Abstract
For six decades Jürgen Moltmann has wrestled harder than any contemporary theologian with eschatology and the character of Christian hope. “When my wife, Elisabeth, died in 2016, however, my perspective on these matters became intensely personal, and I was forced to rethink my theological position” (vii). This slender volume, which aims to prepare its readers for resurrection in eternal life, articulates how the author's mind has changed, held steadfast, and been deepened de profundis.
The book is organized into five chapters. Chapter 1 addresses “Two Questions” (1–4): “Is There Life After Death?” and “Eternal Life: What Are We Asking?” The first receives an indirect answer: “Our mortal love of those we cherish is an echo of the divine love” and of eternal life (2). To speak of eternal “liveliness,” “life in the eternal present” (4), rather than eternal life, “shifts the focus to the intensity rather than the longevity of the experience” (3). Emphasizing the testimony of Mary Magdalene (7–12), chapter 2 returns to Scripture to consider “The Resurrection of Jesus Christ.” In nineteen pages (5–23) Moltmann synopsizes the convergence of theology, Christology, anthropology, ecclesiology, and cosmology. Christ, who experienced the betrayal, despair, and abandonment of the damned (Gal 3:13), is chosen by God in a cosmic event that “pull[s] all of humanity from the ‘kingdom of death’ into the light of eternal life,” “a collective, inclusive act that encompasses all of humankind and all of creation” (13). Divine solidarity with humanity manifests itself in Christ's passion and resurrection, “the beginning of God's new world” (19).
In “Our Resurrection in the Hour of Our Death” (chapter 3), Moltmann reconsiders a position he held in The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (1995): “That which I understood then as a ‘promise’ [of God's kingdom] applying to the future,” with a reservation regarding “what is not yet present within Christ's dominion,” “I see today as a ‘real beginning’” (37). At our death “we awake in a hopeful place … a first step toward resurrection into eternal life [that is] inherent in our fellowship with Christ” (37). While believers live as children of God alongside Jesus, their “first-born” brother (17, 21; Rom 8:29), “[t]he Spirit of the resurrection blows from the resurrected Christ throughout all of the history of mankind and the cosmos” (38). Chapter 4 contemplates “The Death and Resurrection of a Living Soul” (39–63). Here a primary concern is to open the conceptual aperture of “soul” as the “inner life” to the holistic entirety of a Lebensgestalt: the shape and story of human life as lived in natural, social, and divine relationships (47, 50, 59). Because death cannot sever creation's connection to the God of steadfast love (57), “Death is a portal to the transfiguring light” (61), an awakening of life in its entirety to everlasting liveliness (59–60). The final chapter's contention is summarized by its subtitle, “The Primal Light Shines in the Darkness” (65–77). While the darkness of radical evil and death has not yet been completely expelled, Christ's resurrection marks “the dawn of eternity” (74), the irrepressible light that has destroyed hell, shines even now, and “will banish darkness from creation forevermore, until we stand together in the light” (77).
Like Paul, who ponders this life's residual degeneracy from the standpoint of God's raising of the crucified Christ (1 Cor 15:20–57) and speaks of both the Lord's coming (1 Thess 4:15) and his desire to be with Christ by dying (Phil 1:23b), Moltmann grapples with faith's response to an ineluctable mystery. The paradox is built into Scripture: “Even the darkness is not dark to [the LORD]; the night is as bright as the day” (Ps 139:12; cited, 76). Moltmann's reference to Christ's resurrection as der Morgenglanz der Ewigkeit, eternity's dawning, is exegetically insightful. So, too, is his reminder of the Nicene Creed's important addition (“we look for the life of the world to come”) to the Apostle's Creed (“the resurrection of the dead”). The latter stresses the personal side of eternal life; the former, “life in harmony with everything living in the new creation” (62).
Lacking customary academic apparatus, “This [book] is not intended as a work of scholarship” (vii–viii). But make no mistake: it is theologically well wrought and as accessible to pastors as anything its author has ever written. Drawing on Dante and Luther, Bach and Orthodox liturgy, it is Moltmann's reasoned testimony to the living Christ, “standing … on the opposite shore to receive us” (21).