I was not in Bad Boll. I was not in Württemberg. But I was first influenced by Christoph Blumhardt before I read Ernst Bloch. (Jürgen Moltmann)
What could be received from Blumhardt, no matter how primitive the form in which he himself might have offered it, is at any rate also knowledge,. . . He becomes a theologian of hope. (Karl Barth)
When Jürgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope first appeared in 1965, it was seen by many as ushering in a new era of theological thinking.Footnote 1 Following closely in the wake of Karl Barth, Moltmann and his colleagues Wolfhart Pannenberg and Eberhard Jüngel were hailed as the future of the next generation of German theology. This enthusiasm, however, was not universal. Barth, Moltmann's would-be lodestar, sharply criticised Moltmann's work as too heavily dominated by the ‘principle of hope’ of the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch.Footnote 2 This interpretation has largely been taken as a central heuristic factum among commentators on the theology of hope (e.g. M. Douglas Meeks, Daniel J. Louw, Richard Leroy SpencerFootnote 3) and has caused most interpreters of Moltmann to see his turn to the earth and process thought in God in Creation Footnote 4 as being less of a shift of emphasis than a total change of trajectory or even a radical break in his theology – as argued, for instance, by Christian Link and Jozef Niewiadomski.Footnote 5
There is evidence, however, that a different, earlier source contributed to the overall orientation of Moltmann's theology – a source that has generally been neglected by most contemporary commentators on Moltmann's thought. This other source is the life and thought of the radical Schwäbean Pietists, Johann Christoph Blumhardt (1805–80) and his son Christoph F. Blumhardt (1842–1919). The Blumhardts, as Moltmann has recently pointed out, provided him with a different orientation and opened him up to ‘the lost horizons of Christian faith: genuine worldliness, true humanness, simple naturalness and the “wide space” of the Spirit in the dawn of the kingdom of God’, before he was exposed to the influence of Bloch.Footnote 6
In this article we propose to flesh out the thesis that the Blumhardts’ influence on Moltmann is deep and abiding, and that when this ‘hidden’ influence is acknowledged, Moltmann's later ‘shift’ is more easily understood as a shift of emphasis rather than substance. That is, his later thought is essentially in continuity, rather than discontinuity, with his earlier thought. This is because both Blumhardts sought to include a commitment to the embodied presence of God in creation within their intense eschatological expectation of the inbreaking power of the kingdom of God.
We will limit the scope of our discussion in two ways. First, since Moltmann was primarily influenced by the son, Christoph Friedrich, we will confine our discussion to his work. Second, we will focus our comparision on three key theological motifs which permeate Moltmann's theology: 1) Christianity as eschatology; 2) the theology of the earth; and 3) the ethics of hope.
Moltmann and the ‘hidden streams’ of Württemberg Pietism
In Moltmann studies Ernst Bloch has been viewed as one of Moltmann's most important interlocutors and as the primary philosophical influence on his ‘theology of hope’.Footnote 7 Bloch's three volumes of Das Prinzip Hoffung (The Principle of Hope) were published in 1953, 1955 and 1959.Footnote 8 It was while Moltmann was on vacation in Switzerland in the early sixties that he read Bloch's work. A left-wing Hegelian and Marxist humanist, Bloch provided a complex, dialectical Jewish appropriation of apocalyptic philosophy.Footnote 9 There is no doubt that his work proved to be an important catalyst for Moltmann's writing of his Theology of Hope.Footnote 10
It is, however, the ‘dialectic of reconciliation’ found in Moltmann's theology, which, according to M. Douglas Meeks, makes it ‘qualitatively different’ from Bloch. Meeks writes, ‘A grasp of the theology of hope will entail the discovery of those sources which enabled him to criticize and move beyond Barth and Bloch.’Footnote 11 With Meeks we affirm that ‘the basic tenor of his theology developed prior to his acquaintance with Bloch and out of a highly critical reception of Barth’. We depart from Meeks in the stronger account of Pietism's influence on Moltmann's thought, especially that of the Blumhardts. Surprisingly, Meeks does not mention the Blumhardts at all in his Origins of the Theology of Hope. It is only through reintroducing this theological influence that we can clearly understand Moltmann's ‘highly critical reception of Barth’.
During the past few years the mature Moltmann has become very forthright about the stream of South German Pietism that contributed the theological framework and primary motifs of his theology of hope.Footnote 12 Steven J. O'Malley, in an article entitled, ‘The Role of Pietism in the Theology of Jürgen Moltmann’,Footnote 13 argues that Moltmann's thought is ‘distinctly colored by his use of Pietist motifs, as well as by allusions to Pietist authors’. O'Malley points to a number of Pietists and proto-Pietists who have contributed in significant ways to Moltmann's eschatology. The most prominent, excepting Joachim of Fiore (whom it is totally anacronistic to call a Pietist), include those figures usually associated with the peculiar form of Pietism found in the former Duchy of Württemberg. As O'Malley shows, figures like Johann Albrecht Bengel, Friedrich Christoph Oetinger and Nicolas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, not to mention Johann Tobias Beck (who is left out of the list), have all been important contributors to Moltmann's theology. It is, however, the influence of Christoph Blumhardt, a pastor, theologian and witness to the kingdom of God – who undoubtedly pushed the boundaries of Schwäbean Pietism – with which we are concerned. In recent reflections on the importance of Pietism for his thought, Moltmann has pointed to Christoph as a central figure who helped him to move beyond the theology of Karl Barth. He writes, ‘I was not in Bad Boll. I was not in Württemberg. But I was first influenced by Christoph Blumhardt before I read Ernst Bloch. That happened in 1958 in Wuppertal. . . I myself departed from Karl Barth to Christoph Blumhardt at that point of time, in order to rediscover together with him and Dietrich Bonhoeffer the lost horizons of Christian faith: genuine worldliness, true humanness, simple naturalness and the “wide space” of the Spirit in the dawn of the kingdom of God’.Footnote 14 Clearly Blumhardt's influence on Moltmann was prior to Bloch, but it was also important for helping Moltmann to articulate the particularities of his own ‘theology of hope’. To understand why this was so we must briefly turn to consider Blumhardt himself.
Christoph Blumhardt: Theologian of Hope
It was through a dramatic exorcism and healing performed by the elder Blumhardt, Johann Christoph, that an ecumenical renewal movement in the spirit of Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf was inaugurated in the small town of Möttlingen, eventually spreading to much of the region surrounding Stuttgart. ‘Jesus is Victor!’ cried out Katharina Dittus in a voice not her own, the woman from whom the elder Blumhardt had purportedly exorcised a ‘demon’ and the sister of Gottlieben Dittus, the person with which the whole affair had begun some two years prior.Footnote 15 With this incantation of the ancient Christus Victor motif, the liberating power of Jesus Christ became the key slogan for both Blumhardts.
Christoph, following his father, saw Jesus Christ as the primary location of the kingdom of God. In his victory, the healing of the body, the body politic and the world as the ‘body’ of God, was inaugurated: ‘The history of Jesus’ life is the history of God's kingdom then and now.’Footnote 16 For Blumhardt, Jesus’ history is not limited to the once-and-for-all-ness witnessed to in the Synoptics, but included a dynamic and ongoing history of struggle against the ‘powers and principalities’. This dynamism was rooted in the real struggle that Blumhardt saw his father engaged in while dealing with Gottlieben Dittus. Though Christ's victory on the cross was decisive, it must still work itself out in history and both Blumhardts believed that humanity was called to participate in this struggle. Thus, both the struggle and triumph were mediated to the whole cosmos by the Holy Spirit and were not confined to any particular institution, especially the church (he was rather fond of Marx!).
Though the elder Blumhardt's early ministry was among the sick and demon-possessed, it quickly expanded to the poor, hungry and oppressed. The younger Blumhardt deepened this connection by explicitly identifying the poor and the oppressed as the site of the movement of God in the world. They were in fact those from whom ‘the power comes which will overthrow the world, the wretched, unhappy world’, because Jesus was in their midst: ‘the heaven of Jesus Christ will be among the despised, among the outcasts. Here we want to seek him, here shall our hearts be. Let us reach out to these with all our energy. Then we shall see how great a power this Jesus is.’Footnote 17
This conviction led Christoph to identify himself with the Social Democrats (SPD) in 1899, a decision that would cost him not only his ordination vows (he was stripped of his ordination and lost his pension), but would also win him the great disapproval of many of his closest followers. But Christoph, whose independent and charismatic personality was universally attested by his peers, would not be dissuaded. Rather, in his characteristic style, he turned the tables on those who asked ‘how can a Christian be a Socialist?’ with his own questions:
Where there is resistance against warfare and bloodshed, racial hatred and class distinction, debauchery and immorality – what is to hinder me from taking part as a true follower of Christ?. . . Now if there is a group, born out of bitterest need, striving for this goal of redemption, redemption from this age of mammon, who will hinder me reaching out my hand to them in the name of Christ? Who wants to blame me, when I justify their loud witness, that we find ourselves on the precipitous path and hope with them to meet a new time in spite of today's corruption? – a time in which it can be truthfully said ‘Peace on earth!’ – a peace in which those will be born who can grasp the meaning of life and happiness. Such a goal will be God's kingdom on earth, of God who is the Savior of all people.Footnote 18
Though Christoph would eventually leave the SPD, the animating vision of a universal kingdom of God that was both at work in our midst now and breaking into our present from the future, would remain the single concern of his life until his death in 1919.
Karl Barth, Eduard Thurneysen, Friedrich Gogarten, Emil Brunner and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were all captivated by Blumhardt's proclamation of the kingdom of God as that which motivated the church to embrace the world. Blumhardt's belief that the risen Christ, through the Holy Spirit, was present with the sick, poor and oppressed of the world echoes many of the later constructions of liberation theology. His commitment to the apokatastasis ton panton (‘bringing back of all things’) included a decided concern for the earth and the environment, which would share in the ‘glorious freedom of the children of God’ (Rom. 8:21). We believe that the influence of Christoph Blumhardt on Moltmann is seminal, but we will focus on three themes, beginning with ‘Christianity is eschatology’.
‘Christianity is eschatology’
Though both of the Blumhardts were located on the periphery of nineteenth-century theology, many have come to see that they played a central role in the rediscovery of the apocalyptic vision of the Bible in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theology.Footnote 19 In his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century Barth refers to Johann Christoph Blumhardt as a ‘theologian of hope’, a description which can easily be extended to Christoph. Their comprehensive hope for the world in Jesus Christ was the central motif of their theological vision,Footnote 20 a vision that Moltmann, in the Theology of Hope, builds on by claiming that theology is eschatology:
. . .in actual fact, however, eschatology means the doctrine of the Christian hope, which embraces both the object hoped for and also the hope inspired by it. From first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present. The eschatological is not one element of Christianity, but it is the medium of Christian faith as such, the key in which everything in it is set, the glow that suffuses everything here in the dawn of an expected new day. (p. 66)
Barth, again, looms large here. There is no doubt that Moltmann's claim regarding the eschatological nature of Christianity was substantially shaped by Barth. In his Epistle to the Romans, Barth wrote, ‘If Christianity be not altogether thoroughgoing eschatology, there remains in it no relation whatever with Christ.’Footnote 21 Barth, however, was pushed in his theological thinking for a more thoroughgoing eschatological understanding through the writings of the Blumhardts, as well as Franz Overbeck and Albert Schweitzer, a fact of which Moltmann was not ignorant.Footnote 22
When Moltmann sent Barth his Theology of Hope, Barth's central criticism was that Moltmann had subsumed Christian theology under an eschatological principle which was derived from outside the biblical tradition through Ernst Bloch. Barth thought that Moltmann had pushed beyond Schweitzer and the Blumhardts and appropriated Bloch's philosophy of the future. His fear was that, in basing a theology on the ontological priority of the future, severe consequences for Christian theology would be forthcoming, including a loss of the divine freedom which is maintained through a clear distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity. Thus, while theology should always be eschatological in its directionality, a systematic privileging of the future was problematic for systematic theology in general, and the doctrine of God in particular.
Eschatology as an orienting theological perspective can only hold together with an incarnational christology. This was what Blumhardt had provided to Barth and which was subsequently mediated to Moltmann. Christ's victory is the promissory ground of both the Christian faith and its future consummation (2 Cor. 1:20–2, 5:5; Eph. 1:13–14). The Word became flesh in Jesus Christ and dwelt among us. It is the continual dwelling of Jesus Christ in the world that is both the hope and basis of the church's effort to revolutionise and transform the present. For Blumhardt, in Jesus, ‘in his own person, in his advent, he [God] put a seed into the earth’.Footnote 23 This seed is the transformation of the world; the kingdom of God:
The new truth to which we must listen is that which came in the person of the Son of Man himself, namely, that God is now creating a new reality on earth, a reality to come first among men but finally over all creation, so that the earth and the heavens are renewed. God is creating something new. A new history is starting. A new world is coming to earth.Footnote 24
The kingdom is the ‘other’ which is already in our midst and yet is still to come. While Bloch mediated the resolute Marxist notion of a communitarian, political transformation of the present, he did so without the full christological resources to embrace both the immanent and transcendent dimensions of reality. Bloch's christology represented a Jewish ‘messianische Hoffnung’, that lacked any account of God's presence in the present.Footnote 25
Blumhardt's christological eschatology provides a framework for holding together both the inbreaking future and the present. This is because Blumhardt himself rejected a futuristic eschatology. For him, Christ was always coming, always in advent, as Moltmann would say:
Christ's future is not one single point in an absolute remoteness for which we are to wait, a mere coming event. This is hardly thinkable, for we would probably all go to sleep over it. Christ's future is now, or it is not at all. . . . The Savior is coming. He is not sitting on some celestial throne, resting somewhere in eternity, waiting for some particular time before he acts or a certain moment when he will suddenly plunge in. The coming of the Savior runs like a thread throughout history, through God's working in the world (Matt. 28:20). If this thread is not to break, then Jesus must always be coming.Footnote 26
The notion of Christ as continually in advent, or continually present as the coming One, is a complex interlacing of the eschatological truth of Christ's life, death and resurrection as the end and restoration of all things, which will unfold and penetrate all of creaturely reality, including the earth, with Christian discipleship as anticipation and work for the kingdom of God. We do not ‘fall asleep over it’ precisely because God's advent is occurring even now as the presence and work of the eschatological Spirit whose longing and work is to liberate the earth, the human community, and the individual from bondage. The Spirit's longing and work becomes the longing and work of those who belong to her. Thus, the presence of the kingdom of God as the presence of Jesus Christ is instantiated, or should be instantiated, in the faithful response of the community.
Furthermore, Blumhardt's use of the eschatological motifs of Christ as the King and the kingdom of God play an important role that one cannot detect in Bloch. Because Jesus Christ is God enfleshed, the cosmos that God created as good takes on new significance as Christ's kingdom has dramatically broken into the space/time manifold of the universe, not for its ultimate destruction, but for its restoration and recreation, a process which has already begun.
The Earth is the Lord's
The kingdom of God becomes a bridge concept between eschatology and creation in the thought of both Blumhardt and Moltmann. For Blumhardt, new social relations between God and humanity, within humanity and between humanity and creation were the content of the soon coming kingdom: ‘But what is it, then, that is coming? The revealing of an earth cleansed of sin and death. This is the homeland we seek. There is no other to be sought, because we do not have, and there cannot come to be, anything other than what God intended for us in the creation.’Footnote 27 Similarly, Moltmann writes, ‘original creation and its preservation serve a goal. . . God preserves his creatures for their consummation. His preservation of creation is itself already a preparation for their consummation.’Footnote 28 God's providential care for creation is always in light of the coming new heaven and earth.
We see an affirmation of the earth in Moltmann's theology which is often connected to the resurrection. He writes, ‘Beginning and end, creation and resurrection, belong together and must not be separated from one another; for the glorification of creation through the raising of the dead is the perfecting of creation, and creation is aligned towards the resurrection of the dead.’Footnote 29 Moltmann writes that faith ‘sees in the resurrection not the eternity of heaven, but the future of the very earth on which his cross stands’.Footnote 30 This connection between the resurrection and creation is also evident in Blumhardt:
If, however, together with the earth, life-giving life was created, then eternal rebirth can be expected from the earth as well. God infuses his power into the earthly and he permeates the whole earth with his power of life. The earth contains something living from God, so does the water and the air, and it is in this life of the earth, deep below that the kingdom of God begins.Footnote 31
For Blumhardt, this life-giving power is in the earth because of the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus’ presence as ‘the resurrection and the life’ are the basis and the goal of hoped for signs of genuine transformation in the here and now.Footnote 32
As is well known, Moltmann places Christian eschatology at the centre of his theology of hope and in so doing makes explicit connections between politics and Christian theology. Since this theology is orientated towards the eschatological, forward-looking and moving, it always seeks a transformation of the present. Under the influence of Blumhardt, among others, Moltmann sees this transformation of the present as social and holistic in nature because eschatology is framed in terms of the corporate category of the kingdom of God.Footnote 33 Following many of his predecessors, Blumhardt's corporate understanding of eschatology includes the whole cosmos and Moltmann has internalised this in ways which are easily detected. His debt to Schwäbean Pietist arguments, that the healing of the body is only truly completed in the healing of all creation, is evident, for instance, in chapter 10 of his God in Creation entitled ‘Embodiment is the End of All God's Works’, which is a well-known phrase of F. C. Oetinger.
We would argue that the obvious influence of Blumhardt, and many of his forebears, on Moltmann at this point reveals that there is far more continuity than discontinuity to be found in the shift represented by God in Creation. Moltmann's commitment to the concrete concerns of peace, justice and the integrity of creation are clear from Theology of Hope to God in Creation. There is no doubt that Blumhardt contributed to the linking of hope with ecological concerns. Moltmann himself has recently pointed out that:
Blumhardt saw the consequences of this theology of the earth clearly: ‘We have no fellowship with nature at all. . . This way nature is still ice cold toward us and feels strange to us. Something has to come yet’. But what is yet to come? ‘The harmony between man and nature has to come. Then everyone finds satisfaction. And this will be the solution to the social question’. With this early ecological insight Blumhardt recognized the environmental blindness of the modern world. The connection between the social and ecological crises cannot be pictured more clearly.Footnote 34
By seeing the earth as the Lord's, Blumhardt presented a way of connecting the inbreaking kingdom of God, which entails apocalyptic break, with an earth-affirming and earthly Christianity. Struggling to help the poor and to care for the earth, as actions which are internal to the immanent kingdom of God, are part of God's call to love the neighbour, the neighbourhood and the world, and therefore valued in the light of the coming new world.
The Ethics of Hope
An ethic of hope is an ethic of anticipation. We are called to live out the gospel in the present in light of the coming kingdom of God. Blumhardt saw the Christian community as a community of anticipation. ‘Warten und Pressiern’ (‘waiting and hastening’), this was how Blumhardt's ethics were shaped in light of the hope for the coming of the kingdom. As Karl Barth described it:
What appeared again in Boll that was new and in accord with the New Testament can be comprehended in one word: hope – hope for a visible and tangible appearing of the lordship of God over the world (in contrast to the simple, and so often blasphemous, talking about God's omnipotence); hope for radical help and deliverance from the former state of the world (in opposition to that soothing and appeasing attitude which must everywhere come to a halt before unalterable ‘relationships’); hope for all, for mankind (in contrast to the selfish concern for one's own salvation and to all the attempts to raise up religious supermen and aristocrats); hope for the physical side of life as well as for the spiritual, in the sense that not only sin and sorrow, but also poverty, sickness, and death shall one day be abolished (in contrast to a purely spiritual ideal of the so-called ‘religious-moral’ life). To believe in ‘God’ meant, for the two Blumhardts, to take this comprehensive hope seriously, more seriously than all other considerations; to regard and deal with everything on the basis of this hope; to place one's self and one's life in all particulars in the great light of this hope.Footnote 35
Blumhardt's eschatological hope was held as the guiding orientation and motivation for ‘this-worldly’ Christian witness and action. For Blumhardt, the kingdom has been inaugurated in Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit the church and all of humanity (!) are empowered for participation in the personal, social and cosmic reconciliation that is breaking in. The inseparable link between eschatology and social ethics expressed itself in the ministerial activities of the Blumhardts. Frank Macchia has argued that the Blumhardts expressed their deep Christian spirituality through active social engagement.Footnote 36 To make this insight concrete for all, Blumhardt, in the face of great scorn, joined the SPD in 1899 and was an SPD representative in the Württemberg Landtag from 1900 to 1906. Through this he explicitly identified political engagement with nachfolge (discipleship). His thought even moved in an ecological direction as he spoke – following other Schwäbean Pietists – of the earth as the ‘womb of God’, from which the Kingdom comes.Footnote 37
The spirit of hope animates the Blumhardtian vision, where spirit is understood as the Holy Spirit. The Pietist tradition has provided essential penumatological themes which have been appropriated in twentieth-century theology by evangelicals, pentecostals and liberation theologians. It is through the power of the Holy Spirit that the church is empowered for its ministry of reconciliation in the world. The Spirit plays a vital role in the Blumhardtian theological paradigm with many implications including a low ecclesiology and a more earthy, subjective understanding of God. Moltmann's internalisation of both of these dimensions has given his theology some of its more idiosyncratic contours.
The Holy Spirit as the spirit of hope is a Spirit that is open to all. For Blumhardt and for Moltmann, in an important sense, the prominence of the Holy Spirit relativises the importance of the institutional church:
The Holy Spirit is a universal spirit, not a spirit of churches and confessions, parties and nations. It belongs to all humankind; it is the spirit before which all differences among men, though they do not disappear, become meaningless. Yes, human society could be like a lovely wood in which firs, beeches, oaks, tall trees, and undergrowth grow peacefully together, presenting a unified whole. It could be arranged in great variety, in differing stages of development, yet as one glorious organism. But that would be possible only through the Spirit, which makes us truly men in our relationship to one another.Footnote 38
There is a simple communalism and free-church ecclesiology which animates Blumhardt and Moltmann. As the Gospel of Matthew writes, where two or three are gathered, God is in their midst. This gives some concrete cogency to Christoph Blumhardt's dilemma of having his ordination revoked, and yet still ministering in his community at Bad Boll. While an ordained minister in the German Reformed Church, Moltmann's pneumatological ecclesiology provides a justification for primitivist forms of Christianity as sites of resistance against hegemonic power in society, including the institutional church and especially its hierarchical structures in the Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican communions. In both Blumhardt and Moltmann it almost seems as though theology is for the world and the church is merely a stage of reception in the broader divine movement of reconciliation. In this sense, Moltmann is surely a Protestant democrat. Moltmann reminds us that the presence of the Holy Spirit is the true mark of the church, regardless of its particular institutional form.
Conclusion
Though little known in the English-speaking world, the Blumhardts have had a profound impact on modern theology. One can see their influence on many of the most important theologians of the last generation of German theology, including the towering figures of Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and Oscar Cullmann. In this article we have demonstrated, in outline, that the christological eschatology and eschatological ethics of Christoph Blumhardt have also been a critical source for the theology of Jürgen Moltmann.
While Bloch provided a linear, dialectical horizon of hope, whose systematic orientation implies a certain direction that theology must move, Blumhart provided Moltmann with a vast array of fragmentary theological insights that he rearranged in a creative mosaic of hope. It is our contention that when his theology is seen in light of Blumhardt's thought, the shifts in Moltmann can be seen more as shifts of emphasis than as shifts in substance. Our hope is that by making plain the influence of Blumhardt, a new avenue for Moltmann research and reception will open up for those who are interested in furthering his theological vision of a reconciled cosmos.
