Jurgen Moltmann Quotes

Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante's hell is the inscription: "Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.

God weeps with us so that we may one day laugh with him.

Jesus' healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly 'natural' things in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.

The truth of human freedom lies in the love that breaks down barriers.

Wisdom is an ethics of knowledge

Well, first I would ask them if they had read the Bible; then I would ask them if they had understood it.

The motive that impels modern reason to know must be described as the desire to conquer and dominate. For the Greek philosophers and the Fathers of the church, knowing meant something different: it meant knowing in wonder. By knowing or perceiving one participates in the life of the other. Here knowing does not transform the counterpart into the property of the knower; the knower does not appropriate what he knows. On the contrary, he is transformed through sympathy, becoming a participant in what he perceives.

The theological foundation for Christian hope is the raising of the crucified Christ.

In a civilization that glorifies success and happiness and is blind to the sufferings of others, people’s eyes can be opened to the truth if they remember that at the centre of the Christian faith stands an unsuccessful, tormented Christ, dying in forsakenness.

Judgement immobilizes, only hopeful love leaves an opening for God's alternative future.

But to follow Jesus is not to imitate him, for following him does not mean becoming a Jesus oneself. Nor does it mean admiration of a hero and a mystical contemporaneity with him.[48] One follows Christ in one’s own response to the mission of Christ at the present day and in taking up one’s own cross.

Resistance is the protest of those who hope, and hope is the feast of the people who resist.

If I have a theological virtue, it is curiosity or inquisitiveness.

Jesus died crying out to God 'My God, why hast thou forsaken me?' All Christian theology and all Christian life is basically an answer to the question which Jesus asked as he died.

He who is of little faith looks for support and protection for his faith, because it is preyed upon by fear.

It can be summed up by saying that suffering is overcome by suffering, and wounds are healed by wounds. For the suffering in suffering is the lack of love, and the wounds in wounds are the abandonment, and the powerlessness in pain is unbelief. And therefore the suffering of abandonment is overcome by the suffering of love, which is not afraid of what is sick and ugly, but accepts it and takes it to itself in order to heal it. Through

Here the crucified Christ was seen less as the sacrifice which God creates to reconcile the world to himself, and more as the exemplary path trodden by a righteous man suffering unjustly, leading to salvation. Fellowship

In concrete terms, God is revealed in the cross of Christ who was abandoned by God. His grace is revealed in sinners. His righteousness is revealed in the unrighteous and in those without rights, and his gracious election in the damned. The

To suffer and to be rejected are not identical. Suffering can be celebrated and admired. It can arouse compassion. But to be rejected takes away the dignity from suffering and makes it dishonourable suffering. To suffer and be rejected signify the cross. To die on the cross means to suffer and to die as one who is an outcast and rejected. If those who follow Jesus are to take ‘their cross’ on themselves, they are taking on not only suffering and a bitter fate, but the suffering of rejection.

Thus the Eucharist, like the meals held by Jesus with ‘sinners and publicans’, must also be celebrated with the unrighteous, those who have no rights and the godless from the ‘highways and hedges’ of society, in all their profanity, and should no longer be limited, as a religious sacrifice, to the inner circle of the devout, to those who are members of the same denomination. The Christian church can re-introduce the divisions between the religious and the profane and between those who are within and those who are without, only at the price of losing its own identity as the church of the crucified Christ. But

We may have fun, but we are in joy. In true joy, the ecstatic nature of human existence comes to expression. We are created for joy. We are born for joy.

This gave rise to the triumphalism of the theocratic state or the state church, which regularly led to the persecution of the Jews and other representatives of unfulfilled messianic hope. A faith which worships Christ as God without his future, a church which understands itself as the kingdom and a consciousness of atonement which no longer suffers from the continued unredeemed condition of the world, a Christian state which regards itself as God here present upon earth, cannot tolerate any Jewish hope beside itself. But is this still authentic Christian faith?

It is true that in a world of high consumption, where anything and everything is possible, nothing is so humanizing as love, and a conscious interest in the life of others, particularly in the life of the oppressed. For love leaves us open to wounding and disappointment.