Richard Bauckham has written two books on Moltmann, and he summarizes his findings in a general article on Moltmann in David Ford, ed., The Modern Theologians .
He first traces the development of Moltmann’s work, from the early trilogy (Theology of Hope, The Crucified God, The Church in the Power of the Spirit) to the five volumes that Moltmann describes as “contributions” to theology (rather than a “dogmatics”). At the center of his early work is a dialectical understanding of the relationship between the cross and the resurrection. Cross and resurrection represent opposites – death and life, absence/presence of God, now and not yet. By raising Jesus, the Father forms a continuity within this apparent discontinuity; Jesus had been identified with “the present reality of the world in all its negativity: its subjection to sin, suffering, and death, or what Moltmann calls its godlessness, godforsakenness, and transitoriness.” By raising Jesus, God promises a new creation that will overcome this negativity.
The Spirit who proceeds from the rupture of Father and Son on the cross “moves reality toward the resolution of the dialectic, filling the godforsaken world with God’s presence and preparing for the coming kingdom in which the whole world will be transformed in correspondence to the resurrection of Jesus.”
As Moltmann’s early work opens into a Trinitarian theology, it becomes clear that he is describing a Trinitarian history, a history of God with the world, which is a “mutual involvement of God and the world.” For Moltmann, the doctrine of the Trinity, Bauckham says, is not an extrapolation from the history of God with the world; the doctrine of the Trinity is a summary of the history of God with the world.
From his earliest work, Moltmann has emphasized that theology is practical not merely theoretical. The goal is not to understand the world but to change it. In later work, though, he recognizes the danger that this could turn into a grim activism, and so he increasingly emphasizes “enjoyment of being and praise of God, not only for what he has done but also for what he is.”
Finally, Moltmann’s theology is a theology in “dialogue.” Rather than proposing a finished system, Moltmann acknowledges that he is only making contributions “to the continuing discussion within an ecumenical community of theologians, which itself must be in touch with the wider life and thinking of the churches and the sufferings and hopes of the world.” Because of Moltmann’s emphasis on eschatology, the openness of his theology is a “structural openness,” and includes openness to insights from outside theology itself.
Bauckham then helpfully summarizes Moltmann’s contributions to various loci of theology.
Appropriately, he begins with eschatology. In contrast to typical modern opposition to eschatology as a form of mythology, Moltmann places eschatology at the center of his concerns. The Gospel, he claims, is a thoroughly eschatological gospel: “Christianity is eschatology, is hope.” The hope comes not from human potentiality but from the divine promise of recreation that was made in the resurrection of Jesus. Centering eschatology on the resurrection makes it clear that for Bultmann the promise of God stands in contradiction to the world-as-it-is. Jesus’ resurrection promises a “radically new future,” not merely an extrapolation from present trends and immanent forces. That future is “life for the dead, righteousness for the unrighteous, new creation for a creation subject to evil and death.” Importantly, Moltmann stresses that the promise of the resurrection is a promise of restoration of this world, and thus Moltmann’s eschatology underwrites his insistence on praxis in Christian theology. A church of hope is necessarily, he says, a church open to the future and to the world.
Moltmann has also been deeply concerned with theodicy, but his theodicy renounces philosophical explanations and focuses on the cross. The Cross does not explain suffering or evil; it manifests God’s “loving solidarity with the world in its suffering,” and manifests God’s triumph over all that contradicts Him. Radically, Moltmann “brings the dialectic of cross and resurrection within God’s own experience.” The cross contradicts everything God is, and yet God is present there, embracing the godforsaken reality “to deliver from sin, suffering, and death.” The Cross is an inter-Trinitarian event, “in which Jesus suffers dying in abandonment by his Father and the Father suffers in grief the death of his Son.” At the point of their “deepest separation,” the Father and Son are yet “united in love for the world,” and this love “spans the gulf which separates the godless and godforsaken from God and overcomes it.”
Moltmann describes his ecclesiology as “messianic” and “relational,” and his understanding of the church and its mission is deeply rooted in his “eschatological Christology.” As a “messianic” church, the church is “oriented by the missions of Christ and the Spirit toward their eschatological goal,” and as “relational” it “does not exist in, of, or for itself, but only in relationship and can only be understood in its relationships.
Moltmann’s doctrine of God has been the focus of the most sustained attention and criticism of his work. Much of this has already been mentioned. Moltmann rejects much of what he says is a too-philosophical classical doctrine of God, insisting that God’s history with the world is a mutually affecting history. Bauckham sees Moltmann’s theology proper developing in three steps. First, there is, as noted above, the notion that the cross is “an event between the Father and the Son, in which God suffers the godforsakenness that separates the Son from the Father.” This means, second, that the doctrine of divine possibility has to go. Moltmann does not say that every sort of suffering can be attributed to God, but that “suffering which is freely undertaken in love for those who suffer” is demanded by “God’s nature as love.” Finally, third, Moltmann “abandons the traditional distinction between the immanent and the economic trinities.” The immanent is collapse into the economic, so that God is realized as the One Triune God eschatologically. In this eschatological future, the order of the Trinity is not the traditional (hierarchical) Fahter-Son-Spirit, but the eschatological Spirit (who brings creation to the) Son (who delivers it to the) Father.
(Grenz makes the important point that Moltmann is operating with an eschatological ontology in which things are what they will be; things are what they are in the full realization of their being. Plus, Moltmann says that God’s essence is future; He is the God of the future. If this is true, then the eschatologically realized unity of Father, Son and Spirit is what God is, and is what He always is, because He always is His future. This may be confusing, or wrong, or both, but it may help evaluate the charge of “modalism” which some – such as Paul Molnar – have brought against Moltmann.)
For Moltmann, the problem in Trinitarian theology is not a problem of establishing the triplicity of the Persons. He claims that the plurality is on the surface of the text of the New Testament. What needs to be explained is how these Three Persons are one God. Moltmann. Part of Moltmann’s answer is eschatology, but he also employs the notion of perichoresis to explain how the three are one. In his understanding, perichoresis means that t he t hree persons leave room for each to “dance,” and the perichoretic reality of the Trinity also means that the Trinity is open to what is outside Himself. God is an open Trinity.
Moltmann also has a distinctive understanding of creation. He is willing to say that in some sense God “needs” to create the world. Since He is love, He cannot be satisfied with the “selfish” and self-enclosed love of the Triune fellowship, and thus opens His fellowship out to creation. Moltmann claims that God’s relation to the world is perichoretic: God indwells His creation, and His creation rests in Him. Creation also has an eschatological orientation from the beginning, as it moves toward the goal “its glorification through divine indwelling.”
Bauckham covers a few other areas of Moltmann’s work, but let me skip ahead to a few criticisms. Moltmann has been criticized for over-emphasizing some themes and underplaying others, which leads to an imbalanced theology. Bauckham parries this criticism by saying that Moltmann’s work needs to be taken as a whole; while one work can seem imbalanced, the effect of the whole is not so. Moltmann has been criticized by liberation theologians for being too vague about his political proposals. He has been criticized too for losing the freedom of God in his insistence on the mutuality of God’s relation to creation. Moltmann answers this by saying that God is love, and this transcends any polar opposition between freedom and necessity; God’s freedom is His freedom to love, and thus He cannot but choose to love and to be involved in the world’s suffering. Moltmann has also been charged with tritheism; it seems rather that the more central charge is of a modalist tendency. He has also been criticized for his method: He often lacks rigor, and he speculates a good deal. Bauckham notes that while his early work grows out of familiarity with the biblical scholarship of the time, he often ignores “historical-critical interpretation” and leaves his hermeneutical assumptions undefined.