Jürgen Moltmann and Douglas John Hall: A Theological Friendship
In memoriam: Jürgen Moltmann (8 April 1926 – 3 June 2024), guest post by David Lott
Following his retirement from McGill University, the Canadian Protestant theologian Douglas John Hall began writing an autobiography of sorts, Not Hid from Thee: Reflections on My Life. By the time he completed the project, around age 90 (he recently turned 96), he had assembled five volumes, of which he had a handful of copies privately printed and distributed to family, a few friends, and a copy to his archives at McGill. A few years ago, he sent me the electronic files of these volumes, which are filled with fascinating reflections on growing up in rural Ontario, his time at Union Theological Seminary studying with the likes of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, his career in ministry and theological education, his rich family life, and his encounters with numerous peers and acolytes.
One of the most prominent figures among the latter is his friend Jürgen Moltmann. I’m fortunate to have had the opportunity to read those reflections and discuss those with him. In terms of their mutual focus on the theology of the cross, Hall and Moltmann are peers (and arguably peerless), even as their views differ somewhat, not least because of their differing North American and European contexts. Hall is fond of quoting Moltmann’s assertion that the theology of the cross is “not much loved,” but his many writings on that subject have demonstrated why it deserves much more prominence in the Christian church than it has been accorded.
While Moltmann’s first book Theology of Hope has been rightly hailed as a landmark of twentieth-century theology—how many modern theologians have ever had such an influential debut?—Hall was “not charmed” by how it was received in North America. (And he rightly assesses the book as “difficult” and “downright prolix.”) In his autobiography, he writes, “I am convinced that very few American or Canadian religious leaders, including teaching theologians, actually read [it] . . . and fewer still asked themselves seriously whether such a song of hope, emerging out of the chaos and despair of post-War Germany, could be adopted by the English-speaking ‘winners’ without very serious adjustments and nuances.”
For Hall, “Moltmann’s profound study was reduced, in hundreds of symposia, seminars, sermons, and journal articles, to a cliché” when it landed in North America. Hall doubted that a theology forged in post-WWII Europe, under the particular circumstances under which Moltmann returned to Germany after his experiences as a POW in Scotland, could translate easily to a North American context. He writes, “After I had come to know more about Moltmann’s Germany, I always felt (and said, openly) that I would have tried to do exactly the same thing as Moltmann did in his Theology of Hope had I been a Protestant Christian in Germany at that time.” In response to this reception in North America, Hall wrote his first intentionally public theology essay, “The Theology of Hope in the Officially Optimistic Society,” published in Religion in Life.
Hall continues,
It pleased me enormously that, a short while after my article on the theology of hope appeared, I received a very affirming note from Jürgen Moltmann himself. . . . Moltmann seemed to understand my critique very well; and when, in 1972, I visited him in Tübingen, I readily grasped the reason why. His society, too, he said, in its post-war recovery and the subsequent economic euphoria, had become something of an “officially optimistic” society. He himself, therefore, addressed his next book to the Marxist and other misinterpreters of the first. He called it The Crucified God, and he was already working at that manuscript when I talked with him in his office. He needed, he said, to demonstrate more clearly that the basis of hope—for Christians!—is not the natural human need to live positively towards the future, but the grace of God that enters human life at its darkest and most despairing point and transforms it from within. The cross, and not an easy bourgeois hopefulness, and not an easy pietistic Christian “Easter” positivism either, remains the foundation of our faith.
By then, Hall had already published an article in Theology Today, “Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross.” He says,
In it, I sought to turn American and Canadian Protestants away from their almost congenital need to “accentuate the positive” and towards a disciplined and serious concentration on what I called “the experience of negation,” and that experience, I felt, that was increasingly visible and audible beneath the surface rhetoric of our optimism. . . . In retrospect, therefore, I was able to see that [Moltmann and I] were thinking thoughts more similar even than I suspected at the time. For when I visited him in 1972 I had already published a small book called, precisely, Hope Against Hope, and it was the agenda, so to speak, for the larger study that I had gone to Germany that year to write—the manuscript that became Lighten Our Darkness: Towards an Indigenous Theology of the Cross.
I often say that books, like people, have biographies. I find it fascinating how both Moltmann’s and Hall’s landmark volumes on the theology of the cross were born from a somewhat indirect dialogue, as they reflected on their own contexts. Even though many may understand their theologies as being akin to one another, I suspect that this larger, particular connection is not much known. (Hall did refer to this relationship briefly in his essay “Cross and Context,” published in The Christian Century’s “How My Mind Has Changed” series in 2010)
And we often don’t get to see how great theologians relate to one another. Hall’s autobiography has numerous other accounts of their encounters with one another over the years, as well as with Moltmann’s late wife, the feminist theologian Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel. They did not always agree with one another, but they definitely challenged one another to deeper thought. Reflecting on their relationship, Hall wrote these words:
I feel close to him theologically, though our minds work in quite different ways. He seems to me an odd sort of combination of reflective thought and pragmatism. He does not so much develop his ideas as list them. There are great gaps between the items. Perhaps it’s a European approach. I think I hear the business world of Hamburg behind it, though. All the same, we are on the same wavelength. His is not a speculative theology, but one which searches the tradition for ways into the future. Besides, he is very nice personally—rather shy, I think, but with great goodwill.
The death of a theological giant like Jürgen Moltmann is a sobering reminder that nearly all of the great Protestant theologians and biblical scholars whose careers flowered in the last half of the twentieth century have passed from our midst. Only a handful, including Hall, John Cobb, Martin Marty, Walter Brueggemann, and a few others remain. Not all of their writings have aged well, but at their core, they contain insights that continue to influence multiple generations of new scholars and laypeople. How we recontextualize their works for the future and put them in dialogue with newer thinkers remains a challenge that requires at least as much theological imagination as these great ones brought to their vocations as interpreters of the mysteries of God.
David Lott is a retired theological book editor who worked with Fortress Press and The Alban Institute for nearly 30 years. In addition to being editor of Douglas John Hall: Collected Readings (Fortress Press, 2013), he wrote the essay “The Art of Theology: Five Approaches to Curating the Work and Thought of Douglas John Hall” for Christian Theology after Christendom: Engaging the Thought of Douglas John Hall, ed. Patricia G. Kirkpatrick and Pamela R. McCarroll (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2021).
Clint, I have heard you referred to as one of our greatest living theologians.