Three Surprising Theologians Who Blocked My Path to Unbelief
And, as an added bonus, a walk through the spruce trees to Paul Tillich's gravestone
I completed my Master of Divinity degree at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary when it was a very different institution, a place where many of the professors’ convictions were far from historical Christian orthodoxy. One of the professors whose classes I enjoyed the most was a philosopher who encouraged me to consider process theology. After I told this professor about my interest in philosophy and apologetics, he urged me to focus on Paul Tillich as well. I found Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith and Systematic Theology to be intellectually exhilarating. And yet, the more I read Tillich, the more I began to bump against an inconvenient disjuncture.
When I was a college student, it had been the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus that drew me to a point of confidence when I was struggling to trust in the truth of Christianity.
The resurrection of Jesus was, however, far from central in Paul Tillich’s works. According to Tillich, a commitment to the reality of the physical resurrection of Jesus is “absurdity compounded into blasphemy” (Systematic Theology: Volume 1).
The physical resurrection of Jesus.
A blasphemous absurdity.
I knew that I could not embrace such an idea without walking away from Christianity completely. In my first year or so of college, I had already endured an intense struggle to accept the truth of Christianity. I had resolved then that evidence for the resurrection of Jesus was sufficient and that the resurrection itself was central to the Christian faith.
The more I worked through these ideas as a seminary student, the more I remained steadfast in my conviction that, if Jesus was not physically raised from the dead, there was no reason to be Christian at all. And so, I headed to the library in search of theological works that emphasized the reality of resurrection. When I did, I ran across three theologians whose thinking resonated deeply with my confidence in the resurrection of Jesus and in God’s future restoration of the cosmos: Karl Barth, Jürgen Moltmann, and Wolfhart Pannenberg.
Some of you may be wondering, “Why these three names?” In part, it’s because this was the mid-1990s in a library where conservative evangelical resources were scarce, and my “search engine” was limited to a physical card catalog. And so, for whatever reason, those were the books I was able to locate. Until my final year of seminary, the works of Barth, Moltmann, and Pannenberg provided me with a sort of “halfway house” between the theologically liberal stances held by some of my professors and the theological convictions I hold today.
In the fall semester of my final year of seminary, a professor named Mark DeVine introduced me to the works of Thomas Oden. After reading Requiem and Agenda for Theology, I became enamored with the church fathers, and this fascination has remained a central element in my theological development ever since. However, until that moment when Thomas Oden led me to tread the trail of patristic delights, it was Barth, Moltmann, and Pannenberg who blocked my pathway to unbelief.
I was pastoring a small church in rural Missouri at the time, and I yearned to be a faithful pastor. There, in the winter of 1994, I read a statement from Karl Barth in the Makers of the Modern Theological Mind series that arrested any remaining momentum in the direction of theological liberalism: “It is far more difficult to undertake activity in the pulpit [or] at the sick-bed,… if you are an alumnus of Marburg or Heidelberg rather than of Halle or Greifswald” (“Moderne Theologie und Reichsgottesarbeit,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 1909). What Barth was declaring at this point was that theologically liberal pastoral training—“Marburg or Heidelberg”—couldn’t produce pastors who cared well for their flocks.
That moment marked the beginning of a breaking point in my fascination with Tillich in particular.
Although Barth wasn’t speaking about the resurrection of Jesus, I recognized that—if I pursued Paul Tillich’s path—I had no real words of hope to declare as a pastor to church members who were dying, suffering, and grieving. Barth revealed to me the failings of theological liberalism; Pannenberg and Moltmann reassured me that it wasn’t absurd or naïve to trust in the reality of the resurrection of Jesus in the past or in the renewal of all creation in the future. I reveled in Barth’s Christocentric theological system, and I was enlivened by the emphasis on God’s work in history that pervaded the works of Moltmann and Pannenberg.
Jürgen Moltmann and the Task of Theology
Recently, I’ve been re-reading the works of Jürgen Moltmann in preparation for a book on the church as an alternative politic. I still appreciate how the works of Moltmann helped me to retain my confidence in the centrality of the resurrection. Yet, I’ve also recognized that, although Moltmann’s theology provided me with a crucial theological stopgap in seminary, his works are not quite as supportive of historical Christian orthodoxy as I thought they were when I first read them in the 1990s.
Jürgen Moltmann was born in Hamburg in 1926, and he was drafted into the German army during World War II. After working an anti-aircraft battery in his hometown, he was ordered to the front lines. There, in 1945, he surrendered to the first British soldier he met. While a prisoner of war in Belgium, Moltmann read the New Testament and the Psalms. There, he became a Christian and later, after a sojourn in Scotland, he went to University of Göttingen to be trained as a theologian.
Moltmann the theologian saw his task as “relating the Christian tradition and message critically and therapeutically to [the] modern situation” (Theology Today). When we as Christians relate our tradition to contemporary circumstances, we are declaring ourselves to be distinct and separate from the world around us. “Solidarity with others in meaningful actions loses its creative character if one no longer wishes to be anything different from others” (The Crucified God).
The Centrality and the Challenge of Resurrection in the Theology of Jürgen Moltmann
The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus in particular are central in Moltmann’s theology, and this was one of the facets of his theology that reassured me in seminary that it wasn’t foolish to believe in the resurrection. “Christian faith is resurrection faith or it cannot be Christian faith any longer. The resurrection of Jesus was the historical origin of Christianity and is and must be the essential foundation of any truly Christian faith” (“Introduction to Christian Theology,” lecture, 1968).
Modern people—following Ernst Troeltsch and others in thinking that no historical event should be said to have happened in the present for which there is not an analogy in the past—have frequently concluded that the resurrection must be un-historical. The resurrection of Jesus, however, overthrows the entire notion of what can be considered historical by bringing the firstfruits of the end of time into this present world. The resurrection is thus not merely a “revivification of the dead Jesus which might have reversed the process of his death” (Theology of Hope); it is the entrance of new life from the future into history here and now.
While true, Moltmann’s formulation also raises some legitimate questions. After all, although the resurrection of Jesus is certainly more than “revivification,” it should never be rightly seen as anything less than the revivification of a human body in human history. The post-resurrection body of Jesus existed in substantive continuity with his pre-resurrection body. According to the authors of the Gospels, this transformed physical reality was capable of being grasped and cooking breakfast and consuming fish and bread (Luke 24:30–32, 41–43; John 21:9–13).
Here and elsewhere, Moltmann’s theological formulations are not formed primarily by the Scriptures or by the grammar of the church’s historical confessions. For Moltmann, theology is meant to present the tradition of the gospel anew to the world by correlating Christian tradition to the questions of modernity. And so, the shape of Christian theology is not decisively determined by the metanarrative of Scripture or by the structure of the creeds or even by the declarations of the councils and the church fathers. The biblical text functions less as an authoritative text and more as a “promissory history which has called Judaism and Christianity into being and which must determine their life” (Ethics of Hope).
Theology and Theodicy
Christian theology should be—according to Moltmann—re-crafted to correlate with the dilemmas of modernity. In this, Moltmann seems closer at times to Tillich’s “method of correlation” than to any venerable Christian tradition.Throughout this process of correlating Christian theology to the questions of modernity, there is a strong thrust in Moltmann’s theology toward emancipation and freedom as the key determining factors in the suitability of particular theological formulations.
Donald MacLeod has rightly noted:
The two means of verification normally open to Christians are Scripture and tradition. Neither of these seems particularly important to Moltmann. He has a decidedly smorgasbord approach to the canon; and his respect for fathers and reformers is scant, to say the least. His real criteria lie elsewhere. In order to be true, a doctrine must offer a viable theodicy (it must shed light on Auschwitz); it must advance Jewish-Christian dialogue, bearing in mind that Jews were “sufferers” and Christians “perpetrators”: it must meet the ecological concerns of humankind; it must give a platform for Christian political activism; and it must both illuminate and be illuminated by the preoccupations of feminism. Above all, theological statements must be validated by experience. Even what looks like his fundamental theological principle, crux probat omnia (“the cross is the test of everything”) is itself accepted only because it conforms to these criteria.
Moltmann’s “apologetic” thus consists of giving answers regarding our “hope in the future of the crucified one… by conveying to the godless man justification and hope of resurrection” (Theology of Hope). In some sense, Moltmann’s work calls the church to seize modernity’s hope in the future—expressed early in Moltmann’s theological development in dialogue with Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch—but then to reframe and reconceptualize humanity’s hope around the resurrection of Jesus.
“Will the fatal problems of mankind at the end of this century be apprehended and solved in continuity with the critical and liberating tradition of the gospel?” Moltmann asked in The Crucified God. “Or will this and the coming generations, through the default of churches and theologians enclosed within their own sects, nourish their hopes of life and justice from other sources which seem to them less corrupt and more accessible?” Imagination and fantasy—reenvisioning present realities in light of the Christian hope for resurrection—are key aspects of this reconceptualization.
Liberation and Critical Theory in Moltmann’s Theology
As Moltmann’s theology continued to develop in the 1960s and 1970s, his primary interlocutors shifted away from hopeful Marxists like Bloch and toward critical theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and their attempts to apply Marxist thinking to the phenomenon of later capitalism.
In some sense, Moltmann seems to have seen the cross of Christ as a Christian correlate of critical theory, as the means by which Christians interrogate the world’s systems and structures. Critical theories aim—in the words of Christopher Watkin—“to make visible the deep structures of a culture in order to expose and change them.” There is something initially promising in this notion of clinging to the cross as God’s critical unmasking of the brokenness of every social structure in a fallen world. Pursued consistently and thoroughly, this might have provided something similar to the “diagonalization” described by Christopher Watkin in Biblical Critical Theory.
In the case of Moltmann, however, it seems that—instead of highlighting how the cross unmasks every competing way of seeing the world—he ends up looking at the cross through the lens of critical theories. As a result, Moltmann’s theology of the cross functions as a correlate to these theories instead of a critic, and he borrows more from them than he critiques in them. When it comes to Adorno, Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and others, critical theories come entangled with Marxist assumptions that are fundamentally at odds with Christian faith. Although Moltmann’s fascination with Marxism is somewhat understandable given his personal encounters with authoritarian fascism, the inflections of Marxist thought in Moltmann’s theology repeatedly result in misdirected formulations.
For example, the poor and oppressed appear to function in Moltmann’s theology much like the proletariat functions in Marxist thought. The amorphous category of poverty and oppression in Moltmann’s theology is, however, far more vague than Karl Marx’s clear denotation of the proletariat as those whose sole possession of significant economic value is their capacity to sell their labor in exchange for a wage. Yet, working from this adaptation of a Marxist framework, Moltmann insists on ascribing to the poor and oppressed privileges in God’s kingdom to which the religious bourgeoisie lack access. If I understand Moltmann correctly on this point, the crucified Christ shares in the poverty and oppression of marginalized persons; because he shares in their experience, the oppressed and the poor possess a privileged participation in Christ with or without explicit faith in Christ. This does not mean that there is no hope for oppressors. Liberation is not only the empowerment of the poor and oppressed, for Moltmann; it also provides an opportunity for the liberation of oppressors through the reconciliation of the oppressors with the oppressed. Nevertheless, his ascription of kingdom privileges to the poor and oppressed apart from faith in Christ is deeply problematic.
In some ways, I see similarities between Moltmann’s insistence on inherent kingdom privileges for the oppressed and certain popular expressions of critical theory in which the poor and oppressed are perceived as possessing inherent “epistemic virtues”—privileged structures of knowing which socially privileged persons cannot challenge or comprehend. In some expressions of this way of thinking, no one who is perceived as privileged is allowed to question or deny anything that is claimed by persons from marginalized social groups.
Of course, we should all agree that the church is called to care for the oppressed and to listen to their stories as fellow bearers of God’s image. Furthermore, there are aspects of reality that some people may miss or misperceive due to their social status or cultural background, and all of us should learn to look at life from a multiplicity of perspectives by listening to persons who are different from ourselves. And yet, none of us—regardless of how we have been oppressed or privileged—possesses inherent epistemic virtue or unchallengeable insights on the mere and sheer basis of our social standing or cultural experiences. Christians are better served by taking, in the words of Hak Joon Lee, “an inductive, critical realist approach, examining each situation carefully in light of historical facts, evidence, and warrants.”
Contra Moltmann, there is no inherent virtue or wisdom possessed by the oppressed which grants them access to the privileges of Christ’s kingdom apart from submission to Christ as King. To insist on kingdom privileges for the poor and oppressed separated from explicit faith in the King of this kingdom introduces an irremediable cascade of theological problems.
The Church as Instrument
Moltmann does rightly recognize the church as the community within which the inhabitants of the world live out the eschatological reality that is yet to come in its fulness. Yet instead of seeing this way of life as a praxis that identifies the church as a unique people distinct from the kingdoms of this world, he expects the church to establish its presence on earthly political continuums and to take a stand there, generally on the leftward side of these structures. “The church of the crucified Christ must take sides in the concrete social and political conflicts going on about it and in which it is involved, and must be prepared to join and form parties” (The Crucified God). The church, however, speaks its words of judgment and reconciliation as another genus of humanity with a kingdom not of this world, not as another position on a continuum of earthly politics.
Furthermore, Moltmann seems to separate the church as an instrument from the church as an institution. Humanity’s participation in the eschatological future thus occurs not only in the church but also outside the church, in the work of those who have never committed their lives to Jesus. This participation is happening whenever and wherever the cosmos is being liberated (see Church in the Power of the Spirit and The Way of Jesus Christ). What matters most in this liberation is not the confession of Christ as Lord but the enactment of Christ’s presence among the poor and oppressed.
Moltmann seems to favor the simile of “friendships” to describe relationships within the church instead of a “brotherhood,” a “family,” or a “household” (Theology of Hope and The Living God and the Fulness of Life). This friendship, in Moltmann’s mind, encompasses potentially both those who do and don’t confess Jesus as Lord—which is difficult to reconcile with the understanding of friendship that Jesus himself articulates in John’s Gospel (15:13–15).
With Moltmann, I recognize that God is always at work not only within the institution of the church but also beyond the institutional church and even beyond those who explicitly profess faith in Jesus Christ. At the same time, the church’s function as an instrument is inseparable from the concrete reality of the local church as an institution. The realities of the church as instrument and the church as institution can only be distinguished at a theoretical level, and they can never be completely divorced.
Universalizing that Which Is Unavoidably Particular
In the end, it seems to me that Jürgen Moltmann repeatedly attempts to universalize that which is unavoidably particular. This pattern can be seen in his extension of kingdom privileges to the poor and oppressed apart from faith in Jesus Christ, in his preference for universal friendship over the particularities of living as a family submitted together to the lordship of Christ, and in his desire to extend universalized human rights—grounded in Jewish and Christian notions of humanity’s creation in God’s image—into belief systems and structures that reject the truth and authority of Jewish and Christian Scriptures (On Human Dignity).
This latter hope is impossible, not only theologically but also socially and politically. Apart from reverence for the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and a commitment to their authority, any language of universalized human rights has no meaningful claim or binding value. As Tom Holland recognizes in Dominion,
As the flood tide of Western power and influence ebbs, the illusions of European and American liberals risk being left stranded. Much that they have sought to cast as universal stands exposed as never having been anything of the kind…. Humanism derives ultimately from claims made in the Bible: that humans are made in God’s image; that his Son died equally for everyone; that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female…. That human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are owed sustenance, and shelter, and refuge from persecution: these were never self-evident truths.
The theology of Jürgen Moltmann entails far more difficulties than I glimpsed as a twenty-two-year-old seminary student. Yet I’m still thankful for Moltmann. His theology provided guidance for me during a time when the other alternatives were far more problematic. I am not ready to declare, with Karl Barth, that Moltmann’s hope is “only a principle and thus a vessel with no contents.”
And this brings me back to where I started, to the writings of Paul Tillich which I was encouraged in seminary to explore as a model for apologetics.
The Path to Paul Tillich’s Ashes
Most of my students are unaware that Paul Tillich’s ashes are interred a mere two hours west of the campus of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. On June 2, 1963, Paul Tillich dedicated the park in New Harmony, Indiana where he is now buried. He passed away two years after this service of dedication. I have visited Paul Tillich Park from time to time when I need a break while traveling between Kentucky and Missouri.
When I last stopped in New Harmony, the spruce trees that press inward around Paul Tillich’s resting place were thick with late spring growth. The sun was slung low in the sky, and the pathway through the verdant copse that surrounds his cremated corpse grew increasingly shadowed as I passed stone after stone, each etched with a quotation from his writings.
When I reached the upright granite marker at the end of the trail where the theologian’s remains are buried, it was so dark that I could barely see the words engraved there: “And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit for his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.” The more you know about Tillich’s life and theology, the more darkly ironic and contradictory these words from Psalm 1:3 become.
The shadows in this spot were fitting, and so was this reminder of death at the end.
If I had remained on the path away from a firm faith in the resurrection of Jesus, it would have led to death. For that reason, despite the defects I do see in the theology of Jürgen Moltmann, his was one of the voices that God used to pull me away from such a path, and for that I am thankful.
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Interesting journey. Do you have any takeaways from reading Teilhard?