Jürgen Moltmann > Quotes

“Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante's hell is the inscription: "Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.”
― Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology

“God weeps with us so that we may one day laugh with him.”
― Jurgen Moltmann

“That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology

“When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man's godforsakenness. In Jesus he does not die the natural death of a finite being, but the violent death of the criminal on the cross, the death of complete abandonment by God. The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment, rejection by God, his Father. God does not become a religion, so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings. God does not become a law, so that man participates in him through obedience to a law. God does not become an ideal, so that man achieves community with him through constant striving. He humbles himself and takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“Jesus' healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly 'natural' things in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.”
― Jurgen Moltmann

“The truth of human freedom lies in the love that breaks down barriers.”
― Jurgen Moltmann

“The knowledge of the cross brings a conflict of interest between God who has become man and man who wishes to become God.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“But the ultimate reason for our hope is not to be found at all in what we want, wish for and wait for; the ultimate reason is that we are wanted and wished for and waited for. What is it that awaits us? Does anything await us at all, or are we alone? Whenever we base our hope on trust in the divine mystery, we feel deep down in our hearts: there is someone who is waiting for you, who is hoping for you, who believes in you. We are waited for as the prodigal son in the parable is waited for by his father. We are accepted and received, as a mother takes her children into her arms and comforts them. God is our last hope because we are God's
first love.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life

“Believing in the resurrection does not just mean assenting to a dogma and noting a historical fact. It means participating in this creative act of God’s … Resurrection is not a consoling opium, soothing us with the promise of a better world in the hereafter. It is the energy for a rebirth of this life. The hope doesn’t point to another world. It is focused on the redemption of this one.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, Jesus Christ for Today's World

“When the fear of death leaves us, the destructive craving for life leaves us too. We can then restrict our desires and our demands to our natural requirements. The dreams of power and happiness and luxury and far-off places, which are used to create artificial wants, no longer entice us. They have become ludicrous. So we shall use only what we really need, and shall no longer be prepared to go along with the lunacy of extravagance and waste. We do not even need solemn appeals for saving and moderation; for life itself is glorious, and here joy in existence can be had for nothing.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The power of the powerless

“God became man that dehumanized men might become true men. We become true men in the community of the incarnate, the suffering and loving, the human God.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“The motive that impels modern reason to know must be described as the desire to conquer and dominate. For the Greek philosophers and the Fathers of the church, knowing meant something different: it meant knowing in wonder. By knowing or perceiving one participates in the life of the other. Here knowing does not transform the counterpart into the property of the knower; the knower does not appropriate what he knows. On the contrary, he is transformed through sympathy, becoming a participant in what he perceives.”
― Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom

“The one will triumph who first died for the victims then also for the executioners, and in so doing revealed a new righteousness which breaks through vicious circles of hate and vengeance and which from the lost victims and executioners creates a new mankind with a new humanity. Only where righteousness becomes creative and creates right both for the lawless and for those outside the law, only where creative love changes when is hateful and deserving of hate, only where the new man is born who is oppressed nor oppresses others, can one speak of the true revolution of righteousness and of the righteousness of God.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“[Faith] sees in the resurrection of Christ not the eternity of heaven, but the future of the very earth on which his cross stands. It sees in him the future of the very humanity for which he died. That is why it finds the cross the hope of the earth.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology

“When the crucified Jesus is called "the image of the invisible God," the meaning is that THIS is God, and God is like THIS.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“Believing in Christ's resurrection therefore does not mean affirming a fact. It means being possessed by the life-giving Spirit and participating in the powers of the age to come.”
― Jürgen Moltmann

“The opposite of poverty isn't property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community. For in community we become rich: rich in friends, in neighbours, in colleagues, in comrades, in brothers and sisters. Together, as a community, we can help ourselves in most of our difficulties. For after all, there are enough people and enough ideas, capabilities and energies to be had. They are only lying fallow, or are stunted and suppressed. So let us discover our wealth; let us discover our solidarity; let us build up communities; let us take our lives into our own
hands, and at long last out of the hands of the people who want to dominate and exploit us.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life

“God allows himself to be humiliated and crucified in the Son, in order to free the oppressors and the oppressed from oppression and to open up to them the situation of free, sympathetic humanity.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“Because of Christ's prevenient and unconditional invitation, the fellowship of the table cannot be restricted to people who are 'faithful to the church', or to the 'inner circle' of the community. For it is not the feast of the particularly righteous, of the people who think that they are particularly devout; it is the feast of the weary and heavy-laden, who have heard the call to refreshment.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit

“In the cross of Christ God is taking man dead-seriously so that he may open up for him the happy freedom of Easter. God takes upon himself the pain of negation and the God forsakenness of judgement to reconcile himself with his enemies and to give the godless fellowship with himself.
~ Theology of Play, p.33”
― Jürgen Moltmann

“Well, first I would ask them if they had read the Bible; then I would ask them if they had understood it.”
― Jurgen Moltmann

“The God of freedom, the true God, is... not recognized by his power and glory in the history of the world, but through his helplessness and his death on the scandal of the cross of Jesus”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology

“Wisdom is an ethics of knowledge”
― Jurgen Moltmann

“For resurrection faith means courage to revolt against the "covenant with death" (Isa. 28:15), it means hope for the victory of life which shall swallow up and conquer life-devouring death. ~ p.14”
― Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of play

“Resistance is the protest of those who hope, and hope is the feast of the people who resist.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The power of the powerless

“Christian faith isn't just a conviction, a feeling and a decision. It invades life so deeply that we have to talk about dying and being born again, which is what corresponds to the death and resurrection of Christ.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life

“The longer I have lived with this new hope, the clearer it has become to me: our true hope in life doesn't spring from the feelings of our youth, lovely and fair though they are. Nor does it emerge from the objective possibilities of history, unlimited though they may be. Our true hope in life is wakened and sustained and finally fulfilled by the great divine mystery which is above us and in us and round about us, nearer to us than we can be to ourselves. It encounters us as the great promise of our life and this world: nothing will be in vain. It will succeed. In the end all will be well! It meets us too in the call to life: 'I live and you shall live also.' We are called to this hope, and the call often sounds like a command - a command to resist death and the powers of death, and a command to love life and cherish it: every life, the life we share, the whole of life.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life

“In the raising and exaltation of Christ, God has chosen the one whom the moral and political powers of this world rejected – the poor, humiliated, suffering and forsaken Christ. God identified himself with him and made him Lord of the new world ….. The God who creates justice for those who suffer violence, the God who exalts the humiliated and executed Christ – that is the God of hope for the new world of righteousness and justice and peace.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, Ethics of Hope

“God does not suffer out of deficiency of being, like created beings. To this extent he is 'apathetic'. But he suffers from the love which is the superabundance and overflowing of his being. In so far he is 'pathetic'.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom

“The crucified Christ has become a stranger to the civil religion of the First World and to that world's Christianity.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ