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

This paper engages three topics in the call for proposals’ list of suggestions: the concept of freedom within open theology, eschatology, and the work of Jürgen Moltmann. In his book The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, Moltmann’s pneumatology deals directly with a series of conceptions of freedom. The first two conceptions are freedom as subjectivity and freedom as sociality, which Moltmann associates with the theological virtues of faith and love, respectively. I will begin by discussing how Moltmann sees these as conditioning one another. However, Moltmann stresses that these two conceptions are inadequate to account for the nature of Christian faith, which “is essentially the hope of resurrection,” unless they are completed by a conception of freedom as future, i.e., the future coming of God and his “limitless kingdom of creative possibilities” (Spirit of Life 119). Since this is the most important idea of freedom for Moltmann, I will focus the majority of my attention on it.

I offer a constructive exposition of Moltmann’s thought, melding his ideas with some of my own. I take up particularly (1) his linking of freedom with the theological virtue of hope, (2) his distinction between “the limited kingdom of reality” that belongs to the past, whose borders are inscribed by reason, and “the limitless kingdom of created possibilities” that belongs to the future and is the territory of fertile imagination, (3) his claim that Christians “dream the messianic daydream about the new life,” and (4) his belief that this involves a creative thinking that prepares us for, and indeed *is*, “participation in God’s creative acts” (ibid.). What follows is a representative sample of the argument that I make together with Moltmann:

The work of memory is easier than the work of imagination because the materials with which memory works are known quantities. Imagination works with what is yet unknown. Whereas memory grasps what already lies at hand, imagination reaches out toward what God may place into our hands. Yet the Christian imagination is not the fumbling of weak arms in the dark, but the boldness of striving for all the good that may prove possible. We are given this boldness by hope, which is strengthened by the work that memory has already done and continues to do, namely, the remembrance of God’s promises previously and presently kept. Reason tells us that because God has kept God’s promises, God can be trusted to continue to keep them. Imagination then presses beyond the mere reality of the past and present and begins to inhabit the new kingdom of dreams. Resurrection hope is oriented towards a future kingdom of life, and this very particular kind of hope welcomes the banners of that coming kingdom to fly in the present realm of mere reality. 

Without hope, we can never be prepared to receive the promises of God. The fulfillment of those promises, then, can only ever come as a surprise, and it can only be in the future that we are in a position to participate in their fulfillment. But it is a basic premise of the concept of theological virtues that they strengthen us -- the very word “virtue” was originally employed for this concept because its Latin root connotes strength. As a theological virtue, hope makes us stronger. It makes us persons who have the strength to participate in God’s future work, i.e, in the kingdom of life of which God dreams for us. We exercise that strength in the present by daring to imagine that God’s promises will come to fruition, and doing so in the joyful recognition that those promises will bear fruit that exceeds our dreaming. God dreams beyond us, yet we may take part in God’s dreaming. We follow God into the realm of ever-new, previously undreamt-of possibilities.

Let me apply to this a refrain from a Kendrick Lamar song: “crazy, scary, spooky, hilarious.” The future that God imagines for us is, from a human perspective, crazy: it defies the mere reality that reason defines as possible based on what is known from the past. It is scary insofar as it challenges our courage, calling us to welcome the unknown for which we can never be entirely prepared by our own strength. It is spooky insofar as it is a ghostly thing -- but that is to say that it is a thing brought about by the Holy Ghost. And when this future arrives, it is hilarious. That is, it is hilarious according to the sense of the root of that word: the Latin hilaris, meaning “cheerful, merry, lively” -- the future that God dreams for us brings cheer, merriment, life. Of course it does. It is the work of the Holy Spirit, the Giver of Life and of joy. 

Classical theology holds that love is the only one of the three theological virtues that belongs to God. It is supposed that God cannot possess faith because God relies on no one else to accomplish God’s purposes, and that God cannot possess hope because God knows the future and therefore has no uncertainty about what will occur in it. But Moltmann’s theology invites us to regard hope as a theological virtue based in God’s decision to create the world as a realm of possibilities that creatures help to realize. Thus, God hopes or dreams that we will take part in bringing about God’s kingdom, and it is precisely this that grounds our act of hoping; God makes us participants in God’s own dreaming for our future. This conception of God’s role as Creator and Redeemer enables us to think of hope as the same *kind* of theological virtue as love, i.e, as a virtue that is grounded in the work of Godself. I argue, therefore, that *theosis* -- a concept to which Moltmann appeals in the portion of his book that I am treating -- includes our being conformed to God’s hopefulness about the redeemed future of all of creation.