To Think God as Love

In book 10 of his Confessions, Augustine famously asks and answers what it is he loves in loving God: But what do I love, when I love Thee? not beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the brightness of the light, so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of varied songs, [...]

If Moltmann is right about God and suffering, what does this mean for the Holy Spirit, specifically? If tt is clear that the Son’s suffering is uniquely his, then so must the Father’s and the Spirit’s be. Moltmann himself insists the Spirit suffers from the beginning of creation. As he writes in God in Creation, Through his [...]

Following Rahner, et. al., Moltmann refuses the distinction between the economical and the immanent Trinity. That is, he won’t allow us to divorce God’s ‘private life’ from God’s ‘public life’. God is who God is in creating and in saving. Further, Moltmann repudiates any claim that the Father and Spirit remained hidden beyond the world [...]

Moltmann, famously, differs with the tradition regarding the impassibility of god. In his judgment, the god of classical orthodoxy is a sheerly philosophical construct, a theos all-too-weakly Christianized. Beginning with a definition of ‘god’ that assumes aseity, atemporality, and impassibility, classical theologians, with a few notable exceptions, could not avoid saying that Jesus’ death means nothing new [...]

If most Christian theologians have concerned themselves with what Jesus’ death means for humanity,  Jurgen Moltmann, nearly forty years ago, asked a different question: ‘What does the cross of Jesus mean for God himself?’ 1  I, as a Pentecostal, want to ask a more direct form of the question: What does Jesus’ suffering death mean for [...]

In his Theology and Joy, Moltmann critiques the modern idea of finding meaning in one’s usefulness, as if utility were somehow validation. Joy is the meaning of human life, joy in thanksgiving and thanksgiving in joy. In a way, this answer abolishes the intent of such questions as: For what purpose has man been created? [...]

As a special presenter at the Trinity Institute’s 2007 theological conference, Jurgen Moltmann observed that Christian liturgies retain two Hebrew words – Hallelujah and Amen – but have long since ceased (3rd century, at the latest) to make use of other words that should not have been lost: Abba and Marana Tha (which are Aramaic, [...]

“God does not encounter men and women ‘as God’; he encounters them in human form, in the incarnate and crucified Son. With respect to God’s omnipotence this means a limitation. But with respect to God’s goodness it is a de-limitation. His strength is made perfect in weakness.

“What the dogmatic doctrine of the two natures termed ‘Christ’s divinity’ really means is Jesus as ‘only begotten Son’ in his exlusiveness and uniqueness. What is called ‘Christ’s humanity’ really has to do with Jesus as ‘the first-born among many brethren’. For the one person of Jesus Christ is not a matter of two metaphysically [...]