Chapter 23

Jürgen Moltmann and the Crucified God's Reach

A POW finds a Bible — and a century later a Reformed Protestant has argued universal salvation from the cross outward.

A. Behind the Wire

Picture a young German prisoner in the spring of 1945. He is nineteen. His country has just been broken. His school class was conscripted as air-force auxiliaries when he was sixteen. He survived the firestorm of Hamburg in July 1943, when a bomb landed on the platform where he was stationed and killed the classmate next to him. He cried out to God that night for the first time in his life — out of a household, he later said, that had been thoroughly secular, a household whose grandfather had been a Grand Master of the Freemasons.¹ Drafted into the army proper in 1944, he was sent to the western front, lost his unit in the Reichswald, and walked, hands on his head, toward a British soldier. After a year and a half of war he had endured enough.

Now he is behind barbed wire — first at Zedelgem in Belgium, then transferred to Kilmarnock in Scotland, then in July 1946 to Norton Camp at Cuckney near Nottingham, England. In one of the camps an American chaplain hands him a small New Testament with the Psalms.² He reads it mostly out of boredom. In the camps the prisoners see photographs nailed up in their huts — Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen. The German prisoners at first dismiss the photographs as propaganda. Then, gradually, the realization breaks. The shame, the despair, the nightmares: a generation knew its country had done what a country should never do, and the young man behind the wire could not look away.

What he found in those pages — in the Psalms of lament, in the Gospel of Mark — was not a moral exhortation but a person. The young soldier read the cry of Jesus from the cross. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? And in that cry he met someone who knew his condition from the inside. Jesus was a forsaken man. Jesus was a man who had died alone. Jesus had, in some way the soldier could not yet articulate, gone where the soldier himself had been — into the place where the world ends and the silence is total. "I didn't find Christ," he would say many decades later. "He found me."³

The soldier's name was Jürgen Moltmann. He was born in Hamburg on April 8, 1926, and he would live to be ninety-eight years old, dying in Tübingen on June 3, 2024 — a German Reformed theologian whose work would, by the time he died, be cited by the World Council of Churches as the most widely read Christian theology of the post-war era.⁴ His books would sell into the hundreds of thousands. Over five hundred doctoral dissertations would be written on his project. Roger Olson called him one of the most important Protestant theologians of the twentieth century. Miroslav Volf, his former doctoral student, eulogized him as "existential and academic, pastoral and political, innovative and traditional, readable and demanding."⁵

And the heart of Moltmann's theology — the thing that, more than anything else, would make him both famous and controversial — would be the conviction that the God he had met in that Markan Gospel as a prisoner was a God who had gone all the way down. Down into death. Down into abandonment. Down into the godforsakenness of every godforsaken person who had ever lived. If God in Christ had entered that abyss, Moltmann would conclude, then the abyss was no longer an abyss in which anyone could finally be lost. Hell itself had been invaded. The cross was God's claim on every place the absence of God could be felt.

This is a chapter about that conviction and the work it produced. We will trace Moltmann's life and education quickly, then settle into the books that matter — Theology of Hope (1964), The Crucified God (1972), The Way of Jesus Christ (1989), The Coming of God (1996). We will let him argue his case. We will hear the objections from his fellow Reformed theologians, from evangelical critics, and from Catholic ones. And we will assess what he gives the long-hope tradition, what he overreaches on, and what he passes along to those who come after.

If Barth reopened the door, and if Balthasar dared to hope, Moltmann simply walked through and declared, with a confidence that has discomfited many readers, that the God who has been crucified for us will not finally lose any of us. Whether he is right is a question for theological assessment. That he made the argument — fully, soberly, with thirty volumes of supporting work — is a matter of historical record. The long hope had no more forthright Protestant champion in the second half of the twentieth century than this German pastor turned Tübingen professor.

B. From Hamburg to Tübingen

Moltmann returned to Germany in 1948 with a soul wounded and a hope kindled. He had begun some theological reading at Norton Camp under the YMCA-run educational program, where he discovered Reinhold Niebuhr's The Nature and Destiny of Man — the first work of theology he had ever read, and a book whose realism about human fallenness suited a man freshly emerged from the Reich.⁷ He enrolled at the University of Göttingen. There he came under the influence of three teachers in particular: Hans Joachim Iwand (Reformed, a Barthian, a powerful preacher), Gerhard von Rad (the great Old Testament scholar of the Heilsgeschichte approach), and above all the systematician Otto Weber. Weber was the doyen of Reformed theology in postwar Germany and the man who would shape Moltmann into a Reformed dogmatician.⁸

Under Weber, Moltmann wrote a doctoral dissertation on a seventeenth-century French Reformed theologian most evangelicals today have never heard of: Moyse Amyraut (1596–1664), the Saumur theologian who softened the harder edges of Calvin's predestination doctrine by arguing for a "hypothetical universalism." The dissertation, completed in 1951 and published in 1952 under the title Gnadenbund und Gnadenwahl (Covenant of Grace and Election of Grace), placed Amyraut's view in the wider federal-theological tradition of the Academy of Saumur.⁹ It mattered. The young Moltmann was reading, at the start of his career, a Reformed theologian who had taken Calvin's predestination doctrine and made room within it for a wider scope of saving grace. The doctoral project did not commit him to Amyraut's specific position. But it sensitized him from the beginning to the fact that the Reformed tradition has never been monolithic on the question of the scope of the cross.

After his doctorate Moltmann served as pastor in the small rural Reformed parish of Bremen-Wasserhorst from 1952 to 1957 — a pastorate he remembered for the rest of his life. (He returned regularly to that congregation as an old man.) In 1957 he completed his Habilitation thesis on Christoph Pezel and the Calvinism of Bremen, the second-degree credential required for a German chair. The same year he received calls to the Reformed theological faculty in Wuppertal. In 1958 he moved there, teaching at the Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal — an institution rooted in the Confessing Church tradition that had resisted the Nazis. He served for a time as Rector. In 1963 he was called to the University of Bonn. And then, in 1967, came the chair that would define his career: Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Tübingen, a post he held until his retirement in 1994.¹⁰

It was during those early academic years that Moltmann began to read the figure who would do most to shape him intellectually outside of the theological tradition itself — the Marxist philosopher of hope Ernst Bloch. Bloch's massive Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope, three volumes, 1954–1959) reframed human existence around the future-oriented dynamic of hope as ontologically constitutive of what it means to be human. Moltmann was not a Marxist. He was a Reformed Christian. But Bloch gave him a category — hope as the orienting principle of human and historical existence — that he would baptize into Christian theology and use as the leverage point of his first great book.¹¹

The other major shaping influence was, of course, Barth. Moltmann was a self-described post-Barthian: deeply indebted to Barth's reframing of the doctrine of God around the gospel, but conscious that Barth's theology had become, by the 1960s, too dogmatically self-contained, too uninterested in the future of history and the world. Moltmann set himself the task of writing a theology that took Barth's gospel and made it apocalyptic — directed not inward toward the Church's contemplation of its own doctrine but outward toward the world's coming transformation.¹² That was the agenda of his first major work.

C. The Books

Theology of Hope (1964)

The German title — Theologie der Hoffnung: Untersuchungen zur Begründung und zu den Konsequenzen einer christlichen Eschatologie — gives the project away. This is not a theology of the End or the Last Things in the textbook sense. It is a theology of hope: the future-directed orientation of the entire Christian gospel toward what God has promised to do, and what God is doing now in light of that promise. Moltmann's central polemic in Theology of Hope is against the metaphysical conception of eternity that had dominated Christian theology since the patristic appropriation of Platonism. The biblical God, Moltmann argues, is not the timeless, immutable Absolute of Greek metaphysics. He is the God who promises, the God whose name is given to Moses as "I will be who I will be," the God whose self-disclosure is bound up with what He is going to do.¹³

The book made an extraordinary impact. Published in 1964 by Kaiser Verlag, it went through six printings in two years. The English translation by James W. Leitch appeared in 1967 from Harper & Row, and it was front-page news in The New York Times — an almost unthinkable thing for a work of systematic theology even then.¹⁴ The reason was that Moltmann had found language that spoke to a generation. The student movements of the 1960s, the civil-rights movement in the American South, the burgeoning Latin American liberation theology — all of them were looking for theological resources that could speak to social transformation rather than retreat from it. Moltmann offered them a Christianity in which the resurrection of the crucified was not just a private comfort for the believer but the seed of a coming transformation of all reality.

For Moltmann in 1964, eschatology is not the last chapter of theology but the first. "From first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope," he wrote in lines that became famous.¹⁵ The Christian future is not a static eternity into which the saved are removed at death. It is the coming kingdom that breaks into history from God's future and re-orients the present. Hope, on this account, is not wishful thinking. It is the structure of Christian existence under the promise of the resurrected Christ. We do not hope because we are optimists. We hope because the God who raised Jesus has made history's outcome open to His promise rather than closed in upon its own decay.

The book is not, in 1964, an argument for universalism. Moltmann mentions the question of the fate of the unevangelized only obliquely. The eschatology of Theology of Hope is more concerned with the kingdom that comes than with the individual's destination. But two seeds are planted in 1964 that will grow into the universalism of 1996. The first is the conviction that the resurrection is the future of all reality, not just the future of believers. The second is the conviction that the God of the resurrection is the God of the cross — and that the cross has a scope as universal as the God-forsakenness it embraces.

Moltmann's polemics in 1964 are worth pausing on. He is fighting two great theological enemies at once. On one side is what he calls the "epiphany religion" of the Greek-philosophical tradition — the idea that God shows Himself in timeless presence to the contemplating soul, with the world's history being more or less irrelevant to the religious life. On the other side is the existentialist theology of his teachers' generation, especially the form developed by Rudolf Bultmann, in which the eschatological future has been collapsed into the existential moment of decision. For Bultmann, eschatology was an existential category — the encounter with the kerygma in the present. Moltmann would have none of it. The kerygma is not a timeless address to the individual soul. It is the announcement of a coming future, the resurrection of the dead, the new heaven and the new earth. Christianity's center of gravity, in Moltmann's reading, is not in the timeless or in the existential present but in the promised future that lies open before all of creation.⁴⁵

The Bloch engagement deserves a moment as well. The young Moltmann had been reading Ernst Bloch — a Marxist philosopher, a survivor of fascism, a Jewish atheist working out a metaphysics of hope from within the Marxist tradition — and recognized in Bloch's framework a category Christian theology desperately needed. Bloch had argued that human existence is structured by anticipation, by what he called the "not-yet" of reality. Moltmann took this category and put it to work for Christology and eschatology. The risen Christ is the "not-yet" of new creation breaking into the present. The promise of God is the ground of a hope that is not flight from the world but engagement with it. This was the move that made Theology of Hope usable for liberation theology, for political theology, and for any Christian project of social engagement. Moltmann did not become a Marxist. But he had learned from a Marxist how to talk about hope as a structural feature of human existence, and he poured the gospel into that vessel.⁴⁶

One of Moltmann's most quoted lines from Theology of Hope is his complaint that for the Bultmannian tradition, eschatology had been banished to the very end of theology, as a small and ultimately superfluous loculus. Moltmann's whole project is to invert this: eschatology is the structure within which all the other doctrines must be reread. Creation is read forward to its consummation. Christology is read forward to the parousia. Ecclesiology is read forward to the kingdom. The whole gospel is given its bearings by the future that God has promised. Whatever else one says about Moltmann's later universalism, the recovery of eschatology as the structural center of theology is widely acknowledged — even by his critics — as one of the major theological achievements of the twentieth century.⁴⁷

The Crucified God (1972)

If Theology of Hope made Moltmann famous, The Crucified God made him controversial. He later said of it, "I wrote it with my lifeblood."¹⁶ The German title Der gekreuzigte Gott appeared in 1972; the English translation by R. A. Wilson and John Bowden came out in 1974 from Harper & Row, was reprinted by SCM in London, and has been continuously in print ever since.¹⁷ The book stands as the most influential of Moltmann's writings on the broader Christian church. It is also the book where the universalist tendency that flowered in 1996 has its first real roots.

The argument can be stated simply, though the working out is anything but. Christian theology, Moltmann maintains, has been governed for centuries by an unspoken assumption that God in Himself is impassible — incapable of suffering, immune to time, untouched by the world's pain. The cross, on this view, is something that happens to Jesus's human nature only. The divine nature watches from outside, unharmed. Moltmann argues this is theological evasion. The God of Jesus Christ is not the impassible Absolute of late antiquity. He is the God who, in the death of His Son, enters into death from the inside.

To say that, Moltmann insists, requires trinitarian language. The cross is not the death of an undifferentiated divine being. It is, more precisely, an event between the Father and the Son in the Spirit. The Son suffers dying. The Father suffers the death of the Son. The Spirit binds them together across the rift. As Moltmann puts it in a much-quoted passage: The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son. The fatherlessness of the Son is matched by the sonlessness of the Father. The cross is, in a manner that has to be carefully stated, an event within the very life of God.¹⁸

Moltmann is careful — and his Reformed and Catholic critics have not always given him credit for this — to reject patripassianism, the ancient heresy that the Father suffered on the cross. The Son was crucified; the Father was not. But the suffering of the Father, Moltmann insists, was no less real, even though it was different in kind. What Abraham did not do to Isaac, God in the Trinity did to His Son. He gave Him up. He abandoned Him. He delivered Him to an accursed death. And in doing so, the Father Himself "suffers the death of the Son in the infinite grief of love."²⁰

The Crucified God's argument, then, is that the Trinity is constituted around the cross — and the cross is constituted around the experience of God-forsakenness. This has enormous consequences for any doctrine of hell. If God in Christ has entered into the very experience of God-forsakenness — the experience the strict doctrine of eternal conscious torment assigns to the damned as their everlasting condition — then God in Christ has descended into the place that the most rigid Augustinian theology says is utterly cut off from Him. The cross, in Moltmann's reading, makes hell penetrable by the love of God. There is no longer any place in creation, including the place of utter abandonment, where the crucified Son has not already gone in love. Balthasar's Holy Saturday theology comes close to this conclusion from the Catholic side; Moltmann arrives at it from the Reformed.

One more thing about The Crucified God deserves note here: its political theology. Moltmann does not develop the universal-salvation question at length in 1972 — but he does insist that the cross commits Christian theology to solidarity with the victims of history. The crucified Christ is found among the godforsaken, and the godforsaken of history are not only those in the existential abyss but also those crushed by political and economic and social oppression. "Theology," Moltmann wrote, "springs from a divine passion — it is the open wound of God in one's own life and in the tormented men, women and children of this world."²¹ This conviction, that eschatology must speak to the actual sufferings of the actually suffering, is the link between Moltmann's Christology and his developing universalism. The unsaved are not abstractions in his theology. They are the gulag prisoner, the Auschwitz victim, the slum child, the wartime conscript — the whole catalogue of those for whom history has been hell. A Christian eschatology that consigns them to a further and eternal hell after death has, in Moltmann's judgment, failed both Christ and them.

The Auschwitz question is, in fact, never far from The Crucified God. Moltmann had returned to Germany in 1948 from his POW years to find his country reduced to rubble — a moral as well as physical rubble. He had seen the photographs of the camps nailed to his hut wall. The question of whether Christian theology could speak honestly after Auschwitz was, for his generation, the question. Moltmann's response in The Crucified God takes Elie Wiesel's famous Auschwitz vignette — the young boy hanged in the camp, and the question "Where is God now?", answered in Wiesel's narration by an internal voice: "There — He is hanging on the gallows" — and turns it into theological grammar. Where is God in Auschwitz? On the cross, where He has always been when the worst happens. The protest atheism of the post-Holocaust generation, Moltmann argued, was not wrong to protest. It was right to demand that any God still worth believing in must be a God who has gone into the camps, the gas chambers, the trenches, the unmarked graves of every century's wars and famines and tyrannies. The cross is the affirmation that He has.⁴⁸

This makes Moltmann's theology of hell different from the Augustinian and Calvinist theologies of hell that preceded it not only in its conclusion but in its starting point. The classical Western theology of hell starts with the doctrine of God's justice and asks what justice requires regarding sinners. Moltmann starts with the cross and asks where God has already gone for the godforsaken. The answer he reaches changes the question. If God in Christ has descended into the abyss, then the abyss is no longer a foreign country. It is territory that has been visited by the Trinity itself. Whatever Christian eschatology says about hell, after the cross, it cannot say that hell is a place beyond the reach of God. The classical view said hell is precisely the place where God's love is withdrawn forever. Moltmann argues, in effect, that the cross is the formal proof that no such place exists. Whether his argument succeeds is debatable. That it has reframed the question for a generation of readers is not.

The Trinity and the Kingdom (1980)

Moltmann's 1980 book Trinität und Reich Gottes (English: The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, Harper & Row, 1981) extends the trinitarian theology of The Crucified God into a constructive doctrine of the Trinity. The major contribution here is what is sometimes called Moltmann's "social trinitarianism" — the view that the three persons of the Trinity are not modes of a single subject but a true community of mutual relations, and that the Christian doctrine of God is therefore a doctrine of communion before it is a doctrine of unity. Chapter II, "The Passion of God," develops the divine passibility argument that The Crucified God had introduced.²² The kingdom of God, on this account, is not the rule of an isolated monarchic deity over His subjects but the extension into creation of the perichoretic life of the triune persons in love. The implications for eschatology are clear: if God's life is communion, then God's kingdom is communion realized; and a communion realized that leaves any rational creature finally outside is, by definition, incomplete.

This is not yet an explicit argument for universalism. But it is the trinitarian framework that will support that argument when it comes.

The Way of Jesus Christ (1989)

The 1989 Christology, Der Weg Jesu Christi (English: The Way of Jesus Christ, Harper & Row / SCM, 1990), takes the cross-and-trinity arguments of the earlier works and rebuilds them as a full account of the person and work of Jesus. The most relevant chapter for our purposes is the chapter on the descent of Christ — the patristic theme of the descensus ad inferos, Christ's going to the dead.

Moltmann treats the descent not as a marginal feature of patristic devotion but as the structural center of Christ's solidarity with the dead. Christ goes to the dead because the dead are where God-forsakenness is most complete — the absolute privation of life and communion. He goes not to harrow them in the sense of dragging the saved out (the medieval Western image) but to share their condition and to bring His own life into their absence of life. The patristic line we tracked in Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria — Christ preaching to the dead, the gospel reaching even there — finds a modern Reformed voice in Moltmann.²³

What this means for the long hope is straightforward. The descent is not a one-time historical event sealed off in the past. It is a permanent feature of the trinitarian life as constituted around the cross. The descent says something about who God is in relation to the dead: God is the one who, in His Son, has gone to where they are. Whatever else Christian eschatology must say, it must say that.

Two further features of Moltmann's treatment of the descent deserve attention because they distinguish his account from both the medieval Western tradition and the modern Protestant suspicion of the doctrine. First, Moltmann insists that the descent must be read in trinitarian and not merely christological terms. When the Son goes to the dead, He does not go alone. The Father gives Him over and the Spirit accompanies Him. The whole inner life of God is drawn into the territory of the dead. This is the same move Moltmann had made in The Crucified God with respect to Golgotha — the cross is an event between the persons of the Trinity, not merely a transaction performed by one person on behalf of another — and he extends it here into the realm of the grave. The dead are not abandoned by God to a divine indifference, because there is no divine indifference; the triune God is constitutionally turned toward them.

Second, Moltmann ties the descent to the question of the unevangelized. He is not unaware of the missiological problem that has driven so much of the postmortem opportunity literature (the literature we will examine in Chapter 26). What happens to those who die without ever hearing the name of Christ? Moltmann's answer is not to multiply hypothetical mechanisms but to point at what the New Testament already says about the Christ who preaches to the spirits in prison (1 Peter 3:19; 4:6). The patristic exegesis of those verses, suspect to many modern interpreters, becomes in Moltmann's hands a load-bearing column. If the descent really happened and really means what the Fathers said it meant, then the question of the unevangelized is not the unanswerable scandal it has so often been made out to be. Christ Himself is the answer, and He is the answer on the far side of death as well as on this side.

The Coming of God (1996)

The book where Moltmann finally treats universal salvation head-on is the 1996 eschatology, Das Kommen Gottes: Christliche Eschatologie (English: The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, Fortress, 1996). It is the volume that, more than any other in his career, defines his contribution to the long-hope tradition. It won the Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion in 2000.²⁴

The book is structured into five large parts: an "eschatology of personal life" (death, the soul, what comes next for individuals); an "eschatology of human history" (the kingdom, the millennium); an "eschatology of cosmos" (the new creation, ecological eschatology); an "eschatology of glory" (the eternal life of God's kingdom); and the final section on the divine sabbath. Embedded in the first part is the long discussion that has drawn the most attention: chapter II.6 ("The Restoration of All Things"), in which Moltmann takes up the question of universal salvation directly.²⁵

His method in that chapter is to set out the biblical and historical case on both sides — the universalist passages of Paul (Rom 5:18; 1 Cor 15:22, 28; Phil 2:9–11; Col 1:20; Eph 1:10), and the double-outcome passages (Matt 25, the language of eternal punishment in the Gospels and Revelation). He acknowledges that Scripture testifies to both. He does not pretend the universalist case can be made by simple proof-texting. He acknowledges that confident universalism and confident double-outcome eschatology are both biblically attested. The question, he argues, is which of these two scriptural witnesses is the structural center and which is the limit-case — and on that question one must turn to Christology.²⁶

His answer is the cross. Christian universalism, for Moltmann, is not the abstract universalism of nineteenth-century liberalism, which simply rounds the rough edges off the gospel for the sake of polite modernity. It is, on the contrary, a hard-won theological conclusion drawn from the depths of the cross. Moltmann is here in essential agreement with the argument that Robin Parry — writing as Gregory MacDonald — would later make in his evangelical universalist project: "If we follow the method of providing christological answers for eschatological questions … we must submerge ourselves in the depths of Christ's death on the cross at Golgotha. It is only here that we find the certainty of reconciliation without limits, and the true ground for the hope for 'the restoration of all things.'"²⁷ Parry himself, despite his sympathy, judges that Moltmann goes too far on the inferential side; we will come back to that critique.

Moltmann is careful — and this is one of the most-overlooked features of his argument — to distinguish his position from Origen's apokatastasis. Origen's restoration doctrine, Moltmann notes, depended on a metaphysical scheme of the pre-existence of souls and a cyclical-cosmological framework that no modern theology can accept. Moltmann's universalism is not Origenist in that technical sense. It does not rest on the pre-existence of rational creatures. It rests on the once-for-all event of the cross.²⁸ This is the right distinction to make, even if the contested historiography of Origen's actual views (see Chapter 11) might complicate Moltmann's reading of Origen's pre-existence speculation.

The argument from the cross is supplemented, in The Coming of God, by an argument from divine character. If God created human beings out of love, asks Moltmann, "can God hate what he himself has created without hating himself?"²⁹ The question is rhetorical but pointed. The doctrine of double outcome, taken with full seriousness, asks us to imagine a God who eternally maintains in existence the very creatures He came to redeem, in order to keep them in everlasting torment. Moltmann does not think this God can be reconciled with the God who in Christ entered into our God-forsakenness on the cross.

Closely related is his argument from the nature of judgment. Stephen Jonathan, whose work on postmortem opportunity is examined in Chapter 26, has helpfully drawn out this strand of Moltmann's case. Moltmann argues that the early Church understood the Last Judgment not as a tribunal in which the wicked are sentenced but as a hope for the victims of history — a moment when the suffering of the poor and the wronged would at last be vindicated.³⁰ Only after Constantine, he claims, did the Last Judgment come to be modeled on the Roman criminal tribunal. To recover the older sense — to "Christianize" the doctrine of judgment, as Moltmann puts it — is to recognize that the Judge is none other than the crucified Christ. And the crucified Christ does not judge by any righteousness other than the one He showed in His life: love of enemies, mercy for the broken, restoration of the lost.³¹

What Moltmann offers, then, is a vision of the Last Judgment in which the perpetrators of evil are not annihilated as persons but transformed. He is willing to speak directly about the hardest cases. What of the mass murderer? What of the perpetrator of genocide? Moltmann's answer: the victims of sin and violence will be supported, healed, and brought to life by God's righteousness; the perpetrators of sin and violence will experience a rectifying transformative justice, in which they "die off" in their atrocities and are "reborn" to a new life.³³ The point is not soft. The point is the cross. The same Christ who hung between the thieves and forgave one of them on the spot will, on Moltmann's reading, complete that forgiving work in the eschaton — not by leaving the impenitent to themselves, but by drawing them to the place where impenitence dies and life begins.

Two more chapters of The Coming of God deserve quick mention. The third part of the book contains Moltmann's lengthy, controversial defense of millennialism — a sympathetic engagement with the biblical text of Revelation 20 against the centuries of Western theology that had spiritualized the millennium away. Moltmann sees the millennium as the historically realized phase of the kingdom in which the witnesses of Christ are vindicated in time. He is not a dispensationalist — far from it. But he refuses to dissolve the literal future of redeemed history into the abstract eternity of the Augustinian tradition.³⁴ And the fifth part contains an extraordinary eschatology of nature — a vision of the redemption of the non-human creation that, in our own time of ecological crisis, has spoken to readers who would otherwise have nothing to do with Moltmann's other commitments.

What is most striking about The Coming of God, read as a whole, is the breadth of its vision. Eschatology in Moltmann is not a doctrine about what happens to the individual at death and how the bookkeeping is settled at the judgment. It is a doctrine about the future of everything — every creature, every history, every dimension of the cosmos. The human person, redeemed; human history, vindicated; the cosmos, transfigured; the Trinity, glorified in a creation that has come at last to its sabbath rest. The five-part structure is not arbitrary. It is the spelling-out of what the resurrection of the crucified means when you take it as the future of all reality rather than as a private guarantee given to the believer.

Moltmann's section on hell, embedded within Part II, is worth pausing on directly. He does not deny that the New Testament speaks of judgment, of wrath, of destruction, of the wages of sin. What he denies is that any of these eschatological realities can be made into a doctrine of eternal conscious torment without doing violence to the cross. Hell, on his reading, is a transitional reality, not a final one. It is the experience of God's purifying presence by those who are not yet ready to receive it — and the purification, Moltmann is willing to claim, will succeed for everyone in the end. The Eastern Orthodox theology of God's energies as fire to the unprepared and light to the prepared lies close to the surface of this argument, though Moltmann does not develop the affinity at length.⁴⁹

Whether this constitutes a doctrine of conditional immortality with postmortem opportunity, or a doctrine of universal restoration through purifying judgment, is a question Moltmann does not resolve as crisply as the conditionalists or universalists who came after him would have liked. He writes in the spirit of the older Christian tradition where these were not yet sharply distinguished alternatives. The fire of judgment purifies. The purified are saved. Whether any are finally destroyed (annihilated) rather than purified is a question Moltmann tends to answer in the universalist direction without belaboring the distinction. For the purposes of this book, his work is most precisely classified as cross-centered universalism with a strong purgatorial element — closer to Gregory of Nyssa's framework than to either pure annihilationism or pure postmortem opportunity.

Sun of Righteousness, Arise! (2010)

Moltmann did not stop writing. Sun of Righteousness, Arise! (German 2010, English Fortress 2010) is the late book in which he reaffirmed and developed his universalism. The title comes from Malachi 4:2, and Moltmann reads it as a promise of the cosmic dawn that ends night. By 2010 he was eighty-four years old and writing with a freedom that the earlier, more cautious systematic works did not always allow. The book's title essay defends what Moltmann calls "Christian universalism" against what he sees as the inadequacy of both the strict double-outcome view and various forms of hopeful universalism that refuse the final step.³⁵ By the end of his life, Moltmann was the most theologically articulate Protestant universalist publishing in the English-speaking world.

D. Reception

How has Moltmann been received? The pattern is instructive. In the American mainline Protestant world, Moltmann taught for a decade as the Robert W. Woodruff Distinguished Visiting Professor at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, where he spent regular semesters from 1983 to 1993. He delivered the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 1984–1985. His American students included Miroslav Volf (a Yale theologian), Michael Welker, and (in different ways) figures across the mainline.³⁶ Through them, Moltmann's theology became a structuring presence in late twentieth-century American mainline Protestantism.

The Volf connection is worth noticing in particular. Volf, a Croatian Pentecostal who became an Episcopalian and now teaches at Yale, was Moltmann's doctoral student at Tübingen. Volf's own theological project — especially his work on memory, reconciliation, and the place of victim and perpetrator in the eschaton (The End of Memory, Exclusion and Embrace) — develops directly out of Moltmann's framework while stopping short of Moltmann's confident universalism. Volf has remained committed to the possibility that some may, in the end, be lost. But the texture of his thinking on judgment, on the wronged and the wrongdoer, on the cross as the structural center of reconciliation, is unmistakably Moltmannian. The pattern with Volf — accepting the framework, declining the universalist conclusion — is common in Moltmann's American reception.⁵⁰

The evangelical reception has been more cautious — and more divided. Richard Bauckham, whose 1995 monograph The Theology of Jürgen Moltmann (T&T Clark) is the standard scholarly introduction, has done as much as any single figure to bring Moltmann into the evangelical conversation. Bauckham's 1999 edited volume God Will Be All in All: The Eschatology of Jürgen Moltmann (T&T Clark; Fortress US, 2001) gathered a major colloquy of theologians around Moltmann's Coming of God, including an essay by Moltmann himself responding to his critics.³⁷ Bauckham's own assessment is sympathetic but not uncritical: he is convinced of the seriousness of Moltmann's project while doubting some of the trinitarian moves of The Crucified God.

Bauckham observed in his 1995 book — and the observation has been widely cited — that Moltmann's mature theology arrived, by way of The Coming of God, in a place that looks surprisingly close to where Barth ended up in Church Dogmatics II/2: with a christologically grounded universal hope, held in tension with the warning passages of the New Testament. The two great Reformed eschatologies of the twentieth century, Barth's and Moltmann's, end up at the same destination by different routes — Barth by way of election, Moltmann by way of the cross.⁵¹ This is, in a way, the formal demonstration that the long hope has a place within Reformed theology, not just at its margins. Two of the major dogmatic projects of the century — both written by Reformed theologians — reach the universal hope as a serious systematic conclusion.

Stanley Grenz, the late Canadian Baptist theologian, engaged Moltmann substantively in his Theology for the Community of God and elsewhere, drawing on Moltmann's social trinitarianism while declining to follow him into universalism.³⁸ Roger Olson, the Baptist historian of theology, has treated Moltmann with respectful disagreement in The Story of Christian Theology and elsewhere — appreciative of Moltmann's recovery of eschatology and of his refusal to dehistoricize the gospel, but unconvinced by the universalism. The pattern is common in the evangelical mainstream: The Crucified God is admired; the universalism is set to one side.

The Reformed reception has been still more reserved. The classical Reformed world has rejected Moltmann's universalism — Cornelis Venema's The Promise of the Future, Michael Horton's The Christian Faith, R. C. Sproul's writings on hell — while acknowledging the seriousness of the engagement.³⁹ The classical Reformed objection is two-fold. First, the trinitarian moves of The Crucified God seem to many Reformed readers to compromise the impassibility of God and to verge, even with Moltmann's careful disclaimers, on patripassianism. Second, the universalism is seen as a violation of the strict double-outcome reading of the New Testament that the Reformed confessions presuppose. Moltmann is, by his own self-understanding, a Reformed theologian; the institutional Reformed response has been to treat him as a Reformed theologian who has gone too far. The Westminster Confession of Faith, 33.2, on the eternity of the punishment of the wicked, is not a confessional position Moltmann is willing to confess.

An interesting wrinkle here is the conditionalist response. The modern conditional-immortality movement (treated in Chapter 28) has engaged Moltmann selectively. Edward Fudge's The Fire That Consumes draws on Moltmann's reframing of biblical fire-imagery away from preservation-in-torment and toward destruction-of-evil; but Fudge stops short of universalism, holding that those who finally refuse God will be destroyed. Glenn Peoples and Chris Date and the Rethinking Hell collaborators have engaged Moltmann's exegesis of aiōnios and the universalist Pauline passages with respect, even while concluding that the texts will not bear Moltmann's universal-restoration interpretation. Moltmann is in this sense more sympathetically read by some conditionalists than by some confessional universalists who find his speculative theology too freewheeling.

The Catholic reception is mixed. Balthasar read Moltmann appreciatively, especially the Holy Saturday material in The Crucified God that corresponded to his own; the two were close enough that Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale and The Crucified God can be read as parallel projects on the descent. But Catholic critics have flagged Moltmann's trinitarian moves more sharply than have evangelicals. Avery Dulles, writing in First Things on the population of hell, was reserved about Moltmann's universalism, preferring Balthasar's more carefully hedged "dare we hope" position.⁴⁰

The Orthodox reception is the most interesting. There is a natural sympathy between Moltmann's trinitarian theology and the Eastern emphasis on perichoresis. There is also a real Orthodox tradition of theological universalism running from Origen and Gregory of Nyssa down through Isaac of Nineveh to Sergei Bulgakov in the twentieth century (see Chapter 24). Modern Orthodox figures like Kallistos Ware have spoken sympathetically of the hope of universal salvation while remaining within a tradition that has not dogmatized either position. Moltmann's trinitarian moves, however, are not Eastern in their structure. He works from the cross outward to a doctrine of God, where the Orthodox tradition has classically worked from the apophatic ground of God outward to the economy of the cross. Some Orthodox readers have therefore admired Moltmann's universalism while finding the route by which he gets there unsatisfying.

Among postmortem-opportunity and conservative-universalist scholars treated in Chapter 26, Moltmann is a constant interlocutor. Stephen Jonathan draws on The Coming of God repeatedly for Moltmann's case that the Last Judgment is the vindication of the victims rather than the punishment of the perpetrators, and for Moltmann's reframing of judgment around the crucified Judge.⁴¹ Robin Parry, writing as Gregory MacDonald, accepts the cross-centered logic of Moltmann's universalism but argues that Moltmann overplays his hand when he treats the cross as a guarantee that no creature will ever experience any divine wrath at all. Parry's careful judgment is that "the cross does guarantee … that … punishment will not be the last word; that after 'crucifixion' God speaks another word — 'resurrection.'"⁴² The cross is the last word for the universalist case, but not the only word. Moltmann's confidence is, on Parry's reading, slightly stronger than the New Testament will bear.

E. Assessment

What can we conclude historically about Moltmann's place in the long-hope tradition? Three things, at different levels of confidence.

First, and at the highest level of confidence: Moltmann is the most theologically articulate Protestant universalist of major academic standing in the second half of the twentieth century. There is no serious challenger for that title. Karl Barth left his universalist tendencies as suggestion and refused dogmatic universalism (see Chapter 21). Hans Urs von Balthasar argued, from the Catholic side, that Christians may "dare to hope" but not "know" that all are saved (see Chapter 22). Robin Parry, David Bentley Hart, and Thomas Talbott are major contemporary universalist voices but work in a different theological register from Moltmann (see Chapter 25). Among twentieth-century systematicians of confessional standing, Moltmann is the one who took the universalist position openly and defended it from within the structures of Reformed dogmatics.

Second, with somewhat less confidence: Moltmann's argument for that position has a distinctive shape that differentiates it from the historical universalisms. Origen's apokatastasis was cosmological and metaphysical — the return of all rational creatures to the divine principle from which they had fallen. Gregory of Nyssa's universalism was rooted in his anthropology — the human being made for God and incapable of finally resting outside Him. The medieval and early modern universalisms drew variously on these inheritances. Moltmann's universalism is constructed instead from the cross outward — from the trinitarian event of God-forsakenness on Golgotha to the structural impossibility of any finally God-forsaken place in creation. This is the distinctive Moltmannian move. Whether it succeeds is debatable, and the patripassianism charge is the major site of doubt. But the shape of the argument is, in the long history of Christian eschatology, recognizably new.

It is worth pausing here on what is at stake in calling Moltmann's argument cross-centered. The classical Augustinian doctrine of hell took its bearings from God's justice. The classical Reformed doctrine took its bearings from God's sovereignty. The classical evangelical revivalist doctrine took its bearings from the urgency of the present decision. None of these classical anchorings is wrong on its own terms. Moltmann adds a fourth anchor: God's solidarity with the godforsaken, as demonstrated by the cross. He does not pretend this displaces the other anchors. He argues, rather, that it is the structural center to which they must be referred. The justice of God is the justice of the Crucified. The sovereignty of God is the sovereignty of the Crucified. The urgency of decision is the urgency that the Crucified will not let you go. From this center, Moltmann claims, the universal-restoration conclusion is the more natural extrapolation of the cross than the eternal-conscious-torment conclusion. The classical Augustinian-Calvinist response is that this is not how the New Testament texts handle the question — that the warnings of judgment are too sharp, too repeated, too final, to fold into a cross-centered universal scope. The argument continues.

Third, and with the most caution: Moltmann's confidence about universal salvation may overreach the available theological evidence. Here I am inclined to agree with Parry. The cross gives Christian hope its structure, and Moltmann is right that any serious eschatology must reckon with the universal scope of what Christ has entered. But moving from "the cross gives ground for hope that all may be saved" to "the cross guarantees that all will be saved" is a step that the New Testament does not unambiguously authorize. The double-outcome passages are real. The warnings of judgment are real. Moltmann acknowledges this in The Coming of God and argues that the universalist witness of Paul should be taken as structural and the double-outcome witness as a serious limit-case. But the inference is contested, and the church's long historical witness — including the universalist fathers — has more often spoken in hope than in dogmatic certainty (see Chapter 22's treatment of Balthasar). Whether Moltmann's confident step is the right one or whether Balthasar's hesitant one is more faithful to the apostolic witness is a question on which the readers of this book may legitimately differ.

There is also the question of human freedom — the question that, in our own time, has been pressed most sharply by the analytic theologians (Jerry Walls, R. Zachary Manis, William Lane Craig). If God will not finally override human freedom, then on what basis does Moltmann maintain that every creature will be saved? Moltmann's answer in The Coming of God is that the freedom of the creature is itself oriented toward God; that the encounter with the crucified Christ at the eschaton is so overwhelming, so authentically loving, so manifestly the answer to everything the creature has ever genuinely sought, that no rational creature will finally refuse it. This is, in effect, a version of what Talbott calls "soft" universalism — the view that the conditions of free creaturely existence are such that all will, given enough time and enough divine pursuit, freely come to God (see Chapter 25). Moltmann does not develop the analytic argument with Talbott's precision. But the structural logic is the same. Whether this argument works as a guarantee, or only as a basis for hope, is one of the central questions of the modern universalist conversation.

There is also Moltmann's historical claim about the condemnation of Origen — that Origen was condemned at Constantinople II (553) for the wrong reasons, namely for the metaphysical speculations of his pre-existence doctrine rather than for the doctrine of apokatastasis as such. Recent patristic scholarship, especially the work of Ilaria Ramelli, has lent some support to this reading: the anathemas of 553 do appear to target the Origenism of the sixth century (the systematized Evagrian version with its strong metaphysical commitments) rather than Origen's own theology as he himself presented it.⁴⁴ Moltmann's reading is therefore not historically eccentric. But it is contested — Michael McClymond's Devil's Redemption argues the opposite case at length — and the historical question is genuinely open. Readers will have to weigh the evidence for themselves. The point for Moltmann's project is that he can distinguish his cross-centered universalism from a hypothetical Origenism the Church has formally condemned, which gives him room to make his case as a legitimate continuation rather than a rejected heresy.

Finally, an honest word about what Moltmann does not give the long-hope tradition. He does not give a sustained exegesis of the postmortem-opportunity texts in 1 Peter 3:18–4:6, nor a fully worked-out doctrine of the intermediate state, nor a satisfying account of how an individual's free response to grace fits into universal restoration without coercion. These questions are taken up more carefully by other writers in this story — by Parry in The Evangelical Universalist, by Talbott in The Inescapable Love of God, by Beilby and Jonathan and Harrison in the postmortem-opportunity scholarship (see Chapter 25 and Chapter 26). Moltmann's contribution is at the level of theological architecture rather than exegetical detail or analytic precision. He gives us the framework in which the question of universal salvation can be asked from the cross outward. He does not always close out the details.

F. Why This Matters

So why does Moltmann matter, in a book about the long hope of postmortem salvation in the Christian tradition?

He matters first because he is proof that the long-hope conversation was not the property of fringe sectarians or nineteenth-century liberals. By the end of the twentieth century, the universalist position had moved from the margins of Christian thought into the work of a major Reformed dogmatician occupying one of the most prestigious chairs in German Protestantism, taught for a decade at Emory, lecturing at Edinburgh, advising the World Council of Churches. The "modern innovation" charge against universalism — that no respectable Christian theologian has ever held it — collapses on contact with the bibliography of Jürgen Moltmann. One may disagree with his arguments. One cannot pretend he is not there.

He matters second because of his theological method. Moltmann did not arrive at universal salvation through soft-hearted sentimentality or through a generic appeal to the love of God in the abstract. He arrived at it by tightening the screws on Christology — by insisting that we read eschatology through the cross, and that we read the cross trinitarianly, and that we follow the cross as far down into God-forsakenness as the New Testament will let us go. Whether or not one accepts his conclusion, the method is one that any future Christian theology of the long hope will have to reckon with. It is no longer enough, after Moltmann, to dismiss universalism as a softening of the gospel. The most theologically serious universalist project of the twentieth century is a cross-centered project, not a cross-evading one.

He matters third for the long-hope tradition specifically because of the company he keeps. Moltmann's work is not a private project. It is the central node in a network: Karl Barth before him, Robin Parry and Thomas Talbott after, Stephen Jonathan and William Harrison and Andrew Hronich in the postmortem-opportunity stream, David Bentley Hart in the contemporary Eastern Orthodox conversation, the whole evangelical-universalist movement of the early twenty-first century. The line that runs from Barth's election in CD II/2 through Moltmann's cross in The Crucified God to the contemporary explosion of conservative universalist publishing is a single line. If we are looking for the modern theological pedigree of the long hope, Moltmann is the place where the threads come together.

He matters fourth, and this point is sometimes missed by his critics, for what he gives the conditionalist tradition as well as the universalist tradition. Moltmann's reframing of biblical fire-imagery — the fire that consumes evil rather than preserves it — is exegetically and theologically friendly to conditional immortality even where Moltmann's own conclusion is universal restoration. His refusal of eternal conscious torment, his refusal of the impassible deity, his refusal of the Augustinian elect-and-reprobate calculus, his refusal of the existentialist evacuation of the future — all of these refusals are useful to the long-hope tradition in any of its three modern forms (universalism, postmortem opportunity, conditional immortality with PO). The conditionalist who reads Moltmann selectively is not making a mistake. There is a great deal in Moltmann that supports the conditionalist case, even if Moltmann himself does not finally take it.⁵²

And he matters finally because of what his theology will not let us forget. The young soldier behind the wire in 1945, reading the Markan Gospel for the first time, met a God who had gone into the godforsakenness of the cross because that was where the godforsaken were. The whole of Moltmann's career is, in a way, an unfolding of what that young man understood in the camp. Christian eschatology is not a doctrine about who is safely inside and who is dangerously outside. It is a doctrine about a God who has gone, in His Son, to every place where godforsakenness is suffered, in order that the godforsaken may not finally be lost.

That is the claim. The reader of this book is welcome to weigh whether it is true — whether the cross guarantees the salvation of all, or whether it only guarantees the possibility of the salvation of all, or whether it does not in fact reach as far as Moltmann thought. What cannot be honestly denied, after reading Moltmann, is that the question was asked with theological seriousness and answered with theological argument, by a major Reformed dogmatician of the late twentieth century, working from within the cross-centered tradition that all of us in the Reformation churches inherit. The long hope, by 1996, had a forthright Protestant champion. It would not lack for company in the decades that followed.

One last word, pastoral rather than academic. Moltmann's theology was forged in a labor camp. The young soldier who picked up the New Testament out of boredom was not looking for a theological system. He was looking — or being looked for, in his later telling — for a way to survive the shame of being a German in 1945, of being a soldier who had served the Reich, of being alive when his classmates were dead and his country was rubble. What he found was a Christ who had gone where he had gone. The cross was the affirmation that the worst that could happen to a human soul had already been entered into by God. That conviction, more than any technical argument, is the spiritual center of everything Moltmann wrote for the next eighty years. When he insists, at the end of The Coming of God, that we may hope for the salvation of even the worst of perpetrators — even the very perpetrators whose deeds he had spent his teenage years witnessing in his own country — he is not being soft. He is being faithful to what he believes the cross requires.

The reader who finishes this chapter unconvinced of Moltmann's confident universalism may still come away convinced of two things: that his theological seriousness has earned him a place at the table of the long-hope tradition, and that his refusal to let the cross be smaller than the abyss it descended into is a refusal Christian theology of any future generation will have to take with the same seriousness Moltmann took it.

We turn next, in Chapter 24, to the broader Catholic and Orthodox recoveries of the long-hope tradition in the twentieth century — Karl Rahner and the post–Vatican II Catholic shift, Sergei Bulgakov's sophiology, Kallistos Ware and the modern Orthodox conversation, and Ladislaus Boros's striking hypothesis of a final decision at the moment of death. Moltmann's Protestant universalism does not stand alone. It is part of a wider twentieth-century opening, and that opening has its Catholic and Orthodox sides as well.