Theology Today - Vol 25, No. 3 - October 1968 - ARTICLE

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"If one hopes for the sake of Christ in the future of God and the ultimate liberation of the world, he cannot passively wait for this future, and, like the apocalyptic believers, withdraw from the world. Rather he must seek this future, strive for it, and already here be in correspondence to it in the active renewal of life and of the conditions of life, and therefore realize it already here according to the measure of possibilities. Because this future is the future of one God, it is a unique and unifying future. Because it brings eschatological liberation, it is the salvation of the whole enslaved creation. The messianic future for which Christianity arouses hope is no special future for the church or for the soul alone. It is an all-encompassing future. As all-encompassing future, its power of hope is able to mediate faith to earthly needs and to lead it into real life."

MANY believe that Christian theology has become irrelevant. It has become introvert, orthodox, traditionalist, or personalistic. Occupied only with itself, it has lost contact with reality. In this wide field of difficulties, two experiences have created a new challenge to theology which can be met only through a reorganization of the theological system itself and a reorientation of the entire theological endeavor.

The first of these experiences is that in conversations with modern atheists, humanists, and Marxists, one always arrives at a point where

Jürgen Moltmann is Professor of Theology at the University of Tübingen, Germany. This past year he served as Guest Professor at Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina. Author of several books in German, he is best known for his recent Theology of Hope (1967). This present essay, which was given originally as a public lecture in connection with the Gallahue Conference on Theology at Princeton, will be included in a forthcoming volume of Professor Moltmann's American lectures to be published by Scribners: Religion, Revolution and the Future, translated by M. Douglas Meeks.

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one recognizes the deep schism of the modern age: In the past two centuries, a Christian faith in God without hope for the future of the world has called forth a secular hope for the future of the world without faith in God. Since the Christians, the churches, and theology believed in a God without future, the will for a future of the earth has joined itself to an atheism which sought a future without God. The messianic hopes emigrated from the church and became invested in progress, evolution, and revolutions. In the church only a half-truth remained. We have arrived at a moment in history that provokes the question: Should there now be a parting of ways in history, so that faith aligns itself with the past and unfaith with the future? I think that we can overcome this present dilemma only if Christians begin to remember the "God of Hope," as he is witnessed to in the promissory history of the Old and the New Testaments, and thus begin to assume responsibility for the personal, social, and political problems of the present.

The other experience to which I refer is the emergence of something like "one world" for the first time in history. We have reached a situation where human beings can completely eradicate each other. It is thus the situation in which mankind will survive only in a new community. Therefore today even the historical future will not be the continuation of the past but something new. In the past, human beings had histories in the plural but no common history in the singular. Today we have pasts in the plural: each people, each culture, each religion has its own past. But since in the future we will either perish together or survive in a new community, we have a future only in the singular. We have many pasts but only one future. Therefore past and future today no longer appear in one and the same continuum. We have arrived at the leap from the quantities of history to a new quality of history. In a time in which the actual movement of history is beginning to reach the universal horizon of eschatology, our understanding of our responsibility in the areas of faith, politics, and ethics is still caught in the provincial thought forms of a passing epoch.

In my view, it was from experience of this kind that a movement, if it is a movement, emerged which has been called eschatological theology and which soon revealed itself as project of a political theology.

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Eschatology is here the doctrine of hope, the doctrine of the future for which one can hope, and simultaneously the doctrine of the action of hope which brings the hoped-for future into the sufferings of the present age. Theology as eschatology would wish to project the universal horizon of the future in which theology in history becomes meaningful and relevant. It does not wish to substitute eschatology for theology. The universal horizon of eschatology reveals the reality of the world as history, manifests faith in Christ as practical hope for the coming God, and thus qualifies herein the past and the present as history of the future of God. This leads us to an understanding of the present as the presence of the future. The present becomes the frontier where the future is gained or lost. Traditional differences and conflicts become relative, if we can find the future only together in a common effort. Either we will all hang together now or we will all hang separately (Franklin).

The political dimension of theology emerges from the universal horizon of eschatology. The differences between a "theology of the word" and a "theology of culture," and the conflicts between a "theology of existence" and a "theology of world history" are relativized the more one recognizes that Christianity stands with all its powers in the dawn of the future and must therefore bring the "power of the future world" into the trouble spots of the present, personally, socially, and politically. In view of the universal horizon of the future the church finds a new companionship with the social and political institutions of society. The difference between church and world becomes relative if both stand before that future which one traditionally has called the judgment and the kingdom of God. The lines of separation no longer go spatially through body and soul, spirituality and secularity, faith and politics, church and world, but are found temporally in all areas of life between the power of the past and the "power of the future world."

But which horizon of the future is wide enough to embrace the differences of the present and concrete enough to mediate them practically? Is Christian eschatology capable of it? What changes are necessary in an eschatology, traditionally oriented toward a salvation of the soul in the beyond, in order to be able to do justice to this task? Can we unfold a Christian universalism of hope which makes meaningful and relevant the political humanism of Christianity?

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The peculiarity of Christian theology can be defined as follows: Christian theology speaks of God historically and of history eschatologically.

Christian theology speaks of God historically. It speaks of the "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," of the "Father of Jesus Christ," and unites the proclamation of God with the memory of historical persons.

It speaks of the "God of the Exodus," as in the first commandment, and of the "God, who raised Jesus from the dead," as in the Easter kerygma, and unites with faith in God the memory of historical events. The hermeneutical starting point of Christian theology is therefore the concrete history witnessed to in both the Old and the New Testaments.

Christian theology speaks of history eschatologically. It proclaims the "God of Abraham" as the God of the promise in whom all nations will be blessed. It proclaims the "Father of Jesus Christ" as the one God of all peoples and as the future of every creature groaning in travail. In making history present, Christian theology anticipates simultaneously this one universal future for all men and all things. The all-embracing horizon of historical theology that gives meaning is "the end of all things" or "the future of history."

This unity of particular history and universality, of specific memory and all-embracing expectation is a peculiarity which we find only in Jewish and Christian thought. As long as this dialectical unity can be retained and meaningfully represented, Christian faith is alive. If the unity breaks down, the Christian faith breaks up into a merely historical memory, on the one hand, and new experiences of the absolute and the universal, on the other.

The present crisis of the idea of God has come about because the old forms, in which the divinity of God had been understood and merged with the thought and the life of a particular time, have lost their self-evidence.

A first form of Christian theology was the union of the sacra doctrina (the biblical tradition) with prima philosophia (cosmological metaphysics). The cosmological proofs for the existence of God, in which the divinity of God and his presence were brought into an analogical relationship to the experience of the world accessible to

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everyone, have lost their persuasive power, since modern man no longer understands himself as a part of the cosmos, but has placed the world as material of his scientific and technical possibilities over against himself. He no longer lives in the house of ordered being but in the open history of a technical transformation of the world. The old cosmological-theistic world view which spoke of God in relationship to the cosmos of the natural world is antiquated and is experienced as mythical by man who has become the master of his environment. But it is naive pathos of the enlightenment to discard the fundamental question which was to be answered by the old world view. Behind the cosmological-theistic world views lies the real misery of man which expressed itself in the manifold forms of the theodicy question: Si deus, unde malum? (If God exists, whence evil?). The old world view answered this fundamental question in the vision of the orderly and wisely steered cosmos and used the image of the divine cosmos in order to do battle against chaos threatening everywhere. Even though this answer no longer persuades today, since we experience reality as history and no longer as cosmos, the fundamental theodicy question is still with us and is more pressing than before. For us it has no longer only its old naturalistic form as in the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755. It appears today in a political form, as in the question of Auschwitz. But it still is to a large extent the comprehensive horizon of the question of God in which the theistic and the atheistic answers lock horns in battle. Thomas asked the question: An Deus sit? (Whether God is?) on grounds of an explanation of nature and its evils, and he argued on the basis of the cosmological proofs of God against atheism. We ask the question: An Deus sit? on grounds of history and its crimes and must struggle with the question of God in historical knowledge and political action. Following the victory of science over the mythical world views, the theodicy question and the debate with atheism in the context of this question lead us to the development of a political theology.

After the demise of the cosmological proofs for God's existence in the time of the enlightenment, the psychological (Descartes), the moral (Kant), and the existential (Kierkegaard) proofs of God's existence began their victorious advance in Christian theology. Ostracized from cosmology by the natural sciences, Christian theology became anthropology. Here the claim of the Christian kerygma

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was joined to the question of human existence. While God could no longer be demonstrated as ground and Lord of the world, he was now understood as transcendent ground of one's being in the world. Here man's soul, his spirituality, subjectivity, personality, or selfhood became the real referent of theological thought. This turn from theistic metaphysics of the world to the theological illumination of existence and language analysis is an important step. The misery underlying the illumination of existence is the identity question, the question of man as to his authenticity. The concrete initiative for the overcoming of the pain of this question, as inherent in theology as anthropology, can be regarded in the offer of faith as inner identity-experience, and in the offer of love as relationship to the neighbor, wherein personhood is fulfilled. The quest of man for his identity is here understood as horizon of the question of God, and the debate with atheistic humanism goes on in the horizon of this existential question. If we take a closer look at the identity question of man, we will find, however, that it cannot be answered apart from the social, political, and historical particularities of man, nor apart from his social, political, and historical identifications, engagements, and commitments. After the individualistic view of man has become obsolete and in view of the debate with atheistic humanism, the identity question of man leads us toward a political theology. While the theodicy question for a just world cannot be answered without the justification of man in his personhood, man cannot find identity in himself without engaging his personhood in a battle for a just and human world.

As regards the basis of the fundamental questions, there exists therefore no genuine alternative between the cosmological and the newer anthropological theology. Man and world are mediated today in the realm of history, and that means in social, political, and technological history. Without humanization of the world man will not find his inner identity, and without a solution to the identity crisis of modern man there is no imaginable solution to the social and political crises of the world. The theodicy question and the identity question are two sides of the same coin.

If we listen in this situation to the New Testament, a third dimension can speak to us, the dimension of primitive Christian apocalypticism. At this point, I am taking over the historical and systematic thesis of Ernst Käsemann: "Apocalypticism is the mother of all

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Christian theology." Käsemann did not mean thereby that body of ideas and writings we usually call "apocalypticism," but that peculiar questioning which combines the question of God with the question of the future of history. The eschatology of Paul, of the Book of Revelation, and of primitive Christianity in general is propelled by the question whether God is and when he would become God fully. This question with its temporal component goes beyond the Thomistic question: An sit Deus? The question of God is placed here on the ground of historical experience and, defined in temporal terms, turns into the question of his coming. It is the question whether the God of Jesus Christ is God and Lord of all men and when he would become this God fully. The ground for this question is the contingent history of Jesus Christ. Its horizon is the future of world history, as it is expressed in the symbols of the last judgment and new creation. On the basis of the Christ-event Christian theology raises the question of God as the question of the future of God in which God will be God universally. Eschatologically directed toward the future of God, Christian faith in the experience of the world introduces the theodicy question: Si Christus, unde malum? (If there is Christ, whence evil?) and makes men conscious of human suffering in view of the misery of man's godlessness and god-forsakenness. Eschatologically directed toward the future of God, the Christian message proclaims the new man and thus leads man into an identity crisis, that is, into conscious suffering in view of the misery of his inability to recognize his true humanity.

Theology as eschatology tries to understand man together with the world historically in view of that future which both will find in the future of God.

Christian theology therefore is itself a historical initiative. It does not indicate what was and what is, but it tries to change things historically through performative language. It is historico-eschatological thinking about God between cross and parousia. In the painful realities of history it upholds the hope for God's future, and in the anticipating reflection about this future it searches for realizable possibilities to overcome the misery of history. Christian theology is therefore, even in its very language, according to ancient terminology, theologia viae, but not as yet theologia patriae. That is, it is still the theory of historical action, and not as yet the theory of the theoria Dei, the vision of God.

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III

If we understand the immanent reality of the world and of man historically, we presuppose that we view the transcendent reality of God eschatologically. Both emerge together: the understanding of the world as history and the understanding of God as the future of history.

From the God who reveals himself in the context of historical persons and events, everything that is, is referred to the future and is experienced in its historical openness. On the basis of the promises and the historical guidance towards fulfillment, the Old Testament spoke of the "coming God," who would bring his people out of captivity and exile and his creation out of chaos and misery into the home of his glory. Besides various spatial characterizations of his epiphanies in history, we therefore find in the biblical witness the temporal characterization of his promised future. Consequently, we must think through the "future" as God's mode of being with us. The future of his glory and his reign is not something accidental that must still be added to his eternity for the sake of completion. God is Lord in carrying out his reign. In the actual demonstration of his divinity he is "God with us" and with the world. The divinity of God will become manifest and real only in the coming of his unlimited reign.

The faith that God is God therefore necessarily embraces the hope that the future of his kingdom will come in its full identity into the world. In the modern debate between the faith in the "God above us" and the faith in the "God in us" or "between us," a third position thus enters in, which speaks of the "God in front of us, ahead of us," the "God of hope" and the God of the Exodus. In the modern conflict between a theism that affirms, "God is," and an atheism that negates God, saying, "God is not," eschatological theology can say: God's being, the kingdom of his full identity, is coming. God is present in the way in which his future takes control over the present in real anticipations and prefigurations. But God is not as yet present in the form of his eternal presence. The dialectic between his being and his being-not-yet is the pain and the power of history. Caught between the experiences of his presence and of his absence, we are seeking his future, which will solve this ambiguity which the present cannot solve. By future ("advent") we do not mean a faraway condition, but a power which already qualifies the present-

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through promise and hope, through liberation and the creation of new possibilities. As this power of the future, God reaches into the present. As creator of new possibilities he liberates the present from the shackles of the past and from the anxious insistence on the status quo. Thus God becomes the power of the protest against the guilt that throws us into transiency and produces death, and he becomes also the ground of the freedom that renews life.

If we understand the reality of God in the temporal and the historical categories of the future, we must conversely also unite the temporal and the historical categories of the future with the God-idea. Our traditional understanding of time puts past, present, and future as the three tenses next to each other in terms of equal importance. In temporal terms, the eternity of God is usually expressed as his presence in past, present, and future: "Zeus was, Zeus is, and Zeus will be." This understanding of time balks against an overestimation of the future and finds God in the present and the past as well. In the New Testament this view of time is changed. In Revelation 1:4 we read: "Peace from him who is and who was and who is to come." One expects to read: "and who will be." Instead we find in place of the future tense of einai, being, the future tense of erchesthai, coming. This gives the future a new dominance over the other tenses. Future is the "coming of God." Therefore the future is expected from the coming God. What God was in the past and what he is in the present becomes understandable from the announcement of his ultimate coming. As the coming God, he is not only the future of the present but also the future of the past. We can therefore grasp history as the process of this future.

Even so, there remains a difference between eschatological theology which speaks of the "coming God," and teleological metaphysics and process philosophy, which speak of the "becoming God" or of God as the finis ultimus (the final end) of all things. As far as I can tell, process theology, on the one hand, speaks of the "becoming God" in the context of the dynamics of the world process. Eschatological theology, on the other hand, speaks of the "coming God" in the context of the dialectical dynamics, circumscribed by the symbols of creatio ex nihilo, justificatio impii, and resurrectio mortuorum.

(1) God and Promissory history. "The new is never completely new. A dream always precedes it" (Ernst Bloch). Correspondingly, the future of the coming God is never pure future. It is preceded

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by a history of promises and anticipations. Israel experienced the reality of God in its history of Exodus, covenant, and promise. The Old Testament is a history book rather than a book of law and cult, since law and cult have been integrated within the covenantal history of the promises. What is a promise? A promise announces a reality which has not as yet arrived. But in announcing this future, the future becomes word-present. This distinguishes a promise from a mere prediction. If the promise brings the future into the present in the word, it compels the present to decisions. No one will see the land of fulfillment if he does not start seeking it. This distinguishes the Old Testament promises from Cassandra's oracles of fate. The Old Testament promises are historical because they open up a history through hope and exodus. But how are future and presence of God in the tension of this promissory history to be understood? I think that we can differentiate here between a presence of God on the way and a presence of God at the goal of the way of promises. God is experienced as "fire and cloud in the Exodus," and is sought in the homeland of his identity in which the Exodus terminates. One can distinguish between the presence of the will of God in history and as history, and the real presence of God in the end of history and as its end. The historical epiphanies of God, of which Israel could truly speak, were particular and transient epiphanies. Therefore memory transforms them into signs and promises of the ultimate and eschatological epiphany of God at the end of history. The future-oriented concept of the presence of God in his promises is not directed against the concrete religious experience of theophanies but actually preserves it in the "memory of hope." Because an ultimate future announces itself in a provisional past, hope exists in the mode of memory and memory in the mode of hope.

If we understand history generally as promissory history, we discover a profound difference which is experienced time and again in messianic religious movements. It is the difference between hope and experience, between vision and reality. Israel set out to find the promised land "flowing with milk and honey," but it found Palestine where it was threatened by both internal and foreign foes. Jesus proclaimed-according to an ironic as well as profound dictum of Alfred Loisy-the kingdom of God, but what came was the church. The French Revolution promised "freedom, equality and brotherhood," but its progeny was the age of the bourgeoisie. The socialist

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revolution nurtured the expectation of the completely human society, but in effect produced a hierarchy of specialists and functionaries. The industrial revolution promises peace and humanity, but we find ourselves today in the midst of an irrational dynamics of civilization. All of this points to the difference in which we experience history. In fact, it is precisely this difference which propels history. On the one hand, hopes are greater than the fulfillment of reality and history falls short of hope. On the other hand, the new reality necessitates a new interpretation of hopes. We find this alternating process of realization and reinterpretation quite evident in Israel's history of traditions and, moreover, we should keep it in view in order to proceed with patience between the promises of history and the disappointments of history.

(2) God and Christ. In the horizon of hope in the "coming God" we confront Jesus, his mission and history with the ancient messianic question: "Are you the one who is to come?" Thereupon we will discover that the messianic claim of Jesus lies in the prolepsis of his proclamation of the kingdom. In the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount, in the beatitudes, and in the call to discipleship, Jesus re-presents through his own presence and mission that not-yet-realized future of the kingdom in which God is God. In that he himself announces the arrival of this future he brings eschatological freedom into the misery of the present. It is congruous with the eschatological proclamation of the historical Jesus that the Easter witnesses proclaimed the crucified one as the eschatological representative of God on the basis of his Easter appearances and found in him the focus of universal hope. Just as his proclamation could be repeated in the light of Easter, and just as Easter became the ground of a new hope on the background of his proclamation, so one could recognize in him the real anticipation of the future of God. With his mission and proclamation and the Easter event, the ultimate liberation of the world is set in motion and its end is confidently anticipated. If we see Jesus, his proclamation, and his history together in the concept of the "Christ event," we find in this event two perspectives.

In this event there lies a real anticipation of the future of history in the midst of history. For this reason the early Christian community gave Jesus messianic titles and characterized his end with the eschatological expression "raised from the dead." The eschatolog-

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ical future of God, of life, of righteousness, and of the new creation occurred in history and under the conditions of history through him and in him. Therefore memory of him can become the ground of world-surpassing hope.

Nevertheless the early Christian community kept in mind the distinction between Jesus, the Lord, and God himself. In the worship of the New Testament community one prayed only to God, never to Jesus the Lord. Rather the Lord was called upon. We have access to God through the Lord, and can pray to God in his name. We again find this distinction between God and Jesus, the Lord, in the eschatological reflection of I Cor. 15. God has delegated his lordship to Jesus for a definite time and for a specific purpose. At the consummation of that purpose Jesus will return his dignity so that God will be "all in all." The meaning of these observations is that the finality of faith in Jesus as the Christ of God was linked up with the provisionality of hope in God himself. The lordship of Christ in a world of sin and death is the provisional and messianic realization of the ultimate lordship of God. Seen from this perspective, the purpose of Christ's lordship is to make room for the absolute lordship of God. Thus we find in many parts of the New Testament an eschatological Christology or, articulated in the formula of old church dogmatics, an eschatological subordinationism (Emil Brunner). Therein Christ becomes the precursor, the place-holder, and the representative of the coming God.

On the other hand, however, there is inherent in the Christ event a real incarnation of God's future. Eschatological subordinationism results only if from the particular presence of Christ one looks upon the universal future of God. If, conversely, one looks from the future of God to the presence of Christ, one finds in him the incarnation of God. I think that we find this perspective again in the title "Son of God." However much Jesus' proclamation and the proclamation of the resurrected Lord are future oriented, the church sees in his passion and death the offering up of the Son through the Father and the offering up of the Son himself. This is the movement of incarnation, of obedience, and of love. Therefore it is not sufficient to designate Jesus as the "stand-in" and deputy of the coming God. For precisely in such a capacity he is also already the incarnation of the coming God. Eschatological Christology goes astray if it does not become in the counter movement a Christological eschatology.

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As the anticipation of the future of God, Christ becomes the ground of hope. As the preparatory Messiah of God, he reveals God as the Father. The real anticipation of God through Christ attains its abiding significance through the trinitarian relationship of the Father to the Son and the Son to the Father.

The anticipation of the coming God through Jesus and in Jesus is comprehended in the symbol of the resurrection of Jesus-"ahead of us." The incarnation of the coming God in Jesus is manifest in the meaning of his cross-"for us." The Christ who was raised "ahead of us" mortals as the first-fruits into new life is the same as the Christ who "for us" died the death of god-forsakenness.

It does not suffice to speak only of the prolepsis of the eschaton in the resurrection of Christ. That is no help to those who are living within the agony of history. Within the agony of history the message of the resurrection and of life always reaches us, as sinners and mortals, i.e. as men closed to the future and unfree, in the form of the message of the Christ who was, for us, offered up and crucified. Theoretically expressed: just as the resurrection alone manifests the meaning of the cross of Christ, so his cross alone makes the resurrection meaningful for us. Resurrection faith can only be grasped as faith in the crucified one. And eschatological hope can be "hope against hope" only if it is born out of the redeeming and freeing efficacy of the cross of Christ. For in the one crucified "for us" and for our justification, hope in freedom is not only portrayed paradigmatically before our eyes but is actually mediated. Hope is not born out of enthusiasm but out of love which liberates us from old bonds and opens up new opportunities. Therefore in a world of death and forsakenness the coming glory of God shines forth at first on the face of the crucified Christ.

(3) God and the community of Christ. With the acquired Christological or messianic concepts of anticipation and incarnation, of resurrection and cross, we can consider the mission of the community of Christ, of the messianic congregation in a corresponding way. Its word of the gospel is the anticipation of the eschatological manifestation of God in all areas of the world. It thus bears in itself the character of promise. It is, in a hidden way, the anticipatory epiphany of God in the world. "Where the gospel is proclaimed, the exalted Lord anticipates his manifestation in his word uttered by man, he anticipates the future in the announcement of himself as the coming

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one" (H. Schlier). The gospel proclaims nothing other than that Jesus, the Christ of God, was killed and resurrected for us. But that it does this is already the beginning and anticipation of the future of Christ and of the ultimate liberation of the world. That such an ultimate liberation is already possible in history through the faith-creating word is nothing less than a messianic possibility. Correspondingly, the Christ-event is represented and re-birth and reconciliation are made present in baptism and the Lord's Supper. But that this is already happening is a possibility of the messianic time.

The memory that makes Christ present is, as such, the anticipation of his future in hope. Because faith relates to the reality of God only through word and not yet through sight in the visible new creation, it is, as faith, hope. It is the trusting beginning of the vision of God face to face. The obedience of the faithful in the body and in everyday life is an imitation of Christ and as such is already the anticipation of the resurrection of the body under the conditions of history and the anticipation of the kingdom of freedom in the possibilities of the present.

Finally, the community which is called together from Jews and Gentiles, cultured and uncultured, masters and slaves can understand itself messianically as the representation of the new mankind. As the brotherhood of the Christ of God it is the vanguard of a world freed from godlessness and inhumanity and, conversely, only where it is something like that, is it the messianic community of Christ. Only when it freely chooses to make its own the groaning of the whole enslaved creation is the Christian community the sacrament of God's hope for the world.

(4) God and the creation of history. With this we come to the furthermost horizon of eschatology, namely, to an eschatology of being. Hope in the coming God leads not only to a messianic interpretation of biblical and of Christian history but must, if it is to be relevant, lead also to a messianic understanding of reality itself. A few intimations must suffice here. If we combine the idea of God with the idea of the future, the future assumes a creative character for time and for the whole of historical being. Out of the future spring new possibilities and out of these possibilities a new reality is created. In this sense history is the product of a creative process. To express it in another way: the future realizes itself in history and - as history and yet always rebounds

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from its own realization in history and becomes again a not-yet-realized future of the whole of being.

All historical realizations of the future of being are ambiguous because they both realize and hinder this future of being. Possibilities are realized and at the same time also forfeited. Every historical reality has in itself the intention to be an enduring, eternal reality, for everything which is, wishes to remain and not vanish. Thus we find everywhere in reality the tendency toward stabilization in cosmic orders against chaos. But no historical reality is already that prevailing eschatological reality; therefore the prevailing reality transcends all historical realities and renders them once again historical realities. In the light of a messianic future we can thus conceive reality as historical tension between particularity and universality, between ambivalence and clarity, between incarnation and transcendence.

Reality is not a permanent cosmos and does not consist of repeatable orders. Neither is it a chaos. It is the historical process of the coming fullness of being. We can therefore rediscover in the intentions and tendencies of all beings in history something of what is called in traditional language "Spirit." It is the agony, the motivating force, the tension of matter. It is the yearning, unfulfillment, anxiety, and suffering in matter itself. The unrest which man experiences in his heart wherever hope affects him is an unrest which he rediscovers in his body and in all beings. Everything which exists is burdened with transitoriness, but in hope, because it wants to be free. The formation of an eschatological or messianic understanding of being will necessitate 1) understanding nature historically and 2) understanding spirit materially and matter spiritually. The views of Teilhard de Chardin and Ernst Bloch point in this direction. To man's "restless heart" (Augustine) there corresponds a "restless world."

How does the messianic mission of men for the future realize itself? For messianic hope, the future, the kingdom or the city of God do not simply lie in readiness in the future, so that one could only wait for this future and relate to it in conceptualization. Even though the kingdom of God is God's kingdom, it is also true that one must seek it in order to find it. Christian hope anticipates the

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future in the spirit of Christ and realizes it under the conditions of history. In that this future is anticipated in hope and obedience, it is itself conceived as in the process of coming. We are construction workers and not only interpreters of the future whose power in hope as well as in fulfillment is God. This means that Christian hope is a creative and militant hope in history. The horizon of eschatological expectation produces here a horizon of ethical intentions which, in turn, gives meaning to the concrete historical initiatives. If one hopes for the sake of Christ in the future of God and the ultimate liberation of the world, he cannot passively wait for this future, and, like the apocalyptic believers, withdraw from the world. Rather he must seek this future, strive for it, and already here be in correspondence to it in the active renewal of life and of the conditions of life, and therefore realize it already here according to the measure of possibilities. Because this future is the future of one God, it is a unique and unifying future. Because it brings eschatological liberation, it is the salvation of the whole enslaved creation. The messianic future for which Christianity arouses hope is no special future for the church or for the soul alone. It is an all-encompassing future. As all-encompassing future, its power of hope is able to mediate faith to earthy needs and to lead it into real life.

After the humanistic ethic of hope in the nineteenth century and its impotence in the catastrophes of the twentieth century, many in Europe and America developed an ethic of faith. That was justified, but it appears to me that today we should now develop a new ethic of the hope of faith. Together with Joh. B. Metz, I call it political theology in order to make clear that ethics is not an appendix to dogmatics and also is not only a consequence of faith but that faith itself has a messianic context in which it becomes meaningful and that theology itself stands in a political dimension in which it becomes relevant.

For us the field of politics designates the extensive field of constructive and destructive possibilities of the appropriation and utilization of nature's powers as well as of human relationships by human society. Nature and human history come together in the process of civilization. In it there can no longer be a distinction between cosmology and anthopology. For man and nature, politics is becoming a common destiny. We take up the ancient concept of theologia politica or theologia civilis to point out the fundamental

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situation in which the God-question is raised and in which Christian God-talk must become relevant today.

If it is correct that the old cosmological theodicy question about evil and misfortune has become today a political question, then the Christian faith in the creative righteousness of God and the liberation of the world out of its self-inflicted misery must become practically responsible exactly at this point. It is, on the other side, well-known that the retreat of theology and faith out of politics into the private dimension has conceded the field of politics to godless and inhuman powers. That faith which no longer seeks God and his righteousness in the world but only in the soul has allied itself with a practical atheism which seeks the world without God and righteousness, and with it has contracted an alliance of death, of the "death of God" in the world.

On the other hand, the theology of the believing "I" or of the esoteric I-thou relationship has reached its limitations because it is not in a position to come to grips with social and political institutions and organizations. But as soon as one emerges from the problem of realizing the "I" and of the question of identity, he can then see his "I" in connection with larger spheres. The identity question of man finds no solution without the recognition of the call of man to concrete engagement and to active self-renunciation for the sake of a greater cause. Man finds his inner certainty only when he finds certainty about the tasks for which he exists and in which he can exert himself. He who forgets himself in devotion to the mission of Christ for the liberation of the world will find himself. The New Testament community spoke of such calls in connection with charisms and virtues. They realized these in their time in the missionary proclamation of freedom, in the messianic community of free men, and in the new obedience for the sake of liberation out of bodily misery. If in our time politics is increasingly becoming the destiny and more and more threateningly the fate of man, it is necessary to develop a political theology of Christian virtues.

Political theology unites the old cosmological theology and the new theology of existence in the eschatological understanding of history with the messianic tasks of men in history. Yet exactly at this juncture we must consider that it is unreal to anticipate and work for the future if this future does not come toward us. The future in which we hope is never identical with the successes of our activity, for our

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actions are as ambivalent as we ourselves insofar as we are historical beings. The future must come towards us in order that our activity be "not in vain," as Paul puts it in the chapter on resurrection hope, against the paralyzing impression of the mortality and transitoriness of all things.

Revolutions which must bring a better future with force are aimed at the reconciliation of their attained reality with the hoped-for-future. For that reason messianism, of which we spoke politically in reference to the liberation of the world from its misery, needs permanent reconciliation through the freedom of Christ.

Hope which mobilizes the renewal of life needs faith in order to find certainty. The liberating future of God enters into the possibilities and impossibilities of our history in a two-fold way: as exhortation of redemption from the guilt-laden coercion which binds us to the past and hurls us into transiency, and as demand for the renewal of life. The surplus value of the future over history manifests itself in hope's permanent surplus incentive and, with equal importance, in the redemption of the compulsion of the instincts. Without faith, hope cannot laugh, and without hope, faith cannot live and dispose of itself in the world.

Allow me to sum up what I wanted to say in the last section about the necessity of a political theology and the necessity of a theology of reconciliation in politics with a few lines of a poem by Bertolt Brecht:

We who wished to prepare the soil for kindness
could not be kind ourselves.
But you, when at last it will come to pass that man
is a helper to man,
remember us with forbearance.