Godless Theology by Jurgen Moltmann

Religion on line


All who believe and think about what they believe are theologians. The theology of all believers is the foundation for every academic theology. But does that mean that Christian theology can be nothing other than a self-related "doctrine of faith," to echo the title Schleiermacher gave his modern theology? Does it mean that only people who are "believers" or "born again" can study and understand theology, and that they understand it because they are already in agreement with it from the outset?

Now, faith is of the essence for Christian theology, because theology does not purpose to be a theory about the Absolute, devoid of any determining subject, and the rebirth to a living hope is the subjective opening up of God’s new future for the world. But that still does not have to mean that theology is only there for believers. God is not just a God of believers. He is the Creator of heaven and earth, and so he is not particularist, in the way that human belief in him is particularist; he is as universal as the sun which rises on the evil and the good, and the rain which falls upon the just and the unjust, and gives life to everything created (Matt. 5:45).

A theology solely for believers would be the ideology of a Christian religious society, or an esoteric mystery doctrine for the initiated. It would be in utter contradiction to the universal God-ness of God, and his public revelation as the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus Christ. It is not theology that has an absolute claim. What does have that claim is the one God, about whom theology talks in human terms. Neither the tolerance required of human beings, nor the situation of the multifaith society in which Christians exist today, can narrow down the universal offer of the gospel, and the eschatological invitation to the new creation of all things through God.
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