Jürgen Moltmann, who has died aged 98, was the most significant Protestant theologian of the second half of the 20th century. He became a Christian as a result of reading the New Testament in a prisoner-of-war camp in Britain and later, in a long sequence of groundbreaking books translated into many languages, offered new insights into the message of the Bible.
He held the post of Professor of Systematic Theology at the German University of Tübingen from 1963 to 1994, and his books, as well as the lectures he gave across the world, were in the German tradition of rigorous theological and philosophical analysis. As a consequence, most of them were not accessible to non-professionals. Yet they could not be confined to academic ivory towers, since they had considerable social and political implications.
The basis of Moltmann’s work was his conviction that true theology must always be related to concrete human situations and that the teaching of Jesus about the Kingdom of God requires of his followers commitment to the overthrowing of everything in the social order that is contrary to its demands. This led him to personal involvement in peace and other demonstrations, including some in London, and close association with the Liberation Theology movement in Latin America, where his work was specially valued by Catholic theologians.
Jürgen Moltmann was born on April 8 1926 into a sceptical, non-churchgoing family in Hamburg. It had been his intention on leaving school to study mathematics and physics, but he was immediately recruited as an air force auxiliary to serve in the anti-aircraft defences of his much-bombed city. He was on duty in July 1943 when the RAF created a firestorm in which 40,000 people were killed, among them a friend who was standing alongside him before being blown to pieces by a bomb. Although not then a Christian believer, Moltmann cried out: “My God, where are you?”
Soon after this he was called up for army service, and after brief training was sent to Belgium to help resist the advance of the Allied forces, but in February 1945 he was made a prisoner of war by the British. The next three years were spent in camps in Scotland and Nottinghamshire.
During this time, when he was working on local farms, the camp chaplain gave him a copy of the New Testament and the Psalms. This was at first an unwelcome gift, but eventually he decided to read some of it and, influenced also by some Christian camp visitors, came to the Christian faith.
News of the events at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps greatly affected him and when he returned home in 1948 he decided to study theology with a view to ordination as a Lutheran pastor. Assisted by the scholarly pastor of his own parish, he went to the University of Göttingen, where he soon displayed considerable academic gifts.
In 1953 Moltmann became pastor of a small rural congregation at the evangelical church of Bremen-Wasserhorst, which left him with sufficient time to continue his studies and complete a doctorate. But he was disappointed that the leaders of the post-war Lutheran Church were opposed to new ideas and he was led by his own experiences, and by what he called “the long shadow of Auschwitz”, to believe that “true theology can never be remote but must always be related to human need.”
In 1958 he left his parish in order to teach at a theological college in Wuppertal, and the following year he published his first book, The Lordship of Christ and Human Society. This was a relatively small volume but contained all the themes of his later work: eschatology, the Kingdom of God, faithfulness to the Earth and new partnerships for the church in the world.
He moved to a professorial chair at the University of Bonn in 1963 and 12 months later published what proved to be a seminal book, Theology of Hope. For the next decade no contemporary theological work was more widely read and discussed.
In Germany alone it went through six impressions in two years and translated editions were printed in several European countries, including Britain, as well as the United States and Japan. The message was of a God whose coming to the world lay not in some distant future but was a present reality, thus offering both hope and challenge.
The Crucified God (1972), another highly influential book, was concerned with the nature of Christian belief after Auschwitz. The crucifixion of Jesus was, Moltmann said, to be seen as an indication of “the powerlessness of God” in some situations and its meaning interpreted as a transaction within the mysterious relationships of the Trinity. He developed this further in another major book, Trinity and the Kingdom of God (1980), which many theologians found particularly illuminating.
During the 1960s Moltmann played an important part in the Christian-Marxist dialogue, involving scholars from both sides of the Iron Curtain, in which some common ground was discovered on the theme of hope and on the need for religious and philosophical thought to be turned into action. He was teaching as a visiting professor at Duke University, North Carolina, in 1968 when one of his lectures was interrupted dramatically by the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Thereafter he was keenly interested in black theology and became a strong supporter of America’s civil rights movement.
After retiring from his Tübingen chair in 1994 he continued to write and to lecture worldwide. His final book was The Living God and the Fullness of Life (2014). In 2006, he published a memoir, A Broad Place.
His met his future wife, Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, herself a distinguished scholar and a leading exponent of feminist theology, when they were students at Gottingen; they married in 1952. She died in 2016, and he is survived by four daughters, another child having died in infancy.
Jürgen Moltmann, born April 8 1926, died June 3 2024
