My Friend Johann Baptist Metz

Johann Baptist Metz died on December 2, 2019. He and I shared a theological and personal friendship marked by affection and respect. It was an honest friendship and it lasted for over fifty years. It started when two texts met: Metz’s essay “God before Us” and my essay “The Category of Novum in Christian Theology.” Both were published in the volume To Honor Ernst Bloch. ¹ Personally, Metz and I met for the first time in 1967 in Tübingen at the occasion of Bloch’s birthday. Together, we greeted Ernst Bloch and ate afterwards.

A few weeks later, we saw each other again during the famous Christian–Marxist dialogue in Marienbad in what was then the CSSR. Metz presented three theses on “political theology” for discussion: “The hope, which the church proclaims, is not hope in the Christian religion, but rather in the Kingdom of God as the future of the world.” After the “anthropological turn” of his teacher and friend Karl Rahner, Metz carried out his “eschatological turn.” In any case, he won me over with this phrase: “Only in an eschatological horizon does the world appear as history.” I gladly agreed: “Every theology must become a political theology as a theology critical of society.” The “Protocols of Marienbad” tell the story of hope in the unification of Europe by virtue of the Czech “socialism with a human face.” But this hope was steamrolled by Soviet tanks in Prague at the end of August in 1968. The Soviet Union died twenty-one years later.

But in Marienbad Baptist Metz had said something else yet, which became the center of his later thinking: “Christ was not crucified between two candlesticks on an altar, but outside of the city gates.” With that, he coined the theme Memoria Passionis, which occupied him for the rest of his life. ² I wrote my book The Crucified God. ³

My wife Elisabeth and I attended Baptist’s sixtieth birthday in Litzldorf, Upper Bavaria, where, together with Karl Rahner, he occasionally served as a substitute priest. We sat in the first row of the church and Baptist waved the palm leaf with the holy water with extra force over us Protestants. I took my revenge that evening with a speech on his cues: “The God before us,” “dangerous memories,” “religion is interruption,” “suffering,” “the scream.” He was a genius in getting to the heart of the situation and its challenges. The editors of Concilium, the journal to which I belonged as well, also gathered in Litzldorf. Together with Hans Küng, I edited the issues on ecumenism for twenty years. For this reason, Metz and I met each other every year during the week of Pentecost.

When Elisabeth and I turned seventy, we invited well-known theologians of our generation to Tübingen with the question: “How have I changed?” We wanted to join together biography and theology: Dorothee Sölle, Jörg Zink, Hans Küng, Norbert Greinacher, Johann Baptist Metz, Eberhard Jüngel, Philipp Potter, and the two of us. We planned three rounds of discussion with three persons each. Each had twenty minutes of time to share their personal experience and theological message. Then, there was time for cross-questioning and back-and-forth questioning. Metz reported of his wartime experience, when he found his company: “Dead men—dead men everywhere!” I had a corresponding experience, since I was one of the few survivors of my company, when it was run over by British tanks in 1944 in Holland. Then, we had fun. Baptist interjected: “You know more about the inner life of God than about the inner life of your Elisabeth.” I had a comeback: “And that you want to know so little about God, my dear Baptist, that’s what I don’t understand.” In the evening, we sang folk songs with Dorothee Sölle, which she had just discovered.

I also attended Metz’s eightieth birthday in Ahaus. There, Cardinal Ratzinger wanted to make up for having blocked Metz from being called to a chair in theology in Munich years earlier. The encounter was not a happy one. Finally, both of us were in Berlin when we gave lectures at the Guardini-chair. In Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream,” Baptist saw the “silent scream” of all those who suffer. My last encounter with him was in January 2017. I will miss my friend Johann Baptist Metz, as long as I am still here.