The Spirit of Hope

Theology for a World in Peril

Jürgen Moltmann

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781611649871
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

Famous theologian Jrgen Moltmann returns here to the theme that he so powerfully addressed in his groundbreaking work, Theology of Hope. In the twenty-first century, he tells us, hope is challenged by ideologies and global trends that would deny hope and even life itself. Terrorist violence, social and economic inequality, and most especially the looming crisis of climate change all contribute to a cultural moment of profound despair. Moltmann reminds us that Christian faith has much to say in response to a despairing world. In the eternal yes of the living God, we affirm the goodness and ongoing purpose of our fragile humanity. Likewise, Gods love empowers us to love life and resist a culture of death.

The books two sections equally promote these affirmations, yet in different ways. The first section looks at the challenges to hope in our current world, most especially the environmental crisis. It argues that Christian faithand indeed all the worlds religionsmust orient themselves toward the wholeness of the human family and the physical environment necessary to that wholeness. The second section draws on resources from the early church, the Reformation, and the contemporary theological conversation to undergird efforts to address the deficit of hope he describes in the first section.

PART ONE

Facing the Future

Chapter 1

A Culture of Life in the Dangers of This Time

IN THIS CHAPTER I GRAPPLE WITH WHAT HAVE BEEN MY MOST URGENT concerns for some time: a culture of life that is stronger than the terror of death, a love for life that overcomes the destructive forces in our world today, and a confidence in the future that overcomes doubt and fatalism.¹ These issues are for me most urgent because with the poet Friedrich Hölderlin I believe strongly:

Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst

Das Rettende auch.

[But where there is danger

Salvation also grows.]²

We should inquire whether and to what extent this hope bears weight as we explore the possibilities of a culture of life in the face of the real annihilations with which our world is threatened. I will begin by addressing some of the dangers of our time in the first section, and in the second section offer some answers by considering dimensions of a world capable of supporting life and in a quite literal sense a world that is worthy of love. At the end I return to the first verse of the poem by Hölderlin: “Near is God, but difficult to grasp.”³

The Terror of Universal Death

The unloved life

Human life today is in danger. It is not in danger because it is mortal. Our life has always been mortal. It is in danger because it is no longer loved, affirmed, and accepted. The French author Albert Camus wrote after the Second World War, “This is the mystery of Europe: life is no longer loved.”

I can attest to this. I remember the experiences of the war with continuing horror. My generation was destined for a murderous war in which it was no longer a matter of victory or peace, but only of death. Those who suffered in that monstrous war knew what Camus meant: a life no longer loved is ready to kill and is liable to be killed. The survivors experienced the end of terror in 1945, but we had become so used to death that life took on a “take it or leave it” atmosphere because it had become meaningless.

The 20th century was a century of mass exterminations and mass executions. The beginning of the 21st century saw the private terrors of senseless killings by suicidal assassins. In the terrorists of the 21st century, a new religion of death is confronting us. I do not mean the religion of lslam, but rather the ideology of terror. “Your young people love life,” said the Mullah Omar of the Taliban in Afghanistan, “our young people love death.” After the mass murder in Madrid on 11 March 2004, there were acknowledgments by the terrorists with the same message: “You love life, we love death.” A German who joined the Taliban in Afghanistan declared, “We don’t want to win; we want to kill and be killed.” Why? I think because they view killing as power and they experience themselves as God over life and death. This seems to be the modern terrorist ideology of the suicidal assassins. It is also the mystery of crazed students who in the United States and Germany suddenly shoot their fellow students and teachers and end up taking their own lives.

I remember that we had this love of death in Europe some 60 years ago. “Viva la muerte,” cried an old fascist general in the Spanish Civil War. Long live death! The German SS troops in the Second World War had the saying “Death gives, and death takes away” and wore the symbol of the skull and bones. It is not possible to deter suicidal assassins, for they have broken the fear of death. They do not love life anymore, and they want to die with their victims.

Behind this terrorist ideological surface a greater danger is hidden: Peace, disarmament, and nonproliferation treaties between nations share an obvious assumption, namely, that on both sides there is the will to survive and the will to live. Yet what happens if one partner does not want to survive but is willing to die, if through death that partner can destroy this whole “wicked” or “godless” world? Until now we have had to deal only with an international network of suicidal assassins and individual students overcome by a death wish. What happens when a nation possessing nuclear weapons becomes obsessed with this “religion of death” and turns into a collective suicidal assassin against the rest of the human world because it is driven into a corner and gives up all hope? Deterrence works only so long as all partners have the will to live and want to survive. When it is of no matter whether one lives or dies, one has lost the fear that is necessary for deterrence. Those who are convinced for religious reasons that they must become a sacrifice in order to save the world can no longer be threatened with death. Those who clamor for the “great war” even if it means their own destruction are beyond deterrence.

The attraction of destroying a world that is considered “rotten,” disordered, or godless can obviously grow into a universal death wish to which one sacrifices one’s own life. “Death” then, becomes a fascinating divinity inflaming a desire for destruction. This apocalyptic “religion of death” is the real enemy of the will to live, the love of life, and the affirmation of being.

The nuclear suicide programme

Behind this present political danger endangering the common life of the nations there also lurks an older threat: the nuclear threat. The first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945 brought the Second World War to an end. At the same time, it marked the beginning of the end time for the whole of humankind. The end time is the age in which the end of humankind is possible at any moment. No human being could survive the “nuclear winter” that would follow a great atomic war. Remember that humankind was on the cusp of such a great atomic war for more than 40 years during the Cold War. It is true that since the end of the Cold War in 1990 a great atomic war is not as likely. We live in relative peace. Yet there are still so many atomic and hydrogen bombs stored up in the arsenals of the great nations (and some smaller ones as well) that the self-annihilation of humankind remains a distinct possibility. Sakharov called it “collective suicide”: “Whoever fires first, dies second.” For those 40 years we depended for our security on “mutually assured destruction.”

Most people had forgotten this atomic threat until President Barack Obama, in a speech delivered in Prague in 2009, revived the old dream of a world free of atomic bombs and started new disarmament negotiations with Russia.⁴ Then, many of us became aware again of this destiny hanging like a dark cloud over the nations. Strangely enough, we feel the presence of the nuclear threat publicly in what American psychologists call “nuclear numbing.” We repress our anxiety, try to forget this threat, and live as if this danger were not there. Yet it is gnawing at our subconscious and impairing our love of life.

The social conditions of misery

A general impairment of life also exists in miserable social conditions. For more than 40 years, we have heard repeatedly and everywhere the charge that, despite all political efforts, the social gap between rich and poor is widening. It is not just in the poorer countries of the two-thirds world that a small, rich sector of the population rules over the masses of the poor. In the democracies of the developed world, the financial asset gap between financiers, on the one hand, and low-income workers, welfare recipients, the unemployed, and those not able to work, on the other hand, takes on obscene proportions. Yet democracy is grounded not only in the freedom of citizens but also in their equality. Without social justice in life opportunities and the comparability of life circumstances, the commonweal dies and with it what holds society together falls apart. Trust is lost.

Since the democratic revolutions in England, the United States, and France, the political task in the European states has been the balancing of individual freedom and social equity. The deregulation of the economy and fiscal institutions wrought by American politics, with all its destructive consequences, has led to an imbalance between freedom and equality that has become life-threatening for many people. It has led to their disempowerment and poverty. A capitalism that is no longer politically controllable through the commonwealth becomes an enemy of democracy because it destroys the common meaning of the society. We find ourselves on a social slippery slope. Climbing on the social ladder brings anxiety. In the modern competitive society, the losers fall off, the winners ascend, and “the winner takes all.” The anxiety of life creates nothing but the anxiety of existence for modern human beings. Yet is anxiety a good incentive for life, for work, and for happiness?

The ecological conditions of world destruction

Unlike the nuclear threat, climate change is not only a threat but already an emerging reality everywhere. It is not only a latent problem but also very much a matter of public consciousness. People know it because they can see it, feel it, and sometimes smell it. The biosphere of the planet earth is the only space we have for life. The globalization of human civilization has reached its limits and is beginning to alter the conditions of life on Earth.

The destruction of the environment that we are causing through our present global economic system will undoubtedly seriously jeopardize the survival of humanity in the 21st century. Modern industrial society has thrown out of balance the equilibrium of the earth’s organism and is on the way to universal ecological death, unless we can change the way things are developing. Year after year, vulnerable species of animals and plants die out. Scientists have shown that certain chemical emissions are destroying the ozone layer, while the use of chemical fertilizers and a multitude of pesticides is polluting our drinking water and making the soil infertile. They have shown that the global climate is already changing, so that we now are experiencing an increasing number of “natural” catastrophes, such as droughts and floods, expanding deserts, and intense storms – catastrophes that are not simply natural but are also caused by human activity. The ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic is melting. In the coming century, scientists predict that coastal cities such as my hometown, Hamburg, and coastal regions such as Bangladesh and many South Sea islands will be flooded. All in all, life on this earth is under threat. Why is this so? With some irony one may say: Some do not know what they are doing, while others do not act on what they know.

This ecological crisis is fundamentally a crisis wrought by Western scientific and technological civilization. Yet it is a mistake to think that environmental problems are problems for the industrialized countries of the West alone. On the contrary, ecological catastrophes are intensifying even more in the midst of already existing economic and social problems of countries in the developing world. Indira Gandhi was right when she said, “Poverty is the worst pollution.” Despite the well-documented “limits to growth,” the ideology of permanent “growth” continues unabated with its specious promise of solving social problems. We know all this, but we are paralyzed and do not change our economy or our lifestyle: We do not do what we know is necessary to prevent the worst consequences. This paralysis may be called “ecological numbing.” Nothing accelerates an imminent catastrophe so much as the paralysis of doing nothing.

We do not know whether humanity will survive this self-made destiny. This is actually a good thing. If we knew with certainty that we would not survive, we would do nothing; if we knew with certainty that we would survive, we would also do nothing. Only if the future is open for both possibilities are we forced to do today what is necessary to survive tomorrow. We cannot know whether humankind will survive, so we must act today as if the future of life depends on us and trust at the same time that our children and we will survive and thrive.

Must a human race exist or survive, or are we just an accident of nature? We can ask cynically: Didn’t the dinosaurs come and go?

The question of existence: Whether humanity should be or not be

More than seven billion human beings already live on earth today. This number likely will grow rapidly. An alternative future is that the earth could be uninhabited. The earth existed without human beings for millions of years and may survive perhaps for millions of years after the human race disappears. This raises an even deeper question: Are we human beings on earth only by chance, or are we human beings a “necessary” result of evolution? If nature showed a “strong anthropic principle,” we could feel “at home in the universe” (Stuart Kauffman). But if a strong anthropic principle of this kind cannot be demonstrated, the universe gives no answer to this existential question of humankind. Looking to the universe for an answer to the question of our reason for being, we encounter the sad conjecture of Nobel–Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg: “The more the Universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”⁵ The silence of the world’s expanses and the coldness of the universe can lead to despondence. In any case, neither the stars nor our genes say whether human beings should be or not be.

How can we love life and affirm our being as humans if humanity is only an accident of nature, superfluous and without relevance for the universe, perhaps only a mistake of nature? Is there a “duty to be,” as Hans Jonas claimed? Is there any reason to love life and affirm the human being? If we find no answer, every culture of life is uncertain in its fundamentals and built on shaky groun...