Siempre en contacto
Pulse 1 varias veces.
“Most people now are looking for a better place, which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one… There is no better place than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it, and our keeping of it, that this world is joined with heaven.”362 – Hannah Coulter
Now having an understanding of the ways in which Hegel’s philosophy of history, and Hegel’s dialectical philosophy more generally, have impacted Moltmann’s theology of hope, we are led to a deeper exploration of Moltmann’s doctrine of creation. For a theology of hope which is looking forward while finding rooting in the divine promises of the past, the continuous interplay of past-present-future, like the Hegelian interplay of being-nothing-becoming, two of the most impactful philosophical notions are ‘beginning’ and ‘ending’. In distinctively theological terms, the same level of complication is evident in discussions of ‘creation’ and ‘eschatology’. The evident difficulty lies in the fact that a dialectic of becoming – an apparently processive if not also progressive movement – seems to be always erupting from within a pre-established fluidity of self/notion/proposition. The ‘Philosophy 101’ recounting of Hegel’s dialectic(s) in terms of thesis-antithesis-synthesis is profoundly misleading for this very reason.363 Dialectic never begins with a single
362 Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2004), 83.
363 Laurence Wood placed much of the blame for the ubiquity of this triad at the feet of Marx. “His insight
that history is composed of conflicting economic forces is surely one of the practical applications of Hegel’s dialectic, although Marx’s rigid three step process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis was greatly overdone. Hegel did not apply the dialectic in a rigid three-step manner. He used the dialectic method primarily as a theodicy of history.” Laurence W. Wood, God and History: The Dialectical Tension of Faith and History in
standalone thesis, but rather arises from within an already complicated situation which was itself dialectically composed.
Moltmann, with political and theological motives that differ from the phenomenological/epistemological motives demonstrated by Hegel, demonstrates less of a problem with the question of a beginning. Theologically, although not anthropologically or geologically, Moltmann is content to posit something like a traditional Christian notion of divine creation as ‘the beginning’. By making such a concession Moltmann in no way does away with the very valid question of existence, whether divine or secular, prior to this assumed ‘beginning’. Yet, Moltmann, effectively for his purposes, rejected that such a question was relevant to his particular task.364 Hegel, to the contrary, could make no such rejection insofar as his general project was explicitly a response to the transcendental philosophy of Kant.365 As such, Hegel was in no position to arbitrarily block off a potentially foundational movement of history. Hegel’s insistence on the science of a system, in notable contrast to Moltmann’s general uncomfortability with system, could not allow an unsupported ‘beginning’. Yet, because of the dialectical nature of Hegel’s thought, neither was he able to directly define any sort of ‘beginning’, whether of time, of
Modern Thought (Lexington: Emeth, 2005), 109. Although beyond the bounds of this project, Wood’s
argument regarding ‘theodicy of history’ is an enlightening take on Hegel.
364 Roger Olson described this as a radical historicizing of the life of God through which “historical events
become determinative of God’s eternal being.” Roger Olson, “Trinity and Eschatology: The Historical Being of God in Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg,” Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 36, iss. 2 (May, 1983): 217.
365 See e.g., Sally Sedgwick, Hegel’s Critique of Kant: From Dichotomy to Identity (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012). Sedgwick’s goal with this text was to dispel what she calls the ‘traditional view’ that Hegel was not a particularly thoughtful reader of Kant. Sedgwick makes a compelling case throughout that not only was Hegel a careful reader of Kant, but that even non-referentially Hegel’s philosophy was often an intentional reaction or response to the recognized importance of Kant’s Copernican Revolution.
a person, or even of philosophy itself.366 He recognized both the importance and difficulty
of seeking a ‘beginning’. “To want the nature of cognition clarified prior to the science is to demand that it be considered outside the science; outside the science this cannot be accomplished, at least not in a scientific manner and such a manner is alone here in place.”367
As discussed previously, Hegel viewed philosophy as a practice that always took place within a given situatedness. Paul Ashton rightly recognized, “There is no doubt that Hegel is rejecting a kind of meta-philosophical perspective, that there exists some space outside of, or for that matter within, philosophy from which to clarify what philosophy is.”368 It is not, however, the case that epistemology is thus entirely outside the bounds of
the philosophical endeavor. A great deal of Hegel’s thought went into exactly this project, but he made it clear that one cannot hope to examine the movement of knowledge – in this particular case, although the same argument could be made ontologically or historically as well – from outside the process from which knowledge comes to be. Insofar as Hegel’s struggle with ‘beginning’ can be dealt with directly, it has been described well elsewhere.369 For the purposes here, the more important question is not whether one could
366 As Andrew Hass noted, “Hegel also knew perfectly well that one cannot grasp the principle of beginning
in pure immediacy alone. What would this look like, pure beginning? How could we isolate it, mark it out? Beginning, like any principle, is also always mediated.” Hass, 48.
367 Science of Logic, 68. Hass characterized Hegel’s quest for a beginning as a “paradoxical journey… We
can begin with beginning, which is immediacy itself, but only once we have travelled the journey through the mediation of consciousness to knowing. Once there, however, we must then return to a presuppositionless immediacy, as if we had never travelled in the first place.” Hass, 48.
368 Paul Ashton, “The Beginning Before the Beginning: Hegel and the Activation of History,” Cosmos and
History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 3, nos. 2-3, (2007): 330.
offer a purified description of Hegel’s ‘beginning’, but rather how Moltmann has interpreted and utilized Hegel’s work to speak about a beginning.
In theological terms the concept of ‘beginning’ is almost always tied explicitly to a doctrine of creation. This is as true for Moltmann as it is for others. Yet, it will soon become clear that Moltmann’s doctrine of creation is intentionally and explicitly not only tied to the idea of a beginning but likewise to the idea of an ending. This unusual tendency in describing creation is closely tied to the idea of hope. One might see here a chicken/egg question as to whether there exists, in either direction, a causal connection between creation and hope. Whether or not one sees a sort of ontological primacy one way or the other, both are part of a self-informative cycle.370 Both history and hope are moved by promise, and, at least for Moltmann, it seems that promise is tied in a very important way to creation. Indeed, because ‘creation’ is seen in both the beginning and the end, it holds an important role in mediating between the past and the future by transforming the present into the promised future of hope.371 In this movement of becoming, Moltmann has learned a great deal from Hegel. Ashton described the transformative capacity inherent to Hegel’s world:
For Hegel the world will change to fully embrace the reality of freedom not because we can think how to change the world… but because the event of speculative thinking expresses the changeability of the world itself… It follows that the world must have already changed in order for its changeability to be embraced by speculative philosophy, and that
370 In discussing Ricoeur’s influence on Moltmann’s theology of hope Rebecca Huskey well-described this
cycle, “The promise of the coming Christ points us away from the promise itself, orienting us towards the future and giving us a sense of history, a sense of something new which is to come.” Rebecca Kathleen Huskey, Paul Ricoeur on Hope: Expecting the Good (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009), 38.
371 Creation, as beginning, demonstrates a (teleological) end. “It is Moltmann’s contention that the hope-
sentences of promise anticipate, initiate, and present the future, that in so doing they contradict the present.” Morse, 41.
philosophy as post-revolutionary can be understood as a recollection of this embracing.372
The mediating role held by Moltmann’s doctrine of creation is evident throughout his political theology. That the term ‘creation’ encompasses more than ‘the beginning’ of history is tied to Hegel’s understanding of the becoming of Geist. This processive understanding of becoming demonstrates an important caveat to the doctrine of creation. Namely, creation ‘in the beginning’ should not be understood as complete, but as already enmeshed in the dialectical process of becoming. The narratives of creation found in Genesis should not, therefore, be read in terms of primordial perfection, as a goal to which we hope to return. Rather, I will argue, creation is best described in terms of ‘tragedy’, an existence in which brokenness is inherent, and for which redemption beckons.373
The Tragic Politics of Creation
To speak of creation, particularly when ‘creation’ refers not only to beginnings, is necessarily to speak about the order of the world – the way things are, and ideally is also to speak about the way things ought to be. Learning from Hegel, Moltmann’s doctrine of creation is built upon the notion that “[theology] as post-revolutionary can be understood as a recollection” of the embrace of the changeability of the world.374 Although one might
372 Ashton, 343.
373 Moltmann does not offer any extended commentary on the nature of tragedy, but described the reality of
death as “a sign of tragedy in creation.” The Way of Jesus Christ, 170. John W. Cooper traced this notion of the tragic in Moltmann to “Berdyaev’s idea of the ‘tragedy in God,’ including his appropriationg of Bӧhme’s ‘dark nature in God’ and Schelling’s idea that world history is a painful theogonic (God-generating) process.” John W. Cooper, Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers from Plato to the Present (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 244.
look at a work like God in Creation and see that one of Moltmann’s primary ethical concerns is ecological, the politics of creation run much broader than simple environmental concern.375 In order to understand why the doctrine of creation is itself a politico-ethical mandate, Moltmann’s doctrine of creation will here be explored through the lens of tragedy.376
Moltmann’s doctrine of creation is rooted much more deeply than a re-telling or interpretation of the creation stories of Genesis. Rather, Moltmann’s understanding of creation is interwoven with real-world political issues.377 The continued degradation of
creation is one of these political real-world issues, but Moltmann saw that it is but one part of a much larger tapestry of brokenness. Moltmann made this clear when he said,
The natural environment of human beings cannot be understood apart from the social environment. The processes which intervene destructively in the natural environment originate in the economic and the social processes. So
375 Yet, even these other political concerns cannot be removed from the ecological. “Primarily, the ecological
concept of space may be seen as the intersection of social and moral space where creation is enabled to flourish by the Spirit and thus become what God desires for it.” Timothy Harvie, Jürgen Moltmann’s Ethics
of Hope: Eschatological Possibilities for Moral Action (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 164.
376 An excellent overview of classical literary, philosophical, and historical notions of tragedy as related to
the practice of Christian theology can be found in Rowan Williams, The Tragic Imagination: The Literary
Agenda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), especially 4-29. Hegel’s discussion of tragedy through Hamlet will here be explored to help make sense of a theological worldview of tragedy. However, even prior
to that usage, which is a conditional reading of only one text, I appreciate this definition/description of tragedy from Williams, “Tragic representation confronts the imagination with pictures of utterly unpredictable dissolutions of social solidarity and humanity stability; it uncovers not so much the unknown as the fact of our not-knowing… its task is to persuade us that as some significant level we have never really known it; that there is no finished narration but only the continuing exposure of ourselves to ever new perspectives on the danger concealed in where and who we think we are.” Ibid., 27.
377 Williams is again helpful to describe the relationship between a theology of tragedy and the need for
political engagement. “This constantly changing and expanding representation of danger seeks to move us towards truthful and just action in the city; it does not offer any consolation about the past, but by the plain act of liturgical showing-forth, tells us that disaster can be shown in a way that changes the world we inhabit.”
if the destruction of nature is to be halted, the economic and social conditions of human society must be changed.378
Any meaningful doctrine of creation must account for the present reality of these economic and social processes just as carefully as it considers the origins of the universe. It is from within this intertwining of promise, hope, and brokenness that Moltmann’s doctrine of creation originated.
Moltmann’s theology is decidedly political because he understood from early on that we live in a tragic world.379 As the classical questions of theodicy remind, we live in a world of natural disasters, a world in which children die, a world of hunger, violence, and sorrow.380 Far too often in the history of the Christian church, theologians, both
professional and lay, have been all to ready to set aside the tragic reality of the present in favor of a focus on the otherworldly blessedness of the afterlife.381 The church has read “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,”382 to mean, ‘Do not be
378 God in Creation, 23-24. Perhaps not surprisingly, this sort of language has earned Moltmann critics, like
Randall Otto, who has claimed, “The invocation of the concept of biblical eschatology seems…to be simply a popular pictorial device heuristically reinterpreted in the light of Marxist philosophy for the purposes of worldwide revolutionary activity.” Randall Otto, The God of Hope: The Trinitarian Vision of Jürgen
Moltmann (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), 102.
379 Johanne Kristensen offered a brief overview of the ways in which Moltmann conceived of the world in
terms of tragedy. See, Johanne Stubbe Teglbjaerg Kristensen, Body and Hope: A Constructive Interpretation
of Recent Eschatology by Means of the Phenomenology of the Body (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 61-63.
380 Although outside of a specific doctrine of creation, Nicholas Lash also saw the reality of tragedy as an
important starting point for theology, “I shall suggest not only that time is running out, but that the background against which we take our human and Christian decisions is ineluctably tragic: there are no grounds for optimism, nor is it the Church’s business to pretend otherwise.” Nicholas Lash, The Beginning
and the End of ‘Religion’, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 220.
381 Moltmann decried this sort of escapism in some detail in Jürgen Moltmann, Ethics of Hope, trans.
Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 52-54. Here, Moltmann speaks directly of “a vague Gnostic religiosity,” of “American pop-apocalyptic” in the form of the once-popular Left Behind phenomenon, as well as non-Christian forms of religious escapism.
concerned about your present situation, because the worse things are for you now, the better they will be in the eternal future’. The church has sung songs with lyrics such as, “Let us then be true and faithful, trusting, serving every day; just one glimpse of Him in glory, will the toils of life repay.”383 When hearing such lyrics, one should be immediately struck by
how clearly discounted is the present.384 Living well, being true and faithful, is a toil in need of repayment. Such Christian beliefs and practices have served to negate the importance of the here-and-now, of life as we actually know it.385 Just as hope must be understood through crucifixion, so too must eschatology be viewed through the brokenness of creation.386 As part of a dialectical movement, negation must always be embraced.
To better understand how one might theologically speak about creation as tragic, rather than seeing the stories of Genesis as proof of a primordial perfection, a brief interlude
383 Eliza E. Hewitt, “When We All Get To Heaven,” in Worship in Song Hymnal (Kansas City: Lillenas
Publishing, 1972), 252.
384 Dietrich Bonhoeffer made similar arguments by pointing to the tendency that some Christians have toward
‘escaping’ internally from the difficulties of life in community, or, as he described it, “Escapism in the guise of piety.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “137: To Eberhard Bethge,” Letters and Paper From Prison, Ed. John W. deGruchy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 367.
385 Here, we again encounter the convergence of ‘popular’ theology with academic theology. While it is easy
to speak against theological escapism from outside, it has become tightly wound into the fabric of many sermons, hymns, and stories. Mary Rose O’Reilley, then enrolled in a graduate program in Spiritual Formation (a hybridizing of academic and ecclesial if ever there was one), spoke to her feelings on the creep of theological escapism into her studies. “The readings seem to be composed from a circumscribed set of words like those on the lists issued to writers of children’s books, words reprocessed over and over through each writer’s theological Cuisinart… After so many years of feminist theology, I see few attempts in religious circles to unify the physical and the spiritual. How I want to cry out against this relentless negation of life – negation once by commandment and caveat, negation now by silence, erasure.” Mary Rose O’Reilley, The
Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd (Minneapolis: Milkweed
Editions, 2000), 283. It is precisely because of this ‘negation by silence’ that academic theology, as that of Moltmann, is needed to speak life into the church.
386 Lash also spoke out against eschatological escapism in terms of ‘hope’, “Christian hope remains a form
of the tragic vision in the measure that it refuses to foreclose the question of the future by postulating, in the imagination, some resolution to past and present tragedy, that in fact, has not been resolved.” Nicholas Lash,
from Hegel is in order.387 An area of Hegel’s thought which has not yet been explored here
is that of aesthetics.388 In the Lectures on Fine Art, Hegel’s treatment of Hamlet can be used as an entryway into what it might mean to speak of a tragic creation.389 Hamlet is of particular interest because it will help to elucidate the literary aspect of the term ‘tragedy’ while also serving as a point of distinction against which the word can be further nuanced.