Theology of Hope by Jurgen Moltmann
Chapter 3: The Resurrection and the Future of Jesus Christ
13. The Future of the Kingdom of God and of the Freedom of Man The real heart of eschatology, and the basic concept which it constantly
employs with varying content, is doubtless to be found in the promise and expectation of what is known as the ‘kingdom of God’ and the
‘lordship of God’. It is plain that even in the early days of Israel, the hope which has its ground in the promise is directed towards the lordship of Yahweh. It is in his real, historic lordship that his glory manifests itself. It is in the faithful and powerful fulfillment of his promises that he manifests himself as himself, as God and Lord. Bound up with the expectation of the lordship of God is the expectation that his people, mankind, and all that he has made will attain to salvation, peace, happiness, life -- in a word, to what it was truly meant to be. Faith in his lordship finds its expression in the confession that Yahweh is king (Judg. 8.23). If we go back to the nomadic period of the Israelite tribes, then we find the idea that Yahweh is the Leader who goes before his people, that he rules them by leading them as a shepherd, issuing
commands, giving counsel and announcing his will for the future.(Cf.
M. Buber, Konigtum Gottes,, 2nd ed. 1936.) Thus his lordship does not mean in the first instance a worldly kingship over the natural world around man, but leadership towards the lands of promise, and thus a historic lordship which shows itself in unique, unrepeatable, startlingly new, purposeful events.
God’s lordship originally means lordship in promise, faithfulness and fulfillment. Life under his lordship then accordingly means the historic life of the nomad in breaking new ground and in obedient readiness to face the future -- a life that is received in promise and is open to
promise. It is only in controversy with the nature religions and
theophanous ideas of the world in Palestine, and in the context of the development of belief in creation and of the prophetic eschatology, that the idea of God’s lordship becomes universal, and that this universality of the lordship of the one God is at the same time understood
eschatologically. The praises of God’s royal lordship over all things, the ideas of his coming, his justice and judgment upon earth, are all related to the God who is on the march with Israel, the God of the promise and the exodus. Thus the ideas of universal theophany can be supplemented by ideas from the nature religions, and yet these latter can at once be set in an eschatological framework on the ground of the historic religion of promise.
In the idea of the lordship of God two elements are combined:
remembrance of his historic lordship and confidence in it, and
expectation of his universal lordship in which the world and all nations and things become his universe, his kingdom and his praise.
It is not possible to distinguish the two by making the first a matter of narrow nationalism and the second one of universal cosmic faith. Rather, the universal expectation has its ground in remembering the particular historic reality of his sovereign action in Israel. After the breakdown of Israel’s historic independence, the expectation of the divine lordship was represented in rabbinic theology in the obedience of the legally
righteous, while in apocalyptic theology it was futurized by means of speculations about world history, and his coming was delegated to events in the course of world history. This shows the impossibility of conceiving the promise of divine lordship in both historic and
eschatological terms without its being given new content from experience.
In the New Testament the is obviously a central concept -- especially in the synoptic tradition, and here indeed at all levels of the tradition. In particular, the message and acts, miracles and parables of Jesus before Easter are described as ‘the kingdom of God’. Jesus proclaims the messianic kingdom of God. The peculiar feature of his proclamation of the kingdom lies in the fact that nearness to, entry into, and inheritance of; the kingdom are bound by him to the decision of the hearers and their attitude to his own person. The future of the divine lordship is
immediately bound up with the mystery of his own presence.
This can be understood in the sense that as the last prophet of the coming kingdom he gives men’s decision in face of his message the character of the final, and in this sense eschatological, decision.
It can also be understood as a transformation of the kingdom of God tradition. Then Jesus has surmounted the apocalyptic question as to the appointed times and historic circumstances of the arrival of the kingdom
‘by concentrating on what the announcement of the kingdom means for existence’.(H. Conzelmann, Art. ‘Reich Gottes’, in RGG3 vol. V, col.
915.) By proclaiming his hour as the last hour of decision, Jesus himself demythologizes the apocalyptic pictures of the kingdom for the sake of existential actualization. ‘The eschatological proclamation and the ethical demand both point man to the fact that he is brought before God and that God is at hand; both point him to his Now as the hour of
decision for God.’(R. Bultmann, Theologie des Neuen Testamentes, p.
20 [ET p.21]) In that case, however, the peculiar feature of Jesus’
message of the kingdom would lie in an existential ethicizing of it, in favor of which all ideas of cosmological apocalyptic fade out of the picture. But this alone gives the primitive Christian Church no reason, and hardly even a right, to continue his proclamation. The reason and the right of the Christian Church to carry on his proclamation, and for its part even to transform it, surely lies in the event which gave it cause to remember Jesus’ words and actions at all and to proclaim him as Lord of all the world -- namely, in the Easter appearances of the risen Lord. The Easter appearances, however, were recognized and proclaimed within a horizon of apocalyptic expectation: resurrection as an eschatological event -- Jesus as the firstfruits of the resurrection. The understanding of Jesus which results from the event of the raising of the crucified one by God was necessarily connected in the Church’s mind with its
remembrance of the understanding of God and his kingdom which results from the words and acts of Jesus.(For what follows cf. the discussion on kingdom of God and Son of Man: P.Vielhauer,
‘Gottesreich und Menschensohn in der Verkündigung Jesu’, Festschr. f.
G. Dehn, 1957, pp. 51 ff.; H. E. Tödt, Der Menschensohn in der
synoptischen Uberlieferung,1959 (ET by D. M. Barton: The Son of Man in the Synoptic Tradition, 1965); E. Schweizer, ‘Der Menschensohn’, Zeitschrift für NT Wissenschaft 50, 1959, pp. 185 ff.; P. Vielhauer,
‘Jesus und der Menschensohn’, ZTK 60, 1963, pp. 133 ff. (now also in Aufsätze zum Neuen Testamentes [Theol. Bucherei 31], 1965, pp. 135 ff.). The latter’s systematic observations on the problem how far it is true that Jesus did not understand himself as the expected Son of Man, but that the Church rightly did so (ZTK 60, pp. 173 f.) provide our starting point here.) The note of eschatological decision in his
proclamation of the imminent lordship of God was therefore necessarily transferred to the note of eschatological decision in the message of the crucified and risen Lord. With this, however, the proclamation of the divine lordship acquired a new apocalyptic character and could be bound up with the messianic titles of Christ, such as Son of Man, which are found in apocalyptic. This constitutes a discontinuity between Jesus’
message of the kingdom and the Church’s christological message of the kingdom, as it is aptly expressed in the remark of Albert Schweitzer:
Jesus proclaimed the kingdom, and the Church proclaimed -- him. Yet this discontinuity exists rightly. The Church has not to carry on Jesus’
self-consciousness or self-understanding, but to proclaim who he is.
This, however, can be seen only in the light of the end, i.e. of the cross and of the Easter appearances as the foreshadowing of his
eschatologically still outstanding goal and end. The Church’s statements are based not on Jesus’ self-understanding, but on that which happened to him in the cross and the resurrection. His death and resurrection mark the discontinuity between the historical Jesus and primitive Christian Christology. His identity, however, which lies in the fact that he who here appears as risen is the one who was crucified and no other, forms at the same time the bridge to the historical Jesus and provides the ground and occasion for the historical remembrance of Jesus’ message and acts.
This remembrance may be clouded in the gospel tradition of primitive Christianity by many an enthusiastic concern for resurrection and the Spirit, yet the Easter Christophanies are the only adequate ground for remembering and calling to mind his proclamation, just as his cross is the only adequate ground for not forgetting his promise of the kingdom in face of the so-called delay of the parousia of the kingdom. There is no need here to subject the gospel narratives to the verdict of being
imaginative backward projections of the resurrection faith. They
remember Jesus on the ground of the expectations for his future which are aroused by the resurrection appearances, and present the earthly Jesus of the past in the light of the hopes for his future which become
possible with Easter. These hopes are no doubt a strong motive for historical remembrance and also for historical discoveries. The key to what he ‘in fact’ was and is, is provided not by his self-understanding, whatever that may have been, but by the understanding of his future which Easter makes credible and enables us to hope for. It is not the remembrance of the dead Master in the light of his death, but the
experience of Easter, that makes it necessary to identify Jesus. It is only the enigmatic, dialectical identity of the risen Lord with the crucified Christ that compels the acceptance of a continuity between the primitive Christian Christology and the message of Jesus himself. The ‘self-
consciousness’ of Jesus does not compel men to remain conscious of him, but their consciousness of Jesus -- as fashioned by the resurrection appearances -- is certainly compelled to raise the question of its own continuity with Jesus’ consciousness.
But if the raising of Jesus from the dead is thus a constitutive part of the Christian message of the kingdom, then it is hardly possible any longer for the latter to be concentrated on its ‘meaning for existence’ and existentially ethicized, but then it is essential to take the universal horizon of hope and promise embracing all things and develop it just as widely as apocalyptic had done -- not in the same way, but in the same cosmic breadth. Hence we ought not to speak only of divine lordship, meaning by this the eschatological subjection of man’s existence to the absolute demand, but we should also speak again of the kingdom of God, and so bring out the all-embracing eschatological breadth of his future, into which the mission and the love of Christ lead the man of hope.
If the Easter appearances of Jesus as perceived within the eschatological horizon of expectation are the occasion for remembering and taking over Jesus’ message of the kingdom, yet they are at the same time also the occasion for the transforming of this message of the kingdom. The future which remained open in Jesus’ message of the kingdom is
confirmed by his resurrection appearances, assured in anticipation as the dawn of his parousia, and can now be called his future. At the later levels of the synoptic tradition a christological understanding of the kingdom of God asserts itself; inasmuch as the idea of the kingdom of Christ, or of the Son of Man, is developed on the lines of the Jewish idea of the messianic kingdom. This, how- ever, brings with it a change in the idea of the kingdom of God itself. To be sure, it still retains its bearing on the present decision for new obedience, but this call which summons men to new life in obedience finds support and prospect in the
resurrecting act of God. The sole Lord of the kingdom is the God ‘who
has raised Jesus from the dead’ and therein shows himself to be the creator ex nihilo. His kingdom can then no longer be seen in a historic transformation of the godless state of man and the world. His future does not result from the trends of world history. His rule is his raising of the dead and consists in calling into being the things that are not, and choosing things which are not, to bring to nothing things which are (I Cor. 1.28). This makes it impossible to conceive the kingdom of God in deistic terms of salvation history, as a result of world history or of a divine plan for the world. It also makes it impossible to conceive the kingdom of God ‘without God’ and to resolve ‘God’ himself as the
‘highest Good’ into the ideal of the kingdom.
Finally, the enigma of the Easter appearances -- understood in the Hellenistic church as ‘exaltation’ -- also led to regarding Jesus as the exalted cultic Kyrios and extolling his kingdom as his hidden heavenly lordship. Thus whatever the horizon within which the ideas were
formed, it was always the interpretation of the resurrection of the crucified one which became determinative for the understanding of the promise of the kingdom of God.
In the very different views which thus arose, we note the following characteristics:
I. The experiences of the cross and of the resurrection appearances of Jesus give a new stamp to the message of the kingdom of God. His cross and resurrection in a certain sense ‘distort’ his own open picture of the future and the coming of the kingdom of God. But at the same time, and for this reason, the lordship of God assumes the concrete form of this event of the raising of the crucified one. In this event the kingdom of God is not only christologically ‘distorted’ (verstellt), but concretely represented (vorgestellt). If Jesus has been raised from the dead, then the kingdom of God can be nothing less than a nova creatio. If the risen Lord is the crucified Christ, then the kingdom is tectum sub cruce. The coming lordship of God takes shape here in the suffering of the
Christians, who because of their hope cannot be conformed to the world, but are drawn by the mission and love of Christ into discipleship and conformity to his sufferings. This way of taking into consideration the cross and resurrection of Christ does not mean that the ‘kingdom of God’ is spiritualized and made into a thing of the beyond, but it becomes this-worldly and becomes the antithesis and contradiction of a godless and god-forsaken world.
2. The experience of the cross and resurrection of Jesus brings not only a christological understanding of the ‘kingdom of God’, but also in a new sense an eschatological understanding of it. Because of their experiences of the cross and of Easter, the oldest churches did not live in a ‘time of fulfillment’, but in earnest looking forward to the future. To be sure, it was possible for the experiences of Easter and of the Spirit to give occasion for an eschatology of fulfillment in the Spirit, as a result of which the experiences of the cross and of the contradiction of reality appeared to be overcome in the Spirit. Only, the realism of the earthly cross of Jesus and of the contradiction everywhere perceptible in an unredeemed world in the course of the Christian mission showed this religious or cultic docetism to be an error. Thus particularly in Paul an eschatological view of the still outstanding kingdom of God asserted itself over against all eschatological and cultic enthusiasm. If the raising of Jesus from the dead provides the ground for a new kind of hope in the kingdom, then the promised future cannot lie simply in the very fact of the giving of the Spirit, but the ‘Spirit’ himself becomes the ‘earnest’ of the still outstanding future and therefore ‘strives’ against the ‘works of the flesh’. If the kingdom of God implies the raising of the dead, then it is a new creation, and then the ‘exalted Lord’ cannot be understood as one of several cultic lords or as the ‘true cultic Lord’, but only as the Cosmocrator. The lordship of the risen and exalted Christ, as it was understood in the Hellenistic church’s Christology of exaltation, is from the eschatological standpoint itself provisional and serves the final goal of the sole lordship of God, in which all things become new. Then, however, the christological understanding of the message of the
kingdom does not distort Jesus’ message of the kingdom, but makes it universal, opens it to embrace a totality of new being. The Easter appearances are then made the occasion for expecting the lordship of God over death and the righteousness of God in all transient things. If the kingdom of God begins as it were with a new act of creation, then the Reconciler is ultimately the Creator, and thus the eschatological prospect of reconciliation must mean the reconciliation of the whole creation, and must develop an eschatology of all things. In the cross we can recognize the god-forsakenness of all things, and with the cross we can recognize the real absence of the kingdom of God in which all things attain to righteousness, life and peace. Hence the kingdom of God can mean no less than resurrection and new creation, and hope in the kingdom can be satisfied with no less than this. Because of this
universality, the new hope of the kingdom leads us to suffer under the forsakenness and unredeemedness of all things and their subjection to vanity. It leads us to a solidarity with the anxious expectation of the whole creation that waits for the liberty of the children of God (Rom.
8.22), and thus it perceives in all things the longing, the travail, and the unfulfilled openness for God’s future. Thus the kingdom of God is present here as promise and hope for the future horizon of all things, which are then seen in their historic character because they do not yet contain their truth in themselves. If it is present as promise and hope, then this its presence is determined by the contradiction in which the future, the possible and the promised stands to a corrupt reality. In the Reformers it was said that the kingdom of God is tectum sub cruce et sub contrario. This was intended to mean that the kingdom of God is here hidden beneath its opposite: its freedom is hidden under trial, its happiness under suffering, its right under rightlessness, its omnipotence under weakness, its glory under unrecognizability. Here the kingdom of God was seen in the form of the lordship of the crucified one. This is a true insight, and one that cannot be relinquished. Only, the kingdom of God does not end in the paradoxical form of a presence of this kind. Its paradoxical hiddenness ‘under the contrary’ is not its eternal form. For indeed it is only the resurrection hope and the mission of Christ, the hunger for righteousness in all things and the thirst for true life, that first lead to the suffering, the weakness, the rightlessness and the
unrecognizability. The contradiction does not result automatically from man’s experiences with history, with sin and death, but it results from the promise and the hope which contradict these experiences and make it no longer possible to put up with them. If the promise of the kingdom of God shows us a universal eschatological future horizon spanning all things -- ‘that God may be all in all’ -- then it is impossible for the man of hope to adopt an attitude of religious and cultic resignation from the world. On the contrary, he is compelled to accept the world in all
meekness, subject as it is to death and the powers of annihilation, and to guide all things towards their new being. He becomes homeless with the homeless, for the sake of the home of reconciliation. He becomes
restless with the restless, for the sake of the peace of God. He becomes rightless with the rightless, for the sake of the divine right that is
coming.
The promise of the kingdom of God in which all things attain to right, to life, to peace, to freedom, and to truth, is not exclusive but inclusive.
And so, too, its love, its neighborliness and its sympathy are inclusive, excluding nothing, but embracing in hope everything wherein God will be all in all. The pro-missio of the kingdom is the ground of the missio of love to the world.
It is the ground of the outgoing of the spirit in bodily obedience, because