One of the signal gifts Jürgen Moltmann brought to the Church is a prophetic voice woven seamlessly with a theological voice.

The journey of his life through the Second World War and its consequences, his ministry, the tragedy of his son’s death, the extraordinary theological voice of his wife Elisabeth, all informed a theologian who strove never to speak in the abstract, but with a profound understanding of, and engagement with, people’s lives, most especially any who suffer.

This gift Moltmann offered is rarely comfortable; the implications of a God who suffers, who loves so passionately, whose Spirit stirs so relentlessly, whose ongoing engagement so consistently compels our response, is not something with which we can ever be complacent.

The event of God in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, was not a moment bookmarked in history, but the event around which all history is shaped – and restored. The Church finds all the good news it needs to proclaim in this alone.     

Moltmann’s seminal text The Crucified God was a “conversion” point for me in my formation for ordained ministry. My copy fell open at this quote, which informs so much of my preaching at Easter and, indeed, at the funeral of a loved friend just this week.

“The message of the new righteousness which eschatological faith brings in to the world says that in fact the executioners will not finally triumph over their victims. It also says that in the end the victims will not triumph over their executioners. The one will triumph who first died for the victims and then also for the executioners, and in doing so revealed a new righteousness which breaks through the vicious circles of hate and vengeance and which from the lost victims and executioners creates a new [humankind] with a new humanity.”                [The Crucified God, p.178]

May Jürgen Moltmann rest in peace and rise again in glory.