Marginal Christianity

“For a long time one of the important questions in modern christology was the transition from 'the Jesus of history' to 'the Christ of faith'. I discussed this question in the Theology of Hope (1964; ET1967) and The Crucified God (1972; ET1974). But since then I have come to find another question more important still, because it is more 'down to earth' - more 'embodied'. This question is the path leading from the Jewish Jesus to the Christian Jesus, and the rediscovery of the Jewish Jesus in the Christian Jesus.” ( The Way of Jesus Christ, 1990, xvi) Earlier than most of the rest of us Moltmann made the (re)turn to the Jewish Jesus. The turn from the Jewish Jesus ran out of gas with the existentialist Jesus of the post-war generation. New discoveries of Second Temple Judaism and its riches opened up fresh directions for research. The so-called Third Quest for the Historical Jesus is an expression of this (re)turn to the Jewish Jesus for historica...

Theological Journal – May 11 Moltmann Monday “But the ultimate reason for our hope is not to be found at all in what we want, wish for and wait for; the ultimate reason is that we are wanted and wished for and waited for. What is it that awaits us? Does anything await us at all, or are we alone? Whenever we base our hope on trust in the divine mystery, we feel deep down in our hearts: there is someone who is waiting for you, who is hoping for you, who believes in you. We are ... waited for as the prodigal son in the parable is waited for by his father. We are accepted and received, as a mother takes her children into her arms and comforts them. God is our last hope because we are God's first love.” Hope is not wish fulfilment. We cannot define or determine what awaits us. The “mystery” we are caught up in in Christ is one that remains beyond our powers and insight to penetrate.  What we do realize is not what awaits us but that someone waits, hopes, and believes in us. A “f...

“Christ isn't merely a person. He is a road too. And the person who believes him takes the same road he took. There is no christology without christopraxis, no knowledge of Christ without the practice of Christ. We cannot grasp Christ merely with our heads or our hearts. We come to understand him through a total, all-embracing embracing practice of living; and that means discipleship. In the Reformation period, the Anabaptist Hans Denk put it by saying: 'No one is able verily to know Christ except he follow him in life.' Discipleship is the holistic knowledge of Christ, and for the people involved it has a cognitive as well as an ethical relevance: it means knowing and doing both.” ( Jesus Christ for Today's World Kindle loc. 501-508)  

“ When the fear of death leaves us, the destructive craving for life leaves us too. We can then restrict our desires and our demands to our natural requirements. The dreams of power and happiness and luxury and far-off places, which are used to create artificial wants, no longer entice us. They have become ludicrous. So we shall use only what we really need, and shall no longer be prepared to go along with the lunacy of extravagance and waste. We do not even need solemn appeals for saving and moderation; for life itself is glorious, and here joy in existence can be had for nothing. ” In Heb.2:14-15 we read: “ Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.” Richard Beck identifies death as the chief and most powerful reality motivating and shaping huma...

“There can be no theology of the incarnation which does not become a theology of the cross . As soon as you say incarnation, you say cross. God did not become man according to the measure of our conceptions of being a man. He became the kind of man we do not want to be: an outcast, accursed, crucified. Ecce homo! Behold the man! is not a statement which arises from the confirmation of our humanity and is made on the basis of ‘like is known by like’; it is a confession of faith which recognizes God’s humanity in the dehumanized Christ on the cross” ( The Crucified God, 205). “He became the kind of man we do not want to be” – there you have it in a nutshell! -Why we have the kind of Christianity we’ve had through most of Western Church history. -Why Christmas is far more important to us than Easter. -Why we cannot admit he is the measure of genuine humanity and opt either for a quasi- or even fully docetic Christologies, on the one hand, or an ethical, moral(istic) Jesus, on t...

Theological Journal – April 13 Moltmann Monday – Easter “Believing in the resurrection does not just mean assenting to a dogma and noting a historical fact. It means participating in this creative act of God’s … Resurrection is not a consoling opium, soothing us with the promise of a better world in the hereafter. It is the energy for a rebirth of this life. The hope doesn’t point to another world. It is focused on the redemption of this one.” ― Jürgen Moltmann, Jesus Christ for Today's World (Kindle loc.83 Jesus’ resurrection is a reality as or more relevant to the here and now than the then and there! That’s what Moltmann claims here. Contra Karl Marx, Christianity, based on the assurance of a hope for life with God after death in the then and there, is for Moltmann, based on that same resurrection, an energetic “steroid” for life with Jesus before death in the here and now. He is about a “Christianity Today,” not a “Christianity Tomorrow”! As Moltmann says, “The ...

“The crisis of the church in present-day society is not merely the critical choice between assimilation or retreat into the ghetto, but the crisis of its own existence as the church of the crucified Christ . . . for only by Christ is it possible to tell what is a Christian church and what is not. Whether or not Christianity, in an alienated, divided and oppressive society, itself becomes alienated, divided and an accomplice of oppression, is ultimately decided only by whether the crucified Christ is a stranger to it or the Lord who determines the form of its existence . . . As far as I am concerned, the Christian church and Christian theology become relevant to the problems of the modern world only when they reveal the 'hard core' of their identity in the crucified Christ and through it are called into question, together with the society in which they live . . . Faith, the church and theology must demonstrate what they really believe and hope about the man from Nazareth who...

  “The cross is not and cannot be loved. Yet only the crucified Christ can bring the freedom which changes the world because it is no longer afraid of death. In his time the crucified Christ was regarded as a scandal and as foolishness. Today, too, it is considered old-fashioned to put him in the centre of Christian faith and of theology. Yet only when men are reminded of him, however untimely this may be, can they be set free from the power of the facts of the present time, and from the laws and compulsions of history, and be offered a future which will never grow dark again. Today the church and theology must turn to the crucified Christ in order to show the world the freedom he offers. This is essential if they wish to become what they assert they are: the church of Christ, and Christian theology.”( The Crucified God , 1) Moltmann once called the theology of the cross a minority position in the church and a teaching “not much loved” by it. It was, perhaps, understandabl...

Theological Journal – March 16 (Lent 2020) Moltmann Monday – The Crucified God “The one will triumph who first died for the victims then also for the executioners, and in so doing revealed a new righteousness which breaks through vicious circles of hate and vengeance and which from the lost victims and executioners creates a new mankind with a new humanity. Only where righteousness becomes creative and creates right both for the lawless and for those outside the law, only where creative love changes when is hateful and deserving of hate, only where the new man is born who is oppressed nor oppresses others, can one speak of the true revolution of righteousness and of the righteousness of God.” ― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology , 178. Jesus’ cross scandalizes us, always scandalizes us, even his most faithful followers with its morality-ignoring, boundary-transgressing, propriety-busting, political...

“When the crucified Jesus is called "the image of the invisible God," the meaning is that THIS is God, and God is like THIS.” ― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology This is where so much “Christian” theology fails. We presume we know who, what, and how God is before we get to the human Jesus and then try to fit him into the mold of the God we already believe we know or else we separate the two saying God is one way, Jesus another. And when push comes to shove God trumps Jesus or they stand in tension or opposite one another. This latter dilemma arises in some atonement theology where God (the Father) stands on the side of justice while Jesus stands on the side of love and forgiveness. Jesus dies out of love to forgive humanity thus blocking the wrath of the Father who must have his offended justice satisfied before he can forgive. The Father and Jesus thus operate out of opposed motivations ...

Theological Journal – March 5                                                                                                                          What’s Joy Got To Do With It? 1.        Joy is not a sedative that insulates the church from its struggles or a consolation prize that salves the wounds it incurs for not “winning,” This is the first item I...

Theological Journal – March 2 (Lent2020) Moltmann Monday I’ll be quoting from The Crucified God during Lent. “Jesus did not suffer passively from the world in which he lived, but incited it against himself by his message and the life he lived. Nor did his crucifixion in Jerusalem come upon him as the act of an evil destiny, so that one could speak of a heroic failure, as heroes have often failed and yet remained heroes to posterity. According to the gospels, Jesus himself set out for Jerusalem and actively took the expected suffering upon himself. By proclaiming the righteousness of God as the right of those who were rejected and without grace to receive grace, he provoked the hostility of the guardians of the law. By becoming a ‘friend of sinners and tax-collectors’, he made their enemies his enemies. By claiming that God himself was on the side of the godless, he incited the devout against him and was cast into the godlessness of Golgotha. “The more the mysticism o...

“Christian hope does not promise successful days to the rich and the strong, but resurrection and life to those who must exist in the shadows of death. Success is no name of God. Righteousness is.” — Jürgen Moltmann Success Here are some quotes from inspirational/success-oriented Americans: “Either you run the day or the day runs you.” –Jim Rohn “Mondays are the start of the work week which offer new beginnings 52 times a year!“ -David Dweck “ You've got to get up every morning with determination if you're going to go to bed with satisfaction.” – George Lorimer “Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it's always your choice.” –Wayne Dyer “Your Monday morning thoughts set the tone for your whole week. See yourself getting stronger, and living a fulfilling, happier & healthier life.” -Germany Kent “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” –Zig Ziglar “E...

From Moltmann’s The Ethics of Hope (Kindle loc.72) we read: “The principle behind this ethics of hope is: -not to turn swords into Christian swords -not to retreat from the swords to the ploughshares -but to make ploughshares out of swords.” I take from this description of ethics that its sharp edge, its interface with the reality of the world we know, love, and anticipate is -to know it well enough not to be trapped in its reality (“not to turn swords into Christian swords”), -to love it deeply enough not to leave it to suffer, despair, and die from that reality (“not to retreat from the swords to the ploughshares”), but -to counter its reality with the strange but true hope of the transformation of the world through the Crucified but Risen Jesus Christ (“to make ploughshares out of swords). Reflecting on Moltmann’s insight in light of my experience as an American Christian, they say to me that: -culture wars (of the right or left) are wr...

"The cross is not something historically fortuitous which might not have happened. God himself is nothing other than love. Consequently Golgotha is the inescapable revelation of his nature in a world of evil and suffering." ( The Trinity and the Kingdom ) Do you ever wonder what life will be like then and there and how different it will be from the here and now? I do. And what I’ve come to realize Moltmann captures in this quote. It’s this: “in a world of evil and suffering.” What will be different then and there is not how we will act and behave or what we will be expected to do. Everything required of us here and now will be required then and there. -loving still means serving others -their interests remain more important than our own -“dominion” over the creation (Gen.1:26-28) remains “tilling and keeping“ (or “protecting and serving”) it (Gen.2:15) -“glory” means “fastening our belts, bidding those other and less than us to sit down to eat,...

In this piece theologian Jürgen Moltmann makes a frontal assault on the heresy of nationalism, a heresy which has distorted and disabled Christianity in the most profound of ways. I add “tribalism” to “Nationalism” because in our day the breakdown of national entities into various “tribes” is a prominent and growing reality. The same dynamics that fuel nationalism also drive this tribalism. I take heresy rather narrowly as any teaching that substantively compromise either one of or both of the two ecumenical creeds definitional of Christianity: the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. The former expounds the mystery of the trinity; the latter the mystery of the incarnation.  Does “nationalism/tribalism,” really qualify as a heresy? How does it compromise these ecumenical creeds? First, what is nationalism”? A dictionary definition will do: -spirit or aspirations common to the whole of a nation. -devotion and loyalty to one's own country; patriotism. -the policy...