Moltmann Jurgen Quotes & Sayings

As long as hope does not embrace and transform the thought and action of men, it remains topsy-turvy and ineffective. — Jurgen Moltmann

Well, first I would ask them if they had read the Bible; then I would ask them if they had understood it. — Jurgen Moltmann

But for us this also means that in place of the spread of our Orthodox, Roman Catholic or Protestant churches we have to put a passion for the kingdom of God. Mission doesn't mean 'compelling them to come in'! It is the invitation to God's future and to hope for the new creation of all things: 'Behold, I am making all things new' - and you are invited to this divine future for the world! — Jurgen Moltmann

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. — Jurgen Moltmann

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. — Jurgen Moltmann

God is not only a divine person who we can address in prayer, but also a wide living space We human beings are giving each other space for living when we meet each other in love and friendship. — Jurgen Moltmann

God allows himself to be humiliated and crucified in the Son, in order to free the oppressors and the oppressed from oppression and to open up to them the situation of free, sympathetic humanity. — Jurgen Moltmann

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. — Jurgen Moltmann

To discover the 'traces of God' in nature does not indeed save us, but it does mane us wise, as tradition says; for we discover in the memory of nature a wisdom of existence and life which mirrors the wisdom of God, and for human civilization it is wise to co-operate with nature and to become integrated in it, instead of exploiting and hence destroying it in the interests of human domination. — Jurgen Moltmann

The turn from this end [despair] to a new beginning came from three things. A blooming cherry tree, the unexpected kindness of Scottish workers and their families, and the Bible. — Jurgen Moltmann

Just as they were formulated to express Jewish or Greek reasons for faith in Jesus, it is possible on principle to formulate new titles to express, say, Hindu reasons or even Marxist reasons for faith in Jesus. This historical openness and variability of the titles for Jesus, to which the history of Christian tradition bears witness, has, however, a point of reference and a criterion. This is provided by his personal name, Jesus, and the history which concluded with his crucifixion and resurrection. — Jurgen Moltmann

When I love God I love the beauty of bodies, the rhythm of movements, the shining of eyes, the embraces, the feelings, the scents, the sounds of all this protean creation. When I love you, my God, I want to embrace it all, for I love you with all my senses in the creations of your love. In all the things that encounter me, you are waiting for me.
For a long time I looked for you within myself and crept into the shell of my soul, shielding myself with an armour of inapproachability. But you were outside - outside myself - and enticed me out of the narrowness of my heart into the broad place of love for life. So I came out of myself and found my soul in my senses, and my own self in others. — Jurgen Moltmann

It is only as a unity in diversity that the Christian community will become an inviting community in a society which is otherwise pretty uniform. Creation is motley and diverse, and the new creation even more so. — Jurgen Moltmann

Believing in Christ's resurrection therefore does not mean affirming a fact. It means being possessed by the life-giving Spirit and participating in the powers of the age to come. — Jurgen Moltmann

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. — Jurgen Moltmann

The knowledge of the cross brings a conflict of interest between God who has become man and man who wishes to become God. — Jurgen Moltmann

Even the disciples of Jesus all fled from their master's cross. Christians who do not have the feeling that they must flee the crucified Christ have probably not yet understood him in a sufficiently radical way. — Jurgen Moltmann

The same Christ Jesus is not the same for everyone, because people are different. He has one profile for the poor and another for the rich, one profile for the sick and another for the healthy. — Jurgen Moltmann

The freedom to talk with God and of God is being opened by God's joy. It cannot be forced. For true awareness cannot be coercive; it does not come about by either authoritarian pressure or the force of logic. It presupposes liberty. Being aware of God is an art and
if the term may be permitted
a noble game. — Jurgen Moltmann

The church's final word is not 'church' but the glory of the Father and the Son in the Spirit of liberty — Jurgen Moltmann

[Faith] sees in the resurrection of Christ not the eternity of heaven, but the future of the very earth on which his cross stands. It sees in him the future of the very humanity for which he died. That is why it finds the cross the hope of the earth. — Jurgen Moltmann

Capitalism, racism and inhuman technocracy quietly develop in their own way. The causes of misery are no longer to be found in the inner attitudes of men, but have long been institutionalized. — Jurgen Moltmann

For resurrection faith means courage to revolt against the "covenant with death" (Isa. 28:15), it means hope for the victory of life which shall swallow up and conquer life-devouring death. ~ p.14 — Jurgen Moltmann

When the crucified Jesus is called "the image of the invisible God," the meaning is that THIS is God, and God is like THIS. — Jurgen Moltmann

With every righteous action, we prepare the way for the New Earth on which righteousness will dwell. And bringing justice to those who suffer violence means to bring the light of God's future to them. — Jurgen Moltmann

We experience what life and death really are when we love, for in love we go out of ourselves, become capable of happiness and at the same time can be hurt. — Jurgen Moltmann

The gift and the presence of the Holy Spirit is the greatest and most wonderful thing which we can experience - we ourselves, the human community, all living things and this earth. For with the Holy Spirit it is not just one random spirit that is present, among all the many good and evil spirits that there are. It is God himself, the creative and life-giving, redeeming and saving God. Where the Holy Spirit is present, God is present in a special way, and we experience God through our lives, which become wholly living from within. We experience whole, full, healed and redeemed life, experience it with all our senses. We feel and taste, we touch and see our life in God and God in our life. — Jurgen Moltmann

That is why 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. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present. — Jurgen Moltmann

Americans as no one else in the Old World are looking ahead and are future-minded without the limitations of traditions and can look ahead without the burdens of the past. — Jurgen Moltmann

Despair can be like an iron band constricting the heart. — Jurgen Moltmann

The truth of human freedom lies in the love that breaks down barriers. — Jurgen Moltmann

Jesus' healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly 'natural' things in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded. — Jurgen Moltmann

In the New Testament, Christ's 'virgin birth' is related only by Luke and Matthew. It was unknown, or considered unimportant, in wide areas of early Christian belief (the Pauline and Johannine sectors, for example). But from the third century onwards it became a firm component of the Christian creeds and theological christologies. — Jurgen Moltmann

Christ's own 'God-forsaken-ness' on the cross showed me where God is present where God had been present in those nights of deaths in the fire storms in Hamburg and where God would be present in my future whatever may come. — Jurgen Moltmann

If I have a theological virtue, it is curiosity or inquisitiveness. — Jurgen Moltmann

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. — Jurgen Moltmann

The present time of believers is no longer determined by the past. It takes its definition from the future. — Jurgen Moltmann

I believe that for us men and women truth is to be found in dialogue. It is only in dialogue with one another that we can discover truth, because it is only in relationship to other people that we form our own identity. We always need the eyes of others if we are to understand ourselves and if we are to overcome our narcissism. When we encounter other people and hear them say 'I see you', 'I hear you' or 'I know you', we begin to see ourselves and understand ourselves. If it weren't for this experience of other people and their outside view of us, we should remain trapped in the prison of our own prejudgments and illusions about ourselves. No one loses his or her authentic identity in dialogue with other people. But in dialogue with other people everyone acquires a new profile. — Jurgen Moltmann

The problem of modern man is no longer so much how he can live with gods and demons, but how he can survive with the bomb, revolution and the destruction of the balance of nature. He usurps more and more of nature and takes it under his control. The vital question for him, therefore, is how this world which he has usurped can be human- ized.36 His main problem is no longer the universal finitude which he experiences in solidarity with all other creatures, but the humanity of his own world. — Jurgen Moltmann

The history of the kings is the story of how those who had been anointed failed to live up to that anointing. It is this fact alone that can explain the rise of messianism: belief in the anointed one who will fulfil his anointing.' 14 — Jurgen Moltmann

Hope is lived when it comes alive, when we go outside of ourselves and, in joy and pain take part in the lives of others. — Jurgen Moltmann

The crucified Christ has become a stranger to the civil religion of the First World and to that world's Christianity. — Jurgen Moltmann

The Holy Spirit does not 'proceed from the Father and the Son', as the Western church's Nicene Creed maintains. The Spirit proceeds from the Father, rests on the Son, and from the Son radiates into the world. — Jurgen Moltmann

The new is preceded by the destruction of the old, that which has become guilty, and not out of the possebilities which we possess, but in the impossible situation which confronts us, that the new shows itself as God's creative act. God's new reality is always like a novum ex nihilo. When all hopes have died, there comes the wave of the future like a spirit of resurrection into the dead bones (Ezek. 37), creating hope against hope. — Jurgen Moltmann

In Christian terms, evangelization and humanization are not alternatives. Nor are the 'vertical dimension' of faith and the 'horizontal dimension' of love for one's neighbor and political change. — Jurgen Moltmann

Out of hope for eternal life, love for this vulnerable and mortal life is born afresh. This love does not give anything up. If we had to surrender hope for as much as one single creature, for us Christ would not have risen. The love founded on hope is the strongest medicine against the spreading sickness of resignation. The modern cynicism which is prepared to accept the death of so many created things is an ally of death. But we Christians are what Christoph Blumhardt called 'protest-people against death'. That is why out of the deadly depths we cry out for God's Spirit. That is why we cry out for the Spirit who sustains the whole creation, and wait for the Spirit of the new creation of all things. Our cry from the depths is a sign of life - a sign of divine life. — Jurgen Moltmann

Anyone who believes in the power of God and the power of Satan can surely not be viewed as a pure monotheist. — Jurgen Moltmann

Judgement immobilizes, only hopeful love leaves an opening for God's alternative future. — Jurgen Moltmann

The Spirit is more than just one of God's gifts among others; the Holy Spirit is the unrestricted presence of
God in which our life wakes up, becomes wholly and entirely living, and is endowed with the energies of life. — Jurgen Moltmann

Personal, inner change without a change in circumstances and structures is an idealist illusion, as though man were only a soul and not a body as well. — Jurgen Moltmann

The longer I have lived with this new hope, the clearer it has become to me: our true hope in life doesn't spring from the feelings of our youth, lovely and fair though they are. Nor does it emerge from the objective possibilities of history, unlimited though they may be. Our true hope in life is wakened and sustained and finally fulfilled by the great divine mystery which is above us and in us and round about us, nearer to us than we can be to ourselves. It encounters us as the great promise of our life and this world: nothing will be in vain. It will succeed. In the end all will be well! It meets us too in the call to life: 'I live and you shall live also.' We are called to this hope, and the call often sounds like a command - a command to resist death and the powers of death, and a command to love life and cherish it: every life, the life we share, the whole of life. — Jurgen Moltmann

Ever since the beginning of the middle-class era, with its faith in progress, belief in progress has dominated the upbringing of children too. Childhood now came to be understood only as the preliminary stage on the way to the full personhood of the adult ... Every lived moment has an eternal significance and already constitutes a fulfilled life. For fulfilled life is not measured by the number of years that have been lived through, or spent in one way or another. It is measured according to the depth of lived experience. — Jurgen Moltmann

The motive that impels modern reason to know must be described as the desire to conquer and dominate. For the Greek philosophers and the Fathers of the church, knowing meant something different: it meant knowing in wonder. By knowing or perceiving one participates in the life of the other. Here knowing does not transform the counterpart into the property of the knower; the knower does not appropriate what he knows. On the contrary, he is transformed through sympathy, becoming a participant in what he perceives. — Jurgen Moltmann

If we have children. When they are just born we do everything for them. We are omnipotent, they are completely dependent on us, but then when they grow up you must take back your influence on them, to give them freedom. — Jurgen Moltmann

[Christian theology] awakens pain over the present internal and external enslavements of human beings — Jurgen Moltmann

The question about the end bursts out of the torment of history and the intolerableness of historical existence. — Jurgen Moltmann

Passion is loving something enough to suffer for it. — Jurgen Moltmann

God does not suffer out of deficiency of being, like created beings. To this extent he is 'apathetic'. But he suffers from the love which is the superabundance and overflowing of his being. In so far he is 'pathetic'. — Jurgen Moltmann

The God of freedom, the true God, is ... not recognized by his power and glory in the history of the world, but through his helplessness and his death on the scandal of the cross of Jesus — Jurgen Moltmann

A dead man cannot forgive sins. The gospel, as the present forgiveness of sins, assumes the new, divine, eschatological life of the crucified Christ, and is itself the 'Spirit' and the present 'power of
the resurrection'. Thus according to Paul's understanding, in the 'word of the cross' the crucified Christ himself speaks. — Jurgen Moltmann

with Christ in faith a wholly new life begins. It is not a restored life, and it is not a rejuvenated life either. It is not even a life reborn out of its origin. The resurrection of Christ has no historical prototype. It is something completely new in history. It is the beginning of the new creation of everything. — Jurgen Moltmann

The ordination of
women is not a matter of adaptation to changed social conditions. It has to do with new fife from the beginnings of the Christian church: life out of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. — Jurgen Moltmann

There are various names for this 'Spirit of Life' because there are various life experiences. — Jurgen Moltmann

A change in external circumstances without inner renewal is a materialist's illusion, as though man were only a product of his social circumstance and nothing else. — Jurgen Moltmann

To reinvent your own country you need a great audacity of hope. — Jurgen Moltmann

Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante's hell is the inscription: Leave behind all hope, you who enter here. — Jurgen Moltmann

The opposite of poverty isn't property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community. For in community we become rich: rich in friends, in neighbours, in colleagues, in comrades, in brothers and sisters. Together, as a community, we can help ourselves in most of our difficulties. For after all, there are enough people and enough ideas, capabilities and energies to be had. They are only lying fallow, or are stunted and suppressed. So let us discover our wealth; let us discover our solidarity; let us build up communities; let us take our lives into our own
hands, and at long last out of the hands of the people who want to dominate and exploit us. — Jurgen Moltmann

As Christians understand it, creation is a trinitarian process: God the Father creates through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. So all things are created 'by God', are formed 'through God' and exist 'in God'. — Jurgen Moltmann

No where else in Christianity does the terrible or heroic name of Armageddon play such role as in America. Not even in the Revelation of John. — Jurgen Moltmann

As time goes on we become old, the future contracts, the past expands ... But by future we don't just mean the years ahead; we always mean as well the plenitude of possibilities which challenge our creativity ... In confrontation with the future we can become young if we accept the future's challenges. — Jurgen Moltmann

There were two different expectations in this land of the future. On the one hand the the optimistic belief in an unending progress with millenarianistic overtones and on the other hand the doomsday expectation of the final battle of Armageddon. Both are perspectives are uniquely American and both are inter-related. — Jurgen Moltmann

Resistance is the protest of those who hope, and hope is the feast of the people who resist. — Jurgen Moltmann

God became man that dehumanized men might become true men. We become true men in the community of the incarnate, the suffering and loving, the human God. — Jurgen Moltmann

God heals the sicknesses and the griefs by making the sicknesses and the griefs his suffering and his grief. In the image of the crucified God the sick and dying can see themselves, because in them the crucified God recognizes himself. — Jurgen Moltmann

In the cross of Christ God is taking man dead-seriously so that he may open up for him the happy freedom of Easter. God takes upon himself the pain of negation and the God forsakenness of judgement to reconcile himself with his enemies and to give the godless fellowship with himself.
~ Theology of Play, p.33 — Jurgen Moltmann

Isaiah 11.1-9 goes a step further, giving this picture of the messiah a new depth. The coming messiah, who springs from the house of Jesse, is the true 'anointed one'. Yahweh's ruach will 'rest' on him,
and will equip him with wisdom, understanding, counsel and strength, and with the fear of the Lord' (cf. 11 Sam. 23.2). His legitimation depends on the divine righteousness, not on his Davidic origin. He will bring justice to the poor and an equitable judgment to the miserable, and he will defeat the wicked - the oppressors. So the kingdom of his righteousness does not merely embrace poor human beings. He brings peace to the whole of creation, peace between man and beast, and peace among the beasts themselves (vv. 6-8). This kingdom will reach out from his holy place Mount Zion, so that 'the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord' - a vision which no doubt corresponds to Isaiah's vision at his call (6.3): 'the whole earth is full of his glory'. — Jurgen Moltmann

The triune God will indwell the world in a divine way - the world will indwell God in a creaturely way. — Jurgen Moltmann

Our social and political tasks, if we take them seriously, loom larger than life. Yet infinite responsibility destroys a human being because he is only a man and not god." ~ p.23 — Jurgen Moltmann

When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man's godforsakenness. In Jesus he does not die the natural death of a finite being, but the violent death of the criminal on the cross, the death of complete abandonment by God. The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment, rejection by God, his Father. God does not become a religion, so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings. God does not become a law, so that man participates in him through obedience to a law. God does not become an ideal, so that man achieves community with him through constant striving. He humbles himself and takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him. — Jurgen Moltmann

The messianic hope was never the hope of the victors and the rulers. It was always the hope of the defeated and the ground down.31 The hope of the poor is nothing other than the messianic hope. — Jurgen Moltmann

It is only when human beings see themselves simply as human beings, no longer as gods, that they are in a position to perceive the wholly other nature of God. — Jurgen Moltmann

Christian faith isn't just a conviction, a feeling and a decision. It invades life so deeply that we have to talk about dying and being born again, which is what corresponds to the death and resurrection of Christ. — Jurgen Moltmann

Because of Christ's prevenient and unconditional invitation, the fellowship of the table cannot be restricted to people who are 'faithful to the church', or to the 'inner circle' of the community. For it is not the feast of the particularly righteous, of the people who think that they are particularly devout; it is the feast of the weary and heavy-laden, who have heard the call to refreshment. — Jurgen Moltmann

God weeps with us so that we may one day laugh with him. — Jurgen Moltmann

Wisdom is an ethics of knowledge — Jurgen Moltmann