From its English publication in 1973, Jrgen Moltmanns The Crucified God garnered much attention, and it has become one of the seminal texts of twentieth-century theology. Following up on his groundbreaking Theology of Hope, The Crucified God established the cross as the foundation for Christian hope. Moltmanns dramatic innovation was to see the cross not as a problem of theodicy but instead as an act of ultimate solidarity between God and humanity. In this, he drew on liberation theology, and he was among the first to bring third-world theologies into a first-world context.
Moltmann proposes that suffering is not a problem to be solved but instead that suffering is an aspect of Gods very being: God is love, and love invariably involves suffering. In this view, the crucifixion of Jesus is an event that affects the entirety of the Trinity, showing that The Crucified God is more than an arresting titleit is a theological breakthrough.
Jrgen Moltmann formulates necessary questions about the significance of Jesus the Christ for persons today. He offers a compelling portrait of the earthly Jesus as the divine brother in our distress and suffering and points to the risen Christ as the warrant for the future in which God will restore everything . . . and gather everything into his kingdom. Urging that acknowledgment of Christ and discipleship are two sides of the same coin, Moltmann contends that the question of Jesus Christ for today is not just an intellectual one. Moltmann takes fresh approaches to a number of crucial topics: Jesus and the kingdom of God, the passion of Christ and the pain of God, Jesus as brother of the tortured, and the resurrection of Christ as hope for the world, the cosmic Christ, Jesus in Jewish-Christian dialogue, the future of God, and others.
The following efforts bear the title Theology of Hope, not because they set out once again to present eschatology as a separate doctrine and to compete with the well known textbooks. Rather, their aim is to show how theology can set out from hope and begin to consider its theme in an eschatological light. For this reason they inquire into the ground of the hope of Christian faith and into the responsible exercise of this hope in thought and action in the world today. The various critical discussions should not be understood as rejections and condemnations. They are necessary conversations on a common subject which is so rich that it demands continual new approaches.
A creative rethinking of the Trinity in Light of human suffering. . . In the suffering of Christ we see that we have a God who suffers with us out of a faithful love toward us.
The Christian Century
Here is a theology that challenges the restrictive suppositions of our time, inviting not only the theological establishment but also church leaders and teachers everywhere to assess and perhaps re-think their own theologies in light of this remarkable study.
The Christian Ministry
Jrgen Moltmann's life and work have marked the history of theology after the Second World War in Europe and North America like no other. He is the most widely read, quoted, and translated theologian of our time. Now, after celebrating his eightieth birthday, he looks back on a life engaged in and forging a Christian response to the tumult and opportunities of our age. In his autobiography Moltmann tells his engaging and searching life story, from his Hamburg youth in an unconventional parental home up to the incompleteness of the present moment. Yet his narrative also sheds light on the creative arc of Moltmann's work, on the journey of his own theological development from its beginnings after World War II through the beginnings of political theology and, most phenomenally, the advent of the theology of hope.
A wide-ranging document alert to the deeper currents of his time and ours, Moltmann's work is also an engrossing reconsideration of a life full of intense experience and new beginnings.
Winner of Grawemeyer AwardIn this remarkable and timely work in many ways the culmination of his systematic theology world-renowned theologian Jurgen Moltmann stands Christian eschatology on its head. Moltmann rejects the traditional approach, which focuses on the End, an apocalyptic finale, as a kind of Christian search for the final solution. He centers instead on hope and God's promise of new creation for all things. Christian eschatology, he says, is the remembered hope of the raising of the crucified Christ, so it talks about beginning afresh in the deadly end.Yet Moltmann's novel framework, deeply informed by Jewish and messianic thought, also fosters rich and creative insights into the perennially nettling questions of eschatology: Are there eternal life and personal identity after death? How is one to think of heaven, hell, and purgatory? What are the historical and cosmological dimensions of Christian hope? What are its social and political implications.
In a heartbreakingly fragile and fragment world, Moltmann's comprehensive eschatology surveys the Christian vista, bravely envisioning our horizons of expectation for personal, social, even cosmic transformation in God.
In this deeply personal and daring meditation, eminent theologian Jürgen Moltmann challenges many closely held beliefs about the experience of dying, the nature of death, and the hope of eternal life. Moving deftly between biblical, theological, and existential domains, Moltmann argues that while we know intimately the experience of dying--both our loved ones' dying and, ultimately, our own--death itself is a mystery. Are those who have died in fact dead? If the dead are alive, how or in what respect? When the dead awaken to eternal life, who wakes? Moltmann's interrogations yield surprising and beautiful fruits. The living soul that awakens to eternal life is not a ghost in a machine, but the Lebensgestalt, the shape and story of a life, its human and divine contexts, its whole. Drawing on themes from his oeuvre's entire arc, Resurrected to Eternal Life testifies to the inner unity of Moltmann's theology: the cross, the Spirit, the kingdom, the end, and the hope that makes the end present here and now. Seasoned readers of Moltmann will find in these pages a capstone of a lifetime of theological exploration, while those new to his complex thought will find a concise and elegant entry point into his voluminous work.
In this masterful analysis of the religious and political dilemmas at the end of the modern age, world-renowned theologian Jrgen Moltmann assays the vaulting dreams and colossal failures of our time. He asks how we came to this point, and he argues strenuously for Christian discipleship and public theology that take sides. In both critical and creative ways he advances the specific relevance of Christian messianic hope to today's thorniest political, economic, and ecological questionsincluding human rights, environmental rights, globalization, market capitalism, fundamentalisms, and Jewish-Christian relationsand the deeper values contested therein.
In a world reeling between utopia and disaster, Moltmann here passionately and provacatively shows how Christian discipleship, through engagement and solidarity, can blaze a redemptive path.
'In my end is my beginning, '' wrote T. S. Eliot, and Jrgen Moltmann's new book is a powerful testament to personal hope in chaotic, even catastrophic times.
As Moltmann's award-winning volume The Coming of God laid out the systematic framework of eschatology (the doctrine of the ''last things''), so here he explores the personal meaning of that fundamental affirmation for Christians. Debunking the classic images of Christian apocalyptic scenarios, the final struggle between God and Satan, Christ and the AntichristArmageddonMoltmann instead shows that Christian expectation of the future has nothing to do with these but everything to do with new beginnings and a horizon of hope. Three parts explore three particular beginnings: birth (childhood and youth), rebirth (failures and defeats), and resurrection (death, judgment, afterlife).
This brief volume promises to be one of Moltmann's most personal and compelling books.
This book, which in my opinion is Moltmann's best, can be recommended on the basis that it contains challenging and creative insights that can be used by the discriminating reader in the service of church renewal...Moltmann represents the theology of liberation at its best, and those who wish to know more about this theology would do well to study this creative and searching theologian.
--Donald G. Bloesch
Christianity Today
Jrgen Moltmann's life and work have marked the history of theology after the Second World War in Europe and North America like no other. He is the most widely read, quoted, and translated theologian of our time. His systematic work thrives on the cutting edge of Christian theology in the twenty-first century, challenging and stimulating a whole generation of theologians to work at theology in different and more comprehensive ways. Margaret Kohl, a translator of many of Moltmann's volumes, has chosen representative samples of Moltmann's theological writings from eight of the volumes published by Fortress Press and has written brief prefaces to each of the selections. Moltmann scholar Richard Bauckham provides an extended Introduction.
Comprised of four lectures and two sermons, Passion for God provides a unique look into the theological perspectives of renowned theologians Jurgen Moltmann and Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, each a preeminent figure in the proliferation of contemporary theology in the twentieth century.