This study argues that kenosis, in the thought of Jürgen Moltmann, is a freedom-making movement of divinity and, moreover, that kenosis is both structural and catalytic for virtually all unique dimensions of Moltmann’s theological program. Though Barth has been knighted as a “theologian of freedom” (see Green, 1991), such a title is perhaps more rightly ascribed to Moltmann. Moltmann, of course, is widely seen and understood as a “theologian of hope,” and numerous scholars have productively thematized his work along such lines (most obviously: Neal, 2008). However, like faith and love, hope requires an object: hope for what? And when this question is pressed, across all of Moltmann’s major works, the result is the same: the hope is for freedom, for liberation, for justice, for our feet to be set “in a broad place.” Moltmann is clear throughout his corpus that God is the author of hope through the instantiation of divine promises. But what is far less discussed, and much more theologically seismic, is that Moltmann also considers God the author of freedom, and that God instantiates such freedom via divine kenosis. This study thus presents an original and holistic reading of Moltmann as a kenotic theologian, unfurling his latent “grammar of kenosis” and, in so doing, framing his unique and deeply formative grammar of freedom.
Moltmann signaled in his introduction to The Crucified God an emergent and radical unity between hope, self-limitation, and suffering, and he also pointed toward how these fundamentally serve the cause of freedom: “Wherever Christian hope makes people active and leads them into the ‘creative discipleship’ of Christ, the contradictions and confutations of the world are painfully experienced. ‘When freedom is near, the chains begin to chafe.’ One begins to suffer with the victims of injustice and violence. One puts oneself on the side of the persecuted and becomes persecuted oneself” (1993a, ix). It is also in The Crucified God that Moltmann stages his first overt discussion of divine kenosis. Deftly sifting the convoluted christological history of the idea, Moltmann separates himself from any theological stream that sees the kenosis, or self-emptying, of Christ as any sort of exception to the course of divine life. No, rather, “When the crucified Jesus is called ‘the image of the invisible God,’ the meaning is that this is God, and God is like this” (1993a, 205). Kenosis, in Moltmann, is exemplary of divinity, not exceptional (he hereby anticipates much recent reflection on Philippians 2 in modern New Testament studies–see Wright, 1993; Bauckham, 2008; Gorman, 2016, e.g.). Famously, of course, this also helps to fund Moltmann’s rejection of divine impassibility.
But yet another pivotal movement emerges in the final pages of The Crucified God, for Moltmann does not marshal the divine suffering of the Son in any penal direction. That is, although God suffers the cross, the divine suffering itself is not redemptive. This is well-known, so far as it goes, but Moltmann’s true alternative to a penal reading of divine suffering is often neglected. For him, the site of God’s kenotic solidarity is the beachhead of true human freedom. The God who self-empties is not the God of inexorable control, exhaustive providence, or logically-secured omnipotence. The kenotic God frees our religious psychology from myths of divine wrath and coercion (Moltmann, 1993a, 419-458). But this intrapersonal freedom radically extends to the interpersonal, for it is this kenotic way of God that is “the lordship that makes us free” (Moltmann, 1993b, 191; see further Gutesen, 2011).
From this start in The Crucified God, this study weaves together the underlying kenotic grammar that binds Moltmann’s most salient theological themes. We articulate Moltmann’s “kenotic staurology of divine surrender,” crucial to his thinking on the cross, the Trinitarian relations, and the knitting of divine life with the created order. Thereafter, we explore: the kenotic triune perichoresis, the kenotic providence of the divine Shekinah (a deeply neglected motif in Moltmann studies), the kenosis of divine love in creation, and finally the twin-theme of the kenotic Spirit and the kenotic life of the church. This holistic kenotic grammar is extrapolated in tandem with Moltmann’s developing theology of freedom, showing at every turn how the varied kenotic movements of divinity are all in the service of freeing the created order to inhabit and echo the divine life: “God’s freedom is not the almighty power for which everything is possible. It is love, which means the self-communication of the good. If God creates the world out of freedom, then he creates it out of love: creatio ex amore Dei” (Moltmann, 1985, 75-76).
Throughout this exposition of Moltmann’s holistic grammar of kenosis, the study also brings his thought into dialogue with contemporary religious psychology and political theology, demonstrating a deep confluence between Moltmann’s intuitions and the actual flowering of freedom-promoting discourse in interdisciplinary spaces. Building on Oliver Davies’ and Paul Janz’s incarnational theology (2007), as well as Hanna Reichel’s notion of “theological affordances” (2023), the study concludes by asking what such a kenotic theology “makes possible” in the world. Might it be possible that the true test of theology is the freedom it brings? Moltmann provides the frame for such a question and, quite possibly, the trajectory for an answer.
References
Oliver Davies, “Theology in the World,” in Transformation Theology. Bloomsbury, 2008.
Clifford Green, Karl Barth: Theologian of Freedom. Fortress, 1991.
Poul F. Guttesen, Leaning into the Future: The Kingdom of God in the Theology of Jürgen Moltmann and the Book of Revelation. James Clarke and Co., 2009.
Paul Janz, “Revelation as Divine Causality,” in Transformation Theology. Bloomsbury, 2008.
Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.
Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1993 edition.
Jürgen Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1993 edition.
Ryan Neal, Theology as Hope: On the Ground and Implications of Jürgen Moltmann’s Doctrine of Hope. Princeton Theological Monograph Series, 99. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2008.
Hanna Reichel, After Method: Queer Grace, Conceptual Design, and the Possibility of Theology. Westminster John Knox Press, 2023.
The theology of the late Jürgen Moltmann is often thematized according to the motif of hope. Ryan Neal and GM Saaiman are representative of this sort of commentary, and it has proven fruitful across diverse applications of Moltmann’s work. This study argues, however, that Moltmann should also be considered a “theologian of freedom.” For hope, like faith, requires an object: hope for what? And when this question is pressed, across all of Moltmann’s major works, the result is the same: hope for freedom, for liberation, and for justice. Moltmann says that God is the author of hope through the divine promises. But far less recognized and understood is that Moltmann also considers God the author of freedom, and that God instantiates such freedom via divine kenosis. This study thus presents an original and holistic reading of Moltmann as a relational-kenotic theologian and of his deeply formative grammar of freedom.