Lecture 29-2: Hope from the Cross, Revelation from the Future

These two passages map cleanly onto this lecture's two halves. Romans 8:22's groaning creation is the text Moltmann returns to again and again as evidence that Paul's own hope was never a private, individual matter but a hope for the whole created order, suffering included — which is exactly the shape of hope Theology of Hope argues for. Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 15, by contrast, proceeds by exactly the kind of reasoning Pannenberg thought Christian theology needed more of: Paul treats the resurrection as a claim whose truth or falsehood has real, testable consequences ("if there is no resurrection of the dead, neither has Christ been raised"), not as a private conviction insulated from evidence and argument.

Moltmann: hope as history's forward pull

Theology of Hope's central and, at the time, startling move was to argue that Christian eschatology — the doctrine of "last things" — should not be treated as one doctrinal topic tucked at the end of a systematic theology, addressed only after everything else has been settled. Moltmann argued instead that the entire structure of Christian faith is fundamentally oriented toward a promised future, and that this future orientation is not an appendix to faith but its engine. His key technical term is prolepsis: the resurrection of Jesus is not simply a past miracle that happened once, to be believed as a fact about history and then set aside. It is a proleptic — an anticipatory, forward-reaching — event, meaning that in raising Jesus, God has already, in advance, revealed and guaranteed what the end of all history will be: the transformation and redemption of the whole created order, exactly as Romans 8:22's "whole creation" that "groans" is waiting for. Hope, on this account, is not wishful optimism about how things might turn out; it is a disciplined, historically grounded confidence about how things definitely will turn out, based on a concrete promise already partially fulfilled.

This reoriented Christian ethics as much as Christian doctrine. If the resurrection guarantees a coming transformation of the whole created order, Moltmann argued, then Christian hope cannot remain a purely private, otherworldly comfort — it obligates believers to work, here and now, for provisional signs of that promised future: justice, peace, and the relief of suffering, understood not as a separate "social gospel" competing with evangelism but as hope's own necessary outworking. This move is precisely what later made Moltmann's theology so influential for political and liberation theologies (chapter 28 covers Gutiérrez's parallel, though independently developed, move) and for ecological theology, which lecture 29-3 will take up directly.

Moltmann: the crucified God

The Crucified God, published eight years later, pressed the argument in a different, more provocative direction: toward the cross itself, and toward the doctrine of God. Classical Christian theology, largely following a philosophical inheritance from Greek metaphysics, had generally held that God is impassible — incapable of suffering or being changed by anything outside himself, since suffering implies a lack or a vulnerability that a perfect, self-sufficient God cannot have. Moltmann argued this inherited doctrine could not actually account for the cross. If God the Son genuinely suffered and died at Calvary, and if the Trinity is not three separate gods but one God in three persons, then the Father, too, is somehow involved in that suffering — not by dying himself, but by really suffering the loss of the Son, in a grief Moltmann called, borrowing but reworking the concept, a form of divine "patripassianism" carefully distinguished from the ancient heresy of that name (which claimed the Father himself died on the cross; Moltmann's claim was narrower — that the Father grieved the Son's death, not that the Father was crucified). The payoff, for Moltmann, was pastoral and theological at once: a God who cannot suffer cannot actually be with a suffering, groaning creation in any meaningful sense, and the cross is precisely the event in which God demonstrates the opposite — that God's own being includes the capacity to suffer in solidarity with the world's real pain, rather than observing it from a safe, unaffected distance.

Pannenberg: the resurrection as a historical claim

Pannenberg's argument moved along an entirely different axis. Where Moltmann worked from the cross toward a doctrine of God's suffering, Pannenberg worked from ordinary historical method toward a case that the resurrection itself could be defended as history — not merely confessed as faith or treated, as Bultmann had treated it, as symbolic language whose factual truth or falsehood was beside the point. In Jesus — God and Man, Pannenberg laid out a case built on public, checkable evidence: the empty tomb tradition, attested independently in multiple early strands; the appearance traditions Paul lists in 1 Corinthians 15, including an appearance to "more than five hundred brothers at once," most of whom Paul says were "still alive" at the time of writing — an appeal, Pannenberg noted, that only makes rhetorical sense if Paul expected skeptical readers to be able to go check; and the otherwise hard-to-explain transformation of a group of frightened, scattered disciples into a movement willing to proclaim a crucified man as risen Lord even under persecution. Pannenberg argued that ordinary historical reasoning, applied without a prior methodological rule excluding miracles from consideration, could conclude that something happened that the "resurrection" language best explains — not with mathematical certainty, since no claim about the distant past achieves that, but with the same kind of warranted historical probability historians grant to other well-attested ancient events.

This drew Pannenberg into direct conflict with a widely held assumption in critical historiography, sometimes traced to Ernst Troeltsch's principle of "analogy": that a historian, working as a historian, may not conclude that an event occurred if the event has no analogy in ordinary present experience, since history's method depends on inferring the unknown past from the known, repeatable present. Pannenberg's counter was not to abandon historical method but to argue that the analogy principle, applied as an absolute rule rather than a working presumption, illegitimately decides the answer to a historical question — whether a genuinely novel, non-repeatable event like a resurrection could occur — before any evidence is examined, which is not disciplined historical method but a metaphysical assumption dressed up as one.

Pannenberg: revelation "from the future"

Pannenberg's second major and more distinctive claim was that revelation should be understood as coming "from the future" rather than being deposited once, completely, in the past. His argument ran, briefly, like this: the meaning of any event in history is not fully settled at the moment it happens — it depends on how the larger story it belongs to eventually turns out, the way the meaning of an early move in a long chess game is only fully clear once the game is over. Applied to revelation, this meant that God's self-disclosure in history is not complete until history itself reaches its end, when the whole of reality's meaning will finally be settled and revealed. The resurrection of Jesus is decisive for Pannenberg precisely because it is a proleptic anticipation — a term Pannenberg shared with Moltmann though the two developed it somewhat differently — of that final end appearing already, ahead of schedule, within history: in Jesus's resurrection, the end of history (the general resurrection Jewish apocalyptic hope expected for all the dead at history's close) has already happened for one man, which is why Pannenberg could argue that revelation is genuinely universal and historical rather than a private disclosure to Israel or the church alone, even though its full and final confirmation still lies ahead, at history's actual end.

4-1. Two arguments, two centers of gravity

5. Going to the Sources

Read the opening chapter of Jürgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope (English translation by James W. Leitch, SCM Press, 1967 / Harper & Row), where Moltmann states his central claim that eschatology is not one doctrine among others but "the medium of Christian faith as such." For Pannenberg, read the historical-argument sections of Jesus — God and Man (English translation by Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe, Westminster Press, 1968), part I, where Pannenberg lays out his case for the resurrection's historical defensibility and directly engages the analogy principle.