Top 33 Quotes & Sayings by Jürgen Moltmann

Explore popular quotes and sayings by Jürgen Moltmann.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Jürgen Moltmann is a German Reformed theologian who is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at the University of Tübingen and is known for his books such as the Theology of Hope, The Crucified God, God in Creation and other contributions to systematic theology. Jürgen Moltmann is the husband of Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, a notable feminist theologian. Jürgen Moltmann described his own theology as an extension of Karl Barth's theological works, especially the Church Dogmatics, and he has described his own work as Post-Barthian. He has received honorary doctorates from a number of institutions, such as Duke University (1973), the University of Louvain in Belgium (1995), the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Romania (1996), the Chung Yuan Christian University in Taiwan (2002), the Nicaraguan Evangelical University (2002), and the University of Pretoria in South Africa (2017). Moltmann was selected to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 1984–85, and was also the recipient of the 2000 University of Louisville and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary Grawemeyer Award in Religion.

Born: April 8, 1926

Source: Wikipedia

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

Jürgen Moltmann

Totally without hope, one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live.

Jürgen Moltmann

No where else in Christianity does the terrible or heroic name of Armageddon play such role as in America. Not even in the Revelation of John.

Jürgen Moltmann

In Christian terms, evangelization and humanization are not alternatives. Nor are the vertical dimension of faith and the horizontal dimension of love for ones neighbor and political change.

Jürgen Moltmann

God is not only a divine person who we can address in prayer, but also a wide living space We human beings are giving each other space for living when we meet each other in love and friendship.

Jürgen Moltmann

Passion is loving something enough to suffer for it.

Jürgen Moltmann

Christian hope does not promise successful days to the rich and the strong, but resurrection and life to those who must exist in the shadows of death. Success is no name of God. Righteousness is.

Jürgen Moltmann

That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.

Jürgen Moltmann

. . . if we have children. When they are just born we do everything for them. We are omnipotent, they are completely dependent on us, but then when they grow up you must take back your influence on them, to give them freedom.

Jürgen Moltmann

The turn from this end [despair] to a new beginning came from three things. A blooming cherry tree, the unexpected kindness of Scottish workers and their families, and the Bible.

Jürgen Moltmann

In the cross of Christ God is taking man dead-seriously so that he may open up for him the happy freedom of Easter. God takes upon himself the pain of negation and the God forsakenness of judgement to reconcile himself with his enemies and to give the godless fellowship with himself.

Jürgen Moltmann

Imprisoned professors taught imprisoned students free theology.

Jürgen Moltmann

Even the disciples of Jesus all fled from their master's cross. Christians who do not have the feeling that they must flee the crucified Christ have probably not yet understood him in a sufficiently radical way.

Jürgen Moltmann

It is only when human beings see themselves simply as human beings, no longer as gods, that they are in a position to perceive the wholly other nature of God.

Jürgen Moltmann

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

Jürgen Moltmann

The church's final word is not 'church' but the glory of the Father and the Son in the Spirit of liberty

Jürgen Moltmann

The knowledge of the cross brings a conflict of interest between God who has become man and man who wishes to become God.

Jürgen Moltmann

To reinvent your own country you need a great audacity of hope.

Jürgen Moltmann

That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience.... Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is.

Jürgen Moltmann

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.

Jürgen Moltmann

As long as hope does not embrace and transform the thought and action of men, it remains topsy-turvy and ineffective.

Jürgen Moltmann

Hope is lived when it comes alive, when we go outside of ourselves and, in joy and pain take part in the lives of others.

Jürgen Moltmann

Believing in the resurrection does not just mean assenting to a dogma and noting a historical fact. It means participating in this creative act of God’s … Resurrection is not a consoling opium, soothing us with the promise of a better world in the hereafter. It is the energy for a rebirth of this life. The hope doesn’t point to another world. It is focused on the redemption of this one.

Jürgen Moltmann

Christ's own 'God-forsaken-ness' on the cross showed me where God is present where God had been present in those nights of deaths in the fire storms in Hamburg and where God would be present in my future whatever may come.

Jürgen Moltmann

God heals the sicknesses and the griefs by making the sicknesses and the griefs his suffering and his grief. In the image of the crucified God the sick and dying can see themselves, because in them the crucified God recognizes himself.

Jürgen Moltmann

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.

Jürgen Moltmann

Americans as no one else in the Old World are looking ahead and are future-minded without the limitations of traditions and can look ahead without the burdens of the past.

Jürgen Moltmann

As time goes on we become old, the future contracts, the past expands...But by future we don't just mean the years ahead; we always mean as well the plenitude of possibilities which challenge our creativity...In confrontation with the future we can become young if we accept the future's challenges.

Jürgen Moltmann

With every righteous action, we prepare the way for the New Earth on which righteousness will dwell. And bringing justice to those who suffer violence means to bring the light of God's future to them.

Jürgen Moltmann

There were two different expectations in this land of the future. On the one hand the the optimistic belief in an unending progress with millenarianistic overtones and on the other hand the doomsday expectation of the final battle of Armageddon. Both are perspectives are uniquely American and both are inter-related.

Jürgen Moltmann