The New Creation of All Things: An Interview with Jurgen Moltmann

[Is the "Last Judgment" the final divine redemption of human history? The theme of Christian eschatology is the new creation of all things,not "the end". In all personal, historical and cosmic dimensions, eschatology follows this christological pattern: the beginning in the end. The teaching of hope is central to the protestant thinker and theologian Jurgen Moltmann. What is hope for eternal life and how does it relate to God's kingdom, the new heaven and the new earth? This interview originally published in November 1998 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.DiePresse.at.]

Die Presse: Mr. Moltmann, eschatology is regarded as the "doctrine of the last things" or the "end of things"... The ambiguities of history will become unequivocal, the time of transitoriness will pass away. The unanswerable questions of people will end. Time and again the question about the end breaks forth out of the torment of history and the agonies of historical existence.

Moltmann: Eschatology seems to seek the "final solution" of all solvable problems as Sir Isaiah Berlin noted indignantly alluding to the 1942 Wannsee conference on the final "solution of the Jewish question" in the extermination camps. Theologic al eschatology seems to present the "final game" of the "theodrama" of world history. In history, eschatology is described pictorially as God's great world judgment over the good and the evil with heaven for one and hell for the other. Is the "Last Judgment" the final divine solution of human history? Others dreamt of the "final battle" in the struggle between Christ and Antichrist or God and the devil on the "day of Armageddon" whether with divine fire or with modern nuclear bombs. Eschatology always involves the end, the last day, the last word and the last act. God retains the last word. If eschatology were only this, it would be better to dismiss the term. The "last things" ruin the taste of the "penultimate things". The dreamt or desired "end of history" robs one of the freedom of the many possibilities of history and tolerance amid incompleteness and provisionalities. Whoever always emphasizes the end misses life. If eschatology were nothing but the final religious solution of all questions as the last word, it would actually be a very jarring way of theological dogmatism or even psychological terrorism as practiced by some apocalyptic exstortioners among our contemporaries.

Die Presse: What is the goal of Christian eschatology?

Moltmann: Christian eschatology is the remembered hope of the resurrection of the crucified Christ and therefore speaks of new beginnings in the mortal end. "Christ's end was his true beginning", Ernst Bloch once said to me. Christian eschatology follows this christological model in all personal, historical and cosmic dimensions: the beginning in the end! So Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian and resistance fighter sentencede to death in 1945 by the Nazis bid farewell to his fellow prisoner Payne Bast when he was executed in the Flossenburg KZ (concentration camp): "This is the end - for me the beginning of life." So John on Patmos saw the "Last Judgment" of the world not as destruction, conflagration of the worlds or cold death but as the first day of the new creation of all things: "Behold, I make all things new". I do not speak about Christian eschatology in terms of the "last things" or the "end of things" but of God's coming. In God's creative future, the end becomes the beginning. The true creation has still not occurred but is approaching.

Die Presse: Years ago, you explicitly affirmed Karl Barth's statement: "Christianity is altogether eschatology, not only in the appendix. Hope is prospect and orientation forward and therefore awakening and transformation of the present." Do you still emphasize this prospect and forward orientation?

Moltmann: In the last thirty years, I have gone a long theological way with surprises and curves. Little that happened was planned. I thankfully confess a deep influence of contemporary Jewish thinking in Ernst Bloch and Franz Rosenzweig. No one has hope for himself alone. Hope for Christians is always hope for Israel. The hope of Jews and Christians is also hope for the nations. The hope of the peoples is always hope for the earth and all its inhabitants. Back to your question: In a time when so many colleagues are only occupied with methodological questions, theological themes, their revision and innovation interest me. There is a personal reason for this interest. I wasn't very deeply socialized in a Christian sense but grew up with poets and philosophers of German idealism. Since I began studying theology - first in 1947 in a prisoner of war camp near Nottingham and then in Gottingen from 1948 - everything theological has been wondrously new. Still today theology is a vast adventure to me, a journey in an unknown land. If I have a theological virtue, it is curiosity or inquisitiveness. Therefore my intellectual style is experimental - an adventure of ideas - and my communication style takes the form of proposal. The sentences which I write are uncertain and risky. Some insist I say too much theologically and more about God than can be known. I feel deep humility before the mystery that we cannot know...

Die Presse: What do you propose with your eschatology?

Moltmann: An integration of the often divergent perspectives of so-called individual eschatology and universal eschatology, the eschatology of history and the eschatology of nature. Traditional medieval, protestant and modern eschatologies concentrated on individual hope with which questions of personal life and death were answered: What will happen to me in death, the Last Judgment and afterwards? Where is there a supporting certainty in life and death? The salvation of individual persons and the salvation of the soul in the individual person were so much in the center that the salvation of the body, human community and the cosmos were marginalized or no longer noticed. However if Christian hope is reduced to the deliverance of the soul in a heaven beyond death, then its life-renewing and world changing power is lost and smoulders into a gnostic longing for redemption in the vale of tears of this world.

Die Presse: Is there a "resurrection in death"?

Moltmann: Modern theologians have developed their own interesting "intellectual experiment" in this regard. They start from the idea that the true life of a person lived in body and soul with all the senses is reconciled, redeemed and transfigured by God, not the unlived life of the soul. God is not interested in the unlived life of the soul but in the lived life of the whole person. During his life, a person grows out of the world and the world grows in him.
Salvation doesn't separate what God joins together in this life. Therefore visions of hope for salvation must be world-embracing. Salvation is understood in an integrated sense as "resurrection of the dead", not "blessedness of souls". The resurrection of the dead belongs to God's "new earth" in which death will be no more. Universal eschatology cannot be reduced to individual eschatology but includes individual eschatology.

Die Presse: When does this holistic resurrection of the dead occur?

Moltmann: Life after death is something like the resurrection of the new body. This resurrection body is not the same as the molecules and atoms which perish inthe earth.

Die Presse: How can a "resurrection in death" be imagined?

Moltmann: One must start out eschatologically. The "Last Judgment" is not simply the last chronological day on the calendar but is eschatologically the "day of the Lord", the day of all days. If this is the day of the resurrection of the dead, then it appears to all the dead whenever they died temporally diachronically "in a simultaneous instant". If that is right, all individual death hoours of this age lead immediately to this eternal "day of the Lord". If the earthly time in human succession doesn't exist with God, then all people at whatever time they died meet God at the same time, in God's time, the presence of eternity. With this "intellectual experiment", the difference between the immortality of the soul on one side and the resurrection of the body on the other side is overcome. Many things in our life remain unfinished. We attempted a life project. We failed; the project came to nothing. Only mourning is left!

Die Presse: How can life here be "perfected" and completed?

Moltmann: We die with the unanswered question which we were all life long. Whatever we imagine under "eternal life", it cannot be the "perpetuation" of our beginnings in life and the experienced or intentional ruptures of life. Can "resurrection" in the life of the future world really happen in death as Luther and contemporary catholic theologians (Karl Rahner, Ladislaus Boros, Gerhard Lohfink) believe? Then it would appear as though this earthly fragmentary life were broken off with death and a different divine life accepted. Still we have not yet coped with this life. With "hell", "heaven" and "the future world", final states are meant which have no future any more but are eternally present and therefore don't offer any history any longer.

A Place without Distress
The spirit of eternal life is firstly a vast living space in which broken, disabled and destroyed life can develop freely. Already in this life before death, we experience the spirit of life as the enormous space where there is no distress any more. This will be true far more after death.

Die Presse: Isn't there a cosmic eschatology?

Moltmann: Yes, eschatology must be expanded into cosmic eschatology. Otherwise it becomes a gnostic doctrine of redemption and no longer teaches the redemption of the world but a redemption from the world, not a redemption of the body but the redemption of the soul from the body. Cosmic eschatology is not some kind of "universalism" but is necessary for God's sake. There aren't two gods, a Creator God and a Redeemer God but the one God. Gor his sake, the unity of creation and redemption must be emphasized. The program of a cosmic eschatology encounters considerable problems in the scientific-technical civilization since the cosmos as a whole and in all its parts has become the subject of the natural sciences. As far as these sciences proceed agnostically in their methods, they allow no theological statements in their provinces, neither about the beginning of the cosmos nor its end.