Jürgen Moltmann

Life

Moltmann was born on April 8, 1926, in Hamburg, Germany. He grew up in a nonreligious family and reportedly first intended to study mathematics and physics. In 1943, during World War II, he was drafted into the German air force at the age of seventeen. He was later taken prisoner by the Allies and held in prisoner-of-war camps in Britain, including one in Scotland. While in captivity, he was given a New Testament and Psalms by an American army chaplain. He later recalled that he came to faith after identifying deeply with the passage in which Jesus on the cross cries out that he has been forsaken by God (Mark 15:34).

After returning to Germany in 1948, he studied theology at the University of Göttingen and received his doctorate in 1952 under Otto Weber. After several years as a pastor, he began teaching the history of doctrine at the Wuppertal Theological Seminary (Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal) in 1958. He became a professor at the University of Bonn in 1963, and from 1967 until his retirement in 1994 he was professor of systematic theology at the University of Tübingen. From 1983 to 1993 he also served as distinguished visiting professor at the Candler School of Theology of Emory University in the United States. His wife, Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, was a feminist theologian who influenced his theology; she died in 2016. Moltmann died in Tübingen on June 3, 2024, at the age of 98.

Ministry and Work

In Theology of Hope (1964), Moltmann treated eschatology (the doctrine of the end and consummation of the world) not as a topic appended to the end of theology but as the starting point of theology as a whole. He argued that the promise and hope grounded in the resurrection move the church to transform the unjust realities of the present. The book is known to reflect the influence of the philosopher Ernst Bloch's philosophy of hope.

In The Crucified God (1972), he interpreted the cross as an event in which God himself participates in suffering, and he explained it as an event within the life of the triune God. In developing his doctrine of the Trinity, he sought to move beyond the framework of the Western church and to draw on the theological tradition of the Eastern Church as well. Over some sixty years he wrote more than forty books, and in 2000 he received the Grawemeyer Award in Religion.

His theology is regarded as having inspired political theology and Latin American liberation theology. He was also active in the ecumenical movement, serving for many years as a member of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches (WCC), and he took part in editing the Catholic theological journal Concilium. Theologians who studied under him include Miroslav Volf and Michael Welker.

Influence on the Korean Church

Moltmann visited Korea on several occasions and trained many Korean students at Tübingen. He received honorary doctorates in theology from Seoul Theological University and Hanshin University. In 2014, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Theology of Hope, he gave a special lecture at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary. His major works have been translated into Korean and widely read in seminaries, and after his death Korean church media and theologians published a series of tributes.

Assessment

The World Council of Churches described him as the most widely read Christian theologian of the postwar era. He is commonly ranked with Wolfhart Pannenberg and Eberhard Jüngel as one of the leading systematic theologians of late twentieth-century German Protestantism. Ecumenical and progressive theologians have praised his theology for its attention to those who suffer and to the created world and for its emphasis on hope. On the other hand, criticism has reportedly come from conservative Reformed and evangelical circles. These critics take issue with his claim that God suffers, which they see as conflicting with the traditional doctrine of divine impassibility, and with a universalist tendency that holds that all things will ultimately be restored.