Katie Snipes Lancaster
Monday, July 8, 2024
Jürgen Moltmann

A few weeks ago the New York Times wrote a tribute to Jürgen Moltmann with this title, “Jürgen Moltmann, Theologian Who Confronted Auschwitz, Is Dead at 98.”1  That four word eulogy speaks volumes. As a German soldier he came with the burden of a unique perspective. As someone who grew up without religion his rise to theological renown made the raw details of his story critical to understanding him. As a teenager recruited to enlist he served as a German Air Force auxiliary. He served in Hamburg during major allied bombardments. A friend died instantly while they were shoulder to shoulder in July of 1943 in a “storm of fire” in which forty thousand people died. That harrowing night was followed by military service in the German Army and three years as a prisoner of war.

Moltmann tells the story best in his own words, “I came from a secular Hamburg family of teachers…. For me religion and theology were totally remote. I wanted to study mathematics and physics. Max Planck and Albert Einstein were the secret heroes of my youth. Goethe’s poems and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra gave form to my feelings and the stirring awake of my mind. But in that catastrophic night, for the first time in my life I cried out to God ‘God, where are you?’ That was my question in the face of death…and then came the other question, the one which has haunted me all my life and ever since ‘why am I still alive and not dead like the rest?’”2 Many months into being a prisoner of war he was given a bible, which he began to read from Genesis to Revelation. He came to Psalm 39, which echoed his own laments, and later read Mark’s Gospel, in which Jesus cries out from the cross “My God, my God why have you forsaken me.” From those two passages, a Psalm of Lament, and Christ’s groaning prayer of abandonment, a kinship arose, a common language and connection to the divine who knows and holds the impossibility of suffering. In prison he took courses in religion and Bible, and upon release went on to obtain a doctorate in theology at University of Göttingen. Life changes course in a matter of minutes it seems, and then suddenly over the span of decades. He saw photos of the concentration camps while still a German POW in England and spent his life unpacking the horrors therein. He served as a pastor, then professor, publishing Theology of Hope in 1969 and continuing to publish for the next five decades, always working out who God is for us on this side of Auschwitz.

You can hear that wartime prayer on the verge of death “God, where are you?” being worked out in every sentence he writes. He suggests that praying in times of struggle are about inviting God’s creative love here and now, instead of asking God to fairy us away to some other realm of perfection explaining “We don’t pray ‘Let us come into your kingdom’ either. We pray ‘Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.’ The petition for the coming of the divine Spirit to us frail earthly people implies a great unbroken affirmation of life.”3

Later in a 2012 interview, he urges us to keep awake to the presence of God in times of trouble, praying with eyes wide open, watching for the shift and sweep of the spirit, saying “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.”4

He challenges us. He pushes us. He helps us to recognize that looking at the world with the lens of Christ’s love means to always want the world to be more kingdom-shaped. He says “Faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it.”

Let us pray with Jürgen Moltmann

God of Gethsemane and Garden
Give us faith and form us in hope
Let us be impatient to undo oppression
and unquieted by suffering.
Let us keep awake. Let us
open our eyes to what is happening,
dangers and opportunities for your
kingdom come. Divine Spirit, come
to us frail and earthly people and
breathe into us a great, unbroken
affirmation of life. Amen.

1 Risen, Clay. "Jürgen Moltmann, Theologian Who Confronted Auschwitz, Is Dead at 98." New York Times, June 8, 2024.

2 Moltmann, Jürgen. In the End the Beginning: The Life of Hope. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013, 33.

3 Moltmann, Jürgen. The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.

4 Jürgen Moltmann, "Jürgen Moltmann," interview by High Profiles, High Profiles, accessed June 29, 2024, https://highprofiles.info/interview/jurgen-moltmann/.