Tag Archives: Jürgen Moltman

What To Read…

29 Thursday Jan 2015

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I am currently reading N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. And I must say it is one of the most enjoyable reads in long while. I don’t remember the last time I’ve had so many “aha” moments about passages and concepts so familiar. Over and over again I found my assumptions delightfully challenged and reshaped.

This leads me to an important principle: It is beneficial (and enriching) to read authors from outside of our own traditions.

Lately, I have made a practice of intentionally reading people who write from within a different tradition than my own. And I have found it valuable for the following reasons:

  • it broadens my perspective of the church
  • it helps me to understand /relate to people within those traditions
  • it has potential to reveal blind spots within my own tradition
  • it removes unhelpful caricatures that flourish through “hearsay”
  • it teaches me how to disagree agreeably, if you know what I mean
  • it deepens my respect for the diversity of the body and reminds me that I don’t have to agree with everything someone says to be encouraged / edified by their work

The list could go on.

Here is a sample of some of the writers that I have read recently and the traditions they write from:

  • N.T. Wright – Anglican Communion (Church of England)
  • Karl Barth – Swiss Reformed (Confessing Church in Germany)
  • Walter Brueggemann – United Church of Christ
  • Richard B. Hays – United Methodist
  • T. F. Torrance – Church of Scotland
  • D. A. Carson – Evangelicalism [my own tradition]
  • John Webster – Anglican Communion (Church of England)
  • John Goldingay – Episcopal
  • Jürgen Moltmann – German Reformed

I have not read very much from the Orthodox tradition but I am eager to read something by Georges Florovsky or his pupil John D. Zizioulas, from within that tradition.

A Day Sanctified

02 Friday Jan 2015

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moltmannI just read an article that made me think of the Sabbath in a way that I have not thought of before. Jürgen Moltmann (“The Sabbath: The Feast Of Creation.” Journal Of Family Ministry 14.4 [2000]: 38-43) talks about the nature of the Sabbath in some pretty profound ways. I’ll just share a few thoughts worth pausing over. First, he notes that in the Genesis account God’s blessing of the Sabbath is unique because previously God had blessed only things. For example, God blesses the sea creatures and birds of the air (1:22) and he also blesses the man and woman (1:28). But when he blesses the Sabbath (2:3) he is not blessing a thing but rather a day, that is, a time. “God does not bless this day through activity, but rather through his rest; not by creating, but rather by being there. In this day God is wholly present” (40). Commenting on Augustine’s famous dictum, ‘our heart is restless in us until it finds rest in thee’, Moltmann points out that restlessness is universal among mortal creatures. So where is the refuge? the place of rest? “It is in time–here and now–on the seventh day, God’s Sabbath. On this day God simply is. All creatures therefore find there place…in the calm of God’s presence” (40). So, because on the Sabbath God blessed a time and not a thing this means that in a sense his blessing is universally available to all creatures who exist in this time, that is, the Sabbath.

And yet, as a spacio-temporal blessing the Sabbath points forward and backward, according to Moltmann. It points backward because it beckons us to remember creation (the day of blessing from the Creator). It points forward because on the Sabbath (in a uniquely blessed way) we may experience life in the presence of the Living God. I’ll close with a quote in which Moltmann makes an interesting analogy between the Sabbath day and the function of temples in the ancient world:

In the limited temples of the peoples, heaven and earth touch, but in the Jewish Sabbath, time and eternity touch. That way the Sabbath is both a day of remembrance of the original creation and a day of hope in our final salvation. Beginning and End are present on this day, interrupting time and indeed rescinding it. On this day death is abolished, for life is experienced so deeply that it is eternal. On this day the law of time is put away, for God himself lives in this day: eternal presence in an instant of time.