Advertisement
Holy Week resources and reflections

Ethics of Hope

by Jürgen Moltmann

Fortress Press, Minneapolis. 288 pages

reviewed by ROGER J. GENCH

Jürgen Moltmann is widely regarded as one the most important Reformed theologians since Karl Barth. This is a fitting accolade because his writings have inspired both evangelicals and liberals (and many in between) for the past half-century. In his seminal work, “Theology of Hope,” Moltmann declared that the mode of God’s being must be understood as ahead of us, rather than behind us or in us. God’s future intervenes in our here and now, liberating the present, for the pivotal event of Christ’s death and resurrection anticipates in history the hoped-for new creation.

In “Ethics of Hope,” Moltmann continues this trajectory, claiming, “with Christ the eschatological future has already begun.” Differentiating himself from Barth, for whom eschatology is completed in Christ, Moltmann boldly proclaims that eschatology begins with Christ, and the coming of the Holy Spirit is “nothing other than the beginning of Christ’s parousia.”

194-23-ethics.pngAccordingly, the ethics by which disciples of Jesus live are “anticipation-ethics of his future.” A Christian ethic is thus neither conformist nor separatist. It entails transformative action that anticipates the new creation and “the liberation of the oppressed, the raising up of the humiliated, the healing of the sick, and justice for the poor.” From this foundation, Moltmann spells out his ethics of hope in three arenas: the ethics of life, which entails medical ethics; earth ethics, which entails ecology; and ethics of just peace, which entails war, peace, justice and civil rights.

Moltmann’s discussion of the “ethics of life” begins with a litany of modernity’s death-tending ways (terrorism, nuclear madness, etc.) that are concomitants of a dominating and oppressive notion of God as well as notions of human life patterned on God (as lord and possessor of the earth). Such notions have spawned an ethics of death. An ethics of life, in Moltmann’s view, begins with an image of a God who is robustly relational and life giving — an image that enables us to accept our bodies and our finite existence because we know that we are loved. Moltmann’s earth ethics extends this relational image of God, utilizing Calvin’s notion of God’s glory manifest in every particle of the creation: “The immanence of the transcendent God brings all created things to their self-transcendence.” Thus, all created things are signs of the future coming of God, the goal of which is God’s Sabbath rest within creation. The ethics of just peace provide a vision of Christian responsibility with a dual focus, embodied on the one hand by the historic peace churches and their distant orientation of “pure ploughshares,” and on the other hand by churches that “make ploughshares out of swords” and engage in active resistance against barbaric tyrants. Moltmann concedes that Christians have no better answers to questions about life, earth and justice than others, “but Christians have to live in accordance with the divine hope and the claim of Christ.”

Ethics of Hope” is not a textbook or survey of Christian ethics, but rather the culmination of a lifetime of concrete theological thinking. It is a must-read for devotees of Moltmann, and provides for all of us a fresh set of eyes on today’s perplexing social and moral dilemmas.

ROGER J. GENCH is senior pastor of The New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington.

LATEST STORIES

Advertisement