Aspects of hope

Abstract

In my paper, I am going to analyse some aspects of Jürgen Moltmann’s reflections on the central position of eschatology for Christianity and on the essential dimension of hope for Christian believers. I shall show that in Moltmann’s interpretation God is, first of all, the God of the promise. God reveals Himself as the God of the promise of resurrection for everybody, of the promise of the fulfilment of the kingdom of God, and of the promise of the renewal of the world. God’s promise of the resurrection represents as such the opposition against the present dimension of death. The resulting emergence in the Christian believers of hope connected to a promise of a completely new dimension of future entails, in Moltmann’s view, both a critical disposition of Christian believers towards the current conditions of the world and the strong intent to change it. Christian theology is, therefore, a theology implying a message of renewal of reality. For the individuals, the awareness that the new reality will come implies that the whole present dimension is exclusively a temporary state. The fullness of reality is not yet here; reality is waiting for its fulfilment. Thus, the central attitude of the individual who has hope is his living in the expectation of God’s new creation. Through his living in the expectation of the new creation, the individual is able to see the shortcomings of the present and of the past. As a consequence of his capacity to see the shortcomings of reality, the hoping individual receives the impulse to modify reality itself. Hence, hope proves to be both the orientation for the individual’s evaluation of reality and the source of the individual’s action in reality.