When he died at home in Tübingen, Germany, last Monday morning at age 98, the world could justly say that Jürgen Moltmann was the leading Christian theologian of the second half of the twentieth century. He had championed liberation theology from South America, then imported it successfully to the West. He had inaugurated an eschatological “theology of hope” and freshly underlined the role of the Holy Spirit in mainstream Protestant and Catholic theology alike. His 1973 book, The Crucified God, had developed an almost instantaneous following amongst evangelical Christians on each side of the Atlantic, and the total list of Moltmann’s literary output is dazzling.
I used to be Moltmann’s last overseas doctoral student, and we were close friends for 33 years. On Wednesday, I’ll fly to Germany to attend his funeral and interment at Tübingen. But today, I would like to share with you a glimpse of his remarkable and faithful life.
Moltmann’s theological considering emerged initially as the results of his captivity, from 1945 to 1948, as a German prisoner of war in Britain, in addition to his searing experience as a teenage anti-aircraft gunner through the 1943 British air raid on Hamburg, his native city. After the war ended, he returned to Germany and studied theology at Göttingen under the Reformed theologian Otto Weber, and was much influenced by Karl Barth.
Moltmann then spent five years as a neighborhood pastor outside Bremen, during which era his wife Elisabeth gave birth to a stillborn child. It seemed an absurd and despairing event on the time, before the couple would go on to have 4 healthy daughters—how way more loss could God impose?
After that early pastorate, Moltmann step by step became world renowned. He supported James Cone’s development of Black theology in New York. In El Salvador, when six liberationist Jesuits were murdered of their beds by members of the Salvadoran military, certainly one of the priests was reading The Crucified God when he was shot. Moltmann was especially popular in Eastern bloc countries behind the Iron Curtain, including East Germany before the autumn of the Berlin Wall. A consistent world traveler, he would spend 10 years within the US as a visiting professor at Emory University in Atlanta, though Tübingen was at all times home base.
When I knew him, Moltmann was never cold nor distant, despite his prestige. He looked you straight in the attention, almost at all times warmly, and at all times had his students’ best interests at heart. If he was piqued, you could possibly tell in a moment.
Moltmann was greater than an instructional adviser. He helped me and my family through the seemingly not possible task of earning a Tübingen doctorate entirely inside the German language, recognizing my wife Mary’s sacrifice in keeping us together during that period. One week, when he and I traveled from Tübingen to the UK, we spent a day with my son John, who was at boarding school nearby. As we sat together on the airplane back to Germany, he said with real feeling, “Now I understand what you and Mary have taken on. I’ll do whatever I can to assist.”
I used to be not the one beneficiary of this generosity. I once observed Moltmann pilot a really nervous doctoral student through his final oral examination. The student, who had traveled many miles for this moment, almost failed the test—until Moltmann saved the day with a matter for which the coed was equipped to offer a superb answer. He passed.
Moltmann observed the human dimension of all his students. That was exceptional within the extremely demanding world of doctoral candidates at Tübingen. Where other professors may very well be severe, Moltmann was not fearsome—under no circumstances! He brought you in to his life and thought. He never omitted the pastoral dimension, the sensation dimension, the pain and stress dimension of all with whom he got here into contact.
After a 12 months of slow progress under his tutelage—including having to master Hebrew durch Deutsch, probably the most arduous mental task I actually have ever been set—I used to be suddenly admitted to Herr Moltmann’s Lehrstuhl team in 1992. I used to be a type of unpaid assistant for his research projects, and morale on the team was high. We wrote our respective dissertations, tutored undergraduates, edited and translated Moltmann’s manuscripts, and even created movies and other popular programs for the broader community.
The night I gave my first full lecture to the team—fellow doctoral students, full-time assistants to Moltmann, and the person himself—I played, as an intro, an excerpt from Bob Dylan’s 1979 song, “Gotta Serve Somebody.” It went on a little bit too long, and I saw the professor blanch for a moment, as if wondering if he’d made a mistake in taking me on. But then the lecture got here, my German was okay, and I could see him breathe a sigh of relief.
After my doctorate was accomplished in 1994, Mary and I returned to the US. I had been called to the post of dean and rector of Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. We kept in close touch with the Moltmanns, each of whom were warmly welcomed once they visited our church to evangelise and teach.
We saw them several other times on each side of the Atlantic over the a long time to come back. Moltmann knew concerning the conflicts inside the American Episcopal Church, which is my denomination, over questions of gay marriage and ordination. He was less traditional on the topic than I, but he sympathized with the challenges we faced at the moment. I wish now that I had actively sought his wisdom, so enduringly affected by his wartime experience, during that fraught and difficult period.
I can think of virtually no weaknesses in Moltmann’s character and soul, if I can put it that way. He loved those whom he was given to like with wholehearted enthusiasm. Once, I spent a day in his company when a grandchild came visiting. It was as if Kris Kringle were right there within the flesh, crawling on the ground and cracking us all up.
He had greater than a twinkle in his eye—he had a belly laugh, and infrequently. It never felt like an act, as if he were attempting to be “certainly one of the boys” (or girls, as two of his three assistants were good young women). It was simply that, in any case he and Elisabeth had suffered, he remained an unfailingly practical optimist.
It is strange to recall that I first went to Tübingen to check under another person—not Moltmann. Justification by faith was my intended subject, not liberation theology! It happened, nonetheless, that George Carey, the then–archbishop of Canterbury, called his friend Jürgen, not the opposite chap, to make my initial contact in Germany. And it became clear, very soon after I arrived, that the opposite chap was not the fitting person—not in a thousand light years.
One Sunday afternoon, within the garden at 25 Biesinger Strasse, Moltmann turned to me and said, “You ignore him. I such as you. I’ll take you. And we’ll make it about justification.” I smiled inside and thought to himself, “This is God’s teacher for me. I would like no other.”
Paul Zahl is a retired Episcopal priest. He and his wife, Mary, along with their three sons, John, David, and Simeon, were loved warmly and encouraged mightily by Jürgen Moltmann.
