Theology Today - Vol 25, No. 3 - October 1968 - BOOK REVIEW

387 - Theology Of Hope

Theology Of Hope
By Jürgen Moltmann
342 pp. New York, Harper & Row, 1967. $8.50.

This is unquestionably one of the most important books in recent Protestant theology. It has already created a considerable stir in Europe, and is now rapidly gaining recognition in this country as the major statement to date of a new eschatological theology which emphasizes the critical and revolutionizing effect of Christian hope upon the thought, institutions, and conditions of life here and now. Moltmann understands Christian faith as essentially hope for the future of man and this earth promised by the God of the exodus and the resurrection of the crucified Jesus. The coming God of the biblical tradition is identified as the power at the "front" of history rather than "above" it; the promise of God is the propulsive force of history, awakening hope which keeps men unreconciled to present experience, sets them in contradiction to prevailing natural and social powers, makes the church "a constant disturbance in human society," and "the source of continual new impulses toward the realization of righteousness, freedom, and humanity here in the light of the promised future that is to come" (p. 22).

By keeping history in "eschatological process," God's all-embracing promise, far from robbing man of freedom and historical initiative, makes possible creative discipleship in an unfinished world. A hermeneutic of hope in God's promise must be a political hermeneutic; it does not have its focus merely in the proclamation of the word or in a new self-understanding but in the "hermeneutic of Christian mission" (pp. 272 ff.). Christian theology thus becomes the theory of Christian practice. Its task is to clarify the radical openness of reality to new possibilities, to summon men to break away from the spell of the status quo, and to take up the task of building a new reality which corresponds better to God's promised future. Moltmann expresses the socio-political implications of his theology of hope in a way reminiscent of Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: the point is not simply to interpret the world, history, and human relations differently but to change them in the expectation of God's transformation (p. 84).

While Moltmann's description of the "eschatological process" of history is firmly based on the biblical themes of "promise" and "death and resurrection," it is intricately linked as well to the social theory of the early

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Hegel, especially his concept of self-expenditure (Entäusserung), and to the philosophy of the not-yet of the contemporary Marxist, Ernst Bloch. The category novum, which is so important in Bloch's philosophy, is paralleled in Moltmann's theology by the novum of God's promise which urges men into a dialectical process of struggle with reality as "given." Men participate in the life of the crucified Lord by accepting the "cross of the present" (Hegel), i.e., the suffering involved in opposing present structures and orders of human community, and by mediating to modern society for which "God is dead" a restlessness which resists institutional stabilization and risks self-expenditure in the cause of humanizing the conditions of life, thus exhibiting the "spirit of the resurrection" (cf. pp. 84, 168-72).

While the points of contact between Moltmann's eschatological process and the Hegelian and Marxist dialectics of history make possible a lively new Christian-Marxist dialogue, some important problems are also created. One may wonder whether Moltmann's interpretation of the resurrection of the crucified as "event of promise" and "history-making event," while a masterful dialectical surpassing of the "historical"-"not historical" alternatives, does not cloud over some pedestrian difficulties; whether it is altogether clear how we are to understand the talk of the "latency" and "tendency" of the Christ-event, particularly in relation to the use of these terms in Bloch's philosophy; whether the call for "the realization of the eschatological hope of justice, the humanizing of man, the socializing of humanity, peace for all creation" (p. 329) is concrete enough to provide something more than a rhetoric of change to the church in its effort to exercise its hope responsibly in modern society and in confrontation with particular issues.

Moltmann's theology of hope differs from the Marxist dialectic at two decisive points: first, in the grounding of hope for the future of man and the world in the God who raised Jesus from the dead; and second, in the description of Christian hope as eschatologia crucis, i.e., hope which perseveres in the struggle for justice, freedom, and peace in the face of suffering and death, without falling victim to utopian illusions which identify the coming kingdom with a particular social program or social order. Unfortunately, however, Moltmann's dialogue with Bloch's Marxist philosophy of hope is kept largely under the surface in this book. It is therefore especially regrettable that the American publisher decided not to include the appendix to the third edition in German in which Moltmann discusses Bloch's philosophy.

Perhaps the crucial weakness of Moltmann's work, as H. Cox notes, is that the hope consciousness which it describes is too Spartan. Little attention is given to celebration, play, and humor as the necessary com-

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panions of the struggle for a new world if this struggle is not itself to be overwhelmed by the spirit of rigidity and closedness which it seeks to overcome. In his book Moltmann speaks very briefly of the joy of Christian hope and in a recent essay characterizes Christian hope as hope which can laugh, but he has not yet productively explored the relation between a theology of hope and a theology of play.

A volume of critical reviews of the Theology of Hope has already been published in Germany (Diskussion über die "Theologie der Hoffnung," edited by W. D. Marsch). A similar collection of essays by American theologians will appear soon. The discussion about hope and history which Moltmann's work has helped to launch may well be the most exciting and fruitful in theological study today.

Daniel L. Migliore
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey