The Emergent Moltmann

Sounds a little like comic book hero, doesn’t it? But, no, I‘m referring to the featured dialogue partner of the recent 2009 Emergent Theological Conversation, Jürgen Moltmann, who, from my impressions of the event, appears to be gaining a significant audience within that ever-so-hard to pin down movement called the Emerging Church.

This is an exciting development because as influential as Moltmann has been for a whole host of academic theologians and church professionals, I have the vague sense that he still hasn’t gotten his due, even from that segment of the church catholic you might expect to be reading him. I believe for the previous generation of clergy The Crucified God, at least, was standard reading. But nobody ever assigned me a Moltmann text in the Lutheran (ELCA) seminary I graduated from a few years ago, and when I’ve testified among my mainline peers to the impact he’s had on my own faith and ministry, more often than not I feel like I’ve just revealed some exotic hobby.

I have some theories as to how so many who sit in the liberal tradition of the North American church have remained immune to Molmann’s genius:

1. He gets dismissed up front as an “old white German guy,” and we have simply heard from too many of those. This is always most sad when those who consider themselves champions of the full humanity of the marginalized evidence a blind spot where it is okay to lump those God has made unique into a monolithic category. Moltmann’s work exudes gratitude for the new horizons opened to him by feminist and “third world” theologians; and without pretense of objectivity consistently reflects and critically integrates what he has seen and heard. Some complain that he is dry like all German theologians, but this is like saying all Americans are fat without ever coming to America. Moltmann is one of the most passionate Christian theologians I have encountered, and too many have simply not allowed themselves the chance to be surprised.

2. His entire corpus is relentlessly Trinitarian and thoroughly eschatological. For too many mainline clergy their chief concern with the Trinity is how to cope with the masculinity of the words “Father” and “Son”; beyond that, the liberal tradition of consigning the Trinity to an appendix is alive and well. As for eschatology, the coming of God does not appear to animate the preaching of many mainline clergy. As a program or a Way, the kingdom is fine; but as the actual future of Creation won in the Resurrection of Jesus that is breaking in on us whether we anticipate it or not—this has not caught on. Many clergy are as prejudiced against anything End Times related as their people and simply haven’t dug deeply enough into the Theology of Hope to realize how utterly different it is from Left Behind fantasy.

3. Moltmann’s major works are probably too difficult for the vast majority of laypeople (though some of the shorter ones like Jesus Christ for Today’s World, In the End—the Beginning, etc. are more accessible). Ideally, he could bypass preachers whose speech is confined to activism and/or optimism and get straight into the hands and heads of everyday Christians, but the truth is he needs interpreters.

That some of the brighter lights of the Emerging Church movement are taking a serious interest in Moltmann—and promoting his ideas throughout their every-believer-a-theologian style movement—suggests that maybe the great theologian has at last found some truly fertile soil for his ideas. Biographically speaking, many emergents are disaffected, wounded evangelicals; and beyond his smarts, Moltmann has both the passion and the personal conversion narrative (indeed one of the most moving I have heard) that evangelicals, including estranged ones, relate to. He cares about both truth and context. He weds theology and praxis. He has a unique way of sounding orthodox and progressive at the same time. All of these qualities will appeal to those in the emerging church who are seeking to transcend the tired-out mainline/evangelical split in North American Christianity.

Perhaps Moltmann was just ahead of his time. Nothing would be more fitting.

Here are some excellent nuggets from the 2009 Conversation that may or may not be found in print:

--“All theologies must have an open end to acknowledge the parousia of Christ, the Coming of God.”
--“The Reformed is my tradition and the ecumenical is my future.”
--“God is not in control of everything; God is carrying and bearing everything.”
--“I read the Bible with the presupposition that I will meet the divine Word in human words.”
--“Postmodernism is another form of modernism. There are universal problems we face that must be dealt with together, not with a million different narratives.”
--“Pelagius is the saint of American Christians.”
--“Atheism and theism are both outside the Trinity.”
--“In Christianity we have two crosses, one is the cross of Golgotha; the other is a dream cross of Constantine: ‘In this sign you will win.’”
--“Forgiven sinners always have a short memory, but the victims of sin have a long memory, and so many of us need the victims to tell us who we really are.”
--“I don’t want to go to heaven. The angels make their home in heaven. I want to be here on earth where justice dwells and God has made his home.”
--“The opposite of poverty is not property; it is community.”
--On controversy over homosexuality: “I don’t know why this is more important to the churches than something like war and peace.”
--“In the Lord’s Table, we do not celebrate our theories of the Lord’s presence; we celebrate the Lord’s presence. We can discuss our theories after we have eaten and drunk.”