To reprint a book after twenty-five years and to send it out into the world again with a new preface is a risky affair. Books too have their own time. But some books have a destiny of their own as well, for they go their own way. This is what happened to me with Theology of Hope. I published it in 1964, and in 1967 it appeared in English. But after that it slipped away from me and acquired a history of its own, a history that I had not intended and could never have predicted and that has since been given back to me in many different forms. I am its author, that is true; I acknowledge and stand by everything I wrote. But the history of the impact made by the Theology of Hope is a different matter. There I am really one person among others, someone who has been affected by the book’s impact, and in this context I am perhaps the book’s first reader rather than its author. Let me talk a little about the way this theology came into being and the road it took.
The Theology of Hope grew out of discussions carried on between 1958 and 1964 among the editors of the periodical Evangelische Theologie. At that time we were caught up in the controversy between Gerhard von Rad’s theology of the Old Testament and Bultmann’s theology of the New. At issue was the way we understand history. Is reality experienced as history in the context—or against the horizon—of God’s promises, which awaken human hopes? Or is history based on the historical nature of personal human existence? It was a highly specialized theological discussion. But what it really concerned was nothing less than how to get beyond the general existentialism of the post-war era and how to acquire future perspectives for building a more just, more peaceable and more humane world. Hope took the place of apathy. Prometheus replaced Sisyphus. The exodus out of slavery into freedom was rediscovered. The expectant creativity of the kingdom of God again gave faith in Christ a real chance for the future. What I wrote then for those internal theological discussions was initially no more than a limited theological contribution. But for myself the different theological threads came to be woven into the broader pattern of a whole tapestry: the Old Testament theology of the promises, New Testament eschatology, the theology of Christianity’s apostolate and the revolutionary ethic that aims to transform the world until it becomes recognizably God’s world. ‘Iron in anaemic Christian blood’, wrote Der Spiegel in 1967 about Theology of Hope.
I found important categories for the pattern of this tapestry in the messianic philosophy of the neo-Marxist Ernst Bloch. I discovered his Prinzip Hoffnung (Principle of Hope) in 1960 and read the East German edition while I was on holiday in Switzerland. So engrossed was I in the book that the beauty of the Swiss mountains passed me by unnoticed. Why has Christian theology allowed hope to escape it, when this is its very own, special theme? That was my first impression. And then: What has happened to the early Christian spirit of active hope today? That was my first question. I did not imitate Bloch’s philosophy of hope. Nor did I ‘baptize’ it, as Karl Barth suspiciously conjectured. I simply built a theology of hope on the foundation of what I saw as the presupposition of the theology of Christianity and Judaism. For Ernst Bloch, atheism was the presupposition of active hope; for Jean-Paul Sartre, atheism was the presupposition of human freedom. But for me, the God of promise and exodus, the God who has raised Christ and who lets the power of the resurrection dwell in us, is the ground for active and for passive hope. The atheism that wants to free men and women from superstition and idolatry and the Christianity that wants to lead them out of inward and outward slavery into the liberty of the coming kingdom of God—these two do not have to be antagonists. They can also work together. Which of them will prove to be stronger in the long run is something we may confidently leave to the future.
In 1965 the Theology of Hope evidently, though unintentionally, met its kairos. The subject was in the air, so to speak. In the Second Vatican Council the Roman Catholic Church was just opening itself to questions of the modern world. In the United States the civil rights movement was forging ahead. In Eastern Europe we saw the beginning of the Marxist reform movement that people called ‘socialism with a human face’. In Latin America the Cuban revolution roused the hopes of ordinary people and intellectuals alike. In West Germany we overcame the stagnation of the post-war period (‘no experiments!’) with the will for ‘more democracy’, better ‘social justice’ and ‘the fight against nuclear death’. The 1960s were truly years of hope, a new beginning and a turn to the future. When Theology of Hope was published by Harper & Row in New York in 1967, the New York Times wrote on its front page for March 18: ‘God is Dead Doctrine Losing Ground to “Theology of Hope” ’.
Of course many hopes of the sixties were bitterly disappointed. In 1968 the tanks of the Warsaw Pact mowed down socialism with a human face in Czechoslovakia. The Vietnam War brought the United States into a tragic conflict with itself. The world-wide economic crisis of 1972 made it clear to all of us that we are not after all living in a world of boundless opportunities, but that we have to content ourselves with this earth and its limited resources. Hope in the world of unrestricted future possibilities was replaced by resistance against the real destructions of our earth. For all the people who clung to hope then, today is a time of undreamt-of happiness, as they see their hope vindicated, twenty years after the disappointments of 1968. The non-violent, peaceful and even cheerful revolution in Eastern Europe and East Germany—cheerful in spite of all the suffering and fears—is for me an unexpected though always hoped-for endorsement of the ‘theology of hope’.
The impact of Theology of Hope in other countries goes beyond any direct influence of mine. ‘Hope’ flowed back to me from the countries of the Third World in continually new and fascinating forms—in Gustavo Gutierrez’s ‘theology of liberation’, in James Cone’s black theology, in Ahn Byuun-Mu’s Minjung theology, from the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and from black South Africa. ‘Hope in action’ was translated into many different political and cultural contexts and bore fruit contextually. I can only think that it was by bringing together eschatological redemption and historical liberation in a single coherent perspective of the future that the book could make the impact that it did.
The doctrine of creation in relation to the philosophy of nature and to the sciences was not yet explored in Theology of Hope. Apart from a comment on the need for a cosmic eschatology, little that has an ecological bearing appears here. At that time I was thinking about the ‘historicization of the cosmos’ in apocalyptic eschatology. I wanted to build up the doctrine of creation from the new creation of heaven and earth (from Revelation 21) not, as is usual, from creation-in-the-beginning (that is, in the light of Genesis 1). The ecological crisis of 1964 had not yet penetrated my awareness. At that time we were more terrorized by the horrors of human history and fascinated by their potentialities. Hope in the field of human history was the theme; we were not yet able to formulate hope in the field of nature. It was not until 1985 that I published a theology of creation, which had been something I needed to develop ever since 1964.
With Theology of Hope I evolved a theological method, though more by chance than intention. I tried to see the whole of theology in a single focus. This was the method I used in writing the books that followed: The Crucified God in 1972 and The Church in the Power of the Spirit in 1975. To draw theology together to a single point like this, illuminating it from a single focus, of course leads to one-sidedness. But the person who is caught up in a discussion, who wants to speak to a particular situation, cannot be complete and harmoniously balanced. In standing up for one’s own concern one must over-emphasize, putting one’s own viewpoint over against others, if need be polemically. Every theology, being earthly and part of history, is related both to its substance and to its context. It is only in heaven that we may expect a state of tranquillity and completion, because then we shall no longer have to ‘will’ anything more, but shall simply be able to enjoy God and one another. But here on earth and in the midst of the conflict about the righteousness and justice of God, no theology can escape a degree of passionate extremism. The older and the more self-critical one becomes, the more one values the ruthless radicalism of one’s own beginnings. ‘Do not despise the dreams of your youth’, says someone in one of Schiller’s plays. And as I write the words I am again heart and soul in the visions of Theology of Hope, twenty-five years ago.
Jürgen Moltmann
Tübingen, Germany
April 1990
F. Herzog, ed., The Future of Hope. Theology as Eschatology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970)
W. Capps, ed., The Future of Hope (Philadelphia: Fortess Press, 1970)
M. D. Meeks, Origins of the Theology of Hope (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974)
C. Morse, The Logic of Promise in Moltmann’s Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979)
R. Bauckham, Moltmann. Messianic Theology in the Making (London: Marshall Pickering, 1987)
A. J. Conyers, God, Hope and History. Jürgen Moltmann and the Christian Concept of History (Macon, GA: Mercer Univ. Press, 1988).