I have several times written about Jürgen Moltmann’s wonderful autobiography, A Broad Place: it is a work to which I returned recently when presenting a short session on his life story. I notice that one of my blogs on this work was written in the months after I was recovering from the tsunami trauma and my subsequent cancer surgery, and there is a rich sense in that blog of simply loving the physical invitations of daily life, sunshine and freedom, a place to be—all of which fits so well with the ‘broad place’ image of life with and in God which is at the heart of Moltmann’s thought, and mine.
Moltmann’s work, more than almost any other contemporary theologian I know, derives from his life experience, especially from his time as a prisoner of war at the end of the Second World War, when he reflected upon his own activity in Hitler’s army, upon what he has since learned of the Reich’s murderous program to exterminate the Jews, and since then his own desire to find both freedom and health, restoration and justice, for all people, for the entire creation.
Moltmann has developed a lot of his theology in dialogue with groups of people, including professional groups such as medical practitioners, disabled people, and Christians in marginalized contexts. He has shown a wonderful capacity to learn from others, not just to expound the deep insights of his own experience and study.
Just a glimpse of this is found on pages 88-89 when he speaks of participating in a conference on ‘Theology in the World of the Modern Sciences.’ He then comments on how theology faculties seem to focus on training pastors for the churches or more teachers for religion departments. These are good purposes, but he says this is too narrow a view of theology. ‘theology is a task for the whole people of God; every Christian is a theologian!’
(This is one of those moments when one thinks: ‘I agree. I have said that too. I am in great company!’)
It is not accidental that he then goes on to discuss his idea of the Lord’s Table and the ‘open friendship of Jesus’. This is one of the most creative ideas in his missional ecclesiology, which in my view is one of the great strengths of Moltmann’s theology. I wish that all theology had this evangelical passion, in the best sense of that word. Here it is, for example:
The community of Christ is a community in the open friendship of Jesus. The person who lives in his friendship also discovers Jesus’ friends, his brothers and sisters, the people whom he calls blessed. If we look at his example, we see that these people include the sick, the excluded, and the disabled. Jesus liked being with them, and they sought him out. He embraces them with his friendship, and they are close to him as he is to them. Consequently, disabled people belong in the worship of the congregation. Church congregations become communities when they themselves accept their disabled members, as far as they can. Diaconal service belongs in one’s own family, neighbourhood, and congregation, not just in special homes and institutions. p.89
On the next page, Moltmann goes on to speak of the importance of experience for theology, and what was called a ‘natural theology’. It might be clearer to call it a ‘theology from nature’, or a theology from experience, although it does also draw upon the possibility that humans have some inherent or ‘natural’ knowledge of God.
Karl Barth had vehemently rejected the possibility of a natural theology, at the time of his furious debate with Emil Brunner, in the 1930s and 40s. The context was the struggle against the “German Christian’ movement, which basically identified the kingdom of God with the emergence of the superior Aryan culture. Now, in vastly different times, Moltmann writes:
It was a long time before I put aside my Barthian fear of ‘natural theology’ and realized that it was a task for Christian theology. To discover ‘traces of God’ in nature does not indeed save us, but it does make us wise, as tradition says; for we discover in the memory of nature a wisdom of existence and life which mirrors the wisdom of God, and for human civilization it is wise to co-operate with nature and to become integrated into it, instead of exploiting and hence destroying it in the interests of human domination. p.90
Another quote, this time picking up a related theme. Moltmann is very interested in what we might call a spirituality of all life, and one expression of this concerns where the table of the Lord is located. Is the fellowship of Jesus and the open circle of his friendship only expressed in church buildings and official church ceremonies? Not at all! So here we get a sense of the heart of the man, as he reflects on this question, in direct relation to two specific experiences.
First, Moltmann was in London and was invited to attend an anti-Vietnam war demonstration. He records:
A motley collection of Protestant and Catholic Christians, together with people from ‘the highways and byways’, met in the offices of the Catholic publisher Sheed and Ward, and with a celebration of the Lord’s Supper, sitting on the floor, we prepared ourselves for the demonstration by agreeing to renounce violence; for in the previous demonstration many people had been hurt. Bread and wine passed from hand to hand in a small circle, and we felt the bodily presence of Jesus among us. …
[Later, in Edinburgh] I preached at St Giles, John Knox’s church. After the sermon, those who stayed behind were served the Lord’s Supper on silver trays by servers clad in black. The participants sat separate from one another, scattered here and there in the great church. There was no sense of community, and I went out of the beautiful church depressed. Where does Jesus’ feast belong? On the streets of the poor who follow Jesus, or in the church of the baptized, the confirmed and established? I decided for the feast that is open to all, and to which the weary and heavy-laden are invited. Baptism, on the other hand, should be reserved for believers. That certainly contradicts the practice of the mainline churches, but it is in conformity with Jesus according to the Synoptic Gospels. Jesus’ Supper is not a church meal for people who belong to one’s own denomination. It is the feast of the crucified Christ, whose hands are outstretched to everyone. … The Eucharist is in Jesus’ literal sense ‘catholic’: that is to say all-embracing, exclusive of no one but inclusive of all. p.164
Another lovely glimpse into the heart and mind of this man is found in a section where he asks himself ‘What do I love when I love God?’ Here, at pages 349 – 350, he contrasts a somewhat life-denying or world-denying vision of spiritual life with his own richly life-affirming experience. This is wonder-ful!
‘What do I love when I love God?’
One evening I read the following passage in Augustine’s Confessions:
But what do I love when I love you? Not the beauty of any body or the rhythm in its movement; not the radiance of light so dear to our eyes; not the sweet melodies in the world of manifold sounds; not the perfume of flowers, ointments and spices; not manna and not honey; not the limbs so delightful to the body’s embrace: it is none of those things that I love when I love my God. And yet when I love my God I do indeed love a light and a sound and a perfume and a food and an embrace— a light and sound and perfume and food and embrace in my inward self. There my soul is flooded with a radiance which no space can contain; there a music sounds which time never bear away; there I smell a perfume which no wind disperses; there I taste a food that no surfeit embitters; there is an embrace which no satiety severs. It is this that I love when I love my God.
And that night I answered him:
When I love God I love the beauty of bodies, the rhythm of movements, the shining of eyes, the embraces, the feelings, the scents, the sounds of all this protean creation. When I love you, my God, I want to embrace it all, for I love you with all my senses in the creation of your love. In all the things that encounter me, you are waiting for me.
For a long time I looked for you within myself and crept into the shell of my soul, shielding myself with an armour of inapproachability. But you were outside—outside myself—and enticed me out of the narrowness of my heart into the broad place of love for life. So I came out of myself and found my soul in my senses, and my own self in others.
The experience of God deepens the experiences of life. It does not reduce them. For it awakens the unconditional Yes to life. The more I love God, the more gladly I exist. The more immediately and wholly I exist, the more I sense the living God, the inexhaustible source of life and eternal livingness.
Right now, when a global pandemic has undermined so much that we call ‘normal life’ and challenges us to consider what is central and worthwhile, this warm and hopeful simplicity is both challenging and deeply encouraging. It is an invitation into the broad place.