We still need the coming of God

Introductory remarks about conversion

I am a Christian convert. And the title of my contribution—“We Still Need the Coming of God”—entails more than a vague future hope. It is a conviction deduced from how central conversion is for the Moltmann that we know as theologian and celebrate today, and how necessary conversion remains for us as we move into unfinished worlds with the inspiration of his thoughts. By conversion, I mean recognizing and living into the mercy of God.

Hoffen und Denken

Jürgen Moltmann begins a 2016 collection of untranslated essays, Hoffen und Denken: Beitrage zur Zukunft der Theologie, with a verse from the Romantic German poet Friederich Hölderlin, “Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch.” But where danger is, the saving also grows.

For Moltmann, Hölderlin’s line captures his argument to reignite a love for life against what he describes as a love for death made palpable in global dangers like terrorism, nuclear weaponry, widening economic inequality, and climate change. ¹ A new religion of death arises and trivializes life. Yet for Moltmann, our belief in life and its meaning amounts to more than what we experience. Recent devastations may lead us to question the very purposes of life. Yet the eternal yes to life defined by the eternal love of God offers a pre-rational confidence that emboldens us to affirm life no matter what happens. ²

That confidence, according to Moltmann, sustains within us an awe for life lived in common. It also compels us to strive for ultimate peace through actions of justice for humanity and the earth. ³ How exactly? He makes three recommendations. First, he asserts that human life must simply and emphatically be affirmed. Saying yes to life cancels out the threat of any “no.” Second, he states that human life is participation. Taking part in life with interest prevents the sickness unto death that is apathy. Third, human life becomes intelligible (bestimmt) through the pursuit of fulfillment and that pursuit is the right of everyone. If the “pursuit of happiness” comes to mind as you consider Moltmann’s third recommendation, you’re still following him. He invites us to broaden the American ideal of pursuing happiness as a collective endeavor. For Moltmann, pursuing fulfillment as he means it is not a private ambition. It demands compassion that enables us to suffer and to cry out with others as we strive together to rekindle love for life. ⁴

The vision of his third recommendation widens as he concludes his essay by introducing a litany of questions regarding the significance of human existence and the nearness of God. He answers the questions he poses with a final recapitulation and reinterpretation of Hölderlin’s line—But where danger is, the saving also grows. For Moltmann, it is precisely in the predicament of increasingly dangerous and inconsequential life, where God seems at best remote, that, ironically, salvation draws near.

The turn

Over half a century ago, the same line from Hölderlin—But where danger is, the saving also grows—appears as a focal point within a lecture from Martin Heidegger. Die Kehre, or The Turn, is the fourth and final contribution in a series of lectures known in English as “Insight into that Which Is,” or the Bremen Lectures. The Bremen lectures later became synthesized into The Question concerning Technology.

In The Bremen Lectures, the danger for Heidegger is modern technology. By modern technology, Heidegger meant more than the improvement of architecture, devices, services, and selves for example. Rather, modern technology is an age where persons and all things become commodities and stockpileable goods. As modern technology instrumentalizes the entirety of life, it separates and shrouds us from the truth of the world as it actually is. In “The Turn,” Heidegger conceived of Hölderlin’s salvation as the truth of being that flickers unexpectedly within the dangerous ways that modern technology makes us forgetful of Being’s truth. So, whereas Moltmann appeals to Hölderlin to probe the nearness of God, Heidegger quoted Hölderlin to order to examine the nearness of the truth of Being.

An associate professor of philosophy at Emory University—Andrew J. Mitchell—translated the Bremen lectures into English. Mitchell reminds us that the Bremen lectures were the first public lectures Heidegger delivered after World War II, when he was officially banned from teaching. It is not so much the particular content of Heidegger’s essay—“The Turn”—to which I want our attention drawn, but rather to Mitchell’s reminder—that these lectures, these teachings from Heidegger, arise out of a postwar context.

Their dual use of Hölderlin amounts to more than a rhetorical coincidence leading to inverse intellectual ends. It is a poetic clue leading to a concrete historical simultaneity that motivates their diverging intellectual programs. That clue also leads us to recognize our share in what historically links them and what that entails for our theological responsibilities going forward.

Moltmann, Heidegger, and World War II

A 67-year gap separates Moltmann’s Hoffen und Denken from Heidegger’s Die Kehre (“The Turn”). The significance of that span of time nevertheless fades when we recall that their ways of recognizing, discerning, and teaching how truth appears in reality emerges from the shadows of World War II. The philosophy of Heidegger grew with his dedication to the Nazi party. Moltmann’s vocation as a theologian began not only with his being a prisoner of war. It also started before that with his time as a soldier enlisted and active in the Wehrmacht.

In A Broad Place: An Autobiography, Moltmann recounts his deficient religious education as a child and how his father joined the Wehrmacht in 1939. Moltmann rode horses in the mounted section of the Hitler Youth, and in February of 1943, Moltmann himself was conscripted and made an air force auxiliary. He manned an anti-aircraft machine gun while stationed in Schwanenwieck, a section of Hamburg. On July 24, 1943, the British Royal Air Force commenced Operation Gomorrah. They dropped explosives and then incendiaries reaching up to 1,000 degrees with the aim of torching the city.

Moltmann’s counterpart—Gerhard Schopper—was torn apart and decapitated when an explosive bomb hit the platform upon which he was standing. Moltmann survived with only a few splinter wounds on his shoulder and cheekbone. He also recounts losing his friend Peter Schmidt who was killed near Magdeburg in May 1945 just before the war ended. Those horrific experiences led Moltmann to ask himself, “Why am I alive and not dead, too, like the friend at my side?” “I felt the guilt of survival and searched for the meaning of continued life. I knew that there had to be some reason why I was still alive. During that night I became a seeker after God.” He converted. And his conversion that evening is the vanishing point for the Moltmann we know today.

Biographer Rüdiger Safranski writes that just after completing his doctorate, Heidegger also served in the German army, in 1914, at the start of World War I. But he was deferred due to “limited fitness.” ⁵

After the war’s end, the German Empire ceased to exist. Hyperinflation ravaged the country’s economy. A stamp in 1923 cost 5 billion marks. Germans burned money to warm their homes and children played with stacks of bills. New measures by the German Central Bank and the US Dawes Plan helped revaluate the currency and stabilize the economic outlook by removing troops from the Ruhr area and reorganizing debt structures and taxes related to war reparations. But the American Stock Market crash of 1929 also sunk Germany’s ability to participate in such economic recuperation. Unemployment reached 30% in 1932. Still Heidegger rose within the ranks of the German elite, and he did it with venomous political and philosophical prejudice.

On November 3, 1933, supporting the German vote to separate from the League of Nations, he declared, “Let not axioms or ‘ideas’ be the rules of your Being. The Führer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and its law.” ⁶ His public devotion to national socialism also had a shadow-side of anti-Semitism held in secret. The year that Moltmann’s father joined the Wehrmacht, and a decade after Being and Time set the tone for 20th-century Western philosophy, Heidegger described Judaism in his now infamous Black Notebooks as “scheming” and “worldless.”

The Black Notebooks

The Black Notebooks encompass nine volumes of Heidegger’s not yet fully published Gesamtausgabe (Complete works). The project currently exceeds 100 volumes. In the notebooks with black covers, Heidegger journaled an assortment of thoughts from the 1930s to the 1970s.

His designation of the Jews as worldless essentially dislocated them from the entirety of Being as Heidegger understood it. ⁷ In another untranslated volume from the Black Notebooks—Anmerkungen I–V dating from around the time that Moltmann endured Operation Gomorrah and lost his comrade Gerhard Schopper and then three years later, his friend Peter Schmidt, 1942 to 1948, Heidegger wrote that the Jews must be left to fight amongst themselves, for they stand outside of the Greek origins of what we know as the Western World. In order to achieve what is truly of the West, we must part from them in order to start anew. ⁸ In The Black Notebooks, we witness in fragments Heidegger’s philosophical worry that the Jews have contaminated the true Dasein or Being of the people. And they must be banished from it. Incidentally, Americans, Christians, and the Chinese are also discussed as foes in Heidegger’s Being- and history-based apocalyptic.

Safranski calls Heidegger’s Nazism “decisionist.” He denies any anti-Semitism, at least with regard to the ideological lunacy of the Nazi party. Heidegger, after all, had a Jewish mentor, Jewish lover, and Jewish students. Yet Peter Trawny in Heidegger & the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, completely disagrees. According to Trawny, that Heidegger embedded his anti-Semitic statements within the Black Notebooks that were withheld from the public view as long as possible shows how deeply conceived and carefully considered his bigotry was. He hid his anti-Semitism from the Nationalist Socialist party only because he felt as if his bias had more sophisticated toxin than theirs.

I will not go any further into the anti-Semitism of Heidegger. What I am trying to show, rather, is how the evolution of his thought during and after World War II can be seen as a striking counterpoint to the transformational theological program that follows from Moltmann after his decision for God. The difference I am highlighting is not simply a matter of two German men taking two divergent vocational paths in response to a shared historical tragedy. Their opposing paths embody how differently they understand the salvation that grows in the midst of danger. Heidegger’s thinking does not bloom as a result of conversion. It metastasizes from a growing infection of philosophical perversion. Conversion, however, changes everything for Moltmann. And his transformation and ensuing life as a theologian brings into focus the necessity of conversion for us now, especially with respect to our history with World War II and its continued implications for ministry and theological education.

The US atomic bombings

On August 6, 1945, the United States eclipsed the fury of Operation Gomorrah by incinerating the city of Hiroshima with an atomic bomb wryly named “Little Boy.” Three days later on August 9, 1945 a second atomic bomb named “Fat Boy” destroyed Nagasaki. Much has been written about the strategy behind the atomic bombings. I want to bring attention instead to the fact that the United States has never issued an apology, and suggest that as long as it remains undone, we excuse ourselves from admitting how unprecedented violence secures our modern livelihood. We also fail to respond and to live into the mercy of God. Why are we alive and not dead too, like our Japanese sisters and brothers?

Kiyoshi Tanimoto

In 1940, Kiyoshi Tanimoto (1909–86) graduated from Candler School of Theology with a Bachelor of Divinity. From there, he went on to serve in churches in Los Angeles, Okinawa, and Hiroshima, where he ministered until his retirement 40 years later. Three kilometers separated him from the epicenter of the atomic blast. Though he suffered radiation sickness from the aftermath, he survived without burns or major injury. He even saved his wife and child as he headed toward the carnage. He also passed many victims along the way. Guilty that he did not stop to help, he questioned himself like Moltmann did—“Why am I alive and not dead, too, like the friend at my side?”

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Hersey documented Tanimoto’s tale of survival in the New Yorker and then published it in the bestseller, Hiroshima. ⁹ With help from a former Emory roommate who read the account, Tanimoto went on to create the International World Peace Day Movement, which designated April 6 as a day to promote world peace. In 1948, 26 countries held International World Peace Day events. The Methodist Board of Missions and Church Extensions also resourced Tanimoto financially, which allowed him to commence a 15-month, whirlwind speaking tour across 256 cities in 31 states. He addressed audiences such as the Department of State, UNESCO, Pearl S. Buck, Albert Einstein, and Harry Emerson Fosdick. The talks led to the founding of the Hiroshima Peace Center and later the Moral Adoption Project, which built orphanages for war orphans. In 1986, Candler conferred upon him an honorary Doctor of Divinity. During the School of Theology’s centennial, he received posthumously a Centennial Medal. Pitts library holds a Kiyoshi Tanimoto archival Collection (1938–90).

The continued need for conversion

Conversion within Tanimoto himself, his former roommate, and the United Methodist Church led to his remarkable work. Yet his influence has largely vanished from cultural consciousness, as has most outrage about the precedent and barbarism of US atomic warfare. We rightfully celebrate faithful people like Tanimoto. Yet I have never experienced a sermon, liturgy, or theological lesson that engaged our participation in singular atomic warfare tantamount to war crimes against civilians. Could we at least say that we’re sorry in churches? If not, are we who we think we are and do we worship in spirit and truth?

After a visit to the Hiroshima International Peace Conference in 1984, Sansei poet and activist Janice Mirikitani describes in the poem “Shadow in Stone” how she put her mouth “to the tongues of a river, its rhythms, its living water weeping on the sides of lanterns each floating flame, a flickering voice murmuring over and over as I put my mouth to echo over and over never again.” Her verse from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial restates what Hölderlin sensed: “Where the danger is, the saving grows.” Her verse also makes real again the expectant hope of today’s lectionary passage from John 4 where the woman at the well declares “I know that Messiah is coming.” ¹⁰ Because if the horrific memories of the atomic bombings still fail to elicit a US apology, we still need the coming of God to convert us to live into the truth.