Word: man
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Moltmann took his initial cue and much of his underlying philosophy from a highly unorthodox source: Marxist Philosopher Ernst Bloch.* Bloch is an atheist who nonetheless believes that man's hope for the future is the only transcendence in the universe: "Where there is hope, there is religion." Moreover, says Bloch, a hopeful future came into the world with the Bible...
Precisely, says Moltmann. What makes man's future so full of promise is not the modernist's idea of upward, evolutionary progress inherent in man but, quite simply, Christ's death and Resurrection. No matter whether the Resurrection is verifiable as a historical event; that "something" happened to give early Christians their immense hope is evidence enough. In addition, argues Moltmann, while the Resurrection may be "the sign of future hope," the cross itself-through Christ's sacrifice-means "hope to the-hopeless...
...today in a globally heightened form, has fundamentally arisen not against Christianity but through it," he writes. "It is originally a Christian event." So is it also, in a strikingly different way, in the thinking of Roman Catholic Theologian Gregory Baum. In a study called Man Becoming, to be published next spring, New York-based Father Baum perceives the promise of eschatology not so much in man's collective history as in each man's psychological nature. The "coming God," as Baum sees him, offers man a special freedom to rise above the determinism of his psyche. "Human...
Might not such theological concepts impel men toward social revolution? Indeed, yes. U.S. Theologian Richard Shaull says that only at the center of the revolution can we "perceive what God is doing." His fellow romanticist Rubem Alves, a 36-year-old Brazilian Protestant, thinks man must meet the liberating event of Christ's Resurrection halfway, as "cocreator" of his own destiny (a Teilhardian notion) through the processes of political revolution. Moltmann frankly admits that hope leads to revolution, declaring that the Christian community ought above all to favor the poor and the dispossessed. But both he and Alves suggest...
...theology of its own. In The Feast of Fools, Harvey Cox presents Christ as clown and Christianity as comedy, because the world "should not be taken with ultimate or final seriousness." Theologian Sam Keen, 38, pleads a similar case in Apology for Wonder. While he believes that "the wise man is a dancer," he insists that the "authentic" man temper his ecstasy with a sense of timeliness...