one of those "disfiguring prejudices" or "shameful ideas."

Modern theology has not treated Kant's third question with much more respect than philosophy. When the doctrine of the immortality of the soul was fumbled away by philosophy, theology attempted to recover the fumble by falling on the biblical idea of the resurrection of the body. But when it came to stating what "resurrection of the body" really means, we were not so well instructed. The idea of "resurrection of the body" has functioned most successfully in parochial theological polemics, that is, when budding theologians armed with "the resurrection of the body" (with Bible in hand, plus Hebrew categories) have taken the offensive against poor pastors and professors over fifty who still believe in the orthodox-but unbiblical-doctrine of "the immortality of the soul." But what have these biblical theologians themselves meant by "the resurrection of the body?" Has it not been demythologized and therefore interpreted existentially to mean that Christians, like the Hebrews, place a high value on the physical body in this life? It is an anti-Manichean statement; it was meant to counteract the gnostic depreciation of the material body. It may also be taken as a statement against the Hellenistic body/soul dichotomy. That is all well and good. But is that what "resurrection of the body" meant? Is that all it means? If that is the case, the teaching has been taken out of its eschatological context, and has been reset in the framework of the doctrine of creation, with certain strong ethical implications for this life. But then it no longer functions as the Christian answer to Kant's question, What may I hope? It is more a roundabout way (a long detour indeed!) of speaking about how Christians ought to regard the body as an integral part of the whole man created by God, and what that ought to mean for Christian life. The content of eschatology is rendered intelligible by translating it into a noneschatological framework, and Kant's third question goes a-begging.

My observation that theology has not done well by Kant's third

⁴ Karl Rahner's expression; Ingo Herman, "Total Humanism," Is God Dead? Concilium, Vol. 16, edited by Johannes B. Metz (New York: Paulist Press, 1966), p. 162.

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question may be challenged, it would seem, by citing the decades of debate on eschatology in the New Testament since Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer traced the apocalyptic passages in the gospels back to the historical Jesus. Many word studies on "hope" and books and articles on biblical eschatology have been written, and in the course of all this research we have learned interesting things about what Jesus or Paul or John or this or that community in the early church believed about the future. I would not say all this has been much ado about nothing, only next to nothing, unless it is shown how one can make a transition from an historical observation to an existential concern. What do the eschatological ideas in the Bible have to do with my existence, that is, with my hope concerning the future, especially with the inevitable future of death's annihilating power? How can it concern me existentially whether it was first Jesus or Paul or anyone else who formulated a certain teaching about the future, unless it is also shown how such a teaching corresponds significantly with a structural element in human existence? So the debates that have gone on between Schweitzer, Cullmann, Bultmann, Dodd, Jeremias, etc., have not yet yielded an answer or answers to Kant's third question: What may I hope?-but only answers to the historical question: What did Jesus or the early church happen to hope? They have not taken up the question of what it means for man to hope at all, whether to be human is to have hope, and therefore in what way eschatologies from the past may be addressed to man today, offering him the ground, guidelines, and goal of his inevitable hoping. Perhaps the sole exception here is Bultmann, who does take from biblical eschatology as much as he thinks is existentially relevant. Bultmann is right in doing that. He is the one who has taught us that biblical theologians cannot postpone indefinitely the hermeneutical question. That is the question of how to move from what it meant to what it means.⁵ The question, however, to address to Bultmann is whether his dependence on Heidegger's existentialist system of philosophy has not overly restricted his view of what may be relevant in the biblical eschatology. In other words, is his reading of the dynamics and scope of hope in human existence adequate?

Just when it seemed that the Bultmannian existentialist transla-

⁵ Cf. Krister Stendahl's use of this distinction in his article, "Biblical Theology," The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Abingdon Press, 1962), p. 430.

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tion of New Testament eschatology was to rule the day, a new movement towards the re-eschatologizing of theology was launched a few years ago in Germany. The leading bearers of this movement are Wolfhart Pannenberg and Jürgen Moltmann. They are grafting on to the rediscovery of eschatology at the turn of the century through the research of Weiss and Schweitzer. At the same time they are trying to overcome the "sterility" of this rediscovery. There has been no lack of talk about eschatology in contemporary discussions. It may therefore strike us as rather tedious that still another effort will be made to activate the meaning of eschatology, or to rescue it from its dissolution in existentialist analysis. But if Pannenberg and Moltmann are right, we will have to endure the tedium, and try once again to understand the eschatology of the Bible, because without it there is nothing that remains that deserves to be called "the biblical message."

II

It is doubtful that just another attempt to describe the contents of biblical eschatology would be any less free of that "sterility" which has characterized all other recent efforts without some point of contact in contemporary culture or modern philosophy. The reason for the validity of Bultmann's program is that it had a point of contact (namely, modern existentialism) which the efforts of others, for example, Cullmann, Dodd, and Jeremias, seriously lacked. In the case of Schweitzer and his school, the postponement of the parousia meant a complete refutation of New Testament eschatology. While eschatology was central to Jesus and primitive Christianity, it is incredible to modern man. We have to build on other foundations. Few theologians have agreed with Schweitzer. Somewhat piously they have assumed that what is so central to the New Testament must still somehow be relevant to our time. It is as if they have had their hands on a cord attached to a powerful electrical generator, but haven't found where to plug it in. That is what we mean by the need for a cultural point of contact. Otherwise theology is done in the isolation of its own ghetto with no power to convince or interest anyone outside its circle. A non-theological point of contact for Pannenberg and Moltmann, not exclusively but significantly, is the philosophy of hope sketched out by the eighty-one year old Marxist, Ernst Bloch, who after his flight from East Germany has been teaching at Tübingen. His major work is en-

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titled, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, which he wrote between 1938 and 1949 while he was in exile in America from Nazi Germany. It was published in West Germany only as recently as 1959, and since then has stimulated the new dialogue between theologians, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, and Marxism.⁶ Moltmann's exciting book, Theologie der Hoffnung, is itself a theological parallel to Das Prinzip Hoffnung, as its title hints.

For Ernst Bloch the key to human existence is to be found in the hopes which man holds for the future state of humanity and the world. What fires man's spirit in the present is the radiation which emanates from "the promise of a 'transcendental' homeland where all who now suffer, labor, and are incomplete will find their true identity. In the 'radiation' from this utopian state, an attempt is made to discover the ultimate meaning of human existence. This radiation derives from an unshakable confidence that there will be a new life or novum ultimum."⁷ Bloch, a Jewish-Marxist atheist, draws much of his understanding of man's directedness toward the future from the prophetic history of the Bible. He says, "Man is indebted to the Bible for his eschatological consciousness."⁸ As Moltmann puts it, Bloch accepts the "major objects of hope in the Bible" without belief in the transcendent personal God of Judaism and Christianity. It is a "hope without faith," or a "humanism without God." What is significant is that Bloch's view of man provides a point of contact for the biblical promise of the kingdom of God. Man as such is open-ended toward the future; this openness is evident in his hopes. Bloch makes the categories of possibility, of the new, of futurity, fundamental in his "ontology of not-yet-being."⁹

⁶ Cf. the following articles by theologians: J. Moltmann, "Ernst Bloch: Messianismus und Marxismus. Einführende Bemerkungen zum 'Prinzip Hoffnung'," Kirche in der Zeit, 1960, pp. 291-295; Moltmann, "Die Menschenrechte und der Marxismus. Einführende Bernerkungen und kritische Reflexionen zu E. Blochs 'Naturrecht und menschliche Würde'," ibid., 1962, pp. 122-126; Moltmann, "Das 'Prinzip Hoffnung' und die christliche Zuversicht," Evangelische Theologie, 23, 1963, 537-557; Moltmann, "Die Kategorie Novum in der Christliche Theologie," Ernst Bloch zu ehren, ed. by Siegried Unseld (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1965), pp. 243-263; Moltmann, "Hope Without Faith: An Eschatological Humanism Without God," Is God Dead? op. cit, pp. 25-40; W.-D. Marsch, "Eritis sicut Deus. Ueber das Werk E. Blochs als Problem evangelischer Theologie," Kerygma und Dogma, 7, 1961, 173-196; W.D. Marsch, Hoffen worauf? Auseinandersetzung mit E. Bloch (Hamburg: Furche-Verlag, 1963); Gerhard Sauter, Zukunft und Verheissung (Zürich: Zwingli Verlag, 1965); Fritz Buri, "Ernst Blochs 'Prinzip Hoffnung' und die Hoffnung im Selbstverständnis des christlichen Glaubens," Reformatio, 15, 1966, 211-225; Wolfhart Pannenberg, "Der Gott der Hoffnung," Ernst Bloch zu ehren, op. cit, pp. 209-225.
⁷ J. Moltmann, "Hope Without Faith: An Eschatological Humanism Without God," op. cit., p. 26.
⁸ Ibid., p. 26.
⁹ Ernst Bloch, Philosophische Grundfragen. Zur Ontologie des Noch-Nicht-Seins (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1961).

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Theologians who have entered into dialogue with Bloch see that his categories of hope and the future correspond to the biblical picture of man as one who lives within the framework of promise and fulfillment. The arrows in the biblical conception of reality as history are always pointing toward the future. The tremendous emphasis on remembering the past is due precisely to the fact that it contains the promises which articulate our hopes for the future. Bloch's philosophy of hope is being hailed as a secular confirmation of the fact that biblical eschatology deals with what is central in human existence; man's hopes burst open his present, connect him with his past, drive him toward the horizons of the not yet realized future. Moltmann says, and here we pass on only a few testimonies from theologians on Bloch's relevance, "As scarcely any other philosophy Das Prinzip Hoffnung is suited to help in activating and elaborating the Christian doctrine of hope . . . Das Prinzip Hoffnung can in the present situation of Christian theology give us courage to try a new interpretation of the original Christian hope, . . ."¹⁰ Pannenberg in similar vein states, "Perhaps Christian theology will have Ernst Bloch's philosophy of hope to thank if it regains the courage to return to its central category, the full concept of the eschatological. What remains decisive in this is the outlook on the future which is to be temporally understood. Bloch has taught us to understand anew the overwhelming power of the still open future and of hope which anticipates that future, for the life and the thought of man as well as for the ontological quality of all reality. He has recovered the eschatological thought-pattern of the biblical traditions as a theme of philosophical reflection, and also for Christian theology."¹¹ Wolf-Dieter Marsch, in his book Hoffen worauf? Auseinandersetzung mit Ernst Bloch, says, "Evangelical Christians can find in him a worthy partner in the discussion so urgently needed today about the basis, content, and goal of Christian hope-a hope in a God who is coming-especially when so many of the leading images of the 'good old order' as well as of an otherworldly fulfillment have become so questionable."¹²

In our situation Harvey Cox has enthusiastically endorsed this new direction in German theology in his "Afterword" of The Secu-

¹⁰ J. Moltmann, "Die Kategorie Novum in der christlichen Theologie," op. cit., pp. 243, 244.
¹¹ W. Pannenberg, "Der Gott der Hoffnung," op. cit., p. 213.
¹² W.D. Marsch, Hoffen worauf? op. cit., pp. 91-92.

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lar City Debate: "I am now pursuing the hints, perhaps misleadingly, of two vagabonds on the periphery of theology, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Ernst Bloch. . . . Though there are many differences, both Teilhard and Bloch discuss transcendence in terms of the pressure exerted by the future on the present. They both see that his future is the key to man's being, and they recognize that an authentically open future is only possible where there is a creature who can orient himself toward the future and relate himself to reality in terms of this orientation-in short, a creature who can hope."¹³ Then with an intuition that here I can only applaud, Cox states, "I believe that Bloch's massive Prinzip Hoffnung… supplies the only serious alternative to Martin Heidegger's… Sein und Zeit as a philosophical partner for theology."¹⁴ The basis for Cox's judgment is that Heidegger's vision of man shuts him up within a finitude whose core is anxiety and whose boundary is death (Sein zum Tode), whereas Bloch sees hope as the kernel of existence pressing on towards a future world that overcomes the limitations of the present, towards a "still unpossessed homeland."¹⁵

It would be perhaps gratuitous to observe that the crux of the theological dialogue with Ernst Bloch is the question whether the living God of the Exodus and the Resurrection is not the only guarantor of a future that corresponds to the highest hopes of man. The dialogue with Bloch affirms the humanism of his hope, but grounds it in the "power of the future" who has revealed himself as the "God of hope"¹⁶ in the eschatological event of Jesus' resurrection. The attempt is made to show that Bloch's atheism is right to the extent that it is a protest against a divine hypostasis who obstructs the freedom and the future of man, and instead guarantees the prevailing forces in nature and society. The God of orthodox churches has usually been pictured as one most at home in the past, as relating to the present only through the churches, and keeping his distance from those revolutionary tendencies in society which accept responsibility for the future and somehow threaten the social status of Christianity. The first generations of Christians were fired by hopes for the kingdom; the second wave of Christianity built the church as an interim

¹³ Harvey Cox, "Afterword," The Secular City Debate, ed. by Daniel Callahan (New York, Macmillan Co., 1966), pp. 197-198.
¹⁴ Ibid., p. 200.
¹⁵ Bloch's expression, quoted by Harvey Cox, ibid.
¹⁶ Cf. W. Pannenberg's essay, "Der Gott der Hoffnung," in which he speaks of God as "the power of the future."

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device while waiting for the kingdom; later generations identified the two. Today the task is to reactivate the Christian hope by pointing to the kingdom of God whose biblical images have been blurred in the history of Christianity.

III

In the dialogue with Bloch there is no question of taking over modern secular forms of hope as such; the task is rather to rediscover the "logos of hope"¹⁷ inherent in Christian eschatology. Moltmann begins his Theologie der Hoffnung with this question. He calls eschatology "the medium of Christian faith."¹⁸ What is needed is not so much "a new version of the articulus de novissimis, but rather a 'thermal current' of hope in all articles of the Christian faith."¹⁹ Since Christian faith lives absolutely from the resurrection of the crucified Christ, it is directed as hope towards the universal future of this Christ. The future is the real problem of Christian theology, not just any future, but the future of Jesus Christ. But how is it possible to speak of the future when it has not yet happened? In a certain sense there can be no "eschato-logie," for the Greek logos concept presupposes that language can grasp the truth about reality that is always and already there. In Greek ontology reality is not open-ended; it has no real future; there is no need for hope; and there is no problem of history. Thus, if we operate with a Greek logos concept, we can have no eschatology, for the future of Christian hope is not an extension of the past, or recurrence of the present. Reality as nature is circular; reality as history is always unfinished, opening forwards toward a real future of new events that have never happened before.

Christian eschatology speaks of the future in utterances of hope based on the history of promise. These utterances do not conform to reality experienced in the present; they do not correspond to empirically verifiable reality. In fact, it is their very nature to contradict reality as it is experienced at the present. They are a "negation of the negative," which Tillich calls the principle which guides hope in the formation of its language and pictures.²⁰ These state

¹⁷ J. Moltmann, "Hope Without Faith," op. cit., p. 28.
¹⁸ J. Moltmann, Theologie der Hoffnung (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1965), p. 12.
¹⁹ J. Moltmann, "Hope Without Faith," op. cit., p. 39.
²⁰ Paul Tillich, "Die politische Bedeutung der Utopie im Leben der Völker," Der Widerstreit von Raum und Zeit, Gesammelte Werke, VI (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1963), p. 186.

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ments of hope do not express our experiences of reality; they stand over against that experience and provide "the condition for the possibility of new experiences."²¹ They do not mirror reality as it now stands; they look for a change in reality. Hope lives from the promises that reality can and will be changed. How? And in what manner? That is what the dialogue is all about with Ernst Bloch and with every other form of humanism that is seriously concerned about the future of mankind.

The element of contradiction is essential in the language of hope. Hope contradicts experience; the future will contradict the present-so we hope. There can be no empirical verification of hope, for it is of the nature of hope to press towards that which cannot yet be seen. "Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?" (Rom. 8: 24). Christian hope itself, Moltmann says, is born from contradiction, from the contradiction of the resurrection to the cross.²² The mission of hope is to radicalize the existing discrepancy between righteousness and sin, joy and suffering, peace and war, good and evil, life and death, and to look to the absolute future of Christ for a universal and transcendent resolution of this discrepancy. Faith acknowledges that this future has already erupted in history in the Christ event. Without this knowledge of Christ hope would become merely utopian, that is, a leap forward into the empty air.²³ Because the limits of finitude, sin, and death have been transgressed by the resurrection of Christ, hope becomes a confidence that all the promises of God for humanity and the world will reach an ultimate fulfillment. This hope is not utopian; utopia comes from u-topos, that which has "no place." Hope, on the contrary, looks to the future for that which only as yet has no place, but which might have place-if the God of hope is faithful to his promises. Hope does not allow man to resign himself to despair in the face of unchangeable situations and brute facts. It points man ahead to the horizons of really new possibilities. It presupposes what Bloch calls an "ontology of not-yet-being," a dynamic ontology with a really new future as an open possibility of reality historically understood. In an ontology of history that includes futurity, the statement of faith that "with God all things are possible" makes more sense. As Moltmann argues, the "God of Parmenides"

²¹ J. Moltmann, Theologie der Hoffnung, p. 13.
²² Ibid., p. 14.
²³ Ibid., P. 16.

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is the basis of an ontology of static being which makes a meaningful experience of history impossible, and undercuts hope by collapsing the future into the present. If the Eternal makes its epiphany in the present, if the "moment" is an atom of eternity, what is there left to hope for from a new future?²⁴

IV

Both Pannenberg and Moltmann see the resurrection of Jesus as the anchor of hope in history, and as the bridge between the universal expectations in late Jewish apocalypticism and the eschatological mission of the church in world history. The "theology of hope" is both a "theology of the resurrection" and a "theology of universal history." This comes out with special force and frequency in Pannenberg's writings.

In post-exilic apocalypticism the idea of the resurrection of all the dead is an element in its theology of universal history. Pannenberg observes, "Jewish apocalypticism completed the extension of history so that it covered the whole course of the world from Creation to the end."²⁵ When the early Christians spoke of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, as those who shared the apocalyptic expectations of a general resurrection of all the dead at the end of the world, they knew they were speaking eschatologically. It is not the case that they first encountered the risen Christ, and then generalized from that particular instance of resurrection to all others. The question they would ask is not whether the resurrection could happen, but whether it already has happened. If it has happened, it is a world-historical event of eschatological significance.

For Pannenberg the apocalyptic expectation of resurrection as an end-event is an abiding presupposition of Jesus' significance for all later times. The basis of primitive Christian faith in Jesus as the Christ of God was so closely bound up with basic features of the apocalyptic hope that Pannenberg concludes, "If the apocalyptic expectation should be entirely untenable to us, then the primitive Christian faith in Christ is also untenable to us; then the continuity of that which would remain of Christianity after discounting such [apocalyptic] features would be broken with Jesus and primitive Christian proclamation, including Paul. We must be clear of what

²⁴ Ibid., pp. 24-25.
²⁵ W. Pannenberg, "Redemptive Event and History," Essays on Old Testament Hermeneutics, ed. by Claus Westermann (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1964), p. 319.

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is at stake when we discuss the truth of the apocalyptic expectation of a future judgment and the resurrection of the dead: we are dealing directly with the foundation of the Christian faith. Without the horizon of the apocalyptic expectation we could not grasp just why the man Jesus should be the finally valid revelation of God, why in him and only in him God himself should have appeared. . . . If this horizon should disappear, then the foundation of faith is lost, then Christology becomes mythology, and it no longer has any continuity with Jesus and the witness of the apostles."²⁶ That is rather strong endorsement of apocalypticism, especially at a time when major schools of biblical interpretation have tried to teach us that neither modern man nor the real message of the Bible has any permanent stake in apocalypticism.

The apocalyptic hope for resurrection that early Christianity declared had reached its preliminary fulfillment (its first fruits) in the Easter event is still relevant for man today if he looks for a fulfillment of his essential being as man. If man is to hope for individual personal fulfillment, in some sense he must hope for life beyond death, for he knows that such fulfillment cannot occur within the finite limits of his earthly existence. The question whether hope can survive cannot ultimately disregard whether there is something to hope for that transcends death, the last hindrance to hope. By way of a "phenomenology of hope" Pannenberg states that "it belongs to the nature of man's being to hope beyond death."²⁷ In modern anthropology this specific element of man's nature is expressed in the concept of "openness to the world." This is an openness beyond every finite situation.²⁸ Man seeks to go beyond every limit, even that final limit which he can anticipate as his own death. He expresses this infinite striving to cross over even the boundary line of death in his images of hope. A classical image of this quest for self-fulfillment is the idea of the immortality of the soul; the biblical expression is the resurrection of the dead. Pannenberg's point is that these expressions are not imposed upon men through a revelation from the outside, but are rooted in the nature of man's very being to push back all frontiers which obstruct a total fulfillment of hope. In a sense, then, hope is the voice of man's "essential" (Tillich)

²⁶ W. Pannenberg, Grundzüge der Christologie (Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1964), p. 79.
²⁷ Ibid., p. 81.
²⁸ Ibid.

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or "authentic" (Bultmann) being. Wherever man does not raise the question about life beyond death, there man's being as man has not yet come to full expression.

Pannenberg sees a structural correspondence between man as a hoping creature, phenomenologically ascertained, and the resurrection of Jesus proclaimed by the apostles against the background of apocalyptic expectations. The end of history has been pre-actualized in his resurrection. The Christian looks forward to that which has already occurred at Easter. The presence of the eschaton in Jesus Christ has far-reaching significance for the interpretation of all history as God's history. This eschaton casts a light on the entirety of world history and its destiny, and not only on my personal existence and its meaning, as Bultmann interprets the resurrection. For Bultmann the resurrection has nothing to do with world history, only with personal existence here and now, because he thinks it possible to separate Jesus and the kerygma from the universal historical framework of apocalypticism. Pannenberg concludes that what Bultmann means by calling Jesus the eschatological event is something other than what it means within the apocalyptic concept of history.²⁹

Pannenberg adduces testimonies from recent philosophers of history to substantiate his notion that the understanding of history as a whole and as a unity is possible only from the standpoint of the end of history. The same philosophers, however (Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Löwith), have no confidence in the possibility of universal history because in the nature of things history runs on without yielding an overarching perspective from which to view all particulars. One would have to stand outside of history or at the end of history in order to grasp the totality of history. As long as history has a future which has not yet happened, we are limited to only partial glimpses; perhaps at best we can deal with meaning in history,³⁰ but not the meaning of history. Ever since Hegel tried to sketch out a universal history, philosophers and historians have shuddered before the very prospect. It was the hybris of Hegel to imagine that he possessed the key for a philosophy of universal history as the self-unfolding of the absolute spirit. Pannenberg's concern is to recover

²⁹ See Pannenberg's discussion with Bultmann's eschatology in "Redemptive Event and History," op. cit., pp. 320 ff.
³⁰ This is the argument of Karl Löwith's Meaning in History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1949).

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the concept of universal history that actually roots in apocalypticism, and to free it from its particular liabilities in Hegel's system.

If the end of history alone can provide us with the perspective from which to understand the total course of history, then Christian theology cannot eschew the concept of universal history so long as it claims that Jesus is the eschatological event. The end of history is present proleptically in Jesus of Nazareth. In his resurrection the final end of universal history has been anticipated; it has occurred beforehand. Among other things, Pannenberg differs from Hegel's concept of universal history because of this insistence on the eschatologically differentiated structure of the resurrection of Jesus. Therefore, history is not abolished,³¹ as in Hegel. Nor is it abolished as in the realized eschatologies of such different thinkers as C. H. Dodd, on the one hand, and Bultmann, on the other.³²

Pannenberg places the notion of universal history under careful restrictions. He is aware of its pitfalls, and notes: "the anticipated coming of the end of history in the midst of history, far from doing away with history, actually forms the basis from which history as a whole becomes understandable. This does not make possible, however, an oversight over the drama of world history as from a stage box. . . . Jesus Christ, the end of history, is not available to us as the principle of a 'Christologically' grounded total view of world history. Christ's Resurrection, the daybreak of the eschaton, is for our understanding a light which blinds as Paul was blinded on the Damascus road. . . . Also our participation in this event, the hope of our own resurrection, is still hidden under the experience of the cross. No one can make the eschaton into a key to calculate the course of history, because it is present to us in such a mysterious, overpowering, incomprehensible way."³³

V

Lest it appear that I have unduly homogenized the thought of Pannenberg and Moltmann, it may be worth mentioning that Moltmann holds some reservations on Pannenberg's idea that the resurrection of Jesus is the anticipated end of all history. If that is the case, he says, then the risen Jesus himself as such has already attained

³¹ W. Pannenberg, "Redemptive Event and History," op. cit., p. 334.
³² Ibid., p. 333.
³³ Ibid, p. 334.

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the end and himself no longer has any future.³⁴ Also this would mean that believers do not look forward in hope towards the future of the risen Christ, but instead only for that to happen to them that has already happened to him. The resurrection of Jesus is not only the first instance of the final resurrection of the dead, but is also the source of the resurrection life of believers. This means that believers will find their future in him and his future, and not only in a final event which was like his. Moltmann thinks that what is at stake is the meaning and purpose of the future in history between the resurrection of Jesus and the final resurrection of all the dead. The purpose of the church during this interim is not merely to interpret the world or history or humanity differently, but in the expectation of the divine transformation to be busy changing it.

I have not seen anywhere a direct reply from Pannenberg to Moltmann's criticism; yet it is most clear from his latest writings that for him as for Moltmann the category of the future provides the basic perspective for all theological and ethical reflection. The resurrection of Jesus breaks history open for real changes to occur as the life of hope not only anticipates a transformation by God in the ultimate future, but shares in the processes of change in the present time. The standard Marxist criticism of Christian hope is that its hope of heaven deadens the nerve to work step by step in history towards the future total transformation of the world. If heaven is a guaranteed gift to us, all our efforts to charge this world may even be accused of "works righteousness"; therefore it's better that we don't do anything at all. In the ethic that follows from this "theology of hope," the Marxist criticism is taken seriously. Moltmann states, "This humanism [of esoteric Marxism] reduces the transcendent hopes of Christianity in order to bring them into life and an active alteration of the world; it is able to stimulate that aspect of hope in Christ which is concerned with the changing of this world."³⁵ The Christian hope for the kingdom and justice of God in Christ must enter into partnership with those who work for the economic relief of the "heavy laden," and who work politically for the freedom and dignity of man. An ethic of "faith active in love" has easily managed to fit into the prevailing structures of society, however unjust, with its work of private charity for the relief of individual vic-

³⁴ J. Moltmann, Theologie der Hoffnung, p. 73.
³⁵ J. Moltmann, "Hope Without Faith," op. cit., pp. 35-36.

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tims; an ethic driven by "hope for the future" can stimulate the courage to alter the world, to change the course of history, and to seek the future of the kingdom of freedom and justice. For this hope for the future is a hope and trust in God as the power of the future who says, "Behold, I make all things new." "God appears as the power of the future to contradict the negative moments of existence that we now experience and to set free the forces through which victory is achieved. Only in the real transformation of an individual life and of the conditions of life, by breaking the bonds of the present, and in essential change, does this freedom penetrate the history that its future lays open for it."³⁶

The traditional ethic of orthodox Christianity has been most concerned to make room for the church in society, to fit in, or to find a means of co-existence alongside of the state. But it is doubtful that an ethic that is eschatologically motivated can receive its due in such a framework of concern. Moltmann states, "Although it is clear that faith in God and expectation of the future are indissoluble in the Old and New Testaments, Christian theology pays far too little attention to the future as a divine mode of being. The exegetical discoveries of the eschatological nature of the original message, as seen by the early Christians, have not received enough weight; they have been outbalanced by the pressures of theological tradition and the social position of Christianity."³⁷

The deepest ontological basis of this "theology of hope" is the idea which both Pannenberg and Moltmann develop, namely, the future as a divine mode of being. The biblical God is the God of promises who leads history onward toward the future; he is the God of the coming kindgom; biblical thought is filled with passion for the future. The future is not only to be thought of subjectively as the referent of man's hope to transcend the givens in his present, but as ontologically grounded in God's own mode of being. The traditional concept of God as summum ens or as ens perfectissimum is hardly reconcilable with the notion of the future as a divine mode of being. Pannenberg asks, "Is the future of God's lordship, of his kingdom, something unessential to his divinity, only something that is supplementary to it?"³⁸ "As the power of the future God is no

³⁶ Ibid., pp. 38-39.
³⁷ Ibid., p. 39.
³⁸ W. Pannenberg, "Der Gott der Hoffnung," op. cit, p. 217.

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thing, no extant object . . . He appears neither as a being among others nor as the quiet background of all beings."³⁹

Only if we think of God as the power of the future can hope be directed towards him, for it is the power of the future that can contradict the negativities of the present and free man to overcome them. God as the power of the future is not only the power to determine the future of our present, but has determined the future of all past times on their way to becoming present. A thought difficult enough to grasp, Pannenberg says that this "reflection on the power of the future over the present leads therefore to a new concept of creation, which is oriented not to a primeval event in the past, but to the eschatological future."⁴⁰ The traditional doctrine of creation has been enveloped by an "Urzeit-Mythologie," without ever being converted in the light of the eschatological message and history of Jesus. "In the message of Jesus creation and the eschatological future are most closely connected."⁴¹

The futurity of God does not altogether exclude the notion of his eternity; but it transforms it. For God is to be thought of as the future of every past, the future of every present, as ontologically prior in his futurity to every event and epoch at the remotest distance from us. "But there is a difference whether eternity is thought of as timelessness or as an endless continuation of something in existence from primeval time, or in terms of the power of the future over every present."⁴² Eternity is thus not an attribute of an absolutely immutable being, but expresses the primacy of the future of the God of the kingdom, the future for which man as man hopes.

VI

Because this essay is getting too long for the occasion of its writing, and at the same time too brief to deal adequately with the scope and complexity of the subject, I must refrain from attempting a lengthy critical assessment of this new theology. It should be plain enough, however, that I think it is on the right track. Whatever its eventual liabilities may prove to be as the guns of criticism are turned upon it, it has some immediately recognizable assets.

³⁹ Ibid.
⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 218.
⁴¹ Ibid., p. 219.
⁴² Ibid.

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(1) First of all, its very conception is an attempt to bring to fruition at last the exegetical findings on the thoroughgoing eschatological nature of the biblical message, all along the line from the prophetic and apocalyptic eschatologies of the Old Testament to the New Testament message of Jesus and the early church. What has been largely confined to biblical monographs, written in the key of historical research, is now the point of departure and "thermal current" of all dogmatic and ethical reflections, of all hermeneutical and methodological procedures.

(2) It seems to me to have touched the nerve endings of that "modern man" who has become, for good or ill, an invisible partner in contemporary theology without whom we cannot get along. The secular translation of the religious question today is: what about our hope for the future?⁴³ Modern man is not interested in the past, certainly not for its own sake. Only as it has any bearing on his future will he bother with his past. Modern man is also restless and dissatisfied with his present; he has become homo viator; the world for him is mundus viator. He is tired of theories about the world. He intends to change the world. If there is one word which is constantly appearing in the titles of major addresses and conferences around the world, under religious and secular auspices, it is the word "change." Here is a theology which takes change seriously, and lays bare the foundations and aims of the Christian vision of change. It is a vision guided by hopes suspended between the historical promises of God and his coming kingdom.

(3) I think this theology offers a new angle of approach to the doctrine of God which seems to have become encased in a conceptual system of propositions that resulted from the encounter of the gospel with Hellenistic metaphysics. Much rearguard action has been devoted to updating this metaphysic, to bring it in line with a modern sense of reality and consciousness of history. The zeal for this attempt is rapidly flagging, even in Roman Catholic theology which has had so many of its treasures stored away in the Thomistic synthesis. Leslie Dewart's revolutionary book, The Future of Belief,

⁴³ I agree with Karl Rahner's picture of the modern man in "Christianity and the 'New Man'," The Christian and the World (New York: P. J. Kennedy & Sons, 1965). "It cannot be doubted … that the spiritual situation of man today is essentially determined by the blueprint of the new man of the future. The man of today feels himself to a larger extent to be someone who must overcome himself in order to prepare himself for a new and quite different future. He feels himself to be someone whose present can be justified only as the condition of his future" (p. 207).

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which speaks for a growing edge in Roman Catholic thought, has numerous affinities with this German theology of hope, and seems to me to be a symptom of a trend that is only barely beginning. There is a parallel also in that the thought of the French Marxist, Garaudy, serves as a stimulus to Dewart's theology similar to Bloch's influence on Moltmann and Pannenberg.

(4) Finally, this theology, in making contact with modern man in a way that is deeply grounded in what is biblically central, can help the church to escape its ghettos in two directions. It places before the church its divine appointment as mission in world history. At a time when there are so many signs that the church doesn't know what its mission is in the world, whether it be conversion of individuals, dialogue with other cultures or religions, or simply Christian presence in showing a vague concern for others, this theology is a "hermeneutic of Christian mission" in the world.⁴⁴ Secondly, its eschatological centeredness provides a needed dynamic and direction for the social ethical involvement of the church in the penultimate questions of modern society. There is no question that the church is becoming involved in the public and political issues of modern society, willing to cooperate with humanists and all so-called "men of good will."' The church needs a "practical eschatology or eschatological praxis."⁴⁵ What is the relation between church and society, between eschatology and ethics, between the kingdom of God and history? Moltmann lays down a challenge: "A dialogue with these humanists who are seeking a 'future without God' can become a suasion to Christians to cease seeking 'God without his future.' In such a meeting of ideologies, the aspect of Christian eschatology which is concerned with this world must be emphasized, for the very purpose of showing the significance of that aspect of Christian hope that transcends this world."⁴⁶

⁴⁴ J. Moltmann Theologie der Hoffnung, pp. 250 ff.
⁴⁵ J. Moltmann: "Die Kategorie Novum in der christlichen Theologie," op. cit., p. 256.
⁴⁶ J. Moltmann, "Hope Without Faith," op. cit., p. 28.