Chapter 23

Jürgen Moltmann and the Crucified God's Reach

The forsaken Christ, the suffering God, and a hope that will not let go of the lost

A young soldier in a borrowed Bible

A young German soldier sits on a cot in a prisoner-of-war camp. The war has ended. His country lies in ruins. The names of the Nazi camps — Belsen, Auschwitz — have begun to appear in photographs pinned to the walls of his barracks. He is nineteen years old. He cannot go home. There is no home left to go to. An American chaplain hands him a small army-issue Bible. With nothing else to do, he begins to read.¹

He reads the Psalms. He reads the Gospel of Mark. And he comes to the cry from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Something breaks open. Here is a Christ who knows what it is to be a German prisoner of war in 1945. Here is a Christ who has stood inside the very godforsakenness that the young soldier feels. Years later, Jürgen Moltmann will say it this way: "I didn't find Christ; he found me." And he will spend the rest of his life — sixty-five years of writing, lecturing, traveling, arguing — trying to say what he saw that night.²

What he saw was this: that the God of Christian faith is a God who suffers, who has gone down into the deepest places of human despair, and who has carried his suffering into the very life of the Trinity. And if that is true — if the cross is what Christians say it is — then the reach of God's love has no outer boundary. No place of human forsakenness lies beyond it. No person, however lost, has fallen further than the Crucified Son.

That conviction, born in a POW camp in 1945 and worked out over the next six decades, made Jürgen Moltmann (1926–2024) the most influential Protestant theologian of the second half of the twentieth century — and the most outspoken Reformed universalist since Karl Barth. He is the major Reformed Protestant voice we have to deal with in this volume, and his case for universal restoration is the most thoroughly worked-out Protestant case of the modern era. It is not the easy universalism of nineteenth-century liberalism. It is a hard-earned, cross-shaped, trinitarian universalism that takes the horror of suffering as seriously as the breadth of redemption.³

The life that shaped the theology

Moltmann was born on April 8, 1926, in Hamburg, into what he later called a "secular humanist" family — not a religious family at all, but a family of Enlightenment readers who taught their children to think.⁴ He dreamed of studying mathematics and physics, hoping perhaps to follow Einstein. The war ended that. He was conscripted at sixteen as an anti-aircraft auxiliary defending his own city. In July 1943 he stood on a flak battery during the British firestorm that killed roughly forty thousand civilians in Hamburg. A friend standing beside him was blown to pieces by the same blast that left Moltmann alive. He never forgot it.⁵

In February 1945 he surrendered in the Belgian forest to the first British soldier he met. The next three years he spent moving from camp to camp — first in Belgium (where the photographs of the death camps were first pinned to the walls), then in Kilmarnock, Scotland, then at Norton Camp in Nottinghamshire, England, a camp partly administered by the YMCA. There he received the Bible, met the Baker family of local Methodist pastors who took prisoners home for Sunday dinner, and in 1947 attended a Student Christian Movement conference at Swanwick where he met, for the first time, young Christians from the countries his nation had attacked.⁶

Released in 1948, he enrolled at Göttingen and studied under Hans Joachim Iwand, Gerhard von Rad, and — most decisively — Otto Weber. Under Weber he wrote his doctoral dissertation (1952) on the seventeenth-century French Reformed theologian Moyse Amyraut, the figure of the Saumur school who tried to soften strict Calvinist predestination by speaking of a hypothetical universal saving will of God.⁷ The choice of subject was telling. From the beginning Moltmann was Reformed by training and conviction, but he was already pulling on the threads where strict double predestination did not quite hold. His Habilitationsschrift followed in 1957, on the Reformed Bremen theologian Christoph Pezel.

He pastored at Wasserhorst near Bremen, then taught at the Confessing Church's Kirchliche Hochschule in Wuppertal from 1958, then at Bonn in 1963, and finally — for the long stretch of his major work — at Tübingen from 1967 to 1994. He kept publishing for thirty more years after his retirement. He died in Tübingen on June 3, 2024, ninety-eight years old.⁸

The three books that opened the door

Moltmann's working theology is laid out in three books from a single decade. They are uneven in style — German systematic theology is rarely a brisk read — but their argument is direct.

Theology of Hope (1964)

Theologie der Hoffnung landed in 1964 like a depth charge. The headlines were almost embarrassing. The New York Times put the English translation on its front page; Time and Newsweek noted it; American seminaries scrambled to teach it.⁹ The book's claim was simple and revolutionary: eschatology is not the last chapter of Christian theology, the appendix tacked on to handle death and the end of the world. Eschatology is the engine. The Christian gospel is, from the inside out, about a future that God has promised and that breaks into the present from ahead.

That move did real work. For most of the twentieth century, eschatology had been embarrassed or futurized into irrelevance. Liberal Protestantism had pushed it offstage as ancient myth; existentialist Protestantism (Bultmann) had pulled it inward as a moment of personal decision; Barthian Protestantism had pushed it upward into the timelessness of God. Moltmann pulled it back into history. The resurrection of Jesus is the in-breaking of God's promised future, and the Christian community lives now in active hope toward what is genuinely coming.¹⁰

For our purposes, the universalist note is not yet sounded directly in Theology of Hope. But the seedbed is there. If the gospel's basic shape is promise, and if the promise is rooted in the resurrection of the crucified, then any Christian eschatology that ends with the eternal triumph of unredeemed evil — a permanent hell coexisting with the new creation — looks like a permanent contradiction of the promise itself.

The Crucified God (1972)

If Theology of Hope launched Moltmann's career, Der gekreuzigte Gott made it. It remains the book by which most readers know him. Moltmann himself called it the necessary corrective to the first book: hope had to be brought down into the depths, set in the place of the cross, or it would float away as utopia.¹¹

The book's central claim is that the cross of Jesus is not merely the death of a human being who happens to be the Son of God. The cross is an event within the life of the Triune God. On Golgotha, the Father gives up his Son to the abandonment of death; the Son cries out to a Father who does not answer; and the Spirit — Moltmann argues — is the bond of love that holds Father and Son together in the moment of their deepest mutual loss. The crucifixion is, in this sense, a trinitarian event.

The cross's universal scope follows from that trinitarian structure. If in Jesus, God has entered the deepest forsakenness any creature can know, then there is no human god-forsakenness that lies outside God's own experience. The damned, in the strict ECT picture, are defined precisely by their endless God-forsakenness. But Christ has already been god-forsaken — for them, in their place, taking their forsakenness into the divine life and so robbing it of its finality. The cross does not merely demonstrate God's love alongside the possibility of eternal damnation; it cuts the ground out from under the very logic of eternal damnation.¹²

That is the theological foundation of Moltmann's later, more explicit universalism. He does not yet draw the universalist conclusion in 1972, but the foundation is poured. Once you have said that God-in-Christ has taken on universal God-forsakenness, it is very difficult to say that some creatures will be left in a forsakenness God has not borne.

The Way of Jesus Christ (1989)

Seventeen years later, in his Christology Der Weg Jesu Christi, Moltmann returned to the descent of Christ. The descent of Christ into hell, he argues — the article of the Apostles' Creed that the medieval Latin tradition tamed into a "harrowing" of the just dead — is not a footnote. It is the very breadth of the cross. Christ descends into the place of the dead; he descends into the place of the unredeemed; he descends into the abyss of human suffering itself. His descent is what makes the cross universally efficacious for the dead as well as the living.¹³

Robin Parry, the contemporary evangelical universalist, summarizes Moltmann's move this way: any Christian doctrine of hell must be done in the light of Christ's cross, because it is at Golgotha that Christ has suffered our god-forsakenness for us, and it is therefore inconceivable that the cross will not finally achieve its goal — "the complete death of death for the whole of creation." Parry quotes Moltmann directly from the next major work.¹⁴

The argument made plain: The Coming of God (1996)

Moltmann finally laid down the explicit universalist case in Das Kommen Gottes: Christliche Eschatologie (1995; English, 1996). This is his major late eschatology, and it is the book most directly relevant to this chapter. Moltmann had been circling the question for thirty years. Here he says it plainly.

He does not call himself a universalist of the Origenist type. He distances himself carefully from Origen's pre-existence-of-souls speculation and from any speculative cosmology that turns eschatology into a closed system of metaphysics.¹⁵ What he embraces, he calls "Christian universalism" — a universal hope grounded directly in the cross of Christ and not in any philosophical claim about the nature of the soul.

The central methodological move is this. We do not derive our doctrine of the last things from speculation about the future. We derive it from the cross, where the last things have already happened. The "method" Moltmann lays down is to give christological answers to eschatological questions. He says it as clearly as he ever said anything:

That passage is, I think, the single sentence to remember from Moltmann's eschatology. The breadth of Christian hope is not measured by speculation. It is measured by the cross. And the cross is wide enough to take in everything.¹⁶

The book is organized into five large parts: personal eschatology (the dead, the resurrection), historical eschatology (the kingdom, the millennium), cosmic eschatology (the new creation), divine eschatology (the glory of God), and a long introduction on method. The universalist case is laid down most directly in the section on the Last Judgment, where Moltmann argues that Judgment is not, as the post-Constantinian Western tradition came to think, a divine criminal tribunal in which the guilty are sentenced to eternal torment.¹⁷ Judgment is, instead, the establishment of God's righteousness — and the Judge is none other than the Crucified.

"In the crucified Christ," Moltmann writes, "we recognize the Judge of the final Judgment, who himself has become the one condemned, for the accused, in their stead and for their benefit. So at the Last Judgment we expect on the Judgment seat the one who was crucified for the reconciliation of the world, and no other judge."¹⁸ Sin is judged — annihilated, even. But sinners are saved through transformation. The fire that destroys evil restores the person God meant the person to be.¹⁹

The book also contains a sympathetic chapter on the millennium — Moltmann thinks the strictly-spiritualizing Augustinian reading of Revelation 20 has cost the Church too much; he wants a more historical eschatology — and a long final treatment of the eschatology of nature and personhood. Whatever you make of the millennial chapter, the universalist thesis stands on its own.

Moltmann returned to the same set of themes a third time in Sun of Righteousness, Arise! (2010), the late book in which an older man in his eighties reaffirmed without apology what the younger man had argued — that the gospel of Christ, taken as far as the cross will carry it, holds out the certainty of reconciliation without limits.²⁰

What is new in Moltmann's case

Three things in Moltmann's universalism are genuinely new — or at least sharper than what the long-hope tradition had said before. Worth naming them clearly.

First, the trinitarian-cross argument. Patristic universalism (we'll see this in our chapters on Origen and Gregory of Nyssa) was rooted in a metaphysics of the good and a philosophy of the soul's return to God. Barth's case (which we treated in the last chapter but one) was rooted in the doctrine of election and the unity of God's saving will. Moltmann's case is rooted directly in the trinitarian event of the cross. The Trinity opens to take in human god-forsakenness, and the destiny of every god-forsaken creature is therefore gathered into the trinitarian life by way of the cross. This is theologically distinctive.

Second, the political-theological dimension. Moltmann's universalism is not a private speculation about what happens to nice unbelievers. It is integrally tied to his political theology — to his commitment to the victims of history, the casualties of empire and torture and war, the cry of the abandoned. A merely partial eschatology, in which most of God's image-bearers are written off in the end, cannot be the eschatology of the cross. The eschatology adequate to the cross has to be wide enough to gather the disappeared of the Argentine junta, the children of the death camps, the unnamed of every massacre, the broken of every regime — and the perpetrators too, transformed by judgment into what God always meant them to be.²¹

Third, the Reformed-Protestant location. This matters more than it looks. Origen and Gregory were Greek Fathers; Eriugena was a Carolingian outlier; the seventeenth-century English universalists were a marginal current within the Reformed; Barth was the great twentieth-century Reformed exception. Moltmann is the second great Reformed exception, and he is more forthright than Barth ever was. Where Barth refused the universalist label (preferring the language of "objective" reconciliation that left subjective consummation hanging), Moltmann holds — with theological argument — that all will be saved. His position is more confident than Balthasar's "dare we hope": he passes from hope to expectation.²²

Reception, criticism, and contest

Moltmann's reception has been more global than that of any other twentieth-century theologian except perhaps Karl Rahner. His books have been translated into over two dozen languages. He has lectured in Seoul and São Paulo as often as in Tübingen and New Haven. Over five hundred doctoral dissertations had been written on his work by the time of his death.²³

The English-language reception has been especially deep. Moltmann served from 1983 to 1993 as Robert W. Woodruff Distinguished Visiting Professor at Candler School of Theology (Emory), and he taught and lectured widely at Duke, Princeton, Fuller, and other American schools. His most influential American student, Miroslav Volf, wrote his doctoral work under Moltmann at Tübingen and has carried the Moltmannian project forward — though Volf, characteristically, has remained more cautious than Moltmann on the strict universalist conclusion.²⁴

The major scholarly study of Moltmann's theology is Richard Bauckham's The Theology of Jürgen Moltmann (1995) and the companion volume Bauckham edited, God Will Be All in All: The Eschatology of Jürgen Moltmann (1999), which contains a careful appreciative critique by Bauckham himself, a sustained engagement by Trevor Hart, and a response from Moltmann. The most thorough recent monograph on Moltmann's universalism is Nicholas Ansell's The Annihilation of Hell: Universal Salvation and the Redemption of Time in the Eschatology of Jürgen Moltmann (Cascade, 2013), which gives a sympathetic but probing engagement and proposes what Ansell calls a "covenantal universalism" as a development of Moltmann's argument.²⁵

The evangelical reception has been more cautious. Many evangelicals admire The Crucified God and find Moltmann's seriousness about suffering theologically clarifying. They balk at the universalism. Stanley Grenz and Roger Olson have written sympathetically about much of Moltmann's program while declining the universalist conclusion. Clark Pinnock cited Moltmann appreciatively across his career.

Robin Parry, writing as an evangelical universalist, judges Moltmann's argument "goes too far" — not because the cross does not bear the weight Moltmann places on it, but because, Parry suggests, the New Testament itself can affirm both that Christ has suffered for all and that some experience real eschatological wrath. Parry's position is that the cross secures the final word but does not abolish the penultimate word of judgment. This is a careful evangelical reception: it takes Moltmann's christological method seriously while modifying his conclusion.²⁶

The Reformed reception in North America has been largely critical. Cornelis Venema, Michael Horton, and R. C. Sproul have all rejected the universalist conclusion while acknowledging the seriousness of Moltmann's engagement. The Orthodox reception has been mixed. Some Orthodox theologians have noted points of contact with the patristic universalist current that the Eastern tradition never fully closed off, while others have raised concerns about Moltmann's trinitarian moves and his eschatological optimism about creation as a whole.

Assessment: what Moltmann saw, and what may be overstated

What did Moltmann get right? More than the critics admit.

He recovered eschatology as a living doctrine. Before Moltmann, twentieth-century Protestant theology had spent decades doing eschatology by quietly looking away from it — futurizing it into demythologized existence, or spiritualizing it out of history. Moltmann put the Last Things back at the center, where the New Testament has them.²⁷

He took the cross seriously as a doctrine of God. The cross is not just where God shows us how much he loves us; it is where God enters the deepest experience a creature can have, and brings that experience inside the divine life. Even theologians who balk at Moltmann's trinitarian moves have had to reckon with the gravity of his insight. The cross is not a side door of theology. It is the front door.

He refused to compartmentalize doctrinal eschatology from the political reality of suffering. The Holocaust, the gulags, the dirty wars of Latin America, apartheid, the wars of the twentieth century — these are not background noise to Christian eschatology. They are its testing-ground. A doctrine of the last things that cannot speak to the cry of the abandoned is not adequate to the cross.

Where might he have overreached? On three points, I think, the careful reader has to push back.

First, the trinitarian moves in The Crucified God remain contested. Moltmann's intent is not patripassian — he distinguishes the Father's grief from the Son's dying — but the language strains the traditional grammar of divine impassibility further than many theologians (this one included) are willing to go. The point is not that Moltmann is necessarily wrong; the point is that the question is not as settled as The Crucified God sometimes sounds.

Second, Moltmann's historical claim that Origen was condemned for the wrong reasons — that the 553 anathemas were politically rather than theologically driven — is contested in the scholarship and treated more fully in our chapter on the Origenist controversies. Ilaria Ramelli reads the record sympathetically; Michael McClymond reads it skeptically. Moltmann's reading is closer to Ramelli's, and the case is not as one-sided as he suggests.

Third, the confidence Moltmann shows in universal salvation may overreach. Balthasar's "dare we hope" left more room for the seriousness of human refusal than Moltmann's "all will be saved" seems to. I write as someone who genuinely holds open the possibility of biblical universalism while not yet finally affirming it — and I find the Balthasarian stance more disciplined by the unresolved texts than the Moltmannian. That is not an objection to Moltmann's argument so much as a modesty about its conclusion. Where Moltmann says will, others among us are still saying may.

None of this diminishes the chapter's main point. Moltmann is the most forthright modern Reformed Protestant universalist of major theological standing. His universalism is not the sentimental universalism of the nineteenth century. It is grounded in the cross, in the trinitarian life, and in the political theology of suffering. He represents the maturation of the Reformed eschatological reconsideration that began with Barth.

Why this matters

Two reasons matter most for the argument of this book.

The first is the simple historical fact. Moltmann is a major Reformed Protestant theologian — arguably the major Reformed Protestant theologian of the late twentieth century — who has held, in print, with sustained theological argument, that the cross of Christ secures the universal restoration of all creatures. If the Christian tradition has "always taught" that death seals one's fate, somebody forgot to tell Moltmann. He is not a fringe figure. He is not a liberal Protestant outlier. He is at the center of Protestant theology in our lifetime, and he has worked out a Reformed universalism with the dogmatic care of a Reformed dogmatician.

The second reason is the substance of his argument. Even readers who decline Moltmann's strict universalism — and I am one of them, on a given day — cannot really return to the easy restrictivism that takes for granted that most of humanity will spend eternity in conscious torment. Once you have seen the cross with Moltmann's eyes, the strict ECT picture becomes very hard to hold. You may end up at the same place Robin Parry ends — a more cautious evangelical universalism — or at the place Balthasar ends — hope without claim — or at the place James Beilby and the postmortem-opportunity advocates end (whom we will meet in Chapter 26) — a robust hope that holds open the offer of salvation beyond death. But you will not, having read Moltmann honestly, return to a comfortable picture in which the majority of God's image-bearers are sentenced to endless conscious agony for a finite earthly life.

That contribution — the relocation of eschatology under the sign of the cross — is why Moltmann belongs in the line that runs from Origen and Gregory of Nyssa through Isaac of Nineveh and Julian of Norwich and Karl Barth. The line does not move forward by repeating the same arguments; each generation reads the cross with its own eyes, and asks how far the cross will carry. Moltmann's answer is more confident than mine. But the question is the right question, and the direction of his answer is the direction of the long hope.

We turn next to the broader Catholic and Orthodox recoveries of the twentieth century — Karl Rahner's "anonymous Christian," Sergei Bulgakov's sophiology, Ladislaus Boros's "final decision at death," and the Eastern Orthodox theologians whose tradition never had to "recover" the long hope because, in its better moments, it had never quite lost it.