Attached Paper In-person November Annual Meeting 2025

Hope as Liberation and as Participation with God: An Engagement with the Theology of Jürgen Moltmann

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

In his chief work on pneumatology, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, Jürgen Moltmann explores three conceptions of freedom--as subjectivity, as sociality, and as orientation towards the future--associating these with the theological virtues of faith, love, and hope, respectively. He explores each with reference to a theology of the Holy Spirit, focusing on the hope that springs from the "liberation for life" by which the Spirit makes us participants in God's ongoing creative work.

On a classical conception of the theological virtues, love is the only one of the three that belongs to God. I argue, however, that Moltmann's theology invites us to understand our hope as grounded in God's own hoping as a dream for the future of the world.