Abstract
A new book from Werner Jeanrond is always a promising prospect, and his latest is no exception. In this closely reasoned study, Jeanrond examines theologies of hope, actual and potential, and carves out a fresh trajectory through tradition and innovation, to create a landscape of hope transformed by a relentless emphasis on love, divine and human.
Nearly 60 years ago Moltmann’s Theology of Hope burst in upon a theological scene caught agonizing between Barth’s Word and Bultmann’s Kerugma in the present, moving the goalposts forcefully into the future. I was visiting Tübingen, and I remember an almost audible sigh of relief all round. Today, academic theology is much more fragmented, and there are no magic bullets. This study, fittingly dedicated to the memory of Terence McCaughey, is transformative in a different way, and it certainly repays careful attention.
The first chapter sets the scene with a survey of hope, hopes and radical hope, among ambiguity and complexity. We have been here before, but the literature citations throughout, referencing work in many different languages and from different religious affiliations, signal a welcome release from the domestic ecclesial silos in which much contemporary theology often seems happily hunkered down. We come to the tradition of hoping for salvation, from the biblical texts to Thomas Aquinas, and then to Moltmann. Throughout these chapters there is an often brief but always cogent conversation with the long European intellectual tradition. In the third chapter analysis of the tensions between salvation and reconciliation illuminates the differences between theologies that focus on divine love and those that engage consistently with human as well as divine love, leading towards the pivotal divisive issue of the Fall. Ratzinger/Benedict, Jenson and Kelly now provide significant extended models for quite different eschatological programmes, privileging the individual or the community.
The fifth chapter, ‘Memory and hope’, is key to the underlying thrust of the argument. How is our present society – and our loves and hates – to be encompassed in the eschatological fulfilment of love, divine and human? The Wounded Memorial, a commemorative plaque shot through with bullet and shell splinters, is worth a thousand words. Can we find a transformative mode of remembering? In Europe we are permanently confronted by our recent past. Today we may not always do God, but we are forced to do death. Can we see the soul not as solitary but as part of ‘larger bodies of love’ (p. 123)? The tradition offers us a plethora of images of heaven and hell, judgement, damnation. What sort of heaven do we hope for – ecclesial or more inclusive, joyfully full of our nearest and dearest, or mercifully free from some of them? Here, as in Dietrich Ritschl’s 1967 Memory and Hope, there is a strong Christological emphasis.
In Chapter 8, we reach another major chord, the ‘Christian praxis of hope and Europe’s future’. Jeanrond is well aware that there are profoundly important issues beyond Europe. But in this study he is specifically concerned with the crisis of the European project, and the rise of populist, tribal and nationalist sentiment, summed up in one iconic image: Brexit. He does not believe in the idea of a European soul, or of a Christian Europe, any more than he believes in Christian love. What matters is God’s love for all humanity, unconstrained by the bounds of ecclesial community, a love that embraces the otherness of the other. The development of a community of remembering in Europe may create a drive towards a transformative praxis of hope within the universe of God’s creation. The self is created as a relational self, drawing energy for human love together with others through the divine love – transparently clear in Bonhoeffer’s witness of radical hope for life together.
This is a book to read and to keep.