Theology Today

In this article Jürgen Moltmann offers a clarion call to the whole church at the eve of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation to be semper reformanda. Moltmann discusses five major points: the theological implications of the contemporary move from a culture of dispute to a culture of dialogue; the unity of the Christian church under what he terms “the papacy of all believers”; the only true “reformation by faith alone” initiated by the Anabaptists; the ecumenical importance of celebrating the Lord’s Supper together; and, finally, the idea that a reformation of hope needs to follow a reformation of faith.

The refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016 and the subsequent theopolitical responses in Europe, North America, and elsewhere have been marked throughout by concerns about Islam and Muslims. The long and often uneasy relationship between Christianity and Islam has shaped European and North American responses to forced migration and has been an often unchallenged source for anti-migrant policies and rhetoric. In order for Christian theology and the church communities to offer constructive engagement within the current migration context, they must find new avenues to address and engage with Islam. This essay borrows from Jürgen Moltmann’s theopolitical interpretation of interreligious dialogue and his innovative rethinking of Christian theology in conversation with Judaism to propose that an analogous posture toward Islam be developed. It concludes by outlining the contours of a theology of witness/shahid that offers constructive possibilities for reframing Christian–Muslim debates to better attend to its theological, political, and ethical considerations.

Jürgen Moltmann’s christology takes embodied life as the point of departure for knowledge of Christ. For Moltmann, christology is not primarily about the history of creeds, christology is christopraxis. That emphasis helps to prevent the problems of abstract theological doctrines that avoid the concrete and enable theological justification of politically oppressive ideology. Dietrich Bonhoeffer also argued for a social understanding of christology, which takes priority over creeds as guide for Christian life. Both of these German thinkers represent a theological engagement with the forces that Harlem Renaissance intellectuals name and address in their work to recalibrate humanity from false, harmful abstractions, towards real embodied life.

I would like to contrast some of the premises proposed by the so-called postcolonial approach with what some Latin-Americans scholars identify as “epistemological Decolonization.” Colonialism is not something of the past; it has new forms. That is the challenge of the Latin American Theology. I wish to show how Moltmann's critique of and dialog with Latin-American Theology help us in the process of elaborating more clearly a “decolonial epistemology.” At the same time, I wish to show how Latin American liberation theology resonates with many of the insights that the decolonial approach offers. I argue that since its inception Latin American theology has displayed a decolonizing content and impetus, which becomes clearer in our present global climate.

The article underscores and explores the conversion of Jürgen Moltmann as a departure point for considering the importance of conversion for ministers and theological educators today. Through summary of a 2016 untranslated essay from Moltmann, “Hoffen und Denken,” comparison showing how the intellectual work from Moltmann and Martin Heidegger arise and mature as divergent responses to World War II, and reflection upon Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Hiroshima survivor and Japanese Methodist Minister who graduated from Candler School of Theology and went on to found International World Peace Day, the article traces why conversion matters as an elemental beginning for Christian theological thinking and practice. In order to ground the line of argumentation within a wider context of US political and ecclesial reform, the article also brings special attention to the need for ministers and theological educators to repent for the United States’ nuclear bombings of World War II.

In his 2015 encyclical, Pope Francis argued that Christianity stands in need of an “ecological conversion.” Conversion is an urgent kind of theological language, urging a resilient and ecologically grounded faith, a faith that turns on the capacities necessary to inhabit God’s world well. Drawing on the eschatological tension described by Jürgen Moltmann as the “unquiet heart,” this essay builds a practical theology for nurturing Christian faith in our vulnerable and changing ecological context. Engaging generative questions from the fields of theological anthropology, educational theory, and practical theology, it reframes the work of human life as becoming good inhabitants in God’s household. As such, it reexamines the shape of human identity and vocation in relationship to the world and to God’s promised future. It concludes with modest proposals for practices and educational approaches that might cultivate what Larry Rasmussen has called an “earth-honoring faith.”