High Profile
Look forward!
Interview by Simon Jenkins
With such groundbreaking books as Theology of Hope
and The Crucified God,
Professor Jürgen Moltmann has changed profoundly
the way Christians think about both this world and the next. Third
Way found him at home in Tübingen.
![HP1.jpg]()
You had an unusual childhood in that you grew up in a
settlement outside Hamburg where your parents had gone to live in
the countryside. How did that shape you?
This was part of a movement in Germany before and after World War
1, to return to a simple and healthy life and raise one’s own
vegetables, don’t smoke, don’t drink alcohol. This was my parents’
idea, it was not my idea!
There was a lot of gardening involved, I believe…
Yes. Instead of going to church on Sunday, we had to
labour in the garden. My sister and I were washed by my mother on
Saturday evening and on Sunday morning we were dirty again!
And there was no religion in your lives, was there?
There was no church in this suburb of Hamburg – only
after World War 2 a church was built there – and we were a secular
family. My grandfather was a grand master of the Freemasons in
Hamburg and very critical of religion and the church. At Christmas,
my father said, we celebrated not the birth of the Saviour but the
holiness of family: father, mother and the first child in the
manger. Well, that was more or less all I learnt of religion in my
youth.
I did have confirmation class and was confirmed – my parents did
not leave the church, they just did not go to church. But it was a
very strange confirmation class with a pastor who proved to us that
Jesus was Aryan and not a Jew because he came from the Phoenicians,
the [seafaring] people from the north. It was complete
nonsense.
Do you think that, later in life, it made you an
unlikely theologian that you had grown up outside the church?
No, I was accepted as a member of the church and as a
pastor – that was no problem. But I was always a brother of
atheists. When I was a pastor in Bremen, I often met with Social
Democratic leaders who were atheists and I liked them because after
the second glass of wine they always talked about God – in contrast
to Heinrich Böll, the famous Catholic poet from [Cologne], who
said: ‘I don’t like atheists. They always talk about God’! I felt
like a comrade of those who had left the church for various
reasons, although I did not go along with their protests against
God.
It was after World War 2 when we had this type of ‘protest’
atheism. Because of the misery, many people [objected to] the
traditional image of the loving and caring God and therefore they
left the church as a protest – but this protest bound them to God!
Today, we have people who have just forgotten about the church and
have discovered that they can live a happy life without God or
religion. It’s more an atheism of banality. And so the church
should not only bring consolation to this society but stir it up,
because (as a character in an Ingmar Bergman movie once said)
‘without God everything would be OK, but with God nothing is’ –
because God gives us a conscience about what we do and what we let
happen.
You’ve said that only a Christian could be a good
atheist.
Well, I had an exchange with [the Marxist philosopher]
Ernst Bloch, who said: ‘Only an atheist can be a good Christian,
because he does not believe in other gods.’ I responded: ‘Only a
Christian can be a good atheist, because he doesn’t believe in
other gods.’ And he put that in his book on atheism in
Christianity (and Christianity in atheism).1
Bloch was always a very religious person. When I first met him, I
asked him: ‘In your lecture, you spoke in religious terms. Are you
not an atheist?’ And he answered: ‘I’m an atheist for God’s sake.’
And that, only a Jew can say.
But it troubled you that he said that, didn’t it? You say
in your autobiography2 that you lay awake thinking about it. It
wasn’t a joke?
No, no, it was from the depths of his heart.
![HP2.jpg]()
I became a theologian for God’s sake, and he spoke about
atheism ‘for God’s sake’ – to follow no false gods in politics and
economics and other areas of life. If you take the Second
Commandment seriously, you should have no images of God but also no
concepts of God, because he is not far away that we must represent
him by images or even rational concepts of him. If my wife is
travelling I look at a picture of her, but if she is present I
don’t need pictures. And so in the full presence of God, if you
feel that he is present, you don’t need pictures, or concepts of
whether he is almighty or good or whatever. He is more present than
you are. Or, as Augustine said: God is more in me than I am
myself.
As Meister Eckhart said: If you enter into the way to God, you
must leave all images of the way to God behind and be happy in his
presence.
When you were 17, you have said, you cried out to God
for the first time. Can you tell us about that occasion?
This was a terrible experience. We were drafted when I
was 16 and in 1943 my whole class at school was put in the
anti-aircraft batteries in Hamburg, and in the last week of July
we experienced the destruction of the city by the Royal Air Force.
This was given the codename Operation Gomorrah by the British.3
I was in the centre of Hamburg with my battery and as thousands of
people died in the firestorm around me I cried out to God for the
first time: Where are you?
You emphasise in your autobiography that you asked not
‘Why does God allow this to happen?’ but ‘My God, where are you?’
What is the distinction?
Well, the first question is asking for an explanation of
the evil situation you are in; the second question asks how to get
out of it. I don’t want it explained why I am in this misery, I
want to be liberated from it, and therefore I cry to God: ‘Where
are you? Save me!’
If you as a pastor visit a dying person and he asks you why he is
dying and you explain his situation, he will have you thrown out
of the room. The question of theodicy is, to my mind, one asked
mostly by the onlookers, not by those who are in a hopeless
situation.
Does the question of theodicy not interest you?
No, it is only asking why there is evil if God is
almighty and good. It doesn’t ask about God’s other attributes –
for example, love, compassion – only power and goodness. And it is
a very speculative question, a question about the God of Plato and
Aristotle. It is not a biblical question, or a personal
question.
Do you think that is the God that atheists today are
rejecting? That traditional God Almighty, rather than the God of
the Trinity, or the God of the Bible…
If God is almighty, he has not only power over everything
else in the world but also power over himself. So, he is free. A
God who has everything under control is a God who is not free in
himself. If he is free in himself, he can [limit] his power [in
order] to let others be – and be free. So, the freedom of God is
another attribute that is not included in the question of
theodicy.
And the picture of God in Israel’s experience of the Exodus is not
that he is more powerful than the Egyptians but that he is a
carrying God, ein tragender Gott, all the time. He carries
his people on his shoulders just as a man carries his son or a
woman carries her baby in her arms. These are the more
experience-related pictures of God in the poetry of the Bible.
![HP3.jpg]()
When you were writing The Crucified God [1972],4
a key text for you was Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the
cross.
How strong, do you think, are the links between your
theology and your own experience?
Certainly, this is the foundation of that book – my experience
of the destruction of Hamburg, in the prison camps… By the end of
the war, all of Germany’s cities had been destroyed and millions
had been driven out of East Prussia and Silesia, so Germany was no
fatherland, no home, any more. The only news I got from home was in
October ’45, that my family were alive but our house was half
destroyed by a bomb and my father was on a French prison
ship.
You must have felt an immense sense of loss.
Yes, and then this feeling of guilt and shame because of
the Nazi dictatorship which took us into this war, and the killing
of Jews… So, it came from all sides.
The feeling of forsakenness came to me first, I think, with the
experience of being a prisoner of war in Belgium, living behind
barbed wire with no expectation of freedom. Everything broke down,
even my inner equilibrium, which had been maintained by the poems
of Goethe and Schiller. And then in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire we were
working on the roads and it was always raining. I remember one
evening we were taken down to the camp in big trucks and everybody
was sitting there with their heads between their knees and it was
a picture of real forsakenness. And then I discovered Psalm 39 and
the Gospel of Mark, with the death cry of Jesus, and I felt that
there is one who understands me, and from my own feeling of
forsakenness I understood his forsakenness between Gethsemane and
Golgotha. And so I came to a belief in Christ. It’s only for
Christ’s sake that I believe in God, not the other way
round.
And yet a lot of other people in such circumstances lost
their faith, or found faith impossible. Some people said: There can
be no God after Auschwitz.
In whom can we believe after Auschwitz if not God?
Also, Rabbi Emil Fackenheim made a good argument: If we abandoned
our faith in God after Auschwitz, we would give Hitler a posthumous
victory.
And as long as we know that the ‘Sh’ma Yisrael’ and the ‘Our
Father’ prayers were prayed in Auschwitz, we must not give up our
faith in God.
What, in honour of the people who said those
prayers?
Of course.
In your conversation with atheists after the war, they
must have said to you: ‘There cannot be a God or why would he have
allowed this to happen?’ Were you not then obliged to do
theodicy?
No. I am convinced that God is with those who suffer
violence and injustice and he is on their side. He is not the
general director of the theatre, he is in the play.
In your new book, Ethics of Hope,5 you say that
people
can be awakened from a dark night of the soul and again experience
an unconditional love for life. Is that what happened to you after
the war?
Well, three things I still remember. One was the cherry
tree blossoming in Belgium in May ’45, which gave me an
overwhelming feeling for life after the darkness and coldness of
the prison camp.
And then the humanity of the Scottish workers and their families,
who were amazing. They felt solidarity with us because they felt
they, too, were victims of violence and injustice from their own
government, in 1926 when Churchill [broke] the General Strike [and
sent them back] down the mines.
And then there was the Bible I received from a chaplain. These
three things convinced me to love life again.
And it was Mark’s Gospel in particular that affected you,
rather than Luke or John. Why Mark? Because he makes Christ more
immediate and more human?
Yes. Christ is not as divine as he is in the Gospel of
John, where you always feel a distance between you and this holy
person. In Mark’s Gospel, to put it in simple terms, he is more
your brother.
You were finally released and repatriated in 1948…
I think they had only one ship to take prisoners home to
Germany, and those who had been captured first, at El Alamein, were
sent home first. I was one of the last to be captured, so I was one
of the last to be sent home.
It was just a logistical problem?
This is a secret wisdom of God which I don’t know; but I
wish the House of Lords had listened to Bishop Bell of Chichester,
a friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was always saying, ‘Send the
prisoners home!’
Your book Theology of Hope6 made a big impact when it came
out in English in the late Sixties. The world was in turmoil around
that time, with student riots in Europe and assassinations in the
United States…
There was [Vatican II], ‘socialism with a human face’ [in
Czechoslovakia], the liberation fronts in Latin America after the
Cuban revolution – everything was in movement, and young
Christians, and young theologians, were looking for a place in the
action, because God must be involved in it.
So, you suggested a way to be involved?
My original motivation was to get beyond the
[dichotomy] between Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann in Germany.
Barth had come up with a theology from above down to earth and
Bultmann one from the earth, from below, to above. Wolfhart
Pannenberg and I were inspired by Gerhard von Rad’s [Old
Testament Theology7] to think instead of the God of history.
Pannenberg had more of a metaphysics of world history, and I
[focused] more on the growing promise of Israel from the beginning
and, all of a sudden, the coming of the Messiah – and not only the
Cross and the Resurrection but the Parousia and the new creation
of everything.
I was more on the new left of German thinking and so I was
studying with my students Karl Marx’s early writings, which
understand religion not only as the opium of the people but as
der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, the sigh of the
oppressed creature. And that’s Romans 8! I can agree with him that
that suffering and sighing are part of religion. On the other hand,
religion is always also a celebration of life, but this festive
side of religion was overlooked by Marx.
How does Theology of Hope apply to our current
economic crisis and the kind of protests we are seeing now, such as
the Occupy movement? Is its message still the same?
I think it is relevant more to the situation of
two-thirds of humankind. The Occupy movement is a bourgeois youth
movement but where we are really suffering is in Africa and Asia –
if you want to learn the power of hope, go to these miserable
quarters of humankind. The rich don’t have hope, they have only
anxiety because they have something to lose; but those who have
nothing to lose but their chains, as Marx said once, have real hope
in an alternative future.
Today, I think we need a movement to liberate nature from
suffering and violence and injustice. I think humankind will learn
either through insight or through catastrophe, and I think most of
the people in the First World are waiting for the next catastrophe.
At the moment I am a little proud of Germany, which has given up
atomic power because of Fukushima – but that is another
story…
You say that hope ‘alienates people from their native
land, their friendships and their homes. It brings us into
contradiction with the existing present.’ Do you think Christians
are called to be restless in that way?
Well, Abraham and Sarah were the first who believed in
God, and belief in God means leaving your home and
so on behind and searching for the future City of God. It makes
Christians uncomfortable with the [status quo], with the growing
gulf between poor and rich in our countries, though we say we
believe in the equality of all people. I think the churches are
here not only for consolation and the religious niceties but for
justice. If you believe in an earth in which justice will dwell,
you become sensitive to the injustice around you and you protest;
and some churches are doing very well in this respect, others are
more on the side of the [status quo].
You have said that a catalyst for The Crucified
God was
the assassination of Martin Luther King. What was the impact of
his murder on your plans for your work?
Well, I’m not a great planner. I want to be
surprised!
Well, yes, Hans Küng said you zigzagged. Is that
true?
Hans Küng’s great enemy, Cardinal [Alfredo Ottaviani], had the
motto Semper idem, ‘Always the same’, but this was never my motto.
But no, I do not zigzag; I trust in the providence of God to lead
me.
In ’67 I was at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and
when Theology of Hope was mentioned on the front page of the New
York Times my students came to me and said: ‘You’ve made it!’ We
had a large ‘Theology of Hope’ conference at the university in
April ’68 and I could sense how the forward-looking spirit of
Americans was reinforced by the theology of hope. And then
someone came storming into the room and cried, ‘Martin King is
shot!’ By the end of the day there were pictures of cities burning
everywhere – the black population was enraged by the murder of the
prophet of the civil rights movement. And then Durham came under
curfew and we broke off the conference and they all rushed home as
quickly as they could.
And then I saw that the theology of hope is not the right way to
speak the gospel to Americans: they need to get a feeling of the
suffering and violence and injustice in their country. And I
promised that whenever I returned to that country I would speak
about the cross of Christ and the cross of Martin Luther King and
all the black people who had been lynched. And so I came to write
The Crucified God.
And in it you radicalise the meaning of the Cross, don’t you? You
say that not only Jesus suffered but the Father suffered, too. It
was a very bold thing to say.
I had some support from [AN] Whitehead, the founder of process
philosophy. When his only son died in a car accident at the age of
21, he said: ‘God is a fellow sufferer who understands.’ At first I
thought he was thinking of Jesus, but no, he was thinking of his
Father.
Then I discovered those pictures of the Gnadenstuhl
[Mercy Seat] where God the Father carries the crossbeam of his only
Son, and I made the analogy: If we die, we suffer the process of
dying but we do not suffer our own death, because we don’t survive
our own death; but if our child dies, we suffer the death of the
child
because we survive it. And this is a different suffering, the
suffering of the father or the mother. Christ suffers on Good
Friday and the Father suffers on Good Saturday, when the Son is
dead. I think this is quite obvious. Mark’s Gospel starts with the
baptism of Jesus and ‘You are my beloved Son,’ and so we are led
to understand that the loving Father must have suffered as a result
of the death of Jesus.
I also found that Christ suffers in solidarity with all those who
suffer violence and injustice. His cross stands among the thousands
of crosses in the Roman Empire – those who were enemies of the
Empire and its system of slavery were crucified. So, he carries the
suffering of the world on the one hand and the sins of the world on
the other. Where there are evildoers, there are victims, and Christ
suffers both vicariously for the sins of the perpetrators and in
solidarity with the victims. This is a broadening of the
significance of the Passion. Church tradition was always oriented
towards the perpetrators, but I think liberation theology,
unconsciously perhaps, prepared the way for a theology of the
victims.
I tried to convince the churches in Germany, Lutheran and
Catholic, to overcome this one-sided orientation towards sinners
and look also at victims. But the Augsburg Accord8 refers only to
the justification of sinners. Does God prefer sinners to
victims? I think he has a preference for victims. If we look in the
Psalms, it is always the victims who are justified by God.
Sinners need to confess their sin to God, but what about
victims?
The truth makes free not only sinners who confess their
sin but also victims who speak out, so they need a place where they
can speak without shame about what they have suffered. They need a
‘conversion’ to be liberated from what they have suffered so that
they can again walk with their heads held high and can forgive, to
escape the long shadows of their victimhood.
What do you turn to for consolation or inspiration? Is it music,
or art? Or do you have a favourite hymn?
Mostly watching nature, and especially the sea. I am from
Hamburg and we always spent our holidays at the seaside. I’m always
fascinated by the sea – I get mystical experiences! The music of
the sea – we call it the Brandung – is like the sound of
eternity, because it was there before human beings came and it
will be there when human beings may have vanished from the
earth.
Karl Barth famously had a portrait of Mozart in his study,
didn’t he? I think that surprised some people, because they felt
that Bach was the more serious composer.
I cannot stand Mozart longer than one hour. I’m more for
Beethoven and the tensions in his music. In Mozart, I feel there is
harmony everywhere and no conflict. But my friend Hans Küng is also
for Mozart, so at least we disagree in our preference in
music.
And a hymn? I like Easter hymns, of course. Easter is for me the
most important Christian festival.
Evagrius of Ponticus, one of the Desert Fathers,
said:
‘A theologian is someone who prays, and everyone who prays is a
theologian.’ Would you agree with that?
You can’t say about God to other people what you cannot
say to God himself, and therefore prayer is at least a test of
theology – but it’s certainly more. When I pray, I see the world
sub specie aeternitatis, with the eyes of God, and so I
see it differently from other people who don’t have this
perspective. I see as wrong things they call ‘good’ and so
on.
So, prayer is the ground of Christian faith and theology; but the
call in the New Testament is not ‘Pray!’ but ‘Watch!’ ‘Can you not
watch with me for one hour?’ Jesus asks in the Garden of
Gethsemane. To pray means to open one’s eyes and watch what is
happening, what is coming, the dangers and the opportunities.
Normally we close our eyes when we pray, but the catacombs of
Rome show that the first Christians stood and prayed with open
hands and open eyes.
So, we must learn this new type of praying with open eyes. We need
a prayer of hope, an eschatological or a revolutionary prayer by
watching.
Ethics of Hope is available from the Third Way
bookshop for a special price of £20 (RRP £40). See page
13.
1 Published in English as Atheism in Christianity: The
religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom (Herder & Herder,
1972)
2 A Broad Place: An autobiography (SCM Press,
2007)
3 Operation Gomorrah was a series of air raids by the RAF
and USAAF from July 24 to August 3, 1943. Some 42,600 people died,
most of them on the night of July 27, when a firestorm producing
winds of up to 150 mph incinerated more than eight square miles of
the city.
4 The Crucified God: The cross of Christ as the
foundation and criticism of Christian theology (SCM Press,
1974)
5 Published by SCM Press on May 31, 2012
6 Theology of Hope: On the ground and the implications
of a Christian eschatology (SCM Press, 1967)
7 First published, in two volumes, in 1957 and ’67
8 The historic ‘Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of
Justification’ signed by representatives of the Lutheran World
Federation and the Roman Catholic Church on October 31, 1999
