In the End, the Beginning
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In the End, the Beginning

The Life of Hope

Moltmann

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In the End, the Beginning

The Life of Hope

Moltmann

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About This Book

'In my end is my beginning', wrote T. S. Eliot at the close of his poem East Coker, and that line gave me the title for this book. With it I should like to express the power of the Christian hope, for Christian hope is the power of resurrection from life's failures and defeats. It is the power of the rebirth of life out of the shadows of death. It is the power for the new beginning at the place where guilt has made life impossible. From the Introduction by Jurgen Moltmann In this short doctrine of hope, Jurgen Moltmann examines the personal experiences in life, in which the future is awaited, times when we search for new beginnings and find them. In three parts that correspond to the three beginnings in life: birth, rebirth and resurrection, Moltmann extols the true value of Christian hope that powers new beginnings. Jurgen Moltmann is Emeritus Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Tubingen, Germany. He is the author of a number of books published by SCM Press, including Theology of Hope, The Crucified God and The Church in the Power of the Spirit.

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Publisher
SCM Press
Year
2013
ISBN
9780334048664
PART ONE: There is a Magic in Every Beginning
I. The Promise of the Child
ā€˜There is a magic in every beginningā€™, wrote Hermann Hesse. What does this mean, if we think about the beginning of every human life? In order to grasp this more clearly, let us look at the biblical concept of promise. A divine promise is the promise of a future which God is going to bring about. When God promises something he is bound to keep his promise, for his own sake and for the sake of his glory. His whole being is faithfulness. That is why we human beings can trust him and can believe what he promises. Abraham and Sarah offer the primal image of this kind of trust, for according to Genesis 12 they left everything in response to Godā€™s promise that he would make of them a great people and a blessing for all generations of human beings. The departure of Abraham and Sarah from their home country, and the wanderings that followed, show that a divine promise doesnā€™t just point forward to some far-off future, which we have to wait for; the promised future is already present in the promise itself, and mobilizes the people concerned through the hope it awakens. The biblical stories have made us familiar with divine promises of this kind in verbal form, but we find Godā€™s promises in the form of events too, events which point beyond themselves, like the miracle of the Reed Sea, which saved Israel from its persecutors. We meet divine promises which have taken human form among the prophets. And from the psalms we also perceive that everything that God has created points beyond itself to the Creator and to the future of his glory, for which it has been created. Everything that is and lives, holds within itself this ā€˜magicā€™ of promise and points beyond itself, as the beginning of something greater.
In the biblical stories, from early on we find ā€˜the child of promiseā€™. We shall see what this orientation towards the future has to say to us in a world of the ancestor cult, of patriarchies and matriarchies. We shall then see how this special promise of the messianic child who is to redeem the world is reflected in the context of life in general, and shall try to discover what ā€˜the promise of the childā€™ means for all of us.
ā€˜To us a child is bornā€™, proclaims the prophet Isaiah to his people who are ā€˜walking in darknessā€™ (Isa. 9.6, 9.2). The destruction of their country, the expulsion from their homeland, forced labour in Babylon: a black eclipse of God had fallen on Godā€™s people. With the announcement of the birth of the messianic child and his reign of peace ā€˜without endā€™, the prophet gives hope once more to the stricken people. The yoke of their burden and the rod of their oppressors will disappear. The year 587 brought a catastrophic end, with the capture of Jerusalem and the deportation into exile, but a new beginning is coming, a beginning as full of new possibilities as a child that has just been born. So ā€˜the child of promiseā€™ becomes the symbol for the future of life, in contrast to the sufferings of the present. And in this way it also becomes the pledge of Godā€™s faithfulness: he will find his forsaken people and bring them home.
ā€˜In every child the messiah can be bornā€™, says a Jewish proverb. So every child deserves respect. It is encompassed by the magic of the messianic hope. At Christmas, Christians celebrate the festival of the birth of the Redeemer in ā€˜the child in the mangerā€™ in Bethlehem. What are we really doing then? We are celebrating the encounter with the almighty God in the weak and helpless child Jesus. But this presupposes a tremendous proceeding: the Creator of heaven and earth, whom even the heaven of heavens cannot contain, becomes so humble and small that in this child Jesus he is beside us and lives among us. The theology of the early Church said that in this event God ā€˜became manā€™ ā€“ became human. But the mystery really begins with Godā€™s becoming a child. The great, all-comprehensive rule of God begins as this childā€™s rule of peace. The gospel of Christ is profoundly engraved by the gospel about children: ā€˜Whoever receives a child receives meā€™ and: ā€˜Unless you become like children ā€¦ā€™, for the kingdom of God is theirs.
This religious orientation towards the child of promise and peace is not merely Jewish and Christian. It was familiar to the prophecy and philosophy of the ancient world too.1 Virgilā€™s famous Fourth Eclogue, which Christians later adopted for themselves, prophesies the birth of the redeeming child:
Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns; now a new generation descends from heaven on high. Only do you, pure Lucina, smile on the birth of the child, under whom the iron brood shall at last cease and a golden race spring up throughout the world! Your own Apollo now is king ā€¦ See how the world bows its massive dome ā€“ earth and expanse of sea and heavenā€™s depth! See how all things rejoice in the age that is at hand.2
And even earlier the supposedly obscure philosopher Heraclitus wrote:
Lifetime is a child playing, moving pieces in a (backgammon?) game:
Kingly power (or: the kingdom) is in the hands of a child.
(Fragment 52)3
Heraclitus means that behind the becoming and passing away of phenomena in nature and history, the guiding hand of a wise king is evident in the form of a carefree, playing child.
ā€˜The reign of a childā€™: the divine is not just the primordially old. It is at the same time the archetypally childlike. The world is like a childā€™s game, and in the child what is divine comes to appearance.
If we see the particular birth of the child of promise as mirroring the promise of children in general, we can cry with the Romantic poet Clemens Brentano, ā€˜What a mystery is a child!ā€™ In his poem Brentano traces the pattern of this mystery, seeing in it a triple-stranded bond between our relation to God as his children, the birth of the Redeemer as a child, and the special relationship to all children forged for us through the child Jesus.4
1. The Mystery of the Child: Some Perspectives
Children grow up in the world of adults, and experience themselves in the way adults think is appropriate for a child.5 From what angle do we perceive the mystery hidden in every child? The way parents and teachers talk about a child is different from the way the child talks about itself, and different again from the way adults remember their own childhood. According to the perspective we choose, we see the childhood of educational theory, the childā€™s own childhood, or a childhood with a future ahead of it. It must always be remembered that here for the most part we are talking about the secure middle-class childhood familiar to us. We are not talking about the blighted childhood of the street children in Bucharest, or of the children forced into prostitution in Bangkok, or the child labourers in India, or the child soldiers in Africa. But if we take the three perspectives we have mentioned, what is childhood?
1. From the viewpoint of parents and teachers, childhood is of course on the one hand an inherently good and meaningful stage in life; but from another and more important aspect it is a state which has to be surmounted, through the childā€™s own development, and through upbringing on the adult side, an upbringing which is designed to meet the expectations of society as a whole. When all is said and done, parents have to ā€˜bring upā€™ their children, as we say, so that ā€˜they can make something of themselvesā€™, and are able to master an adult life in which they make their own decisions. Both these aspects have to be taken into account and balanced against one another. Parents ought to play with their children because they enjoy them just as they are. So they shouldnā€™t just play ā€˜educationalā€™ games, like Scrabble or Monopoly. They should play hide and seek or football as well. And yet parents are bound to look beyond the present childhood of their children, towards their possible future in the adult world, so that they can give the children bearings and guidelines. If they are to do this they must also have the courage to be adult themselves, and not to dress like teenagers, or talk like children.
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. This was typified by the often-heard question: ā€˜Well, young man, what are you going to be when you grow up?ā€™ Boys were trained to be in command of themselves, and to have control of their bodies, preferably through toys that have to do with fighting, hitting and shooting. Dolls prepared girls for their future role as mothers. In this way the childā€™s own future was pressed into the pre-existing moulds of the adult world. From this perspective, childhood was merely a personhood still to be developed. The model of complete personhood was then supposed to be the adult between the ages of 25 and 60, preferably the man ā€˜in his primeā€™, as the phrase went.
If we apply for a job, we are obliged to write a curriculum vitae, an account of our previous career. But the world curriculum originally meant a race. So according to the curriculum vitae the whole of life from the cradle to the grave is a race from one stage to the next. Learning is supposed to be ā€˜life-longā€™. But what are we really learning for?
In the middle-class family, the all-important thing was social advancement from one generation to the next. With that in mind, one dressed ā€˜according to oneā€™s position in lifeā€™, but lived ā€˜above oneā€™s circumstancesā€™ and saved by eating at home ā€˜beneath oneā€™s stationā€™. But is childhood too a matter of ā€˜advancementā€™? Is it really no more than a still undeveloped human condition which has to be surmounted? The great historian Leopold von Ranke already protested against the credulous faith in progress which reduced the past to a mere preliminary stage on the way to the future. He maintained, conversely, that ā€˜Every age is immediate to God, for in every age the Divine desires to realize itself, and is unable to show itself in its entirety in any single era.ā€™ This is also true of age in the personal sense: children and young people, adults and the old, find the meaning of their lives in whatever is their own present at any given time. 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. Even a child who dies young has had a fulfilled life. Every child has a right to its own present, and the life fulfilled in that particular present must be respected by parents and teachers. It must not be sacrificed on the altar of progress.
Janusz Korczak, the director of the Jewish orphanage in Warsaw, who accompanied his children to the death camp, identified some fundamental childrenā€™s rights, which must be respected by everyone who loves a child. Among these are (1) the childā€™s right to the present day; and (2) the childā€™s right to be as it is.6 These fundamental rights also represent a claim to human rights on the part of children, so that infringement of these rights can be brought before the courts.
Of course to say that childhood is intrinsically meaningful, and that every moment is a fulfilment, is also wishful thinking on the part of adults: it is what they hope for their children. Adults who have become slaves of their over-organized time like to dream about those wonderful childhood years, which were so carefree and without set purpose. But as a corrective to an upbringing which presses forward with the aim of rapid progress, this dream is a valuable utopia. What we need, whether we are children, adolescents, adults or the old, is a balance between experience of the present and expectation of the future, between the fulfilled moment and the beginning of a new day.
2. What childhood means for children themselves is surely bound to remain an almost impenetrable mystery for us adults. When the child was still...

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