Abstract
This article will attempt to offer contributions from the systematic theologian, Jürgen Moltmann, to practicing clinicians of psychotherapy and counseling. It will begin by introducing Moltmann and three of his major theological themes of hope, pathos, and liberation. For Moltmann, hope is linked to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The presence of God in the person of Jesus represents God’s divine pathos or willingness to be vulnerably affected by human suffering. Liberation is then found in the suffering way of Jesus Christ. Next, the article will discuss how each of these three theological themes can be integrated with the work of psychotherapy as well as how Moltmann’s theology provides a critique of contemporary models of psychotherapy that attempt only to reduce or eliminate suffering. Finally, an example is used to draw out the implications of the critique as well as offer applications for clinical integrative practice.
Keywords
Christian life is a form of practice which consists in following the crucified Christ, and it changes both man himself and the circumstances in which he lives (p. 25).
I had the opportunity to meet Jürgen Moltmann in the spring of 2008 while at a conference at Duke University. He was a kind man, not very tall, and his German accent was thick. I walked past him in a hallway. His presence was unassuming and I might have missed him if it were not for the fact that he looked right at me. His white hair and wide-rimmed glasses were unmistakable. For me, it was like running into a celebrity or rockstar in an unexpected public setting. With a racing heart and almost short of breath, I asked him to sign a copy of his own autobiography, A Broad Place. He generously agreed and we had a short but memorable conversation in which I told him about using his theological ideas as part of my doctoral dissertation. He kindly asked to read it someday, gave me his address (as he told me that he did not have an email address), and went on his way. I was a bit starstruck, but his gentle and welcoming presence put me a bit more at ease as I was talking to one of the great theologians of our time.
To introduce this man and to make the case that he has something relevant to say to clinicians, know that Jürgen Moltmann is praised for being more “comprehensive and wide ranging” than any other systematic theologian (Rasmusson, 1995) and more influential throughout the world than any other contemporary Protestant theologian (Bauckham, 1989). And while he has his critics for his own inconsistencies within his broad systematic project (Dorrien, 1990; Zimany, 1977), it would be difficult to judge his work as insignificant. His wide influence on political theology and liberation movements lends testament to his own emphasis on the critical issues facing Christianity from the second half of the 20th century to today and beyond. Even more important, and perhaps relevant to our current context, is that Moltmann attempts an approach at a Christian “theology after Auschwitz” (Moltmann, 1973/1993b, p. 277). If there is a modern picture of the suffering of persons, Auschwitz is that, and Moltmann places this human suffering and the need for liberation at the heart of his theological vision. This vision might just be something that clinicians of psychotherapy need to hear amid the task of sitting with those that suffer.
Biographical Information
To begin, I want to offer a brief biography of Jürgen Moltmann. Moltmann was not raised in a Christian home. Rather, he was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1926 and raised by parents that were quite secular and who eventually left the city of Hamburg and moved to the country to appreciate a life of farming and belong closer to nature. They valued education and Moltmann quickly became enamored by mathematics and the sciences. In 1843, Moltmann was conscripted into the German army along with his entire school class. What followed was that Moltmann, as a young soldier in the German army, saw firsthand the carnage that was World War II. His war experience began as youthful duty, although he acknowledges, “I was always shot at but never fired a shot myself. And that was all to the good” (Moltmann, 2006/2008, p. 22). However, it led to his own disillusionment and suffering. In 1945, while perpetually on the run and hiding from British soldiers, he was eventually discovered and captured. He states, “They didn’t shoot me, and, more than that, the next morning their lieutenant gave me a mess tin of baked beans. It was the first food I had tasted for days, and I have loved baked beans ever since” (p. 25).
While in a prisoner-of-war camp he was confronted by the horrific atrocities brought about by his own people toward the victims of concentration camps. He states that depression overcame him with a “feeling of profound shame at having to share in shouldering the disgrace of one’s own people” (p. 29). He was provided a Bible by an army chaplain. Having been raised in a secular world, he had no idea what to do with such a book, but he found “an echo from [his] own soul” (p. 30) in the lament of Psalms. He also read the Gospel of Mark and in Jesus’ cry on the cross, he knew that a God that suffers with the sufferer understood him. He pursued his introductory theological studies in an educational prisoner-of-war camp that was sponsored by the gift of an American businessman and the British YMCA. Upon his return to Germany, he states, Shattered and broken, the survivors of my generation were then returning from camps and hospitals to the lecture room. A theology which did not speak of God in the sight of the one who was abandoned and crucified would have nothing to say to us then. (Moltmann, 1973/1993b, p. 1)
Moltmann’s newfound faith and theological inspiration would turn to disappointment as Germany soon turned to systems and structures, many of which were supported by the church that attempted to forget the atrocities of the war and return Germany to its previous cultural state. However, inspired by the Student Christian Movement in Britain, Moltmann sought out theological training at the University of Göttingen, whose educators were participants in the “confessing church” of Germany and were inspired by the theology of Karl Barth. Following earning his doctorate from the University of Göttingen, Moltmann would serve as a pastor for 5 years and then have multiple instructional assignments before accepting the position of Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Tübingen in 1967. Moltmann would receive many accolades, but the invitation to deliver the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh (1984–1985) put him on “cloud nine” as the only prior German theologians to give these lectures had been Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Emil Brunner, and Rudolf Bultmann (Moltmann, 2006/2008, p. 295). Moltmann retired in 1994 but has continued to write and inspire many with a theology that he resists in calling systematic, as he hopes that others will “solve the riddles” in his theology and “explain its obscurities” (Moltmann, 2006/2008, p. 382). But one thing has been clear in the work of Jürgen Moltmann, he has been determined in his life to work toward a theology that sees “God in Auschwitz and Auschwitz in the crucified God” (Moltmann, 1973/1993b, p. 278).
Seminal Theological Themes
It is honestly difficult to summarize the theological themes of one of the most comprehensive theological minds of our time. Moltmann traverses the theological terrains of eschatology, ecclesiology, Christology, and pneumatology. He explores the trinity, the crucifixion, the creation, and the coming kingdom. His thoughts are expansive and his themes are complex and approaches major theological ideas from multiple angles. Nonetheless, he is known by many as a theologian of hope and liberation, and so I will expand on these major themes in his work. In between, I will concentrate on his specific idea of pathos, which I believe is an important link that moves the act of hope into a way of liberation.
Hope
Moltmann perhaps has a starting point for his theological vision: hope. For Moltmann (1991/1992), the Christian community is a narrative community that is “shaped by the re-calling and making present of [its] common origin, and by the shared voyage of discovery into memories” (p. 25). This story is not just a collection of ideas but a shared communal identity that reflects the person of Jesus. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are therefore the origin and that which the church remembers within history that shape Christianity because they represent for the Christian tradition God’s promises for the future of humanity and creation. It is the totality of the historical life of Jesus from which the Christian tradition can proclaim the possibilities for the future of the tradition in hope for the fulfillment of God’s promises. Hope, therefore, looks forward to the day when the promises are fulfilled and the truth of the Christian tradition is manifested (Moltmann, 1965/1993d). The reality of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is the assurance of the future of the tradition; and it is the totality of Christ’s reality that guides the life of the Christian tradition and its theological story.
There is not full space to expound upon the theological significance that Moltmann finds in the resurrection of Christ. However, Jesus’ way of living is not something that can easily be glossed over. Moltmann points out that Jesus himself became poor and his works put an emphasis on redeeming and liberating the true Other—those persons who are poor, oppressed, and at the fringe of society. When Jesus performs liberating acts such as casting out unclean spirits or healing the sick, he is actually proclaiming the good news of what God intends for God’s creation. These are not just miracles that supplement Jesus’ message of salvation to the world; these acts of liberation are the message. This is really the theological centerpiece. Jesus did not bring an idea that must be understood, believed, or accepted. Instead, he bore witness to the Father in his embodied way of life. As a whole, the entire life of Jesus becomes the good news to the poor because God has become identified, through the person of Christ, with those who are destitute, oppressed, and dehumanized. The entire life of Jesus reminds all persons that God intends to bring bodily salvation in this life to all people and parts of creation that experience brokenness. The messianic life reminds all people that God loves God’s creation and loves life in creation. The salvation that God brings is not a means to escape creation, nor a knowledge that transcends creation, but rather it is a way to redeem bodily life within creation (Moltmann, 1989/1993f).
Moreover, the culmination of the life of Jesus is found in the way that Jesus died; and the character of Christ is best understood as rooted in his suffering and death upon a cross. It is the cross that stands at the center of Christ’s history, making the cross the hermeneutic through which Moltmann interprets the messianic life of Jesus as well as the very nature of God. It is out of the suffering and death of Christ that the Christian tradition comes to understand the character and Trinitarian nature of God (Moltmann, 1980/1993e). Moltmann avoids discussing the nature of the Trinity in terms of three substances or three subjects. Instead, he proposes “a social doctrine of the Trinity,” which acts as a hermeneutic for interpreting the Christian narrative in terms of relationships and communities, rather than separate objects in isolation (p. 19).
Pathos
To appreciate the social nature of the Trinity, Moltmann (1980/1993e) begins with the suffering that was experienced by Christ the Son of God and therefore vicariously by the Father. He states, “[In] the history of the world’s suffering, the crucified Christ is our sole means of access to knowledge of God” (p. 40). He defines this suffering as active suffering—“the voluntary laying oneself open to another and allowing oneself to be intimately affected by [another]; that is to say, the suffering of passionate love” (p. 23). For Moltmann, it is God’s ability to lay God’s self vulnerably open to creation that allows God to love creation. If God were not able to experience suffering in every possible way, then God would not be able to fully experience love for another. But because God has experienced the suffering of Christ for God’s creation, God is able to lay God’s self open for the relationship to creation. Consequently, God is vulnerable to experiencing the pain and rejection that comes from being fully open to experience the other. This love that God experiences for God’s creation, Moltmann distinguishes from a need or deficiency—that God is somehow not complete without creation. Rather, the very nature of God’s being is God’s “superabundance and overflowing” love (p. 23). In this sense, God is not apathetic, or unaffected by God’s creation. It is not God’s sovereignty, God’s capacity to stand outside or above creation, that is the essence of God’s character. Rather, God is pathetic (God’s pathos)—entirely open to being affected through relationship to creation. And it is God’s pathos that is God’s identity.
It is God’s pathos that allows God to reach out of God’s self and enter into relationship with creation, and specifically with God’s chosen people with whom God makes God’s self a covenantal partner (Moltmann, 1980/1993e, p. 25). This pathos is the origin of the covenant that God formed with Israel and allows God to be open to suffering with God’s covenantal people. In a sense, God’s pathos means that God’s own existence inevitably ties God to the history of God’s chosen people. God’s identity is tied to a historical, corporate, and embodied way of life. Moltmann states, “Creation, liberation, covenant, history and redemption spring from the pathos of God” (p. 25). God’s pathos leads God into such a relationship with all human persons in such a way that God suffers with humanity as humanity suffers with the brokenness of creation. And though Moltmann states that God is entirely free, God’s own character inextricably ties God to the covenant with God’s chosen people in such a way that God has therefore chosen to share a destiny with Israel and consequently the Church, all of humanity, and all of creation. The relationship that humankind can have with God is therefore not one of striving for perfection, but one where Godforsaken people can commune with a God who has humbled God’s self by suffering and becoming Godforsaken with God’s people (Moltmann, 1973/1993b). The hope for humanity is in God’s pathos that accordingly frees humanity.
This freedom is God’s friendship that God offers to all of humanity. As God is free, God offers this freedom to humankind, inviting humankind to love in return, but opens God’s self to the possibility of rejection through humanity’s freedom to choose (p. 56). God’s love is therefore made complete in the sense that the Father, who loves the only begotten Son, sends the Son to humanity, opening God’s self to suffering and rejection, and revealing God’s very character to all of creation. The suffering of God made evident in Christ’s passion goes to the very heart of who God is. The paradox of the cross is that in weakness and vulnerability is found true strength and power. It is in this paradox that the deity of God is made known (Moltmann, 1973/1993b). To understand God is to understand the hope found in the cross of Christ and the “inextricable suffering, death and hopeless rejection” that comes with it (p. 277). The hope found in this messianic way of life is in Christ’s vulnerability and openness that reveals the openness of God that is God’s Triune nature.
Liberation
Regarding the messianic way of life, Moltmann (1975/1993a, p. 275) states, “Wherever people experience and hold on to the meaning of human life, a certain way of living comes into being.” The heart of this way of being is the proclamation of the year of the Lord’s favor, found in both Luke 4:18-19 and Isaiah 61:1-2. Jesus pronounces his messianic mission as one that brings good news to the poor, healing to the sick, and acceptance to the outcast. This is the mission of the church that is brought by the way of Jesus Christ. The church is therefore to practice a way: participation in acts of liberation that bring about freedom from the compulsion of sin, freedom from idols of power and destruction, freedom from isolation, freedom from sickness, freedom from poverty, freedom from captivity, and freedom from all forms of oppression. As such, the redemption that God desires from creation is begun when the church practices liberation in this way.
Christian practices of liberation seek freedom by opening new possibilities of life. Christian liberation desires freedom on all levels of human existence. This notion of freedom exists from the beginning in the open freedom of the Trinity that is available to creation through God’s willingness to suffer. For Moltmann, the Christian tradition justifies human agency by starting with God’s patient preservation of the world through God’s divine pathos (Moltmann, 1980/1993e). In God’s own creative nature, God is entirely free to create the world; yet, in God’s own freedom, God chooses to lay God’s self open to the world, allowing God’s self to be intimately affected by God’s own creation. Consequently, God establishes freedom for all created things by allowing them the space to live and create for themselves. In doing this, God embodies the courage to vulnerably accept creation’s free response to God, which includes the possibility for rejection or for love.
Moltmann (1980/1993e) contends that the pathos of the Triune God is made most evident in the incarnation of Christ. In Christ, God humbles God’s self and demonstrates the courage to be affected by God’s own creation. Christ’s willingness to go to the cross and suffer at the hands of human persons who despised and rejected God is God’s sign that God is willing to enter into the experience of those who suffer in the world. The Christian way of life that reflects the messianic character of Christ and the Triune nature of God, therefore, means that Christian persons are called to enter into “solidarity” with those who experience forms of suffering and oppression (Moltmann, 1973/1993b, p. 25). Christian acts of liberation become those acts that open Christ’s followers to being affected by the suffering and oppression of others. Liberation requires that Christians not just know or understand the pathos of God but rather must embody the pathos of God and demonstrate the virtue of courage by entering into the broken experiences of others and bringing about the hope for a new creation.
Implications for Clinicians
The implications of Moltmann’s theology for clinicians are potentially boundless. Mining his robust work for themes that offer meaning and significance for the work of clinicians can be a rich experience and I think a lot more can be done to explore how his concepts might inform psychotherapeutic practice. However, for this purpose, I will draw on implications rooted in the theological themes expounded upon above: hope, pathos, and liberation. I will also offer what may be a theological critique of psychotherapy that emerges from Moltmann’s theology.
Hope
Moltmann (1965/1993d) understands hope to be tied up in expectation and anticipation. While it may seem obvious, this sort of anticipation is crucial to the practice of psychotherapy. Despite any client’s resistance to change that psychotherapy offers, an effective therapist is able to offer an unwavering sense of hope that change is still possible. The therapist is crucial in instilling within the client not only a belief that what is new and potentially unknown will be worth the effort, but also an anticipation that something new will truly manifest. Subsequently, there is often a close connection between the hopes of the therapist and the hopes of the client. The hope that is offered by the therapist is that the new ways of connecting with and relating with the therapist are real and can translate to the “real world” outside of psychotherapy if the client is committed to engaging with and struggling through the difficulties of breaking through the old into the new.
Establishing hope is a necessary component of any practice of psychotherapy, for in hope there is the expectation of and desire for something new. Moltmann’s theology suggests that when human persons, in suffering, experience the possibility of something different, they are confronted with the hope that is the redemption of all of creation. It is this hope for freedom that is the source of creativity and imagination, which are necessary aspects in psychotherapy that bring what is anticipated into life. The therapist must offer this hope through faith in the therapeutic process. And the evidence of this hope is in the therapist’s capacity to embody the virtue of creativity that is necessary to imagine relational life differently. The therapist must be able to creatively elicit a new hope out of the old longings of a client. Or as Mitchell (1993) articulates it, what is most therapeutic is when the psychotherapist is able to “find opportunities for new growth embedded in old hopes, to see in the patient’s hope a dialectical relationship between the static and familiar and the longing for something fuller and more rewarding” (p. 221). It is up to the therapist to hear the cries of the client’s suffering and the client’s longings for something new within the seemingly fixed context of something old. The therapist that embodies the virtue of creativity is able to imagine the potential of newness where old hopes had seemingly gone.
For Moltmann (1985/1993c), the source of this creativity is in the Triune God that demonstrates the imagination to bring forth and arrange something new where there once was nothing. While the client certainly brings something to therapy, rather than nothing, the vicious cycles of oppression can leave persons experiencing nothingness from a lack of hope. It is up to the therapist to reflect the creative nature of God and offer new possibilities while making meaning of the client’s relational experiences. The therapist must directly challenge the hopelessness of the client’s situation by offering the client alternatives. Even the oppressed can learn helplessness and, on occasion, resist liberation because a new life is fraught with uncertainty. The therapist must embody the virtue of courage that is found in Christ’s messianic mission in order that the client might embody the creativity necessary to imagine choices that lead to a redeemed relational life.
Pathos
While hope may be activated from the therapist’s imagination and creativity, these are only likely to be transmitted to the client in as much as the psychotherapist can join with the client. A client that is not joined in the client’s suffering is not likely to experience the hope that is offered in the therapeutic process. This brings the discussion back to Moltmann’s (1980/1993e) previous notion of active suffering—“the voluntary laying oneself open to another and allowing oneself to be intimately affected by [another]; that is to say, the suffering of passionate love” (p. 23). The necessity of active suffering suggests that psychotherapy requires that the therapist have the courage to begin the transformative process of therapy by entering into what Stephen A. Mitchell (1988) refers to as the client’s relational matrix. This matrix is the developmental intersection and interdependence of the various interpersonal relationships and intrapsychic relationships that make up a person’s identity. A person is not simply a subjective “I,” but rather a culmination of dependent relationships that have shaped the person. To sit with a person is not just to accept them as an independent self, but to see them as a product of human relationships. In so doing, a therapist sits side-by-side with the client, attempting to make meaning out of the client’s relational experiences. Full engagement in the therapeutic practice requires that the therapist open themselves up to the possibility of being affected by the client’s way of relating by entering into a relationship that is determined by the client’s relational matrix. It takes courage on the part of the therapist to embody this opening of self, or what Moltmann would identify as God’s pathos, and be willing to enter into suffering through the relationship with the client.
Mitchell’s (1997) notion of “self-reflective responsiveness” is a therapeutic model that incorporates a liberating use of what I see Moltmann identifying as active suffering and the divine pathos. As the therapist engages in a relationship with the client, the therapist is in a constant mode of evaluating the effect that the relationship is having on both the client and the therapist. In being entirely emotionally and psychologically present with the client, the therapist reflects what Moltmann (1980/1993e) identifies as God’s willingness to take people “seriously to the point of suffering with them in their struggles” and being wounded in relationship with them (p. 25–26). In asking the questions, “How am I being affected by this client right now?” and “Who have I become as a result of my present relationship with this client?,” the therapist is able to make meaning of the client’s relational matrix from a position within. At the same time, the therapist should be asking how their relationship with the client is affecting the client as well.
Through the therapeutic process of self-reflection and other-reflection, the therapist is able to increase their own capacity to choose a response to the client that is for the client. The intent behind any response is to be therapeutic—to bring freedom by increasing the client’s own capacity to choose, and particularly the capacity to choose that which is life affirming. That is, in constantly reevaluating the effects of the relationship on both the therapist and the client, the therapist is continuously making decisions regarding which responses to the client will be helpful to the client in making meaning from their relational patterns. As the client is able to make meaning, the client is potentially freed from the vicious cycles that bind clients to past experiences and open the client to the capacity for what Moltmann calls “the love of life.”
The practice of psychotherapy not only requires the courage of the therapist but also requires that the client embody the virtue of courage to be emotionally and psychologically affected by the relationship with the therapist. As the pathos of God entails God’s courage to trust God’s covenantal relationship with God’s chosen people, as God moves out of God’s self and into a relationship with God’s people (Moltmann, 1980/1993e), likewise both the therapist and client must have the courage to move out of their own selves and into the therapeutic relationship. Even so, as the therapeutic relationship moves into new relational terrain, the client is confronted with that which is ambiguous or even entirely unknown. Out of fear, the client will inevitably (and usually unconsciously) attempt to force the relationship into patterns that are familiar. However, as the therapist models the courage to tolerate these tendencies, and perhaps the grace to accept the client despite these tendencies, the client is confronted with new promises for what is relationally possible and will be offered liberation through new choices.
Liberation
While increasing a person’s capacity to choose offers freedom, true liberation in the Christian tradition is present only in as much as it frees a person to live life in a way that participates in God’s love. A crucial implication of Moltmann’s theology for psychotherapy is that if psychotherapy is to act as a true practice of liberation, it must promote a way of life that participates in God’s love of life, which he states: . . .links human beings with all other living things, which are not merely alive but want to live. And yet it challenges human beings in their strange liberty towards life; for life which can be deliberately denied, has to be affirmed before it can be lived. Love for life says “yes” to life in spite of its sicknesses, handicaps and infirmities, and opens the door to a ‘life against death.’” (Moltmann, 1991/1992, p. 86)
Love of life cannot be reduced to a knowledge that allows persons only to be free from, but also participates in embodied practices that promote a way to be liberated to a life that loves others. Psychotherapy, at its best, offers a hope that opens up new life into great responsibility to others and all of creation. The purpose of liberation is not only to open people to choices that offer life, but also to open people to one another. As Moltmann (1980/1993e) points out: The more open-mindedly people live with one another, for one another and in one another in the fellowship of the Spirit, the more they will become one with the Son and the Father, and one in the Son and the Father. (p. 158)
In fact, the Christian hope for the future is one in which all oppressed persons are liberated and therefore sit together at the Eucharistic table of fellowship (Moltmann, 1975/1993a).
In the very act of seeking out psychotherapy, the client is demonstrating the courage necessary to experience liberation. In the courage of moving into new relational terrain with the therapist, the client is opening the client’s self up to liberation. It is within the conversation of liberation that Moltmann (1973/1993b), himself, acknowledges a need for psychotherapy or counseling in the world because liberation entails freeing those who are in places of psychological and emotional bondage. The church’s practices of liberation are placed alongside those forms of psychotherapy that seek to develop a “freedom of experience and action” (p. 294). As such, the Christian faith can work with or partner with psychotherapy as both intend to bring freedom to those who are oppressed. As Moltmann states: [If the Christian faith] makes human apathy superfluous and destroys it by virtue of the passion of God, it is a partner in the attempt to liberate man from the gods and laws of repression, self-love, parricide and illusion. To free sick man from his psychological vicious circles it offers not only the critical rationality and ego-support which are often summoned up against the psychological strategies of evil, but also the new spontaneous liveliness which that critical rationality needs as the atmosphere in which it can develop freely. (p. 314)
Psychotherapy, along with other practices of liberation, and along with the church, can act to end the cycles of destruction in people’s lives and provide “a barrier against anxiety and the threat of death on the level of the feelings, that is, a love of life” (p. 314). Here, perhaps there is a place not only for psychotherapy to work alongside the church but perhaps the Christian faith provides the context that justifies the particular liberating acts of the practice of psychotherapy in the first place.
In summary, Moltmann (1985/1993c) offers the perspective that practices of liberation, including psychotherapy, sit in a balance between the recollection of the reality that is the history of Jesus Christ, and the future of Jesus Christ that makes possible the gloria Dei of humankind—humankind’s reflection of the eschatological glorification of the Triune God. In its victory, psychotherapy acts as a practice of liberation that, having been advanced by the virtues of creativity, imagination, and courage, brings people to an increased capacity for fellowship that opens them up to abundant relationships with themselves, with others, with creation, and with the Triune God. In this sense, if psychotherapy is to offer this form of true liberation, then the liberation from psychotherapy spawns a new way of life that promotes further liberation. The Good News of Jesus Christ is that Jesus is the Good News. As Moltmann (1989/1993f) points out, “Here the history of the person who proclaimed to the poor the gospel of the kingdom of God actually itself becomes the gospel” (p. 75). It is not that Jesus has some knowledge or gnosis of the good news that he reveals for humanity to also know and accept the truth. Rather, the truth of Jesus is revealed in his liberating acts—in the way that he lives. And Jesus offers the invitation to join him in this new kingdom way of living. The Good News is that creation is offered the opportunity to perpetuate liberation by joining the liberating Jesus Christ in his way.
Theological critique
If the Good News is an invitation into a new life that does not just receive liberation but also offers liberation to others, then a space may emerge for Moltmann to offer a critique of contemporary psychotherapy. This critique is that many forms of psychotherapy may fail to offer what Moltmann views as true liberation by simply returning clients to a level of functioning within oppressive societal structures, rather than offering participation in freedom to life. Perhaps the key concern is with what contemporary forms of psychotherapy do with suffering. In many cases, the task of psychotherapy seems to alleviate or eliminate suffering altogether, often by encouraging a sort of accommodation or adaptation to the culture or systems that surround the client. The freedom that is usually offered by many forms of modern psychotherapy is often only a freedom from suffering rather than also a freedom to suffer with.
Contemporary forms of psychotherapy often invite clients into having information, changing behaviors, or developing insight that is believed to free them from that which has been restraining, rather than invite clients into communities that promote freedom through participation in life-giving and life-sustaining action in the world. Psychotherapy acts as a way to free from the ties that bind, rather than bind to the ties that free. Philip Rieff (1966), in his important work, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, pointed this out by stating that contemporary psychotherapy as a discipline has largely assisted people to adapt to living in “negative communities”—technologically and self-sustained communities that focus on the individual and prefer the gathering of information to relational transformation. Many psychotherapeutic theories have sought a route to understanding the human person that, while they may have differed in perspective on human life and conduct, remain morally neutral, avoiding association with traditional religions and moral systems, and proposing no specific commitment to a way of life (Doherty, 1995).
While many forms of contemporary psychotherapy focus on liberation by reducing suffering or “symptoms,” this symptom-reduction is often brought about by conforming to or adapting to forms of cultural or societal oppression. Because the therapy focuses on the individual (or at most, the individual couple or family system), this symptom-reduction does not identify the broader societal systems that promote oppression, marginalization, and injustice, nor does psychotherapy invite clients into actively engaging these systems for change. In fact, Moltmann (1973/1993b) points out that suffering may actually be a sign of spiritual health as it points to a “superficial, activist, apathetic and therefore dehumanized society” (p. 315). And while the primary notion of health for contemporary psychotherapy seems to lean toward a form of individual autonomy that liberates clients from internal psychological forces such as guilt or shame, Moltmann believes that a Christian form of liberation must also identify and liberate from “the compulsive idolatry” that emerges from our modern forms that humanity that produce and consume (p. 314). If clinicians are to take seriously Moltmann’s theological claims, they must grapple with the implications of this critique and critically evaluate how modern forms of psychotherapy may collude with modern systems of oppression by avoiding suffering, rather than act as true forms of liberation that are free from and free to new ways of giving and sustaining life, sometimes even through suffering.
Conclusion
Perhaps I can conclude a paper on the relevance of Jürgen Moltmann for clinicians by referencing a practical example. I was recently consulted by a lead pastor of a local church that was struggling to understand the impact that counseling was having on one of his pastoral staff members. This staff member had a history of struggling with anxiety and depression, interfering with his capacity to foster supportive interpersonal relationships and to serve the church well and experience a full and effective life of service. The lead pastor referred this staff member to a local counselor, hoping that counseling might be effective at helping this person with his challenges. Over time, it became apparent that the counseling was beneficial as the staff member was struggling less with depression and anxiety; however, a new problem had arisen. This staff member was increasingly declining to fulfill his responsibilities that were part of his staff role at the church. When confronted about this, the staff member told the lead pastor that he was no longer willing to simply conform to the expectations and demands of others. He was learning from his own therapy that so much of his psychological suffering was due to the ways in which he had learned (from his past) to only submit himself to others and that he had not learned how to care for himself properly, set appropriate boundaries, and to pursue his passions. As a result of therapy, he was now learning to say “no” more often and to seek out things in life that were meaningful to him and gave him a sense of contentment and satisfaction. The result of this new insight and these new pursuits is that he was now declining to fulfill all of his pastoral responsibilities at the church.
The lead pastor had come to me, as a psychologist and psychotherapist, to understand how this counseling practice, which he had recommended with an intention to be a source of something positive for this staff member, was now seemingly a source of conflict between this staff member and the rest of the church staff. If this staff member refused to fulfill his responsibilities, his job description, the church might be forced to terminate his services. Why was this therapist, at least from the perspective of the lead pastor, seemingly encouraging this staff member to eschew his duties? This led to a valuable conversation in which some of my thoughts about the divergence between Moltmann’s theological vision and modern psychotherapy started to be reinforced.
As mentioned in the critique earlier, contemporary psychotherapeutic models do not always seek to strengthen commitment or enhance responsibility to that which is outside the client. Instead, psychotherapy often seeks to help a client pursue commitments or obligations that are true to the client’s self to alleviate the suffering that the client is reporting. Psychotherapy often is used to help a client understand the ways in which the client (particularly a client that may be dissatisfied by those commitments or responsibilities) feels trapped or obligated in unhealthy ways (that is, unhealthy from the perspective of self-satisfaction or feelings of happiness as a sign of health) and to free them from the tyranny of oughts or internal demands that are in opposition to that which the client identifies as consistent with the client’s identity, desired pursuits, or meaning. Therapy often has the capacity to deconstruct the ways in which clients experience external obligations and to open them up to new possibilities or choices, but the choices get framed up in terms of the self and personal autonomy that is freedom from suffering.
With this in mind, I explained to the lead pastor that there may be something useful in this psychotherapeutic process for his staff member. I suggested that perhaps this staff member is at a crossroads, based on what he is coming to understand in therapy about himself, in which he must decide whether or not a pastoral role at this particular church and at this particular time in his life is what he really wants. The conflict that has emerged between this staff member and the rest of the staff, however, may be due to the fact that the therapeutic process is only offering the client a perspective on how he is understanding things from the perspective of his own self-interest and addressing his own needs. This is not unusual, as my experience with engaging with other clinicians in the profession and supervising and consulting with psychotherapists has shown me that counseling often only considers the therapeutic process from this perspective. Psychotherapy takes on the task of freeing the client from but rarely initiates a practice of freeing a client to. Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting that a therapist ought to be leading this staff member into a ministerial commitment that is not authentically positive for all involved. Perhaps this staff member got into ministry for reasons that are not life giving or life affirming. I do not know. However, more often than not, I find that therapists take on the perspective of promoting independence or autonomy in clients and deconstructing commitments and responsibility, rather than assisting the client to evaluate those commitments and determine to whom the client is committed and to whom the client is responsible, the value of sacrifice, and how self-emptying might be a way.
I recognize that I am making assumptions about what therapy may or may not be offering this particular pastoral staff member. Psychotherapy is always a process, and how this person may be understanding himself and his role with the church may be evolving slowly. He may be making assumptions or choices that are not necessarily in harmony with what is actually being offered up in his therapy. I do not always assume that what clients do outside therapy is a true reflection of the work that psychotherapists are doing with the clients in therapy. I know that my clients have often made questionable choices and then reported that they did so based on what they believed they received from our work together or even based on what they thought I was suggesting, although it definitely was not what I would have wanted for them. So perhaps, in this instance, the pastoral staff member’s behaviors are emerging as part of an evolving process of self-exploration. Even so, I believe my suspicions about contemporary psychotherapy are justified by what I have observed not only from other clinical experiences but also from my experiences as an educator.
As an educator of future counselors and psychotherapists, my colleagues and I lead discussions with our graduate students about what they understand the goal or goals of psychotherapy to be after they have been in school for some time and had the opportunity to become familiar with and to practice the major psychotherapeutic modalities and interventions in clinical settings. We hear many of the usual and expected answers that sound something like freeing clients from past hurt and trauma by assisting some inner change in the client’s mind that leads to things like contentment, peace, inner happiness, self-confidence, and/or reaching one’s full potential. After mining these responses, the same theme emerges: Modern theories of psychotherapy all seem to promote some level of self-satisfaction via enhancing personal autonomy and reducing suffering. By loosening the chains of emotional distress, unconscious forces, dysfunctional thinking, maladaptive behaviors, problematic family dynamics, or a debilitating developmental history, our students are practiced into untethering clients from a previous version of self and offering them some form of self-sovereignty. What themes rarely emerge in these discussions with students are things like commitment, social responsibility, promoting justice, accountability, communal reliance, self-sacrifice, and suffering with those that suffer. It is not that I believe psychotherapy cannot help clients achieve these things, or that contemporary psychotherapeutic modalities and interventions cannot be a means to these ends, but I do believe that the implicit values of modern psychological theories are revealed in the ways that counseling students are shaped by the practices of contemporary psychotherapy.
While I believe that Moltmann’s potential critique of contemporary psychotherapy presents challenges that are complex and not easily resolved, I do believe that Moltmann offers a clearing toward a productive path forward for those that might be interested in psychotherapy as a liberating practice that partners with the church in its love of life. Hope is inspired not through assisting clients to avoid loss but to offer creativity and imagination to see suffering as redemptive. This can be modeled by the therapist’s capacity (pathos) to sit in and tolerate the pain that the client experiences, taking on the pain in solidarity with the client. In addition, the therapist can offer up alternative horizons for the client that point toward a freedom to something that is life giving and sustaining for the client, for others, and for all of creation.
To return to the case of the pastoral staff member above, if I imagine what therapy can optimally be for this young man, inspired by Moltmann’s theological vision, I hope that others will eventually see a difference in how psychotherapy illuminates new ways of living and responding to life’s circumstances. Certainly, uncovering new things about himself may mean that he has to make some difficult choices about who he wants to be and how he wants to live. However, the therapeutic process ought to lead to the revelation that any choice he makes will mean suffering in terms of the loss of having that which comes from a different choice. The hope that can be shown to him in therapy is not through offering him choices to avoid suffering through loss but to point him to an embrace of suffering for the sake of accepting something new. This may mean for him that he stays committed to his role at the church even when it does not seem congruent with his wants or needs, to allow something new to emerge in his life. Or it might mean stepping away from his role with the church for the sake of self-exploration and freeing the church staff up to find someone else who is willing to accept the full responsibilities that he cannot accept at this time. Therapy should still point to a responsibility that is beyond him and toward his community. That responsibility is neither to stay nor go, for either choice has the capacity for a better outcome than what is currently happening, but rather to believe in the hope of the love of life and therefore act in a new way that is truly life giving for others and himself.
In my own work with clients, Moltmann has inspired me to change my own tendencies to simply attempt to alleviate the suffering of my clients. Rather than putting my hope in the alleviation of pain in suffering, I am working to be more creative and imaginative about the ways in which I can offer my clients a sense of hope through suffering. I am efforting to be more courageous in enacting a redemption that can emerge from suffering. I believe this begins in my own participation in not only the practice of psychotherapy but also the embodied practices of the church that is psychotherapy’s partner in liberating humankind. I do not believe that this form of theologically informed work is possible by simply reading the work of Jürgen Moltmann; rather, because of Moltmann, I believe that it requires that I regularly inhabit the practices of the Christian community to be habituated into a person that can embody the spirit of God’s pathos. As Motmann has inspired me to make therapy a liberating work that points to the way of Jesus, I hope that his theology inspires clinicians to take seriously what it means to participate in God’s redemptive work through practices that point to the history of God with creation. It is only this participation that frees humanity “for an acceptance of human life which is capable of suffering and capable of love” (Moltmann, 1973/1993b, p. 313).
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
