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The Power of the Powerless: The Word of Liberation for Today

By Jürgen Moltmann

San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1983. 166 Pp. $12.95.

While eminent theologians do not necessarily make good preachers, some have excelled in both capacities. Tillich and Barth-to mention two obvious examples-were also outstanding preachers, and their sermons have often been used as highly readable introductions to their theologies. As this recent collection of Moltmann's sermons attests, he, too, is not only a creative and provocative theologian but a strong and eloquent preacher.

Moltmann understands the sermon as a mediation between biblical text and present context. He insists that the text is not to be confused with the context even though the latter is to be taken with utmost seriousness. Text and context stand in a permanent tension in his view, and the task of each sermon is to rediscover the Gospel of Jesus Christ attested in Scripture within the context of the actual world we experience here and now. Thus Moltmann's sermons are textual but not in a wooden or pedantic manner. He is free both to approach the text with surprising questions shaped by present experience and to question present assumptions and patterns of life in light of the message of the text.

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The fundamental human experiences addressed by these sermons are limitation, bondage, and powerlessness. These are the pervasive experiences of third-world peoples, blacks, women, the handicapped, and other marginalized groups in Europe and North America; and of those who work for justice and reconciliation in places like South Korea, South Africa, El Salvador, and Northern Ireland. The experience of limitation is universal, but it is often repressed.

Moltmann contends that the weak, the poor, the suffering, and the handicapped are forgotten or kept at arms's length by us because they radically call in question our world whose highest values are dominating power, private possessions, and complete invulnerability. According to the Christian Gospel, however, the power of God is not to be found in security systems or in the experiences of self-aggrandizement and domination over others. If God is the crucified Lord. then God is "the power of the powerless-that is the name of God, the true God."

According to Moltmann, the most destructive evils of our time-militarism, racism, classism-have in common a deep fear of and hostility toward the "others," those who are different from us, who make us insecure on account of their otherness, and who therefore become targets of our aggression. By contrast, the creative and redemptive love of God is other-affirming power, power that "suffers" the other, affirms the stranger, forgives the sinner, loves the enemy. In the sermon, "Accept One Another," Moltmann speaks of the strength to accept others who are so threateningly different from us as coming ultimately from God's acceptance of us all in Christ. It is here that Moltmann finds the root of a new human freedom that empowers the powerless in their struggle against injustice and keeps alive the hope for God's coming kingdom of justice and peace even in face of severe opposition and repeated disappointment.

In a striking sermon entitled, "The Pharisee and the Tax Collector," Moltmann shows how "the radical from Nazareth turns everything upside down." Jesus' parable declares God's judgment on "good people" who despise the miserable others and proclaims God's mercy to "bad people" who acknowledge their sinfulness and their need of forgiveness. " In community with Jesus, 'the friend of sinners and tax collectors,' we see that we are loved-and how much we are loved-in the place where we do not want to be at all, in community with the people we despise. In community with Jesus, we discover that doors open-the door to the repressed self in our inmost heart, and the door to the repressed 'other,' who is at our side."

Not all of Moltmann's sermons are equally penetrating and compelling, but in each he tries to bring the biblical message to bear on such crucial issues as nuclear disarmament, world hunger, and the temptation to get used to systemic injustice. Moltmann is unmistakably a "political" theologian, and his sermons light up the "political" dimension of the Gospel. But his sermons also disclose a pastor's sensitivity and a distinctive spirituality. Moltmann is passionately concerned about

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justice and peace, but for him these concerns are inseparable from a sense of the radiant beauty of God and the real, if partial, experience of the great joy of human community created by and centered on the love of God. "God is beauty," he writes, "and he is nowhere lovelier than in the winning tenderness and the prevenient grace which comes to meet us in Christ."

Most of, the sixteen sermons contained in this volume (two lectures are also included) were preached in university services in the Stiftskirche in Tübingen.

DANIEL L. MIGLIORE

Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey