Theology of Hope by Jurgen Moltmann
Chapter 2: Promise and History
I. Epiphany Religions and Faith in Terms of Promise
3. The Experience of History
stretch further than any fulfillment that can be conceived or
experienced. However limited the promises may be, once we have caught in them a Whiff of the future, we remain restless and urgent, seeking and searching beyond all experiences of fulfillment, and the latter leave us an aftertaste of sadness. The ‘not yet’ of expectation surpasses every fulfillment that is already taking place now. Hence every reality in which a fulfillment is already taking place now,
becomes the confirmation, exposition and liberation of a greater hope. If we would use this as a help towards understanding the ‘expanding and broadening history of promise’,(G. von Rad, ‘Typologische Auslegung des Alten Testamentes’, EvTh 12, 1952, pp. 25 f.) if we ask the reason for the abiding overplus of promise as compared with history, then we must again abandon every abstract schema -of promise and fulfillment.
We must then have recourse to the theological interpretation of this process: the reason for the overplus of promise and for the fact that it constantly overspills history lies in the inexhaustibility of the God of promise, who never exhausts himself in any historic reality but comes
‘to rest’ only in a reality that wholly corresponds to him.(G. von Rad,
‘Es ist noch eine Ruhe vorhanden dem Volke Gottes’ (1933) in Ges.
Studien zum Alten Testament (Theologische Bücherci 8), pp. 101 ff.
(ET ‘There Remains Still a Rest for the People of God’, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, 1966, pp. 94 ff.).
unhistoric experience of space and turned the occupied areas (bewohnte Raüme) of the land into temporal periods (Zeiträume) of an all-
embracing history.
What could here be experienced as ‘history’ in the potential changes of reality always reached as far as the promises of God stretched men’s memories and expectations. ‘Israel’s history existed only in so far as God accompanied her, and it is only this time-span which can properly be described as her history.’(G. von Rad, Theologie des Alten
Testamentes II, 1960, p. 120 [ET p. 106]) This fact of God’s
accompanying his people, however, was always seen within the area of tension between a manifest promise on the one hand and the expected redeeming of this promise on the other. It was within the span of this tension that history became of interest to Israel. ‘Only where Yahweh had revealed himself in his word and acts did history exist for Israel.’(G.
von Rad, ‘Offene Fragen im Umkreis einer Theologie des Alten Testamentes’, TLZ 88, 1963, col. 409.) This means, however, that the experience of reality as history was made possible for Israel by the fact that God was revealed to Israel in his promises and that Israel saw the revealing of God again and again in the uttering of his promises.
Now, if events are thus experienced within the horizon of remembered and expected promises, then they are experienced as truly ‘historic’
events. They do not then have only the accidental, individual and relative character which we normally ascribed to historic events, but then they have always at the same time also an unfinished and
provisional character that points forwards. Not only words of promise, but also the events themselves, in so far as they are experienced as
‘historic’ events within the horizon of promise and hope, bear the mask of something that is still outstanding, not yet finalized, not yet realized.
‘Here everything is in motion, the accounts never balance, and fulfillment unexpectedly gives rise in turn to another promise of
something greater still. Here nothing has its ultimate meaning in itself, but is always an earnest of something still greater.’(G. von Rad,
‘Typologische Auslegung’, op. cit., p. 29. cf. also p. 30: ‘Thus in the presentation of a fact there is very often something that transcends what actually happened.’) The overspill of promise means that the facts of history can never be regarded as processes complete in themselves which have had their day and can manifest their own truth by themselves. They must be understood as stages on a road that goes further and elements in a process that continues. Hence the events that are ‘historically’ remembered in this way do not yet have their ultimate
truth in themselves, but receive it only from the goal that has been promised by God and is to be expected from him. Then, however, the events that are thus experienced as ‘historic’ events give a foretaste of the promised future. The overspill of promise means that they have always a provisional character. They contain the note of ‘provisio’, i.e.
they intimate and point forward to something which does not yet exist in its fullness in themselves. Hence the history that is thus experienced and transmitted forces every new present to analysis and to interpretation.
Events that have been experienced in this way ‘must’ be passed on, because in them something is seen which is determinative also for future generations. They cast their shadow, or shed their light, on the way ahead. On the other hand they may also be freely interpreted and actualized by each new present, since they are never so firmly
established that we could restrict ourselves merely to ascertaining what they once were.(On this point cf. H. W. Wolff, ‘Das
Geschichtsverständnis der alttestamentlichen Prophetie’, EvTh 20, 1960, pp. 258 ff., and G. von Rad’s comment in ‘Offene Fragen’, op. cit., pp.
413f.)
The ancient historic traditions give expression to experiences which Israel had of its God and his promises. But if these promises reach out into that future which is still ahead of the present, then the historic narratives concerned cannot merely narrate experiences of the past.
Rather, the whole narrative and representation of this past will lead us to open ourselves and our present to that same future. The reality of history (Wirklichkeit der Geschickte) is narrated within the horizon of the
history of the working (Wirkungsgeschichte) of God’s promises. The stories of Israelite history -- the histories of the patriarchs, of the
wilderness, of David -- are treated as themes pregnant with future. Even where the historic tradition passes over into legendary tradition, the peculiarly Israelite tradition is still dominated by the hopes and
expectations kindled by Yahweh’s promises. Since the history that was once experienced contains an element that transcends history in its pastness and is pregnant with future, and to the extent that this is so, two things follow: first, this history must again and again be recalled and brought to mind in the present, and secondly, it must be so expounded to the present that the latter can derive from history an understanding of itself and its future path and can also find its own place in the history of the working of God’s promises.
The peculiarity of Israelite accounts of history as ‘historiography conditioned by faith in the promise’(W. Zimmerli, ‘Verheissung und
Erfullung’, op. cit., p. 50.) is particularly outstanding in comparison with the accounts of history in other peoples and other religions. ‘In the Greek and Roman mythologies, the past is re-presented as an everlasting foundation. In the Hebrew and Christian view of history the past is a promise to the future; consequently, the interpretation of the past
becomes a prophecy in reverse.’(K. Löwith, Meaning in History, 1949, p. 6.)
The history of Israel shows again and again that the promises to which Israel owes its existence prove amid all the upheavals of history to be a continuum in which Israel was able to recognize the faithfulness of its God.(H. W. Wolff, ‘Das Kerygma des Jahwisten’, EvTh 24, 1964, p.
97.) It could perhaps be said that the promises enter into fulfillment in events, yet are not completely resolved in any event, but there remains an overspill that points to the future. That is why reality, as it comes and is awaited and as it passes and is left behind, is experienced as history, and not as a cosmic and ever-recurring constant. It is experienced not in the epiphany of the eternal present, but in expectation of the
manifestation and fulfillment of a promised future. That is why the present itself, too, is not the present of the Absolute -- a present with which and in which we could abide -- but is, so to speak, the advancing front line of time as directed purposefully towards its goal in the moving horizon of promise. If the promise of God is the condition on which it becomes possible to have historic experience of reality, then the
language of historic facts is the language of promise -- otherwise events can be called neither ‘historic’ nor ‘eloquent’. The promises of God initiate history for Israel and retain the control in all historic
experiences.
Where we abstract from the process of promise, historic events are robbed of the outlook that makes them ‘historic’. Where the promises lose their power and significance as initiators of history, there the events of history are rounded off, as it were, to become facts of the past,
processes complete in themselves. They are then treated and presented in the light of other outlooks. Where God’s revelation is no longer seen in promise and mission, we can, for example, reflect upon the eternal, immortal and absolute being of the Deity. Then historic events belong within the sphere of transience. They are then no longer provisional events that point to the future of promise, but transient and relative events that reflect the eternal intransience of the Deity. Then there can in principle be ‘nothing new under the sun’. A history of such facts can then be contemplated as a succession of completed processes, a series of
images of eternal ideas. In what they have been, we then seek to discover eternal Being. In their coherent working we then seek to discover eternal laws. We have then, however, to look around for other conditions for the possibility of perceiving reality as history. Yet here the question constantly arises, whether this other picture of history and the designations derived from it are really adequate to the understanding of history in a historic sense and can stand theological and philosophical comparison with Israel’s experience of history, conditioned as it was by faith in the promise and determined by hope.
The very use of the term ‘fact’, ‘divine fact of history’, is incapable of expressing what Israel experienced in history. For this term implies a concept of being, of absoluteness, of immutability and finality, which refuses to be combined with promise, hope and future, and therefore also with ‘history’.(The use of the expression ‘divine fact of history’ in G. von Rad’s Theologie des Alten Testamentes is at many points unclear and allows manifold interpretations. If according to vol. I, p. 112 (ET p.
106) the ‘faith of Israel is fundamentally grounded in a theological view of history’, i.e. ‘it knows itself founded on facts of history and knows itself fashioned and refashioned by facts in which it saw the hand of Jahweh at work’, then it is surely, as von Rad himself goes on to
emphasize, the ‘faith of Israel’ for which these ‘facts’ are pregnant with future because of the divine promises in which they are interwoven -- it is not such an understanding of the facts as results from critical
historical examination. If according to vol. II, p. 157 (ET p. 504) the
‘historic acts by which Jahweh founded the community are absolute’, then this surely means that because they have the character of promise they overreach their temporal transience and move into the future -- it does not mean absoluteness in the sense of intransience.)
Now it has also been observed that very many of the prophets’ words about the future, especially their political predictions, did not come to pass in the way they were originally meant, and that history has thus outrun, and thereby antiquated, many words of promise. And this has been made a reason for no longer understanding history from the standpoint of promise but seeing in history a reality which overreaches these words of promise. ‘History has outrun the words.’(W. Pannenberg, Offenbarung als Geschichte, postscript to the 2nd ed., p. 132.) Is it
possible where the Old Testament is concerned to speak in principle of
‘history’s remaining short of the promise’,(W. Zimmerli,
‘"Offenbarung" im Alten Testament’, EvTh 22, 1962, p. 31.) and thus of expectations which again and again transcend the new situations of
history and make them ‘historic’, or does ‘history outrun the promises’
and does the consciousness of Israel already show some indication of a view of history that no longer has promise, hope and mission for the future as the condition that makes it possible?
Now it is certain that apart from the promises that fell by the way in the course of history, there are also and above all others to which Israel owed its existence as ‘Israel’ in a theological and a historic sense, in the constant recalling of which and the ever new embracing and
interpretation of which Israel consequently found its identity and continuity. These include not only the ‘basic promises’ of Exodus and the Sinaitic covenant -- ‘I am the Lord thy God’(Thus F. Baumgartel, Verheissung, 1952, p. 133.) -- but for example also the promises to Abraham.(H. W. Wolff, ‘Das Kerygma des Jahwisten’, op. cit., pp. 95 ff.) It cannot be said that mummified formulae of promise were capable of mastering new experiences of history, neither can it be said that some kind of numinous history as it ran mysteriously on rendered the
promises obsolete. The process of word and history surely went on in such a way that men were neither concerned to discover from history the formal confirmation of the ancient promises, nor yet to take the
promises merely as interpretations of history. Rather, the really new experiences, such as the occupation of Canaan and then later on the collapse of the kingdom, could be taken as explications of the traditional promises by means of new acts of Yahweh, and the new events could be understood in the light of the attested promise of Yahweh’s faithfulness.
Thus we find promise and history in a process of transformation, in which the traditional accounts of the promises took their place in the mastering of the new experiences of history, while the new experiences of history were understood as transformations arid expositions of the promises. The result of these processes of transformation, however, was never the emergence of views of history that were no longer based on promises and no longer bound to them. Never did men reflect on the overwhelming power of history and the powerlessness of the out-dated promises, and abandon the rest of the future to other powers than the God of promise. The tension of promise and fulfillment was not left behind by the simple progress of Israel’s history, but was much more strongly creative of Israel’s historic progress. As a result of those experiences of history for which the old election traditions were no match, the tension was actually heightened in the prophets. Only, this tension which has its origin in promise and its goal in fulfillment must not be represented in too schematic a form. Between promise and fulfillment there is a whole variety of intermediate links and processes,
such as exposition, development, validation, assertion, renewal, etc.
Between promise and fulfillment stretches the process of the history of the working of the word -- an event of tradition, in which the promise is transmitted to coming generations in interpreted and actualized form, and every new present is exposed to the promised future in hope and obedience. This event of tradition, which creates continuity amid the changes of history, cannot already be taken in itself as a profounder concept of history. The process of tradition, in which we recall history and undergo new historic experiences, is understandable only in the light of the tradendum or object to be transmitted -- viz., the promise and the future prospect it implies for events.