Jurgen Moltmann

Jürgen Moltmann (1926-2024) was a German Protestant theologian and professor emeritus of systematic theology at the University of Tübingen, best known for Theology of Hope (1964)¹ and for a doctrine of God, classified by confessional critics as a form of panentheism rather than classical theism, in which the Trinity is open to, and changed by, the world’s suffering.²³

Life and Ministry

Moltmann was born on April 8, 1926, in Hamburg. Drafted into the German air force at sixteen, he served in an anti-aircraft battery during the Allied bombing of Hamburg, in which a friend standing beside him was killed, and surrendered to British forces in 1945.¹ He spent the next three years as a prisoner of war in camps in Belgium, Scotland, and at Norton Camp near Nottingham, England, where he met theology students and first encountered Reinhold Niebuhr’s writing.¹ An American chaplain in the camps gave him a New Testament and Psalms; reading Mark’s account of Jesus’s cry of abandonment on the cross, Moltmann later said he found there someone who understood his own despair.¹

He returned to Germany in 1948, earned his doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1952 under Otto Weber, and married Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, herself a theologian and later a pioneer of feminist and ecological theology, the same year.¹ From 1952 to 1957 he pastored a Reformed congregation in Bremen-Wasserhorst before moving into academic theology: the Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal from 1958, the University of Bonn from 1963, and finally the University of Tübingen from 1967, where he held the chair of systematic theology until his retirement in 1994.¹ He also served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, from 1983 to 1993.¹ Moltmann died in Tübingen on June 3, 2024, at the age of ninety-eight.¹

Theological Contribution

Moltmann’s first major work, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology (1964; English translation 1967), argued that Christian hope, grounded in Christ’s resurrection and God’s promise of a coming kingdom, should be the organizing category for the whole of theology rather than one topic among others; Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics names the book among the works that treat hope for the future as a universal human constant.⁴

The crucified, suffering God

Moltmann developed Theology of Hope’s concern with suffering and promise into an explicit rejection of divine impassibility. He took as paradigmatic Elie Wiesel’s account of a hanging witnessed at a Nazi camp, where an onlooker asks where God is and hears, in reply, that God is there, on the gallows.² Moltmann held that any other answer would be blasphemous: “To speak here of a God who could not suffer would make God a demon.”² For Moltmann, God’s suffering is not merely a relation to the world but reaches into God’s own being: “God in Auschwitz and Auschwitz in the crucified God, that is the basis for a real hope.”² He read biblical descriptions of God’s wrath as a real “divine pathos” rather than an anthropomorphism, an “injured love” that is “a divine suffering of evil,” so that humanity feels sympathy not only with God but “for God.”² On the cross, Moltmann held, it was not the Son alone who suffered in his human nature but the whole Trinity, Father included, so that God’s own redemption is bound up with the world’s: “Israel is redeemed when God has redeemed himself.”²

The social Trinity and panentheism

Moltmann’s mature doctrine of God, developed principally in The Trinity and the Kingdom (1981), states the Father, Son, and Spirit as three Persons “mutually interrelated with no hierarchy,” bound to the world in a relationship he describes as reciprocal: “the relationship between God and the world has a reciprocal character.”³ On his reading of the Trinity as an “open union,” the whole creation can be united within the divine life itself, not merely related to it from outside:

The union of the divine Trinity is open for the uniting of the whole creation with itself and in itself.³

John Cooper, quoted by Carter, has called this “the most extensive explicitly panentheistic Christian theology of the late twentieth century.”³ Moltmann himself described Christ’s suffering as “the suffering of the passionate God,”⁵ and elsewhere framed the God-world relation as mutual: “Where we suffer because we love, God suffers in us,” and “the history of the divine pathos is embedded in the history of men.”²

Historical Significance

Craig Carter, following Stephen Holmes’s survey of twentieth-century trinitarian theology, groups Moltmann with Wolfhart Pannenberg and John Zizioulas among the century’s influential revisers of the doctrine of God, theologians whose work moves away from the classical tradition’s simple, immutable, impassible God toward one whose being is open to and conditioned by history.³ Kevin Vanhoozer, quoted by Carter, has argued that Moltmann’s account leaves the Trinity so open to creation that it risks a “loss of transcendence.”³ Carter classes Moltmann’s panentheism, alongside Spinoza’s pantheism, as an example of reducing God to the level of the creature, and groups it with process theism and open theism under the broader label “relational theism.”⁵

Matthew Barrett engages Moltmann’s suffering God at length, arguing that a God who suffers as creatures do cannot, for that reason, rescue them from suffering: “We desperately need someone who is impassible; only he or she is able to save others from that burning house.”² On Barrett’s reading, Moltmann’s move follows the same basic Creator-creature confusion classical theism was formulated to guard against.²

Related Doctrines

References

Biographical details as reported in Wikipedia, s.v. “Jürgen Moltmann,” accessed September 2026. Most contemporary obituaries of Moltmann (Christianity Today, the World Council of Churches, Episcopal News Service, Church Times, and Fortress Press, his English-language publisher) were unreachable from this session’s network at the time of writing; this citation should be replaced with one of those once reachable. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 7, “Does God Have Emotions? Impassibility.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹
Craig A. Carter, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 9. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), citing Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM; New York: Harper & Row, 1967). ↩
Carter, “Classical Orthodoxy and the Rise of Relational Theism,” chap. 1. ↩ ↩²